Chapter VIII

LINGO ducked into his cabin and emerged carrying a pile of clothes. “Here, Jay,” he said, “put it on.”

“What is it?” Palmer asked dubiously. The clothing seemed to be some kind of garish uniform, all green and scarlet and gold braid.

“Dress uniform,” Lingo muttered. “Let’s say we…uh…anticipated that you might need it, so we had one made.”

Palmer fingered the uniform sourly. “Doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Just put the thing on,” Lingo said impatiently. “It’s been designed for psychological effect, not for elegance. We’ve got to create a certain impression, and that Ambassador’s uniform is part of it. No time to argue about it now. Just hustle it on, and get back to the common room before our Doog friends start getting trigger-happy.”

Then Lingo stepped into his cabin and slammed the door behind him.

Palmer stood self-consciously for a moment just outside the common room. He looked and felt like a comic-opera field marshal. The uniform had bright green pants and shirt, heavy gold-braided epaulets, a Sam Browne belt fastened by a gigantic ornate brass buckle, calf-length black boots tooled in gold and green, a snow-white cap with brass braided visor, and a long flaming scarlet cape. A square foot of ribbons adorned the tunic’s breast.

Sourly, Palmer wondered why Lingo had failed to supply a ceremonial sword.

The Solarians were already in the common room, and their uniforms seemed designed to make Palmer feel even more ludicrous. All but Linda Dortin, who was to remain on the ship, were dressed in black from head to toe, dead, totally unadorned black; plain black boots, black cotton pants, and black leather shirts. They were bareheaded, and the only insignia on thewas a tiny golden sunburst on the left breast.

Somehow, the total effect was terribly sinister and infinitely earnest; a uniform that was not quite a uniform—almost a priest’s habit. But dark indeed would be the rites led by such priests….

As they looked him over approvingly, it was painfully obvious that the Solarians were suppressing their laughter only by the most heroic efforts.

Even Koris, as he surveyed the peacock in the nest of falcons, seemed moved by some unreadable emotion—his head weaved erratically on the end of his long flexible neck, and his ears twitched convulsively.

“Come, vermin,” Koris droned. “We proceed to the Council of Wisdom.”

As they stepped down onto the concrete of the field, onto the surface of Duglaar itself, the sheer strangeness of the place hit Palmer with its full force. The city, spread around them as far as the eye could see, glass and metal in the dull gray light, seemed more a gigantic factory or monstrous machine than a city as such—Palmer could not conceive of a park or amusement section, a lake or even a stray blade of grass in that vast, ugly conglomeration of globes and boxes. There was an indefinable humming regularity about the sounds of the city, as if of an enormous engine, with all parts meshing smoothly.

And the smell of the air—a harsh, chemical, disinfectant smell, the odor of hospitals, of dynamos, of great impersonal public buildings. Not merely an artificial smell, but the odor of artificiality itself.

Palmer shivered convulsively, though the air was quite warm and though he was practically trotting to keep up with the strides of the long-legged Doogs. Robin and Fran were looking around with the same disdainful expression. Half of Max’ mind seemed back on the ship with Linda. Lingo and Ortega were also elsewhere, wrapped up in their thoughts, and noticing their surroundings only mechanically.

Now they were nearing the entrance to the Hall of Wisdom, itself. The main entrance to what was, in a sense, the capitol building of the entire Duglaari Empire, was simply a large rectangular hole in the smooth plastic wall.

“Enter, vermin,” ordered Koris.

Instead of the great open area that one would’ve expected the entrance of a large public building to open onto, Palmer and the Solarians found themselves in a small sealed chamber. The open entranceway was the rear wall; the two side walls were translucent and featureless plastic.

The wall facing the entranceway consisted of ten closed panels, each with a small light over it, and what looked like the coding board of a small computer.

Koris made straight for the coding board and manipulated the typewriter-like series of buttons built into the console.

“I have coded us into the Council of Wisdom,” Koris informed them. “We will now await ourdaictives.”

After a few moments, the lights over two of the panels lit up, and the panels slid upward, revealing smooth-walled tunnels, with moving-strips for floors. A quick clatter came from the computer-console, and a few lines of curlicued Duglaari letters appeared on the little screen above the incod-ing buttons.

Koris glanced at the message on the screen.

“Vermin, take the right-hand input channel,” he droned. “Soldiers of the Empire will take the left. We leave you now, vermin. You have been coded into an input channel of the Council of Wisdom. Do not suppose that you may deviate from directives just because you are unguarded. No guards are required once you are incoded. Any attempt to deviate from directives will immediately result in your destruction. Go.”

Lingo led them through the open doorway and onto the moving-strip. As the strip bore them on, into the bowels of the Hall of Wisdom, Palmer glanced back and saw that the panel had slid shut behind them.

The strip carried them inward and, every twenty yards or so, it came to an intersection of three to five separate passageways. But there was no question of choosing which passageway to follow; as they approached each intersection, panels slid down blocking off all passageways but one and the strip carried them through the approved tunnel. The Council of Wisdom itself was carrying them inexorably towards whatever fate awaited them.

Palmer felt as if he were a molecule of water caught up in a highly complicated system of piping. Whatever was operating the “pumping system” was controlling their passage through it simply by closing the proper valves. It mattered not at all that the contents of this piping system happened to be sentient human beings, for they had no control over their movements whatever.

As they shot past the various intersections, Palmer was able to catch tantalizing glimpses of sections of the building before the panels slid shut. One passageway opened into a large hall filled with machinery where dozens of Duglaari scurried about at unguessable tasks. Another emptied into what seemed to be a storeroom. He caught glimpses of what might’ve been computer panels; of a commissary; of things completely beyond his experience.

Finally, the moving strip deposited them in what was patently some kind of waiting room or cell: a small, empty cubicle, containing only a flat, hard bench and a speaker grill set high on one smooth wall.

The panel slid shut behind them, and the speaker came on with an audible click.

“Vermin. You will remain here until the Kor sees fit to interview you. Do not attempt to leave.”

Then the speaker clicked off, and they were completely isolated, imprisoned somewhere in the vast bowels of the Hall of Wisdom.

Numbly, Palmer sat down on the bench.

“It…it’s not like a building at all,” he muttered. “It’s like being inside of some gigantic machine.”

Lingo grinned sardonically and sat down beside him. “Jay,” he said, “you don’t know the half of it. Not ten percent of the truth. It is a machine. A computer.”

“The whole building? One computer? But I thought this was the Hall of Wisdom, the Kor’s palace and the meeting place of the Council of Wisdom.”

“Oh, it’s that too, in a way,” said Ortega. “But it is a computer.”

“How can the whole building be a computer and be….?”

Lingo laughed hollowly. “Not just the building,” he said. “The whole city. And in a sense, the entire Duglaari Empire.”

“What?”

“There are things the Confederation doesn’t know about the Duglaari Empire,” Lingo said, rising to his feet and pacing up and down the small cubicle. “Things it has been much better off not knowing. MacDay found some of them out—in the beginning, you know, every battle was fought to the death, and we did take an occasional Doog prisoner. Some of these things…well, they were one more good reason for isolating Sol from the Confederation. For if the Confederation should ever learn them….” Lingo shrugged bitterly. “The Confederation now despairs knowing only a small part of the truth—if they knew it all, they’d no longer have the will to continue fighting.”

Lingo stopped and stared down at Palmer, his great green eyes heavy with the weight of some terrible burden.

“Jay has a right to know the truth,” Robin said. “It’s his life that’s at stake as well as ours.”

“You’re right, Robin,” said Lingo, with a little sigh. “We owe him that much. Jay, what do you know of the history of the Duglaari Empire? The Doogs are creatures of perfect logic; hasn’t it ever occurred to you to wonder what made them that way?”

“Wasn’t it just an accident of evolution?” Palmer said, knowing at once from the look on Lingo’s face that he was wrong.

“No,” said Lingo. “Life does not evolve along logical lines. Not unless it takes evolution into its own hands. Which is what happened to the Duglaari at least a millenium ago. We don’t know the whole story; what we do know was collected piecemeal from less than a dozen Doog prisoners, and there are great gaps in our knowledge. Apparently, the Duglaari had a great leader, perhaps a millenium ago, perhaps even longer. This Doog made himself the first Kor of all the Duglaari—at that time, it would seem that the office was simply that of absolute dictator. This first Kor was a genius. Unfortunately, he was also quite insane, at least by our standards.”

Lingo stood up again, and resumed his nervous pacing, bouncing his voice off the walls as if speaking to no one in particular.

“It’s so hard for a human being to comprehend what happened,” he said. “Even then, the Duglaari were very different from us, with much less individual consciousness, and more of a sense of collective identity. They were alien, and to really understand, you’d have to be able to think like a Doog madman, a paranoiac. This first Kor, like all sentient beings, knew he was mortal and doomed to die. But in his madness, he would not accept it. He was insanely determined that even after death, he would continue to rule the Duglaari Empire forever.

“So he built the Council of Wisdom.”

“Built it? But the Council is….”

“No it isn’t!” Lingo snapped savagely. “MacDay thought it wiser to conceal the Council’s true nature, once he learned it. For the Council of Wisdom is not some Duglaari legislature, as the Confederation has been led to believe. It is…this city. But it is not a city—it is one immense computer. The first Kor built the computer and gave it total power over the entire Duglaari Empire. We think that there are duplicates of the Council scattered throughout the Empire, deactivated, but ready in case this one should be destroyed, but of course, their locations are the Doogs’ most closely kept secret.

“But at any rate, we do know that the Empire has no government, as we think of governments. The computer is the government. But it is more than that—remember, the Council of Wisdom is not a complex of computers as you have on Olympia IV, it is not merely a machine for deciding policy. It is one huge, integrated computer, and its output circuits do not feed into data boards—it does not advise, for every military move, every economic move, everything, down to the design of hand-weapons, down to the personal lives of every single Duglaari is dictated by the Council of Wisdom.

“No, the computer does not advise—it commands!“

Palmer was completely staggered. “You mean…you mean the Kor is just a figurehead for the Council of Wisdom? The Duglaari Empire is ruled by…by a machine?“

Lingo laughed darkly, and his face twisted into an ironic grin. “Nothing as simple as that,” he said. “It would be impossible—a computer, after all, is only a logic machine. It can only determine the most efficient means to a given end. But a living being must set those ends. The selection of goals is not a matter of logic. And logic must be founded upon premises. No system of logic can set its own premises; therefore, no computer can set its own goals. They must be set by intelligence, arbitrarily.”

“In other words,” said Palmer, “a computer must be programmed. It must be given goals, or it will not act.”

“Exactly!” said Lingo. “The function of the Kor is to program the computer. He tells the Council of Wisdom what the goals of the Empire are to be, and the computer runs the Empire accordingly.”

“But then the Kor really does rule. The Council of Wisdom just takes care of the details.”

“Ah, but that’s where the madness comes in!” said Lingo, slamming his hand down on the bench. “You see it is the computer which chooses the new Kor when the old one dies. The Council of Wisdom selects its own programmer! And remember, its control over the Empire is absolute. It determines everything. Including breeding. That was the madness and the genius of the first Kor. He gave the Council of Wisdom power over everything, total, absolute, complete power. It was the computer which made the Duglaari into a completely logical race—by a millenium of training, indoctrination and selective breeding. In a very real sense, all Duglaari have identical personalities—the personality of the Council of Wisdom itself!“

“But why? What kind of monster would make his people over in the image of a machine?”

“A most special monster,” said Lingo. “A monster craving immortality. Remember, the original computer could do nothing until it was given goals, until it was programmed. And it was the first Kor who set the original premises of the computer. He created its ‘personality’ and he used his own mind for the blueprint!”

“I don’t….”

“Think, man, think!” cried Lingo. “He made the computer into an image of himself! An image with the same madness, the same paranoiac goals and fears, but with the resources of an entire race to accomplish them! And infallible logic, one hundred percent efficiency, to boot. And to complete the circle, the Council chooses its own programmer. It chooses a Kor on the basis of how close his personality is to that of the original Kor—and for a thousand years, it has been breeding the Duglaari so that they are all as close to the original Kor as possible. Then it just chooses the most perfect duplicate available. Yes, Jay, the Duglaari Empire is made in the image of a machine, but that machine is the image of a being dead for over a millenium.”

Palmer sat woodenly on the bench, scarcely daring to think. This, then was the true nature of the enemy! Not a government, not even a race, but in a very real sense one integrated immortal organism! No wonder the Computation Center on Olympia IV was hopelessly outclassed. It computed strategy for the General Staff, but the Council of Wisdom was the Duglaari Empire. The Empire was ruled by…by…?

“But then what does rule the Duglaari Empire?”

Lingo laughed sharply and shrugged. “You pays your money and you takes your choice,” he said. “In a sense, the first Kor actually succeeded in achieving the mad goal of immortality. The computer rules the Empire. The Kor directs the computer. But the computer chooses and molds to its image, the Kor. And the Council was molded in the image of the first Kor. Is the the Duglaaaari Empire ruled by the Kor? By the Council of Wisdom? Or by the ghost of a Doog dead a thousand years? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“And this is what you think you can outwit? Six Solarians against an organism that is an entire empire?”

Lingo stopped pacing. He stared directly at Palmer, and there was a fire in his eyes that instantly made Palmer believe, though in what he could not tell.

“Yes,” Lingo said, in a whisper that was a shout, “we will fight the computer, the Kor and the whole bloody Empire. We will fight, and we will win! Because we must. The Duglaari Empire is a thing insane. A malignant cancer that threatens the death of an entire Galaxy. It must be destroyed, for the sake of all sentient beings everywhere! By the memory of MacDay, by the words of The Promise, a promise that was meant, Jay. We will destroy it! We must. We….”

Suddenly, the panel slid open.

“Vermin,” droned the wall speaker. “Enter the input channel at once. The Kor awaits you.”

The input channel emptied into a cavernous rectangular chamber at least fifty yards in width, a hundred yards long and full three stories high. The moving strip continued on down the length of the great chamber, through a living corridor of immobile and fully armed Duglaari soldiers, hundreds of them, shoulder to shoulder down the entire length of the chamber.

The entire rear wall of the chamber—fifty yards wide and three stories high—was the face of a gigantic computer; hundreds of square yards of controls, punchboards, data panels, tended by an army of Duglaari technicians, clambering over its face on many-leveled catwalks.

Directly in front of this huge complex, haloed by the ever-changing light patterns, was a plain throne-like affair, elevated about three feet off the floor. A ring of small data panels formed a semi-circle around its base.

