The Star Fox

I

When the Earth ship came, Gunnar Heim was bargaining with a devil-winged messenger from a nuclear smithy. The Aerie of Trebogir, for which Ro spoke, had weapons to sell; but there were conditions.

Non-human words hissed and whistled into the man’s helmet pickup. Gregorios Koumanoudes translated into English. “—missile gets so large an initial velocity by drawing on the ship’s own gravitrons for a launch impetus.”

Heim wished he could show horse-trader reluctance, as by thoughtfully scratching his head.

But it would look silly under present circumstances. Damn this need to wear air-suits! Even on the lift platform where he stood, which kept his weight Earth normal, and even with the strength of a two-meter-tall body which he had gotten back into first-class condition on the voyage hither, the mass of equipment he must carry was tiring. Originally he had planned to stay inboard, put a 3V two-way outside Connie Girl, and thus meet with the Staurni; but Koumanoudes warned him against it “They’ll respect you more, Captain, for coming out into their own environment,” the Greek had said. “Irrational, sure, but they make a big thing of physical toughness. And they’ll give a better deal to someone they respect.”

So—Heim scowled into harsh blue sunlight. “I see the advantage,” he answered. “However, with my own maneuvering handicapped, I’d be a sitting duck.”

Koumanoudes put his objection into the language that prevails between Kimreth heights and the Iron Sea. Ro spread his taloned hands, a startlingly humanlike gesture. “The loss of maneuverability is negligible,” he said, “as only a fractional second is needed for launch.

Thereafter one immediately has full accelerative power available again. To be sure, the system must be synchronized with the engine complex, but it should not take long to make the necessary modifications on your ship.”

Unconsciously, Heim glanced skyward. Somewhere beyond that deep purple vault, those icily blue-tinged clouds, Fox II swung in orbit around Staurn; tenders flitted back and forth with cargoes of hell, men and not-men swarmed over the cruiser, working together to fit her for war.

There was not much left to do. And every nerve in him throbbed to be away. Each day he spent here, Alerion grew stronger, the cause of men on New Europe more hopeless.

Still, one privateer, raiding in the Phoenix, was dreadfully alone. She needed any microscopic advantage he could find for her. Like this missile sling which R6 claimed they could make in the Aerie of Trebogir. It did sound promising… “How long to install?” Heim asked.

Again four claw fingers, set around the entire palm of the hand, gestured. “Some days. One cannot tell exactly without more knowledge than my kinfather’s technologists possess about vessels of your particular class. May I suggest that the captain send his honored chief engineer to discuss such matters with our folk?”

“Um-m-m.” Heim considered. His gaze went past Ro, to Galveth, who waited impassively for something to be said that might concern the Lodge. But the blast gun remained idly cradled in the observer’s arms. If Galveth had any expression, it was of sleepiness, his yellow eyes drooping.

A human could never be sure, though, what went on in the narrow Staurni skulls.

It was even hard to tell individuals apart. A common alienness outweighed variable details.

Ro and Galveth were each about three meters long; but half of that was in the thick, rudder-tipped tail, on whose double coil the legless torso sat. The keelbone jutted like a prow. The face was sharp-muzzled, with wolfishly fanged mouth and small round ears. Its mask appearance came less from the dark band across the eyes than from the nostrils being hidden under the chin. A gray growth, neither hair nor feathers but something in between, covered the entire hide. No clothes were worn except two pouched belts crossing from shoulder to waist. All was overshadowed by the immense chiropteran wings, seven meters in span.

When you looked closely, you saw differences, mainly that Galveth had grown lean and frosty-tinged while Ro was still in the fierceness of youth. And Galveth wore the gold-ornamented harness reserved for Lodge members, Ro the red-and-black geometry of Trebogir’s pattern.

Heim turned to Koumanoudes. “What do you think?” he asked.

The stocky man shrugged. “I’m no engineer.”

“But damnation, you and Wong have spent a couple of months here. You must have some notion who’s honest and competent, who isn’t.”

“Oh, that. Sure. Trebogir isn’t one of the robber barons. He has a good name. You can deal with him.”

“Okay.” Heim reached a decision. “Tell this messenger, then, that I am interested. I’ll call C.E. down from Fox as soon as possible—right now he’s got to help the contractor from the Hurst of Wenilwain install our fire-control computers—and we’ll come to the Aerie and talk further about the proposal.”

“You can’t be that blunt,” Koumanoudes said. “Lodge members are, but they’re different. A Nester is worse than an Arab or a Japanese for wanting flowery language.” He turned and began to form syllables.

Through the wind that rustled the low red-leaved forest surrounding the spaceport, through the beat of surf a kilometer distant, a sudden whine smote. It grew, became thunderous, the heavy air was split and a shadow fell across concrete field and lava-block buildings. Every head swung up.

A rounded cylinder was descending. The blue-white radiance was savage off its metal; spots danced before Heim’s eyes when he turned them away. But he recognized the make. The heart jumped in his breast. “A spaceship! Human built—What’s going on?”

“I… don’t… know.” Behind the dark faceplate, Koumanoudes’ big-nosed countenance harshened. “Nobody said a word. Galveth!” He rattled off a question.

The Lodge agent made a bland reply. “He says he didn’t think it mattered,” Koumanoudes translated.

“Blaze,” Heim said in anger, “he knows about the Aleriona crisis! He must have at least some inkling of our trouble with our own government. The Lodge must’ve stopped that ship for inspection no later than yesterday. Why haven’t we been warned?”

“I’m not sure how much the Staurni ever understood,” Koumanoudes said. “To them it’s ridiculous that we couldn’t arm ourselves at home and take off whenever we wanted. Besides, those people can’t have any real weapons along, or they wouldn’t’ve been allowed to land.”

“They can have small arms,” Heim snapped. “We do. Get rid of these bucks as fast as you can, Greg, and come inboard. I’ve got to alert the boys.”

He strode rapidly across the platform to the landing ramp and up to the airlock. There he must fume while pumps replaced the atmosphere of Staurn with something he could breathe, and while he himself was decompressed. The baffled rage that he had thought was left behind on Earth came back to possess him. So much could have happened in the couple of weeks that Fox II had needed to cross the hundred-odd light-years to this star, or in the three weeks that followed while she was being refitted. If the appeasement party had won out, if his privateering venture had been declared illegal—Of course, he told himself, over and over, that’s not a Federation Navy ship. She’s a small civilian ranger. But then, the Staurni don’t let any warcraft but their own near this planet. If she’s simply bringing an official order for me to come home—Well, all right, face the question: what then? Do I go on anyway—as a pirate?

Sickly: Wouldn’t be much use. The hope was to create a situation that Earth could take advantage of. If Earth refuses the chance and disowns us, we can only be troublemakers to Alerion, until at last we’re cornered and killed. I’ll never see Lisa again. It was as if once more he could feel a small body pressed against him in farewell. They’ll tell her, the whole rest of her life, her father was a criminal.

But maybe, maybe even a pirate could accomplish something. There was Drake of the Golden Hind—He sailed in another day, when men weren’t afraid.

The inner door opened. He moved on into his yacht; which was now an auxiliary for the starship, and opened his helmet.

Endre Vadász had the bridge. The minstrel’s thin dark face was turned outward, staring through the viewport as the other vessel neared in a gravitron-distorted shimmer of light. When Heim’s boots rang on the deck, he didn’t look around, but said tonelessly, “I have ordered the crew into battle gear, and brought your own rifle from your cabin.”

“Good man.” Heim took the weapon in the crook of an arm. There was assurance in that weight and solidity and beautiful deadly shape. It was a .30-caliber Browning cyclic, able to send forty rounds a minute through any atmosphere or none, the pride of his collection. Vadász, also in a collapsed airsuit with faceplate unlocked, had settled for a laser pistol.

“I am not certain,” the Hungarian remarked, “What six men can do if they try to storm us.

Yonder ship can easily hold five times as many.”

“We can stand ’em off till the boys arrive from Fox,” Heim said, “and they total almost a hundred. Assuming the Lodge doesn’t stop the fight.”

“Oh, that I doubt,” Vadász murmured with a slight smile. “We aren’t likely to damage their nice spaceport, and from everything I hear, they have no rules against bloodshed.” He pointed to several winged shapes, wheeling black against the clouds over the western end of Orling Island.

“They’ll come enjoy the spectacle.”

Heim directed the radioman to get in touch with Fox. It would take a while. The beam must go through a ground station and a couple of relay satellites. Wong was in orbit to interpret between human and native workers, while Sparks’s command of the language was slight And the newcomer would be down in another minute.

I’m borrowing trouble, Heim tried to believe. Yet why would any Terrestrial come here, except in connection with me?

To trade? Yes, yes, an occasional merchant does call, from Earth or Naqsa or one of the other spacefaring worlds. That’s why the weaponmakers of Staurn will accept my Federation credits. But surely not while the Aleriona trouble is so near explosion.

Beside him, Vadász was softly whistling. “The Blue Danube,” now of all times? Well, maybe he wanted to remember, while he still could…

The least quiver ran through ground and hull and Heim’s bones as the stranger touched jacks to concrete. Her shadow fell engulfingly over Connie Girl. Through the intercom he heard a few oaths from his men, Sparks’s mumble at the transmitter, the snore of a nuclear engine on Stand-by. A ventilator gusted air across his cheeks, which were sweating.

When Koumanoudes clumped in, Heim spun about with a jerkiness that revealed to him how tense he was. “So?” the captain barked. “Did you get any information?”

The Greek looked relieved. “I think we can free-fall, sir. According to Galveth, they want to stay awhile, look around, and ask questions. A xenological expedition, in other words.”

“To this planet?” Heim scoffed.

“Well, after all, we are in Hydrus,” Vadász pointed out. “The trouble is going on in the Phoenix. Quite some distance from here.”

“No further from The Eith than Alpha Eridani, Heim said, “where we had our biggest skirmish with the Aleriona. And that was many years ago. They’re prowling through this whole sector. Besides, it takes time to organize an expedition. Why didn’t we hear of it on Earth?”

“We were rather occupied,” Vadász said dryly. He went, to the radiophone. “Shall I try to call them?”

“What?… Oh, yes. Of course.” Heim swore at himself for forgetting so simple an act.

The connection was made at once. “MDS Quest of the U.S.A.,” said a mild young man.

“Captain Gutierrez is still busy, sir, but I can switch you to Dr. Bragdon. He’s the head of the scientific team.”

The release was like a blow. Heim sagged in his suit. “You’re only here to make studies, then?”

“Yes, sir, for the University of Hawaii, under contract to the Federation Research Authority.

One moment, please.”

The screen flickered to a view of a cabin, crowded with references both full-size and micro.

The man in the foreground was also young, husky, with black hair and cragged profile. “Victor Bragdon speaking,” he said, and then, his mouth falling open, “Good heavens! Aren’t you Gunnar Heim?”

The privateer captain didn’t reply. His own astonishment was too much. The woman behind Bragdon leaned over the man’s shoulder and met Heim’s stare with wide hazel eyes. She was tall; an informal gray zipsuit clung to a figure strong and mature. Her face had strength too, rather than conventional good looks: straight nose, wide mouth, arching bones, framed by curly chestnut hair. But some years back it had, troubled his sleep. When he saw the name Jocelyn Lawrie on the letterhead of a flyer from World Militants for Peace, an old hurt awakened, and he went on still more intensely with his preparations for war.

Surprise faded. Suspicion tightened his muscles. “What are you doing here?” he rapped.

II

Afterward he remembered with irony and sadness how careful he had been. Pleading an urgent requirement for his presence on Fox II, he raised his yacht within .the hour. But Koumanoudes volunteered to stay behind, aboard the Quest on a “courtesy call.” Heim knew the Greek had done a good: job of preliminary arrangement-making on Staurn; how good he would be with his fellow humans was uncertain, but there was scant choice. It had to be him or Wong, the only ones who spoke the local language fluently and hence could use the spaceport’s eavesdrop-proof maser line.

His report came after two watches. “They’re clean, skipper. I was toured around the whole ship and talked to everybody. There’re five in the crew, plus captain, mate, and C.E. They’re plain spacehands, who signed on for this cruise the same as they would for any other exploratory trip.

You can’t fake that. Anybody who’s so good an actor works on 3V, not in the black.”

“They don’t have to act,” Heim said. “They only have to wear a poker face.”

“But these bucks didn’t. They swarmed over me, asking every kind of question about us. On the whole, they thought we had a hell of a fine idea here. A couple of them wished they’d joined us.”

“Uh-huh. I’m not surprised. The common man often shows more common sense than the intellectual elite. But wait, now, do you include their officers in this?”

“The engineer, yes. Captain Gutierrez and the first officer… well, they were stiff as meteorite plating. I don’t know what they think. Probably they don’t like us on principle, figure war should be left to the regular Navy. But I did make an excuse to see the articles of the expedition. It’s bona fide, official papers and everything.”

“How about the scientific passengers?”

“A mixed bag. I think Bragdon and Mrs. Lawrie must be the only ones who’ve ever been out of the Solar System. There’s another xenologist, a semanticist, a glossanalyst, a biologist, and half a dozen graduate students to help. I gather none have visited Staura before.”

“Odd.”

“Charlie Wong and I hadn’t either, boss, when you sent us off. They did the same as us, boned up on what information was available and learned the main language with RNA-electro cramming, en route. Anyhow, I can tell you there’s nothing to fear from these academic types. I don’t think any but Bragdon can handle a gun. They don’t much care for us and what we stand for, so relationships were a tad strained even if nothing rude got said. But they’re no threat.”

“They all feel this way?” Heim asked, with a curious little sinking in his spirit.

“No, funny thing, Bragdon and Mrs. Lawrie were both friendly. He remarked once he disagrees with your ideas but has a lot of respect for your guts. And she said she hopes you can come back soon.”

“I can,” Heim said softly. “Oh, I can.”

An hour later, Connie accelerated planetward.

Seated on the bridge, Heim listened to the thrum of the yacht and his own pulse, underlying the flamenco that leaped from Vadász’s guitar beside him. For a while neither man spoke, nor did their eyes leave the spectacle in the viewports.

Two and a fifth times the diameter of Earth, nine and a half times the mass, Staurn rolled immense against darkness. The seas shone royal blue, the continents, blurred by snow-colored cloud bands, were ocher and cinnabar. Along the horizon, atmosphere made a violet rim; over the whole, under the irradiation of a hot FS sun, ran a fluorescence which near the poles became great banners of aurora, shaken aloft into space. Two moons were visible beyond, glacially luminous, and further yet there glittered strange constellations.

