The Rithian Terror

VI

After the initial struggle, Pembun had relaxed. He was breathing shallowly now, his eyes half open and unfocused.

"Have you got enough test patterns?" Spangler asked, using a finger-code.

"Yes, I think so, Commissioner," the young technician replied in the same manner. "His basics are very unusual, though. I may have some trouble interpreting when we get into second-orders."

"Do the best you can." He leaned forward, close to Pembun's head. "Can you still hear me, Pembun?" he said aloud.

"Yes."

"State your full name."

"Jawj Pero Pembun."

"How long have you been an agent of the Rithians?"

A pause. "I never was."

Spangler glanced at the technician, who signaled, "Emotional index about point six."

Spangler tried again. "When and where did you last meet a Rithian before coming to Earth?"

"In April, twenty-five fourteen, at the Spring Art Show in Espar, Man'aven."

"Describe that meeting in detail."

"I was standing in the crowd, looking at a big canvas called 'Yeastley and the Tucker.' The Rithch came up and stood beside me. 'E pointed to the painting and said, "Very amusing.' 'E was looking at the picture through a transformer, so the colors would make sense to 'im. I said, I've seen Rithi collages that looked funnier to me.' Then 'e showed me 'ow, by changing the transformer settings, you could make it look like Yeastley 'ad a mouldy face with warts on it, and the Tucker 'ad a long tail. I said…"

Pembun went on stolidly to the end of the incident; he and the Rithch, whose name he had never learned, had exchanged a few more remarks and then parted.

The emotional index of his statement did not rise above point nine on a scale of five.

"Before that, when and where was your last meeting with a Rithch?

"On the street in Espar, early in December, twenty-five thirteen."

"Describe it."

Spangler went grimly on, taking Pembun farther and farther back through innumerable casual meetings. At the end of half an hour, Pembun's breathing was uneven and his forehead was splotched with perspiration. The technician gave him a second injection. Spangler resumed the questioning. Finally:

"… Describe the last meeting before that."

"There was none."

Spangler sat rigid for a long moment, then abruptly clenched his fists.

He stared down at Pembun's tortured face. At that moment he felt himself willing to risk the forcing procedures he had planned to use on Cassina, forgetting the consequences; but there would be no profit in it. In Cassina's case, the material was there; it was only a question of applying enough force on the proper fulcrum to get it out. Here, either the material did not exist, or it was so well hidden that the most advanced Empire techniques would never find a hint of it. But there had to be something: if not espionage, then treason.

Spangler said, "Pembun, in a war between the Rithians and the Empire, which side would you favor?"

"The Empire."

Hoarsely: "But as between the Rithian culture and that of the Empire, which do you prefer?"

"The Rithi."

"Why?"

"Becawse they 'aven' ossified themselves."

"Explain that."

"They 'aven' overspecialized. They're still yuman, in a sense of the word that's more meaningful than the natural-history sense. They're alive in a way that you can't say the Empire is alive. The Empire is like a robot brain with 'alf the connections soldered shut. It can't adapt, so it's dying; but it's still big enough to be dangerous."

Spangler flicked a glance of triumph toward the technician. He said, "I will repeat, in the event of war between the Rithians and the Empire, which side would you favor?"

Pembun said, "The Empire."

Spangler persisted angrily, "How do you justify that statement, in the face of your admission that you prefer Rithian culture to Empire culture?"

"My personal preferences aren' important. It would be bad for the 'ole yuman race if the Empire cracked up too soon. The Outworlds aren' strong enough. It's too much to expect them to 'urry up and make themselves self-sufficient, w'en they can lean on the Empire through trade agreements. The Empire 'as to be kept alive now. In another five centuries or so, it won' matter."

Spangler stared a question at the technician, who signaled: "Emotional index one point seven."

One seven: normal for a true statement of a profound conviction. A falsehood, spoken against the truth-compulsion of the drug, would have generated at least 3.0.

So it had all slipped out of his hands again. Pembun's statement was damaging; it would be a black mark on his dossier: but it was not criminal. There was nothing in it to justify the interrogation: it was hardly more than Pembun had given freely in that report of his.

Spangler made one more attempt. "From the time I met you at the spaceport to the present, have you ever lied to me?"

A pause. "Yes."

"How many times?"