Seated on the throne, and peering downward at the data panels was one lone and ancient Doog, his brown fur grizzled with gray, a microphone held loosely in one hand like a sceptre—the most powerful single individual being in the known Galaxy—the Kor of all the Duglaari!

As the moving strip carried them inexorably towards the throne, Palmer could sense a terrible aura of power emanating from the being on the throne. This was the will, the might, the mind of an entire race channeled into one individual through the face of the giant computer at his back. It shone through all racial barriers, all inscrutability of alien features. Palmer’s heart sunk, and he felt like a fool in his comic-opera uniform.

For this was Power.

But a glance around him at the Solarians showed him something far more terrible. In the midst of hundreds of Duglaari soldiers, in the face of the Kor, of power personified, Ortega, Max, Robin and Fran rode the moving strip as if it were a special chbnience erected for them out of deference—and a rather inferior one at that. In their ominous black uniforms, with thin smiles of amused contempt on their faces, they looked every inch the representatives of the mystical legend that Confederation propaganda had made of Fortress Sol. They walked as if they owned the universe, and the illusion was so complete, that Palmer found himself believing it too.

But if the other Solarians carried themselves like royalty, Lingo was a god. His blazing green eyes raked the faces of the Duglaari soldiers like the muzzles of twin lasecannon; such was the power in his stare that as he passed, each Doog was forced to avert his eyes—dogs stared down by their master. Lingo held his hands loosely at his hips, his mouth twisted in a grin that was light-years beyond contempt, a scorn that transcended defiance.

Even though a part of him knew that there was nothing to back up the facade, Palmer’s soul was vitally stirred by the pretense itself. Their glacial pride might be nothing but a facade, but there was truth in its bravery. And that truth made him deeply proud of his humanity, and prouder still that these magnetic beings from Man’s home system had accepted him as a part of their Group. Somehow, the importance of the fact that he was likely to never leave this chamber alive receded into a far distance, leaving him filled only with the glory of the moment. They would face the Kor, the Council of Wisdom and the whole Duglaari Empire with every ounce of pride the human race could muster, and somehow, that in itself was a kind of terrible victory.

The moving strip deposited them at the foot of the throne.

“All will bow in deference to the will of all-knowing Duglaar,” droned the grizzled Kor.

Hundreds of Duglaari soldiers dipped to one knee as a single organism. Lingo hand-signaled to Palmer to follow suit, and, reluctantly and awkwardly, Palmer obeyed.

But the five Solarians, alone in the great chamber, remained standing.

“Kneel, vermin, to the power of Duglaar,” droned the Kor, his leathery ears flapping like monstrous bats. “Know that I am Kor of all the Duglaari. Know that by the Microphone of State in my hand and by the Data Panels of Truth at my feet, I am in direct circuit with the Council of Wisdom itself, the will of the entire immortal Duglaari Empire. We are Duglaar. Know and kneel.”

Lingo slouched negligently and in a cold voice, filled with infinitely easy arrogance said: “Animals kneel to Solarians, and never the reverse.”

The nearest guards sprang to their feet, energy rifles at the ready. But the Kor stopped them with one wave of his hand and motioned the rest of the soldiers to their feet.

“We are not illogical human vermin,” he droned. “I have been informed that you are here to surrender. That data has been coded into the Council of Wisdom, and the Council has issued the following directive: The surrender is to be accepted. The Council of Wisdom has computed the following terms of surrender: all human forces are to immediately cease hostilities against ces of the Duglaari Empire. All solar systems now controlled by human vermin, including the home system known as Fortress Sol, are to be immediately occupied by the forces of Duglaari Empire. All vermin in those systems are hereby deprived of any and all rights as sentient beings. All vermin are forbidden to continue breeding. All vermin are forbidden to possess arms or any other form of personal property. All vermin are hereby declared property of the Duglaari Empire. These are the rules of surrender.”

Lingo laughed, long, loud and contemptuously, his voice echoing and filling the otherwise silent chamber. He pursed his lips and spat in a lazy, high arc at the foot of the throne.

Instantly, the guards trained their rifles at him; their fingers squeezing the triggers a hair’s breath away from the firing point.

But at that instant, their bodies were frozen to living stone. Only their frantically rolling eyes betrayed their intent. Max Bergstrom stared blankly at them, his gaze deceptively remote and placid. But Palmer knew well what that calm, brown stare meant—the guards no longer controlled their own bodies.

“I fear you are mistaken,” Lingo said, in a preternaturally hollow voice that made the words a toll of doom.

“The Council of Wisdom does not make mistakes,” the Kor droned with a furious snap of his ears. “The Council of Wisdom is perfectly logical. Its nature does not permit incorrect calculations.”

Lingo laughed again, this time with the tolerance of a teacher for a not-very-bright child. “Well, then just let’s say that the Council of Wisdom has been supplied with incomplete data.”

“If you wish to supply additional data,” the Kor said, “do so. This chamber is circuited directly into the Council of Wisdom. Every word you say will be coded directly into an input channel of the Council.”

“Excellent,” smiled Lingo. “I compliment you on your service. I will now supply the missing data—our terms. You see before you an Ambassador from the Human Confederation,” Lingo said, pointing to Palmer as to a mess on a rug. “Amusing creatures, perhaps, to some tastes, but no longer of concern to us. We have transcended them as our remote ancestors transcended the primates from which they sprang. These primitive humans of the Confederation are yours to do with as you like. They are no longer under the protection of Fortress Sol.”

It took long moments for the meaning of Lingo’s words to impress themselves on Palmer’s stunned mind. It…it was all a phony! Everything the Solarians claimed to stand for! The friendship…the…. It was all a monstrous lie! They were nothing but traitors, cowards, miserable, inhuman….

With a savage and wordless growl, Palmer sprang at Lingo, his hand clutching at the Solarian’s throat.

But even as his fingers reached around Lingo’s neck, he felt himself losing control over his own body; he felt the tendrils of Bergstrom’s mind enfold his own, and against his will, his fingers let loose their grip, his arms drifted to his side, and he found that he could no longer move.

“That will be quite enough,” Lingo said, with exasperating arrogance. “Either behave yourself, or Max will have to dispose of you immediately.”

Palmer realized it was no use—there was no way to fight a telepath. And quite suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter any more. The world had collapsed about him. The Solarians had accepted him as a brother—more than a brother—he had felt something within the Solarian Group that he had never felt before, something fine, and proud and loving…. And it had all been a foul lie! A cheap, cowardly trick, in perfect harmony with everything else the Solarians had done. The Solarians were the perfect traitors—false on every level of their beings, false bravery, false Promise, false love….

The fight was all gone out of him. What was the use? He was alone, more alone than any human being had ever been. Caught between Man’s mortal enemy, and the most abominable traitors in all history. What hope was there?

And as soon as he felt this defeated resignation, he felt Bergstrom leave his mind, and return control of his body to him. Why not? Palmer thought bitterly. He knows what I’m thinking. He knows that I’m beaten….

“As I was saying before this annoying interruption,” Lingo continued, with infinitely smooth arrogance, “we will hand over the Human Confederation to the Duglaari Empire, to do with as you see fit. Sol demands but two token conditions in return.”

Lingo ticked off his words on his fingers as he spoke, and his voice changed to that of a dry pedant, to match his gestures.

“One: the Duglaari Empire must sign a treaty of eternal fealty to Fortress Sol. Two: once the Duglaari Empire has occupied the Confederation, you must hand over four thousand of your ships to Fortress Sol as a token of your good faith.”

Before his words could stop echoing in the vast chamber, Lingo spoke again, and now there was nothing at all of the pedant in his voice.

“Should you be so stupid as to refuse these over-generous terms,” he hissed, sneering threateningly at the Kor, “the Duglaari Empire will have but ten years left to exist. At the end of that time, Sol will be more than ready, and the forces of Fortress Sol will fall upon the Duglaari Empire and annihilate it down to the last living creature. The choice is, of course, up to you.”

The Kor sat stupefied for a full minute, only his ears moving in a dance of rage.

“Vermin, do you dare to offer such an ultimatum to the Duglaari Empire?” he finally said. “Do you dare to insult the Kor, the Council of Wisdom and the will of all Duglaar with such proposals?”

Lingo smiled wanly, and gave a diffident little shru“The terms are far more generous than you deserve,” he said. “Do not try my patience.”

“Vermin, you are either a fool or completely insane. The Council of Wisdom has calculated that it will be possible to complete the destruction of the Human Confederation within seventy-eight years. At the end of that period, Fortress Sol will have to face the entire might of the Duglaari Empire alone.”

“Long before the end of that period,” Lingo said, in a perfect and savage imitation of the Kor’s drone, “the Duglaari Empire will have ceased to exist. In ten years, Sol alone will be able to crush you to atoms. Let the Council of Wisdom digest this data: at present, at present, mind you, it would take eight thousand Duglaari warships, more than total existing force, to destroy Fortress Sol. I don’t need a computer to tell me the significance of that. And that is only now. By the end of this decade, Sol will have completed development of weapons that your Council of Wisdom can only dream of.”

Lingo rattled off the list like some black litany: “Impenetrable screens of force. Explosives based on the total conversion of matter to energy. A means of detecting and locating ships while they are still in Stasis-Space. A ray that can nova suns from light-years away, without having to come anywhere near them, as you must to produce a nova with a Stasis-Field generator. These are only a few of the more mundane examples. If you do not meet my terms, and meet them now, the Duglaari Empire will have vanished in ten years. Let the Council of Wisdom calculate its way out of that!” He finished with a peal of staccato laughter that reverberated off the high ceiling like gunshots.

The Kor was silent. Palmer could sense that he was deeply disturbed from the way his ears seemed to wilt. The ancient Doog shrilled orders in Duglaari to the technicians on the network of catwalks covering the great face of the computer behind him. They scurried furiously to their tasks, setting up the new problems for the computer.

The great chamber was utterly silent, save for the padding feet of the technicians, and the muted noises of the great computer in operation, as the Kor sat immobile on his throne, his eyes intent on the data boards in front of him, waiting for a determination from the Council of Wisdom that was both his slave and master.

After silent minutes that dragged on like centuries, the Kor’s eyes came to life. The computer’s answers were appearing on his data screens.

As the Kor scanned the screens, the cartilage supporting his drooping ears slowly began to stiffen, until the great ears were once again stiff and erect. He lifted his face and stared intently at Lingo, his glaring red eyes meeting the cold green of Lingo’s in what seemed a clash of equal demons.

“The Council of Wisdom has completed, its calculations, vermin,” he droned. “As I suspected, it is you who have calculated incorrectly. The will of Duglaar will prevail.” Somehow, devoid of all gloating, all emotion, the dead, flat voice seemed utterly deadly and final.

“The Council of Wisdm has determined,” the Kor continued, “that the weapons of which you have spoken are within the range of possible scientific development. Of course, it is not possible to determine whether or not you can actually produce such weapons within ten years. The Council of Wisdom has calculated that if you do produce such weapons within ten years, you will, as you boast, be able to defeat the Duglaari Empire.”

Palmer held his breath. Was it really possible that in spite of everything, Sol would be able to save itself at the expense of the Confederation? Would they really be able to callously trade the lives of hundreds of billions of people for the ten years’ time needed to develop the superweapons that could save Sol?

If we die, he thought savagely, then let Sol die with us!

Lingo returned the Kor’s stare without displaying any more emotion than a Doog.

“However,” the Kor said, after a long and ominous pause, “the Council of Wisdom has calculated that at the present, despite your foolish boasting, it is a mathematical impossibility for any single solar system, including Fortress Sol, to be able to withstand the attack of four thousand warships. Vermin, let me remind you that the Duglaari Empire possesses seven thousand warships. The Council of Wisdom has calculated that three thousand ships will be sufficient to maintain our defensive lines against the Human Confederation, with acceptable losses, during the time necessary for our remaining four thousand warships to proceed in one great Fleet to Fortress Sol and annihilate it completely. Your superweapons of the next ten years will never come into being, vermin. Sol will last not another ten weeks. The Council of Wisdom has already given the orders to marshal the necessary four thousand ships. Within months, all Solarians will be dead.”

The Kor leaned forward and eyed the five Solarians one by one. His ears twitched in what might’ve been amusement.

“It will be a source of considerable satisfaction,” he droned, “to commence the extermination process immediately, with the five Solarians now present, as well as their tame ambassador from the Human Confederation. You are to be killed at once.”

Chapter IX

DIRK LINGO smiled back blandly at the Kor. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Not unless you want to die with us. You and the Council of Wisdom itself.”

“What are you talking about, vermin? The Council of Wisdom covers many square miles. It would take a large thermonuclear device to destroy it.”

“Exactly,” said Lingo. “And of course, we knew that long before we came to Duglaar. Max!” He gestured to Bergstrom, who stepped to the foot of the throne.

Bergstrom stared evenly and blankly at the face of the ancient Doog. Mechanically, he began a screeching drone of incomprehensi syllables in a reasonable human approximation of the Duglaari language.

The Kor’s ears began to flap crazily. “How can you know that, vermin?” he droned. “You would have to be reading my mind!”

Lingo nodded to Max, who averted his gaze from the Kor and stopped his ear-jarring recital.

“You’re a lot smarter than you look,” Lingo cracked at the Kor. “Max is a telepath. He was reading your mind. Since you were thinking in Duglaari, and since Max doesn’t understand the language, all he got was meaningless sounds. But of course, with someone who speaks English, with, for instance, another telepath, he could maintain two-way communication over quite a distance.”

“Very interesting, vermin. Thank you for providing us with this additional data before your execution. And now….”

“Just a minute!” said Lingo. “You’re missing the best part. If you will check with your Haarar Koris, you will learn that one of us was permitted to remain on the ship. A girl by the name of Linda Dortin—another telepath. She is in direct communication with Max at this moment.”

“What of it, vermin? You think it possible for her to escape? The lasecannon at the landing field would incinerate your ship before it got off the ground, and….”

“Oh, she has no intention of taking off,” Lingo said with a little smile. “Far from it, she’ll wait for us to return unharmed to the ship, before we take leave of your hospitality.” He laughed sharply, and sneered self-confidently at the Kor. “And you will let us go, you know,” he said. “You see, our ship contains quite a large thermonuclear bomb, easily large enough to destroy the entire Council of Wisdom. If Max relays my order, or if we should be killed….” Lingo ran his right forefinger across his throat.

The Kor leaned back, unperturbed. “So you take me for a fool, vermin,” he said. “Did you really suppose that we would permit your ship to come anywhere near Duglaar without going over it most thoroughly with radiation detectors? I know very well that there cannot be so much as an ounce of radioactive matter on your ship.”

“Perhaps,” said Lingo blandly. “Nevertheless, if I were you, I’d do the safe thing and run another check.”