“When I see something like that,” Heim murmured at length, half to himself, “I wonder.”

Vadász stopped playing and cocked a birdlike glance at him. “What do you wonder?”

“Why the hell we waste time hating and killing, which we might use to—Argh, never mind.”

Heim got out his pipe. “It only takes one to make a quarrel.”

Vadász studied him, “I’ve come to know you somewhat well, Gunnar,” he said. “You are not given to the role of Hamlet. What is the real trouble?”

“Nothing!”

“Ah. Excuse me if I pry, but this whole enterprise depends on you. Is it the lady’s unexpected arrival that is so disturbing?”

“A surprise, no more. We used to be friends.” Heim became busy loading his pipe. The Magyar’s steady look forced him to explain further. “My wife and I had quite a bit to do with the Lawries, years ago. They went off to Ourania in the Epsilon Indi System shortly before Connie died, to establish a machine-tool factory in the colony there. Things can’t have worked out too well, because she came back last year, .divorced. The conflict with Alerion was already serious, even if they hadn’t yet attacked New Europe, and she became active in the peace movement. It had her shuttling around the world, so we only met again a few times, briefly, at large loud parties. I, uh, half doubted she’d speak to me now, after what I’ve done.”

“And are pleasantly amazed, eh? She is indeed attractive. You must find her especially so.”

“What do you mean?” Heim bridled.

“Oh…” Vadász’s grin was disarming. “One does not wish to get too personal. However, Gunnar, busy though you were, I felt you were mistaken not to, um, prepare yourself for a long cruise in strictly male society.”

Heim grinned back. “I’d trouble enough concocting stories to explain your absences. How could I tell Lisa her hero was out tomcatting?”

“Touché.” Vadász went tomato red and attacked his guitar with great vigor.

But he has a point, maybe, Heim thought. I could have—well, Connie would’ve understood.

The way she understood about Jocelyn. Lord knows there’ve been other women since—Maybe I was thinking too hard about Madelon on New Europe. Damned foolishness. Or—I don’t know, I’m all confused.

That was what he remembered, afterward.

His finger was not quite steady when he pressed the button on her door. She opened it while the chime was still sounding. “Gunnar,” she said, and took both his hands. “I’m so glad you could come.”

“You were nice, to invite me,” he said.

“Nonsense. When two old friends meet again, halfway between home and the Southern Cross, what else do they do but have a private gabfest? Come in, man.”

The door closed behind them. He looked around. Her cabin was large and comfortable, and she had made it her own. He recognized some things from her lost San Francisco home—a Matisse and a Hiroshige reproduction, some worn volumes of Catullus, Yeats, Tagore, Pasternak, Mosunic-Lopez, the flute he had once loved to heat her play—and there were a few souvenirs of her years in the Epsilon Indi System, less from Ourania than from stark New Mars. His attention returned to her and stayed. She had on an electric blue dress and a Gean necklace of massive silver. The outfit was at once quiet and stunning. Or was that simply the contents?

Whoa, boy! he checked himself. Aloud: “You haven’t changed.”

“Liar. But thanks.” Her eyes dwelt on him. “You have, anyway. Tired and bitter.”

“Why, no, I feel happier now than—” His protest was cut off. She let his hands go and went to a table where bottles and ice stood.

“Let’s do something about it,” she said. “As I recall, you’re a Scotch drinker. And here’s some sho-nuff Glenlivet.”

“Eh? You always preferred light wine.”

“Well, Vie—Dr. Bragdon, you know—he shares your taste, and very kindly gave us this from his locker.” She poured. For a moment the clear gurgle was the only sound in the universe.

What the devil right have I to feel jealous? “I’m not sure what, uh, you’re doing out here with him.”

“Officially I’m secretary to the expedition. I have such skills from my job before I married, and got the rust off them working for the peace movement. Then too, I’ve had experience on other planets, including planets where you need special equipment to live. I used to go to New Mars quite often, ostensibly with Edgar’s mineral prospectors, actually to get away—No matter. That’s past. When I heard about this expedition, I applied for a berth and, rather to my surprise, got it. I suppose that was partly because most qualified people were scared to come so near the big bad Aleriona, partly because Vie knew me and felt I could handle it.” She handed him a glass and raised her own. “Welcome aboard, Gunnar. Here’s to the old days.” They clinked rims, wordless.

“When life was simple and splendid,” she added. Tossing off a sip of her Chablis, she toasted again, defiantly. “And here’s to the future. We’ll make it the same.”

“Well, let’s hope so.” His mouth creased upward. She’d always been overly, dramatic, but his own stolidity had found it a trait more endearing than otherwise.

“Sit down.” She waved him to her lounger, but he took a chair instead. Jocelyn chuckled and relaxed in the form-fitting seat. “Now,” she said, “tell me about yourself.”

“Didn’t you get a bellyful of me in the news?”

“There sure was plenty.” She clicked her tongue. “The entire Solar System in an uproar. Half the people wanted to hang you and H-bomb France for commissioning you. The rest—” Her humor waned. “I hadn’t known there was so much popular support for your side of the issue. Your departure crystallized it, somehow.”

He gathered his nerve and said, “Frankly, that’s what I hoped. One decisive gesture, to cut through that wretched muddle… Okay, you can throw me out.”

“No, Gunnar. Never.” She leaned over and patted his hand. “I think you’re wrong, horribly wrong, but I never doubted you mean well.”

“Same for you, of course. Wish I could say likewise for some of your associates. And mine, I must admit. I don’t like having the approval of some pretty nasty fanatics.”

“Nor I. The Militants—I quit them when they started openly applauding mob violence.”

“They tried to blackmail me through my daughter,” he said.

“Oh, Gunnar!” Her clasp tightened over his knuckles. “And I never came to see you while she was missing. There was this work for the movement, way off on Venus, and by the time I got back and heard, everything was finished and you were gone. But… are you serious? Did Yore’s people really—”

“I fixed that,” he said. “ ’Druther not say any more. We had to keep it out of the news. I’m glad, Joss, you broke with them.”

“Not with what they meant in the beginning, though,” she said. Tears glimmered suddenly in the long hazel eyes; he wondered on whose account. “Another reason I wanted to get off Earth.

Everything was such a ghastly mess, no clear rights or wrongs anyplace you searched.” She drew a breath before continuing, with swift earnestness:

“But can’t you see what harm the French have done? It looked as if the dispute with Alerion could be settled peacefully. Now the peacemakers have been tied in a legal knot, and it’s all they can do to prevent the extremists from taking over control of Parliament. The Aleriona delegation announced they weren’t going to wait any longer. They went home. We’ll have to send for them when our deadlock is broken.”

“Or come after them, if it breaks my way,” he said. “What you can’t see, you won’t see, is that they’ve no intention of making any real peace. They want Earth out of space altogether.”

“Why?” she pleaded. “It doesn’t make sense!”

He frowned into his glass. “That’s something of a puzzle, I admit. It must make sense in their own terms; but they don’t think like us. Look at the record, however, not their soft words but their hard deeds ever since we first encountered them. Including the proof that they deliberately attacked New Europe and are deliberately setting out to exterminate the French colonists there.

Your faction denied the evidence, but be honest with yourself, Joss.”

“You be honest too, Gunnar—No, look at me. What can a single raider do but make the enmity worse? There aren’t going to be any more privateers, you realize. France and her allies have been able to keep Parliament from illegalizing your expedition, so far. But the Admiralty has frozen all transfers of ships, and it’ll take more of a legislative upheaval than France can engineer to get that authority out of its hands. You’ll die out there, Gunnar, alone, for nothing.”

“I’m hoping the Navy will move,” he said. “If, as you put it, I make enmity worse—Uh-uh, not a delusion of grandeur. Just a hope. But a man has to do what little he can.”

“So does a woman,” she sighed.

Abruptly, sweeping to her feet, taking his glass for a refill, smiling with an effort but not as a pretense: “No more argument. Let’s be only ourselves this evening. It’s been such a long time.”

“Sure has. I wanted to see you, I mean really see you; when you came back to Earth, but we were both too busy, I guess. Somehow the chance never seemed to come.”

“Too busy, because too stupid,” she agreed. “Real friends are so rare at best. And we were that once, weren’t we?”

“Rawthuh,” he said, as anxious as she to walk what looked like a safe road. “Remember our junket to Europe?”

“How could I forget?” She gave him back his glass and sat down again, but upright this time, so that her knee brushed his. “That funny little old tavern in Amsterdam, where you kept bumping your head every time you stood up, till finally you borrowed a policeman’s helmet to wear. And you and Edgar roared out something from the Edda, and—But you were both awfully sweet outside Sacre Coeur, when we necked and watched the sun rise over Paris.”

“You girls were a lot sweeter, believe me,” he said, not quite comfortably. A silence fell.

“I’m sorry it didn’t last between you and him,” he ventured.

“We made a mistake, going outsystem,” she admitted. “By the time we realized how much the environment had chewed our nerves, it was too late. He’s got himself quite a good wife now.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“What about you, Gunnar? It was so dreadful about poor Connie. But after five years, haven’t you—?”

“After five years, nothing,” he said flatly. “I don’t know why.”

She withdrew herself a little and asked with much gentleness, “I dare not flatter myself, but could I be to blame?”

He shook his head. His face burned. “No. That was over with long ago. Let’s discuss something else.”

“Sure. This is supposed to be a merry reunion. A nuestra salud.” The glasses clinked again.

She began to talk of things past, and presently he was chiming in, the trivia that are so large a part of friendship—do you remember, whatever became of, we did, once you said, we thought, do you remember, and then there was, we hoped, I never knew that, do you remember, do you remember?—and the time and the words and the emptied glasses passed, and finally somehow she was playing her flute for him, “Au Clair de la Lune” and “Gaudeamus Igitur,” “September” and “Shenandoah,” Pan-notes bright and cool through the whirl in him, while he had moved to the lounger and lay back watching the light burnish her hair and lose itself in the deep shadows below. But when she began “The Skrydstrup Girl”.

the flute sank to her lap and he saw her eyes shut and her mouth go unfirm.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. Wasn’t thinking. You taught it to me, Gunnar.”

He sat straight and laid a clumsily tender hand on her shoulder. “Forget that business,” he said. “I should’ve kept my big mouth shut. But there was no real harm done. It was no more than… than one of those infatuations. Connie didn’t hold it against you. She nursed me through the spell okay.”

“I wasn’t so lucky,” she whispered.

Dumfounded, he could only stammer: “Joss, you never let on!”

“I didn’t dare. But that was the real reason I talked Edgar into leaving Earth. I hoped—Gunnar, when I came back, why were we both such idiots?”

Then suddenly she laughed, low in her throat, came to him and said, “We’re not too late, are we? Even now?”

III

Staurn rotated once in about eighteen hours. Seven such days had passed when Uthg-a-K’thaq finished work on the naval computers and rode a tender down to Orling spaceport.

As his huge cetacean form wallowed into the yacht’s chart-room, Endre Vadász, who had been waiting for him, backed up. Phew! the minstrel thought. Decent and capable he is, but I always have to get reacclimated to that swamp stench… How do I smell to him?

“Hallo, C.E.,” he greeted. “I hope you are not too tired to depart at once. We have spent too much time here already.”

“Quite,” replied the rumbling, burbling voice. “I am in-watient as you wy now. Ewerything else can ’roceed without me and, I weliewe, reach com’letion simultaneously with this swecial missile tur-ret. That is, iw the Staurni system is as good as claimed.”

“Which is what you are supposed to decide.” Vadász nodded. Another irritating thing about Naqsans was their habit of solemnly repeating the obvious. In that respect they were almost as bad as humans. “Well, I’ve seen to your planetside supplies. Get your personal kit together and meet us at the lift platform outside in half an hour.”

“Us-s-s? Who goes to this Nest?”

“You and the skipper, of course, to make decisions, and Gregorios Koumanoudes to interpret. Myself… ah, officially this falls in the steward’s department also, since the extra armament will affect stowage. But in practice the steward’s department is idle, bored, and in dire need of a jaunt. Then there are two from the Quest, Victor Bragdon and Jocelyn Lawrie.”

“Why come they with?”

“They’re here for xenological research, you know. Accompanying us on a business trip to an important kinfather is a unique opportunity to observe laws and customs in action. So Bragdon offered to lend us one of his flyers, provided he and the woman could ride along. He wanted several of his people, actually, but Nesters limit the number of visitors at one time. Suspicious brutes. In any event, by using the flyer, we save this yacht for shuttle work and so expedite our own project.”

“I scent. No, you say ‘I see’ in English.” Uthg-a-K’thaq’s tone was indifferent. He turned and slap-slapped on webbed feet toward his cabin.

Vadász looked thoughtfully at his back until he had disappeared. I wonder how much of our interhuman quarrels and tensions come through to him, the Hungarian reflected. Perhaps none.

Surely he will think the business between Gunnar and Jocelyn is utter triviation, if he even notices.

And he may well be right. Thus far, at least, it has only amounted to Gunnar’s being often absent from our vessel. Which has done no harm at the present stage of things. The men gossip, but the tone I hear is simple good-natured envy. For myself, I am the last to begrudge a friend what scrap of happiness he can stumble upon. Therefore—why does it make me uneasy, this?

He threw off worry and pushed buttons on the radiophone extension. A middle-aged, scholarly-looking man glared from Quest’s saloon.

“Good day, Dr. Towne,” Vadász said cheerily. “Would you please remind Captain Heim that we’re leaving in half an hour?”

“Let him remind himself,” the glossanalyst snapped.

“Do you so strongly oppose our little enterprise over here that you will not even give a man an intercom call?” Vadász leered. “Then kindly remind Mme. Lawrie.”

Towne reddened and cut the circuit. He must have some very archaic mores indeed. Vadász chuckled and strolled off to complete his own preparations, whistling to himself:

—And aboard the Quest, Heim looked at a bulkhead clock, stretched, and said, “We’d better start.”

Jocelyn laid a hand on his roan hair, another beneath his chin, and brought the heavy-boned homely face around until it was close to hers. “Do we have to?” she asked.

The trouble in those eyes hurt him. He tried to laugh. “What, cancel this trip and lose Vie his data? He’d never forgive us.”

“He’d be nearly as happy as I. Because it’s far more important that… that you come out of this lunacy of yours, Gunnar.”