"Once."

Sp angler leaned forward eagerly.

"Give me the details!"

"I tol' you the song, Odum Pawkee Mont a Mutting, was kind of a saga.' That was true in a way, but I said it to fool you. There's an old song with the same name, that dates from the early days on Man'aven, but that's in the old languages. Wat I sang was a modern version. It's not a folk song, or a saga, it's a political song. Old Man Pawkey is the Empire, an' the cup of cawfee is peace. 'E climbs a mounting, and 'e wears 'imself out, and 'e fights a 'undred battles, and 'e lets 'is farm go to forest, jus' to get a cup of cawfee—instead of growing the bean in 'is own back yard."

A wave of anger towered and broke over Spangler. When it passed, he found himself standing beside the interrogation table, legs spread and shoulders hunched. There was a stinging sensation in the palm of his right hand and the inner surfaces of the fingers; and there was a dark-red blotch on Pembun's cheek.

The technician was staring at him, but he looked away when Spangler turned.

"Bring him out of it and then let him go," Spangler said, and strode out of the room.

The screen filled one wall of the room, so that the three-dimensional orthocolor image appeared to be physically present beyond a wall of non-reflecting glass.

Spangler sat a little to right of center, with Gordon at his left. To his right was Colonel Leclerc with his aide; at the far left, sitting a little apart from the others, was Pembun.

Spangler had spoken to Pembun as little as possible since the interrogation; to be in the same room with him was almost physically distasteful.

On the ancillary screen before Spangler, Keith-Ingram's broad gray face was mirrored. The circuit was not two-way, however; Keith-Ingram was receiving the same tight-beam image that appeared on the big wall screen, and so were several heads of other departments and at least one High Assembly member.

The pictured room did not look like a room at all: it looked almost exactly like the Rithian garden-city Spangler had seen in the indoctrination film. There were the bluish light, the broad-leaved green vines and the serpentine blossoms, with the vague feeling of space beyond; and there, supported by a crotch of the vine, was a Rithian.

The reconstruction was uncannily good, Spangler admitted; if he had not seen the model at close hand, he would have believed the thing to be alive.

But something was subtly off-key: some quality of the light, or configuration of the vine stalks, or perhaps even the attitude of the lifelike Rithian simulacrum. The room as a whole was like a museum reconstruction: convincing only after you had voluntarily taken the first step toward belief.

Leclerc was chatting noisily with his aide: his way of minimizing tension, evidently. The aide nodded and coughed nervously. Gordon shifted his position in the heavily-padded seat, and subsided guiltily when Spangler glanced at him.

Keith-Ingram's lips moved soundlessly; he was talking to one of the high executives on another circuit. Then the sound cut in and he said, "All ready at this end, Spangler. Go ahead."

"Right, sir." Distastefully, Spangler turned his head toward Pembun. "Mr. Pembun?"

Pembun spoke quietly into his intercom. A moment later, the vines at the left side of the room parted and Cassina stepped into view.

His face was pale and he looked acutely uncomfortable. Under forced healing techniques he had made a good recovery, but he still looked unwell. He glanced down at the interlaced vines that concealed the true floor, took two steps forward, turned to face the motionless Rithian, and assumed the "at ease" position, hands behind his back. His stiff face eloquently expressed disapproval and discomfort.

No one in the viewing room moved or seemed to breathe.

Even the restless Leclerc sat statue-still, gazing intently at the screen.

How does Cassina feel, Spangler wondered irrelevantly, with a bomb inside his skull?

Leclerc had set his watch to announce seconds. The tiny ticks were distinctly audible.

Three seconds went by, and nothing happened. Theoretically, if the buried message in Cassina's brain were triggered by the situation, the buried material would come out verbally, with compulsive force.

Four seconds.

Pembun bent forward over his intercom and murmured. In the room of the image the Rithian dummy moved slightly— tentacles gripped and relaxed, shifting its weight minutely; the head turned. A high-pitched voice, apparently coming from the dummy, said, "Enter and be at peace."

Six seconds.

The watch ticked once more; then the dummy spoke again, in the sibilants and harsh fricatives of the Rithian language.

Nine seconds. Ten. The dummy spoke once more in Rithian.

Twelve seconds.

Cassina's expression did not change; his lips remained shut.