“You will do anything to prolong your miserable existence another few moments, won’t you, vermin? Very well, to be absolutely sure, we will do another check. But it won’t give you very much more time, since the vehicles surrounding the ship are equipped with radiation detectors.”

The Kor screeched a few words in Duglaari into his microphone, and then concentrated his attention on the data screens before him.

Suddenly, his ears collapsed and his red eyes rolled.

“The detectors show a large concentration of radioactives on your ship,” he droned. “How were you able to get it past the detectors? It is impossible.”

“Impossible for you, perhaps,” Lingo said, with a nasty little laugh, “but then, you are merely a Doog. Now then, my hairy friend, the situation is quite clear. Let us go, and you live and the Council of Wisdom survives. Kill us, and you die too, and the surrounding hundred square miles are vaporized in the bargain. The choice is yours.”

The Kor shrilled orders to the technicians on the catwalk who busied themselves at the face of the computer.

“I have submitted your proposal to the Council of Wisdom,” the Kor said. “We will await its calculations,”

After a few minutes, the Kor looked up from his data screens, and his ears were stiffly erect.

“Very well,” he droned. “The Council of Wisdom has completed its determination. You are free to go.”

“That’s very wise of you,” drawled Lingo, eying the Kor narrowly. “But I’d keep being smart, if I were you. For instance, I wouldn’t be so simple-minded as to let us leave the surface of Duglaar and then blast us as soon as we’re far out enough in space for the bomb to be harmless. Because at the first hint of a hostile move, once we leave this planet, we’ll just turn on our Stasis-Fiqld generator, and Dugl will go nova.”

The Kor’s ears flapped with thwarted rage. “So you think yourself clever, vermin? So you have guessed the outcome of the Council of Wisdom’s calculations. But you have been too clever, for you have pointed out the essential flaw in your plan. What is to prevent you from turning on your Stasis-Field generator as soon as you leave Duglaar, whether you are attacked or not, thus destroying this entire solar system?”

“It would result in our deaths too,” said Lingo. “We don’t want to die.”

“And why should we believe that?” said the Kor. “While it is true that duplicates of the Council of Wisdom are scattered throughout the Empire, in reserve, they are of course all dormant and unprogrammed, and it would take many months to set up a new one, thus setting back the date of Fortress Sol’s destruction by a good many months. How can I know that you would not consider the sacrifice of your lives for this delay a reasonable exchange?”

Lingo smiled. “You can’t,” he said. “You have to take my word for it.”

“Why should I?” replied Kor. “Unless you are willing to take my word. I will permit your ship to leave the system of Dugl, but it will be completely surrounded by a Duglaari Fleet until it is safely beyond the point where it could turn Dugl nova by turning on its Stasis-Field generator. The Fleet will be in a position to crush your ship within its Fleet Resolution ou lead, and of course it will be close enough to do so in the time it takes a Stasis-Field generator to warm up. As you know, it is a simple matter to detect a growing Stasis-Field before it is large enough to do any damage, thus giving our Fleet sufficient time in which to destroy you. But I give you my word that we will not destroy you unless you attempt to turn on your Stasis-Field generator within the Dugl system.”

“And how do I know that you won’t just destroy us without waiting for us to turn on our generator?”

The Kor twitched his ears convulsively. “You can’t. You have to take my word for it,” he said.

Lingo frowned. For the first time, he seemed unsure of the next move. It was obvious that he could not trust the Kor. It was equally obvious that the Kor could not trust him. Yet one would have to trust the other. Palmer grinned to himself. This time, Lingo had outsmarted himself. In fact, he suddenly realized, Lingo had been fouling himself up all along. The Kor hadn’t bought the story about Sol’s impregnability—the Doogs would soon be attacking Sol in overwhelming force as a direct consequence of Lingo’s arrogant boasting. And now, Lingo had painted himself into a corner!

Palmer almost forgot that it was his life Dirk Lingo was bargaining for as well.

“Just a minute, Dirk,” said Raul Ortega. “Let me take over for a minute.”

He turned to the Kor. “The Council of Wisdom is circuited into this?” he asked. “I’ve got some tricky calculations for it to do.”

“It is,” the Kor said.

“Okay,” said Ortega. “Basically, here’s the situation: First of all, we can destroy the Council of Wisdom, provided we are willing to die ourselves, and you can destroy us, if you are willing to see yourself killed and the Council of Wisdom destroyed. But I think it safe to assume that you would rather have the Council survive, just as we would rather survive. You’d be willing to let us get safely away into Stasis-Space as long as you had a guarantee that we would not nova Dugl.”

“Of course,” said Kor. “The death of seven humans is not worth the destruction of the Council of Wisdom, especially since Sol will soon be destroyed in any event.”

“So…” said Ortega licking his lips. “The problem is simply one of trust. Both of us prefer mutual safety to mutual destruction, at least we say we do. The trouble is, you can’t trust us not to go into Stasis-Space prematurely, sacrificing our lives but destroying Dugl, and we can’t trust you not to destroy us with your escorting Fleet as soon as you have the chance. In other words, if the Fleet is close enough to destroy us before we can go into Stasis-Space, we must trust you, and if it isn’t, you must trust us.”

“You have stated the dilemma correctly, vermin#8221;

“Ah!” cried Ortega. “But there is a way out. A way that does not require trust on either side. Let the Council of Wisdom calculate an exact course for our ship, and for your escorting Fleet, so that the relative positions will be such that it would take exactly as long for you to destroy us as it would for us to warm up our Stasis-Field generator and nova Dugl. In other words, should either side make a hostile move, the chances of our ship’s being destroyed before we can go into Stasis-Space would be exactly equal to the chances of our turning Dugl nova before we were destroyed. We’d of course check the computer’s calculations ourselves, so there could be no tricks. This way, it wouldn’t pay for either of us to gamble on a hostile move, since our chances of failure would exactly equal our chances of success.”

Palmer’s head was swimming. Wheels within wheels within wheels…. Yet there seemed to be something Ortega was missing. But it was too much for him, Palmer thought, and from the look of it, too much for the Kor as well. The great ears of the ancient Duglaari were flapping like crazed bats.

But the Kor, unlike Palmer, did not have to rely on his own brain to unravel the implications of Ortega’s proposal. He gestured imperiously with the microphone in his hand, and shrieked a few words in Duglaari.

The technicians tending the Council of Wisdom once again sprang to furious life, setting up the new problem for the great computer.

Silence reigned for long minutes in the cavernous chamber, broken only by the muted clickings and whirrings of the Council of Wisdom at work.

Palmer watched the flickering pattern of lights on the great computer-face tensely. He knew that the outcome of the computer’s calculations would determine whether he would live or die, but somehow, after the perfidy of the Solarians, this did not seem terribly important—not when the entire human race was doomed in any case. A part of him wanted to live, but another part of him wanted the Solarian strategy to fail. Revenge was a poor satisfaction when it meant your own death, but perhaps it was better than no satisfaction at all.

And there was something that Ortega was missing. Palmer could not put his finger on it; it was little more than a feeling in the pit of his stomach. But somehow he just knew that Ortega had overlooked some small but vital detail….

Finally, after what seemed like centuries, the Kor began to study his data screens intently. After a few moments, he looked up, his alien face calm and unreadable, his ears still.

“The Council of Wisdom has completed its calculations, vermin,” the Kor said. “It accepts your proposition, with the understanding that any attempt to deviate from the agreed upon course will be met by instant destruction.”

“Agreed,” said Ortega. “With the further understanding that if any of your ships try to inch up on us, we will immediately activate our Stasis-Field Generator.”

“Understood, vermin. You will return to your ship immediately. The guards will conduct you to the proper output channel.” The Kor screeched an order in Duglaari, and the ten nearest Duglaari soldiers stepped forward and surrounded the humans. The Solarians turned their backs disdainfully on the Kor and stepped towards the moving strip which led out of the chamber. Five of the guards began to walk in front of them.

The other five stepped between Palmer and the Solarians. Two of them grabbed his arms and pulled him to his knees. The other three raised their energy rifles.

Lingo whirled, his huge green eyes blazing. “What is the meaning of this?” he snapped.

“The Confederal officer who accompanied you is about to be executed,” the Kor said blandly. “Nothing more. Return to your ship.”

“Just a minute,” Lingo said, pointing to Palmer as if he were some inanimate object. “He goes with us.”

“You have declared that the humans of the Confederation are no longer under the protection of Fortress Sol,” the Kor said. “Therefore this officer is not under your protection. Therefore he is a prisoner. Therefore he is to be killed.”

“Not so fast,” Lingo said. “We agreed to withdraw our protection from Fortress Sol providing you met our terms. Since you have not met our terms, the offer no longer holds. Or do I misunderstand you? Are you now willing to turn over four thousand ships to us? If you are, why then….”

“Enough, vermin,” the Kor said, with a furious snap of his ears. “You are to be permitted to escape with your lives. Do not attempt to set further conditions. Return to your ship, while you can.”

“Don’t give me orders, Doog,” Lingo roared. “This officer came here under our jurisdiction, and by damn, he’ll leave under our jurisdiction, or I’ll give the order to detonate the bomb right now!”

The Kor flapped his ears in rage, but the Duglaari penchant for logic prevailed. “Very well,” the Kor said. “It is not worth risking the Council of Wisdom over human illogicality. Take the Confederal vermin and go.”

Palmer was jerked to his feet and ushered onto the moving strip with the Solarians. He stared at Lingo with unrelieved loathing. The Solarian had saved his life, but only to show his superiority over the Kor. Somehow, Palmer felt more sympathy for the Doog who had wanted to kill him than for the human who had saved his life.

“Sorry about this, Jay,” Dirk Lingo said, “but we’re going to have our hands full, and we can’t take the chance of your doing anything foolish.”

Palmer convulsed his muscles against the bonds tying him firmly into one of the dummy seats in the Solarian ship’s control room.

“Don’t give it a second thought, traitor,” he snapped. “You’ve got much more important things to be sorry about.”

Lingo was already preparing the ship for lift-off; Fran Shannon was in her control seat; Ortega sat in the other dummy.

“Things aren’t always what they seem, Jay,” Lingo said, as the great hemispherical viewscreen was activated.

“They sure aren’t!” Palmer said. “You people seemed like decent human beings, friends…more than friends. All that baloney about accepting me as a member of the Group. All that crud about the noble mission of Fortress Sol. And what do you turn out to be? Garden variety cowards and traitors!”

Lingo scanned the gray cloud cover, patently ignoring Palmer. “Should be here any minute,” he muttered to himself.

“If you had any guts,” Palmer sneered, “you’d detonate that fusion bomb right now, and at least destroy the Council of Wisdom. How can you live with yourself, anyway?”

Lingo, Fran and Ortega burst into laughter.

“Bomb?” said Ortega. “Bomb? Didn’t you hear what the Kor said? It’s impossible to sneak a fusion bomb past radiation detectors. There isn’t any bomb.”

“What? But…but the second time, the detectors did show that there was a bomb…?”

“Oh, use your head!” grinned Lingo. “Remember, Linda was on the ship at the time. Thought waves are a form of electromagnetic energy, and a rather gross form, compared to what radiation detectors work on. If telepaths can control other beings’ bodies, they surely can create illusions on delicate instruments, create the illusion of radioactives where there are none.”

“The whole thing was a fake? Like everything else?”

“Very aptly put, Jay,” Lingo said. “Think about it: the bomb was a fake, like everything else. Like everything else.”

“Here they come!” cried Ortega.

Duglaari warships were breaking through the cloud cover and dropping down towards the ship, ten…twenty…fifty…a hundred, over two hundred ships formed a solid blanket over the landing area, hovering at about two thousand feet.

“Solarian ship to Duglaari commander. Solarian to Duglaari….” Lingo droned into his mike. “We are now lifting off and proceeding as per our agreement.”

“Acknowledged.”

Lingo turned on the Resolution Drive. The ship began to rise, and the blanket of Duglaari warships above rose at the same rate, keeping the distance between them constant.

As soon as they had emerged from Duglaar’s atmosphere and achieved escape velocity, the Duglaari Fleet formed itself into a great hollow hemisphere, concavity forward. The Solarian ship took its position, as calculated, just forward of the lip of the cup-shaped formation and directly in line with its center, and hence with its line of flight, balanced just ahead of the great Duglaari Fleet Resolution Field.

Thus, a slight relative acceleration forward would put it momentarily ahead of the Doog Field, and an equally minimal cut in speed would throw it directly upon the Duglaari Fleet Resolution Field.

The Solarian ship began to accelerate outward, accompanied by its oversize escort which maintained its position nearly, but not quite, surrounding it, like a shock wave pushing a dust mote before it.

Palmer was somehow calmed by the terrible spectacle of the Duglaari warships, filling the viewscreen in all directions save one. Here was raw power; here was death. He remembered that he had faced much the same death with these six Solarians before, not once but three times. He remembered that wonderful comradeship, that unspoken mutual trust that he had felt then, and he perversely found himself mourning for it, like a small boy who has finally discovered that his trusted father is a fallible human being.

He found himself desperately considering Lingo’s words: “…the bomb was a fake, like everything else. Like everything else.” Everything that Lingo had said to the Kor had been a bluff or a lie or a trick: the bomb, the impregnability of Sol, the…Why, even the superweapons might not be real! They did sound suspiciously like Human Confederation propaganda…. But…. But why would Lingo have warned the Kor of weapons Sol might or might not have in the next decade? Why had he bragged that it would take eight thousand ships to destroy Fortress Sol, when he must’ve known that it would be impossible to defend against even four thousand? Surely, they must’ve known that the Council of Wisdom would not be fooled.

There had to be some hidden purpose behind it all, hidden from himself as well as the Duglaari. And if everything else was some kind of elaborate trick, couldn’t Lingo’s attempt to sacrifice the Confederation be just a trick too? After all, the Kor hadn’t accepted it…. In fact, he suddenly realized, Lingo had made the proposal in such arrogant terms that he must’ve known that the Kor would turn it down. He must’ve planned it that way!

As the ship sped outward from Duglaar, balanced precariously on the razor-edge of death, Palmer realized that he wanted very much to be able to trust the Solarians again. For without that trust, all was meaningless, all was hopeless. Whether they escaped alive or not, Fortress Sol was the myth that had sustained the Confederation for three centuries, and if Sol were proved a hideous and traitorous lie, the human race was finished and the paranoiac’s nightmare that was the Duglaari Empire was destined to destroy the Galaxy.

Palmer felt a mre terrible fear lurking behind the normal fear of death—the fear of dying meaninglessly, alone, confused and betrayed, of dying alone with the awful knowledge that the entire human race would soon follow him into that final oblivion.