“My dear,” he said, “the only thing that’s marred an otherwise delightful time has been your trying and trying to wheedle me into giving up the raider project. You can’t. In the old Chinese advice, why don’t you relax and enjoy it?” He brushed his lips across hers.

She didn’t respond, but left the bed and walked across the cabin. “If I were young again,” she said bitterly, “I might have succeeded.”

“Huh? No, now, look—”

“I am looking.” She had stopped before a full-length optex beside her dresser. Slowly, she ran her hands down cheeks and breasts and flanks. “Oh, for forty-three I’m quite well preserved. But the crow’s feet are there, and the beginnings of the double chin, and without clothes I sag. You’ve been—good, kind—the last few days, Gunnar. But I noticed you never committed yourself to anything.”

He swung to his own feet, crossed the intervening distance in two strides, and towered over her; then didn’t know what to do next. “How could I?” he settled for saying. “I’ve no idea what may happen on the cruise. No right to make promises or—”

“You could make them conditionally,” she told him. The moment’s despair had left her, or been buried. Her expression was enigmatic, her tone impersonal. “ ‘If I come home alive,’ you might say, ‘I’ll do such and such, if you’re agreeable.’ ”

He had no words. After some seconds she breathed out and turned from him. Her head drooped. “Well, let’s get dressed,” she said.

He put on the one-piece garment which doubled as under-padding for an airsuit, his motions automatic, his mind awash. Okay, what do I want? How much of what I felt , (do I still feel it?) was genuine and how much was just a grab at the past when lonesomeness had me off balance? I plain don’t know.

His bewilderment didn’t last long, because he was the least self-analytical of men. He shoved his questions aside for later examination and, with them, most of the associated emotions.

Affection for Jocelyn remained in the forefront of his awareness, along’ with regret that she had been hurt and a puzzled wish to do something about it; but overriding all else was eagerness to be away. He’d cooled his heels long enough on this island. The flight to Trebogir’s would be a small unleashing.

“C’mon,” he said with reborn merriment. His hand slapped the woman playfully. “Should be quite a trip, you know.”

She turned about Grief dwelt in her eyes and on her lips. “Gunnar—” She must look down at her fingers, tensed against each other. “You really don’t think I’m… a fool at best, a traitor at worst… for not wanting a war… do you?”

“Hvad for pokker!” he exclaimed, rocked back. “When did I give you that idea?”

She swallowed and found no reply.

He took her by the forearms and shook her gently. “You are a fool if you think I ever thought so,” he said. “Joss, I don’t want war any more than you. I believe a show of force now—one warning snap of teeth—may head off a fatal showdown later. That’s all. Okay, you have a different opinion. I respect it, and I respect you. What’ve I done to make you suppose anything different?

Please tell me.”

“Nothing.” She straightened. “I’m being silly,” she said in a machine voice. “We’d better go.”

They went silently downhall. At the locker outside Boat-house Three, Victor Bragdon was donning his airsuit. “Hi, there,” he called. “I’d begun to wonder what was keeping you. One of your men delivered your stuff last watch, Gunnar. Good thing, too. You’d never fit into anybody else’s.”

Heim took the stiff fabric, zipped it shut around himself, and put on gloves and ankle-supporting boots with close attention to the fastenings. If the oxygen inside mingled with the hydrogen outside, he’d be a potential torch. Of course, in a flyer it was only a precaution to wear a full outfit; but he’d seen too often how little of the universe is designed for man to neglect any safety measure. Connecting the helmet to high-pressure air bottles and recycler tank, he hung the rig from his shoulders, but left the valves closed and the faceplate open. Now, the belt of food bars and medicines; canteen; waste unit; not the machine pistol, for you did not come armed into a Nest… He saw that Jocelyn was having some trouble with her gear and went to help.

“It’s so heavy,” she complained.

“Why, you wore much the same type on New Mars,” Heim said.

“Yes, but that was under half an Earth gravity.”

“Be glad we aren’t under the full Staurnian pull, then,” Bragdon said genially. He bent to pick up a carrying case.

“What’ve you got there?” Heim asked.

“Extra camera equipment. A last-minute thought. Don’t get alarmed, though. The field survival kit is aboard and double checked.” Bragdon was still grinning as he walked to the entry lock. His aquiline profile was rather carefully turned toward Jocelyn. Heim felt amused.

The boathouse seemed cavernous. The space auxiliary intended to rest here had been replaced by three atmospheric flyers built for work on subjovian planets; and one of them was out on a preliminary mapping flight. The humans wriggled through the lock of another bulky fuselage and strapped in, with Bragdon at the controls. He phonespoke to his dispatcher. The boathouse was evacuated, Staurn’s air was valved in, the outer doors were opened. With a whirr of power, the vehicle departed.

It set down again immediately, to let in Vadász, Koumanoudes, and Uthg-a-K’thaq. The Naqsan looked still more ungainly in his own airsuit than he did nude, but it confined most of his odor. Bragdon made a last check of his instruments and lifted skyward.

“I’m excited as a boy,” he said. “This’ll be the first real look I’ve had at the planet.”

“Well, you should be able to play tourist,” Koumanoudes said. “No bad weather’s predicted. ’Course, we wouldn’t be aloft anyway in a Staurnian storm. Fee-ro-cious.”

“Indeed? I thought wind velocities were low in a high-density atmosphere.”

“Staurn’s isn’t that dense. About three times Earth pressure at sea level, with gravity accounting for a good deal of it. Also, you’ve got water vapor, which rises to breed thunderstorms. And so damn much solar energy.”

“What?” Jocelyn cast a surprised glance aft, not too near the morning sun. At half again the distance of Sol from Earth, the disc had slightly less angular diameter; and, while it was nearly twice as brilliant, throwing a raw blue-tinged light across the world, its total illumination was likewise a little inferior to home. “No, that can’t be. Staurn gets only—what is it?—20 percent more irradiation than Earth.”

“You forget how much of that is ultraviolet,” Heim reminded her, “with no free oxygen to make an ozone barrier.”

“A poor site for a nudist colony,” Vadasz said. “If the hydrogen, helium, and nitrogen don’t choke you, or the methane and ammonia poison you, the UV will crisp you like a steak.”

“Birr. When it’s so beautiful, too.” Jocelyn pressed her nose against the port by her seat and stared downward.

They were high now, with Orling dropping behind at supersonic speed. The island reared Gibraltar-like from an indigo sea, beaches obsidian black, land turned a thousand subtle shades of red by its forest. There was a final glimpse of a radar, skeletal at the spaceport, then that scar was lost to view and one saw only a great peace brooding under westward cliffs of cumulus. On the edge of vision, kilometers away, a flock of Staurni winged in a V on an unknown errand.

As if to escape some thought, Jocelyn pointed at them and said, “Pardon me if I’m dumb, but how can they fly? I mean, aren’t hydrogen breathers supposed to have less active metabolisms than oxygen breathers? And is the air pressure enough to support them against nearly twice Terrestrial gravity?”

“They have bird-type bones,” Koumanoudes explained.

“As for the energy consideration,” Heim added, “it’s true hydrogen gives less energy per mole than oxygen, reacting with carbon compounds. But there are an awful lot of hydrogen molecules in a lungful, here. Besides, the enzyme systems are efficient. And—well, look. Staurnian plants photo-synthesize water and methane to get free hydrogen and carbohydrates. Animals reverse the process. Only with that flood of ultraviolet on them, the plants build compounds more energy-rich than anything on Earth.”

“I see, I suppose.” She relapsed into her brown study.

The island fell below the wide horizon. They flew over wine darkness, streaked with foam, until the mainland hove into sight. There mountains climbed and climbed, red with wilderness at the foot, gray and ruggedly shadowed above, snowpeaked at the top. Sunlight glinted off a distant metallic speck. Heim tuned his and Jocelyn’s viewport to full magnification. The speck became a flyer, of gaunt unhuman design, patrolling above a cluster of fused-stone towers that clung to a precipice a kilometer over the surf. “The Perch of Rademir,” he said. “Better jog a little farther south, Vie. I’m told he’s somewhat peeved at us, and he just might get an impulse to attack.”

Bragdon adjusted the autopilot. “Why?”

“He wanted to sell us warheads, when Charlie Wong and I arrived to make arrangements,”

Koumanoudes said. “But the Roost of Kragan offered us a better price.”

Bragdon shook his head. “I really don’t understand this culture,” he said. “Anarchy and atomic power. They can’t go together.”

“What?” Vadász tautened in his seat. “There is quite a literature on Staurn,” he said very slowly. “Have you not even read it?”

“Oh, sure, sure,” Bragdon answered in haste. “But it’s a jumble. Nothing scientific. My own field work was mainly on Isis.”

“We aren’t the best-prepared expedition that ever went out,” Jocelyn added. “Quite hurriedly organized, in fact. But with all the trouble in this sector, the Research Authority decided it was urgent to get some solid information on the space-traveling societies hereabouts.”

“The Staurni aren’t that, exactly,” Heim said. “They have the capability, but use it only for planetary defense purposes. They’ll trade with visitors, but aren’t interested in looking for business themselves.”

“They must once—Say.” Bragdon turned in his seat to face the others. “We’ve time to kill.

Why don’t you give us your version of the situation here? Even when I’ve read it before, it’s helpful to have the material put in different words.”

Vadász narrowed his eyes and remained silent. Heim was chiefly conscious of Jocelyn’s glove resting on his. He thought that somehow she was pleading with him. To keep away from the thing that divided them? He leaned back, easing the weight of his air equipment onto the rest bracket, and said:

“I’m no expert. But as I understand it, the Staurni are a rare thing, a strictly carnivorous intelligent race. Normally carnivores specialize in fighting ability rather than brains, you know. I once talked with a buck who’d visited here and poked around a little. He said he’d noticed fossil outcrops that suggested this continent was invaded long ago by a bigger, related species. Maybe the ancestral Staurni had to develop intelligence to fight back. I dunno. However it happened, you’ve got a race with high-powered killer instincts and not gregarious. The basic social unit is, uh, a sort of family. A big family, with a system of companionate marriage so complicated that no human has ever figured it out, plus retainers with their own females and cubs; but still, a patriarchal household dominated by one big, tough male.” The flyer rocked in a gust. Heim peered out. At their present speed, they were already crossing the spine of the mountains. In the west he saw foothills, tumbling off to the red and tawny plain of the Uneasy Lands.

“I shouldn’t think that would make for advance beyond savagery,” Bragdon remarked.

“They managed it on Staurn, for a while. I don’t know how. But then, does anybody know for sure what the evolutionary laws of human civilization are? Maybe being winged, more mobile than us, helped the Staurni. In time they got a planet-wide industrial culture, split into confederations. They invented the scientific method and rode the exponential curve of discovery on up to nuclear engines and gravitronics.”

“I think,” Uthg-a-K’thaq grunted, “those nations were wuilt on conquest and slawery.

Unnatural, and hence unstawle.”

Heim gave the tendriled face a surprised glance, shrugged, and went on: “Could be. Now there is one stabilizing factor. A Staurni male is fiercer than a man during his reproductive years, but when he reaches middle age he undergoes a bigger endocrine change than we do. Without getting weak otherwise, he loses both sex drive and belligerence, and prefers to live quietly at home. I suppose under primitive conditions that was a survival mechanism, to give the females and cubs some protection around the Nest while the young males were out hunting. In civilization it’s been a slightly mellowing influence. The oldsters are respected and listened to, somewhat, because of their experience.

“Nevertheless, the industrial society blew itself apart in a nuclear war. Knowledge wasn’t lost, nor even most of the material equipment, but organization was. Everywhere the Staurni reverted to these baronial Nests. Between the productivity of its automated machines and the return of big game to hunt, each such community is damn near independent. Nobody’s interested in any more elaborate social structures. Their present life suits them fine.”

“What about the Lodge?” Jocelyn asked.

“Oh, yes. There has to be some central group to arbitrate between Nests, defend the planet as a whole, and deal with outworlders. The Lodge grew up as a—I suppose quasi-religious organization, though I don’t know a thing about the symbolism. Its leaders are old males. The more active jobs are done by what you might call novices or acolytes, younger sons and such, who sign on for the adventure and the concubines and the prospect of eventually becoming full initiates. It works pretty well.”

“It wouldn’t with humans,” Bragdon said.

“Yeh,” Koumanoudes answered, “but these people aren’t human.”

“That’s about everything I know,” Heim said. “Nothing you haven’t found in books and journals, I’m sure.”

He looked outside again. The prairie was sliding swiftly beneath; he could hear the whistle and feel the vibration of their passage. A herd of grazing beasts darkened the land and was gone.

Eastward the last mountain-tops vanished. No one spoke for a considerable period. Heim was in fact startled to note how much time had gone by while they all sat contemplating the view or their own thoughts, before Bragdon ended the silence.

“One item I have not seen explained,” he said. “Apparently each Nest maintains a nuclear arsenal and military production equipment. What for?”

“To fight,” Koumanoudes said. “They get an argument the Lodge can’t settle, like over territory, and hoo! They rip up the landscape. We’ll probably see a few craters.”

“But… no. That sort of insanity smashed their civilization.”

“The last phase of their civilization, you mean,” Heim said. “The present one isn’t vulnerable. A Nest is mostly underground, and even the topside buildings are nearly blast-proof.

Radiation affects a Staurni a lot less than a human, he gets so much of it in the normal course of life; and they have medicines for an overdose here, same as us. And there are no incendiary effects, not in a hydrogen atmosphere. In fact, before atomic energy, the only way to smelt metals was to use a volcanic outlet—which there are plenty of on a big planet with a hot core.”

“So they have no restrictions,” Jocelyn murmured. “Not even on selling the things offworld, for others to kill with.”

“We’ve been over that ground too mucking often,” Koumanoudes growled.

“Free-fall, Greg,” Heim warned. The woman’s face was so unhappy.

Koumanoudes shifted in his seat, glared out, and grew suddenly rigid.

“Hey!” he barked.

“What’s the matter?” Bragdon asked.

“Where do you think you’re headed?”

“Why, to the Aerie of Trebogir.”

The Greek half rose. His forefinger stabbed at the bow viewports. Above the horizon, ghostly in its detachment, floated a white cone. The plain beneath rolled down toward a thread which wound blinding silver through a valley where cloud shadows ran.

“What the hell!” he exploded. “That’s the River Morh. Got to be. Only I know the map.