Pembun sighed. "It's no use going on," he said. "I'm afraid it's a failure."

"No luck, Chief," said Spangler. "Pembun says that's all he can do."

Keith-Ingram nodded. "Very well. I'll contact you later. Clearing." His screen went blank.

Pembun was speaking into the intercom. A moment later a voice from behind the vines called, "That's all, Colonel." Cassina turned and walked stiffly out. "Clearing," said the voice; and the big screen faded to silvery blankness.

Spangler sat still, savoring his one victory, while the others stood up and moved murmuring toward the door. Vines, he thought mockingly. Dummy monsters. Smells!

The next time, it was very different.

Cassina lay clipped and swathed in the interrogation harness. His glittering eyes stared with an expression of frozen terror at the ceiling.

Spangler, at the bedside, was only partly conscious of the other men in the room and of the avid bank of vision cameras. He watched Cassina as one who marks the oily ripples of the ocean's surface, knowing that fathoms under, a gigantic submarine battle is being fought.

In the submerged depths of Cassina's mind, a three-sided struggle had been going on for more than half an hour without a respite. The field of battle centered around a locked and sealed compartment of Cassina's memory. The three combatants were the interrogation machine, the repressive complex which guarded the sealed memory, and Cassina's own desperate will to survive.

The dynamics of the battle were simple and deadly. First, through normal interrogation, Cassina's attention had been directed to the memory-sector in question. The pattern of that avenue of thought was reproduced in the interrogation machine—its jagged outline performed an endless, shuddering dance in the scope—and fed back rhythmically into Cassina's brain, so that his consciousness was redirected, like a compass needle to a magnet, each time it tried to escape. This technique, without the addition of truth drugs or suggestion, was commonly used to recover material suppressed by neurosis or psychic trauma; the interval between surges of current was so calculated that stray bits of the buried memory would be forced out by the repressive mechanism itself— each successive return of attention, therefore, found more of the concealed matter exposed, and complete recall could usually be forced in a matter of seconds.

In Cassina's case, the repressive complex was so strong that these ejected fragments of memory were being reabsorbed almost as fast as they were emitted. The repression was survival-linked, meaning to say that the unreasoning, magical nine-tenths of Cassina's mind was utterly convinced that to give up the buried material was to die. Therefore the battle was being fought two against one: the repressive complex, plus the will to survive, against the interrogation machine.

The machine had two aids: the drugs in Cassina's system, and the tireless, pitiless mechanical voice in his ears: "Tell! … Tell! … Tell! … Tell!"

And the power of the machine, unlike that of Cassina's mind, was unlimited.

Cassina's lips worked soundlessly for an instant; then his expression froze again. Spangler waited for another few seconds, and nodded to the technician.

The technician moved his rheostat over another notch.

Seventy times a second, blasting down Cassina's feeble resistance, the feedback current swung his mind back to a single polarity. Cassina could not even escape into insanity, while that circuit was open; there was no room in his mind for any thought but the one, amplified to a mental scream, that tore through his head with each cycle of the current.

The repression complex and the will to survive were constants; the artificial compulsion to remember was a variable.

Spangler nodded again; up went the power.

Cassina's waxen face was shiny with sweat, and so contorted that it was no longer recognizable. Abruptly his eyes closed, and the muscles of his face went slack. The technician darted a glance to one of the dials on his control board, and slammed over a lever. Two signal lights began to flash alternately; Cassina's heart, which had stopped, was being artificially controlled.

An attendant gave Cassina an injection. In a few moments his face contorted again, and his eyes blinked open.

The silence in the room was absolute. Spangler waited while long minutes ticked away, then nodded to the technician again. The power went up. Again: another notch.

Without warning, Cassina's eyes screwed themselves shut, his jaws distended, and he spoke: a single, formless stream of syllables.

Then his face froze into an icy, indifferent mask. The signal lights continued to flash until the technician, with a tentative gesture, cut the heart-stimulating current; then the steady ticking of the indicator showed that Cassina's heart was continuing to beat on its own. But his face might have been that of a corpse.

Spangler felt his body relax in a release of tension that was almost painful. His fingers trembled. At his nod, the technician cut his master switch and the attendant began removing the harness from Cassina's head and body.

