The Off-Worlders
by John Baxter

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I
London has always been a city of enduring flexibility, adapting itself to whatever demands its inhabitants have made upon it. At various times a camp, a market, a fortress, a port, a commercial city, a center of the arts, a seat of imperial government, the world's brothel and its cathedral, it became in the 27th century, when war and peace blended into a twilight of action, that least alive of all living centers, a university town. The attitude which holds that nothing but ideas is really worthwhile settled like a fog onto the city, and London by degrees began to die. The mathematicians went to Moscow, the engineers to New New York, the architects to Chandigar, and London was left to the philosophers and the dusty sweepings of the intellectual universe.

Elton Penn entered the telephone exchange and stood watching the other callers around the lofty light-filled room.

The place was empty except for the calling machines, a hundred white cylindrical columns three feet high jutting from the floor in a circle, and three people using them. Penn walked to the far corner of the room where it was quietest. He had a small leather case in his hand which he put down carefully on the floor before feeling across the flat end of the cylinder for the patches of warmth that were its controls.

He was still clumsy at this, even though he had been on Earth for three years. The manipulation of monopolar machines was a skill one picked up early in life or never entirely mastered. Penn had been thirty years old when he had come to Earth from the worlds beyond The Limit. His mind and body had never entirely adjusted to a monopolar universe, a world where machines no longer had moving parts, switches, dials or knobs, but were only smooth-faced blocks of germanium-impregnated stone designed to trap magnetic monopoles and channel them into electrical paths impressed on the substance of the block. His fingers were slow and awkward as they traced out the calling pattern, but he refused to start again. Finally the heat ceased and there was an audible click in the center of the column. He lifted his fingers.

"Yes?" a voice said from the air just in front of his face.

"It's Penn," he said.

"Is it arranged?"

"Yes. I'll be at the meeting place in ten minutes."

"So soon?"

"It must be now. I have to leave tomorrow."

"Very well. In ten minutes."

The heat resumed. The call was over.

Penn picked up the leather case and went out into the street. Light rain was falling, giving the already polished and antiseptic streets and buildings a gloss which made them seem more impersonal than ever. This must be how a microscope slide looks to the bacillus being examined, he thought: a hostile and repellent place that might at any moment become a killing ground. He shoved his free hand inside his robe to keep it warm. The rain depressed him. On Earth, one never really adapted to the changes of temperature. It seemed that, on a world where man was so much in control of his environment, where the last secrets of science and nature were displayed for everybody to see, heat and cold would likewise be subjugated. But it was a skill that Earth scientists had never bothered to pursue. Each storm and frost was, to Penn, a subtly disturbing event. At home he had not minded the extremes of climate because his was a Limited world, beyond the sphere of Earth hegemony, inhabited by Earth colonists but abandoned by the administration when the first tide of colonization had reached its high-water mark, and then ebbed. On Merryland, one expected bad weather; on Earth, it was a perpetual surprise.

Wrapping himself against the rain, he took the stairs up to the flyover which curved above the wide plaza in front of the exchange. There was only the narrow ribbon of metal; no railing, although a waist-high tangle-foot field had been installed to prevent children from straying too close to the edge. Penn strolled along the walkway, watching the evening walkers. There were more people on the streets than usual tonight. It was graduation eve and London was filled with students and teachers, there either to give degrees, receive them or comment noisily on the fact that none had been offered. They hurried across the square, too busy to look up. Even if they had, they would not have seen the thin pale man in gray standing there. The flyover was very high.

His contact arrived on time, walking quickly along the street and glancing worriedly around the square before mounting the steps. As Penn turned to meet him, his foot slipped on the wet surface of the path. Somebody could very easily fall from the flyover on a night like this.

Penn took the papers the man gave him and put them into his pocket without looking at them.

"Is that all?" he asked.

"They're all the reports I could find in the files. Material on the Limited Planets is usually locked up in the secured bureau but this must have slipped out."

"Here." Penn took a sheaf of notes from the leather bag and gave them to the man. "Is there more?" Penn asked.

"I don't think so." The man stuffed the money into his clothes awkwardly, as if he had to force himself to take it. "I'll pay well for anything you can find."

"There isn't anything else, as far as I know. Except…"

"Yes?"

"It's against the law to buy official secrets."

"And to sell them."

"Don't worry; I'm not going to blackmail you. But I'm wondering why you're prepared to risk so much just for some technical information collected by a small research group years ago on a remote planet nobody has ever heard of."

"It's the planet I was born on," Penn said. "I know. But that doesn't explain it." He paused. "What is it? If the information is valuable, I know markets that you don't have access to."

"Nobody but myself would be interested."

"Perhaps not. And yet, reading through those reports, I started to wonder if perhaps they hadn't found something important out there in that little unit. They were experimenting with the cobalt reaction in monopolar material, weren't they?"

"They didn't find anything."

"Probably not. Still…" Penn felt his skin prickle. "Yes?"

"I think I might look into it. After all, you're going back tomorrow, so it can't interest you any more. But a lead on the cobalt reaction—that could be very important." He looked up at Penn. "As long as you don't mind, that is."

"No. Not at all. Why should I?"

Then he punched the man squarely in the stomach. He went down without a sound.

The tangle-foot field was like an invisible thicket of vines along the edge of the pathway, but by heaving the unconscious man onto his shoulders Penn was able to raise him above it. He poised himself for a moment, then toppled the limp figure over the magnetic barrier. It fell down through the gusting rain, turning silently in the air until it disappeared below.

At the bottom of the steps Penn joined the crowd and listened to their talk of suicide for a few seconds before moving on. Finding a quiet alcove, he took a black graduate's gown from the leather bag and slipped it on. Then he threw the bag away and went to a party.

Everybody held a party on Graduation eve. It was the high point of the academic year, the day when all the greatest minds were in London at one time. The pleasure gardens of the three university towns, London, Oxford and Cambridge, were booked solid months ahead by hostesses anxious to be the first to invite the really famous educators and most brilliant students. Penn was not a brilliant student or a great mind. He had managed to earn a second class degree in a relatively easy course, the sort of course that was offered to those few off-worlders who came to Earth to study. In the beginning he had expected much more, but he had been put in his place soon enough in the first few days of his visit to Earth. The Dean, he remembered, had been as helpful as possible in the circumstances. He walked among the chattering party guests, remembering.

"Please don't feel," the Dean had said, "that this is in any way a criticism of your intelligence, Master Penn. It has been some centuries since the colonial planets had any real contact with Earth. There is a… well, shall we say a lag in development between the two. On Earth, our education system makes it possible to train children earlier and teach them more. I'm sorry that you weren't aware of the situation before you came such a long distance to study on Earth."

"I thought that free education was the right of every citizen, regardless of where he is born and what his qualifications are. In effect, I'm being penalized because I was born on a colonial world and not on Earth."

"No, not at all," the Dean said patiently. "In many ways, it is our loss to be born on Earth. We live shorter lives, our houses are small, our cities congested. And do you know that the suicide rate is 27° of the total death figure? Benefits such as our education system and the high degree of automation possible through the use of monopolar machines don't really compensate for these disadvantages."

"All this is beside the point. Do you mean to say I can't study here?"

"I didn't say that, Master Penn. You have come a great distance to reach Earth. We can't let such enterprise go unrewarded. We are prepared to offer you the facilities to take a degree at one of the Earth universities." He leafed through a pile of papers on his desk, and selected one of them. "However," he went on, "I regret that it can't be the degree you wish to take."

"Why not?"

The Dean read slowly through the application in his hand.

"Master Penn, I'm not sure you realize what is involved in this course. Even a qualified student from Earth who had been trained in our systems since birth would have difficulty in studying such a range of subjects, let alone measuring up to university examination standard in them. Educative Psychology. Well, you might do that, with a lot of work. Ancient History. Yes, I suppose so. But Mathematics! And Monopolar Mechanics! Do you have any idea what is involved in a study of subjects like this?"

"I can do it."

The Dean shook his head. "No, you can't, I'm afraid. The work that goes into even a general study of the basic principles is incalculable. You need a knowledge of mathematics that only a few talented people possess before you can begin to study Mathematics as a university subject. As for Monopolar Mechanics, you would have to master Mathematics as well as three or four other subjects before you could even begin to study the field. No, it's impossible."

"I'm prepared to try."

"Yes, I see that. But we can't permit you to waste your time and energy, not to mention that of our tutors, on such a hopeless task. We can offer you a course covering Educative Psychology, Comparative Philology, General Mathematics for Technicians, and Computer Engineering, with History, Ancient and Modern, if you feel you can handle the extra subject. Computer Engineering will give you a grounding in the general principles of monopolar mechanics and of course the ability to operate and service certain basic machines."

"What is the alternative?"

"There is none. If you don't accept this course, the government will have to rescind your visa and return you to… what world is it you come from?"

"Merryland."

"I don't recall having heard of it. But of course I'm out of touch."

"Nobody on Earth has heard of it. It's beyond The Limit; one of the lost worlds. The last report from a survey ship is dated more than two hundred years ago."

"But how did you get to Earth if no ships have visited your world? Surely it hasn't developed space travel?"

"I didn't say no ships had called there; only that no reports had been made. A party called three years ago, but the crew was killed. I managed to get on board their ship and take it off."

The Dean looked blank. He was not used to the intrusion of real life into his quiet and scholarly existence. Penn glanced around the over-decorated neoclassical office with its fittings of brass and chrome, facings of marble, glass and stone. It made him feel uncomfortable, and he wanted to get out of there as soon as he could. "I'll take the course," he said shortly.

The Dean recalled himself with an effort. His mind was still on a world where Earthmen were killed by savages and young men stole spaceships.

"Of course, of course. I'm sure you'll find the subjects very satisfactory."

"I'm sure I will," Penn said. And that had been a lie, the first of many lies he would tell on Earth.

The party was getting noisy. Penn withdrew his mind from the memory of three years before and looked around at the crowds. He needed a drink. The aftereffects of the murder were beginning to creep over him. Finding an automatic drink dispenser, he felt for the black control block on the side. The machine responded to his order pattern, but sluggishly. That was no surprise. Even after years on Earth he had a clumsy touch. Children did better, but of course they grew up with monopolar machines. Penn was thirty-five, and had been twenty-three before he'd seen any machine more complex than a wheelbarrow.

As he turned away from the machine, he heard it buzz twice. The sound was a sign of some defect, usually a blockage of the memory track caused by mishandling. The machines were incredibly sensitive, and even the slightest clumsiness in keying them could cause a breakdown. Penn had heard the buzz hundreds of times before, mostly as a result of some error on his part in using a machine. He looked around for a waiter or mechanic. The machine continued to buzz.

"Allow me," somebody said. "I'm afraid our hostess has invested in some low-quality catering machines this year."

Penn turned quickly and saw a man standing there. He was as short and chubby as Penn was tall and thin, and his face had the barbered elegance of a patrician. Though he wore the same black graduate's gown as Penn did, he seemed at home in it, as if he wore it all his life. Suspicious of this lack of precise definition in a world devoted to categorization, Penn was cautious.

"Don't concern yourself. I'll find a waiter."

The man put down his glass and felt under the switching box with his fat fingers. The buzz rose in intensity for a moment, then stopped.

"There. These hired things usually have a cut-off underneath the block."

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it." He picked up his glass again and looked around. "A poor party."

"Yes."

The man glanced over his shoulder. Two men were pushing their way through the crowd, looking neither to left nor right, saying nothing but watching everything. They were short and stocky, dressed entirely in black. They looked very businesslike.

"Not only dull," the man said, "but in bad taste too."

Penn watched the men pass.

"You take risks," he said. "The proctors might have heard you."

The man took a medallion from around his neck and showed it to Penn. He recognized the seal of a minister.

"I'm safe enough. As chaplain to the household, I'm expected to say 'unworldly' things. They let me get away with a great deal."

"You're the first minister I've met since I came to Earth," Penn said. "There can't be many of you."

"Oh, there's still religion on Earth," the man said.

Penn looked across the lawn to where two women were staging a dress battle. Both had brought their dressmakers with them and their clothes shimmered from color to color and style to style as the men dictated. Neither woman looked at the other but the eyes of their dressmakers flicked quickly over the clothes of the other and the fingers of each danced on the control panels at his side. By manipulating the static electricity of the materials, the gowns could be made short or long, thick or gauzy, flame red or deepest black. One moment clad in a cloak of butterflies' wings, the next naked but for a huge Elizabethan ruff around her neck, each woman struggled to be the more striking.

"I know what you're thinking," the man said. "In many ways it's a godless place. But we have our rules. Even the richest."

"Most of all the richest," Penn said. "The rich always have the more interesting rules."

"You sound jealous. What world are you from?"

"Merryland," Penn said. "You won't have heard of it."

"I have, as a matter of fact. Isn't it beyond the Limit?"

"Yes. And under proctor quarantine, too."

"A sector cordoned off. That's unusual, isn't it?"

"The proctors are nothing if not unusual."

"True. I'd rather like to go to some of these worlds beyond the Limit. I wonder why that area is quarantined."

Penn knew, but it was a piece of information he would never disclose. It was the one concrete asset he had gained from his visit to Earth, and he had killed to get it.

"I wouldn't worry about it," he said. "Being a religious man, you wouldn't like Merryland."

"Oh?"

"No. They murdered God on Merryland a hundred years ago."

 

The next day Pen took the first step on his long journey back to his home world. It would take him two years to get there, and another six months to penetrate the proctor quarantine. Only then, in the spring of 2833, was he able to begin his search.



 

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II
Although God was dead on Merryland, they still said grace.

"Our Satan who art in Hades, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in heaven as it is on earth. Give us this day…"

While the prayer droned on David Bonython looked down with distaste at his plate. It was not that the food was poor; as always, the meal was perfectly edible, even appetizing in a bland way. His cousin Edith was a good wife in all things, including her choice of a cook. Perhaps it was the way it was served. The others at table—the Farmer, David's cousin, the couple's three sons and two daughters—all ate from plates of metal. David's was earthenware, brown and cracked like dried mud. It was his pride he found hard to swallow, not the food.

"Out of the depths have we cried to thee, O Lord of Darkness. Let thine ears be attentive to our plea. Visit us with thy strong arm. Guard us against the weakness of the spirit. Harden our hearts that we may resist the blandishments of a soft god and the lure of his magic. Destroy the unbelieving and…"

The Farmer had long ago forgotten what he was saying. It was all a meaningless mumble that lost what sense it had ever possessed in the passage through his thick black beard. However, everybody listened: listened while the food dried on their plates; listened while their necks became stiffer and stiffer in the unnatural attitude of reverence that custom demanded—back rigid, head tilted forward at a sharp angle, hands folded in the lap, eyes fastened on a point somewhere on the table before one. It was uncomfortable, it was ridiculous, but it was the law.

For the tenth time that day David entertained a particularly delightful fantasy. It was a work of art, an elaborate piece of mental handiwork embroidered and improved upon over the weeks. There was no work on the farm for a boy of David's slight build and impractical mentality, so he had been given the job of sorting out books—since he alone in the house could read—and servicing the ikons, statues and shrines. In the long hours, he had time to invent dreams, like the one in which he rose from the table in the middle of one of these interminable prayers, picked up his hat from the row standing on the bench beside the table, smiled at the assembled company, riveted them with some classic insult, and departed. Whence he departed, or what he did when the huge oak double doors of Padgett farmhouse had shut behind him and he stood, an orphan, destitute and outcast on the front steps—these things never came into the dream. It ended always long before then, at that disturbing moment when Samantha saw what he had done and looked admiringly up at him. From then on, the dream tended to run away with him. He hated these moments, yet enjoyed them too. Samantha was, even by the standards of Merryland, an evil, hateful and thoroughly wicked girl.

All his instincts told him this. Yet he dreamed of her just the same.

The thought caused an uncontrollable desire to look at her again and he glanced up covertly under his brows to where she sat, directly opposite him. He didn't catch her eye, which was dutifully directed at a point somewhere on the table between them, but he was glad of this. It allowed him to watch without interruption her face and that part of her body not covered by the high-throated black dress which she, like all other girls of marriageable age, wore. The part revealed was not particularly extensive; no more than her slim neck and throat; but he lingered on this for a long moment. Also, he could see her hair. Thick hair, black and mane-like, but streaked by threads and blazes of white. The old women called it Witch's Hair, and said that each white hair represented an unforgivable sin. David could believe the story. He knew Samantha.

For a few seconds he lingered on her throat and down-turned face, gauging the transparent shadows that blocked out the strong, violent lines of her features. Everything about Samantha—her face, her body, her nature—was nervous and active, as if her life force were distilled and concentrated. David felt the familiar tenseness coming over him, the welling up of a thousand wishes, hopes and ambitions that daily he had to fight down. If only he had influence, money, power—then he might do something. But he was helpless, alone and imprisoned in a system from which nobody had ever escaped.

Then the prayer rumbled into its last few phrases, faltered and subsided in a mutter of "amens" from those at the table. The Farmer straightened up, reached across his wife to wrench a choice leg from the roast goose and said to Garth, his eldest son, "Did you get all that manure in before the rain?"

Dinner could now commence.

David ate quickly. The family always dined at five, summer and winter. It was summer now, and the days were long. If he finished his meal quickly there might be time to go exploring again in the upper reaches of the farmhouse, among the old corridors that fascinated him more than anything else in the world. Except for the farm talk there was no conversation during the meal, and David used the time to plan his route to the upper reaches. First up the back stairs that led to the main floors of the house, then past the shrine and up the huge winding staircase that penetrated the ten or twelve stories above the inhabited part of the house. After that…

"David!"

Edith Padgett's voice was sharp and irritated. He looked at her in surprise.

"Your cousin asked a service of you. Please be good enough to oblige."

He looked around the table. Paul and Stephen, the two youngest boys, were gobbling noisily on their food and fighting a covert battle of kicks and prods beneath the table. Anastasia, the youngest sister, was gazing into space with her usual expression of vague wonderment. Samantha, however, was looking at him coolly. Her eyes, cat-green, touched him like sly fingers. He blushed.

"A favor?" he said, confused. "What—"

"The salt, boy! The salt!" his cousin snapped. "Really, child, you are getting worse, not better. What you think about at dinner I don't know."

They were all looking now. The old man paused in mid-mouthful to glance at him. It was not an unkind look. He knew better than anybody what a shrew his wife was.

David picked up the dish of salt and handed it to Samantha. Their fingers brushed momentarily as she took it and he felt a suggestion of pressure. It could have been his imagination, but he thought not. The incident filled his mind again with thoughts of her, and of the things she had said to him that morning. Shocking things, but not unpleasant. Then he pushed the ideas to the back of his mind and concentrated on the task of getting away from the table and up again into the enchanted world at the top of the house. Up there, he could think.

Waiting until the whole family seemed otherwise occupied, he rose from the table and reached for his hat standing beside the others on the bench.

"Where are you going, child?" It was his cousin again. She must have eyes everywhere, he thought.

"I thought I might go outside for some fresh air," he said lamely.

"Fresh air!" The idea scandalized her. "If you don't have work to do, there's plenty I can give you. For a start…"

The Farmer glanced up from his discussion with Garth.

"Let the boy go," he said. "Have you found those maps with the drainage levels yet, boy?"

"No, sir. There are hundreds to go through."

"Make it as quick as you can, then." He bent back to his talk of stock and fences. Edith Padgett looked from her husband to David and back again, her eyes spiteful, but there was nothing she could do. David grabbed his hat and got out of the kitchen. It would take a search party to find him once he was up the steps to the main house.

His feet moved silently over the brick floor as he walked quickly through the pantry and up the narrow stairs. This part of the house was old, dating in some cases back as far as the wars, or even before. Generations of feet had ground the stone into concavity so that the steps seemed to sag with the weight of age. Scattered about the walls were patches of red bricks, their geometrical exactness a sharp contrast to the rough stone slabs that made up most of the chamber. The presence of the bricks was an index to the age of the house. They had not been produced for centuries. The skill of their manufacture, like of milling aluminium plates, of making automobiles, airplanes, spaceships and all the other machines of the Old World, had perished in the bombs, and nobody dared to search for it again. To experiment with the forbidden sciences was the worst crime known on Merryland, the ultimate treason. At the top of the stairs an alcove separated the kitchen from the rest of the house. Beyond it, the floors were polished. There were images and ikons, carpets and brass lamps. Here he put on his best manners, walking carefully, his eyes downcast. At the first of the ikons, he paused, dipped a finger into the pot of mud and smeared it dutifully across the face. It was a long time since the ikon had been cleaned and it was almost completely covered with a gray crust. His nail caught a flake and a few square inches of mud fell away, revealing a soft brown eye. The eye of God.

He picked at the mud until the face was fully uncovered. It was a sad, flat face, a face that would accept anything done to it, even the indignity of ritual vilification. And yet, was it such an indignity? This was the theory, but the execution had made it less an insult than a sort of genuflection. The smear of mud had become almost a prayer—twisted, perverted, but a prayer all the same. It was odd. David felt no hatred towards any unreal thing. Insults, scars and bruises—the people who gave him those were worth hating. A spirit… who could hate a spirit? And especially a spirit that didn't have the power or pride to strike back at its enemies, no matter how much they did to its images. But this was close to heresy. With a guilty glance over his shoulder David hurried on, leaving the abandoned god to mourn in darkness.

"Where are you going?" somebody asked.

David turned quickly and looked into the room he was passing. Wheatley, the steward, was sitting inside the little chamber, cleaning the rust from some old shearing blades. He seemed out of place in the house. He was thick, stupid and unkempt, better suited for the stable than the house.

"That's my business," David said. "What are you doing here? The proper place to clean those is outside in the barn."

"I'll clean them where I like." As if to emphasize the point he gave one blade a last languid buff and dropped it clanging to the floor.

"I'll tell my uncle."

Wheatley put down the polishing cloth and stood up. He looked huge in the small room.

"You won't tell him anything, unless you want him to hear about the books you've got upstairs. Or what you do when you're supposed to be sorting out those old papers."

David opened his mouth to reply, then said nothing. Wheatley was dangerous. His uncle would not understand why he kept the books in his room, or why he spent so much time studying the old manuscripts stored in the attics of the house. He had no concept of reading as entertainment. To him, it was some arcane knowledge close to witchcraft. David was permitted to exercise it only as long as it was done for a sensible purpose, like looking for old survey plans of the Padgett farm or details of soil tests. If he were to find out about the manuals and maps David had hidden in his room, his reaction would be unpleasant. Looking at Wheatley's face again, David knew he would tell his uncle without the slightest compunction. Angry and embarrassed, he turned his back on the man and hurried on.