And the only thing between him and that most horrible of deaths was belief in six people who were, on the face of it, the blackest traitors in all history.

He desperately wanted to believe in them but he knew all too well why he wanted to believe, and so he could not.

“I don’t like it…” Ortega muttered, staring out at the great amoeba that was the Duglaari Fleet. “It just doesn’t add up. The Kor gave in too quickly. It was all far too easy. It just doesn’t make sense that they would let us go like this. There’s got to be some trick up their sleeves….”

“Oh, come on, Raul,” said Lingo, “stop worrying. You should have more confidence in your own Talent. You just outsmarted them, that’s all. It’s much more logical for them to let us go and not take the chance of losing Dugl than to try and destroy us and risk a nova.”

“It’s much more logical to destroy us without risking Dugl,” Ortega said uneasily. “That’s how the Council should’ve seen it. That’s the way I would’ve figured it in their place….”

“But how? That’s just it, Raul, they can’t try to englobe us without an even chance that we’ll be able to activate our Stasis-Field generator before they can crush us in their Fleet Resolution Field. We set things up that way, didn’t we? Once we pass the point where we can go safely into Stasis-Space without triggering a nova….”

Lingo’s jaw dropped. His face whitened.

“Oh no!” Ortega cried. “That’s it! Of course! How could I’ve been so stupid? Sure it isn’t worth the risk to try and destroy us while there’s a chance for us to nova Dugl. But what’s to prevent them from trying to englobe us after we cross the point where our Stasis-Field generator won’t nova Dugl? And you can be damn sure that the Council of Wisdom has calculated when that distance will be reached, down to the microsecond! They’ll try an englobement the moment it’s safe for them. If they succeed, we’re dead, and if they fail, they’ve risked nothing. Sure, their chances will still only be fifty-fifty, but they’ll have nothing at all to lose!”

“And there’s nothing at all we can do about it,” Lingo grunted.

“Outsmarted yourself again, eh, traitor?” Palmer gloated. “If you damn Solarians had fought beside us in The War, instead of isolating yourselves, you’d’ve known that the Doogs are clever tacticians. You’d’ve known that they don’t even make little moves unless everything is on their side. Why, in the last battle my Fleet fought with them, we….”

Of course! he thought suddenly. There was a way to escape! The Solarians might be big on strategy, but they hadn’t fought a battle in centuries. If they had, they’d’ve seen it too. It didn’t require any supercomplicated schemes; it was a standard Confederation escape tactic, and it almost always worked. This case might be slightly different, but….

He grinned sourly. If there was one thing the Confederation forces had plenty of practice at, it was the art of retreat.

“What is it, Jay?” Ortega said, turning to stare at the smirking Palmer.

“Why don’t you figure it out yourself, Gamemaster Ortega?” Palmer said. “Any Confederation Fleet Commander would know what to do. Standard tactics. Maybe it’s just a little too simple for your complicated mind. Too damn bad!”

“You’re talking like a fool,” Lingo snapped. “Remember, Jay, you’re on this ship too. It’s your life as well as ours. If you’ve got a way out, you’ve nothing to gain by not telling us.”

“Nothing but revenge, Lingo,” Palmer said.

“Only a madman throws away his own life for meaningless revenge. I don’t think you’re insane, Jay.”

It hit home. There was no point in dying, not when your death was meaningless, not when you died not knowing whether you were killing traitors or whether you might be destroying…friends.

“Okay, Lingo,” he said. “As usual, you win.”

Outward the ship sped, trailed by the Doog Fleet, past the orbit of Dugl V, approaching ever faster the orbit of Dugl VI, Dugl’s outermost planet—and the border of Dugl’s vulnerability to the Solarian Stasis-Field generator. The border of their safety, as well.

“How close are we, Fran?” Lingo asked, nervously studying the wall of warships behind him.

“About ten minutes to the orbit of Dugl VI,” was the reply.

“It’s now or never, Lingo,” Palmer said. “You’ve got to do it gradually.”

“Are you sure this is going to work? Are you sure they won’t detect it?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Palmer snapped. “But the chances of their detecting it are very slight. I’d say that the mass of the Duglaari Fleet is at least three hundred times our mass. So our combined speed will decrease only a total of a third of a percent, and if we spread that decrease out over ten minutes, the deceleration will never be more than a thirtieth of a percent. I can’t see them detecting that. Besides, we’re doing the exact opposite of what they should be expecting us to do.”

“Okay, Jay,” Lingo said. “Here goes nothing.”

Slowly, minutely, gingerly, Lingo began cutting the power of the ship’s Resolution Drive. The ship lost the tiniest fraction of its forward speed and fell back towards the Duglaari Fleet by less than a hundred yards—an imperceptible distance by the standards of interplanetary space.

But that miniscule change in relative position was enough to put the ship within the boundaries of the mighty Duglaar Fleet Resolution Field.

“We’re in contact with the Doog Field,” Lingo said. “I don’t think they’ve noticed anything.”

“So far so good,” said Palmer. “Now keep cutting power slowly but steadily. You’ve got to time it so that our Resolution Field is completely off just as we cross the orbit of Dugl VI.”

Palmer watched tensely as Lingo continued cutting the ship’s power. It should work, he thought. Their mass is so much greater than ours that they’ll never realize that our drive is off and that we’re just riding their Fleet Resolution Field. And once we cross the orbit of Dugl VI….

“Eighty percent power….” Lingo droned. “Seventy…sixty…thirty…twenty…ten….”

He lifted his hand and breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s working!” he said. “Our Resolution Drive is off, and we’re riding their Fleet Field. And I don’t think they realize it.”

“Good,” said Palmer. “Now remember, timing is everything. You’ve got to turn on the Resolution Drive full power ten seconds before we cross the orbit of Dugl VI, and you’ve got to go into Stasis-Space exactly ten seconds later. If you turn on the Stasis-Field generator too soon—blooey! And if you turn it on too late, the Doogs, with their more powerful Resolution Field, will be able to make up for our sudden burst of speed and englobe us. It all depends on timing. Timing and surprise.”

“Don’t worry about the timing,” Lingo said. “And we can only hope that they’ll be surprised, because if they realize what we’re doing….”

“Don’t even think it!” said Ortega.

“Fran,” said Lingo, “I want you to give me two countdowns: first to the ten-second to Dugl VI’s orbit position, and then give me another ten-count as soon as our drive is on.”

“Right, Dirk.”

Outward the convoy continued. We’re ready for our tactic, Palmer thought. I wonder what the Doog commander is thinking right now….

“We’re just about there, Dirk,” Fran Shannon said. “Twenty seconds to the ten-second mark. Fifteen…ten….”

Lingo gripped the throttle lever of the Resolution Drive with his right hand; the forefinger of his left hand was poised over the button that would switch on the Stasis-Field generator.

“Nine…eight…five…four…three…two…one…now!”

Lingo slammed the throttle lever over. The ship’s Resolution Drive went on under full power.

The Solarian ship had been moving forward at the same speed as the Duglaari Fleet, riding the Fleet’s powerful Resolution Field. Now it was suddenly given a tremendous additional burst of speed by its own Resolution Field—an inertialess drive capable of accelerating the ship to near-light velocities. The ship shot forward, leaving the Resolution Field of the Duglaari Fleet and opening a gap between itself and the Doogs.

“…two…three…four…five…” Fran Shannon began counting.

Palmer watched the receding Duglaari Fleet in the view-screen intently. It was still falling behind…but it was receding slower now!

The Duglaari commander had recovered! Now the Doog Fleet was accelerating; the Solarian ship was no longer gaining ground, but the sudden gap it had opened up was too great for the Duglaari Fleet to begin its englobing action as yet….

“Six…seven…eight…”

Now the Doogs were catching up! The great Fleet Resolution Field was accelerating the warships far faster than the Solarian ship could accelerate, and the gap of safety was rapidly closing.

“…nine…ten…now!”

Lingo pressed the button under his left hand. There was an agonizing minute’s delay as the Stasis-Field generator warmed up, as the deadly, clutching amoeba that was the Duglaar Fleet reached out to englobe them in its grip of death….

Then the Doogs, Dugl, and the stars themselves were suddenly gone, replaced by a swirling maelstrom of color. They were safely in Stasis-Space.

Lingo heaved a deep sigh. “We’re on our way!” he said.

“On our way where?” Palmer asked sourly.

“Why where else, Jay? Fortress Sol, of course!”

Chapter X

LINGO locked the controlips far d walked over to the dummy pilot’s seat into which Palmer was tied.

“I want to thank you, Jay,” he said. “We all owe you our lives.”

“I don’t want your thanks, Lingo,” Palmer snapped. “I saved this ship for only one reason—I had the misfortune to be on it. As you pointed out, suicide is an insane act. But as for you traitors, you can go….”

“Don’t go off half-cocked,” Lingo said with careful mildness. “We’re still your friends. We’ve got a long voyage ahead, and we’d like it to be as pleasant as possible. We don’t want you for an enemy, Jay. We want you to feel a part of our Group. You did once before.”

“And of course, as a token of your affection, you’re keeping me tied in this seat. I’m deeply touched.”

“We tied you up only to protect the ship,” Lingo said, still patiently. “You’ve got no weapons, and there’s no place for you to go. If you’ll promise not to get violent, I’ll untie you.”

Palmer shrugged as best he could in his bonds. “Okay,” he said. “Obviously I can’t go all the way to Sol trussed up like a turkey. No rough stuff. But please, no more phony buddy-buddy lies either.”

“Have it your own way,” Lingo said, untying Palmer. “You’ll have a good long time to simmer down.”

Palmer stood up shakily, rubbing the circulation back into his limbs. Then he pointedly turned his back on Lingo and started for the control room door.

“Where are you going, Jay?”

“To my cabin, if you don’t mind. There seems to be an unpleasant odor in here. As our friend Koris would say, ‘I feel undesirable twinges beginning in my digestive tract.’ “

Palmer lay on his bunk for hours, staring bleakly at the wall. The trip to Sol would take weeks; it might as well be centuries.

A week in this nest of traitors is as bad as a millenium, he thought bitterly. Why was I such a damned coward? I should’ve let the Doogs crush this filty ship like a walnut. It would’ve been all over in a minute or so. All I did was prolong the agony.

After all, what had he really gained by saving the ship and his own life? A few more weeks cooped up with the Solarian traitors, a few more weeks, maybe, on Earth, and then the Duglaari would descend on Sol in overwhelming numbers. Man’s home system would be completely annihilated.

Maybe that’s something to look forward to, after all, he thought bitterly. The pleasure of seeing Fortress Sol die.

But he knew that it would be a holl satisfaction indeed, for the death of Sol, in the long run, would be the death of the entire human race. For three centuries, the myth of Fortress Sol had sustained the Human Confederation in the face of defeat after defeat, in the face of computations that promised certain extinction within a century. All the hope of all men everywhere had been placed in Fortress Sol. It was the last and greatest hope of the human race, the bastion, the Rock of Ages, the Citadel of Man.

And Fortress Sol was nothing but a lie.

Palmer felt alone, more finally alone than any other man had ever been. He was alone with the unacceptable truth that Man’s last god had died, with the knowledge that that god too, like all the others, had been the bastard child of hope and fear, the futile denial of the final reality—that the human race itself, like all of its members, was mortal and doomed to die.

He thought of the great, dead mass of the Galaxy, through which the ship was hurtling; billions of stars, millions of planets. A cold, dead void ruled with an iron hand by the impersonal laws of physics.

What was Man, what was life itself, but a trace element, an insignificant contaminant in the vast, dead universe? In the whole of the Galaxy, life was statistically insignificant. The total mass of all living protoplasm since the dawn of time did not equal the mass of one unimportant, dead dwarf star. And sentience was but the billionth part of all the life in the universe.

The part that cared, the part that gave the dead rock and the fiery gas meaning.

And the part that clung so madly to each hour of its existence that it would sacrifice anything for a few more months of life.

That was the crime of Fortress Sol.

Dirk Lingo had done the impossible—he had invented a new sin. A sin not against men or gods, but against life itself. The universe, after all, was a vast battlefield where life warred against death, where awareness, sentience, intelligence, fought for survival in an infinite sea of nothingness.

And Fortress Sol had gone over to the enemy. No greater treason was possible. For the Duglaari Empire was not on the side of life; it was an agent of nothingness, of death.

Only now could Palmer understand the true nature of the enemy he had spent his life fighting. The Doogs were a thing insane. They did not fight to extend their territory, or increase their wealth or seed the dead universe with life. Death itself was the only Duglaari goal—the extinction of all other intelligent life. And when that mad goal was finally achieved, would the Doogs themselves have anything left to live for? Might not the Council of Wisdom simply shut itself down, and might not the Doogs themselves follow their computer into the final oblivion?

And nothing would remain anywhere, but flaming gas, and cold, cold rock, and hundreds of trillions of cubic miles of dead nothingness….

Palmer shook himself fearfully. He felt himself teetering on the edge of madness. These waters were too deep for any man to safely fathom alone….

And quite suddenly he knew that whatever his feelings, whatever his hate, he would sooner or later have to make at least a temporary peace with the Solarians. No man could bear to die this way, bereft of all human contact.

The Solarians were cowards, they were traitors, they were things unnameable, but at least they were human beings.

And whatever their sins, whatever hate there might be between them, they might very well be the last human beings he would ever see.

There was a knock on the door.

“Go away!” he snapped.

The knock became insistent.

“Go away, damn you!” Later, he knew, he would have to face them, but now hate was all that he could feel, and he wanted to be alone with the dying embers of his fury.

“It’s me,” said the voice of Robin Morel.

Who else? he thought grimly. The one he hated most, with the possible exception of Lingo, and of course the one he would be least able to turn away.

“All right, all right,” he muttered, “come on in.”

Robin kicked open the door and stood there, with an unbearable look of understanding and compassion on her face and a drink in either hand.

“Raul mixed us a couple of Supernovas,” she said, sitting down on the bed beside him. “Have one. It’ll make you feel a lot better.” She held out the small glass of blue liquid in her right hand.

“How do I know it’s not poison?” Palmer snapped sullenly.

“Don’t be juvenile, Jay. If we wanted to kill you, we wouldn’t have to resort to trickery to do it.”

“I’ve learned not to think I can understand the Solarian mind,” he said bitterly.

“Jay….” she sighed resignedly, and then gave a little laugh. “An old, old Terran toast,” she said, switching glasses. “If there be poison in thy wine, let my life pay for thine.”

Smiling, she downed the drink she had first offered him.

Palmer felt infinitely foolish and embarrassed, but also, somehow, quite touched. Wordlessly, he took the second glass.