Trebogir doesn’t live anywhere in sight of a snowpeak. It must belong to Kimreth upland. We’re a good five hundred kilometers north of where we should be!”

Sweat sprang forth on Bragdon’s forehead. “I did set a roundabout course, to get a better look at the countryside,” he admitted.

“And never told us?” Koumanoudes yanked at his harness. “I should’ve noticed where the sun is. Get away from that pilot board. I’m taking over.”

Heim’s eyes swung to Jocelyn. Her fists were clamped together and she breathed in deep uneven gulps.

Bragdon darted his hand into the carrying case by his seat. It lifted, and Heim stared down the barrel of a laser pistol.

“Sit back!” Bragdon ordered. “I’ll shoot the first one who unstraps himself.”

IV

When he cycled through the airlock, out of the flyer’s interior gee-field, Staurn yanked at Heim so violently that he staggered. He tightened his leg muscles and drew himself erect.

However well balanced, the load of gear on him was monstrous.

Jocelyn had gone ahead, to cover the prisoners as they emerged. She looked grotesquely different in her airsuit, and the dark faceplate was a mask over her features. He moved toward her.

“Stop!” In spite of the helmet pickups being adjusted to compensate for changed sound-transmission parameters, her voice was eerily different. He halted under the menace of her gun. It was a .45 automatic, throwing soft-nosed slugs at low velocity to rip open a man’s protection.

He drew a long breath, and another. His own air was a calculated percentage composition at three atmospheres, both to balance outside pressure and to furnish extra oxygen for the straining cells. It made his words roar in the helmet: “Joss, what is this farce?”

“You’ll never know how sorry I am,” she said unevenly. “If you’d listened to me, back on the ship—”

“Your whole idea, then, was to wreck my plan,” he flung at her.

“Yes. It had to be done. Can’t you see, it had to! There’s no chance of negotiating with Alerion when… when you’re waging war. Their delegates told Earth so officially, before they left.”

“And you believed them? Don’t you know any more history than that?”

She didn’t seem to hear. Words cataracted from her; through all the distortion, he could read how she appealed to him.

“Peace Control Intelligence guessed you’d come here for your weapons. They couldn’t send an armed ship. The Staurni wouldn’t have allowed it. In fact, France could block any official action. But unofficially—We threw this expedition together and took off after you. I learned about it because PCI found out I was an, an, an old friend of yours and interrogated me. I asked to come along. I thought, I hoped I could persuade you.”

“By any means convenient,” he bit off. “There’s a name for that.”

“I failed,” she said desolately. “Vie decided this trip was his chance to act. We don’t mean to hurt you. We’ll take you back to Earth. Nothing more. You won’t even be charged with anything.”

“I could charge kidnapping,” he said.

“If you want to,” she mumbled.

Hopelessness gutted him. “What’s the use? You’d get yourself a judge who’d put you on probation.”

Vadász appeared, then Koumanoudes, then Uthg-a-K’thaq. The Greek cursed in a steady stream.

Without a captain, without a chief engineer, Fox will have to go home, beaten before one blow is struck, Heim thought.

He looked around. They had landed on the west bank of the Morh. It ran wide and luminous through a sandy, boulder-strewn dale walled by low bluffs. The mountains of Kimreth reared opposite the sun, still many kilometers distant, not quite real in the blue-gray haze of intervening air, but a titan’s rampart, dominated by the volcanic cone he had seen from afar. Underfoot the ground was covered by that springy mosslike red-yellow growth which was this world’s equivalent of grass. Overhead the sky arched plum-dark, clouds scudding on a wind that boomed in his audio receptors. A flock of airborne devilfish shapes drifted into sight and out again.

How far have we come? What’s going to happen?

Vadász moved to Heim’s side, touched helmets, and muttered, “Quickly, can we rush her? I do not think her aim will be good here.”

“Nor can we move fast,” Heim said. Though… would you really shoot me, Joss?

His heart thuttered and sweat smelt sharp in his nostrils. But before he could nerve himself to try, Bragdon was out, and there was no question whether that laser pistol would be used.

“G’yaaru!” Uthg-a-K’thaq shouted. “You hawe lewt the airlock owen!”

“I know,” Bragdon said. “And I’ve set the pilot a certain way. Better lie down.” He eased himself to a sitting position.

The flyer whined and leaped forward. The glare off its metal blinded Heim. He saw what seemed a comet arc off the ground, to a hundred meters, loop about, and plunge. Instinct sent him flat on his belly.

Some distance away, the flyer crashed. The explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen went off. Blue flame spurted upward. Thunder coughed, again and again, and Heim heard shards scream above him. Then there was only a thick pillar of smoke and dust, while echoes tolled away and were lost in the wind.

He strained back to his feet. His head still rang. The other males did likewise. Jocelyn remained seated.

“Great… jumping… Judas,” Koumanoudes gasped. “What have you done?”

“Don’t be alarmed,” said Bragdon. “We have other transportation coming.” He paused. “I may as well explain. The object is to cripple your damned piracy by taking you back to Earth. I had various schemes in mind, but this chance suggested a simple method.

“One other flyer is out, with a couple of young men who know what’s afoot and know approximately where I intended to do this. They can spot the wreckage from afar. We’ll all go aboard and return to the Quest, Only we’ll be on the floor, out of sight, and I’m sorry, but you’ll be tied. Once back inside the ship, you’ll be taken to a special cell we’ve got fixed. Jocelyn and I will stay concealed too. When you don’t report in, your crew will get worried and go look for you.

Naturally, Captain Gutierrez will lend every assistance. The wreck will be found—unfortunate crash, everybody killed. No one’s likely to check so close that he’ll see there are no human remains. But if anybody does, he’ll conclude that we hiked off in a forlorn attempt to get help, and soon died. So, with much sorrow, two spoiled expeditions wend their separate ways home.”

“Can you rely on your crew?” Vadász asked, snake cold.

“They won’t know the truth until Quest is again in space,” Bragdon said. “Captain Gutierrez and First Officer Hermann do already. I don’t expect the men will mutiny.”

“You filthy bastard—” Koumanoudes advanced a stiff-legged step.

“Halt,” Bragdon warned. “I’m entirely prepared to shoot if I must. On the other hand, if you behave yourselves you’ll be released unharmed on Earth.”

Heim hunched his shoulders. “How will you prevent us from starting right out again?” he inquired.

“Have you forgotten? Your ship’s now equipped for nuclear weapons. The moment she enters the Solar System, the Peace Control Authority is law-bound to seize her. And without their principal officers, where else can your men go?”

“Who are you working for, Bragdon?” Heim fleered. “Alerion?”

“Mankind.” The answer was proud. “In case you’re interested, I’m not a xenologist, only a PCA officer on leave, and they’ll cashier me for this. It’s worth it, though. World Militants for Peace will see I get another job.”

“They engineered this, huh?” Koumanoudes snorted. “Yeh. They’ve got members in government too.”

Heim spoke to Jocelyn. “You never actually quit that gang, did you?”

“Please, please,” her whisper drifted down the wind.

“We may as well make ourselves comfortable,” Bragdon advised. “This gravity will wear us out if we don’t The other vessel probably won’t arrive for several hours, since we couldn’t make exact timing or location arrangements, or risk radio.” He gestured with his gun. “You sit before I do.”

Vadász was so near Heim that the captain alone heard the minstrel’s indrawn hiss and noticed how he stiffened. “Heigh-ho, Roger!” he murmured. “Hook the first moon by.”

“What’s that?” Bragdon challenged, for he saw his prisoners go taut.

“I would not translate in a lady’s presence,” Vadász snarled.

It thrilled through Heim. Spaceman’s slang. “Something’s ,about to happen. Take your chance when you see it.” The blackness and coldness departed him. His pulse slammed with preparation to fight.

“Are you skizzy, though?” Vadász continued. “We can’t stay here.”

“What d’you mean?” Bragdon demanded.

“Next to a river like this. Flash floods. We will get tumbled around, our suits torn open, we are dead unless we get on higher ground.”

“You lie!”

“No, no. Look at those mountains. Think. A dense atmosphere under strong gravity has a high density gradient, therefore a high temperature gradient. This is autumn. It gets cold enough at night, above snowline, to freeze ammonia. But the stuff liquefies again about noon, and pours down into the riverbeds. The gravity pulls it so fast that it goes fifty kilometers or better before it evaporates. Isn’t that true, Gregorios? You were the one who told me.”

“Sure,” Koumanoudes said. “That’s what the name Morh means. Floodwater.”

“If this is some trick—” Bragdon began.

It sure as blaze is, Heim’s thought leaped. There’s no such phenomenon. But the yarn sounds plausible to a newcomer—I hope—how I hope!

“I swear I’ll shoot on any suspicion,” Bragdon said.

Heim started to walk away from him. “Do, if you want,” he retorted. “That’s an easier way to die than in an ammonia flood. You can’t stop me trying to get on top of those bluffs.”

His back was tense against the firebeam. But only Jocelyn’s cry reached him: “Vie, no, don’t!

What’s the harm?”

“I… guess none, except that it’s a difficult climb,” Bragdon conceded. “Okay. You people go first Jocelyn will cover me while I follow. If you feel like running away, once you’re over the crest, I don’t mind too much. You can’t get far before the flyer comes, and we’ll catch you then.

Or if you find some hiding place, Staurn will kill you for me.”

Step by heavy step, Heim wound among the scattered rocks until he reached the nearest bank. It was bare gritty earth, mingled with stones, not high or steep but a daunting obstacle when this weight bore on him. He commenced trudging upward. The slope gave way under his boots, slid past in a hiss and a rattle, he lost his footing and went to hands and knees.

Fumbling erect, he proceeded cautiously. Before long he was half drowned in sweat, his heart raced and the air burned his throat. Through blurred eyes he saw Vadász and Koumanoudes toiling behind. Uthg-a-K’thaq made it with less trouble, down on his stomach, pushing with wide feet and scrabbling with powerful swimmer’s arms; but still the Naqsan’s breath was noisy across the wind.

Somehow they got to the top. Heim and his engineer gave the others a hand. They crouched on the brink and wheezed.

There was a stone under Heim’s glove. His fingers closed. As strength returned, he saw Bragdon halfway up. The Peaceman was taking his time, frequent lengthy rests, during which he stood gun in hand and glared at the privateers. Jocelyn waited below. Now and then sand or pebbles skittered around her, dislodged by Bragdon; but she didn’t try to dodge. Her suited form looked black in the lightning-blue sun-dazzle; her pistol reflected it moltenly.

Vadász knelt between Heim and Koumanoudes. He squeezed their hands. No other signal or explanation was needed.

Heim threw his stone. An instant later, their own missiles whizzed from his men.

Accelerated at nineteen hundred centimeters per second per second, the rocks flew as if catapulted. He didn’t know whose hit Bragdon. He saw the man lurch and fall. Then he and his folk were on their way down again.

Leap-slide-run-skip—keep your feet in the little avalanche you make—charge in your weight like a knight at full gallop!

Jocelyn had not been struck. He saw her stumble back, slow and awkward, and bounded past the collision of Bragdon and Koumanoudes. Dust boiled from his boot-soles. Twice he nearly fell. It could have snapped his neck at the speed he now had. Somehow he recovered balance and raged on ahead.

Down to the valley floor! He must tumble or run, f aster than man had ever run before. His body was a machine gone wild, he fought to steer it and slow it but the momentum was overwhelming. Each footfall slammed through muscle and bone to rattle his teeth. The blood brawled in his ears. Jocelyn had shot once while he plunged. The slug whanged wide. He saw the gun slew around to take closer aim. No chance for fear or hope. He had nothing but velocity. Yet it was too great for common sense to perceive. In her panic and her anguish she hesitated before shooting anew. The time was a fractional second. A man attacking her on Earth would have taken the bullet point blank. Heim crashed by before she could squeeze trigger. His fist shot out. He did not snatch the gun. His blow tore it from her grasp and spun it meters away.

On flat terrain he braked himself to a normal run, a jog, a halt. He wheeled. Jocelyn had been knocked down by his mere brush against her. She was still struggling to regain her feet. Through his own deep gasps, he heard her weep. He plodded to retrieve the pistol.

When he had it, he looked for the others. Uthg-a-K’thaq slumped on his feet in the rubble under the bluff. Two men stood half crouched nearby. One held the laser. A third sprawled unmoving between them, suit rent and blackened.

Heim steadied one shaking hand with the other and took aim. “Endre!” he called, hoarse and in horror.

“We have him,” rang back the voice of the armed man. It sank till the wind nearly overrode it. “But Gregorios is done.”

Slowly, Heim dragged his way thither. He could not see through the Greek’s sooted faceplate. In a dull fashion he was glad of that. The laser beam had slashed open fabric and body, after which gases mixed and exploded. Blood was streaked round about, garish scarlet.

A gruesome keening lifted from the Naqsan. “Gwurru shka ektrush, is this war? We do not thus at home. Rahata, rahata.”

“Bragdon must have recovered himself and shot as Gregorios jumped him,” Vadász said drearily. “The impact jarred his gun loose. I got it and came back here, where they both had rolled. C.E. held him pinned meanwhile.”

Heim stared long at the Peaceman. Finally, mechanically, he asked, “Any serious injuries?”

“No,” Bragdon replied in the same monotone. “At least, no bones broken. I’ve a headache.”

He stumbled off, lowered himself to the ground, and lay there with an arm across his faceplate.

“I thought we could get away with this,” Vadász said, eyes fixed on the dead man.

“We did,” Heim answered. “Wars have casualties.” He clapped the minstrel’s shoulder and walked toward Jocelyn. Sweat, runneling down his body, squelched in his boots. He felt a tightness in chest and gullet as if he were about to cry, but he wasn’t able.

“You all right, Joss?” he asked. She backed away. “I won’t hurt you,” he said.

“But I shot at you!” Her voice was as a frightened child’s.

“That’s in the game.” He laid his arms around her and drew the helmet against his breast. She sobbed for minutes. He waited it out from a vague sense of duty. Not that he hated her; there was a strange ashy vacuum where she had been in him. His emotions were engaged with the man who had died, his thoughts with what must be done.

At last he could leave her, seated and silent. He went on to the wrecked flyer. Fragments and cargo were scattered from hell to breakfast. He found an unharmed entrenching tool and several machetes and carried them back. “Start digging, Bragdon,” he said. “What?” The man jerked where he lay. “We’re not going to leave Greg Koumanoudes unburied. It’ll have to be a shallow grave, but—Get busy. Somebody will spell you when you’re tired.”