Spangler glanced once at the small vision screen that showed Keith-Ingram's intent face, then took the spool the technician handed him, inserted it into the playback in front of him, and ran it through again and again, first at normal speed, then slowed down so that individual words and syllables could be sorted out.

Cassina had shouted, "You will forget what I am about to tell you and will only remember and repeat the message when you see a Rithian and smell this exact odor. If anyone else tries to make you remember, you will die. Vuyoum fowkip tüma Kreth Grana yodg pirup pet shop vuyown geckyg odowa coyowod, cpgnvib btui fene book store ikpyu. Nobcyeu kivpi cyour myoc. Aoprosu…

There was much more of it, all in outlandish syllables except that "pet shop" was repeated once more. The others crowded around, careful only not to obstuct Keith-Ingram's view, while Spangler, pointedly ignoring Pembun, turned the spool over to Heissler, the rabbity little Rithian expert who had been flown in early that morning from Denver.

Heissler listened to the spool once more, made heiroglyphic notes, frowned, and cleared his throat. "This is what it says, roughly,” he began. "I don't want to commit myself to an exact translation until I've had time to study the text thoroughly." He glanced around, then looked down at his notes.

"On the map we sent you by Kreth Grana you will find a pet shop on a north-south avenue, with a restaurant on one side of it and a book store on the other. The first bomb is at this location. The others will be found as follows: from the first location through the outermost projection of the adjacent coastline—" Heissler paused. "A distance, in Rithian terminology, which is roughly equal to six thousand seven hundred kilometers. I'll work it out exactly in a moment… it comes to six seven six eight kilometers, three hundred twenty-nine meters and some odd centimeters—to the second location, which is also a pet shop. From this location, at an interior angle of—let's see, that would be eighty-seven degree's, about eight minutes—yes, eight minutes, six seconds— here's another distance, which works out to… ah, nine thousand three hundred seventy-two kilometers, one meter— to the third location. From this location, at an exterior angle of ninety-three degrees, twenty minutes, two seconds…"

Spangler palmed his intercom, got Miss Miss Timoney, and directed her: "Get street maps of all major North American cities and put all the available staff to work on them, starting with those over five hundred thousand. They are to look for a pet shop—that's right, a pet shop—on a north-south avenue, which has a restaurant on one side of it and a book store on the other. This project is to be set up as temporary but has triple-A priority. In the meantime, rough out a replacement project to cover all inhabited areas in this hemisphere, staff to be adequate to finish the task in not over forty-eight hours—and have the outline on my desk for approval when I come back to the office."

"… seven thousand nine hundred eighty-one kilometers, ninety-eight meters, to the fifth location. Message ends." Heissler folded his hands and sat back.

Spangler glanced at Keith-Ingram. The gray man nodded. "Good work, Thorne! Keep that project of yours moving, and I'll see to it that similar ones are set up in the other districts. Congratulations to you all. Clearing." His screen faded.

… And that was it, Spangler thought. Undoubtedly there were millions of pet shops in the world which had a restaurant on one side and a book store on the other, and were on north-south avenues; but there couldn't be many pairs of them on a line whose exact distance was known, and which passed through the salient point of a coastline adjacent to the first. It was just the sort of mammoth problem with which the Empire was superlatively equipped to deal. Within two days, the bombs would have been found and deactivated.

Curiously, it was not his inevitable promotion which occupied Spangler's mind at that moment, not even the certainty that the Empire's most terrible danger had been averted. He was thinking about Pembun.

In more ways than one, he thought, this is the victory of reason over sentiment, science over witchcraft. This is the historic triumph of the single meaning.

He glanced at Pembun, still sitting by himself at the end of the room. The little man's face was gray under the brown. He was hunched over, staring at nothing.

Spangler watched him, feeling the void inside himself where triumph should have been. It was always like this, after he had won. So long as the fight lasted, Spangler was a vessel of hatred; when it was over, when his emotions had done their work, they flowed out of him and left him at peace. Sometimes it was difficult to remember how he could have thought the defeated enemy so important, how he could have burned with impotent rage at the very existence of a man so small, so shriveled, so obviously harmless. Sometimes, as now, Spangler felt the intrusive touch of compassion.