Remembering the Nine Planets he had drunk, he was prepared for almost anything as he drank the clear blue liquid—anything but whash turned out to be like. It had no taste at all; it was exactly like a cool drink of water.

It glided tastelessly down his throat and into his belly. Suddenly he felt a strange sensation, as if a part of him were diffusing into the drink, rather than the drink diffusing into his bloodstream. He felt his emotions, his hate and fear and fury being leached from him, being compacted into an insufferable, dense, massive ball of emotional turmoil which seemed to be located in the pit of his stomach.

The rest of him, his freshly purged mind, now seemed cool, detached, insanely unemotional and objective, observing the burning, seething miniature sun that his emotions had become from an outside point of view, as a half-amused and half-repelled bystander.

As he watched the seething, churning, glowing ball of hate and fury and fear that was his own emotions, it seemed a thing apart, something alien and ludicrous.

Then it exploded.

For one terrible, nauseating instant, he felt the awful, monstrous, irresistible blast of his own hate sheer through his being like hard radiation through paper. Then it was past him and it was gone.

Completely gone. He felt cleansed by the fire of its passing; cleansed and tranquil and open. The hate had not been a part of himself; it had been the product of the confluence of outside forces beyond his control, and when it had exploded in a blast of cleansing fire, it had expended itself and left him a creature of his own ego and will once more.

Robin laughed softly.

“And that.” she said, “is why it’s called a Supernova.”

He looked at her with his calm new eyes, and he saw not a traitor, but simply a human being, a woman. She too might’ve been in the thrall of outside forces somehow lodged, horrid and alien and inescapable within her, but whatever she and the other Solarians had done, however black their crime, they too were in a sense victims. Victims and victimizers in one body, light and darkness in one mind—they were human beings, after all.

“I guess I’ve been acting pretty melodramatically,” Palmer said, rather sheepishly.

“No more than we have been,” she answered. “The difference is that we were doing it for a reason. But then part of the reason was so that you would act the way you did.”

“This thing must’ve really made me drunk. I don’t understand you at all.”

She laughed, but there was something sad behind it. “No, Jay,” she said. “You’re not drunk. A Supernova doesn’t get you drunk; what it does is let you see your emotions as something apart from the rest of you for a while. It sort of lets you see them from the outside, as if your mind were a detached observer. It isolates your emotions and calms you down. If anything, you’re more sober now than before you drank it.”

“If I’m not drunk, then what in blazes did you mean about your doing what you did so that I’d do what I did? Sounds like a lot of doubletalk to me.”

She seemed to be studying him carefully, almost clinically. “I guess you’re ready to hear the truth,” she said. “At least part of it.”

“That’s all I get around here,” he snapped. “Little pieces of the truth and great big slices of lies.”

She smiled sardonically. “I see that the drink is already beginning to wear off,” she said. “Too bad the effects can’t be made permanent. Just try to remember how you felt without your emotions clouding your mind.”

Suddenly Palmer realized that he did feel different again. He was no longer completely and coldly rational. Once more, he felt the old mixture of confusion, fury and hate. But it was different now; it could never again be completely the same. He had seen that there was another side to his feelings, that the situation did look different when he saw it completely stripped of his emotions. And even though his emotions were fast returning, he realized that the memory of that other, now-alien, point of view had muted and softened them permanently.

“You’ve been playing games with my mind all along, haven’t you?” he said. “From the first minute I boarded this ship. Why? What do you have to gain?”

Robin sighed deeply, and her face and posture seemed to relax, as if a great burden had at last been lifted from her.

“Yes…” she murmured. “In a way we have been…changing you. But largely for your gain, not ours. Try to think of yourself as you were at the beginning, before you met us, and then compare that memory with what you are now. Don’t you approve of the changes?”

He thought back…and the weeks seemed as years. He realized that he had expanded his mental universe; experienced more, in terms of new human relationships, learned more, deepened more, grown more, in these few weeks than he had in the entire previous decade. He felt ten years older; not ten years more tired, but ten years more mature. Though he had been breveted to the largely meaningless rank of general, he had still had the mentality of a Fleet Commander. Now he understood things about the Duglaari, The War, the human mind, Sol, that not even a Confederal High Marshal could fathom. The rank of general was no longer an empty mockery; it was now merely his due.

He had changed, and he found that he did approve of the changes, for the changes had been growth.

“It startles you, when you turn around and look behind you, doesn’t it?” Robin said. “You really are a better man now than the one you started as. For instance, you would not have doubts about your fitness now, were you to become Confederation Commander-in-Chief, as you someday may. Because you know that you’n now thg enough man for the job now. If anything, the job is too small for you.”

“What does that matter now, even if it is true?” he snapped. “The War’s lost. Sol is about to be destroyed, and when that news gets to the Confederation, there won’t be any will to fight left. Thanks to you.”

“You don’t know it all yet, Jay. I think you’re ready for the rest—at least a good part of it. It’s time you spoke to Dirk. He’s got an apology to make.”

“An apology? How do you apologize for treason?”

She shrugged. “Go on up to the control room and find out,” she said.

Lingo was alone in the control room, staring out into the meaningless swirl of Stasis-Space, a strange half-bitter, half-triumphant smile on his face.

“Sit down, Jay,” he said, easing himself into his pilot’s seat.

Palmer sat down next to Lingo. “Robin said you had an apology to make,” he said tonelessly. “I suppose you know where you can stick your apology. How can you apologize for your stupidity—trying to sell out the human race?”

Lingo laughed harshly. “Traitor, I can understand…” he said, “but I’m injured when you accuse me of stupidity.”

“Come off it, Lingo!” Palmer snapped. “You know damn well you blew it. I can understand what you were trying to do, even if it does turn my stomach. Bluff the Duglaari into leaving Sol alone, even using the entire Human Confederation as a kind of consolation prize to the Doogs. Then, if those super-weapons do have time to be developed, when all mankind is dead but you…. But you were a little too smart, weren’t you? You got the Doogs a little too scared, didn’t you? And now you’ll never have a chance to build any superweapons.”

Lingo turned to Palmer, his face convulsed with laughter. “So you believed it too!” he finally said. “Let me congratulate myself! Jay, weren’t all those superweapons somehow familiar? Didn’t they sound terribly like the sort of nonsense the Confederation propaganda section is always churning out? They should, you know, since they were lifted verbatim from Confederation propaganda. Each and every one of them was a lie. No one will be able to build weapons like those for centuries, if ever. Let me tell you, Jay, four hundred Duglaari warships would have little trouble defeating the forces of Fortress Sol, let alone four thousand.”

“Then what in blazes can you find to laugh about? So it was all a bluff to make the Doogs think Sol was too tough a nut to crack, and it backfired! Now the Duglaari will attack Sol with ten times the force necessary to wipe you out. By your own admission, you’ve outsmarted yourself!”

Lingo shook his head. “Ah, Jay,” he said, “surely you are capable of more subtlety than that! Haven’t you ever heard of Brer Rabbit?”

“Who?”

“Brer Rabbit. An ancient Terran folk legend. Brer Rabbit was a machiavellian little bunny who lived in a thorny briar patch. One careless day, he was captured by his arch-enemy, Brer Fox. Brer Fox amused himself by reciting a long catalogue of atrocities he was going to inflict on his victim. But instead of the expected reaction—fear and hate—poor Brer Fox found himself being thanked by Brer Rabbit for his infinite mercy. Finally, Brer Fox demanded to know why he was being thanked for his promise to skin Brer Rabbit alive and boil him in oil. To which our hero replied: You promised you’d only boil me in oil, skin me alive, and eat me. But thank you, Brer Fox! At least you’re not going to throw me into that awful briar patch.”

“So? What does that have to do with….?”

“Really, Jay!” sighed Lingo. “Can’t you guess what Brer Fox did then? He threw Brer Rabbit into the briar patch, of course! Exactly what our clever little bunny was angling for all along.”

Palmer’s jaw fell. “You mean….?”

“What else?” said Lingo, with a shrug and a grin. “From beginning to end, everything went exactly according to plan.”

He sighed, frowned, and stared at Palmer with a sad, contrite expression.

“And that’s what I want to ask you to forgive me for, Jay,” Lingo said. “You were used. You were part of the plan too. Did you ever ask yourself what in blazes we needed a so-called Ambassador from the Confederation for? After all, if, as we told Kurowski, the whole surrender business was simply a ruse to get to see the Kor, we could’ve faked an ambassador too, couldn’t we?”

“But it wasn’t! You really did plan to surrender the Confederation, so you did need an Ambassador.”

Lingo shook his head. “Don’t be juvenile!” he said sharply. “Do you really suppose the Confederation would’ve honored any surrender you made? Of course not, not in a million years! And do you think we would be so stupid as to think that you’d agree to a surrender in the first place? Jay, we needed you along to do exactly as you did.”

“What? You needed someone to try to kill you?”

“Precisely. It made the whole thing credible. We had to make sure that the Doogs really believed that we were throwing the Confederation to the wolves. And the only way to convince them of that, was to have you believe it too, and act accordingly. Let me congratulate you, Jay. You played the part of the betrayed Confederation Ambassador perfectly.”

“Believe me, Lingo,” Palmer snapped, “I wasn’t acting!”

“Of course you weren’t. That’s the whole point. You would never have been able to fool the Doogs if you were. You had to really believe that you were being betrayed.”

“But why?”

“To make the whole thing credible,” Lingo said patiently. “Your attack on me convinced the Kor that we really were ready to hand over the Human Confederation. And once he was convinced of that—or I should say, once the Council of Wisdom was convinced—the rest followed logically: Fortress Sol is no longer protecting the Confederation. Therefore Sol is using the Confederation to buy time. Therefore, Fortress Sol expects to have use for that time. Therefore the superweapons that I told them about may actually be in the process of being built. Therefore, it behooves the Duglaari Empire to take no chances, alter its plans and attack Sol now, rather than after the Confederation is destroyed.”

“You…. you mean the whole thing, the whole purpose of the mission, was to get the Duglaari Empire to attack Fortress Sol?”

“To be more precise,” Lingo said dryly, “our purpose was to get the Doogs to attack Fortress Sol in overwhelming force.”

It explained everything! Palmer was staggered. All the inconsistencies fell into place. The Solarians had told the General Staff one improbable story so that they could get a Confederal Ambassador. They needed an Ambassador so that they could convince the Kor of still another lie. The Kor and the Council of Wisdom had to believe that lie about superweapons so that they would immediately attack Fortress Sol!

It all added up, in logical sequence. But the sum total was madness!

“But why, Lingo, why?” he exclaimed. “What’ve you accomplished? Only the destruction of Fortress Sol!”

Lingo smiled slyly. “What’ve we accomplished? Only what no one has been able to do in three centuries! Think man, think! For three hundred years, the Duglaari have been fighting the War their way. They started out with an advantage in ships, and they’ve been very careful never to risk losing it. They’ve never risked more than three hundred ships in a single battle.”

“Of course not. Neither have we, for that matter. No single solar system is worth risking three hundred ships. It’s ships that count in a war like this.”

“Exactly, Jay, exactly. The Doogs have been having everything their way: this is a war of attrition, a war where relative numbers of ships is what counts, a war where they started out with a sizeable advantage. And so our completely logical friends have never risked endangering that advantage. It’s been their war, on their terms, all the way. Until now, that is!”

̴I still don’t understand. Having four thousand Duglaari ships attack Fortress Sol is somehow one for our side?”

“Come on, Jay, use your head!” Lingo said. “Never before have the Doogs risked a tenth of what they’re risking now. For the first time in the history of The War, we’ve forced them into fighting on our terms. It’s no longer a war of attrition, a war we had to lose. We’ve maneuvered them into staking the entire outcome of The War on one single battle! What would happen if that entire fleet of four thousand Doog warships attacking Sol were to be completely wiped out?”

“Why…why…the entire course of The War would be changed! It’d be turned around. We’d have the advantage in ships. It’d be our war!”

Suddenly, he realized the enormity of what had happened. The fate of the entire human race would depend on what happened when the huge Doog armada attacked Fortress Sol. If Sol were destroyed, the fight would go completely out of the Confederation, and the Duglaari would be left with only a simple mop-up operation. But if the Duglaari fleet were destroyed by the Solarian superweapons…superweapons? Superweapons? But…but….

“But the superweapons don’t exist!” he exclaimed. “It was all a lie! You said so yourself. There aren’t any superweapons. Why…why you said that four hundred Doog ships could easily defeat the forces of Sol!”

“So I did,” said Lingo. “And that was a pretty conservative figure.”

“But then all you’ve done is insure our defeat! The Doogs will annihilate Sol, and….”

“Ah,” said Lingo with an enigmatic smile that contained both a trace of triumph and one of…almost regret, “but there is one weapon you have overlooked. One weapon the Kor has not considered. One weapon that we’ve had all along.”

“All along? But what is it?”

Lingo turned, and stared off into the enigmatic maelstrom of Stasis-Space, through which the ship was hurtling at many times the objective speed of light towards its rendezvous with Armageddon. His face seemed to drain of all color, and when he spoke, the words were somehow leaden with bitterness.

“What else?” Lingo said, withdrawing into his own thoughts.

“What else but Fortress Sol?”

Chapter XI

MAX AND LINDA were fooling around listlessly with the telepathy table. Robin and Dirk were off together in the control room, withdrawing into each other, as they had been doing more and more of the time in the past week or sodrain

Fran Shannon was slumped in a chair, half-reading a book of poetry. Ortega diddled aimlessly about the bar.

The total effect was a combination of impatience and foreboding, like a man with a toothache waiting in a dentist’s office. The pattern of life in the Solarian Organic Group had changed, had adapted itself to the new moody feeling in the air.

It was hard for Palmer to put his finger on the individual differences—it was a total effect compounded out of dozens of subtle changes: the way Max and Linda spent more and more time staring silently at each other, communicating wordlessly and deeply in the intertwining of their minds; the way Robin and Lingo went off for longer and more frequent periods to be alone together; the way Fran Shannon was trying, largely unsuccessfully, to withdraw into the books; the way Ortega seemed overstuffed with directionless nervous energy.

And yet, the Solarians were still very much a Group. Somehow, their individual psychic needs had changed, and the patterns within the Group had altered themselves in response. The communal spirit was still there, but now it was closer akin to the togetherness of an old couple, sharing silences more than words.

To an outsider, the effect was somehow maddening, and Palmer felt his nerves drawing even tighter.

“Damn it, Raul,” he said, picking up a glass nervously from the bar and ringing it with his thumbnail, “what’s going on?”