Bragdon rose, centimeter by centimeter. “What have you done?” he cried.

“I didn’t kill that man. You did, with your insane attempt to—to what? Do you think you can stand off our flyer?”

“No,” Heim said. “I don’t plan to be here when it arrives.”

“But-but-but—”

“You left your motor running.” Heim gave him the tool and continued on to Vadász. Uthg-a-K’thaq bestirred himself and came to help, scooping dirt with his hands.

“Did you think of anything beyond getting control?” Heim asked the Magyar.

“No,” said Vadász. “A dim idea of—I knew not what, except that my forefathers never quit without a fight.”

“Sit down and let’s look at the poopsheets.” Every suit had a pocket loaded with charts and other local information. There wasn’t much about Staurn. Heim unfolded the map of this region.

It fluttered and crackled in the wind. He spread it across his knees. “Greg would have known what these symbols mean. But look—” His finger traced the outlines. “Those mountains are the Kimreth boundary and this is the River Morh; we know that. Now, see, Mount Lochan is marked as the highest in the northern sierra. In fact, no other peak stands that much bigger than its neighbors. So yonder old volcano has to be Lochan. Then we’re about here.”

“Yes.” A certain life returned to Vadisz’s speech. “And here is the Hurst of Wenilwain on Lochan’s northern slope. About a hundred airline kilometers hence, would you not say? I doubt we can survive that big a walk. But if we can get moderately near, someone flying on patrol or on a hunt ought to spy us.”

“And Wenilwain knows us. Uh-huh.” Heim shook his head. “It’s a long chance to take, I admit. What are these areas marked between us and him? The Walking Forest; the Slaughter Machines; Thundersmoke.”

“Let me try—” Vadász riffled through the pitifully thin handbook. “No entry. But then, this is a stat of a map annotated by Gregorios and Charles, on the basis of what they learned while dealing with the natives. They must have planned to pass the information on when they got home.

It’s a common practice.”

“I know. And Greg’s dead. Well, we’ll find out.”

“What of those?” Vadász pointed at Bragdon painfully digging, Jocelyn huddled by herself.

“They’ll have to come along, I’m afraid. For one thing, it’ll puzzle and delay their, friends, not to find anybody here, and so give us time to find cover. For another thing, we’ll need every hand we can get, especially when we hit the foothills.”

“Wait!” Vadász slapped the ground. His voice Weakened. “Gunnar, we cannot do it. We have air recyclers, but nothing for water except a day’s worth in these canteens. That isn’t even allowing for what we will need to reconstitute powdered food. And you know that ten kilometers a day, afoot, will be fantastic progress.”

Heim actually noticed himself smiling, lopsidedly. “Haven’t you ever met that trick? We won’t be far from native water at any time; notice these streams on the map. So we fill our canteens, put the laser pistol at wide beam and low intensity, and boil out the ammonia.”

“Spending the capacitor charges,” Vadász objected. “That leaves only your slugthrower for defense.”

“Shucks, Endre, local tigers are no problem. We’re as unsavory to them as they’d be to us.

Our biggest enemy is the gravity drag; our second biggest the short food and medicine supply; our third, maybe, bad weather if we hit any.”

“M-m-m… as you say. I would still like to know precisely what the Slaughter Machines are. But—yes, of course, we will try.” The minstrel got up almost bouncily. “In fact, you have made me feel so much better that I think I can take my turn at digging.”

They had not much time to spare, enough barely to scrape a little earth over the fallen man and hear Vadász sing the Paternoster. Then they departed.

V

Four Staurnian days? Five? Heim wasn’t sure. The nightmare had gone on too long.

At first they made good time. The ground rolled quite gently upward, decked with sparse forest that hid them from aerial searchers without hindering their feet. They were all in trim physical shape. And their survival gear, awkward though it seemed, was a miracle of lightness and compactness.

Yet between it and the gravity, each was carrying a burden equal to more than his own Earth weight. “Good time” meant an average of hardly over one kilometer per hour.

Then the land canted and they were on the slopes of Kimreth’s foothills. Worse, their bodies. were beginning to show cumulative effects of stress. This was nothing so simple as exhaustion.

Without a sealtent, they could never take off their airsuits. The recyclers handled volatile by-products of metabolism; but slowly, slowly, the fractional percent that escaped chemical treatment built up. Stench and itch were endurable, somewhat, for a while. Too much aldehyde, kettone, organic acid, would not be.

And high gravity has a more subtle, more deadly effect than overworking the heart. It throws the delicate body-fluid balance—evolved through a billion years on one smaller planet—out of kilter.

Plasma seeps through cell walls. Blood pools in the extremities, ankles swell while the brain starves. On Staurn this does not happen fast. But it happens.

Without the drugs in their medikits, gravanol, kinesthan, assorted stimulants and analgesics, the travelers would not have traveled three days. When the drugs gave out (and they were getting low) there would be perhaps one day in which to go on, before a man lay down to die.

Is it worth it? gibbered through the querning in Heim’s skull. Why didn’t we go back home? I can’t remember now. His thought fluttered away again. Every remnant of attention must go to the Sisyphus task of picking up one foot, advancing it, putting it down, picking up the other foot, advancing it… Meanwhile a death-heavy weight dragged at his right side. Oh, yes, Jocelyn, he recalled from a remote past. The rest of us have to take turns helping her along.

She stumbled. Both of them came near falling. “Gotta rest,” her air-warped voice wavered.

“You rested… till ten minutes ago… Come!” He jerked brutally on the improvised harness which joined them.

They reeled on for another five hundred seconds. “Time,” Vadász called at the end. They lowered themselves down on their backs and breathed.

Eventually Heim rose to his knees. His vision had cleared and his head throbbed a bit less.

He could even know, in a detached way, that the scenery was magnificent.

Eastward the hills up which he was laboring swooped in long curves and dales toward the illimitable hazy plain. The gentled light of an evening sun turned their colors—tawny and orange, with red splashes to mark stands of forest—into a smoldering richness. Not far away a brook twisted bright among boulders, until it foamed over in a series of cataracts whose noise was like bells through the still air. A swarm of insectoidal creatures, emerald bodies and rainbow wings, hovered above the pools it made.

Westward the mountains loomed dark and wild against the sun, which was near their ridge.

Yet it tinged Lochan’s snowcone, a shape as pure as Fuji’s, with unearthly greens and blues under a violet heaven. The crags threw their shadows far down the sides, dusking whatever was ahead on Heim’s route. But he saw that, a kilometer hence, a wood grew. His field glasses showed it apparently thick with underbrush. But it was too far to go around—he couldn’t see the northern or southern end—while it was probably not very wide.

Vadász had also been looking in that direction. “I think best we call this a day,” he said.

“It’s early yet,” Heim objected.

“But the sun will soon go below that high horizon. And we are exhausted, and tomorrow we shall have to cut our way through yonder stuff. A good rest is a good investment for us, Gunnar.”

Hell, we’ve been sleeping nine hours out of the eighteen! Heim glanced at the others. Their suits had become as familiar to him as the seldom seen faces. Jocelyn was already unconscious.

Uthg-a-K’thaq seemed to flow bonelessly across the place where he lay. Vadász and Bragdon sat tailor style, but their backs were bent. And every nerve in Heim carried waves of weariness. “All right,” he said.

He hadn’t much appetite, but forced himself to mix a little powder with water and squeeze the mess through his chowlock. When that was done, he stretched himself as well as his backpack allowed. Some time had passed before he realized that he wasn’t sleepy. Exhausted, yes; aching and throbbing; but not sleepy. He didn’t know whether to blame overtiredness or the itch in undepilated face and unwashed skin. Lord, Lord, what I’d give for a bath, clean sheets to lie between, clean air to breathe! He braked that thought. There was danger enough without adding an extra psychological hazard.

Pushing himself to a seated position, he watched the light die on Mount Lochan. The sky darkened toward night, a few stars trembled, the little crescent of the outer moon stood steely near the zenith.

“You too?”

; Heim shifted so he could see through his faceplate who had joined him. Bragdon.

Reflexively, his hand dropped to his pistol.

Bragdon laughed without humor. “Relax. You’ve committed us too thoroughly.”

After a moment: “Damn you.”

“Who made this mess in the first place?” Heim growled.

“You did, back in the Solar System… I’ve heard that Jews believe death itself to be an act of expiation. Maybe when we die here on Staurn, you’ll make some amends for him we had to bury.”

“I didn’t shoot him,” Heim said between his teeth.

“You brought about the situation.”

“Dog your hatch before I take a poke at you.”

“Oh, I don’t hold myself guiltless. I should have managed things better. The whole human race is blood guilty.”

“I’ve heard that notion before, and I don’t go along with it The human race is nothing but a species. Individuals are responsible for what they personally do.”

“Like setting out to fight private wars? I tell you, Heim, that man would be alive today if you’d stayed home.”

Heim squinted through the murk. He could not see Bragdon’s face, nor interpret nuances in the transformed voice. But—“Look here,” he said, “I could accuse you of murder in the course of making your own little foreign policy. My expedition is legal. It may even be somewhat more popular than otherwise. I’m sorry about Greg. He was my friend. More, he was under my command. But he knew the risks and accepted them freely. There are worse ways to die than in battle for something that matters. You do protest too much.”

Bragdon started backward. “Don’t say any more!”

Heim hammered pitilessly: “Why aren’t you asleep? Could it be that Greg came back in your dreams? Have you been thinking that your noisy breed may be powered less by love than by hate? Would you like to chop off the finger that pulled trigger on a man who was trying to do his best for Earth? Can you afford to call anyone a murderer?”

“Go to hell!” Bragdon screamed. “Go to hell! Go to hell!” He crawled off on all fours. Some meters distant, he collapsed and shuddered.

Maybe I was too rough on him, Heim thought. He’s sincere… Fout on that. Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue. He eased himself back to the turf. Presently he slept.

Sunrise woke him, level across the Uneasy Lands and tinging Mount Lochan with fire. He felt more stiff and hollow-headed each dawn, but it helped to move about, fix a cold breakfast and boil a fresh supply of water. Bragdon was totally silent; no one else said many words. But as they started the long slog toward the forest—a whole kilometer uphill—Vadász began to sing.

When he had finished, he went on to “Rimini,” “Marching through Georgia,” “The British Grenadiers,” and “From Syrtis to Cydonia.” Heim and Jocelyn panted with him in the choruses, and perhaps Uthg-a-K’thaq, or even Bragdon, got some help too from the tramping rhythms and the brave images of home. They reached the woods sooner, in better shape, than expected.

“Thanks, Endre,” Heim said.

“My job, you know,” Vadász answered.

Resting before they went among the trees, Heim studied the growth more closely. At a distance, by dawnlight, he had seen that it wound across the hills along a fault line, and was as sharply bordered as if artificial. Since the northwestern edge was well above him on a steep rise, he had also made out a curious, churned sweep of soil on that side, which passed around the slopes beyond his purview. Now he was too near to see anything but the barrier itself.

“Not brushy after all,” he observed in surprise. “Only one kind of plant. What do you think of that?”

“We are none xenowotanists,” the engineer grunted.

The trees were about four meters tall; nothing grows high on Staurn. And they were no thicker than a man’s arm. But numberless flexible branches grew along the stems, from top to bottom, each in turn split into many shoots. In places the entanglement of limbs was so dense as to be nearly solid. Only the upper twigs bore leaves; but those were matted together into a red roof beneath which the inner forest looked night-black.

“This’ll be machete work,” Heim said. “We shouldn’t have to move a lot slower than usual, though. One man cuts—that doesn’t look too hard—while the others rest. I’ll begin.” He unlimbered his blade.

Which! Which! The wood was soft, the branches fell right and left as fast as he could wield his tool. In an hour the males ran through a cycle of turns, Jocelyn being excused, and were far into the forest. With the sun still only a couple of hours up, Heim exulted.

“Take over, Gunnar,” Vadász rattled. “The sweat is gurgling around my mouth.”

Heim rose and advanced along the narrow trail. It was hot and still in here. A thick purple twilight soaked through the leaves, making vision difficult where one stood and impossible a few meters off. Withes rustled against him, spring-fly resisting his passage. He felt a vibration go back through the machete and his wrist, into his body, as he chopped. Huh! Odd. Like the whole interlocked wilderness shivering. The trees stirred and soughed. Yet there was no breath of wind.

Jocelyn shrieked.

Heim spun on his heel. A branch was coiling down past her, along her airsuit. Something struck his back. He lifted his machete—tried to—a dozen tendrils clutched him by the arm. He tore free.

An earthquake rumble went through the gloom. Heim lost balance under a thrust. He fell to one knee. Pain shot through the point of impact. The tree before his eyes swayed down. Its many-fingered lower branches touched the soil and burrowed. Leaves drew clear of each other with a crackling like fire. He glimpsed sky, then he was blinded by their descent about his head.

He shouted and slashed. A small space opened around him. The tree was pulling loose its roots. Groaning, shuddering, limbs clawed into the earth, it writhed forward.

The entire forest was on the march. The pace wasn’t quick, no faster than a man could walk on Staurn, but it was resistless. Heim scrambled up and was instantly thrown against a tangle of whipping branches. Through airsuit and helmet he felt those buffets. He reeled away. A trunk, hitching itself along, smote him in the stomach. He retched and dropped his machete. Almost at once it began to be covered, as limbs pulled from the ground and descended for the next grab along their way. Heim threw what remained of his strength against them. They resisted with demoniac tenacity. He never knew how he managed to part them long enough to retrieve the blade.

Above the crashing and enormous rustle he heard Jocelyn scream again, not in startlement but in mortal terror. He knelt to get under the leaves and peered wildly about. Through swaying, lurching trunks, snake-dancing branches, clawing twigs, murk, and incandescent sunlight spears, he saw her. She had fallen. Two trees had her pinned. They could break bones or rip her suit when they crawled across her body.

His blade flew in his hand. A battle cry burst from his mouth. He beat his way to her like a warrior hewing through enemy lines. The stems had grown rigid, as if they had muscles now tightened. His blows rebounded. A sticky fluid spurted from the wounds he made. “Gunnar, help!” she cried in sightlessness. He cleared brush from her until he could stoop and pull her free.

“You okay?” He must shout to be heard in the racket. She lay against him and sobbed.