Above the kitchen and storerooms, most of which were under ground, the main body of the house lay deserted. David padded through reception rooms, still chambers where old chairs and cabinets sat under their dustcloths like sleeping ghosts, past museums filled with the incunabula of dead decades, through rooms dedicated to the celebration of birthdays, the playing of games and the laying out of the dead. Rooms all unused, empty and dark, dry vessels of a dead heart. Beyond them, near to the cliff on which the house leaned wearily for support, the stairs led upwards, twisting like vines towards a hidden sun.

The building had begun as a fortified farmhouse during the time of the revolts, twelve years after the last world war. Backed against the wall of the valley, it had looked out defiantly on a country where daily living had been a dangerous and deadly business. Over the years the house had grown with the prosperity of the family, extending itself outwards and upwards. When new quarters had been needed, another terrace had been cut into the hillside and a barracks built. The need for more living room had been met by extending the house forward another few yards. When the area had threatened to get out of hand an extra story had been added, then another. Extra stories had been added to the terraces also and joined to the main house by stairways, corridors and steps. Over a century it had grown, haphazardly, formless at least in the sense that no architect could have found any pattern or logic in its layered construction. But David, who knew the house better than anybody else, saw its branched growth as something grand, like the spread of a tree or the lazy sprawl of some old animal. It was in some ways his friend, the only friend he had.

Ten minutes of steady climbing brought him to the furthest edges of present habitation. A wooden fence barred the way. Beyond the barrier the stairs had a look of abandonment and disuse. Isaac Padgett kept few servants, and, no longer polished daily, the wooden paneling and twisting banisters had lost their patina and grown drab. The brass fittings were tarnished, the stair carpet, where it existed at all, threadbare and dusty. David alone ministered to the house, tending the lamps weekly with acolyte devotion.

Pushing aside the wooden barrier—an easy task, since he had long ago removed most of the nails—he moved up the twisting spiral staircase. In these places, close under the cliff, the way was cramped, but he moved confidently in the shadows. Here at least he was master, if only by default. He paused only once in his climb, to look out through a round dusty window which lit one of the cramped landings. From the window he could look down the valley and across the land his family owned.

It was good land, rolling sheep country which would make any farmer rich. The present owner had let much of it lie fallow. He had few servants, little stock—yet he was still rich. A better man, David's father for instance—But that didn't bear thinking about. David's father was two years dead, the victim of one of the shooting matches that still sprang up even in these peaceful times. The Bonython lands had been small but David's father had been a good businessman and the chances had been good that they might have been extended. However, with his father dead the land had gone to the closest male relative, his uncle by marriage. David had gone with the bequest, and old Isaac Padgett had thought it a small price to take over the feeding and education of his benefactor's eighteen-year-old son. David had no say in the matter, nor would he until he was twenty-five. Then, he told himself a dozen times each day, then… He looked down the valley towards the lake that lay in its lowest point, about a mile away. The water was still and black, shaded by the green darkness of a willow grove. If he listened to Samantha he would be under those trees tonight. The two thoughts—Samantha and his ambition—crossed and tangled. He might, with luck, marry Samantha, or at least get her with child and force some sort of recognition. That way he could perhaps wrench a few square miles from the edge of his uncle's estate and perhaps… It was always perhaps. The chances were, he knew, remote. Across the valley, sharp against the evening sky, the silhouette of Stoker Farmhouse stood out barbarically. Its fretted towers and buttresses were a challenge to the whole valley, a challenge David knew he could not take up. Both families wanted an amalgamation of the estates, and both families were large, with sons and daughters to spare. Marriage anywhere outside the two clans was impossible, and marriage to an orphan more impossible still. David could imagine the smile on old Isaac's face were he even to mention it. He could hear his laughter. No. If there were paths of advancement for him, they were not across the valley or along the corridors of Padgett farmhouse, but elsewhere.

As the light faded an eerie calm flowed into the valley, so that it seemed brimming with some impalpable magic. On the far side of the valley where the road entered from outside a lamp flared briefly, then settled into a steady glow. The light was moving down towards the lake. Almost at the same moment there was a movement in front of the Stoker farm. He heard a door slam, the sound carrying clearly to his ears in the still air. Somebody came out of the main door of the house and moved quietly down the hill towards the lake that lay silent and glistening under the dark sky. Trees rustled in the night breeze. On the other hills, along the roads and in the fields David saw other small lights, all moving towards the lake and the grove that surrounded it. Samantha and her friends were gathering.

He slowly closed the window and locked it. Immediately the air felt stuffy and thick. It was only his imagination, he knew, but still each breath felt muffled. He turned towards the next flight of stairs, hoping for a glimpse of another window, but there was none. The steps were narrow and steep, the remains of an old catwalk which had been roughly shored up with beams when the main body of the house had caught up with it. At the top there was a tiny landing and illuminating the landing a window of stained glass. Standing at the foot of the stairs, he could see the window quite clearly. There were many small panes of glass, colored in shades now faded by years of sunlight. He put his hand on the banister.

A little animal padded out from the shadows on the landing and stopped at the top of the stairs, looking gravely down at him.

David had often watched the otters that lived in the lake. They were his favorite animals, perhaps because they seemed always to keep a part of themselves in reserve, some store of talent or intelligence that was always hidden. One saw it only in their eyes, hard and brown and wise. This animal had the look of an otter, though a small otter only, and thin. Nor was it colored brown or black. Its pelt was a cool and serene blue, like sea-ice or shadowed snow. The presence of an animal here, in the abandoned rooms, David could have accepted, but its color was too alien. He felt his skin prickle in fear.

For a minute they stood watching each other with equal interest. David followed the quick flickering of the pulse in the creature's throat and the slow wandering of its tail back and forth over the dusty floor. Then, from the depths of the house below them, the prayer gong boomed. The animal started, falling back defensively on its haunches, one tiny paw upraised in alarm. David reached forward with his hand, instinctively trying to reassure it, but as he did so the gong roared again, louder and more demanding than before. With a quick turn the animal disappeared into the shadows beyond the lip of the landing. He wanted to follow, but the gong boomed a third time, delivering a summons that could not be ignored. Reluctantly, David backed away. After prayers, he could return.

As he ran down the stairs the little blue animal came again to the edge of the landing and looked down at the figure growing smaller and smaller on the spiral steps. When he was gone it went back to the game it had been playing, which consisted of finding a path through the patches of colored light from the window that would take it through the primaries and their subsidiaries in order. When it had done that a few times, it tried looking for a path in reverse order. But only one part of its mind was exercised with this purely intellectual problem. The rest was thinking about the young man and wondering how long it would take him to return.



 

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III
Prayers had already begun when David arrived at the chapel. The three rows of pews were filled, except for a space in the front rank and one almost directly behind it. The rear place was his—but that in front belonged to Samantha. He was puzzled. It was unlike Samantha to miss prayers. Could she have gone to the lake already? He hoped, though not for any reason he could pin down, that she hadn't. Confused, he knelt at the back of the shrine and bowed his head. If Hector Canklin noticed that one of his congregation was missing and another busy with his own thoughts, he gave no indication of it. The old man acted as adviser and prayer-leader for most of the families in the district, spending a day with each before moving on. Most of the time his mind was on the trip to the next house, or the offerings that the more generous farmers were likely to make. He rattled out the ancient prayers and exhortations with the same meaninglessness that marked those of Isaac Padgett, though now they were punctuated by equally meaningless responses from the eight or nine people in the shrine. From the walls ikons looked down with flat and sad faces caked with the mud of a year's vilification. The air was thick with the smell of a religion gone rotten. Behind the filth one could see sometimes a hint of beauty, of the compassion David had seen in the brown eye of the ikon looking at him from behind the mud. But it was only a hint.

These days, nobody paid much attention to the grim war paintings that decorated the walls of the chapel. Most of them had faded into outlines or been masked by dust. Occasionally a brushing shoulder would reveal the shadow of a mushroom cloud or a fragment of some battle scene still preserved from the mildew, but for the most part the paintings were smeared and unrecognizable. In theory, they had served their purpose. The horrors of war were deeply engraved on the minds of every person on Merryland. Never again would they risk a war by tampering with science they could not be sure of controlling. Nor would anybody trust his neighbor again. Each individual must be an armed camp, protected against treachery by his own eternal vigilance. This was the theory. In practice, another attitude prevailed, confused and sick.

David saw the familiar walls of the chapel with part of his mind only. The major portion was concerned with the little blue animal he had seen on the upper landings. He was almost prepared to decide it had been a dream, a trick of the light, a brief intrusion of fantasy into the mundane world he knew, brought on by a momentary blackout perhaps. Almost—but not quite. There had been something peculiarly real and alive about the animal, a spark in the hard brown eyes that could not be written off as imagination. No—he had seen it, that was certain. Then where had it come from? And what sort of beast could it be?

He sensed a movement behind him and swiveled on his knees. It was Samantha. Her hair was disarranged and her face more flushed than it had been at the dinner table. David knew she had been looking for him.

"Where have you been?" she whispered.

He looked around apprehensively at the worshippers, but apparently the call and response of the litany had worked them into a trance. They heard nothing. He opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it. As Canklin turned to the chapel table to make some invocation he squirmed to his feet and slipped out into the corridor. A moment later Samantha followed him.

Outside they listened for a moment to the sounds from the chapel, then moved along the hall until they were out of earshot.

"Where have you been?" she repeated urgently. "I thought you said you were going out for a walk. I looked everywhere."

"I went up to the top of the house."

"Are you coming tonight?"

"I don't know."

"Why not? Are you shy?"

Was he? Probably. But it wasn't as simple as that. And the problem had been complicated by the things that had happened on the upper landing.

"A little," he admitted. "But that's not the main reason. I saw—"

"There's no need to be shy," she said. Her voice was husky and coaxing. "I was shy at first, but I got over it. We all do. Come down with me. You know I like you, David."

He evaded her eyes.

"Your father would kill you if he found out you had gone Christian," he said.

She smiled. "Wouldn't he! But nobody will tell."

"Doesn't it make you feel… well, aren't you frightened?"

"Not really," she said. "We don't mean it. It's just an excuse, you know. Some men come up from New Harbor with candles and pictures. They know some of the old prayers. We even have a password. Dominus Vobiscum. It's Earth language, I suppose. Anyway, we have prayers, but after that we just… well, amuse ourselves. We dance and…" She paused and looked at him defiantly. "We dance naked."

David's mouth went dry. He wanted desperately to go with her, but still he held back.

She glanced at the door of the chapel. "They'll be coming out soon. Are you going with me?" David looked at the stairs, then at her. The choice, oddly enough, was not hard to make.

"I can't, Samantha," he said. "There's something…" There was nothing else that he could say. Quickly he turned and walked along the dark corridor to the staircase. He didn't look back, but her eyes glowed in the darkness before him for a long time. Coward, they accused. He knew she was right. Then, putting the memory of her words out of his mind, he began to climb.

The house was dark now and only his knowledge of every stair and landing guided him. Each new staircase was darker than the last, until he was moving in only the vaguest blur of twilight. On the last landing before the barrier he paused. There was a lamp here. He groped along the walls, touched something and heard the slosh of oil and the rattle of a glass chimney. Clumsily he lit it. The walls became visible once more, each sharp shadow cast by the light pointing upwards towards the landing where he had been that afternoon. Below, there was nothing: blackness and humiliation. He was forced upwards.

Ten minutes later he stood for the second time at the foot of the last flight of stairs and looked towards the tiny landing. There was no sign of movement. He tested the first step gingerly, then moved on to the others with more assurance. At the top he held the lamp high and looked around him. The stained glass window was there, but no sign of life. The animal could have hidden, but where?

The landing was fully enclosed, a dead end. The walls were paneled in dark wood, apparently quite solid.

Apparently.

Stories were always circulating in the big farmhouses about secret passages, hidden rooms and the like, but David had yet to see any of them proved. He felt along the walls with his free hand, testing the panels and rapping on them. They all appeared to be firm enough. The panel at the very rear of the landing was larger than the others, but just as firm. He heaved on it, perhaps more confidently than he should have. The wall gave. The whole landing was set on a pivot operated by some mechanism behind the wall. There was the sound of a rusty swivel squealing in protest, and David yelped as he felt himself spun around and catapulted into a sudden burst of light. His lamp smashed on the floor behind him, but he was too surprised to think about the risk of fire. He stumbled forward into the light. Then there was a hand at his throat. It closed around his neck like a metal claw. He gasped and scrabbled at the fingers, but they did not move. They tightened. There was a roaring in his ears, and then a great darkness.

 

David's first fearful thought when he woke was that he was in a coffin. The darkness, the close proximity of wooden walls and the hot stuffy silence all combined to make him feel hemmed in, imprisoned in a narrow buried box. He struggled for a moment, writhing in the grip of this fantasy until he sensed the greater space above him that was almost completely filled with shadows, and the man leaning against the wall, looking wearily downwards to where David lay.

He was the man with the iron hand. That much was obvious. He had the look of power about him. He was short and solid, hardly more than five feet tall, but massively built. His shoulders were as square and rugged as a block of stone. His legs were pillars. His head was square and bald. He was dressed in a dull black material that looked hard and metallic when the light hit it, and his face was burned almost to blackness, except around the eyes, where the skin was startlingly white, a mask in negative. David had never seen space tan and the effect was eerily new to him. As he watched the man, there was a flicker of movement in the dark and two tiny glittering eyes appeared in the shadows behind his shoulder. The little blue animal scuttled up the man's arm and sat by his head, watching everything.

David did not need to be told the man was an off-worlder. Merryland could never have produced anybody like this. His stance, the way he leaned against the wall as if holding it up, seemed that of a man trapped and lost. His eyes were buried deep in their sockets, as if he needed only a hint to fall asleep from weariness. Beyond him, the room was in darkness, but there were hints of bulk in the shadows and the loom of something huge and monolithic at the very end of the room, a shape that he half recognized but could not quite place. He stirred slowly, trying to rise. As he did so, the man straightened up from the wall and David saw that his right arm was bound to his body by some sort of transparent bandage out of which his hand jutted like a frozen thing, white and bloodless. And for the first time he saw his eyes. The right was normal enough, but in the socket of the left a strange thing glittered, shaped like an eye but stone-dull and cold. Nevertheless, David sensed that it could see, and that it watched him.

The man grunted something. David didn't understand, and shook his head.

"Do you speak English?" he asked.

David didn't know the word.

"I understand you," he said, "but I don't know 'english.' "

"What do you call it, then?—the language you're speaking."

"Words, talking… I don't know."

The idea of another language, of new ways to say the same things, disturbed David. There is One Word, One World, One People—No God, No Love, Nought but the Land. That was the old litany.

The man lurched to the center of the room and sat down heavily on a box of some kind that creaked under his weight.

"How did you find me?"

David glanced at the little blue animal nestling in the other's lap.

"I saw your friend."

"Does anybody else know you're here?"

"No."

Taking the pet from his knee, the man put it carefully on the floor and walked to the secret door through which David had come. He pushed against the panel and the turntable swung him out of sight. He was gone for a moment. Then he reappeared, and returned to the box. Apparently nobody had noticed his absence yet. Had he told Samantha where he was going? He couldn't remember. Everything was far away, misty and vague. He struggled to sit up, and managed to fall into a wobbly crouch. Even this effort made him dizzy. After a moment he straightened up slowly and leaned against the wall. His head was clearing now, but his throat was still sore.

"Do you know the country around here?" the off-worlder asked. His back was half turned to David, but something in the way he was hunched forward betrayed his weakness far more than his face could have.

"A little."

"You know the towns and so on?"

David had traveled some distance to get to Padgett Farm from his father's old lands and so he knew the countryside better than most people. He wondered whether to admit this, then decided on honesty, mainly because he felt too sick to lie.

"I know most of them."

"What's the nearest large town?"

"New Harbor. It's on the coast, about seventy miles away."

"Is that the nearest?"

"Yes."

"Seventy miles," the man said to himself. He glanced over his shoulder at David. "I want your help."

David said nothing.

"If you don't help me, I'll kill you."

The man's one whole hand was taloned into a claw on his knee. Even crippled, he could kill.

"I'll help," David said.

The man said nothing for a long time. David waited for some sort of order, even a question or an explanation, but none came. He felt, half through fear, half through compassion, that he should try to help the wounded man, but there was nothing he could do without instructions. For the moment, he was safest if he stood still and said nothing.

He wondered where he was. The room was still dark. What light there was came from a lamp burning dimly at the other end of the room. In the feeble light he could make out only general shapes, but his nostrils told him more about the place than his eyes could. The room was full of smells. Old rotten wood, mildewed paper, odors of cooking and sweat. There was oil, too, and other scents he could not classify. Over all, there was the wet metallic smell of raw rock. The room must be very close to the main cliff, even hewn out of it, he decided. As far as he knew, there were no chambers of any kind that close to the hill, but his knowledge had proved to be highly inaccurate already, especially in the matter of hidden rooms. For all he knew, there might be a whole warren of chambers and tunnels built behind those he knew. It would explain how the man had got into the room without being seen by anybody in the house or the surrounding countryside.

David's eyes were getting used to the darkness, and he began to examine the room systematically, peering into every shadow. The walls were paneled in a style he had never seen before. Parts of the wooden surface seemed to have been decorated with sheets of colored paper and paintings, but the pictures were faded and the paper had peeled off in mildewed strips. At the other end of the room the black square shape sat menacingly, but the light was too dim to reveal what it was. There were glints of light occasionally when a shadow shifted, but that was all. The light seemed to avoid the area.

On the floor was a jumble of angular shadowed objects, twisted by the shadows into odd shapes. In the corner nearest him there was a pile of woven stuff. He reached out tentatively for a fold and fingered it. It was the sort of material they used at Padgett for sheets and blankets in the servants' quarters. Somebody would have a lot of explaining to do. The cloth was rumpled and disarranged. This was his bed. The shapes on the floor were boxes; opened food containers and so on, David guessed.

The man reached out for the lamp in a sudden movement that startled him. Light bloomed suddenly and a burst of shadows flew back along the walls towards him like frightened birds. Objects were thrown into sharp relief. David saw that he had been right about the food containers and the bed. Boxes had been tossed carelessly into a pile in the center of the room and some sort of machine—a stove, perhaps—had been set up near them. The room had been used as living quarters for some time.

He looked at the man, then past him at the bulky object whose outline he had been barely able to make out. It was clearer now. This had not been brought from outside. It had been here for a long time. It was a block of black stone half embedded in the wall, six feet high, about three feet wide and so deeply darkly transparent that its length beyond the confines of the room might well be infinite. Its surface was etched with images and traceries that blazed as the light wove among them in glittering patterns. David had seen pictures of these among the forbidden things in the chapel. It was a matter transmitter.



 

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IV
The man looked at David, then over his shoulder at the machine.

"Never seen one of these before?"

David shook his head. He was not frightened by the object, just fascinated by the play of light over its surface.

"I've seen pictures," he said. "Did you come through it?"

"Yes. From a planet named Thurwood."

"What happened to your arm? And your eye?"

The man looked down at his bandaged arm. "I was shot. It's badly broken. My eye's a prosthetic. An artificial one. I lost the real one when I was about your age."

David realized his legs were getting stiff. Awkwardly he straightened up and took a few steps. He felt dizzy and sick. The smell of the room was suddenly more unpleasant.

"Aren't there any other transmitters around here?" the man asked. "There should be dozens of them."

"I heard once that they found one in Colyer—the next village—but that was years ago, before I came here."

"How far is Colyer?"

"About ten miles west. But there's no point in going there. They destroyed the machine and burned the people who found it."

The man stiffened.

"Burned?" he said. "You mean burned alive?"

"The Examiners said they could have been possessed," David explained. "The machines are proscribed, like all the others. It's the way things are on Merryland."

"Merryland," the man said ironically. "For God's sake."

"Curst," David said automatically.

"Eh?"

"Curst. You said 'For God's sake' and I said…" He broke off, realizing that the man didn't know what he was talking about.

"It's just a response."

He tried to explain, but it was difficult. So much of what he said seemed remote from him now, as if he were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It was tiny, pointless, petty, almost ridiculous in its careful adherence to old doctrines.

At the end the off-worlder shook his head.

"And I had to pick this of all places to hide out."

"What are you hiding from?" David asked suddenly. The words seemed to fall out of him.

"From the proctors."

Proctors? David didn't understand. But the man had not seemed to mind his question, so he asked another.

"What did you do?"

There was no reply for a moment.

"I stole," he said quietly, almost to himself.

He glanced at David.

"What's your name?"

David told him.

"Mine's Hemskir."

"What did you steal?"

"I stole—" He stopped. "I'll show you."

He rummaged around among the objects piled on the floor and chose one of them. It was a helmet cast in some hard white substance with a visor that covered the eyes. He dragged it free of the rest and held it out to David.

"Put this on."

David took it. His hands were trembling, but he settled it slowly onto his head. It fitted closely. Springs clasped it to his skull, pressing against his temples. He couldn't see. The screen covering his eyes was opaque. Patterns of color moved on the inside surfaces of his eyelids, random blobs of purple and red. He waited for something to happen.

When it came, the image was painfully vivid. In an instant the picture seemed to jump into his mind. He opened his eyes automatically in the shock of non-visual seeing, but there was nothing there and he closed them again.

First there was a shield, an official seal of some kind. Then a voice. It was hard and incisive, but not unfamiliar. Hemskir had just such a voice.

"This is an official announcement to all settlements above Class GSS 4, Proctor Stations and ships in space. Until further notice the sector bounded by laterals 76.5, 9.0, 3-76 and 2-23 is declared restricted territory. For security reasons, this area is closed and any unauthorized person entering it will be liable to execution under Federal law."

The shield was replaced by a colored three-dimensional picture. David recognized the face of Hemskir. The image revolved slowly, turning from full face to profile and back again.

"The proctor Hemskir, lately head of 5 Division, Proctor Corps, is required for questioning for offenses against Federal law." There was a full physical description. Then the voice went on: "This man is also in possession of certain restricted material stolen from the Proctor Corps. In the event of his capture, his belongings must at all costs be kept intact and undisturbed. Rewards are offered for information and for the delivery of this man to Proctor Headquarters, Earth, or any regional station." Then there was the shield again.

David felt the helmet lifted from his head. He blinked in the light of the lamp, trying to readjust his vision to the drab brown and black of the dingy room. His mouth was dry and he realized he had been breathing through it the whole time.

"So you see," Hemskir said, "I'm very much in demand. They don't offer rewards every day."

"Who was the man speaking?" David asked. "And what's a proctor?"