It's how we're made, he thought. The next objective is always the important thing, the only thing that exists for us… and then, when we've reached it, we wonder why it was so necessary, and sometimes we don't know quite what to do with it. But there's always something else to fight for. It may be childish, but it's the thing that makes us great.

Pembun stood up slowly and walked over to Colonel Leclerc, who was talking ebulliently to Gordon. Spangler saw Leclerc turn and listen to something Pembun was saying; then his eyebrows arched roguishly and he shook his head, putting a finger to his pursed lips. Pembun spoke again, and Leclerc grinned hugely, leaned over and whispered something into Pembun's ear, then shouted with laughter.

Pembun walked out of the room, glancing at Spangler as he passed. His face was still gray, but there was a faint, twisted smile on his lips.

He's made a joke, Spangler thought. Give him credit for courage.

He felt suddenly listless, as he had been after the scene with Joanna. He moved toward the door, but a sudden tingling of uneasiness made him hesitate. He turned after a moment and walked over to Leclerc.

"Pardon my curiosity, Colonel," he said. "What was it that Pembun said to you just now?"

Leclerc's eyes glistened. "He was very droll. He asked me if I knew any French, and I said yes—I spoke it as a child, you know; I grew up in a very backward area. Well, then he asked me if it was not true that in French 'pet shop' would have an entirely different meaning than in Standard." He snickered.

"And you told him—?" Spangler prompted.

Leclerc made one of his extravagant gestures. "I said yes! That is, if you take the first word to be French, and the second to be Standard, then a pet shop would be—" he lowered his voice to a dramatic undertone—"a shop that sold impolite noises."

He laughed immoderately, shaking his head. "What a thing to think of!"

Spangler smiled wryly. "Thank you, Colonel," he said, and walked out. That touch of uneasiness had been merely a hangover, he thought; it was no longer necessary to werry about anything that Pembun said, or thought, or did.

Pembun was waiting for him in his outer office.

Spangler looked at him without surprise, and crossed the room to sit beside him. "Yes, Mr. Pembun?" he said simply.

"I 'ave something to tell you," Pembun said, "that you won't like to 'ear. Per'aps we'd better go inside."

"All right," said Spangler, and led the way.

He found himself walking along a deserted corridor on the recreation level. On one side, the doorways he passed beckoned him with stereos of the tri-D's to be experienced inside— a polar expedition on Nereus VI, an evening with Ayesha O'Shaughnessy, a nightmare, a pantomime, a ballet, a battle in space. On the other, he glimpsed the pale, crystalline shells of empty dream capsules.

He did not know how long he had been walking. He had boarded a scooter, he remembered, but he did not know which direction he had taken, or how long he had ridden, or where he had got off. His feet ached, so he must have been walking quite a long time.

He glanced upward. The ceiling of the corridor was stereocelled, and the view that was turned on now was that of the night sky: a clear, cold night, by the look of it; a sky of deep jet, each star as brilliant and sharp as a kernel of ice.

Pembun's gray-brown face stared back at him from the sky. He had been watching that face ever since he had left his office; he had seen it against the satin-polished walls of corridors; it was there when he closed his eyes; but it looked singularly appropriate against this background. The stars have Pembun's face, he thought.

A bone-deep shudder went through his body. He turned aside and went into one of the dream rooms, and sat down on the robing bench. The door closed obsequiously behind him.

He looked down into the open capsule, softly padded and just big enough for a man to lie snugly; he touched its midnight-blue lining. The crystal curve of the top was like ice carved paper-thin; the gas vents were lipped by circlets of rose-finished metal, antiseptically bright.

No, he thought. At least, not yet. I've got to think.

A pun, a pun, a beastly, moronic pun…

Pembun had said, "I've made a bad mistake, Commissioner. You remember me asking w'y Colonel Cassina tried so 'ard to get to the Rithch w'en 'e saw we'd found 'im out?"

And Spangler, puzzled, uneasy: "I remember."

"An' I answered myself, that Cassina must 'ave been ordered to do it so that 'e could be killed—becawse of the message in 'is brain that the Rithch wouldn' want us to find."

"You were right, Mr. Pembun."