Another tree bent down upon them. He yanked her to her feet.

“To me!” he bellowed. “Over here!”

Uthg-a-K’thaq wriggled to join him. The Naqsan’s great form parted a way for Bragdon.

Vadász wove lithely through the chaos.

“Joss in the middle,” Heim ordered. “The rest of us, back to back around her. We can’t outrun this mess, can’t stay here either. We’d exhaust ourselves just keeping our feet. Forward!”

His blade caught a sunbeam and burned in its arc.

The rest was chop, wrestle, duck, and dodge, through the moving horror. Heim’s awareness had gone coldly lucid; he watched what happened, saw a pattern, found a technique. But the strength to keep on, directly across that tide, came from a deeper source. It was more than the simple fear of death. Something in him revolted against his bones being tumbled forever among these marching trolls.

Bragdon gave way first. “I can’t… lift… this… any more,” he groaned, and sank to the earth.

Wooden fingers closed about one leg.

Uthg-a-K’thaq released him. “Get in the middle, then,” the Naqsan said. “Hel’ him, you Lawrie.”

Later in eternity, Vadász’s machete sank. “I am sorry.” The minstrel could barely be heard.

“Go on.”

“No!” Heim said. “We’ll all get out, or none.”

“Let me try,” Jocelyn said. She gave Vadász into the care of Bragdon, who had recovered a little, and took his knife herself. Her blows were weak, but they found she could use the tool as a crowbar to lever a path for herself.

And… sunlight, open sky, turf under Lochan’s holy peak. They went a few meters farther before they toppled.

Heim woke a couple of hours afterward. For a while he blinked at heaven and found curious shapes in the clouds, as if again he were a boy on Gea. When memory came back, he sat upright with a choked oath.

The trees were still moving past. He thought, though, they had slowed down.

Northwestward, opposite to their direction, he saw their trail of crumbled earth. The most distant part that he could spy was overlaid with pale yellow, the first new growth.

Uthg-a-K’thaq was the only other one awake. The Naqsan flopped down beside him. “Well, skiwwer, now we know what the Walking Worest is.”

“I’d like to know how it works,” Heim said.

Rest had temporarily cleared his mind. An answer grew. “I’m only guessing, of course,” he said after a minute, “but it could be something like this. The ultraviolet sunlight makes plant chemistry hellish energetic. That particular species there needs something, some mineral maybe.

Where faulting exposes a vein of it, a woods appears.”

“Not likely mineral,” Uthg-a-K’thaq corrected. “You cannot hawe liwe dewendent on sheer geological accident.”

“Geology operates faster on a big planet than a terrestrial one, C.E.,” Heim argued. “Still, I’ll agree it makes poor ecology. Let me think… Okay, let’s say you get bacteria laying down organic stuff of a particular kind, wherever conditions are right. Such deposits would be fairly common, exposed fairly often. Those trees could broadcast spores that can lie dormant for centuries, waiting for a chance to sprout. All right, then, they consume the deposit at a tremendous rate.

Once mature, such a forest has to keep moving because the soil gets exhausted where it stands.

Reproduction is too slow; the trees themselves have to move. Evidently sunlight starts them on their way, because you remember they didn’t begin till mid-morning and now in the afternoon they’re coming to a halt.”

“What hawwens when they hawe eaten out the whole wein?”

“They die. Their remains go, back to the soil. Eventually everything gets reprocessed into the material they need, and the spores they’ve left wake to life.” Heim grimaced. “Why am I trying to play scientist? Defense mechanism? I’ve got to believe that thing is natural.”

“We came through it aliwe,” Uthg-a-K’thaq said calmly. “Is that not suwwicient?”

Heim didn’t reply. His gaze drifted west, whither he had yet to go. Did he see a vague plume of mist on the lower steeps of Lochan? It was too distant for him to be sure. But—Thundersmoke?

Whatever that is. No need to worry about it now. First we’ve got to get past the Slaughter Machines.

VI

Two more days—twenty kilometers? They could not have done that much were they not crossing a flat space, a plateau on the lap of Lochan.

It was dreary country, treeless, rock-strewn, sparsely covered with low yellowish scrub.

Many streams ran down toward the Morh, their tinkle the only sound except for an endless whittering wind; but the banks held no more life than the dusty stretches beyond. Alone the ranges that hemmed in the world on three sides, and the splendid upward leap of the snowcone ahead, redeemed this landscape.

The first evening they camped in sight of a crater. Its vitrified walls gleamed reddish black, like clotted blood, in the last sunlight. Vadász pointed and remarked, “I thought this region is barren because runoff from above leached the soil. Now I find otherwise.”

“How so?” Heim asked, incurious in his fatigue.

“Why, yonder is plain to see as bombwork. There must have been an industrial center here once, that was destroyed in the war.”

“And you’d let the same happen to Earth!” Bragdon’s accusation was the first word he had spoken in more than a day.

Heim sighed. “How often must I explain?” he said, more to Jocelyn than to the Peaceman.

“Earth has space defenses. She can’t be attacked—unless we drift on from crisis to crisis till matters get so bad that both sides have to build fleets “big enough to take the losses in breaking through.

All I want is to head off that day by settling with Alerion now. Unfortunately, Alerion isn’t interested in a reasonable settlement. We’ve got to prove to them that they haven’t any alternative.”

“Womwardment does not account wor the inwertility here,” said Uthg-a-K’thaq. “The war was three or wour Earth centuries ago. Radioactiwity disawweared long since. Something else has kewt nature ’rom recowering.”

“Oh, to hell with it,” Jocelyn moaned. “Let me sleep.”

Heim lay down too. He thought with a dull unease that they should set a watch—but no, everyone was exhausted… Unconsciousness took him.

The next day they saw two metallic shapes at a distance. There was no question of detouring for a closer look, and in any event they had something else to occupy what small part of their minds could be spared from the ever more painful onward march. The end of the plateau was coming into sight. Between the edge and the mountain’s next upward slope was an escarpment.

Right and left stretched those obsidian cliffs, sheer, polished, not high but unscalable in this gravity without equipment the party didn’t have. To go around them—at whatever unseen point they stopped—would take days; and the survival drugs could not last for such a journey.

Only in the center of view was the line broken. A bank of vapor roiled from the foot of the scarp for several kilometers up the mountainside above. Like an immense curtain it hid the terrain; plumes blew off the top, blizzard color against the deep sky, and a roaring grew louder as the walkers neared.

“That has to be Thundersmoke,” Vadász said. “But what is it?”

“A region ow—I hawe not the English,” Uthg-a-K’thaq answered. “Tsheyyaka. The ground weneath is hot, and water woils out.”

“Geysers and hot springs.” Heim said. He whistled. “But I’ve never seen or heard of anything their size. They make Yellowstone or Dwarf’s Forge look like a teakettle. Can we get through?”

“We must.” Uthg-a-K’thaq bent his head so that all three eyes could peer through his faceplate. Evolved for the mists of his own planet, they could see a ways into the infrared. “Yes-s-s. The cliwws are crum’led. Makes an incline, though wery rugged and with water rushing ewerywhere.”

“Still, thank God, a high gravity means a low angle of repose. And once into those meadows beyond, we should have a chance of meeting hunters or patrollers from the Hurst.” Heim straightened a little. “We’ll pull through.”

A while later he saw a third gleam of steel among the bushes. This one was so near the line of march that he altered course to pass by. They didn’t know exactly where they could best start into Thundersnloke anyway.

The object grew as he plodded. During rest periods he found he could not keep his gaze off.

The shape was no uglier than much else he had seen, but in some indescribable fashion it made his spine crawl. When at last he dragged himself alongside and stopped for a look, he wanted to get away again, fast.

“An ancient machine.” Vadász spoke almost too softly to be heard through the grumble and hiss from ahead. “Abandoned when the bomb struck.”

Corrosion was slow in this atmosphere. Paint had worn off the iron, which in turn was eroded but still shiny in places. The form was boxlike, some two meters square and five long, slanting on top toward a central turret. The ruins of a solar-power accumulator system could be identified, together with a radar sweep and, Heim thought, other, detector instruments. Several ports in body and turret were shut, with no obvious means of opening them. He parted the brush around the base and saw that this had been a hovercraft, riding an air cushion and propelled by net backward thrust in any direction.

“A vehicle,” he said. “After the war it just sat, I guess. Nobody can have moved back to the Lochan region for a long time. Those other things we glimpsed must be similar.”

Jocelyn clutched at his hand. He was reminded of his daughter when she was small and got frightened. “Let’s go, Gunnar,” she begged. “This is too much like dead bones.”

“I wonder,” he remarked, carefully matter-of-fact, “why the metal wasn’t salvaged. Even with atomic energy, I should think the natives on a fireless planet would value scrap iron.”

“Taboo?” Vadász suggested. “These wrecks may well have dreadful associations.”

“Maybe. Though my impression is that the Staurni look back on their war with a lot less horror than we remember our Exchange—and Earth got off very lightly.” Heim shifted the burden of air system and supply pack on his shoulders. “Okay, we’ll push on. The sun’s low, and I don’t fancy camping among ghosts.”

“Can you give us a song, Endre?” Jocelyn asked. “I could use one.”

“I shall try.” The minstrel’s voice was flattened as well as distorted in transmission, but he croaked:

Engaged in helping the woman along, Heim paid no attention to the words at first. Suddenly he realized that Vadász was not singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” at all, but the cruel old Irish original.

Heim glanced at Bragdon. One could almost read the thought in that helmet: How can these devils admit to themselves what war really means? The gloved hands clamped into fists: I know!

I had to bury it!

It was not good to hear in this slain land. But maybe Endre had no choice. Whatever haunted the machine receding too slowly into distance, had touched him likewise.

Everyone was unspokenly glad of the exhaustion which tumbled them into sleep that night.

Yet Heim rested ill. Dreams troubled him, and several times he started awake… what noise? A change in the geysers?—No, something metallic, a creak, a rattle, a buzz, far off but limping closer; imagination, nothing else. He sank back into the feverish dark.

Dawn was wet with mists blown from Thundersmoke, a bare three or four kilometers away.

White vapors coiled along the ground and hazed the countryside so that vision faded shortly into grayness. Overhead the sky was a bowl of amethyst and Lochan’s cap too bright to look at. Heim closed his chowlock on a mouthful of concentrate—the rest was a lump in his stomach—and stared Wearily around. “Where’s Joss?”

“She went yonder,” Vadász said. “Um-m… she ought to be back now, eh?”

“I’ll go find her.” Heim settled the weight on his body and lumbered into the fog.

She hunched not far off. “What’s the matter?” he called through the gush and burble of water.

Her form scarcely moved. “I can’t,” she said thinly.

“What can’t you?”

“Go any further. I can’t. Pain, every joint, every cell. You go on. Get help. I’ll wait.”

He crouched, balancing on hands as well as feet. “You’ve got to march,” he said. “We can’t leave you alone.”

“What can hurt me worse? What does it matter?”

Remorse smote him. He laid an arm across her and said without steadiness, “Joss, I was wrong to make you come. I should have left you behind for your friends—But too late now. I don’t ask you to forgive me—”

“No need, Gunnar.” She leaned against him.

“—but I do tell you you’ve got to make the trek. Three or four more days.” Can’t be any longer, because that’s when we run out of supplies. “Then you can rest as much as you want.”

“Rest forever,” she breathed. Moisture ran down her faceplate like tears, but she spoke almost caressingly. “I used to dread dying. Now it’s sweet.”

Alarm cut through his own weariness. “There’s another reason you .can’t stay here by yourself. You’d let go all holds. This is the wrong time of month for you, huh? Okay.” He took the waste unit she had not refolded and slung it on his own back. His gloves groped at her pack.

“Gunnar!” She started. “You can’t carry my load too!”

“Not your air rig, worse luck. The rest is only a few kilos.” The fresh weight gnawed at him.

He climbed to his feet again and reached down for her hands. “C’mon. Allez oop.”

The breeze shifted and from the north came the sound of his dreams. Clank, bang, groan, close enough to override the thunders. “What’s that?” she shrilled.

“I dunno. Let’s not find out.” His own heart missed a beat, but he was grimly pleased to see how she scrambled erect and walked.

At camp, Vadász and Uthg-a-K’thaq stared vainly for the source of the new noise. Bragdon was already stumping off, lost in an apathy which must stem from more than tiredness. The others followed him without speculating aloud.

The sun swung higher and began to burn off the fog. Steam still shrouded the natural cut in the cliffs, though the Naqsan said he could make out details of the nearer part. The humans saw scores of boulders, some big as houses, and thousands of lesser rocks that littered the final kilometer before the climb began. Among them washed hot, smoking streams, which turned the ground into mud tinted yellow by sulfur. Where pools had formed the hues were red and green, microscopic organisms perhaps…

The pursuing clatter had strengthened. Vadász tried to sing, but no one listened and he soon quit. They tottered on, breathing hard, pausing less often to rest than had been their wont.

The moment came without announcement. Heim cast a glance behind and stopped dead.

“Fanden i helvede!” he choked. His companions slewed around to see.

Between the lifting of fog and its own nearness, the thing had become visible a kilometer or so to their rear. It was another machine like the one they had found. But a twisted, weather-eaten detector frame still rose above the turret, and the body moved… slowly, crippledly, loose parts vibrating aloud, air-blower spitting and jerking, the whole frame ashudder, it moved in their wake.

Jocelyn suppressed a cry. Bragdon actually jumped backward a step. Panic edged his tone:

“What’s that?”

Heim beat down his own quick fear. “An abandoned vehicle,” he said. “Some kind of automaton. Not quite worn out. Scarcely any moving parts, you know.”

“But it’s following us!” Jocelyn quavered. “Probably set to patrol an area, home on any life it detects, and—” A crazy hope fluttered through Heim’s brain, unshared by his guts. “Maybe we’re being offered a ride.”

“Suq?” asked Uthg-a-K’thaq in astonishment. After a moment, thoughtfully: “Yes-s-s, is wossiwle. Or at least, grant a radio that wunctions, we could call.”

“No.” Vadász’s helmet rolled with headshaking. “I do not trust the looks.”

Heim ran a tongue which had gone wooden over his lips. “It’s moving quicker than we can, I think,” he said. “Well have to settle with it one way or another.” Decision came. “Wait here. I’ll go back and see.”

Vadász and Jocelyn caught his arms simultaneously. He shook them off. “Damnation, I’m still the captain,” he rapped. “Let me be. That’s an order.”