The off-worlder smiled thinly. "I've come a long way from home," he said. "Haven't you ever seen proctors out here? Men like me, with the same sort of uniform?"

"No."

"You're lucky. We have our place, but you're better off without us."

"What do you do?"

"Do you have any sort of police force here?" he asked. "Who gives the orders? Is there a king, a governor or what?"

"There's a council," David said, "but I've never seen any of the members. Once a year somebody comes around to collect taxes, but the rest of the time people make their own laws."

"Isn't there anybody to settle disputes, to keep order?"

"Only the Examiners."

"What do they do?"

"Interrogate heretics, arrange burnings . . ."

Hemskir closed his eyes. "That's not quite what I meant."

At that moment his voice became suddenly thinner and he swayed dizzily. Without looking down he felt in his pouch and pulled out a fat capsule with a needle at one end. Then he drove the needle into the shoulder of his injured arm. The liquid drained away in a few seconds and he pulled the ampoule out again. The drug took effect immediately, and he became more animated, though there was a feverishness about his energy.

"How much history do you know?" he asked. "Galactic History. Ever heard of the Reconstruction?"

David probed around in the jumble of facts he had picked up from the old books. "The Rebirth?" he asked, snatching at a phrase from among the pile.

Hemskir raised his eyebrows. "No, not that reconstruction. How old are your books down here? I mean the Reconstruction of 2400. Ever heard of it?"

"No."

"Well, around that time there was a major reorganization of government, and to support its administration the new party introduced an independent force of soldiers cum policemen to keep order where normal forces didn't work. They were completely outside government control, the first really effective peace-keeping force. They answered to nobody except their own consciences. They were called Proctors. It wasn't a bad idea and it worked well for some time, but the sort of power they had made them terribly dangerous. After a few decades the proctors became autocratic and corrupt. At the moment they run most of the universe, and anybody who doesn't care for it doesn't last long."

"You're a proctor," David observed.

"Was, boy, was. I decided that there was more to life than scaring pirates off some miserable outpost planet."

"And they're chasing you because you ran away?"

"Not quite. I took something with me."

He reached into his belt, took out a small mesh bag and emptied the contents into his palm. It was a small carving of a beetle cut from some green, white-veined stone. Looking closely, David saw that the veins where not streaks of white but veils of opacity coinciding with the insect's internal organs and membranes. He admired the way the carver had manipulated the stone to take advantage of the white streaks, but it did not surprise him. He had decided that this man must be from Earth, and with their science the people of Earth could do anything.

"Is it valuable?"

"Very," Hemskir said.

"It doesn't look it," David said, dubiously examining the tiny piece.

Hemskir weighed it in his palm.

"If men's lives count for anything, it's priceless. Dozens of them have died for this little piece of stone."

He held it for a moment, then slipped it back into his belt.

"Died for that?" David said. "Why?"

Hemskir shook his head. "The less you know about it, the better."

He paused.

"You've never seen any more stone like that, have you?"

"On Merryland? No. Should I have seen it?"

"If you do, be very careful who you tell. There's some of it here in this sector, perhaps on Merryland. That's what the proctors are looking for. I found out that it was in this area, but they found out about me too. That's what I'm wanted for."

He looked down at his injured arm.

"They nearly killed me once. They won't miss next time."

"Can't you escape?"

"Not by transmitter. As long as I sit still, they can't get me. But if I run, they'll catch me as I try to escape. And all the time they're getting closer."

He looked around at the narrow room with its peeling walls. Then he stood up abruptly and went to the transmitter. His fingers played a delicate tattoo on the spectrum panel that edged the upper part of the block.

"How does it work?"

"Monopolar mechanics. You wouldn't understand."

"Tell me."

"No! Shut up and listen."

David stopped breathing and watched Hemskir's fingers flickering across the colored squares. There was a sudden throb in the still air of the room. It was repeated. After he made a slight adjustment to the controls it came again, then settled to a penetrating hum. Inside the block David saw the beginning of a light. There were shadows, and red lightning flickered among them. Then the glow began to solidify.

"Don't worry," Hemskir said. "It isn't transmitting. I've only got the vision wave on. We can watch them but they can't see us."

David noticed the word "us" but did not comment on it. It seemed right, somehow. He felt like a fellow conspirator, and welcomed the involvement that it gave him in affairs outside his own world.

In the block pictures and shapes flickered, succeeding each other too fast for the eye to focus on them. There were buildings and cities so huge that David could hardly believe they existed, faces and bodies subtly different from those he knew. Often there were proctors, dark and silent, who seemed to watch everything. After a minute of this, Hemskir touched the panel again and the glow faded.

"Still jammed. They're overriding the safety circuits on this wavelength. Sooner or later they'll check this machine." He turned to David.

"Where did you say the nearest machine might be?"

"In New Harbor, probably. But wouldn't it be jammed too?"

"Not necessarily. They know I transmitted on this wavelength and they're watching it. A larger machine might have a number of channels and I could slip out on another frequency."

The man's words meant little to David, but he sensed the urgency in his voice. The drugs Hemskir had taken were in control of him now and he seemed only half alive.

"Why not hide in the next town, or in the fields? I can probably get you out of the house safely."

"With all this equipment? And my arm? Besides, I don't speak the language very well or know any of the customs. I wouldn't last more than a few hours. No, I'll have to find another machine. This New Harbor place sounds like the best chance I have. How can I get there?"

"I don't know. You can't ride a horse, I suppose?" Hemskir didn't answer, but David knew that, even had he been able to ride, his arm would have prevented him from going far.

"It's three or four days' ride," David said. "And you couldn't get there alone, especially not on foot."

"Isn't there any traffic between this place and the town? Don't people ever come up here to trade or something?" Aside from the family, there were few people in the area whom David knew well, and none that he could trust. He needed somebody beyond the law, who moved around a lot and might know something about the shady side of Merryland.

A Christian.

And Samantha had mentioned some Christians from New Harbor coming to the rites that evening.

"I might know somebody," David said. "But I don't know."

He explained about Samantha and the Christians.

Hemskir was doubtful.

"Isn't there anybody else?"

"No."

"Well, try them," Hemskir said eventually. "I can't be choosy."

He went to the door at the end of the chamber and pushed it open. There was no light on the landing. It was quiet and very still at the top of the house, and as he walked out onto the landing David could feel the night pressing down on the roof above him like a huge black hand applying to everything beneath it, even his mind, a steady and deadening pressure. Perhaps he had a premonition of what was to happen. At the time, he knew only that the night had suddenly become more sinister.

"I'm relying on you," Hemskir said. "And my threat still holds."

"I'll be back as soon as I can," David said.

The door closed behind him. He looked around the landing. Aside from the shattered remains of the lamp he had dropped earlier, there was no sign that anything unusual had happened there. He pushed the broken glass over against the wall, then began his long descent to the inhabited areas of the huge house. As he walked along the dark and dusty corridors, he was alert for the slightest noise, but there was no sound. Nobody accosted him, nor was he noticed as he crept along, except by the ikons whose sad eyes followed him along the shadowed halls.

The front door was locked. Carefully he lifted the heavy iron latch and dragged one of the doors open. The night air rushed in on him, soft and warm but touched with the cold of stars. The moon was down, but it was early. Silently he pulled the door closed behind him and hurried down the hill towards the grove of willows by the lake.



 

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V
It took David fifteen minutes to reach the lake. The way lay across fields roughly divided by hedge and copse, but he had been this way before and knew the path. Occasionally he passed a sleeping cow, a hunched black shape on the grass, but he disturbed none of them and passed on silently. At the edge of the grove the trees were scarce, but as he approached the lake they closed in around him. He paused, listening. Somewhere ahead of him there were voices, though the trees and the mist from the lake muffled them. He moved towards the sounds, feeling his way cautiously from tree to tree. The ground began to shelve steeply and he could smell the mist, clean and cold in his nostrils. The lake was very near.

On the very edge of the water, so close that he could hear the sucking of the lake among the roots and cavities of the shore, he stumbled on a path. It straggled off into the darkness, skirting the waterline, dodging around trees where they blocked the way. Many feet had worn this path over a number of months. Under his shoes David could feel where roots had been smoothed into the ground by regular pressure from heavy traffic. The sound of voices and laughter seemed guided along this one passageway, and he heard it clearly for the first time. There were beams of light too, lancing through the thin mist. Guided by them he moved forward.

Suddenly a dark shape separated itself from the forest and stepped in front of him. He started back. "Password," the man said.

What had it been? David groped for the words Samantha had given him.

"Domus Vobiscum," he said.

"Dominus," the man corrected. "But near enough. Et cum spiritu tuo."

He stepped aside and David walked forward into the light.

The clearing was about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, hemmed in on one side by an impenetrable thicket of willows and on the other by the dark waters of the lake. It was an ideal hideaway. Nobody could approach it from either side, and the only path—that along which he had come was well-guarded. Its location was too convenient to be an accident. In forests like this, the trees usually crowded close to the water. Then, glancing at the ground, David saw the pattern of brickwork under the thin covering of earth. And on the other side of the clearing, just beyond the circle of firelight, he could see the shape of a building. A boathouse, perhaps. Apparently there had been some sort of plaza here once, or the brickwork might even be part of some other construction. They would never know. The secrets of the clearing had evaporated with the others during the war.

About twenty people were crowded into the clearing, arranged in gossiping groups around the huge fire. David knew some of them. Most of the influential families in the district seemed to be represented, usually by their least reputable member. Two of Stoker's sons were there: his eldest, George, a thin rattly little man to whom David had taken an instant dislike as soon as he'd met him, and Martin, a sixteen-year-old who followed George everywhere and seemed to imitate his every action. The Nilson girl was there too—Joyce, blonde and stupid, but not unattractive. For a while she had figured prominently in David's fantasies before Samantha's more blunt sensuality had attracted him.

Where was Samantha? He looked across the clearing towards the boathouse. The air above the fire wavered and shimmered in the heat but he could dimly see three figures in the shadows, apparently conversing. One of them was Samantha. He made his way around the clearing, ignoring the curious glances of the others. Some of them seemed to recognize him, but only George Stoker made any comment. As David stepped over his feet, he reached up with his leg and casually hooked David's ankle. He stumbled and nearly fell.

"What are you doing here, boy?" Stocker asked.

The "boy" stung. David was only a year younger than he.

"Minding my own business," David said stiffly. He was in an awkward position. If he got into an argument with the Stokers, his whole future in his uncle's house could be jeopardized. Go carefully, he told himself.

"What business of yours brings you down here, among your betters?"

David ignored the remark and quickly stepped past the two men lying on the ground. Martin Stoker reached up to grab him, but he evaded his hand. George laughed derisively.

"Let the rabbit go."

David very nearly turned again, but he held himself in check. He was here on an important mission. If he got involved in a fight, it might never be discharged. And the man from Earth was depending on him.

As he got near the building, he saw that his guess about a boatshed had been correct. There was a pair of double doors opening onto the lake and a crude slip ran two rails down into the dark water. The building was rundown, but the walls were made of heavy timber and seemed sound enough. Through the door he could see two figures moving about in dim lamplight. In front of the building Samantha was talking to a tall man. He wore a cloak that covered most of his body and there was a hood over his head that made his face invisible. As David came close to the pair they stopped talking. The man looked away in irritation, and Samantha glanced up. When she saw David, she quickly left the man and came over to him.

"I thought you weren't coming," she said. Her voice had the same tantalizing timbre that had attracted him earlier in the evening. The conviction strengthened that she was his for the taking.

"I changed my mind." He looked at the tall man, who was now standing by the door of the boatshed speaking to the men inside.

"Is he the one from New Harbor?"

Samantha glanced over her shoulder, a little surprised. "Yes. Why?"

"I want to speak to him."

"What for?" She was puzzled.

"I just want to ask him something," David replied evasively.

"But what? I don't see…"

"It doesn't matter," he said, irritated. Brushing past her, he walked up to the man standing by the door. His back was turned to him and he was talking quietly with another man inside the shed. They stopped as David came up to them, and the one inside moved away. The other turned slowly.

"Could I speak to you, please?"

The man didn't answer. David tried to see his face, but the light shining from behind him, though dim, kept his hood filled with darkness. He could see only the glint of a pair of spectacles that reflected the flickering firelight. They were made of the poor Merryland glass, badly ground and uneven in texture, so that the reflection from them was twisted and confusing.

Finally, the man asked, "What about?"

His voice was very deep, and had an odd accent. Its full tone made David feel his voice was thin and childish. Some of his confidence ebbed away.

"It's a private matter," he said, looking around. "Could we…"

David could feel the man's eyes studying him. Then he gestured towards the water.

"Over here."

They went to the water's edge, their feet sucking wetly in the waterlogged ground. The lake was very still, the only movements on it long shadows thrown by the firelight.

"Are you from New Harbor?" David asked.

"Yes."

"You know the town well?"

"Well enough."

Now that he was faced with the necessity of broaching the forbidden subject, David was afraid and confused. How should he approach it? He decided on a frontal attack, mainly because he could think of no other way.

"Do you know of any machines in the town?"

"Machines?" There might have been a note of caution in his voice. David could not tell, although he sensed a new tenseness in the air. He took a deep breath.

"Matter transmitters," he said quickly.

The moment the words were said, David realized that he had used a stupid method to get the information he needed. Where subtlety had been called for, he had been obvious. He had replaced intrigue with childish deception that would fool nobody, least of all the cold tall man he had approached. He saw with horrible clarity the whole range of possibilities that his stupid question had opened up. What if he asked him why he wanted the information, or even how he knew about matter transmitters? What could he answer? He waited in near-terror for the reply.

"You're not very good at this, are you?"

David said nothing. He was too surprised.

"Where do you want to go in a matter transmitter?"

The question took him unawares. "I don't want—" he said, then stopped.

"So it's not for you? Then for whom?"

David's only impulse was to run, but something kept him there.

"Not for a friend of yours, I suppose?" the man asked slowly. "A… traveling gentleman?"

He knew! David felt himself trembling. It was impossible—yet somehow this man must have discovered that Hemskir was in the Padgett farm. But how?

"Don't worry," he said. "We've known for some time."

Another figure came out of the darkness. It was one of his assistants. He said something quietly to the tall man.

"We can't talk any more now," the man said. "I'll have to begin the ceremony. See me afterwards."

He turned and went into the boathouse. At the door, he turned and looked back.

"If you should want me for anything," he said, "my name is Penn."

David stood for a moment looking out over the lake, trying vainly to make sense of the conversation just past. How could Penn know about Hemskir? And if he knew, why hadn't he reported it?

"David?"

Samantha was standing just behind him, silhouetted against the red glare of the fire. At that moment somebody poked the blaze and it flared up, etching the outline of her body into his eyes. Every tiny detail seemed inked onto his brain, even to the last strands of hair blown awry by the soft night winds. His mission accomplished—surprisingly, confusingly, but accomplished all the same—David felt freed of a crushing burden. The fear he had felt earlier that night when Samantha had spoken to him outside the chapel was gone. His mind was occupied with one thought. Taking her hand—warm and dry, not moist like his own—he led her towards the group around the fire.

Its fuel almost totally consumed, the fire had sunk to a pile of red coals, white hot at the center and flickering with blue flames above. It bathed those who sat around it in a languorous heat so that they seemed to float in another element, neither air nor fire nor water but a combination of all three. Under his clothing, David began to sweat. He loosened the string at his throat and opened his jacket. The air that touched his chest was still hot, but it seemed more bearable. He looked at Samantha. With her right hand—David still held her left firmly with his own—she unfastened the top lacing on her high-throated dress. Her eyes never left his as she loosened the next and the next. Her fingers hovered over the fourth, but then she stopped. Inside her gown, now open almost to her waist, David saw the warm swelling of her breasts and sensed the quick dark pulse of blood through her skin.

As the fire's heat had increased its light had ebbed until now only the circle around the coals was brightly lit. Those sprawled around the fire were in near-darkness, illuminated only when a chance coal flared up to show their flushed faces. The trees crowded in around them like a wall so that the clearing was as secret as a huge room. Finding a vacant place in the circle, David and Samantha joined the others on the ground. It was very quiet and warm and dark. Nobody said anything as they waited for the ceremony to begin.

From somewhere in the darkness beyond the fire there was a sudden hard sound, like the impact of a hammer against wood. It was repeated three times.

"Enter," somebody said at the far side of the circle. The word was repeated by each in turn. David felt the sound coming towards him like a wave. The man next to Samantha, then Samantha—then it was his turn.

"Enter," he said quickly, and it passed on.

The word was passed back to the man who had first uttered it and there was an expectant silence. A moment later a tall robed figure walked slowly into the firelight. Although his face was still in shadow, David recognized Penn. One arm was by his side. The other held an ornate candelabra with thin red candles. David counted seven tiny white flames as Penn walked slowly around the fire. In the warm rising air the flames were perfectly still, like eyes in the darkness. Behind Penn walked another of the robed men, swinging a censer. Smoke rose from it in wreathing clouds, and David felt the sting of incense on his nostrils. Not the bitter stuff of his uncle's chapel but a hot spicy fragrance like nothing he had ever smelled before. He sniffed it once, then again eagerly, feeling it flow into him like liquid fire.

Penn circled the fire once, then stopped on the side opposite from David, facing the bed of coals. The candelabra was held high so that he could see the flames of the candles outlined against the darkness of the trees. But they were no longer hard shapes. He saw them blurrily, starred with four points as if glimpsed through tears. He felt his limbs becoming light and weak. Then the prayers began.

They were long and, to David, meaningless, but he felt himself lulled by the round rolling cadences of this unknown language. Half asleep, he listened, letting the heat cover him like a blanket.

"Incensum istud a te benedictum, ascendat ad te, Domine, et descendant super nos misellcordia tue. Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea, sicut incensum . . "

One of the candle flames went out suddenly. David blinked, and looked again. It was gone, snuffed into darkness.

"Elevatio manum mearum sacrificarium vespertinum. Pone, Domine, custodiam ori meo …"

David had a sense of some impending arrival, of the nearness of another presence, huge and awesome. Another flame went out. The people in the circle were stirring as the prayer rolled over them, rich and dark like music in the night. At the end of the prayer, their "Amen" was almost a frantic cry for help, an affirmation of their own humanity in the face of the higher power about to envelop them.

Another flame went out, then another. It was coming closer. "Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. Dominus Deus Sabaoth." The fifth flame winked into darkness. David found himself taking up the chant.

"Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus…"

The sixth flame disappeared. There was only one left, a single ambassador of light in a world filling with darkness. "Sanctus, Sanctus …"

Around the circle hands reached out for other hands, bodies for bodies. David felt Samantha tremble. The last flame went out—and suddenly, It was here, around them, filling the darkness with a new and terrifying music. The last voices faded, leaving only echoes. David lay against Samantha, but he floated in an element he did not know, a warm dark nothingness that pillowed him. His circle of consciousness had contracted until he could see and sense only those things nearest to him. Somewhere inside his mind he knew it was time. But time for what?

To see Penn! Of course. About Hemskir. That was why he had come here. The thought stung him into half-wakefulness. He struggled to rise. Around the fire, in the shadows, he could see the slow movement of bodies. Across the coals there were upright figures, but his eyes would not focus. Penn must be there, waiting for him.

Samantha moved, and David looked down.

Her eyes were half-closed, her hair crushed about her head and face. The last shreds of firelight danced off her nails as she guided his hand to the lacings on her dress. He felt the cords slide and loosen under his touch. Then the heat and the darkness closed in on him and he gave himself up to the night and the girl beside him.



 

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VI
It was cold. David turned over sleepily and reached out for the blankets. He scrabbled about for a few seconds before he realized that the hard lumpy surface beneath him was not a bed, that he was lying naked on the ground in the clearing beside the lake. His head ached, his neck was stiff and his joints cramped, and his mouth tasted indescribably foul. As he moved his dry tongue about his mouth, memories of the night returned—memories especially of the incense they had burned and which he had sniffed so eagerly. Apparently there had been more in that censer than aromatics.

Warily he opened his eyes and looked around. Samantha was lying beside him. Sometime during the night she had come awake long enough to gather up the clothes lying about them and make a blanket for herself. He studied her for a moment, wondering at the calm, almost angelic expression on her face. She slept on her side, her arms curled before her breast and the fingers of one hand with their long transparent nails touching her face. Innocence in a crumpled dress. David looked down at his chest where those same nails had left red marks as they had raked him like spurs. Then he shivered and extracted his clothes from the pile under which she slept.

The fire was dead now, a blanket of white ash from which jutted bits of charred wood, but few of the others there seemed to care about the lack of heat. Once a tightly-integrated circle, the people had scattered and spread out all over the clearing so that it looked like a battleground left to the dead. Here and there a group of two or three had held together and its members lay where they had fallen, like groups of obscene statuary. Only the slow heavy breathing and an occasional snore betrayed the fact that they still lived. Leaning against a tree trunk, David pulled on his boots and stood up shakily. He looked drowsily at the sleeping worshippers. How vulnerable they were, how soft and white, like creatures with their shells off. And how ridiculous. He was glad to have his clothes on now, not only for their warmth but for the reassurance they gave him that he was a human being, not an animal.

Thinking back to the night, he sorted through those few memories that remained of it. His fantasies now seemed childishly unsophisticated, nursery pictures of sex that he was glad to be able to put behind him. Samantha had proved herself an expert. He looked down at the girl curled up among the clothing. With all the desire leached out of him, with all his sexual needs completely satisfied, he was surprised to find left a residue of something else. Real affection, perhaps. It was an odd emotion and one which he could not accurately label, yet he found it satisfying. This much he had gained from the night, outside of mere pleasure.

Hemskir! He felt a sudden thrill of horror. He had forgotten about the Earthman entirely. Last night Penn had said to see him when the ceremony was over, but he had put it completely out of his mind in the first few moments with Samantha. Now the memory of why he had come here in the first place returned to him. He looked around for Penn or one of his assistants, but there was no sign of the Christians.

Picking his way through the sleeping worshippers, he went to the boatshed and looked inside. The three men were sitting around a large wooden box, eating. There was a joint of cold meat wrapped in a white cloth from which each carved slices with his knife. David saw a loaf of bread, fruit and a flask of what he took to be wine. The sight of food made him realize how hungry he was. Tentatively he put one foot over the threshold.

One of the men saw him, glanced at Penn and gestured with his knife. David did not recognize the face when the man turned around. Last night he had seen only shadows, but he knew by the crude rimless eyeglasses that this must be Penn. Without the hood he looked approachable enough, even cheerful in a distant way.

"Sit down," Penn said, indicated a pile of debris in the corner.

David found a box and sat down with the three men. He looked at the food.