"No, I was wrong. I ought to 'ave seen it. We know that the Rithch's post-'ypnotic control over Cassina was strong enough to make 'im try to commit suicide; 'e almost succeeded later on, even though we 'ad 'im under close observation and were ready for it. So it wouldn't 'ave made sense for the Rithch to order 'im to come and be killed. If Cassina 'ad tried to kill 'imself, right then, the minute we came into the office, there isn' any doubt that 'e would 'ave been able to do it. We never could 'ave stopped 'im in time."

Spangler's brain had clung to that unanswerable syllogism, and gone around and around with it, and come out nowhere. "What are you getting at?"

"Don't you see, Commissioner? W'at the Rithch rilly wanted was w'at actually 'appened. 'E wanted us to kill 'im— becawse it was in 'is brain, not in Cassina's, that the rilly dangerous information was."

Pembun had paused. Then: "They love life. 'E couldn' bring 'imself to do it, but 'e could arrange it so that we'd be sure to kill 'im, not take 'im alive."

And Spangler, hoarsely: "Are you saying that that message we got from Cassina was a fraud?"

"No. It might be, but I don't think so. I think the Rithch left the genuine message in Cassina's mind, all right, for a joke—and becawse 'e knew that even if we found it, it wouldn' do us any good."

Spangler had hardly recognized his own voice. "I don't understand you. What are you trying to—What do you mean, it wouldn't do us any good?"

No triumph in Pembun's voice, only weariness and regret: "I told you you wouldn' like it, Commissioner. Did you notice there were two Standard phrases in that message?"

"Pet shop and book store. Well?"

"You can say the same things in Rochtik— brutu ka and lessi ka. They're exact translations; there wouldn' 'ave been any danger of confusion at awl."

Spangler had stared at him, silently, for a long moment. Inside him, he had felt as if the solid earth had fallen away beneath him, all but a slender pinnacle on which he sat perched; as if he had to be very careful not to make any sudden motion, lest he slip and tumble down the precipice.

"Did you know," he asked brittlely, "that I would ask Colonel Leclerc what you said to him?"

Pembun nodded. "I thought you might. I thought per'aps it would prepare you, a little. This isn' easy to take."

"What are you waiting for?" Spangler had managed. "Tell me the rest."

"Pet 'appens to be a sound that's used in a good many languages. In Late Terran French it 'as an impolite meaning. But in Twalaz, w'ich is derived from French, it means 'treasure,' and a pet shop would be w'at you cawl a jewelry store.

"Then there's Kah-rin, w'ich is the trade language in the Goren system and some others. In Kah-rin, pet means a toupee. And as for book store, book means 'machine' in Yessuese, 'carpet' in Elda, 'toy' in Baluat—and bukstor means 'public urinal' in Perroschi. Those are just a few that I 'appen to know; there are probly a 'undred others that I never 'eard of.

"Probly the Rithi agreed on w'at language or dialect to use before they came 'ere. It's the kind of thing that would amuse them… I'm sorry. I told you they liked puns, Commissioner… and you know that Earth is the only yuman planet w'ere the language 'asn't evolved in the last four 'undred years…"

Now he understood why Pembun's face was gray: not because Spangler had defeated him in a contest of wills—but because the Empire had had its death-blow.

Night upon night, deep after endless deep; distance without perspective, relation without order: the Universe without the Empire.

One candle, that they had thought would burn forever, now snuffed out and smoking in the darkness.

Another deep shudder racked Spangler's body. Blindly, he crawled into the capsule and closed it over him.

After a long time, he opened his eyes and saw two blurred faces looking in at him. The light hurt his eyes. He bunked until he could see them clearly: one was Pembun and the other was Joanna.

" 'Ow long 'as 'e been in there?" Pembun's voice said.

"I don't know, there must be something wrong with the machine. The dials aren't registering at all." Joanna's voice, but sounding as he had never heard it before. "If the shutoff didn't work—"

"Better cawl a doctor."

"Yes." Joanna's head turned aside and vanished.

"Wait," Spangler said thickly. He struggled to sit up.

Joanna's head reappeared, and both of them stared at him, as if he were a specimen that had unexpectedly come to life. It made Spangler want to laugh.

"Security," he said. "Security has been shot out from under me. That is a pun."

Joanna choked and turned away. After a moment Spangler realized that she was crying. He shook his head violently to clear it and started to climb out of the capsule. Pembun put a hand on his arm.

"Can you 'ear me, Thorne?" he said anxiously. "Do you understand w'at I'm saying?"