He started off. The hurt in his muscles dwindled. Instead there came an odd, tingling numbness. His mind felt unnaturally clear, he saw each twig and leaf on the haggard bushes around, felt how his feet struck soil and the impact that traveled through shins to knees, smelled his own foulness, heard the geysers boom at his back. Earth seemed infinitely remote, a memory of another existence or a dream he had once had, unreal; yes, despite its vividness this world was unreal too, as hollow as himself. I’m afraid, he thought across an unbridgeable abyss. That machine frightens me worse than anything ever did before.

He walked on. There was nothing else to do. The detector lattice swiveled stiffly about, focused invisible unfelt energies on him. The robot changed direction to intercept Several armor plates clashed loose. Blackness gaped behind them. The whole body was leprous with metal decay.

How long has it wandered this upland? For what?

The turret rotated. A port tried to open, got halfway, and stuck. The machine grated inside.

Another port at the front of the body slid back. A muzzle poked forth. The slug-thrower spoke.

Heim saw dirt fly where the bullets hit, a hundred meters short He whipped about and ran.

The thing growled. Swaying on an unstable air cushion, it chased him. The gun raved a minute longer before stopping.

The Slaughter Machines! beat through Heim’s skull, in time with his gasps for wind and the jar of footfalls. Robots to guard whatever there was where that crater is now. Guard it by killing anything that moved. But a missile got through, and the robots alone were left, and hunted and killed till they wore out, and a few are still prowling these barrens, and today one of them has found us.

He reached the others, stumbled, and rolled, in a heap. For a minute he lay half stunned.

Vadász and Uthg-a-K’thaq helped him rise. Jocelyn hung onto his hand and wept “I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead.”

“He would be,” said Vadász, “but explosives have deteriorated… Watch out!”

Another port had opened, another tube thrust clear. Across the distance, through a red blur in his vision, Heim saw coils, a laser projector, and lasers don’t age. He grabbed Jocelyn to pull her behind him. A beam sickled, brighter than the sun. It struck well to the left Bushes became charcoal and smoke. The beam traced a madman’s course, boiled a rivulet, shot skyward, winked out.

“The aiming mechanism,” Uthg-a-K’thaq said. For once his own voice was shaken. “Has worn to uselessness.”

“Not if the thing gets close,” Bragdon whimpered. “Or it can slugger us, or crush us, or—Run!”

The terror had gone from Heim. He felt a cold uplifting: no pleasure of combat, for he knew how thin their chance was, but total aliveness. The matter grew crystalline in his mind, and he said: “Don’t. You’ll wear yourself out in no time. This is a walking race. If we can get to Thundersmoke, or even to those boulders, ahead of the bullets, we may be able to hide. No, don’t shed your packs. We won’t be allowed to retrieve diem. Walk.”

They struck out. “Shall I sing for you?” Vadász asked. “No need,” Heim said.

“I thought not. Good. I do need the breath.” Heim took the rear. The engine coughed and banged behind. Again and again he could not control himself, he must stop and turn about for a look. Always death was closer. Old, old, crumbling, crazed, half blind and half palsied, the thing which had never been alive and would not die shivered along just a little faster than a man could stride on Staurn. The poise from it was an endless metal agony. Once he saw an armor plate drop off, once the air drive went awry and almost toppled the ponderous bulk; but it came on, came on.

And the rocks of refuge ahead grew nearer with nightmare slowness.

Jocelyn began to stagger. Heim moved to give her support. As if the change in configuration had tripped some relay in a rotted computer, the slug-thrower spat anew. Several of the bullets buzzed past them.

Bragdon joined Heim on the woman’s other side. “Let me help,” he panted. She leaned on them both. “We… won’t make it,” Bragdon said.

“We might,” Heim snapped, for he dreaded a return of that negation he had seen in Jocelyn this dawn.

“We could… maybe… if we moved steady. You could. Not me. Not her. Got to rest.”

Bragdon left the remainder unsaid: The pursuer needs no rest.

“Get into that water, among those rocks,” Vadász said. “Lie low. Then maybe that pokolgep cannot see us.”

Heim followed his gesture. Somewhat to the left, a scatter of stones lay in a muddy pool.

None were bigger than a man, but—A light artillery shell passed overhead. The cannon crack rang back off the unattainable cliffs. The shell struck, splintered a boulder, but did not explode. “Let’s try,” he agreed.

They splashed through muck and crouched belly-down in shallow red water. Heim was careful to hold his automatic free, Vadász his laser. Pistols seemed pathetic against the monster’s size and armament; but a man took care of his weapons. Mist blown from Thundersmoke pattered upon them. Heim wiped his faceplate and stared between two rocks.

The machine had halted. It snarled to itself, jerked guns right and left, swept detectors through a hemisphere. “Good Lord,” Vadász whispered, “I think indeed it has lost us.”

“The water cools oww our in’rared radiation,” Uthg-a-K’thaq replied as hushedly. “We are maywe Under its radar weams, and maywe the owtical circuits are wad. Or the memory system has gone to wieces.”

“If only—No.” Heim’s pistol sank in his fist.

“What did you think?” Jocelyn asked, frantic.

“How to disable what’s left of the detector lattice. Could be done by a laser beam—see that exposed power cable? Only you’d never get close enough before you were spotted and killed.”

The short pulse-stopping hope, that the machine might give up and go away, crashed. It started grinding about a spiral, a search curve. Heim plotted that path and muttered: “Should be here inside half an hour. However, first it’ll move away. Which gains us some slight meterage. Be ready to start when I give you the word.”

“We’ll never make it, I tell you,” Bragdon protested.

“Not so loud, you crudhead. We don’t know that the thing hasn’t still got ears.”

As if in response, the robot stopped. It rested a moment on the whirr from its air blowers; the lattice horns wove around, tilted, came to a halt… It continued along the spiral.

“You see?” Vadász said with disgust. “Keep trying, Bragdon. You may yet destroy us.”

The Peaceman made a strangled noise. “Don’t,” Jocelyn begged. “Please.”

Uthg-a-K’thaq stirred. “A thought,” he belched. “I do in truth weliewe we cannot outrun the enemy to shelter. But can Slaughter Machines count?”

Vadász’s breath hissed inward. “What’s this?”

“We hawe lit-tle to lose,” the Naqsan said. “Let us run, excewt for one who waits here and keews the laser. Can he get unnoticed in cutting range ow the wistol weam—”

“He could be killed too easily,” Heim said. But hope shuddered anew in him. Why not?

Better go down fighting, whatever happen?. And I might even save her.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Give me the gun and I’ll bushwhack our friend.”

“No, skipper,” Vadász said. “I am no hero, but—”

“Orders,” Heim said.

“Gunnar—” broke from Jocelyn.

Uthg-a-K’thaq plucked the laser out of Vadász’s grasp. “No time wor human games,” he snorted. “We were not here without him, and he is the least usewul. So.” He thrust the weapon at Bragdon. “Or dare you not?”

“Gimme!” Heim snatched for it.

Bragdon drew away. “That thing out there,” he said in a remote voice. “What comes of war.

Think about that, Heim.”

Vadász wallowed through the water and silt, after him. Heim saw the robot stop again to listen. “Get out of here!” Bragdon yelled. “I’ll let it see me if you don’t!”

The machine plowed through the bushes, over streams and stones, directly toward them.

No chance to argue. Bragdon must go ahead and be a damn fool. Heim got to his feet with a sucking splash. “Follow me—everyone!” Jocelyn slithered from the pool with him. They started off together.

Thundersmoke brawled before them. The engine chugged hoarse behind. A gun chattered.

Mist swirled in their view, settled on their faceplates, blinded them. Staurn hauled them downward, laid rocks to trip them, brewed mud to glue their boots. Heim’s heart smashed at his ribs as if it were also a cannon. He didn’t know how much he leaned on Jocelyn or she on him.

There was no awareness of anything but noise, weight, and vast drowning waters.

Vadász shouted.

Heim lurched against a boulder, got his back to it, and lifted his automatic. But the hunter machine was not about to pounce.

Near the thing was, most horribly near. Bragdon’s tiny form crept from ambush. Up to that iron body the man went, braced himself on widespread legs, aimed his pistol and fired.

The laser sword hewed. Metal framework glowed white where struck. Trigger held fast, Bragdon probed for the power cable.

Something like a bull’s bellow rose out of the robot. It swung clumsily around. Bragdon stood where he was, dwarfed under its bulk, steadily firing. Ports opened in the armor, where they were able. Guns came out. A few still worked. Heim hauled Jocelyn to the ground and laid himself above her. A wild beam hit the boulder where he had made his stand. Rock flowed from the wound.

The guns could not reach as low as Bragdon. The machine clanked forward. Bragdon severed the detector powerline. “Run, Victor!” Vadász howled. “Get out of the way!” Bragdon turned and tripped. He went on his face. The robot passed over him.

And on, firing, firing, a sleet of bullets, shells, energy beams, poison gases, destruction’s last orgasm; senseless, witless, futureless, the Slaughter Machine rocked south because it chanced to be headed that way.

Heim rose and hurried toward Bragdon. Maybe he’s all right. An air cushion distributes weight over a large area. Bragdon did not stir. Heim came near and stopped.

Dimly, through the clamor of geysers and departing engine, he heard Jocelyn call, “I’m coming, Gunnar!”

“No,” he cried back. “Don’t.”

There were sharp blades in the bottom of the iron shell. They must move up and down, clearing the ground by a few centimeters. He did not want her to see what lay before his eyes.

VII

Drumroll in the earth: vapor puffed from a sulfurous cone. Then the spout came, climbing until a pillar for giants stood white and crowned. Another died; but there were more, everywhere among the tumbled black stones, as far as Heim could see through a whirl of fog. There was no distance. He groped in chaos. Water chuckled around his boots, over and over again he slipped on wetness. The damp was interior too, sweat soddened his skin. Strange, he thought in what detachment he could muster from the weariness with which he trembled, strange that his lungs should be a dry fire. Jocelyn’s gasps reached him, where she crawled at his side.

Half his strength was spent to help her along. Otherwise he heard nothing but the titanic forces that churned about them. Uthg-a-K’thaq’s broad shape was visible ahead, leading the way.

Vadász toiled in the rear. Light waned as the sun sank behind the mountain, to end the day after they piled a cairn over their newest dead.

We’ve got to keep going, chanted idiotically in Heim. Got to keep going. Got to keep going.

And underneath: Why? For the sake of the battle he intended to fight? That had become meaningless. The only battle was here, now, against a planet. For Lisa, then? A better cause, that she should not be fatherless. But she could well survive him. Grief dies young in the young. To discharge his own responsibility to those he commanded? Better still; it touched a deep-lying nerve. Yet he was no longer in command, when his engineer saw more clearly and moved more surely than any human could.

Reasons blew away like geyser smoke. Death lured him with promises of sleep.

Animal instinct raised his hackles. He cursed the tempter and went on.

A mudpot bubbled on a level stretch. The farther bank was a precarious hill of boulders.

Water rushed among them, struck the mud below, and exploded in steam. Uthg-a-K’thaq beckoned the others to wait, flopped down on his belly, and hitched himself forward. Mineral crusts were treacherous, and whoever fell into one of those kettles might be cooked alive before the rest heaved him out against gravity.

Jocelyn used the pause to lie flat. Maybe she slept, or faulted; small difference any more.

Heim and Vadász remained standing. It would have been too much effort to rise again.

On the edge of visibility, among the clouds around the hilltop, Uthg-a-K’thaq waved. Heim and Vadász wrestled Jocelyn back to her legs. The captain led the way, stooped so he could make out the leader’s track through gray soft precipitate powders.

When he came to the rise, hands and feet alike must push him over the high-stacked stones.

Often a lesser chunk got loose and bounced hollowly down to the mudpot. Safest would have been to go one at a time, his dimmed consciousness realized now. The least slip could—

“Gunnar!”

He scrambled around, and almost went down in the same minor avalanche where Jocelyn rolled.

Somehow he was up, bounding through the hot fog as he had plunged to attack centuries ago. Stones turned under his soles, water spurted where he struck. Nothing existed but his need to stop her before she went into the cauldron below.

Her limbs flailed, her fingers clawed, dislodging more rocks that tumbled across her. He reached bottom. His boots sank in ooze. There was not too much heat on this fringe of the pot.

But had there been, he would not have noticed. Those boulders which had spun downward faster than the woman and sunk immediately gave footing. He knelt and braced himself.

The mass poured at him, around him. He laid hold on Jocelyn’s air cycler and became a wall.

When the landslip was done, he pulled his smeared self clear and fell beside her. Vadász saw they would go no further than the verge of the mudsink, ended his own haste, and picked a cautious way to join them. Presently Uthg-a-K’thaq arrived too.

Heim roused some minutes later. The first he noticed was the Naqsan’s voice, weirdly akin to the voice of the kettle: “Wery much harm wor us. Lac-king him, can we long liwe?”

“Joss,” he mumbled, and fought to rise. Vadász helped him. He leaned on the Magyar a while until strength returned.

“Hála Istennek,” gusted from the helmet beside his. “You are not hurt?”

“I’m okay,” Heim said. His entire being seemed one bruise, and blood welled from abrasions.

“Her?”

“Broken leg at the minimum.” Vadász’s fingers touched the unnatural angle between left hip and thigh of the motionless figure. “I don’t know what else. She is unconscious.”

“Her suit is intact,” Uthg-a-K’thaq said. First silly remark I’ve heard from him, trickled through Heim. If the fabric had torn, we wouldn’t worry about bones.

He shoved Vadász aside and bent over her. When the faceplate had been wiped clean, he could make out her features in the dimming light. Eyes were closed, lips half-parted, skin colorless and sweat-beaded. He was dismayed at how sunken her cheeks were. Laying an audio pickup against her speaker, he was barely able to detect breath, rapid and shallow.

He poised on his knees. To stave off the future, he asked, “Did anyone see what happened?”

“A stone moved when she put her weight on,” Vadász said. “She started to roll and half the/hillside went with her. Some recent quake must have unstabilized it. I will never know how you got down here so fast, not falling.”

“Who cares?” Heim gritted. “She’s in shock. I don’t know if that’s due to anything more than the leg fracture, she being so weakened to begin with. Could be worse injuries, like spinal. We don’t dare move her.”

“What then can we do?” the engineer asked.

Heim realized that command had passed back to him. “You two go on,” he said. “I’ll stay with her.”