"We're just having breakfast. Hungry?"

David nodded.

The men cut two generous slices from the joint and a piece of bread from the loaf. He gave them to David and put the flask down in front of him. David was more thirsty than he was hungry. He took a gulp from the flask, and was surprised to find it contained water. His reaction made one of the other men laugh. He was short and fat, and his smile revealed a set of blackened and crooked teeth.

"What did you expect?" he asked.

"Wine, I suppose," David said.

"Wine!" Penn put on an expression of mock horror. "But we're ministers of religion."

The remark seemed uproariously funny to the others and they laughed. David sipped the water and took a bite from the bread and meat. He could not see the humor of it, nor what there was in the situation to laugh about. Last night Penn had seemed to agree that the problem of Hemskir was important enough. This morning the idea had gone from his mind. He couldn't understand these men at all. In the places where he had lived, and especially on his uncle's farm, it was not usual to joke about things like religion. Of course, Christianity was not strictly a religion. It wasn't hard to see that people came to the rites only as an excuse for licentiousness and nothing more. But there were those who took it seriously. He knew from the things he had read that the whole planet had once been Christian. He wondered where Penn and the other men fitted into the pattern.

"I think we've offended your young friend, Penn," the third man said. He was almost as tall and thin as Penn, but older. His face was a network of tiny lines that reminded David of Hemskir's features. He had the same way of talking too: flat, and with little inflection.

Penn looked at David. "Are you offended?"

"No. Puzzled, though."

"Why?" Penn seemed genuinely surprised.

"Well, I came to you last night for help. You agreed that what I had to tell you was important. Yet this morning..." Penn smiled. "Don't worry about your friend, boy. He's perfectly safe. If he weren't do you think we'd be sitting here now?"

"But I don't understand. How do you know? All I asked you last night—"

"—was whether I knew where there were matter transmitters. Yes. But I knew about your friend long before that. It's part of the reason why I'm here."

He took up his knife and cut another slice of meat from the joint.

"I suppose you think we're just three entertainers hired to put on a show for a crowd of overheated yokels? Or at the best three crackpot religious maniacs?"

David didn't answer.

"Well, of course some Christians are one or the other," Penn went on. "There's still a large underground network of Christian churches and such. It isn't easy to stamp out a church after centuries of existence, you know. But quite a few organizations have found it very useful to use a church as an underground. We won't go too deeply into exactly what organizations or what they're using an underground for, but suffice it to say we belong to one of those organizations. It's an ideal cover for us. We can move around the country almost without hindrance."

"Don't you think you're telling him too much?" the fat man interrupted. "Surely, for his own good…"

"He's already found out more than enough for his own good," Penn said. He looked at David. "Did this friend of yours tell you anything at all?"

"A few things. About proctors, and some sort of stone—"

"Shut up!" the third man said quickly. His face was pale. One hand was outstretched as if to clap it over David's mouth.

"I wouldn't advise ever mentioning anything you were told," Penn said quietly. "You can see from Lewis's reaction that it's a bigger secret than you realize. Just keep very quiet. And don't speak to strangers like you did to me last night. Luckily I happened to be the right person to talk to, but you might not be so lucky next time."

"He must have been insane to tell him," Lewis said. His face was pale and drawn.

"I don't think he knows much to tell," Penn said. "Rumors, that's all. The ones we have to worry about aren't here yet. This man's arrival on Merryland was an accident, nothing more."

"I hope so," Lewis said.

"Don't worry."

David wondered if he should tell them about the carved amulet Hemskir had. He decided against it. His attempts at intrigue had taught him one basic rule already: volunteer nothing, but ask questions.

"Who are the others?" he asked. "The ones Hemskir is hiding from."

"Hemskir," Penn said. "I thought it might be him. Yes, I should think the ones we have to worry about are the same ones who are hunting him. And they'll catch him, too. I have no doubt."

"But you said he was safe!" David said.

"I can't make promises for any planet but Merryland. They won't get him here. But once he leaves, I don't like his chances. You don't know what it's like outside. The proctors control everything. Out here, beyond The Limit, they have little authority. It's too far from Earth, and the systems are stagnant for the most part. Of course, this makes it a convenient place to hide. But they can't hide forever, and when they leave, there's only one place to go—back towards Earth. And then they get caught, invariably."

"Have others come here to hide?"

Lewis almost smiled. Apparently the question was a naive one.

"It's not unknown," Penn said.

"Hemskir told me that the proctors could tell when a machine was being used. Couldn't they track people to Merryland?"

"The transmitters on Merryland have been rigged to show an out-of-order signal unless we reactivate them," Penn said. "The machine your friend came through was almost the last one not disconnected. We've been trying to find where it was located, but you seem to be the first Merrylander ever to see the thing. On the proctor charts, most of the transmitters on this world are shown as out of order, so they've assumed the place is reverting to barbarism like most other worlds out here. That's the only thing keeping them off Merryland. If they knew there was civilization here, we'd be finished."

"Well, if the transmitters are still in working order," David said, "couldn't you send Hemskir through the one at New Harbor?"

"Don't worry about your proctor friend," Penn said. "He's already gone."

"Gone?" David said. He couldn't grasp what Penn had said.

"Do you think we'd be sitting around here having breakfast if he was still hiding up there? I assure you that we were just as anxious to get rid of the man as he was to leave. Everything depends on the proctors not discovering what we're doing down here. As it happens, your friend forestalled us."

He walked to one of the piles of boxes and twitched back the canvas cover. Underneath David saw a small machine.

"This is what brought us here. The meter registered an emission of radiation in this area. When you arrived last night we were getting ready to isolate exactly what sort of equipment it was and where it was operating from. Then you came up and put the story right into our laps. We planned to go up last night and see what could be done, but the radiation cut off just after you arrived."

"But where could he have gone?" David asked.

"I can't imagine. Back through the transmitter perhaps, or overland to New Harbor or some other town."

David was disappointed and a little insulted. Hemskir had been insistent that his help was essential. He had felt for the first time in his life a necessary and wanted ally. Not that he had lived up to the trust Hemskir had put in him. He still remembered sharply his failure to do what he had been asked. But to have been sent on a fool's errand—!

"Are you sure he's gone?" David asked.

Penn sat down heavily and reached for his knife to cut more meat. "There isn't a registration on the meter anymore," he replied. "Obviously he must have disconnected the transmitter and left."

David considered. Something nagged at his mind, some irritating element. It was all too easy.

"But what about the other equipment?" he asked. "He couldn't have carried all that equipment—the helmet and..."

"Helmet?" Lewis asked quickly. Penn put down his knife.

"What sort of helmet?" he asked.

"You put it on and it shows pictures," David said.

"Did he connect it to the transmitter?" Penn asked. He seemed nervous. The slice of meat he had cut lay discarded on the box they used as a table.

"No."

"Self-sufficient," Lewis said. "That should have registered."

"It should still be registering," Penn said. He went to the machine again and moved the controls. Then he turned back to them.

"Nothing."

Lewis looked at David. "When did you leave him?"

"About eight o'clock."

"And he was all right then?"

"He had a broken arm, but that's all," David said. "Do you think anything has happened to him?"

"I don't know," Lewis said. "The proctors surely couldn't know he's on Merryland. The chances of them checking this planet so early in the search are infinitesimal, unless he gave himself away somehow."

"Would it matter if he turned on the machine?" David asked. "While I was there he used it once to check the proctor broadcasts. He said they wouldn't be able to trace it."

Penn and Lewis exchanged a glance.

"How long did he have it on?" Lewis asked.

"A minute, maybe two."

"More than long enough," Penn said slowly.

"What do you mean?" David asked.

"In that time, the proctors could easily had fixed his location. He must have been mad to try it."

"But he said they wouldn't hear it," David said desperately.

"They'd hear it. He had no idea what the Earth proctors were capable of. They've been working on the monopolar machines for years. He was only guessing."

David couldn't understand for a moment. His mind seemed to be floating in a gray haze through which thoughts penetrated only in scraps, to disappear again before he could grasp them. Then the full significance of what they had said came to him. While the three men talked excitedly among themselves he got up and left the boathouse. They didn't notice him leave.

It was full day outside. The sun was well up and the clearing crowded with people. Most of them were wandering about sleepily, putting on their clothes, eating a cold breakfast from the packs they had brought with them. David blundered among them, shouldering his way through the crowd. Curses were thrown at him and one man grabbed his coat. David turned. It was Martin Stoker.

"That's the second time—" Stoker began to say. David hit him very hard in the face and he fell to the ground. There was a shout but he was past them before he could be caught.

Samantha was sitting where he had left her. She was dressed now, but still half asleep. He hurried towards her, because behind her was the path that led out of the grove. She looked up at him sleepily and held out her hand.

He ignored her.

She represented everything he hated about the night before, and especially his betrayal of the Earthman's trust. She stared after him in astonishment as he hurried past her and along the narrow path.

He blundered through the grove and out onto the fields. It was a cool, dewy morning and the grass, ankle-high this late in spring, was wet. His shoes and trousers legs were soon soaked, and the cloth flapped against his skin as he ran towards the big house. Farm hands stopped and looked after him, puzzled, as he ran through the meadows panting with exhaustion.

There was nobody in the home field or the kitchen garden. He ran up the steps, crashed through the front doors and raced along the corridors. Some unknown store of strength kept him going as he ran up the stairs, twisting up the spiral staircase towards the top of the house. On one of the landings he collapsed to the floor and gasped in air for a moment before staggering to his feet again. The upper landing came nearer as his vision began to blur. Then he was on the upper steps, looking again at the little stained glass window. There was the landing. And there was the door. Open.

All urgency was gone now. He knew with diamond clarity what he would see. Slowly, lurching with fatigue, he staggered forward and, leaning against the edge of the panel, looked into the narrow room.

It was very much as he remembered it, though the stream of bright daylight through the door made it appear more dingy and desolate than it had been by the light of the lamp. The lamp, he noted with small surprise, was still burning, its glow weak and fitful in the sunlight. It illuminated the ruin of the room. Equipment that had merely been strewn about before was now shattered. He saw the helmet crushed and twisted, the blankets ripped to shreds. Panels had been blasted to splinters by blows of unimaginable ferocity. Even the matter transmitter was scarred by heat marks and the glow in its interior was gone. Before it, like a slaughtered sacrifice offered to some pagan god, lay the body of Hemskir.



 

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VII
David waited for a long time before entering the room, as if hoping that the shattered body before the transmitter would be drawn back into time and he would no longer have to face the fact that he was responsible for it being there. Finally, when it became clear that there was to be no miracle, no divine intervention, he walked slowly down the long chamber towards the crumpled heap at its end. Confused and dizzy, his mind played back with complete fidelity the last words he had said in this room:

"I'll be back as soon as I can."

But he hadn't come back until this morning, until now. Penn had said that the radiation traces had disappeared last night. When he had woken Hemskir had already been dead for hours. Some cog in his memory was jolted into conjunction with another and the whole erotic panorama of the night spilled back into his mind. He saw the events of that period not as actions but as divisions like the second-marks on a clock, and as each went by another instant in the man's life was irretrievably lost.

How brutish it seemed now. Yet that in itself was some sort of comfort. What had prevented him from fulfilling his promise had been a physical thing, something as impossible to fight in its way as a brick wall. If there had been any betrayal, it had been a betrayal of his purpose by his emotions, and of his mission by Samantha. So he was not really to blame. Not really.

Then, looking down at the body, he knew how shallow all his temporizing was. Hemskir was dead. Dead. A man who a few hours before had been talking to him, confiding, trusting him. And he was dead because of David's weakness. There was no escaping the fact.

He examined the body carefully, forcing himself to absorb every detail. The story of his death was written clearly in the corpse's crushed sprawl. It had been quick. Hemskir's sidearm was still holstered, and the blast of heat had fused the butt of it into the metal mesh of his belt. He had probably been standing near the transmitter when it had happened. David could imagine the sudden hum of the machine, his eyes turning to it, his reaction to the appearing shape of the proctor in the block, quick but not quick enough. The first blast had hit him squarely in the chest, killing him instantly.

The ungainly sprawl of the body disturbed David, and he gently eased it over on to its back, settling the limbs into a more natural position. It was one thing he could do for the man, at least. As he did so, he found among the debris under the body a charred lump on which a few tufts of blue fur could still be seen. The proctors had missed little in their work—but they had forgotten one item. At Hemskir's belt, David saw the little mesh bag in which he had carried the stone amulet which meant so much to both him and Penn. It was still in the bag. Without really knowing why, David took the bag and put it into his pocket. He did not know yet why the stone was important, but he knew he had better take it. Perhaps Penn could tell him more about it.

Penn—and the stone. They were inextricably linked. Penn knew what the significance of the stone was, and perhaps more. Why had it been so important to both men?—so important that one of them had died for it? Actual possession of the stone seemed less dangerous than knowledge of its existence. David held the tiny carving in his hand, looking into its depths. He knew about the stone. Was his life then in danger too? What would happen to him if the proctors came back? He began to see the situation more clearly now. It could be a very dangerous one for him if the proctors should discover his connection with Hemskir. He backed towards the door. So long as he' was not found in the room and nobody else learned of its existence, he was safe. The problem of the body would have to be solved later. For the moment, it would be enough to lock the room, Then he could go somewhere and think. At the door he paused for a moment, his hand on the panel.

And heard footsteps on the stairs, coming up towards him.

For a moment he nearly panicked. Then the same cold logic he had found in himself earlier began to reappear. He moved to close the door, then stopped. The rusty squeal of the pivot would alert whoever it was. There were no other visible doors anywhere nearby and they would be sure to suspect something. There was only one thing to do. If he moved quickly and quietly enough he could get down to one of the lower landings and intercept the climber before he reached the upper level and saw the door open. It was probably only a servant anyway.

As silently as he could, David padded across the landing and down the steps. On the lower landing he paused and glanced over, but could see nothing. The footsteps continued. Halfway down the next flight of stairs he began walking more slowly, casually, as if he had been strolling idly about on the upper levels. He listened. On the next landing he would meet whoever it was. He composed his face and turned the corner.

"Hello," Samantha said.

"What are you doing here?" he asked sharply. Samantha! Of all people!

"I was looking for you." Her tone was harsh, and now that David looked closely he could see she was angry. She was pale and her mouth was drawn into a thin line.

"How did you know I was up here?" The wood of the banister under his hand felt slippery. Sweat.

Samantha looked down at the ground. There were regular dark patches on the dust-misted treads.

"Your feet are wet."

David looked at his sodden shoes. He knew without turning that his tracks were on the upper stairs also. He had to stop her from turning the corner and going on.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"Why did you run away? I don't understand the way you behaved at all. And what were you talking to those men for? You don't know them, do you?"

"I just wanted to discuss something with them. This Christianity thing interests me."

Her expression showed that he had lied clumsily. Then her eyes strayed over his shoulder.

"What's up there?"

"Nothing," he replied quickly. Too quickly.

"You've been coming up here a lot lately. What for?"

"Just looking around."

"Looking for what?" She took another step and peered upwards. "Are there rooms up there? I thought all this was closed off."

"It is," David said desperately. He reached out to take her arm. "Let's—"

She shook off his grasp irritatedly. "What are you hiding up there?"

"Nothing, I told you!"

She glanced at him sharply, her green eyes piercing him again as they always did when she was excited or angry. Then, with a sudden movement, she was past him and running up the stairs.

"No!"

He snatched at the retreating hem of her dress, then ran desperately after her, but she was too quick. When he reached the upper landing she was already halfway up the steps leading to the room. As he reached the lower step he heard her gasp of surprise and fear as she looked into the chamber where the body lay. He walked up the last few steps and stood behind her.

"Come away," he said.

She wouldn't move. For a long moment she stared into the room, taking it all in.

"Is he dead?"

David didn't answer. She must have known he was.

"What's that thing?"

"A matter transmitter."

She stiffened. "Did he come through it?"

"Yes. He was from off-world. What they call a proctor."

"And this is what you were talking to Penn about."

"Yes."

She turned suddenly. Her eyes, sharp before, were now as hard as cut stones, not with anger but with fear and panic. She started towards the steps. He grabbed her, and she struggled in his arms.

"Let go!" she said wildly. "Let… me… go!"

Her voice echoed in the narrow stairwell, reverberating down the passages and landings. David slapped his hand over her mouth and drew her hard to him so that her white face was only a few inches from his. Fear and anger gripped him in a frozen rage.

"Quiet!" he said, his voice a metallic whisper. "If you tell your father, I'll…"

He could think of no apt threat to use in reprisal, so said nothing more. His tone must have been convincing, for when he took his hand cautiously away she made no sound, though her mouth remained half-open, the unborn scream caught in her throat.

"You mustn't tell them," he said quickly. "You know we could be killed for having a machine like that in the house. You, me, your father, everybody. Do you want the Examiners here?"

He released her and watched cautiously as she turned and stared around the narrow chamber. If she ran, he was ready to grab her again, but she made no other attempt to escape.

"Did you find this place?" she asked.

As quickly as he could David told her about the room and the man he had found in it. All the time he listened for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but there were none. Apparently he had been lucky and her scream had gone unheard. But the sooner they got away from there, the better. It was entirely too dangerous.

"We'd better go," he said, reaching for the door.

"Why?"

"Do you want to be caught near all this?"

He pushed the door and heard it click satisfactorily shut. They went down the stairs slowly, Samantha in front and David behind her.

"You won't tell anyone, will you?" he said.

"I don't know."

Her voice had none of the kittenish quality he was used to hearing with that phrase. Sudden fear gripped him, and he searched again for some weapon to use as a check against her. The willing partner of last night had been replaced by a threat against his life, a threat that he had to counter.

"If you do," he said suddenly, "I'll tell your father that you've gone Christian."

She stopped and looked around at him. She was furious.

"I think you would, too!"

"This is important," he said defensively.

She glared at him and walked quickly in front of him down the stairs. He didn't try to keep up with her. Something in her manner had told him that she would not mention this to anybody.

When he got to the foot of the stairs, Samantha had gone. He wasted no time in looking for her, realizing that it would be better not to aggravate her further. He paused in the corridor, wondering what to do. The only course with any real hope of success was the one he had followed the previous night: blind faith in the man Penn. He alone seemed to know what was going on. He had known about Hemskir and about his death, at least in part. Perhaps he would have some idea of what David should do next.

In the middle of this discussion with himself, he stopped, surprised. Why should he do anything? Why not leave the door upstairs closed, trust Samantha to keep her mouth shut, and forget the whole thing? But he dismissed the idea at once. This last night had catapulted him into a new world, a red and black landscape of action and violence. It both frightened and exhilarated him, but he wanted to know more about it. The mud-crusted ikons that lined the hall now seemed ridiculous, hopelessly out of date, like everything on Merryland. The world was a stopped clock in which its people roamed like lost insects among the dusty cogs and stilled springs. And what if the clock were started again? He let his thoughts stop there. Time to think of these things later.

He slipped out of the house and hurried through the fields towards the lake, the sun hot on his face. In the home paddock Garth and his father were supervising the stacking of hay, watching with proprietary interest as the indentured laborers sweated in the heat. They noticed David, and Isaac Padgett gave him a vague nod, but that was all the reaction he got. David was part of the furniture, as commonplace as some barnyard animal and just about as interesting. He hurried past them without looking back. It suited him to be ignored at that moment.

The grove that by night had been still and mysterious was less impressive in the sun. Needle points of birdsong punctured the eerie atmosphere and the sun transformed dark caverns into bright corridors. The wood that had seemed so impenetrable by night now became a screen through which the waters of the lake could be seen glinting in the sun. David was almost cheerful as he moved along the narrow path and into the clearing, now empty. The remains of the fire, he noticed, had been removed, probably thrown into the lake, and the ground around had been carefully cleaned to erase all traces of the night's orgy. Anybody stumbling on the place would have to look carefully to realize anything had happened here.

He glanced around for Penn and the others, but the place seemed deserted. They were probably in the boathouse. He walked over and looked in. It was empty. The boxes and equipment were gone, and dust covered everything. Panic seized him for a second time that morning. He turned quickly to the clearing.

"Penn?" he called.

There was no answer. They had gone.

He hurried out of the clearing and along the path. Could they have left so soon? And why would they? Penn knew that David would need his help. He was depending on the man for advice at least. At the edge of the grove he cast around frantically for some sign. He found it quickly enough: the marks of a two-wheeled cart and of horses' hooves. Apparently they had hidden their transport among the trees. The tall dew-soaked grass showed plainly where they had driven the cart up from the lake towards the road that skirted the edge of the Padgett farm. David followed the tracks, desperately trying to ignore the signs which told him they had been hurrying away from the place.

At the road he lost the tracks. The red clay surface was baked hard and showed no signs of their passing. He squinted up the road against the sun, hoping for a sign of them, but it was empty. Glancing at the sun, he computed how long they had been gone. An hour perhaps, not much more. A horse and cart carrying three men could not travel very fast. Resolutely he stepped onto the road and set out in pursuit of them.

He walked for two hours, trudging over the hard red road with energy that decreased a little at the sight of each new hill. This was rich green grazing country, but its cool verdancy did nothing to reduce the heat of the sun. His clothes were soon soaked with sweat and his feet painfully sore from their thudding on the road. At the top of one particularly steep rise he paused and, looking back, saw that he had reached the very lip of the valley. He could see the Padgett and Stoker farms miles behind and below him, looking like discarded toys among their patchwork of fields and meadows, Padgett backed against the cliff and Stoker facing it like an adversary. Ahead of him the country fell off steadily with the same green featurelessness of the fields around him. Rich, green, empty country, barren of people, bare but for the trees standing still and dreamlike in the sun. The road wandered down into this landscape as deserted as the fields on either side. The vehicle he had been chasing seemed to have been swallowed up in the stillness. He couldn't imagine what Penn and the others had done to get away from there so fast, but at the moment he was too tired to care.

Up ahead of him a few hundred feet he saw a shelter of some kind. It provided a focus for his attention and wearily he closed the last short distance to see what it was. As he approached he recognized a roadside shrine. There was a life-sized, inverted crucifix, a weather-beaten roof above it supported by four rickety poles, and two or three rusty chain whips. The head-down image had that same expression of eerie reasonableness David had seen on every ikon and statue. No matter how these ancient articles were perverted, no matter what bizarre or deformed molds they were forced into, they retained this air of tranquil forgiveness. He stood for a while before the shrine, taking in its grotesqueness as he had that of the sprawled body of the upstairs room. The crucified figure, chipped and scarred by the pilgrims, who, passing this way, paused in their journey to flay it with one of the chain whips, seemed to have something in common with the murdered man, though the pattern into which they fitted was one of which David could catch only glimpses.