“Huh?” muttered Ortega, withdrawing suddenly from some private reverie. “Oh, nothing much, Jay…just thinking.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Everyone’s so keyed up, so wrapped up in themselves.”

“You’re not exactly loose as a goose yourself, you know,” Ortega said.

“Well after all, the fate of the entire human race is going to be decided in a few weeks or so,” Palmer said. “It’s pretty hard to accept—the decisive battle. After you’ve been conditioned to believe that The War would last at least another century….”

“It still may,” said Ortega, pouring himself a small shot of whiskey. “In fact, it almost certainly will, no matter what happens. Even if the Doogs lose four thousand ships, they’ll still have three thousand left, after all. The Duglaari Empire just won’t dry up and blow away. They’ll be in the same position the Confederation is in now—fighting a hopeless holding action in a war they can’t win, losing solar systems, one by one…. It’d probably go on for at least another century. The big difference would be that we’d be the ones assured of eventual victory.”

“And if the Doogs wipe out Sol,” Palmer said, “the Confederation won’t be any worse off, militarily speaking, than it is right now. The defeat’ll be purely psychological, and they’ll fightt on listlessly for a few more decades.”

“They?” said Ortega, arching his eyebrows. “They, not we?“

“Pour me one too, Raul,” Palmer said. “Yes, I said they. As for me, I don’t know who or what I am any more. I’ve spent too much time with your people. I know too much about the real nature of the Doogs and The War to feel like just another Confederal citizen.”

He sipped moodily at his drink. “Robin told me I’d changed, and when I took a good look at myself, I was really surprised. I hate to admit it, but there’s something…incomplete and naive about the Confederation. I can’t feel completely a part of it any more.”

“Pentagon City,” Ortega mumbled.

“What?”

“Pentagon City. It sums up what’s wrong with the whole Human Confederation. Doesn’t it remind you of someplace else, now?”

“Why…it does. It…it somehow reminds me of Duglaar! Of the Hall of Wisdom! In a less thorough way, it’s just as ugly, just as functional, and…”

“And just as much a dead end,” Ortega said. “Specialization, Jay, specialization. A law of evolution: the more specialized a species becomes, the closer it is to extinction. What happens when The War is over, assuming that the Doogs are wiped out? What then? Like a cheap imitation of the Duglaari Empire, the Human Confederation is specialized for war in every way: economically, scientifically, psychologically. Even religiously—the only ‘religion’ of the Confederation is the myth of Fortress Sol; strictly a warrior’s religion. The only thing holding the Confederation together is The War. There isn’t even a Confederal government as such, just the Combined Human Military Command. It can’t survive peace.”

Palmer drained his glass. “It’s true,” he said. “The future of the human race is Fortress Sol, if there is a future. I’ve been feeling it all along, but I’ve been afraid to admit it to myself. You people have something…. A new kind of humanity, based on what’s human about the human race. The Confederation is a dead end, a denial of what makes a man a man. I only wish….”

“You only wish what, Jay?”

Palmer sighed. A dam within him seemed to burst, and deep waters indeed flowed forth. “I only wish I could be a part of it, Raul. I know that you’ve tried to help me become a part of it, and now I can at least appreciate what you’ve tried to do. But it can’t work; I’m too much a part of the Confederation. I’ve got too many years of a different culture behind me. I can’t be a part of what you are….

“And yet, now that I’ve had a taste of something better, I can’t be a part of what the Confedration is either. I’m alone, Raul. I’m the most alone human being in the Galaxy. I know too much, and I know too little…. Hell, pour me another drink. A big one.”

Ortega filled Palmer’s glass up to the rim and then refilled his own.

“No, Jay,” he said, staring into the depths of his glass, “you’re wrong again. We’re not the future. We can’t be. There are only five billion of us, and two hundred billion people in the Confederation. We can only be a seed, a germ, the beginning of something. We must be absorbed into the totality of the human race, like any other favorable mutation. We’re not the human race of the future; we’re a new thing that must become part of the human race.”

He drained his glass and stared at Palmer. There was something in his eyes that seemed almost envy.

“You’re the future, Jay,” he said.

“Me? I’m not part of anything. I’m not a Solarian, and I’m no longer part of the Confederation either. I’m nowhere.”

“The future is always nowhere, Jay. It’s the creatures who are ousted from their familiar environments who have always been forced to evolve. And the future is always alone. The first fish to be flung up on the land and live long enough to breed was alone. The first monkey to come down from the trees was alone. The first men to colonize the stars were alone. There couldn’t be any change if there weren’t someone who couldn’t feel a part of everything else that already was.”

“That’s not a very comfortable view of the universe, Raul.”

“It’s not a very comfortable universe! It wasn’t designed by you or me or by the first Kor of the Duglaari, either. The universe couldn’t care less about your comfort, Jay. And if you’ll forgive me—and even if you won’t—neither do we.”

“What do you mean? How is it your fault?”

“You think it isn’t?” sighed Ortega. “Jay, when we decided to take along an Ambassador from the Confederation, we wanted more than just a dupe. Hell, as far as that goes, Kurowski would’ve played the part better than you. And don’t think we couldn’t have bulldozed Kurowski into coming along, if we had wanted to. But we didn’t want a Kurowski. Remember, way back when we first landed on Olympia III, how Max and Linda went through everyone’s minds? It wasn’t idle curiosity; they were looking for something. They were looking for you, in effect. They were looking for a potential that had been thwarted. They were looking for a man capable of meaningful change—and you must realize by now that that’s not so common in the Confederation. To be blunt, they were looking for the right guinea pig. You were an experiment, Jay. If it’s any consolation to you, we consider the experiment a success.”

Ortega’s words bit into Palmer like the cold of space itself. “What are you talking about?” he said sharply. But he knew, and he knew he knew.

Ortega nodded, as if in response to Palmer’s thoughts, rather than his words. He seemed unable to meet Palmer’s eyes.

“We had to know whether the humans of the Confederation were capable of change, capable of accepting that new thing which we had become as a part of the whole of mankind,” Ortega said slowly.

“If the human race were ever to become whole again, there would have to be men who could stand apart from both the Confederation and Sol, men who would be neither Solarians, nor trapped in the dead end that the Confederation had become. Men like you, Jay. A bridge between us and the rest of the human race. The Organic Group is the social unit of the future—but people who are too deeply a part of one can’t bring it to people who are not. And someone who is part of the Confederation cannot understand that the Confederation must change. Yes…that’s what you are Jay: a bridge. A bridge between the past and the future. Whether you’re happy about it or not, that’s what we made of you.”

“I suppose I should hate you,” Palmer said. “But I really can’t do that any more. I understand you too well. Fortress Sol itself is an experiment too, isn’t it? MacDay’s experiment. And if you ask me, MacDay was crueler to you than you’ve been to me. Because he didn’t even know what he was trying to achieve. He forced you to change, but he didn’t know to what. You were guinea pigs too, Raul.”

Ortega laughed. “I suppose so,” he said. “Maybe all human beings are guinea pigs, one way or another. If not ours, or MacDay’s, then evolution’s. Welcome to the club, fellow guinea pig!”

He held out his hand.

Palmer took it.

Ortega refilled the glasses. “Let’s drink to all guinea pigs,” he said, “past, present and future.”

“If there is a future,” Palmer said, draining his glass. He took the bottle and poured another round.

“One more toast,” he said, hoisting his glass. “To home, wherever that may be.”

Ortega slammed his glass down on the bar. A dark shadow crossed his face. “I don’t want to drink to that” he said coldly.

“What’s the matter? You’re going home, aren’t you? Home to Sol, home to Earth. I wish….”

“Don’t wish!” Ortega snapped. “Don’t wish when you don’t know what you’re wishing for. I wish I weren’t going home. I wish I were going anywhere but Sol. Home…. You’re better off without a home, Jay. Home is only someplac you have to leave.”

“You mean the Duglaari fleet? But you’re the ones who made the Duglaari decide to attack Sol in the first place. Lingo said something about one real superweapon….”

Ortega snorted. “Yeah, the weapon…” he said bitterly. “Only there’s nothing super about it, Jay. You don’t get something for nothing. Every victory has a price, and the greater the victory, the bigger the price. And sometimes, you have to pay the price in advance, and hope that the goods are delivered.”

He finished his drink, and got out from behind the bar.

“All of a sudden, I don’t feel very sociable,” he said. “I think I’ll go check in the control room.”

And he left Palmer staring confusedly at the empty glasses.

There was something wrong, something strange beyond the usual strangeness of the Solarians, which Palmer had more or less gotten used to, going on.

Palmer was sure of it, as he made his way from his cabin to the common room. With every day, the ship was getting closer and closer to Sol. Yet, instead of the spirits of the Solarians becoming ever more buoyant as they approached their home sun, a strange ominous brooding had slowly but steadily come over them.

It showed in a hundred little things: the subdued and trivial talk at meals, the choice of music played on the hi-fi, the way they seemed to become upset at the most inexplicable times, the way Ortega had that time in the common room….

Whatever it was, it was something they could not, or would not share with him. It was a wall between them, and every attempt he had made to break through it had been met by a gentle rebuff.

For reasons of their own, the Solarians were keeping something else from him.

Well, he thought, as he entered the common room, whatever it is, it can’t last much longer. We’re only a day or so from Sol itself.

He looked around the common room. The lighting seemed to be strangely subdued. Max and Linda were seated together on the couch, communing wordlessly with each other. Fran Shannon was puttering listlessly about the bookcases. Robin was standing next to the hi-fi. She nodded to him, turned on the hi-fi and sat down in a lounge chair. Palmer sat down next to her.

He was about to say something trivial when the music she had put on caught his ear. It was like nothing he had ever heard before, a crazy jumping from theme to theme, melody to melody, style to style. Even the instruments playing the music seemed to change every few bars: traditional strings to guitar-and-banjo, to primitive drums, to a full orchestral percussion section, to flute-and-drum, to sounds and instruments he had never heard before.

The mood, the tone, the whole feeling of the piece med to change every few seconds. It was orchestral, folk, electronic…every kind of music Palmer could remember hearing and more. Yet there was an uncanny unity to it, as if all the diverse elements were still part of some all-embracing whole.

“What is that?” he asked Robin.

She appeared lost in the music, staring moodily off into space.

“Robin,” he said. “Robin, what is that?”

She turned to him slowly, as if she were reluctantly rousing from some powerful, all-embracing dream.

“That was composed not too long ago. A few months before we left Sol. It’s called the Song of Earth.”

The music went on, and now Palmer began to understand it. The composer, for reasons of his own, had tried to capture all the music of Man’s home planet, the music of all times and all places, and put in into one kaleidoscopic piece that would capture the entire musical heritage of a variegated planet whole.

It seemed that, to a remarkable degree, he had succeeded.

As the music skittered about like a nervous chameleon, Fran Shannon walked over to the smell-organ and began to play, matching odor with melody, smell-chords with the ever-changing style of the music, so that the effect was as of an aural and olfactory odyssey through the endless panoply of cultures, races and peoples that through the millenia had shared the planet called Earth.

Palmer had never thought very much about music or odor symphonies, but he found himself transported, taken over entirely by the mingling flux of sound and smell. Flutes and oak forests…bagpipes and heather…guitars and castinets and the smell of garlic and saffron…. Ever-changing, faster and faster, now flowing into one another, merging, combining, recombining.

Palmer looked at Max and Linda. They had come out of their telepathic communion, and they were listening to the joyous music, the music and smells of Earth, the distillations of millenia of history and thousands of cultures, a heritage that was richer and more convoluted than the cultures of all planets in the Confederation combined. But the expressions on their faces were not in keeping with the scintillating patterns of smell and sound. Their mouths were grim and drawn, and their eyes were wet with tears….

Palmer turned to Robin. She was biting her lower lip with her upper teeth. Her hands were balled into tight fists, and she was crying.

And then the music began to subtly change, and the smells began to change with it.

It was impossible for Palmer to tell just when the change had begun or what precisely it was. The shifts in styles and instruments and cultures began to speed up gradually. At some indefinable point, the music and the smells, the quick flux of the patterns crossed the threshold between the scintillating and the frantic.

The quality of the tape changed too: it was as if it had been recorded at one speed, re-recorded at a faster speed, and then slowed down again. The effect was thinness, frenzy and an almost forlorn wailing quality.

Fran had changed her style on the smell-organ to fit the change. The smells were coming far too fast now; they were mingling with each other in strange and nauseating combinations. Common, innocuous, even pleasant odors were combining into one pervasive, awful stench—the odor of decay, the stink of loss, the reek of death.

Somehow, the gay kaleidoscopic sounds and smells had been transmitted into a frantic, forlorn, mournful dirge played at triple time. The entire composition now seemed like the final moments of a drowning man—a lifetime of impressions, sensations, memories trying hopelessly to crowd themselves into a few transitory moments.

Faster and faster the music and the odors swirled, mounting into a hideous cry of mortal terror and loss, a choking, all-enveloping stench of destruction and lost civilizations, till Palmer could no longer stand it, till his ears ached and his stomach quivered.

And then, suddenly, abruptly, without warning—silence.

Utter silence, a silence so heavy, so deadening, so loud that it seemed the voice of death itself.

For long moments, Palmer sat, stupefied. What would cause anyone to write a thing like that, he wondered numbly. It was a work of unbelievable genius but of equally unbelievable horror. And what was it called? The Song of Earth!

Finally, Palmer turned to Robin. “What…” he muttered, “why…?”

She turned to him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Jay…” she said, “in a million years, I wouldn’t be able to find the words to tell you. In a….”

Suddenly, Raul Ortega stuck his head into the control room. “Come on, everyone!” he shouted. “Come on up to the control room. “We’re there! It’s time to come out of Stasis-Space!”

Palmer got up and, along with Max and Linda and Robin, tensely followed Ortega down the corridor. The six Solarians were merely going home—although it had become obvious that, for some dark reason, they felt little joy in the homecoming.

But he was about to see that which no living human of the Confederation had ever set eyes upon: Man’s original solar system, Sol; Man’s maternal planet, the Earth.

Not for over two hundred and fifty years had a Confederal expedition even tried to penetrate the limits of the Sol system. That last expedition, two and a half centuries ago, had run into a vast minefield enclosing the system just beyond the orbit of Pluto with a globe of certain death: automated lase-cannon mines, like those the Doogs used; thousand megaton fusion bombs with five hundred mile radius proximity fuses; fragmenton mines that could fill ten cubic miles of space with near-microscopic, metal-eroding carborundum particles.