“No!” Vadász exclaimed involuntarily.

Uthg-a-K’thaq spoke in some remnant of his pedantic way. “You can giwe her no aid, woth sealed in airsuits. We others may well need an ex-tra wair ow hands. A diwwicult wassage is wewore us,”

“As battered as I am, I’d hinder you more than help,” Heim said. “Besides, she can’t be left alone. Suppose there’s another rockslip, or this mudpot boils higher?”

“Cawtain, she is done already. Unconscious, she cannot take her grawanol. Without that, in shock, heart wailure comes quickly. Kindest to owen her helmet now.”

Rage and loss flew out of Heim: “Be quiet, you coldblooded bastardl You goaded Bragdon to die, on purpose. One’s enough!”

“Gwurru,” the Naqsan sobbed, and retreated from him.

The venom dissipated, leaving emptiness. “I’m sorry, C.E.,” Heim said dully. “Can’t expect you to think like a Terrestrial. You mean well. I suppose men’s instincts are less practical than yours.” Laughter shook chains in his throat. “Speaking about practicality, though, you’ve got something like an hour of light. Don’t waste it. March.”

Vadász considered him long before asking, “If she dies, what will you do?”

“Bury her and wait. I can stretch out the water in these canteens if I sit quiet, but you’ll need the laser for your own drink.”

“And you will then have nothing to, to fall back on. No, this is foolishness.”

“I’ll keep the automatic, if that makes you happier. Now get going. I’ll hoist a beer with you yet.”

Vadász surrendered. “If not on ship,” he said, “then in Valhalla. Farewell.”

Their hands clasped, pair by pair. Minstrel and engineer began to climb. A geyser spat not far off, steam blew down the wind, the two shapes were lost to sight Heim settled himself.

A chance for sleep, he thought. But that desire was gone. He checked Jocelyn’s breathing—no change—and stretched out beside her, glove upon her glove.

Resting thus, he grew clearer-headed. With neither excitement nor despair he weighed the likelihood of survival. It wasn’t great. Zero for Joss, of course, barring miracles. For the other three, about fifty-fifty. The walkers should emerge from Thundersmoke tomorrow evening, more or less. Then they had perhaps two days (allowing those, tough bodies one day without chemical crutches) in which to cross the high meadows toward Wenilwain’s castle. It was still distant, but the folk of the Hurst ranged widely. Doubtless they even crossed above Slaughter Land now and then, on their way to the plains and the sea. (Hm, yes, that’s why they leave the robots alone. A free defense. Carnivore souls for sure.) Given a break, the travelers might have been spied days ago.

Well, the break was not given. So Joss must die in this wet hell, under a sun whose light would not reach Earth for a century: Earth of the green woods where she had walked, the halls where she danced, the garden where she played her flute for him until he frightened her with babbled impossibilities. As that sun smoldered to extinction behind the fogs, Gunnar Heim pondered the riddle of his guilt toward her.

He had forced her here. But he did so because if she stayed behind she would betray his hopes for his planet. (Are you certain of that, buck? In fact, are you certain your way is the right one?) The choice would never have arisen except for the plot she had joined in. Yet that was evoked by his own earlier conspirings.

He gave up. There was no answer, and he was not one to agonize in unclarity. This much he knew: if the tune aboard the Quest had not matched those dreams he buried long ago for Connie’s sake, it had still been more dear than he deserved, and when Joss died a light would forever go out in him.

Blup-blup, said the mudpot beneath. A hot spring seethed louder. A geyser roared in thickening dusk, echoes resounded from unseen walls and water rilled among the shadow shapes of boulders. Heavy as his own flesh pressed against unyielding painful jumble, night flowed across the world.

Gloom lightened when the nearer moon rose, close to full, a shield bigger than Luna seen from Earth, iron bright and mottled with a strange heraldry. Heim dozed a while, woke, and saw it well above him. A thin glow surrounded the disc, diffusion in the upper mists. But most of the sky was open and he could make out stars. The lower fog rolled ashen through Thundersmoke gulch.

His drowsy eyes tried to identify individual suns. Could that bright one near Lochan’s ghostlike peak be Achernar? If so, curious to look from here upon his emblem of victory. I wonder if Cynbe could be watching it too. Wherever he is. Better check on Joss. He commenced pulling his stiffened frame off the rocks. What’s that? WHAT’S THAT?

The sight was a lightning bolt. For a second he could not believe. A long V trailed across the moon—Staurni, in flight home to the Hurst!

Heim soared erect. “Hey! Hallo-o-o! You up there, come down, help, help, help!”

The bawling filled his helmet, shivered his eardrums, tore his larynx; and was lost within meters of noise-troubled air. He flapped his arms, knew starkly that the blurring vapors made him invisible from so high above, saw the winged ones pass the disc and vanish into darkness. A beast yell broke from him, he cursed every god in the cosmos, drew his automatic and fired again and again at heaven.

That little bark was also nothing. And not even a glint from the muzzle. Heim lifted the useless .thing, which could only kill Joss, to hurl it into the mud.

His hand sank. The metal moonlight seemed to pierce his skull, he was instantly cold, utterly aware, tracing the road he must follow as if on a battle map.

No time to lose. Those wings beat fast. He squatted, unbuckled his air system, hauled its packboard around in front of him. The valve on the hose into his suit closed readily, but the coupling beyond resisted. And he had no pliers. He threw all his bear strength into his hands. The screw threads turned. The apparatus came free.

Now he was alone with whatever air his suit contained; the recycler depended on pressure from the reserve bottles. He cracked their valves. Terrestrial atmosphere, compressed more than Staurn’s own, streamed forth.

The reaction must be kindled, and he had no laser. Heedless of ricochet or shrapnel, he laid the automatic’s mouth, against the cock and pulled trigger. The bang and the belling came together. Alloy shattered, the bullet screamed free, the air tanks became a lamp.

Its flame was wan blue under the moon. Heim held the packboard steady with one hand and fanned with the other. “Please,” he called, “please, look this way, she’ll die if yon don’t.” A far-off part of him observed that he wept.

The fire flickered out. He bent near the pressure gauge, trying to read it in the unpitying moonlight. Zero. Finished.

No, wait, that was zero net. There were still three atmospheres absolute. And hydrogen diffused inward faster than oxygen did outward. Explosive mixture? He scrambled to put the bottles behind a large rock. Leaning across, he shot straight into them and threw himself down.

Flame blossomed anew, one fury and the crash toning away, whine of flying fragments, a grating among lesser stones as they sought new rest, nothingness. Heim got carefully up.

An infinite calm descended upon him. He had done what he could. Now it was only to wait, and live or die as the chance befell. He returned to Jocelyn, listened to her breath, and lay down beside her.

I ought to be in suspense, he thought vaguely. Fm not. Could my air be poisoned already?…

No, I should last an hour or so if I don’t move. I’m just… fulfilled, somehow. His eyes went to the moon, his thoughts to Connie. He had no belief in survival after death, but it was as if she had drawn close to him.

“Hi, there,” he whispered.

And—“Hai-i-i-i!” winded down the reaches of heaven, the air sang, and bat wings eclipsed the moon. Weapons flashed clear, the flock whirled around in their search for an enemy, fangs glittered, and devil shapes came to earth.

Only they didn’t act like devils, once they saw. A warrior bayed into the midget transceiver he carried. A vehicle from the Hurst descended within minutes. Her mother could not have raised Jocelyn more tenderly onto a stretcher and into the machine. Wolf-gray Wenilwain himself connected an oxygen bottle to Heim’s suit. The flyer lifted and lanced eastward for Orling.

“But… listen… jangir ketleth—” Heim desisted. His few pidgin phrases couldn’t explain about Endre and C.E. No matter, really. He’d soon be at the yacht; Wong could interpret via radio; the last survivors would be found no later than sunrise. Heim fell asleep smiling.

VIII

Her cabin was quiet. Someone had hung a new picture on the bulkhead where she could see it: a beach, probably on Tahiti. Waves came over a sapphire ocean to foam against white sands; in the foreground, palm trees nodded at Earth’s mild winds.

She laid down her book as the tall man entered. Color mounted in her face. “Gunnar,” she said very low. “You shouldn’t be up.”

“Our medic wants me on my back till we leave,” he said, “but the hell with him. At least, I had to come see you before you go. How’re you feeling?”

“All right. Still weak, of course, but Dr. Silva says I’m making a good recovery.”

“I know. I asked him. Enzyme therapy is a wonder, eh?” Heim searched for a phrase.

Nothing sufficed. “I’m glad.”

“Sit down, you idiot!”

He pulled the lounger close to her bed and lowered himself. Even in a flyer, the trip had left him lightheaded. Several days yet must pass before his vigor was restored. The gun at his hip caught on the adjuster console. He pulled it free with a muttered oath.

Amusement touched her lips. “You needn’t have brought that. Nobody’s going to kidnap you.”

“Well, hopefully not. Call it insurance.”

Her smile faded. “Are you that angry?”

“No. Two good men died, the rest of us went through a nasty time. I’m sorry it happened, but you can’t take an episode in a war to heart.”

Her look reminded him of a trapped small animal. “You could press charges of murder.”

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “What kind of swine do you take me for? We went out together on a field trip. Our engine failed, we made a crash landing where one man was killed, and hiked after help. If your people will stick by that story, mine will.”

A thin hand stole toward him. He took it and did not let go. Her hazel eyes caught him in turn. Silence grew.

When he could hold out no more, and still lacked meaningful words, he said, “You’re hauling mass at dawn, right?”

“Yes. The scientists—those who thought this was a genuine trip—they want to stay. But Captain Gutierrez overruled them. We’ve lost our purpose.” Quickly: “How long will you remain?”

“About another Earth week, till the new missile units are fitted. To be sure, we’ll lose time getting out of the planetary. system. The Lodge has to escort us, and won’t let us arm our warheads till we’re beyond defensive limits. But still, I figure we’ll be on the move inside of ten days.”

Again muteness, while they looked at each other, and away, and back. “What do you plan on doing at home?” he tried.

“Wait for you,” she said. “Pray for you.”

“But—no, look, your, uh, your political work—”

“That’s no longer relevant. I haven’t changed my mind—or have I? It’s hard to tell.” Her free hand rubbed her forehead confusedly. The motion stirred her hair, awakening light in the chestnut tresses. “I don’t think I was wrong in principle,” she said after a bit. “Maybe I was in practice. But it doesn’t matter any more. You see, you’ve changed the universe. Earth is committed.”

“Nonsense!” His face smoldered. “One ship?”

“With you her captain, Gunnar.”

“Thanks, but… but you flatter me and—Wait, Joss, you do have a job. Sentiment at home might swing too far in the other direction. The last thing any sane person wants is a jehad. You keep telling ’em the enemy is not too evil to live. Remind ’em there’ll be peace negotiations eventually, and the more reasonable we are then, the more likely the peace is to last. Okay?”

He saw that she braced herself. “You’re right, and I’ll do my poor best,” she said. “But talking politics is only an evasion.”

“What do you mean?” he stalled.

Her mouth quirked afresh. “Why, Gunnar, I do believe you’re scared.”

“No, no, nothing of the sort You need rest. I’d better go.”

“Sit,” she commanded. Her fingers closed about his palm.

The touch was light, but it would have been easier to break free of a ship grapple.

Red and white chased each other across her countenance. “I have to explain,” she said with, astounding steadiness. “About what happened earlier.”

His skin prickled.

“Yes, I hoped to persuade you not to fight,” she said. “But I learned more was involved.

Infinitely more.”

“Uh, uh—the past, sure—”

“When you come back,” she asked, “what are you going to do?”

“Live quietly.”

“Ha! I’d like to make book on that. For a while, though, you will be home on Earth.” Her tone dropped. “Oh, God, you must.” She raised her head. “I’ll be there too.”

He must summon so much will to speak that none was left for holding his eyes off the deck.

“Joss,” he said, word by word, “you remember too many things. So do I. There was that chance once, which we did better to pass up. Then we met again, both free, both lonesome, and I admit I also thought the chance might have come again. Only it hadn’t. Time switched the dice on us.”

“No, that isn’t true. Sure, at first I believed otherwise. Our casual meetings after I returned from Ourania, and the political barrier between us—damn all politics! I thought you were simply attractive, and half that must be because of a friendship we’d never revive. I dreamed a little on the way here, but they seemed like just ordinary woman-type daydreams. How could you hurt me?” She paused. “It turned out you could.”

“I’m trying not to,” he said desperately. “You’re too good for soothing with lies.”

She let his hand go. Her own fell open upon the blanket. “So you don’t care.”

“I do, I do. But can’t you see, I didn’t break with Connie the way you did with Edgar. When she, well, helped me about you, we pulled still closer together. Then she died. It cut me off at the roots. I guess without thinking about it I’ve looked ever since for a root that strong. I’m a coward, afraid to settle for anything less, because afterward someone else might happen by who—It wouldn’t be fair to you.”

She rallied. “You’ve outgrown believing in permanent infatuation, haven’t you? We understand what really matters between two people. If you’re trying to warn me you might be restless—I wouldn’t be jealous at your wandering a little. As long as you always came back.”

“I don’t want to wander. Physically isn’t important. I wouldn’t want to mentally. That one time was bad enough. And when I heard about New Europe, I remembered a girl there. I was young and stupid, skittish about being tied down, which is especially bad for a Navy man. So I left when my leave was up without committing myself. Next time I arrived, she’d moved; I dithered whether to track her down, finally didn’t, and soon after got posted too far away to visit that planet. Now—”

“I see. You want to make sure about her.”

“I have to.”

“But that was twenty years or more ago, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “I’ve got to find out what happened to her, see her safe if she’s still alive. Beyond that, yes, I’m doubtless being foolish.”

She smiled then. “Go ahead. I’m not too worried.”

He rose. “I must leave now. Neither of us is in any shape for emotional scenes.”

“Yes. I’ll wait, darling.”

“Better not. Not seriously, anyhow. Hell alone knows what’ll happen to me. I might not return at all.”

“Gunnar!” she cried, as if he had struck her. “Never say that!”

He jollied her as best he could, and kissed her farewell, and departed. While his pilot flitted him the short way back to the yacht, he looked out. A flock of Staurni hunters was taking off.

Sunlight flared across their weapons. The turmoil in him changed toward eagerness—to be away, to sail his ship again—as he watched those dragon shapes mount into the sky.