To his surprise he found himself yawning. He had had little sleep that night and his long journey in the sun had made him tired. It was past noon and too hot to walk all the way back to the farm. The deep ditches along the roadside, dug long ago for cables and pipes but never used, gaped invitingly. He had to have time to think. Finding a suitably shady spot, he lay down in the rank grass and tried to sort things out in his mind, but in a few minutes he was asleep.

Later he stirred but did not wake as a squad of horsemen went by, pounding down the hill towards the valley floor. He was to owe his life to that drowsiness which kept him in the ditch until they had disappeared.

 

When he woke the sun was far in the west and the long slanting shadows betrayed the late hour. The angular arms of the crucifix were etched against the darkening sky like some symbol of doom. David straightened up stiffly and climbed out of the ditch. His joints ached and he felt sick. The euphoria of the noon was replaced by sickness and a raging thirst. Shakily he walked back across the brown of the hill and looked down into the valley.

The dying sun completely changed the aspect of the land, replacing the neat checkerboard of fields with an etched pattern of long shadows that cut grotesquely across natural boundaries. Night neutralized the life that day had injected into things, leaving them hard, sharp and angular. Geometry supplanted surface, form and color; edge was everything.

One thing only marred this country of ruled precision—a trailing road of black shadow that whispered down the valley, spreading across fields and hollows, misting at the edges but hard and dark at its core. It was smoke shadow, the ghost image of a cataract of dark vapor that flowed down the valley on the night wind. At its source was the Padgett farm. David could see it quite clearly. The farmhouse was on fire, clothed from ground to roof in roaring red flames.



 

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VIII
It took a few moments for David to accept the evidence of his eyes. Seen from so far above, the valley and its farms seemed toy-like and unreal. Surely that couldn't be the real Padgett farmhouse burning down there. It must be an illusion of some kind, or a dream. The old clichés assumed new meanings as he considered their suggestions. The things he was watching had to be in a dream; they were too fantastic to be true. But the smoke rolled down the valley in a way that was all too real. Dream smoke was gauzy and fine. This was black, greasy and thick. As he hurried along the road he could almost smell its acrid tang.

By the time he had reached the floor of the valley he had come close for the second time that day to the end of his physical resources, but as before his desperation kept him going. As he ran along the road the landscape seemed to waver blackly about him, twisting as if seen through Penn's distorted eyeglasses. For a while he put it down to weariness. Then the darkness thickened momentarily and he looked up to see the smoke from the burning house laid like a scarf of black mist over his head. It blocked out most of the sky, and he knew then that he was close to the farmhouse.

Pausing for a moment to regain his breath, he saw that the country around him was becoming more familiar. This was Padgett land, though he hardly recognized it in the yellow light of the smoke-filled dusk. At the top of the next rise he would be able to look down on the home fields. He almost dreaded doing so, because he knew at the back of his mind what was happening there and why the house was on fire. As he topped the hill his suspicions were confirmed. Three black wagons stood in the field, surrounded by a group of men whose faces were covered by long masks. The Examiners had gathered for an inquisition.

From the hill he could see everything that happened. The home paddocks were alive with people stung into frenzied activity like an exploded ant-nest. Some stood about in groups, talking, but most seemed to be busy with bundles and vehicles. In front of the burning house huge piles of material had been built up. Almost everything in the house would be there for the Examiners to pray over and purify. People swarmed over the piles, loading objects into handcarts and horse drays. Dominating the whole scene and lighting it like an open furnace, the burning farm stood impotent, chained in flames. As David watched, the upper levels of the house began slowly to tumble, toppling into the cathedral of flames beneath. Even a mile away he could hear the sliding roar of masonry as it crumbled into the ruin.

The road from the farm was thick with people, most of them laden with loot from the farm. It was usual for the goods of a proscribed person to be distributed among the first comers—after, of course, the most valuable had been taken by the Examiners themselves. These people were probably the tenant farmers from Padgett and Stoker properties. David slipped off the road and hid in a small grove of trees while they passed. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, their figures had a look of unreality about them, as if an artist had cut a moving frieze into the sunset. The poses were familiar: the man of the family, his back bent with a heavy load, trudging uphill, his wife behind him, wearily working between the shafts of a handcart, the children and old people all bearing some burden. This was how life was on Merryland. David did not really begrudge these people their meager loot. They probably deserved it more than most.

When the first group had gone he went to the edge of the road and looked towards the farm. There was another cart coming, faster this time, with two people drawing it. He slipped back into the shadows, until something in the movements of these people struck him as familiar. Walking back to the edge of the road, he waited for them to reach him. As the man and woman came close, they slowed. From their sudden return to servility, David saw that they recognized him.

"Master David?" the woman said uncertainly.

"Yes, it's me," David said, stepping forward. "How are you, Wheatley?"

The couple stared at him sullenly. The woman was less vicious than her husband, but her cringing servility hid a cruel and sadistic nature. Together they made an unattractive though well-matched pair. Wheatley stood glowering in the center of the road, hunched between the shafts of the cart like a stupid beast. David knew he would have knocked him down if he had been able, but the man had obviously worn himself out dragging the heavy cart from the farm. It was well loaded, far fuller than those of the other peasants who had gone by earlier. And where they had taken only clothing, bedding and a few trinkets, Wheatley had been greedier. David could see ikons, weapons and rich clothing jumbled together in his cart. The Examiners would never let a servant leave with that sort of loot unless he had earned it. David wondered where Wheatley fitted into the picture.

"Don't talk to him," Wheatley said to his wife. "He's on the list too."

"Is the whole family proscribed?" David asked.

Wheatley laughed coarsely. "As if you didn't know. It's no less than you and rest of them deserve. It'll teach you to disobey the laws. Common people like us have to obey them, so why shouldn't you?"

He picked up the shafts of his cart and started forward. David's temper suddenly boiled over. All his anger and fear foamed up into a rage directed at Wheatley. There was no weapon in sight on the road, so he launched himself at the man with bare fists. Wheatley expected nothing like this and the first two blows crashed into him without any defense being offered. He fell back against the cart and David leaped on him. Grabbing a handful of his greasy hair, he thumped the man's head twice against the edge of the vehicle. Wheatley gasped and sagged to the ground. His wife took one look at David's face, like a mask of fury in the light from the burning farm, and ran screaming up the road. David didn't pursue her. He had more important things to do.

With any sort of luck the Padgetts would still be alive. Samantha would still be alive. He did not much care about his aunt and uncle, but Samantha had to be saved. He knew now that, if he could be said to love anybody, he loved her. Probably it was just an amalgam of other emotions, but it was all he had to offer. And in a way he was responsible for everything that had happened to the Padgetts. He would have to try and save them.

Checking to see that Wheatley was still safely unconscious, he looked through the items in his cart. They were expensive, more expensive than he had imagined. He could see Wheatley making himself useful to the Examiners, pointing out where illicit machines might be kept and, more importantly, where the valuables were stored. For his pains Wheatley had apparently been given the pick of the second best, including most of the contents of the armory.

David looked over the collection of weapons. Most of them were rusted beyond all hope of use, but some of the blades had stood up well. At the very bottom of the heap he found a thin sharp knife about a foot long which was unmarked by even a touch of rust. From its weight and the blank simplicity of its hilt he knew that it dated from before the wars. It would never rust, never break and never lose its edge. Carefully he tucked it into his belt. None of the pistols were any good, but he took instead a leather and spring-steel bludgeon weighted with lead. It was only a few inches long, but he had seen Garth kill a bull with one, bringing it to its knees with a single blow to the skull. The two pieces made him well-armed, but only for close quarters. Still, it would have to do.

He looked down at Wheatley. The man was still unconscious. David wondered for a moment what to do about his loot. It would be wrong to let him keep it, but there was no way it could be taken from him. Then he had an idea.

Taking the cart, he dragged it down the hill to where the ground leveled off. The ditches here were full of slimy stagnant water, and he emptied the cart into the deepest of them. By the time Wheatley woke up and found his cart, the things in it would be thoroughly ruined. Then he hurried along the road towards the home fields. It was already night and soon the Examiners would be starting their worst work.

David left the road and made his way towards the house. The night and the light of the burning house both worked in his favor, making the shadows move restlessly, providing good cover. Although dozens of people went along the road only a few yards from him, he was not seen. After a while the flood of refugees and looters dried up as the last of the spoils were distributed and the place was left to the Examiners. David moved closer to the road, walking more quickly and with an increased urgency. By the time he reached the bridge spanning the creek the road was empty. He struggled across the stream and, under cover of the bridge, rejoined the road. As he did so an unfamiliar shape made him start back. He looked closer and saw that the way was barred by two crossed timbers. At the end of each was the three-lobed trefoil of the Examiners' interdict. Once, such a sign had indicated a radiation hazard, but the Examiners had adopted it as a warning that there were less palpable dangers ahead. David ignored it and moved hurriedly along the road. He did not have much time.

By night, and lit by the burning house at one end of it, the home field was eerie and unreal. David had to look at it for a long time before he made out the familiar objects, the haystacks, barns and ditches that gave it individuality. The fire lit the whole field with blazing horizontal light, each object throwing a block of hard shadow onto the ground beside it. In the center of the field, beyond the circle of highest heat, a group of people had gathered. There were about twenty of them, and they stood about in casual attitudes. It could have been a social gathering of some sort but for the bizarre setting and the masks that all of them wore. David wondered where the Padgetts were being kept until he saw the guard lounging against the wall of a small feed shed. They must be inside.

He looked around, searching for some sort of plan, but nothing seemed to offer much hope. There were too many of them to fight, and he knew enough of his own ability to realize that even in a fair fight with only one of them he would have little chance of winning. He needed a trick. Carefully he worked out the relationship of the various objects in the field, trying to visualize it like a chess game or an exercise with toy soldiers—the men grouped in the middle, the prisoners to one side, the barn in the corner of the field nearest to him (providing handy cover, he noted), the burning house. As he watched the house, there was a dull concussion somewhere inside the ruin as a drum of oil exploded. The fire blazed up momentarily and all twenty men looked around. David had his idea. It was a desperate chance, but even that was better than nothing. Warily he circled, until the barn blocked him from their view, then he ran quickly to its waiting shadow.

The door was half-open, and he slipped inside into the gloom. Light coming through chinks in the boards barred the interior with stripes of brightness. Searching through the piles of merchandise against the wall, he found the cask he was looking for. It was a small one, and light. Gunpowder was not very heavy. He had learned that when he had helped Garth and Padgett blast new irrigation channels a few months before when the lower fields had begun to flood after the rains. He remembered everything about that day: the careful way his uncle had weighed out the big black grains, the paleness of the flame in the sunlight as it raced along the track of powder laid to the main charge, the sudden breathtaking concussion and the eruption of crumbled rock. He shook the cask cautiously. It was at least half full.

David eased the stopper out and dribbled the thick trail of powder across the floor to the half-open door. Then he returned to the beginning of it, spilled another pile of powder over the end of the trail and laid the cask down with its opening conveniently close to the pile. If the men had reacted to the small explosion in the house, they should come running to this one. Then, perhaps, there would be an opportunity for some sort of action. He walked quickly to the door, but stopped. Matches. What was he going to light the thing with?

Then he remembered the dagger at his belt. The barn was floored with flagstones. He took the knife and struck the point gingerly against the stone. There was a brief flare of blue sparks. Finding the trail of powder, he repeated the action. Nothing. He tried again, desperately. The sparks flew among the powder. For a moment there was no reaction—then the trail exploded in a puff of sulphurous smoke that sent him stumbling back, choking. Without waiting to see what happened, he ran from the barn. He was on the edge of the ditch when the sudden roar of the explosion threw him to the ground. He rolled into the hollow and squirmed around to look at the reaction.

It was very satisfactory. The whole wall of the barn was blown out and the rest of the building sagged alarmingly. Hay from the loft was flung out in a huge dry cloud which caught fire before it even hit the ground. Soon the whole ruin was blazing. The men ran shouting towards the fire, most of them leaving their guns on the ground. He waited for the guard to move, but the man only stepped forward a few yards to have a better view of the fire. His back was to David and he was obviously not paying any attention.

Moving as quickly as he could, David ran crouching along the ditch and emerged directly behind the hut. There was no challenge as he ran to it and used it as a shield to cover his approach. Then he was standing at the corner, looking at the broad back of the guard only a few feet away. Was he imagining some familiarity about the way those shoulders hunched? Examiners were secretly drawn from landowners in the neighborhood, so the man might be somebody he had seen at some time. The men near the barn were milling about against the firelight, and none of them seemed to be looking in his direction. David took a deep breath and launched himself at the guard. His bludgeon hit him squarely at the base of the skull and the man went down without a sound. He dragged him back behind the hut. As he dumped the unconscious man in the shadows he paused and, out of curiosity, twitched off the black mask he wore.

The man was Lewis, Penn's assistant.

David stared at the slack face for a moment, trying to make some sense out of his presence here. He found it impossible. Replacing the mask, he went around to the door of the shed. There would be time later to work out where Penn fitted into the events of that day.

There was little light inside the small hut but he could see well enough to recognize Isaac and his wife standing at the end of it. Their wrists were bound. Samantha and Garth were bound hand and foot and had collapsed on a pile of grain spilled from the hoppers which lined the walls. The other children were not there.

It took a moment for them to recognize him. When they did, none of them said anything. David could feel their hatred quivering in the air. He took out his knife. Samantha was nearest and he bent to release her.

"Don't touch me," she snarled, squirming away from him. The grain flowed around her, half-burying her legs in its golden silkiness. "This is all your fault."

"But I'm releasing you," he said desperately. "You can escape."

"Escape from what?" Garth growled. "We're innocent."

"Do you think that will help you?" he said. He appealed to Padgett. "Uncle," he said, "surely you see…"

"Get out of here," his uncle said. His voice was coldly ferocious, like an animal's snarl. "You're the cause of all this. We don't need your help. As soon as we've given evidence, we'll be freed." His voice hardened even more. "Then you'd better watch out, boy."

David glanced desperately at the door. The men would not stay away much longer. He had, perhaps, another half minute. He made his decision quickly.

"Did the children get away?" he asked.

"One of the servants took them," Padgett said.

He turned to Samantha.

"Come with me, Samantha."

She ignored him, her eyes and teeth flashing in the light like those of a cat. Her face was cold and white with hatred.

With his left hand he grabbed the collar of her dress and dragged her bodily to her feet. With his right hand he hit her hard on the jaw. She lurched back, dazed.

"Leave her alone!" Garth shouted. He struggled to rise but the grain shifted beneath him and he tumbled back. David heaved the girl over his shoulder, backed through the door and out into the field. He didn't look towards where the barn was burning. If they had seen him he would be dead soon anyway. And if they hadn't, he must make use of every instant.

Staggering under the weight of the body on his back, he lurched to the ditch and half fell into it. Barely keeping his feet, he crashed into the far side and tossed Samantha onto the edge of the road. He scrambled up beside her and picked her up again. The exertions of the day were beginning to tell. He was dizzy and his knees were weak. The men had tethered their horses on the road. He staggered towards them, praying that they were not hobbled.

They weren't. Using the last reserves of his strength, he threw Samantha over the neck of the first animal he came to and scrambled into the saddle. Grabbing the bridle of the next animal, he jabbed his heels into the one he was riding. It jerked forward, the spare animal following, while the others cantered off into the darkness, startled.

The road was clear and brightly lit as it ran along the edge of the home field. He would have to go right through the light of the burning barn, past the place where the men were standing. They would probably shoot him, but he didn't care. A sudden wild exultation was filling him. He had fought and perhaps killed two men that day. He had planned to trick them and succeeded in doing so. He had rescued the girl he loved. It would not matter if he died now. It would have been worth it. The cold night air made his eyes water as he urged the horses forward. His hair whipped about his head as they galloped towards the light. He dug in his heels again and shouted, forcing them on. The edge of the light raced towards him and he entered it like a thunderbolt, neither knowing nor caring what would happen.

The men, dumbfounded, stood and watched him go.

Before they had time to mount, he was well down the road, and in the darkness they had no chance of finding him. At the top of the hill he turned off the road and struck out across country, urging the horse along copses and through the tiny wooded valleys that lay to the south of Padgett land. Samantha was still unconscious but showed signs of recovering, so he pulled her upright and sat her in front of him. She lolled sleepily against him, only half-realizing where she was and making no effort to fight him. It was better that way. He wanted to think.

As the horses picked their way across the fields, David looked around. The land, silent and darkened, lost all its features, settling into a shadowed anonymity. Ridges touched with faint starlight stood out like wave crests, but the hollows were dark and threatening. It was like the sea, and he was adrift in it. Though he had nothing with which to help himself—no money, no friends, only the most meager of weapons—he felt obscurely happy. Even the precarious freedom of a fugitive was better than no freedom at all.



 

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David squatted by the stream and washed black earth from a bunch of carrots. The water was icy and numbed his fingers, making them feel to him like the red sticks of vegetable they held—stiff, crisp, likely if bent to snap in half. He took them out quickly and shook the water off. The drops sparkled in the morning sun. Massaging his fingers to bring back the circulation, he walked up the slope to the tree under which they had spent the night. His joints twinged at the memory of the hard ground and his spine cried out for a real bed, with blankets, but he knew it might be a long time before he would have such luxury again.

Samantha was standing where he had left her, leaning against the tree. Her hands were flattened against the trunk as if she were bound to it, and she did not move when David came close to her. She had been that way since they had woken that morning. David had been irritated at first, but now he hardly cared. Scorn is a weapon only if used against sensitive persons and David was finding, to his surprise, that he had very little sensitivity about him. He didn't really care what Samantha thought of him. He was concerned mainly with the problem of staying alive and out of the hands of the Examiners, the proctors and other various forces who were chasing him. With this new-found confidence he could even notice with some satisfaction the blue and purple bruise on Samantha's jaw, an indelible reminder of the previous night's work.

"Does it hurt?" he asked, reaching out for her with his free hand.

She jerked her head away without looking at him. David thought about leaving her alone, then decided that he had to take a stand somewhere. He grabbed her by the throat and jerked her head around. She gasped as his hand cut off her breath, but she didn't struggle. David examined the bruise for a moment, then let her go.

"It won't kill you," he said. "Are you hungry?"

He held the bundle of carrots out to her. In the background, beyond where the tethered horses were munching contentedly at the rank grass, he could see the field from which they had been taken, and beyond that the house belonging to the tenant who farmed this plot. He had thought about asking there for food and shelter, but discarded the idea. These would not be familiar people, because last night they had ridden well beyond the Padgett and Stoker lands, but they might well have heard about a man and a girl being chased by the Examiners. Even if they had not, they would remember them later, and David preferred to travel as secretly as possible. So he munched on his raw carrot and thought about better meals of the past. Samantha ignored him and the carrots, though he could see from the way her tongue moved inside her mouth that she was hungry-

"You can't keep this up forever," he said eventually.

No reply.

"You're in this just as much as I am. It doesn't matter who's responsible. The fact is that you're here and you'd better make the most of it. The Examiners are looking for you as well as me. If they catch us, you know what will happen."

"It's all your fault."

Her answer was almost inaudible. David heard only a few of the hard hissed syllables and had to reconstruct the rest in his mind.

"It doesn't matter whose fault it is," he said. "The important thing is that we're in it and we have to survive somehow."

She turned on him suddenly, her face blind with rage.

"Why didn't you leave me alone? If you hadn't—"

"Don't be ridiculous, Samantha," he interrupted. "There was an off-world fugitive using the farm as a hiding place. The proctors found out he was there, and arranged for him to be killed and the witnesses disposed of. And your friend Penn was involved too. The guard on the shed was one of his men. Anyway, it doesn't matter one little bit that I happened to see Hemskir before he died. He would have died anyway, and the proctors would have arranged for the evidence to be removed just the same. The only difference is that both of us might have been killed too."

"We probably will be," she said bitterly, but with less anger.

"Probably," David admitted. "But we have a fair chance of surviving."

He glanced at the sun. It was well up.

"We'd better be moving," he said. Noticing her stiff movements, he made his first concession, a reward for her less angry mood.

"You ride the other horse. But don't try to run away."

David had no clear plan, but as they rode along the narrow farm tracks he tried to evolve one. He could expect nothing from the country around Padgett farm. It was closed to him forever. There was his own country, the place where his father had held land, but that was hundreds of miles away and, without money, completely inaccessible. But in New Harbor he would have a chance of losing himself, of getting money, a boat perhaps. Also, Penn was there, and David had some questions to ask him. They had only a thin chance of getting safely to New Harbor, but it was a chance, the only one open to them.

He tried to estimate their position. New Harbor was almost due east from the Padgett farm. They were heading east now, but in the night they had traveled for miles in a direction David could only guess at. Best to make their way as far to the east as they could during the daylight hours and locate a road. That way, they might make New Harbor in a couple of days, perhaps three.

The country around them was clean and bare, unfenced grazing land, billy, sometimes almost mountainous, but not unpleasant. Granite outcrops thrust above the soil as if the elbows of a rock giant were being forced from beneath the blanket of earth. The rock, weathered by wind and rain, patched by a gray-green lichen, looked totally pure and natural, untouched and perhaps unseen by man. So used was David to the unmarked simplicity of the rock that he did not understand for a moment when in the afternoon they rode through a narrow pass between two hills and found a huge scar cut into a particularly exposed face of granite, the sharp edges betraying its human origin. He reined in his horse and studied it. The scar was weathered and weeds sprouted from the ledges.

"A quarry," Samantha said, wondering why they had stopped.

He nodded and looked around. A quarry. But who had cut it? There was no sign of any habitation. Only the sun and the wind.

Uneasily he urged the horse forward, past the quarry and out of the cleft between the hills. On the other side the ground fell away sharply to a small valley with a road running through it. The road too was weedy and overgrown. On the far side of the road, they saw the building that had been constructed from the quarried stone.

It was a church.

David felt Samantha stiffen on the horse beside him.

"Come away, David," she said in a frightened whisper.

He touched her hand comfortingly. It surprised him to feel his own skin prickle with fear as he looked down on the tiny building, sinister and desolate in the sea of grass. It was only a building, he told himself, a thing of stone and mortar, built by men. The rationalization helped, but not much. It took real courage to nudge the horse forward down the hill. Samantha did not move.

"I don't want to," she said.

Her childish fear irritated him, now that he had conquered his own.

"Churches shouldn't worry you," he said shortly. "You're supposed to be a Christian."

"That's different," she said. But that was all she said. There were no more arguments and she followed him down the hill.