Half that expedition had been destroyed trying to go through the minefield. The rest had finally turned back before reaching the orbit of Pluto, but not before catching glimpses of the Solarian armada waiting to destroy any ship that by crazy luck might penetrate the minefield. The Solarian ships had obviously been constructed without Stasis-Field generators, for they were so huge that it was mathematically impossible to construct a Stasis-Field big enough to contain them. In fact, they were probably little more than huge Resolution Field Generators, which could be built virtually any size—the perfect defensive weapon. Destined never to leave their own systems, there was no need to limit the size of the ships or their Resolution Field generators to that which could be encompassed by a Stasis-Field. Together with the minefields, the monster ships had made Sol virtually impregnable to Confederal forces.

And now, at last, a Confederal general would penetrate to the heart of Fortress Sol, to Earth itself, unmolested.

Palmer grimaced ironically to himself as he entered the control room. A few weeks ago, he would’ve given anything for this opportunity. Now it was essentially meaningless. The fate of the human race would be decided right here, and not by the Confederation, but by Solarians. If he lived to carry back word of any of the secrets he was about to learn, those secrets would have already become quite meaningless. And if the Confederation would still have use for such secrets, it would mean that he wouldn’t be around to tell anyone….

“Well, Jay,” said Lingo, “in about one minute, you’ll see Sol itself. I suppose that’s a sight you never thought to see.”

“Not under these circumstances, anyway,” Palmer said.

“Thirty seconds, Dirk,” Fran Shannon said. “Twenty…ten…five…four…three…two…one…now!”

Lingo pressed the button. The swirl of Stasis-Space disappeared, and the stars came out, red, blue, yellow.

Centered in the red circle indicating the ship’s line of flight was a bright yellow star, at this distance, the brightest thing in the viewscreen.

A curious, unanimous sigh came from the throats of the Solarians as they stared somehow forlornly at that yellow sun.

And Palmer gazed for the first time on Man’s home sun, the forlorn hope of a war-torn humanity, Fortress Sol.

It was just another G-type star; in fact it could just as well have been Dugl. There was no way of telling, at this distance, and far-off Sirius was almost as bright. An obscure, medium-sized yellow star in an out-of-the-way part of the Galaxy, lost in a vast sea of similar balls of gas.

But it was home.

Palmer was astonished at what he felt. He had never seen this yellow sun; he had never even been within seventy light-years of it before. He had been born on the fourth planet of Brycion, a sun not even visible from Earth. Not one atom of his body had ever felt the heat of Sol.

Yet somehow, the ordinary, middle-sized sun seemed far brighter than it should have; its light seemed somehow richer, somehow more benign, as if Sol itself were welcoming its long-lost son home.

“It’s…it’s beautiful…” he muttered inanely.

“It’s just another G-type star,” Lingo snapped unexpectedly, his voice heavy with bitterness. “Just another ball of gas.”

“How can you say that, man?” Palmer exclaimed. “It’s Sol! It’s the home system of the human race. It’s your home sun. Don’t you have any feeling at all?”

“Don’t I…?” Lingo fell silent, and no one else seemed willing to speak. The seven of them stared for long minutes at Sol, and Palmer thought he saw a tear form on Linda Dortin’s cheek. Max squeezed her hand and Robin leaned on Lingo’s shoulder.

“Just another G-type sun,” Lingo finally repeated, with unnatural harshness. “There are a billion others just like it, so let’s stop mooning over it.” His voice quavered slightly.

“Resolution Field on,” he said coldly. “We’ll soon be crossing the orbit of Pluto. Watch out for military secrets, Jay.” The joke fell very flat.

As the ship began to accelerate faster and faster, Palmer saw that the nearby space was filled with mines—there must’ve been close to a billion of them surrounding Sol, for even in the limited field of vision of the viewscreen, he could see perhaps a dozen.

As they passed close by one of the mines, Palmer could see that it was lasecannon type: muzzles projecting in all directions, and antennae of all kinds sprouting all over the globular mine. Of course the mine would not open fire—it would naturally be programmed to distinguish and pass Solarian ships. But….

There was something very wrong. The various sensing devices and antennae were mounted on universal joints so that they could monitor space in all directions, sweeping their laser and radar beams in regular patterns through all quadrants, gathering data from all directions.

But the antennae were not moving. They remained stationary. The mine was dead, deactivated.

“That one’s defective,” he muttered to Lingo. “You ought to report it.”

Lingo said nothing.

As they neared the orbit of Pluto, they passed close to another mine. This one too was dead.

p height="0em" width="13" align="justify">“Another dead one!” Palmer exclaimed. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Jay,” Lingo said. “They’re not defective. They’ve all been deactivated, except for tell-tale camera satellites scattered through the system to give us visual pickups from anywhere we want to see close up.”

“What? But the Doogs….”

Lingo grimaced. “This minefield was never designed to ward off a concentrated attack by four thousand warships,” he said. “There are several ways for that many ships to find a way through. That’s what the Council of Wisdom meant by it being mathematically impossible for any solar system to withstand attack by four thousand ships.”

“We’re crossing the orbit of Pluto now,” Fran Shannon announced.

“Okay, give me an indicator around Saturn.”

A small circle appeared around a barely visible point of light. Lingo maneuvered the ship so that the smaller circle was centered in the larger one indicating the ship’s line of flight.

“Why are we going to Saturn?” Palmer asked.

“We’re not,” said Lingo. “I thought we’d give you the Grand Tour on the way in, Jay. The Rings of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars…. You’ve never seen any of it, and old Sol has some pretty interesting children, for an ordinary G-type sun. I thought…er…I thought you might like to see the sights, since…er….”

Palmer studied the faces of the Solarians, and he thought he understood. They might pretend that the tour was for him, and he saw no reason to deny them the comfortable self-deception, but this might very well be the last chance they would ever have to see the planets of their own solar system…. In a few weeks this system, or what was left of it, might very well be just another part of the ever-growing Duglaari Empire….

“Saturn,” said Lingo, in a tone of almost boyish pride, “the largest ringed planet in the known Galaxy, in fact one of only three such planets. Totally useless itself, but with a moon bigger than a lot of planets—Titan, one of the few satellites in the Galaxy with an atmosphere.”

Palmer stared in wonder at the great gas giant surrounded by its rings of ice particles, like planet-wide rainbows shimmering in the black of space. Surely, one of the most beautiful sights in the Galaxy.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, unable to express any less banal a thought. Then a dark cloud crossed his mind.

“The Doogs don’t even have the concept of beauty, do they?” he said. “It’d be just another uninhabitable gas giant to them, wouldn’t it? Just another piece of useless booty.”

“The Doogs don’t even have the concept of booty,” Lingo said. “But I promise you one thing: one way or another, they’ll never occupy this system.

“Never!” he hissed savagely.

Onward they sped, past Jupiter, the giant of the Sol system, a gas giant so huge that Man came close to never being born. For had Jupiter been a magnitude or two bigger, had the birth of Sol gone just slightly different, Jupiter might’ve become a small star itself, combining its radiation with that of Sol to make Earth a planet where nothing organic could live.

As they passed Mars, where a race that had died while Earth’s life was still confined to the oceans had futilely girdled a whole planet with canals to preserve an inexorably dwindling water supply, Palmer first realized that something was very wrong.

Mars had been the first planet men had ever colonized; the colonization of Mars was the basis for countless plays, novels and other works of historical fiction. The surface of Mars had been speckled with domed cities for many centuries. Mars was Sol’s second most populous body.

But the cities showed no lights. The skys showed no aircraft, and the space around Mars was totally devoid of ships.

“What’s wrong?” Palmer asked. “The whole planet’s dead! The Doogs couldn’t have gotten here already, could they?”

“Of course not,” said Lingo. “Calm down. The planet’s been evacuated. Remember, we planned for a Duglaari attack on Sol. We knew it would happen months, even years in advance, so….”

“And Mars was too vulnerable, with all the breathable air confined in domed cities! Of course! The domed cities are sitting ducks.”

“Uh, huh…” Lingo grunted non-committally.

Palmer was beginning to wonder. There was something very peculiar going on. The mines deactivated…no ships sighted…Mars evacuated…the Solarians sullen and uncommunicative, touring the planets as if they were sure they would never see them again….

Could…? No, it was impossible! No one could be willing to settle for that—let the Duglaari have every planet in the Sol system except Earth itself, every planet in the entire Galaxy save one. Have the pitiful remnants of the human race voluntarily confine themselves to Earth alone, give up even the planets of Man’s home system in the wild hope that the Doogs would let one planet survive as a kind of reservation.

Condemn the human race to live in…in a zoo!

It was unthinkable! Even for Solarians! And yet, it did add up…the apparent lack of resistance, the evacuation of Mars….

Did the Doogs have zoos? Might they be interested in preserving a small remnant of a defeated human race as an exhibit?

Or as a source of subjects for unusually unpleasant experiments?

“Next stop, Earth,” Lingo said, snapping Palmer out of his troubled reverie.

Ridiculous! Palmer told himself. I’ve no reason to think that of them; they’ve proved that they care about the survival of the human race.

But might they care too much? Might not survival be Sol’s only goal?

Survival at any price.

He saw it first as a bright blue star, brighter than Venus as seen from its own surface. From just sunward of Mars, it was the fourth brightest object in space, outshone only by Mars, Jupiter and Sol itself.

But as soon as he was able to distinguish it with his eye, it outshone all else in his soul.

It was Earth.

Earth, the original Earth-type planet; Earth, the planet of the original 1-gee gravitational field, which all other gravitational fields were defined in terms of; Earth, whose very name meant simply “the ground”, “the world”; Earth, the only 1.000 Earth-normal planet.

Earth, the ancestral home of Man.

The sight of that sapphire point of light, waxing into a disc as they sped towards it, released a torrent of associations, of primal emotions in Palmer, to whom the planet was little more than a legend; a man whose body contained not an atom of Earth, but who was a son of Man’s home planet nevertheless.

For though he had never seen the Earth, the planet was inextricably a part of him, of his mind, of his way of thinking, of the very language he spoke. “Earth-normal…Earth-like…extraterrestrial…the good earth…brought to earth…unearthly…earthy….”A thousand words and phrases that he had used casually all his life now became pregnant with new meaning in the light of the blue planet.

As the disc grew larger and larger, Palmer knew that though Man might survive The War, though the human race live a billion years, spreading its seed throughout the Galaxy, even to Andromeda, begetting its kind on a million planets of a million suns, Man could never forget the small third planet of an insignificant yellow sun in the outer boondocks of the Galaxy that had given him birth. As a salmon somehow blindly negotiates a thousand miles of hostile waters to return to the pool where he was born, so men everywhere would always, in their hearts and minds and souls, in their languages, in their criteria of the universe, in the depths of their being, turn to this one small planet.

For it was home.

Not a word was spoken as the ship sped straight toward Earth; for no words were needed and none could be adequate.

In his three decades of life, Palmer had never felt what he was feeling now. He was coming home….

Now the ship crossed the orbit of Luna, that one moon in all the Galaxy known simply as the Moon. From Luna’s orbit, the sunlit portion of the Earth presented a spectacle that moved Palmer almost to tears.

The outlines of North and South America were clearly visible; greens and browns softened by the white fleece of cloud cover and surrounded by the luminous blue seas that gave the planet its brilliant sapphire sparkle as seen from Mars, the seas that were the ultimate womb of all life.

And Palmer knew that across those seas, over those continents, a wind blew that was clean and fresh and somehow right in the way that the wind of no other planet could be, no matter how…how Earthlike.

Home.

The ship spiraled Earthward, nearing the fuzzy line of Earth’s atmosphere-blurred terminator as it approached. Apparently, Lingo was going to land the ship somewhere on the night side.

Soon I’ll be standing on the surf ace of the Earth, Palmer thought, looking up at the stars as the first men must’ve seen them, never dreaming that someday their children would live on hundreds of alien worlds circling those far-off points of cold light.

The ship crossed the terminator and the night side of the Earth passed beneath them. Soon the jeweled lights of a thousand cities would appear like a terrestrial mirror of the stars.

But…but….

Palmer stared numbly at the night side of the Earth in uncomprehending horror. It was dark; it was totally dark, unlit by the light of a single city.

The lights of Earth’s cities were out.

And suddenly Palmer realized that Lingo was swinging the ship in a great parabola past Earth. The darkened disc was no longer waxing, it was waning. They were swinging around the Earth and continuing sunward.

“What…what are you doing? What’s happened to Earth’s cities? Wha…?”

“Nothing’s happened to Earth’s cities,” Lingo said. “Not yet, anyway. They’ve been evacuated.”

“Evacuated? But why?”

“That should be obvious, shouldn’t it, Jay?” Lingo said. “Earth is the prime target. Lighted, inhabited cities would be sitting ducks.”

“You meanem>expect the Doogs to get through to Earth? You goaded them into an attack knowing you couldn’t stop them short of Earth? Why, that’s…that’s….”

Lingo laughed humorlessly. “Inhuman?” he suggested. “Sac riligious? Jay, you’ve come a long, long way from the man you were when we left Olympia III, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve come all the way yet. The last step is the biggest and the hardest, because no one can lead you by the hand, no one can tell you. Some things you just have to live. Man or Duglaari will survive The War, one or the other, and not both. The primary goal of the human race,” Lingo said, with cruel emphasis, as if trying to convince not Palmer but himself, “must be to survive. To survive, no matter what, no matter how terrible the price, no matter what must be risked.”

He stared at Palmer, and, strangely, his eyes seemed to be pleading for approval. “If it was crucial to survival,” Lingo said, “if it meant the outcome of The War, one way or the other, you’d risk Olympia III, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course,” said Palmer. “But Olympia III is just another planet, even if it is the capital of the Confederation. This is Earth, you’re talking about, man! Earth….”

Lingo turned and stared stonily at the waning disc of the Earth. “It’s just another planet too, Jay,” he said over-sharply, obviously not quite believing it himself. “Just another planet. Man is more important than any planet, even this one. But I can’t expect you to feel that, not now. You think you’ve come a long way, Jay, and you have. But the final step is the biggest, and the most painful. And you’ll have to take it all at once, whether you like it or not. They’ll be no considering, no weighing, no….”

Lingo laughed bitterly. “I was going to say I pity you, Jay, but I really don’t. In a way, I envy you.”

“But…but why aren’t we landing on Earth?” Palmer muttered.

“Because our mission is elsewhere,” Lingo said, suddenly distant. “We’re going to Mercury.”

Although the lens of the viewscreen camera was covered with a heavy filter, the image was still blurred and overexposed, for Sol was a great ball of fire, completely dominating the sky of Mercury.