"I'm all right," said Spangler, standing up. "Joanna, what's the matter with you?"

She turned. "You're not—"

"I'm all right. I was tired, and I crawled in there to rest. I stayed there, thinking, for an hour or so. Then I must have fallen asleep."

She took one step and was pressed tight against him, her cheek against his throat, her arms clutching him fiercely. Her body trembled.

"You were gone six hours," Pembun said. "I got Miss Planter's name from your emergency listing, and we've been looking for you ever since. I shouldn' 'ave jumped to conclusions, I guess." He turned to go.

"Wait," said Spangler again. He felt weak, but very clear-headed and confident. "Please. I have something to say to you."

Joanna pulled away from him abruptly and began hunting for a tissue. Spangler got one out of his pouch and handed it to her.

"Thanks," she said in a small voice, and sat down on the bench.

"This is for you, too, Joanna," said Spangler soberly. "Part of it." He turned to Pembun.

"You were wrong," he said.

Pembun's face slowly took on a resigned expression. " 'Ow?"

"You told me, under interrogation, that your only reason for working with the Empire, against its rivals, was that the Empire was necessary to the Outworlds—that if it broke up too soon, the Outworlds would not be strong enough to stand by themselves."

"If you say so, I'll take your word for it, Commissioner."

"You said it. Do you deny it now?"

"No."

"You were wrong. You justified your position by saying that the Outworlds would be forced to overspecialize, like the Empire, in order to break away from it… that the cure would be worse than the disease. You've given your life to work that must have been distasteful to you, every minute of it." He took a deep breath. "I can't imagine why, unless you were reasoning on the basis of two assumptions that a twenty-first century schoolboy could have disproved—that like causes invariably produce like results, and that the end justifies the means."

Pembun's expression had changed from boredom to surprise, to shock, to incredulous surmise. Now he looked at Spangler as if he had never seen him before. "Go awn," he said softly.

"Instead of staying on Manhaven, where you belonged, you've been bumbling about the Empire, trying to hold together a structure that needed only one push in the right place to bring it down… You've been as wrong as I was. Both of us have been wasting our lives.

"Now see what's happened. Earth is finished as a major power. The Empire is dead this minute, though it may not begin to stink for another century. The Outworlds have got to stand alone. If like measures produce like ends, then that's the way it will be, whether you like it or not—but history never repeats itself, Pembun."

"Jawj," said the little man.

"—Jawj. Incidentally, I know you dislike apologies—"

"You don't owe me any," said Pembun. They smiled at each other with the embarrassment of men who have discovered a liking for each other. Then Spangler thrust out his hand and Pembun took it.

"Thorne, what are you going to do?" Joanna asked.

He looked at her. "Resign tomorrow, get a visa as soon as I can, and ship Out. If I can find a place that will take me."

"There's a place for you on Man'aven," said Pembun. "If there isn't, we'll make one."

Joanna looked from one to the other, and said nothing.

"Jawj," said Spangler, "wait for us outside a few minutes, will you?"

The little man grinned happily, sketched a bow, and walked out. His voice floated back: "I'll be with Miss O'Shaughnessy w'en you wawnt me."

Spangler sat down beside Joanna. She looked at him with an expression compounded equally of bewilderment, pain and submissiveness.

"Miss O'Shaughnessy?" she asked.

"One of the tri-D's across the corridor. I wonder if he has any idea of what he's getting into." He paused. "I have something else to say to you, Joanna."

"Thorne, if it's an apology—"

"It isn't. If Pembun told you anything about the last few days, then perhaps you understand part of the reason for— what I did."

"Yes."

"But that's nothing. What I have to tell you is that I made up my mind to marry you three months ago… not because you're Joanna… but because you're a Planter."

"I knew that."

Spangler stared at her. "You what?"

"Why else do you think I wouldn't?" she demanded, meeting his gaze.

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes glittering with the remnants of tears. The aloof, icy mask was gone. She looked, Spangler discovered, nothing whatever like a statue of Aristocracy.

"Will you come with me?"

She looked down. "Will you go without me, if I don't?"

"… Yes," said Spangler. "I've got a lot to do, and a lot to make up for. Thirty years. I can't do it here."

"In that case," Joanna said, "—you'll have to persuade me, won't you?"