As they came closer to the church David saw signs that it was not entirely abandoned. The road, though overgrown, had marks on it of recent traffic, and the grass around the building was worn down in parts, especially around the main door. A worn track led to something behind the church. David reined in by the entrance and peered through the doorless opening. It was dark inside and he could see nothing. Then he urged the horse forward, along the path and around the corner.

The path led to the churchyard, and he knew then why the church was still used. Old habits die hard. Even to a godless people, there is some special aura about a church. A particular quality is given to marriage, birth or death when it is hallowed by holiness, even a holiness that is not consciously respected. Though the people of this place no longer thought of the church as a place of God, they came here to bury their dead. Not in the old way, of course—that was outlawed. It had been fifty years since a new headstone had been set in this little cemetery and the graves lay overgrown and abandoned, their tablets blackened by weather and tumbled in the grass. But above them, on crude tripods of green saplings, some hardly weathered, the dead of this generation were offered to the sky. There were a dozen of them, each with a body cocooned in bandages wedged into its peak. Gray and rotting, the corpses sagged like bundles of discarded clothes. The wind brushed past them, stirring the tattered wrappings and making the wood creak thinly.

David got off the horse and walked into the yard. Samantha sat upright in the saddle, her hands laid lightly on the pommel. After a moment her horse dropped its head and began cropping the grass. David felt as it did, unawed by the connotations of the place, even lulled by its peace. There was a sort of mystery here, but no menace. He felt at home; this was a place to be buried, to sink into the soft dark earth and sleep forever. The ridiculous objects on their tripods had no place here, and their sagging seemed to reflect this. They too longed for the earth.

He wandered among the fallen stones, trying to read their inscriptions. Often they were worn into illegibility but occasionally he saw a few words still etched into the stone: "Mary Rutherford, wife of…" and "… a Captain of the BEHEMOTH, cruiser of the Line. Remembered with AFFECTION AND ADMIRATION BY FAMILY AND CREW." Under that one an emblem of crossed comets had been cut into the stone with such depth and precision that, even after this time, it was still legible. Done by a machine, David thought with a start. Machined things were so rare that they seemed magical now. He passed on, wondering at the peace of the place. It was not empty at all. The people who were buried here seemed to be all around him, friendly living presences. He could almost believe he was being watched.

He glanced back. Samantha was still sitting on her horse. Turning again, his eye caught something lying on the ground a few yards away. He picked it up. It was a small pouch, stitched together clumsily from uncured hide. Inside were some weeds, flowers, scraps of bark and scrapings of some kind. He knew some of them. They were simples: herbs for magic.

The pouch was lying on top of the grass. It had not been weathered at all.

Somebody was watching him.

He walked quickly back to his horse and took up the rein.

"There's somebody watching us," he told Samantha.

Leading the horses, he went back around the corner of the church.

"If anything happens, run," he said. Handing Samantha the reins, he walked to the door of the church and looked inside.

It was not as dark as he had expected. Once there had been windows at the other end and through the gaping apertures a fair amount of light came in. By it, he could see the shadowy proportions of the building, the stone floor tufted with weeds, the dirt drifted deep in every corner. There was the same air of abandonment and yet content that he had found in the churchyard. He felt instinctively that this was a good place, and stepped through the door.

"Anybody here?" he called. "We're friends."

A man stepped out of the shadows beside the door. He had been pressed back against the wall into a small alcove.

"I found your pouch," David said.

The man took it nervously, as if expecting David to leap on him. He was thin and bent, but not old. David wasn't sure what age he was. Perhaps forty, perhaps less. In this light it was difficult to judge. He was dressed in worn black clothes, very like David's, except for one thing: around his neck he wore a narrow white band. David had seen them only in pictures. It was a clerical collar. He felt David looking at the collar and touched it, nervously, as if it were a noose tightening around his throat. His face above it was thin, pale, frightened, even a little mad.

"Don't worry," David said. "We're hiding from the Examiners. I won't report you."

This reassured him a little. His thin face became more animated and the watery blue eyes glanced about with more energy.

"Why don't you ask the young lady to come in? She looks tired."

David looked around the desolate place. It would hardly be more comfortable here than on a horse, but at least she could stretch her legs. He went to the door and coaxed Samantha inside. She stood cautiously at the door, looking about her as if the slightest movement would start her into flight.

"My name is Journeyman," the man said. "I'm the priest here. Are you hungry?"

"A little," David said. He wondered why the man asked. "Do you live here?"

"Oh, yes," Journeyman said, glancing from David to Samantha and back again. "It's quite comfortable."

He followed David's gaze as he looked over the bare interior of the church, and smiled in sudden enlightenment.

"You're thinking this is a bit bare for a residence? Yes, of course—it's meant to look that way."

He walked across to where he had been standing when David had first seen him. Placing one foot firmly on the floor, he eased his weight onto it. There was a grinding noise of stone on stone and a slab tilted upwards in the floor.

"A crypt," he said genially. "I can't imagine why they built it, but there it is. I suppose they thought it might come in handy for storing things or something. Of course it used to have an ordinary entrance at one time but that was bricked up long ago. Over the years I've managed to make it quite easy to get in and out of."

He stepped down into the opening onto what must have been the first of a series of steps. David followed him. Samantha, to his surprise, did the same, without any encouragement. Something about the church seemed to calm her. She had thought the worst. Now that it was not coming up to expectations, she was prepared to face anything.

The cellar was dim and low-roofed, but after the open fields its warm closeness was pleasant. Everything showed signs of long and careful use. The floors were covered with mats of straw, obviously hand-woven. There was an ancient stove cobbled together out of bits of metal, but apparently efficient enough, judging by the bubbling pot on top of it. In one corner there was a narrow bed. The rest of the room was less conventional. Along one wall were piles of books, some of them so ragged they could not possibly be readable. On hooks all around the room were hung sheaves of dried herbs, bits of bone, amulets of unimaginable purpose supported by bits of greasy string that David knew must be woven of human hair. The place was an odd and uneasy combination of scholar's study and hex-doctor's den.

Journeyman ladled out two bowls of thick soup from the pot and gave one to each of them along with a spoon. Samantha's was a worn metal one, apparently a prized piece from the proud way he handed it to her. David's was bone, roughly carved but functional. The soup was hot and savory enough to outweigh the dubious quality of the meat in it and the strong flavoring of herbs. Both of them ate two bowls of it gratefully.

"You said you were a priest," David said. "I've seen the word in old books, but surely there haven't been priests for years."

Journeyman seemed to hear only part of what David said. His vague eyes wandered restlessly along the walls, moving from charm to charm. Often they drifted back to Samantha.

"I've been a priest here for seventeen years," he said quietly, as if David had never asked a question. "Ever since my father died."

David began to understand.

"And your father was a priest here too?"

"And my grandfather."

David could imagine the office being handed on, the liturgy passed by word of mouth from father to son, getting more garbled over the years until it decayed into a sort of magic.

"It must be very lonely," he said.

"Sometimes," Journeyman replied vaguely. "People come. They still use the cemetery, you know, and they need advice occasionally. I pray with them."

David stood up and looked at Samantha.

"We'd better go," he said.

"Couldn't we stay a little longer?" she asked appealingly.

"If we ride for the rest of the day, we should be able to find a farm that'll give us shelter."

She stood up wearily, though David felt she was not unhappy to be leaving the place. It had proved a better stopping place than most, but it was still a church.

"You're welcome to stay," Journeyman said. "I don't have many visitors here."

"We must leave, really," David said. "We must be in New Harbor soon."

Journeyman nodded vaguely. David wondered if he knew where the town was. Probably not. He could not have moved far from this place all his life.

The three of them walked up the steps into the dimly lit church and then out into the sunlight. They stood there, slightly embarrassed, like new friends saying goodbye. David felt absently in his pocket for a handkerchief and pulled it out. Only at the last minute did he remember that the emblem he had taken from Hemskir's body was in that pocket also. He tried to stop his movement, but it was too late. The tiny carving sprang from his pocket and tinkled on the stone flags.

Journeyman blinked and bent slowly to pick it up. For a moment he held it in his hand, staring blankly at the tiny piece.

"Very unusual," he said slowly. "From the islands of the sound. The Green island." He looked up. "Why did I say that? My father must have mentioned it."

David itched to snatch it away from him, but he stopped himself. Better not to draw attention to it. Not that Journeyman would know what it was anyway. Though what had he said about green islands?

"It reminds me…" Journeyman began slowly. He stopped, groping about for some memory. Then he smiled.

"Ah, yes."

He held the insect close to his face on his flat hand, so close that it was only a few inches from his eyes. The bright light penetrated to the heart of the glass, limning every shaded veil in its mysterious heart, every transparent membrane in its intricate interior. Again its workmanship astonished David. How could it have been done?

Journeyman looked at the insect for a long time. Then he blew on it softly.

Lazily, the beetle touched its antennae together, flexed its wings and with a clatter rose gently into the air and flew away.



 

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David's first thought was that he had been tricked, that Journeyman had somehow substituted a real insect for the false one. Was the man more intelligent than he seemed? But the moment he looked at the rapt expression on his face as he stared after the tiny beetle, David knew there must be some other explanation. Perhaps it had been his mistake. He felt in his pocket, hoping to find the hard jagged shape he had carried there for the last few days, but it was empty. He was forced to the belief that the tiny emblem had really spread its wings and flown away.

"What happened to it?" Samantha asked. "It was just a bit of glass, wasn't it? Not a real insect!"

"I don't know," David said. "It looked like glass, but…" He shook his head. "I don't know."

Journeyman was still staring upwards. The sun seemed to penetrate his watery blue eyes, washing into the inside of his head, lapping around the thoughts that stood there like slowly growing crystals. David took him by the shoulder and shook him. Painfully he came out of his daze.

"What happened?" David asked. "How did you do that?"

The little man looked around vaguely, as if not realizing where he was. His hand was still cupped in front of him and he looked at it, hunting about the hollow for something lost.

"Gone," he said. "Flown away."

David tightened his grip on the man's shoulder. He was hurting him. He wanted to hurt him. He wanted to know.

"What did you do to it?" he demanded.

The pain had begun to penetrate Journeyman's daze. He flinched a little.

"I just blew on it," he said slowly. "I don't know why. I think I saw my father…"

He stopped, thinking, trying to remember.

"Yes, my father. He told me something about the green stone, once. It was a long time ago."

"But it was a glass carving, a thing!" David said. "It couldn't fly."

Journeyman nodded. "You wouldn't think so," he said doubtfully. "And yet… well, my father told me about the glass. It isn't glass exactly. He called it something else. Some foreign name. He hadn't ever seen any of it. It's very rare, very secret. Back before the war everybody seemed to think it was very important. But since then they haven't cared."

David thought of Journeyman's meager library.

"Do you have any other pieces, or any books about it?"

"Books? Oh, no. No books. This was a secret thing, you know. Very secret. My father only told me because I was the last one. It was never written down. There are some things that the Lord keeps to himself. For it is said that on the day of judgment shall the mysteries be revealed to you, the righteous shall be exalted and the poor…"

He began to mutter as the old words took hold of him and he wandered back into his dream world. Forgetting about David and Samantha, he walked to the little churchyard. They let him go. Their horses were still cropping grass. David helped Samantha into the saddle, then mounted his own horse, and they rode away from the little church. At the top of the hill he looked back, but the old man was gone. There was only the little valley, the church and the wind.

 

From then on the ground began to slope more as the hills flattened to the sea. Occasionally they smelled on the breeze a hint of salt, but they still had miles to ride before they would be able to see the ocean. They cantered down the winding lanes as if they had nothing to fear save being home late for supper. By dusk they had ridden for what to David seemed like a hundred miles, but the sea still lay somewhere ahead of them. Abandoning any hope of getting to a farm before nightfall, David began looking for a likely place to spend the night.

"We'll have to stop soon," he said. "It's getting dark."

"Another night in the open, I suppose," Samantha said.

David looked around at the country. Aside from a few grass-covered hummocks that marked the rusting remains of abandoned farm machines or an old ruin, there was no sign that man had even touched this land.

"We don't have much choice," he said.

Samantha reined in her horse and stood up in the stirrups, looking around. David liked the look of her, tense and arched in the saddle. He was proud to be with her, if not as lover then as captor. She was selfish and cruel, but better than any other girl he had ever known. He didn't want a quiet woman, a moral or a beautiful one. He wanted Samantha.

"Is that a house down there?" she asked suddenly.

He followed her pointing arm. They were on the spine of a rise at the moment, and to the left the hill sloped down into a narrow valley choked with trees. In the center somebody had built a low wooden cottage, merging it into the trees so that it was almost invisible.

"We shouldn't ask for shelter," David said. "They might remember us later."

"There isn't any smoke from the place," she said. "It looks empty."

David thought for a moment, then turned the horse off the road. It was a chance worth taking.

The house was empty, though there was a stout lock on the door. David looked up at the lowering gray of the sky and went looking for a branch strong enough to lever it off. Inside, it was gloomy and bare, but when a lamp was lit the place had a low-roofed coziness that warmed them almost as much as the fire they lit in the stove. It was a cottage used mainly by hunters and herders, and correspondingly bare, but in a cupboard David found coarse-ground brown flour, salt, dried meat wrapped in oilcloth and a brick of pressed tea. Clumsily he set about converting these unattractive ingredients into some sort of meal.

Almost as soon as they sat down to eat on the floor in front of the stove it began to rain, and they listened with an almost childish pleasure as the downpour battered at the walls and roof while they sat inside huddled under blankets, warm and dry.

"I like the rain," David said.

Samantha didn't reply. Angry again, David thought, then was surprised to find that he cared. She sipped the hot, black tea and he watched her face.

Then she said, "I like to walk in it."

He grabbed at the words, grateful for her reaction.

"It's too cold. The water gets into my hair and makes me shiver."

She smiled, more at his eagerness than the childishness of what he had said.

"I'm sorry about this, Samantha," he said. These were the words he had promised himself he would never speak.

She put down her cup and pulled the blanket further around her.

"It doesn't matter," she said slowly. "I'm almost glad it happened."

He pressed further. Better to get it finished now than to think about it any more.

"But your parents…"

She looked at him sharply, then at the streaming windows, not angrily, but startled at the discovery of some new emotion in her.

"It's odd," she said. "I don't care about them either. I should, I suppose, but I don't. I never have, really. When I was young I used to lie in bed and think of ways to kill them, I hated them so much. I suppose they died then, for me. I don't care what happens to them now."

Her voice had a tightly controlled ferocity about it that David had never heard before, yet which touched some familiar chord in him, so that he was ready for what happened next. Slowly, her face began to crumble. She fought the weakening of her muscles but like a dam breaking it could not be controlled.

"Do you really think they're dead?" she asked.

David nodded.

She began to cry, savagely, as if forcing grief out of her like vomit. He sat beside her, looking into the fire through the black bars of the stove, not touching her. When the sobs had finished he felt her touch his hand and knew that she was ready for anything he could ask of her.

 

The next morning was bright and the sky was clear, but underfoot the ground was sodden. The horses they had left in the grove last night looked up at them in surprise as they came through the trees, laughing at some private joke and flailing at sunbeams. For them, the freshness of the morning was an omen, and they responded to it with a demented gaiety. They raced their horses up the hill, leaped the fences that stood in their way and galloped down the road to New Harbor as if facing some special treat.

The mood faded quickly as they came down the last miles of the road towards the town. Like all settlements on Merryland, New Harbor was two towns, an old and a new. In the first years of colonization, the towns had grown quickly. Teams of builders had been shipped in with plans already drawn up for cities large enough to accommodate more than a thousand times the original population of the area. Better to build houses first, to a set plan, than to track on new suburbs later as they were required. The towns had exploded outwards, flooding the surrounding country in plastic and wood, stone and metal, crusting the earth with habitations. When the work was done the crews had gone back to their ships and returned to Earth, leaving the ready-made cities in the hands of a few hundred families who would be caretakers until the houses were needed.

But on Merryland the plan had broken down. There had been a war and things had gone awry. The towns had been only half occupied when war had swept over the planet, snuffing out civilization as gas stifles a candle. The towns had shrunk in on themselves and the people had drifted back to the old core, leaving the bright new houses abandoned, the streets empty. It was like that all over Merryland. The cities sat like ghosts, throbbing sickly at the heart but still dragging with them their own dead bodies, huge white corpses of plastic and wood that rotted in the wind and sun.

David and Samantha came around a bend in the road and found the city waiting there for them. The transition was as sharp as that between a picture and the real world. One moment there were fields, the next suburbs. The road came so far, then stopped abruptly, the edge sharp and clean as if severed by a knife. With mathematical precision the edge swept to either side of them in a shallow arc, shearing through fields and fences, a flood of houses suddenly halted and frozen. Warily they walked their horses up to it and looked down the wide empty streets.

"It's horrible," Samantha said. "Dead."

David dismounted and went to the side of the road.

Kicking away the rank grass, he heaved a post out of the ditch. It was a trefoil sign. He and Samantha exchanged a glance, then David tossed it back into the grass. Mounting again, he urged the horse forward into the town.

After the solid impact of the horses' hooves on the earth of the road, there was an eerie unreality about the crisp clop they made on these streets. There was a mechanical feel about it, as if their mounts had been changed under them into clockwork toys. Even the horses seemed to sense some evil about the place and snorted nervously. They rode carefully, always staying in the center of the street, looking only occasionally at the empty houses with their bare and sterile gardens and blind windows. At every corner they found trefoil signs, and most of the houses had scrawled on them in black paint the inverted cross of the interdict. Nothing lived here. Even the birds stayed away, wheeling high over it as they would over a desert.

Then they saw a man. They reined in quickly and watched him as he hacked a length of plastic from the fence on a house and dragged it back to his hand cart. When it was wedged firmly in place he picked up the cart and trundled it away down the road. Looking around, David saw that many of the houses had been mutilated. Some had lost fences, most of them had no window glass or metal fittings.

"We'd better leave the horses," he said, dismounting. "The real town must be just down there."

They left the horses tethered in a side street and walked cautiously in the direction the man had taken. The slight slope became steeper as they went on, and across rooftops they occasionally caught a glimpse of the sea glinting blue in the distance. A moment later, turning a corner, they saw more people, a working party battering listlessly at a large two-story house. They passed by without notice being taken. Luckily, clothing was much the same all over Merryland. Soon they began to find newly constructed buildings among the old, and huge areas where the houses had been cleared away. The new houses were generally ramshackle and ill-constructed, made mostly from scraps of those old buildings demolished to make way for them. There was a futility about it that David found subtly amusing.

As the street steepened and became narrower, the town began to take on a new personality. This was almost wholly new construction, rough, awkward and cramped. He was used to this sort of town—the smells, the noise, the uncomfortable lack of style and coherence in everything he saw. The empty suburbs they had just left now seemed cheerful by comparison with this huge slum. He pulled Samantha closer to him and kept well away from the edge of the street with its foul gutters and naked squabbling children.

"Where are we going?" she asked. "Still the Christian headquarters?"

"I thought we decided."

"I don't know. I still don't understand Penn. He frightens me."

"I don't understand him either, but the only way we can get an explanation is to ask him. Anyway, we know too much about him for him to refuse."

"I suppose so."

The traffic was getting thicker now and the road was jammed with carts, most of them hand-drawn but occasionally relieved by a thin and rickety horse. There were few well-dressed people and fewer well-fed ones.

"Where is the temple?" David asked.

"On the waterfront. A big building. Penn described it to me once."

It took them half an hour to reach the waterfront. As they came closer to it the streets became more and more choked until it was almost impossible to move without forcing one's way, but eventually they emerged from the steeply sloping alleys onto a wide promenade that fringed the harbor. As they did, David saw for the first time New Harbor's own special graveyard.

When the Merrylanders had abandoned the old ways, everything had been discarded—every machine, appliance, material and ideal of the old age had been destroyed as thoroughly as possible. In the case of ideals the destruction had been relatively easy, but the larger an object was, the greater the difficulty of disposing of it. They had been unable to remove houses, so they had merely barred them to visitors. The ships of New Harbor had posed a bigger problem, one which the reformers had found insoluble. Ships were made to be unsinkable and almost indestructible. Faced with this, those in charge of destroying Merryland's small merchant fleet had merely piled the ships at one end of the harbor and left them there.

The breakwater seemed to have been constructed specially to curve a protective arm around the graveyard of ships. Inside its curve they had lain shielded from the worst storms, attacked only by the slower erosion of wind, rain and sun. There were all kinds, from merchants to dinghies, fumbled together in the same grave. Nobody had ever counted them but there must have been hundreds, jutting out of the water in a thousand places over an area of acres. The sun had turned the glass green and tarnished the metal fittings, but it would be centuries before the acid of time would be able to rot the indestructible plastic of the hulls. In a way they symbolized Merryland: the outside was gone, but the interior remained the same.

The Christian temple had a good view of the wrecks. The three-storied building stood well above the rest on the quay, and from its roof one could see completely across the town. No sign denoted that this was the headquarters of the sect, but the very lack of any, in contrast to the gaudy advertising of the other buildings in the town, was enough to make the place strikingly conspicuous. David could imagine the graft the Christians paid to keep such a large establishment in so central a location.

Leaving Samantha behind on the other side of the street, he swiftly reconnoitered the building, hoping for some sign that Penn was inside. He found it soon enough. In the alley beside the temple a cart was being loaded with provisions. It was just such a cart that Penn must have taken to Padgett farm. He returned to the street and told Samantha.

"How do we get in?" she asked, glancing at the man who stood guard just inside. As they watched, a woman shuffled up to the door, said something to the man and was admitted.

"It's probably the same password they use at meetings—Dominus Vobiscum. If it isn't, we can make up some excuse."

No excuse was necessary. The guard, bored and half-asleep, hardly noticed them as they went past. Inside, a small entrance foyer led off into a large hall. David had an impression of candlelight and soft movements in the darkness, but his interest was in the less public rooms upstairs. Avoiding the main hall, they went along a side corridor until a flight of steps took them up to the second floor. At the top, David took one look along the corridor and dragged Samantha into a side anteroom. They watched breathlessly as two short black-clad men went by. Proctors.

There were two more doors in the corridor. The first was locked. The second gave when David pushed it. Looking around once more, he took a deep breath and pushed it open.

"Come in," Penn said from behind his desk, "and shut the door, please. There's a draft."



 

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XI
Penn put down the paper he was reading and looked at the two fugitives. He didn't seem very upset by their sudden appearance, almost as if he had expected them. He still wore the same glasses, David saw, though in the dimmer light of the room their effect was eerie rather than ridiculous. His eyes seemed to shift suddenly behind them so that it was impossible to meet his gaze. For the first time David realized that the man wore these glasses for reasons other than those connected with his vision. The room fitted in with Perm's indefinite image. There was a desk, chairs, a map of Merryland, and nothing more.

"David… Bonython, isn't it?"

David nodded.

"And Samantha. I'm very sorry about your parents."

Samantha's hand tightened on David's.

"Are they dead?"

Penn glanced at her in surprise. "Surely you knew?"

He was not disturbed at the thought that he might have shocked her, only with the, to him, more important suggestion that his calculations might have been wrong.

"She knew," David said. "We guessed, anyway."

"You murdered them," Samantha said quietly to Penn. She was very pale and calm.

Penn wasn't upset. He shook his head.

"There are various kinds of killing," he said. "The law agrees that killing to save one's own life is perfectly acceptable. So, while I agree that I'm responsible for the death of your family, I wouldn't call it murder."

"Your man Lewis was there. You organized the whole thing."

"Yes. I sent him across country to raise the Examiners as soon as you left us that morning. I had to hurry. When I knew that the Earth proctors were aware of civilization on Merryland, I had to prove immediately to the proctors here that I was their ally, otherwise when the Earth force arrived I would have been caught between the two groups. The Examiners' methods are also notable for conveniently removing all evidence and witnesses. In theory, everything indicating that Hemskir had been here, even to the information he gave you, should have been removed by them."

"But we escaped."

"Yes, you escaped," Penn agreed. "But I guessed you would head for me here, so you were never really out of my sight. The proctors would never have let you get here if I hadn't kept it a secret that you were still alive."

"I thought the proctors were on your side," David said.

"The situation is more complex than you can imagine."

He glanced at the two of them and made a decision.

"I shouldn't tell you, but perhaps it might be better if you knew exactly what's happening here. Sit down."

He settled back in his chair. David and Samantha found two straight-backed chairs and moved them closer to the desk. The room was dim and very quiet.

"You probably know as much as I do about the history of this planet over the last two generations," Penn said. "The anti-religious reaction to the wars, the general regression, the persecution of almost every minority that might have caused any trouble to the administration, the rise of the Examiners. But perhaps you haven't been aware of the Christian underground and the general reaction against the persecutions that's been going on for the past twenty years."

"The first I heard of it was when Samantha told me about the meetings," David said. "Before that I'd always thought the Christians were some sort of religious sect."

"And so they were," Penn said. "When the persecutions began, the Christians went underground, along with most of the other religions. The others died off fairly quickly, but the Christians have been through this sort of thing before, back on Earth. They adapted well. In fact, they worked up such an effective underground that it soon became more of a pressure group than a church. When you think of that, it isn't so odd. The whole structure of a church is rather like that of an army. It took a few years, of course, but after a time the religious trappings almost disappeared and the Christians became one of the leading power groups on Merryland, only slightly less influential than the administration itself."

So the Christian church was not a church after all. David felt obscurely disappointed.

"But you still use the robes. And why the services?"

Penn smiled. "I'll come to that," he said. "You amuse me, Bonython. I could almost think you wish we were some kind of persecuted religious minority."

David didn't reply.

"The robes," Penn went on, "and the rites like the one you attended out at the farm…" He glanced at Samantha.

"Excuse me, but he did ask. The rites and so on were primarily intended for use in blackmail. The whole business was recorded, sound and vision, for possible use later on."

David felt himself blushing. Samantha was calmer. He wondered if she cared, and decided that she didn't. He admired her for it.

"If you had attended a little longer," Penn said to Samantha, "you would have been approached and asked certain favors. If you had refused…"

"What sort of favors?" Samantha asked.

"Oh, various things. For instance, we might have asked you if you had noticed any suspicious visitors to the neighborhood; men who might have come from the matter transmitter hidden in your house. We could tell from our instruments that there was one in the area, but only a spy could tell us whether anybody had used it."

"What about the proctors? David asked impatiently. "You still haven't explained why you didn't tell them about us."

"The proctors," Penn said slowly. "Yes. Well, I must say that in their case we come out of things in a bad light. About ten years ago we had developed to a point beyond which it was impossible to go without revealing ourselves publicly. Of course our activities were an open secret to the administration, but that doesn't count for much outside the cities, as you probably know. Revolution was considered, but we knew that we didn't have the power or the skill to take over or control the society. We needed help. And the only place we could obtain help was from… outside."

"From Earth?" David asked.

"Not exactly. The politics of the universe are in as much of a mess as ours at the moment. Each planet has as much power as it can snatch for itself. Even the proctors, who are supposed to have unlimited power for the whole galaxy, don't actually control more than a small area. And inside the proctor corps there are all sorts of tensions and schisms. The group that we contacted was a fairly small one operating in this general area, though it had never actually contacted Merryland or any of the other worlds around here. I've been to earth and I knew how the proctors could be contacted. It took a long time to convince them that they should help us, but we eventually did it. With their help we've managed to have the proctor cordon around this area maintained, and all contact cut off. They've also given us equipment and instruction."

"But you said—" David began.

"That I was hiding things from them? Yes. Let me finish. In the beginning we were quite amicable allies. It seemed that we were getting much more than we were giving, and the proctors were happy to let this arrangement continue. If we had been more suspicious we would have realized that we were being led on. It wasn't until a few years ago that we discovered the proctors had been making their own secret survey of Merryland, looking for a certain material of which they had found signs here."

"The green stone," David said.

Penn blinked at his direct statement.

"The green stone," he agreed. "They didn't know much. All they had were a few hints, but enough to make them look for more."

"What is the stone, exactly?" David asked. Better to let Penn reveal himself before telling what he knew.

"I don't know. Once, a long time ago, I was given a clue. I went to Earth to follow it up. I killed people for more information. Then I came back here. I still know little more than when I left Earth, but slowly I'm narrowing down the range of possibilities. It came from a research station somewhere on Merryland, but where… we can never find out except by checking every possible site. That's difficult with the proctors watching everything we do."

David wondered if he should tell Penn about the insect and what had happened at the old church, but he decided to say nothing. Penn could not know that he'd had the stone Hemskir had brought with him. He would think the proctors had taken it when they had killed the fugitive. David glanced at Samantha and knew from her eyes that she would say nothing.

"What will happen now?" David asked. "The Earth proctors know about Merryland, and they must suspect something about the stone."

Penn nodded. "Yes. They'll be here as soon as they can raise a force. There aren't any matter transmitters, so they will have to come by ship, but that won't delay them very long. When they arrive, Merryland will blow wide open. Unless, of course, we find the green stone before they arrive. The person who has that stone controls everything."

The calm way in which Penn discussed his intrigue angered David. For the last few days he and Samantha had been pieces in a game, shunted from square to square at the mercy of the players. It was time for this to stop, for him to assert himself.

"And what will happen to us now?" he asked.

"Well, you can stay here for the moment, until the proctors have been put off the scent a little more, and then perhaps we can think the whole problem out."

"Let's think it out now," David said. "We're valuable to the proctors, you said. So we must be valuable to you too, otherwise we wouldn't be here like this. It's important for you to keep the secret of the green stone out of the hands of the proctors, but your reasons aren't logical ones. You're frightened of it, and you're frightened of what the proctors will do when they eventually find it. If our lives depend on things like this, they aren't very secure. No, we want to get away from New Harbor as soon as we can. I'd rather be hunted over the hills than stay here locked up by you."

Penn tented his fingers, an odd magisterial gesture that made him seem like a judge deciding their fate.

"You can't leave," he said.

David stood up and tried the door. It was locked, as he'd expected. There was no simple knob, but a series of catches that held it in place. Only Penn could let them out.

"Unlock this," he ordered, knowing that Penn would not.

"You'll be much safer here," Penn said.

David leaned back against the door. The hard bulge of his knife jabbed into his spine. Penn did not know he was armed. He would not be prepared for any attack. Deliberately he walked around the desk. Penn watched him coming without alarm. Perhaps he thought David would punch him. His hands rose from the desk and moved with practiced ease to ward off any blow, but he was not prepared for the knife. David pulled it out quickly and with one movement penetrated Penn's defense, holding the point to his unprotected throat. Penn's hands gripped David's sleeve, then relaxed as the point pushed deeper into his flesh.

"Unlock it," David said again.

Penn rose from his chair. Grabbing his arm, David twisted it behind him and, holding the blade horizontally across the man's throat, guided him towards the door. Penn fumbled with the catches and the door swung open.

Samantha looked into the corridor.

"Nobody there," she said. Then she looked at Penn.

"What are you going to do with him?" she asked.

David hadn't thought of it. Without saying anything else, Samantha went to the desk and returned with a heavy rod of ebony that Penn used as a ruler. Their eyes met for a moment, then she hit him hard behind the ear. He gasped and went limp in David's arms. He dumped him to the floor and looked out into the corridor once more. It was still empty. As a last thought David ripped the map of Merryland from the wall. Leaving the unconscious man on the floor, they slipped out and closed the door behind them. With luck, they would be well away from the place when' he woke up.

It was not as hard as they expected to get out of the building, though David had one nervous moment when the map, hastily stuffed under his jacket, began to unfold. The place seemed empty, deserted of people. Moving as quickly as they dared along the narrow corridors, they headed for the rear of the building. The stairs were narrow and their feet rattled on the bricks, but nobody heard them. At the bottom of the steps there was a narrow door. David opened it a crack and looked out. The bright light of the sun and the smell of the sea hit him. They supped into the narrow lane at the side of the building. At the foot of the street they could see the ocean and hear it lapping at the stones of the quay. The loaded cart was still there, unattended.

"What are we going to do now?" Samantha asked.

David pulled the cover back from the cart and began dragging out the contents.

"Find the food," he directed. "Take as much as you can carry. Weapons too, if there are any. And heavy clothing."

As he sorted through the bundles his mind was busy working out a plan. It should work, if they were quick enough—and if it did, the stone and its secret would be theirs.



 

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XII
As they walked together towards the end of the breakwater, the buildings became shabbier and smaller until there were only a few small warehouses, empty and weathered. The few people on the street took no notice of the boy and girl with the hastily tied packs on their backs, and those who did took them for laborers indentured to some merchant. After a while, even those who looked were gone and the breakwater was deserted. It seemed to stretch away for miles, a curve of narrow cobbled street torn from its context and dropped into the ocean.

Soon the abandoned ships began to appear in the water on the sheltered side of the mole. These were mostly small boats, their bottoms stove in and their engines rotting in the slime beside them, hardly more than bundles of rust after decades in the water. They were of no use to David. He knew what he wanted, and he knew it would be up in the pile of ships ahead if it were to be found at all.

"Where are you going?" Samantha asked urgently. "This is a dead end. We can't even hide up here."

"Don't worry," he said. "I know what I'm doing." He was too busy looking around him to explain.

They were among the bigger ships now. Their masts reared up around him like trunks in a submerged forest. The water flowed greenly around their flooded decks, stirring the weeds that drifted like hair in the current. In this huge charnel house of ships, it was impossible to pick out individual vessels from the hundreds jumbled in together. Occasionally there was a glint of metal and plastic among the wrecks but always some blemish marred its completeness. Hulls had been cracked like skulls, metal had rotted and rusted, wood had dissolved into corruption. He walked on, anxious now as the end of the breakwater came into sight. All around, the masts were thicker than trees in a forest, and the wind thrummed through them with a mournful note.

At last, almost at the end of the road, he found a boat that seemed whole. It had been discarded carelessly, tossed over the edge of the mole among the other wrecks and left there. He could imagine the party bringing it out here on some cold night, shivering in the icy wind, flinging the load with a muttered curse among the others, then hurrying back to town for a mug of hot wine. For years the little boat had lain among the others, stirred by the current but otherwise untouched. It was a narrow plastic runabout, the sort that surveyors had used on short coastal trips back in pre-war days. David had seen pictures of them in old books and remembered the trim lines and the description of their capabilities. It was the thing he needed.

He glanced out to sea through the shoals of wrecked ships. The boats here were larger fishing vessels, wooden mainly and therefore well rotted by now. Most of them had fallen away to nothing but ribs and keel-metals, letting the sea come in to submerge their naked skeletons. It would not be hard to get through those.

"We're taking this boat," he told Samantha. "Keep watch for anybody coming along."

She stepped back and leaned against the balustrade, watching both him and the narrow road leading back to town.

She seemed scared, but did what he told her to do. Perhaps then David realized for the first time how much she had changed in the last few days. Cautiously he lowered himself over the edge of the stone barrier and down onto the rough rock foundation of the mole. From there he could clamber down to the little boat lying half capsized against the slimy boulders. He righted it clumsily, bracing himself against the timbers of another boat to keep his balance, and had the satisfaction of seeing his movements empty out most of the water that had filled it.

"Samantha."

Her face appeared over the balustrade, hair hanging forward to shade her face as she looked down.

"Nobody coming," she said reassuringly.

"Do you think you could get down here without falling?"

She gauged the distance with her eye.

"Yes."

"Then throw down the bundles and try it."

It was done more easily than David had expected. With an easy movement she squirmed over the parapet and came down without a slip. He noticed with some envy that she did it with more agility than he had.

"We'll have to push it out beyond the wrecks, but after that we should be all right."

Samantha looked at him, puzzled. "But where can we go in a boat? They'll be expecting us all down the coast. Besides, we haven't got any oars."

David braced himself against the rib of the boat nearest and pushed. The little boat moved easily from under him and he almost fell into the water. He was more careful the next time. Samantha waited for him to answer her question, but when he didn't she turned herself to steering the boat from her side. Together they guided it out of the graveyard to the edge of the open sea. It stretched before them, vacant and hostile. Both felt awed by its vastness.

Samantha sat down on the floor of the boat and pulled her legs up under her.

"I'm not doing any more until you tell me where we're going."

David checked the sun and pointed directly south, across the open sea.

"That way," he said. "I'll explain in a minute. Trust me."

They paddled steadily out to sea, until the breakwater and the graveyard of wrecks ceased to be real things and merged into the generalized blue of shapes that makes up a landscape. During the whole time there was no reaction from the town. If they had been seen, nobody had thought to pursue them. David didn't expect them to. The ordinary people didn't care about anything outside of their daily existences. It would take the proctors to sting them into action, and the proctors were otherwise occupied.

When they could paddle no more David stopped and let the boat ride on the gentle swell. They were already away from the shelter of the mole and the waves had a controlled ferocity about them that was frightening. The sea contemptuously permitted them to sail on it, but it would take only a slightly more vicious flick, a wave only a few feet higher than these, to throw the little craft onto its back. This was the opening of a battle between them and the ocean, a battle that David was determined to win.

The map he had taken from Penn's office seemed huge in the narrow boat. David spread it out as best he could and tried to chart a course. The city of New Harbor was clearly marked. It had been a capital of sorts once. Lines led to and from it, apparently indicating trade routes, telegraph cables and such. None of these would be any good to him now.

"Will you tell me now where we're going?" Samantha demanded. She looked around the narrow boat. "It had better not be far."

Studying the map, David found the main currents and followed their wide swing across the edges of the main continents. One of them swept almost up to New Harbor, then curved away to the south, breaking up into eddies and whirlpools against the hundreds of islands in the main archipelago.

"Down this," he said, following the line of the current with his finger, "to these." His finger lost itself among the islands. "Remember what Journeyman said? 'A green island' And Penn mentioned an experimental station. There's a Green Island here, and it's marked as a restricted zone. Only government installations got that sort of treatment."

Samantha was incredulous. "But that's miles!"

"Only about three hundred."

"But we haven't got any oars. And what about shelter?"

David squatted down on the floor of the boat and looked under the narrow seats. Nothing. But in the prow of the boat he saw a small cabinet wedged tightly into the body. He wrestled with its catch, fumbling with the alien mechanism until with a sudden squeal it fell open. There was a puff of dry musty air and a pile of objects tumbled out between his feet.

"This is the emergency kit," he explained. "Back in the old days all ships used to carry them. Everything we need should be here."

He sorted through the things anxiously, fumbling with each item until he understood what it was. There were no clues. All were made of clear plastic, without markings. It was assumed that any normal person would be thoroughly familiar with each item and its uses. David had to puzzle them out painfully.

"This must be the sail," he said, fumbling at the folded sheet of tissue-thin plastic in a transparent envelope.

Samantha pointed to the fastening holes around the edge and the matching clips on the side of the boat.

"Or a shelter," she said.

"Both, probably," David said. After ten minutes' work with the billowing sheet they finally clipped it into place. Magically, as soon as the sheet was clipped down it froze into inflexible hardness, covering the whole boat with a domed cover stiff enough to repel almost any attack. Only partly erected the half-dome made a handy sail. As well as the sheet there was a conversion still for water, a shallow box lined with metal wire which they concluded was a sort of stove, lines and electronic lures for catching fish, masks for underwater swimming and a few other items neither could make any sense of. The things they could understand would be enough for the time being.

While they had searched among the things in the locker, the boat had been wallowing in the wave troughs, rising and falling in a regular but disconcerting rhythm. The offshore breeze had kept the waves low and the boat almost stationary, but now, with the day waning and the afternoon cooling the air, the sea had begun to heave more suddenly, and the waves were frothed with white. Clumsily they hoisted the sail and paddled the little boat around so that the wind could fill it. At first the motion was imperceptible but it soon increased, and they huddled under the sail dome for protection as the prow butted into the waves and spray exploded over them.

It became dark and the waves rose higher until it was not spray that spattered on the dome but solid green water. Battling the surge and heave of the boat, they clipped the rest of the cover into place and had the comfort of watching it balloon and freeze. It turned the waves easily, but its thinness gave them protection from the water only. The fury of the sea still towered all around, threatening to crush them. Soon waves were washing completely over them, submerging the fragile pod in dark green water, then flinging it high onto the crest of a wave so that the whole tumbled landscape of the sea was visible for a moment before the boat sank again. David and Samantha huddled together, trying not to look at the rage that surrounded them. Finally, they managed to sleep.

 

"Wake up!"

David blinked the sleep from his eyes and tried to turn over onto his back. It was painful. Every joint seemed locked into immobility. He struggled around and looked for Samantha, whose voice had woken him. Squinting against the sun, he saw her sitting on the rail of the boat, dangling her feet in the water, looking over her shoulder at him and laughing. She was fresh and clean as if the sea had just cast her up. He tried to smile.

"How long have you been awake?"

She kicked at the water with her bare feet and a shower of drops sparkled in the sun.

"Oh, hours."

Hours? David glanced at the sun, barely over the horizon, and guessed her "hours" was really more like ten minutes. He dragged himself into a squatting position and began to peel off his outer clothes. He felt no embarrassment, nor did she. They were outcasts, making their own rules. Spreading his clothes over the rail to dry, he lay down in the sun and, resting his chin on his hand, looked out over the water.

"Calm, isn't it?" Samantha said. "You'd hardly know it was the same sea."

The storm had swept the ocean of every feature as a wind sweeps clean a desert. The sea breathed in slow oily expansions on which the little boat moved easily, quivering occasionally with some deep vibration. David watched for minutes, then the problems of keeping alive intruded themselves. On a hunch, he spat into the water beside the boat. Slowly but perceptibly the tiny smear of spittle drifted behind them. He checked the sun, steady to their left. They were going south. The storm had carried them into the main current he had been searching for.

"We're in the current," he said to Samantha.

She kicked some more water.

"This is all quite crazy, you know," she said. "Wandering off in a little boat, looking for some mythical treasure or whatever it is. I hardly believe it's happening."

"Sometimes I don't believe it either. Wouldn't it be funny if it was all a dream?"

"Funny, but unlikely," she said. "I'm hungry—that isn't imaginary."

David took fruit from the bundle they had stolen from Penn's cart and threw one of the fish lures overboard. A minute later he had a bite. It was a small fish, but thick and meaty. He threw the line in again, and a moment later another fish lay flopping in the bottom of the boat. These were rich waters. Nobody had fished them for decades, and the creatures living there had no suspicion of humans. After a little preparatory experiment they found out how to operate the stove and had the fish cooked in a moment.

From then on fishing became their favorite pastime. One of them was always throwing a line overboard, fishing just for the pleasure of seeing the slow fluid shape of the fish floating up towards the lure out of the deep green water. At the last moment they would withdraw the line, watch the fish, disappointed, wriggle back into the depths, then go looking for another one.

Love and the water turned them into beautiful animals, and they drowsed through the long hot days, hardly speaking or moving until night came, and the stars. The sea never again became stormy, and they floated on it without movement, content to be carried wherever it wished to take them. Sometimes David would turn over and search the bright sky for a sign of life, but there was none. He knew, intellectually, that the proctors must be looking for them, and that they would know, in general, that they had gone to sea. Perhaps they even knew they were going towards the islands. But the sea was huge and their boat small and transparent. They were probably safe, for the moment.

But one day he felt Samantha's hand on his arm, laid there urgently, the fingers digging into his flesh. He looked up and saw, as she had seen, the blur of land on the horizon.

It took them all day to drift near enough to make out the first of the islands, but each yard nearer seemed to abrade away another layer of their ease and complacency. They climbed back into their clothes, began cleaning up the boat, looking anxiously upwards to the sky that, although still clear, seemed suddenly menacing, like a clean bright eye that might at any moment lose its interest in the world and focus instead on them alone.

David took out the map and began to make his calculations. Green Island was one of the first islands in the group, and its contour corresponded with that of the island on the horizon. He steered for it, hoping that the current would not veer off too suddenly but would hold strong enough for them to use the rudder to escape from it. It took them a day to reach the island. It was low, but the outline was broken by curious rugged structures standing up jagged against the sky. It was too far away for them to see clearly, but David knew they were buildings. As they drifted into the area of the island the current slowed, dropping them off into one of the slow eddies that edged it. Paddling steadily, they drifted into the bay.

The buildings were not visible from the water, but there were signs all around that this had once been a busy anchorage: docks, a landing strip drifted over with sand, piers. And below, on the floor of the bay, David saw something else that, although almost invisible, was curiously familiar. Taking a diving mask from the emergency chest, he fitted it onto his face. Quietly he dropped into the water and sank towards the white sand. On its surface, a carpet marked only by the patterns of current and sea creatures, lay a sign that he had been right.

Thirty feet long, untouched and still, in its way, alive, a whale of green glass waited for release from its enchantment.



 

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XIII
The beach was a crescent of blinding white sand shelving almost imperceptibly into the clear green water. Once it had been disciplined, smoothed and shaped, edged with docks, esplanades and roads, but the sand had covered those in the first years of disuse. In a few places there were still signs of the old installations, but most of them had been submerged in the fine white sand. Only an occasional corner of weathered concrete jutting from a dune proclaimed man's passing mastery of the small island.

David and Samantha paddled the boat through the shallows and beached it. After weeks at sea, the feel of solid land under their feet was disconcerting. They stumbled for a while until the old ways of walking came back to them. Then, moving clumsily and with exaggerated care through the hot sand, they walked up to the deserted promenades and the buildings that fringed the beach. David tried to make out details, but the sun blazed back from their bleached walls, almost blinding him and making the whole landscape shimmer.

Above the scooped hollow that held the beach the ground leveled off. The sand here had been swept away in places while in others the wind had piled it in drifts or let it flow like dry glaciers over the edge of the promenade. As they came up to the wide street that separated the buildings from the beach they saw that the sand had penetrated even into the lower floors, choking the doors with drifts and debris. There was no way into the buildings, but neither of them wanted to go in. Looking up, they could see the ranks of blind windows, each offering entrance but not invitation.

There were gaps between the buildings. Once they had been lanes and streets, but the sand had clogged them long ago. Samantha walked to the first of them and looked down towards the interior of the island.

"Look, David," she said quickly.

At the end of the street there were more buildings, but not like those on the beachfront. David had never seen anything like them before. Fighting through the loose sand, he scrambled finally to the end of the street and looked down on the main town.

It was like a huge surreal forest of immense steel trees and glass fruit. Metal columns, thick and strong but looking frail for the load they carried, soared hundreds of feet into the air. Curving out from them, delicate branches carried oval dwellings, eggs of plastic, glass and steel, tinted every imaginable color. On every tree there were a hundred houses and there were hundreds of trees in the town. The ground below them was strewn with shattered light tinted and torn by the crazed glass above. Among the sand drifts, sometimes almost covered by the dunes, fallen houses lay like crushed skulls. Eventually they would all fall as the wind and the rain eroded their intricate balance, but for the moment they hung delicately suspended, held up only by their own impalpability, as if the wind did not care to tear them down but was content to flow through and around them. David looked upwards to where the topmost houses lost themselves in the blaze of the sky. His eyes swam as the sun burned into them, but he ignored the black dot that appeared suddenly on the rim of the sun, and it soon became lost among the swirls of color and blots of darkness.

 

From two miles up the archipelago was like a set of jagged teeth curving in a savage grin from horizon to horizon. The sky above the islands, thickened into visibility by the mist from the land, suggested a domed skull, while the white of the sandy bottom could have been bleached bone. The teeth of the skull were well-spaced, some sharp and whole, bedded deep in the frame of the range, while others, old volcanoes, had rotted into dark pits fringed with white. Above one of these atolls the proctor ship was poised.

"Steady it," Elton Penn ordered as the ship rocked in the warm updrafts.

The pilot cursed inwardly and adjusted his verniers. The little four-man bubble quivered, then froze in mid-air as the antigravity grabbed more space, put out extra anchors. When the trim was regained, he searched among the islands and recentered the cross-hairs of his sight on the atoll.

"Are they there yet?" the third man asked. He was older, robed like a Merrylander but uncomfortable in the clothes.

"I can see something moving down there," the pilot said, squinting through the sight. "It must be them."

"We could catch them now," the passenger said.

"I wouldn't suggest it," Penn said. "We don't know what we're looking for."

"I thought that was why we followed them," the passenger said. "What are you hiding?"

"Nothing," Penn said quickly. "Don't you trust me yet?"

"No."

"I've guided you here, haven't I? Didn't I tell you about these two, suggest following them, have them shadowed all the way here?"

"Yes. I'm wondering why."

The pilot stretched the magnification to its limits, but the image he saw, foreshorted by the extreme range and distorted by the miles of shimmering air through which it was viewed, told him nothing. He could see the tree town and somewhere at the base of the trunks shadows moved, sliding grotesquely on the white sand.

"There's plenty of time," Penn said. "I think we might as well wait."

 

"Come back, David."

Ignoring Samantha's warning, David slogged through the last few feet of sand to the base of the nearest tree. He had a sense of the houses hanging over him, but no fear. They seemed too light to have any real weight. As he came to the base of the pylon one puzzle was solved for him. The stem was hollow. Once elevators must have moved up the tube, servicing the houses. The elevator was probably stuck somewhere high above him. He walked into the tube, floored now with sand, and looked up. The sides were welted with cables and pipes, like capillaries and serving the same purpose, providing life for the houses.

"David?"

He looked out. "I'm all right."

She stood well out in the clearing, watching him nervously.

"I don't like this place."

"It's only a town."

He looked at the walls of the stem.

"Only metal."

He banged it experimentally. The steel was thin and boomed faintly. He hit again, harder. The echo rang. Samantha looked up suddenly, and screamed.

There was a grinding sound from above.

"Get back!" David shouted.

She scurried out of the clearing as the house, dislodged by David's blows, fell from the topmost levels of the trees. It seemed at first to drift down, but that was an illusion. As it fell it brushed another branch and the metal limb sheared off instantly, flinging its load out into space. The houses fell ever faster, with a quiet that was more terrifying than any noise. With a suddenness that shocked them both, they crashed into the clearing, shattering on the impact into complete ruin. Dust spurted from them like juice from a crushed fruit. For minutes the whole town rang with the echoes. Then, slowly, they died.

Nervously David and Samantha picked their way through the debris towards the fallen globes.

 

"Something seems to have happened," the pilot said. "It looks like…" He peered closer. "Some kind of collapse. If I was nearer…"

Penn made a decision.

"We might as well go in now," he said. "Call in the others. Tell them to wait for our report." He smiled. "It'll be quite a surprise for our young friends down there."

 

Samantha picked up a bundle and carried it with her fingers. It crumbled under her touch, the cloth falling into brittle strands and dust.

"You'd think it would have been better preserved in this climate."

David poked at the rest of the debris.

"Everything rots," he said. Not only clothing and furniture, but societies too. Nothing lasted. But as each thing died, another should come to take its place. Nothing had yet appeared to replace the old society which had built these houses. Perhaps nothing ever would come. It might all rust away, and the sand would take over completely.

"Where do we go now?" Samantha asked. "There doesn't seem to be anything here."

David looked around. "The buildings out on the beachfront are offices of some kind," he said. "If there was any sort of research station…" He looked up at the hills behind the tree town, the ragged lip of the submerged volcano. "… it should be up there."

"What are you looking for?"

"I don't know exactly. Something to do with the green stone. I think it was invented or made here. I'm sure this was their experimental station."

"But you still don't know what it is."

"I have a good idea. Remember the way the insect flew away when the old priest willed it to? And you know what the earth machines are like—no knobs or dials, just blocks that you touch to turn on. I think the insect and the whale were machines too. Maybe they were made from the stone; maybe they were living things turned into stone. I don't know. I think the reason the insect came to life was that the stone is sensitive to thought. It does whatever you will it to do."

"That's impossible," Samantha said quickly.

"I know it's hard to believe," David said. "I know how you fell. I feel the same way. I don't want to believe it. But that's what I think. What other answer can there be? The Earthmen can make machines that work when you touch them. Why not a machine that works when you touch it with your mind?" He looked up towards the hills. "Are you coming?"

"You know I am," Samantha said. "We've come this far. Perhaps I'm getting as starry-eyed as you."

David smiled. Starry-eyed. He thought of himself as the only sane person on Merryland, but Samantha could be right. He might be nothing but a dreamer without the sense to stop at dreaming. Then he put the thought out of his mind and started slogging through the sand drifts.

He was so engrossed in the physical problem of fighting through the sand that it was not for a moment that the new sound intruded itself on his consciousness. Samantha heard it first, and stopped, looking around. Then David heard, and glanced upwards. Neither of them believed for a moment that the black dot dropping towards them was what it appeared to be—a ship, obviously produced by Earth science. Then the high-pitched whine of its motor punctured their disbelief. David grabbed Samantha by the arm and half-dragged her forward.

"Up in the hills. We can hide there."

Samantha's eyes were wide. "How did they know we were here?"

"They must have followed us. I should have thought of it."

The ship leveled off above the tips of the house trees and moved over the town. Except for the whine of the ship and the clatter of their running steps there was no sound. The edge of the town came abruptly. One moment they were among the trunks, the next they stood on the edge of a cleared area, almost half a mile across.

David had been right about shelter in the hills. The slopes were thickly wooded and offered plenty of hiding places, but between them and the hills was an insurmountable barrier. The open space had been a park once, probably closely clipped lawn with a few trees, but it had become overgrown long ago. The grass was more than a yard high in places, like green wheat. They could not run through it or hide in it.

"What now?" Samantha gasped.

David looked back. Through the tops of the trees he could see the ship circling slowly over the town. It was possible that they hadn't been seen as they'd run from the clearing, so they might be lucky enough to get well out of the town before they were seen. They might even get completely across the park and into the trees without being overtaken.

"Do you think you could run across there?" he asked.

"I could try," Samantha said. "But they'll see us."

"We can chance it." He took a deep breath. "Now." They sprinted out into the grass. But before they had gone a few yards David looked over his shoulder and knew their attempt had failed. The ship was not circling anymore. With a quick turn it broke its regular curving motion and darted towards them. David slowed his pace, then stopped. Samantha stopped too. They knew it was useless to run. The ship would catch them easily.

 

Penn leaned over to see past the pilot.

"They've stopped," he said.

The pilot clicked the safety catch off the ship's fire-control switch.

"Now?"

"No. I want to question them first."

The pilot-leaned over to put the catch on again. The ship lurched slightly as he did so, and a mild updraft from the open field, driven in across the town, accentuated the movement. Quickly he reached to correct it, but the cabin was crowded and his hands did not have enough space to move the stick.

"Get back, please," he said urgently. "I—"

A dark shape loomed up to his left. He banked feverishly to avoid it.

"Look out!" Penn shouted. It was too late. The jagged tip of a house tree reached out and casually pierced the bubble of the ship. With one stroke it tore the side out of the craft. For a moment it lingered on the spike, then tumbled off, crashing to the ground with a dozen dislodged houses.

 

David and Samantha watched the miracle open-mouthed. They did not move until the roar of the collapsing houses had echoed away and died in the sunlit morning.

"Should we go and see if they're dead?" Samantha asked.

David shook his head. "Come on," he said. The collision had had a godlike inevitability about it. They had been saved yet again. He did not know yet for what, only that they must keep going in order to find out.

On the edge of the forest they found a road. It was overgrown, like all the others on the island, but it was wide enough and strongly enough built to have stood up well. David followed its track up the hill with his eye. At the top there were more buildings, low and businesslike.

"That must be it, up at the top there." He glanced at Samantha's face. She was pale. "Do you want to wait here?"

"Yes," she said. "But I'm coming with you anyway."

The road was steep but David hurried forward. At the top a gate barred their way, but the wire was rusted almost to nothing. Dragging a stick from the undergrowth at the side of the road, he knocked a hole in the fence and wriggled through. Samantha was just behind him.

He threw the stick aside and looked around. There were five low buildings made of gray stone. They had no windows. The doors were metal and he would not have had a chance of breaking in, even after such a long period of disuse and decay, unless one of the doors had not been unlocked. Cautiously he heaved it open.

He had expected a laboratory; machines, retorts, plans and maps, but the place was empty. There was only one room, a huge low chamber lit by a ceiling that let in the diffused light of the sun. The floor was black, and it was only when he bent and looked at it closely that he saw the intricate web of fine lines etched into it. This was the machine, this pattern of geometrical symbols and formulae. Like the matter transmitter, it had no moving parts, only the engine of atoms that would never run down, need fuel or wear out.

He went back out into the sun and looked around.

"What was in there?" Samantha asked.

"Only the machines. See for yourself."

She looked in.

"They might have destroyed everything before they left."

"No," David said. "I don't think so. There must be something else around here."

At the back of the area, behind the buildings, there was another fence. But this one had a gate in it. The gate was open, and another road led through it down a steep slope at the back of the station.

"It must be down there," David said. "You'd better stay here."

"No. I want to see."

Their feet clicked with exaggerated loudness on the surface of the road. It led to the lip of the hollow, and on the far side of it the last cliff rose sheer for a hundred feet. On the other side it must drop off to the sea. They walked to the end of the road, stood on the edge and looked down.

It was, David realized, an old fissure in the volcano's side, a natural reservoir that must have been very convenient to the scientists working there. It was very deep, probably about three hundred feet, and half a mile around. But they had filled it. Like a great frozen green lake the stone lay before them in the sun.

The road had long ago collapsed here, torn to shreds by the eroding rain. The surface was loose, but by going carefully David managed to get to the very lip of the hollow. The surface was still about twenty feet below him, but he could see straight down into it. Here was the same clarity he had seen in the insect and the whale, a purity that was subtly terrifying. It seemed to draw him, suck him down. He leaned over further. Samantha's warning cry reached him at that moment, but it was too late. With infinite slowness he toppled over and fell towards the icy green face of the stone.

Icy and green, like water—cool green water, he thought in the last moment. Then he hit the surface. Samantha screamed in terror and surprise as it splashed, the droplets sparkling in a huge shower. David went under, then surfaced gasping. The water was cold, as he had imagined it. The machine had obeyed its orders well.

 

Back in the village, in the shade under the trees, the wrecked ship lay crumpled in the sand. Three of the men were dead, the other close to death, but some deep-buried motor in the body of the survivor drove him on. Squirming from the tangled wreckage, he propped himself up against the crushed wreck and methodically doctored his broken leg and gashed body. Then, purposefully, he dragged himself upright and hobbled among the trunks, following the tracks in the drifted sand. The landscape shifted dazzlingly through his distorting eyeglasses as he lurched among the ruins.



 

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XIV
David swam to the edge of the lake and crawled out panting. Behind him the water sparkled in the sun. It gurgled at his feet, licking at the ground, which was already beginning to dissolve under its touch. Carefully he held the image of the water in his mind, balancing it like a brimming bowl until he could decide what to do.

He heard a sound above him but didn't look up. He knew it was Samantha.

"Don't make a noise," he warned. "I have to concentrate. If I stop willing it to be water, it'll revert again."

"Well, let it."

"I can't. My clothes are soaked. Help me to get them off."

Feeling rather foolish, David let Samantha pull the sodden clothes from his body. When they were lying on the ground he let the sun dry him. Only then did he relax his hold on the water. In his mind he imagined the bowl tipping, pouring the water out onto the ground. The effect was instantaneous. From a shifting sheet of water the lake suddenly became a solid once more. It shimmered briefly, then it was again as it had been when they had first seen it, a deep mirror of green glass, harder than steel.

"What's that?" Samantha asked.

There was a pattering on the lake, the sound of tiny stones falling onto the surface.

"It's probably the water that evaporated," David said. "When it changed back it became stone again."

He brushed his hand through his hair and a shower of tiny droplets flew from it, landing on the lake with the same ringing sound.

Samantha picked up his jacket. It was stiff, like armor. She laughed.

"You wouldn't be very comfortable in this."

"Are any of them dry?"

She sorted through the discarded garments. The jacket was useless, but the leather trousers had absorbed very little moisture and were still wearable. He struggled into them, cursing the fine dust of green stone that clung to the hide, making the surface as abrasive as sandpaper. When they were laced up he brushed the outside thoroughly, trying to gouge the tiny motes from their homes in the pores of the leather. He had a reason for doing this. There was a decision to make, and he was trying to avoid it. But Samantha knew what he was thinking.

"What will we do now?" she asked.

David straightened up and looked at the lake.

"I don't know. This thing—it's…" There was no word. This was the secret of life, the ultimate power, the material from which the universe was made.

"It doesn't really change anything," Samantha said. "We're still outlaws."

"But with this, we have power to control everything," David said. "That's the terrible thing. We could kill everybody on the planet, everybody in the universe if we wanted to."

He stopped. On the lip of the hollow above them there was a movement. He looked up and saw Penn swaying on the edge. Instinctively he reached for his knife, but it was in his clothing, welded into his belt. He grabbed Samantha and pulled her behind him. They waited.

Penn didn't look at them after the first glance. His eyes went to the lake of stone and lingered on it. It was easy to imagine what thoughts were going through his mind. Here was power more sweeping than any the mightiest emperor had ever possessed, and it belonged to him. Or at least it would when he had disposed of his two rivals. That problem could safely be left until later.

He moved to step down, forgetting his wounded leg. As he dug the heel into the loose dirt below the ruined road it buckled under him. Quickly he jerked the other leg forward to steady himself, but it slithered in the soft dirt. Half falling, half sliding, he tumbled down the bank and skidded out onto the lake. Clods of dirt followed him, marring the bright surface with their dissolution. The quiet mood of the place was shattered. Struggling to rise among the dirt he had scattered, Penn seemed to represent all the things David hated—the greed, the search for power that defiled everything it touched. Yet, for all this, he admired the way Penn fought against his weakness. His leg was encased in a plastic sheath that molded the blood-stained cloth against the bruised and swollen flesh. David thought of Hemskir, now almost forgotten. Both men had been caught in the power machine. The first had been destroyed by it, and David knew that Penn would also die in it eventually.

Even though Penn had drugged himself, he was hardly able to stand. Only his spirit kept him going, dragging his wounded body about like a burden. Finally, he stood, facing David.

"I'm not that easily killed," he said, his voice slurred. "Not easily."

He reached to his belt and took out the gun sheathed there, but he did not level it. His strength seemed to come only in spurts. It was necessary to build up fresh reserves before he could raise the gun and shoot them. He looked down at the green lake.

"Did you find out what this is," David said.

Penn shook his head, an exaggerated movement, like that of a drunk man. "No. No, I don't know. I can guess. I've seen it work."

He stopped, remembering.

"Once I saw a whole island blown up with just one little piece of it. That's when I started looking."

"You have it all now," Samantha said.

David tightened his grip on her arm. "Quiet," he whispered urgently.

She shook off his grip. "No. He's going to kill us anyway."

"Kill." Penn looked at the gun in his hand and memory returned. The gun rose shakily to point at them. "You understand," he said. "I must."

David looked at the tiny black hole in the end of the gun. Oddly, he felt no fear. He did not really believe it yet. Then he looked down at the lake. Penn was reflected completely in it, a detailed image that had been rock-steady but which now shimmered vaguely beneath the surface. The rest of the stone was also troubled. The clear green was shot through with shadows, dark patches that shifted at the edge of his vision, always evading his direct gaze. Ominous patches.

Penn sensed something also, and looked down. David and Samantha backed away, scrambling up the steep slope away from the lake that had suddenly become an object of fear.

"It's responding," David said hoarsely. "He must have keyed it with his thoughts."

Thoughts of death.

The green was almost gone now. Welling up from the deepest recesses of the lake, a cloud of black was billowing towards the surface like an eruption from the quiescent depths of the volcano. As it struck the surface, David expected it to boil, billow and seethe, but it remained flat and calm. Penn looked down at the blackness, knowing now what was to happen. But, even knowing, he did not move. Perhaps this was the thing he had been looking for always; the power to give death to others was only a step towards the fulfillment of his own wish for oblivion. The lake was still dark but in it were more shadows, white now, and horribly specific. David looked for a moment, then turned away. The shadows were rising, white wraiths flying towards their victim. He pulled Samantha after him up the slope.

"Don't look," he said.

There was no sound from Penn except at the very end. Lying with his face pressed to the ground, David heard only one cry, a single choking cough, not repeated. When he turned slowly to look, there was nothing on the lake. The black surface reflected only clouds, a clean mirror image. As he watched, the black began to fade until green reasserted itself and the lake was back to normal.

Samantha was pale, and David too felt sick and dizzy. He helped her to the top of the slope.

"Let me sit down," she said breathlessly.

He left her there to rest and, on impulse, turned back to the lake. It was completely green now, smooth and un-marred, a clean slate on which he could write anything he liked.

Anything he liked.

The suggestion formed in his mind so secretly that he hardly noticed it until he was already putting it into execution. Once begun, he could not stop, did not want to stop. Breathlessly he watched the stone, scanning it for the movement that he knew must come. Then, very near to him, just a few feet from the edge of the hollow, the stone moved, shifting slightly so that the surface caught the sun in a new way, breaking the pattern of clean reflection that covered the rest. At first the flaw was geometrical, a neat arrangement of edges and surfaces jutting through the floor, but then it rounded, smoothing down into a familiar shape. Colors ran in it, fading momentarily, then brightening. Reds and whites flowed and froze by turns. Nearing completion, the movement of the colors quickened, the swelling became opaque, then began to move and separate.

David could do nothing more than watch as the man he had made rose slowly to his feet and looked around. His eyes—gray eyes not green—settled on David. His look was slow and without fear.

"You made me?" he asked.

David nodded.

"Why?"

"I wanted to know…"

"To know what?"

"If it could be done."

"A man can do anything."

"Even make other men?"

"Why not? Creation and destruction are easy, compared with maintenance and improvement."

He looked at David again.

"You're worried about this?"

"Yes."

"Because the making of a man should be the work of a God?"

"Yes."

The man smiled. It was like the sun rising. There was brightness and fire in that smile. The secret original sin of mankind was revealed by its light.

"You can make a god if you like."

David looked at the lake and the man, knowing what he had to do.

"You're going to kill me," the man said.

"Yes."

"No!"

He moved quickly, but David was prepared. The image was clear in his mind of the deep chimneys of the volcano that would take the stone and hold it forever. He ordered it, and the hollow began to drain at once, flowing quicker than water, as quick as mercury into the depths of the earth. The man struggled, but the whirlpool of green took him and bore him down until he was lost far below in the welted curve of the funnel. There was one sound, a huge and ugly gurgle as the earth sucked up the last of the stuff, then there was nothing.

 

They met the first men two weeks later, miles out to sea. They were fishermen in a frail wooden boat, searching far from the coast for a larger catch. They looked with terror on the couple in the glass boat, naked and brown like two spirits. Their hands went to their nets and spears, tightening around the crude implements.

"Who are you?" one asked nervously.

"Humans," David said.

"From Merryland?"

As if it mattered. Very soon the proctors would control everything, trying to take over this planet as they had taken over the others. Then Merryland would cease to exist. The power game would take it, making it into just another square on the chess board. David did not want that. People could be great if they were allowed to live out their lives, to search for things in their own way. A religion would not give it to them. They must find the greatness in themselves. David had gone to the furthest point of his potential and discovered that greatness. He had been God for a moment. He did not like it. He wanted to be a human being, and he wanted everybody else to be human too. He could start now.

The fishing lures were on the floor of the boat. He picked one up.

"Paddle nearer."

Samantha poled the boat closer until it nudged the other. David stepped into it. He took the man's fishing spear and laid it down on the floor of the boat.

"Don't use this," he said. "There are better ways."