Why land here? Palmer knew that there had always been an outpost station or two in Mercury’s twilight zone, ever since the early days of interplanetary travel, but no one had ever thought seriously of colonizing Mercury. It was a half-molten ball of slag on the sunside, space-cold on the dark-side, totally devoid of atmosphere, bathed constantly in solar radiation—just about as useless a piece of real estate as a planet could possibly be.

Then Palmer saw that Lingo apparently had no intention of landing on Mercury. After much maneuvering, he put the ship into a low, precise polar orbit so that it would remain in the twilight zone throughout its orbital period.

“Lock us in on the station, Fran,” he said.

Fran Shannon busied herself with the radio. After a few minutes, s e looked up. “I’ve locked us in on the beacon,” she said. “We’re in range now, Dirk. Start broadcasting.”

Lingo activated his microphone.

“Phoenix…phoenix…phoenix…” he said, repeating the word over and over again.

Finally, a signal came in, blurred by the intense solar static, but readable. “Acknowledged…acknowledged…acknowledged…” droned a patently mechanical voice.

Lingo nodded and shut off the radio.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Too hot for comfort. Raul, start dropping tell-tales.”

Lingo broke orbit, and set the ship on a strange course, not outward but upward, perpendicular to the ecliptic. As the ship accelerated faster and faster, further away from the ecliptic, Palmer could see something small and metallic being dropped astern.

‘Tell-tale?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Ortega. “Just a camera and a transmitter. I think Dirk told you we’ve got them scattered throughout the system. Just dropping a few more for good measure. They can all be fed directly into the main viewscreen, so we can get close-ups of just about any location in the Sol system we want.”

“But where are we going?”

“Nowhere” Lingo replied, “absolutely nowhere.”

For hours, the ship kept accelerating, farther and farther above the ecliptic, pushed to near-light velocity by the Resolution Drive.

Finally, when Sol no longer showed a disc, when it was merely a bright star, Fran Shannon said: “We’re far enough now, Dirk. We could safely go into Stasis-Space any time.”

“Stasis-Space?” exclaimed Palmer. “Where are we going? Back to Olympia?”

“I told you,” said Lingo, “we’re not going anywhere.”

Instead of punching the Stasis-Space generator button, Lingo cut the Resolution Drive and locked the controls.

The ship floated dead in interstellar space.

“End of the line,” Lingo said. “We’ll wait here.”

“For what?” asked Palmer.

“What else?” replied Lingo. “For the Doogs, of course.”

Chapter XII

“DAMN IT, Dirk, why won’t any of you tell me what’s going on?” Palmer said, pounding his fist on the bartop. “We’ve been sitting out here in the middle of nowhere for over two weeks now, and no one will tell me a thing. Why, man, why?“

Lingo sighed and drummed his fingers in a little puddle of liquid that had been spilled on the bartop.

“Jay,” he said, slowly and hesitantly, as if groping for words, “we didn’t tell you what we were doing before we went before the Kor, and as you later learned, we had a good reason. We needed a certain reaction from you, and we wanted you to learn certain things in certain ways….”

“So? So what does that have to do with it?”

“So we had good reasons then,” Lingo said. “We have good reasons now.”

“That sounds pretty lame to me.”

Lingo grimaced. “I suppose I can understand that,” he admitted. “But the point is that there are some things which…well, which just are. Things which must be learned, but cannot be taught. You know, the best way to teach someone to swim is still throwing him in the water. You are the future, Jay, and if that future is to be anything but madness, you’ve got to become a bridge between Solarians and the Confederation. But you know all that by now…. You’ve come a long, long way, Jay, and we’re proud of you…and to be honest about it, a little proud of ourselves, too. You’ve proved that a man of the Confederation can at least come to understand Solarians. But that’s not enough. You’ve got to somehow become a real part of our Organic Group, emotionally, viscerally, or the whole thing is pointless.”

“But what’s that got to do with all this secrecy? For that matter, I’m perfectly willing to become part of the Group right now. Just tell me how.”

“Jay, Jay,” Lingo sighed. “I can’t tell you how. No one can really tell you how. How do you think a Group is formed in the first place? By drawing lots? By accident of birth? By a Master Computer like the Council of Wisdom? An Organic Group is a bunch of people who have shared enough deep and meaningful experiences so that they come to feel they are a Group. ‘Organic’ is the key word, Jay. It grows, like an organism, in a sense it is an organism. It isn’t formed, like some government. For instance, take us: Max and Linda happened to grow up together, close as only telepaths can be. I once saved Raul’s life. Robin saved mine. Robin and Raul were together in those days, and Raul became my enemy, brieflut that passed, and we became friends. Fran and I worked together in something like a local government, for years before the Group was formed…. Max and Raul…. but it’s pointless to go on. The point is that the formation of a Group is a slow, complex, arbitrary, essentially alogical business, like any other natural process. It involves shared emotions, good and bad, shared moments of fear and….”

Lingo paused, trying to grope for words which would not come.

“I just can’t find the words to tell you,” he finally said. “Because the whole concept is essentially non-verbal. All I can do is tell you a long series of half-truths, semi-truths and near-lies. I promise you one thing, Jay—if you do live through this, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I won’t tell you, and neither will anyone else, but you’ll know it because you’ll have lived it.”

“But why can’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“Because…because if I told you, you could never understand. You’d…you’d think we were monsters. You’d be too biased by foreknowledge to learn what you should learn from the experience.”

“I don’t understand.”

Lingo sighed heavily. “Of course you don’t,” he said. “I guess I can tell you this much, though—even if everything goes exactly as we’ve planned, even if we’ve figured the Doogs’ reactions correctly down to the tenth decimal place, something terrible is going to happen, something more terrible than any wild suspicion you can dream up. That’s why I can’t tell you what it is—because it’s worse than any fantasy secrecy could possibly create in your mind. I know, Jay, and believe me, I’d give almost anything to be able to change places with you.”

“But if it’s so horrible, then why…?”

“Why?” snapped Lingo. “Because it has to be done! The Organic Group has given men new levels of awareness, but don’t make the mistake of believing that increased awareness is always pleasant. Sometimes…well, just think of poor Douglas MacDay. He had a choice to make: do nothing, sit tight and live for today, and know that the human race will surely perish. Or plunge a solar system into chaos, into agony, into terror, in the hope that some day, somehow, something would emerge from the madness that might be able to save the human race. MacDay chose, and he chose well. What would you have done had you been Douglas MacDay?”

“I…I…I honestly don’t know, Dirk,” Palmer said.

“Nor do I…” said Lingo quietly. “Nor do I. I like to think I would’ve been man enough to do what he did, but maybe I’m just kidding myself…who knows? Who in hell knows…?”

Palmer eyed Lingo narrowly. “There’something else, isn’t there?” he said. “Something personal.”

Lingo stared downward at the bartop, not looking at Palmer, and when he spoke his voice was strangely constricted.

“Yes…” he mumbled, “I suppose there is…. Jay, sometimes, perhaps more often than not; men must choose, not between good and evil but between two different evils. Even if things work out well, when you make that kind of choice, one way or the other, you know it will haunt you for the rest of your life…. Douglas MacDay had that kind of choice to make, and so did we. MacDay chose, and he chose right, but he never lived to know whether he had been right. We’ve chosen too, but…. Well, there aren’t many Douglas MacDays. Jay, I think one of Man’s most basic and perverse needs is the need to be judged, to have some outside opinion on whether you’ve been right or wrong—whether you end up accepting that judgement or not. And I suppose that’s what we really need you for—to judge us. An unbiased, unprejudiced, un-preinforrried judge….”

“But not unsympathetic, Dirk,” Palmer said, trying instinctively to console Lingo for he knew not what.

Lingo looked up and laughed sardonically. “No, not unsympathetic,” he said. “Old homo sapiens has always believed in loading the deck. I suppose….”

“Dirk! Dirk!” Raul Ortega ran into the common room. “Come on! Come on! Up to the control room! They’re here! The Doogs are here!”

“I don’t see anything,” Palmer said, as he, Ortega and Lingo burst into the control room, where the other Solarians were already staring transfixedly out at the great vista of stars in the huge hemispherical viewscreen.

“Over there!” cried Ortega, pointing towards what looked like a miniature comet just approaching the Sol system. “The screen is set at normal view now. We’re seeing what the ship’s own cameras are picking up. Let’s switch over to one of the tell-tale satellites…. There’s one just within the orbit of Pluto.”

Ortega went over to a large jury-rigged console and threw one of several dozen switches. The image on the great view-screen blurred, flickered out, and was replaced by a closer view, with Sol the brightest thing in the viewscreen and…and….

“Lord!” gasped Palmer. “I never realized there could be so many ships in one place at one time!”

What had appeared to be a comet, tail facing away from Sol, in the previous view was now revealed as a monstrous cone-formation of Duglaari warships, hurtling towards Sol, base forward. The eye simply could not encompass the vastness of the Duglaari Fleet. The base of the cone seemed a solid wall of ships, miles in diameter; the apex of the cone was a good twenty miles behind the base and all the intervening space was packed with warships. The total mass of the gigantic Fleet must’ve exceeded that of a major asteroid.

“I don’t believe it,” Palmer muttered. “I see it, but I just don’t believe it….”

“It’s there all right,” said Lingo, his face an impassive mask. “Better than half the strength of the entire Duglaari Empire.”

Now the Duglaari Fleet was approaching the outskirts of Sol’s minefield. The seven humans stared into the viewscreen, birds transfixed by a cobra.

The base of the Duglaari formation seemed to blur for a moment, as if the ships had all suddenly begun to fall apart. Flashes of fire seemed to spread throughout the forward wall of ships. Had the forces of Sol somehow already…?

Then Palmer realized what was happening.

The flashes of fire were rockets; the “fragments” of Duglaari ships were a gigantic fusillade of missiles, thousands upon thousands of them.

Adding the acceleration of their rockets to the forward thrust of the great Duglaari Fleet Resolution Field, the formation of missiles shot ahead of the warships and into the Solarian minefield.

There was a terrible flash of light that momentarily outshone everything else in space combined; a flash of light that could only last for a moment—the deadly brilliance of a titanic thermonuclear explosion. But, incredibly, the explosion did not flare for a moment and then go out. It continued to outshine the rest of the heavens for impossibly long minutes. It elongated, it began to grow Sol-ward, an immense advancing lance of thermonuclear fire, a hell scores of miles in diameter and straight as an arrow.

“Wha…what is it?” cried Robin.

“They’re…they’re blasting a ‘tunnel’ through the minefield!” Palmer replied. “It’s…it’s unbelievable! Thousands of thermonuclear missiles, timed to go off one after the other as they cross the orbit of Pluto and pass through the minefield so that the effect is one gigantic, continuous explosion! And each missile must have close to a thousand-megaton warhead, from the look of it…a multi-million-megaton explosion!“

Now the terrible cylinder of fire, thousands of miles long, advanced past the orbit of Pluto. It began to gutter and die at the end nearest the Duglaari Fleet. It shortened, like an immense flame extinguishing itself, and in a few minutes the last missile had exploded and the lance of thermonuclear destruction was gone.

And the great Duglaari Fleet had a perfectly clear, arrow-straight path through the minefield, and into the Sol system.

The Doog Fleet began to accelerate Solward through its invisible lane of safety. It reached the orbit of Pluto and suddenly changed course ninety degrees.

“What are they doing?”

“They’re headed for Pluto,” Ortega said. “The Doogs are thorough. I think they plan to sterilize every habitable body in the system!”

The base of the Duglaari formation was obscured by flashes of rocket exhaust once more. A great barrage of missiles sped along in Pluto’s orbit straight for Sol’s outermost planet. Even as thermonuclear destruction hurtled towards Pluto, the Duglaari Fleet changed course again, and resumed its Solward journey.

“But Pluto’s a dead world….” Palmer muttered. “Why…?”

“Thoroughness,” said Ortega. “That Fleet has enough firepower to blast everything in the system to a cinder, and they fully intend to do just that. After all, there might be a few dozen humans on Pluto, and their goal is total extermination. And the Doogs always mean everything they say quite literally.”

Suddenly Pluto erupted in a sheet of fire. The planet almost seemed to quiver in its orbit, as thousands of huge fusion warheads blasted its surface simultaneously. Its long-dead surface flowed in rivers of molten rock; miles-deep layers of frozen gases were vaporized, and in its death-throes, Pluto was shrouded by what it had never had before—an atmosphere.

Even as Pluto’s now-molten surface was enveloped in clouds of volatilized ice, the great Duglaari Fleet zigged and zagged, launching missile barrages at the moons of Neptune and Uranus.

Then the Doogs changed course again and headed for Saturn.

“Every habitable moon!” Lingo said. “They’re going to blast every habitable moon!” He nodded to Ortega, who threw another switch on the console, changing cameras again. This tell-tale must’ve been located near the Rings of Saturn, for Titan, the system’s largest satellite dominated the view as the Doogs approached it.

Instead of a missile barrage, the Duglaari went into a low orbit around Titan. Sporadically but methodically, great beams of coherent light, the searing power of thousands of lasecannon, raked the surface of Titan.

“What are they doing?” Palmer muttered. “Why aren’t they using missiles?”

“Another Doog virtue,” said Ortega, “economy. Titan’s few cities are all domed and very conspicious. So they’re just cracking the domes open with lasecannon, like so many walnuts. They don’t need missiles. Titan’s poisonous atmosphere will do the job for them, once the domes are holed.”

Now the Duglaari Fleet broke orbit and changed course, headed straight across the lane of the ecliptic towards Jupiter.

“Where in hell are your ships?” demanded Palmer. “Why don’t they counterattack? Why doesn’t Sol do something?”

But th Solarians ignored him, their full attention riveted on the Duglaari Fleet as it split into several smaller-but-still-immense sections and attacked the habitable moons of Jupiter. This time the Duglaari followed up their lasecannon attacks with “dirty” thermonuclear missiles, since all the moons of Jupiter were airless.

As the Duglaari Fleet completed its deadly work and began to reform itself into one huge cone formation, Palmer kept shouting over and over again: “Where are your ships? Why don’t they attack?”

Lingo turned from the terrible spectacle for a moment. “Please, Jay,” he said, “stop shouting. How can you expect anyone to defend the Outer Satellites against that?“

“But those are millons of people dying, Lingo! How can you just let them die without at least trying to….?”

“The Outer Satellites have been evacuated,” Lingo said coldly. He turned back to the viewscreen, Ortega threw a switch, and the scene changed again. This time the tell-tale was located above the plane of the ecliptic, looking down on the heart of the Asteroid Belt.

“The Belt should be next…” Ortega muttered. “Ceres…Vesta…Pallas….”

But the Duglaari Fleet did not appear in the viewscreen.

“What’s happening?” exclaimed Lingo. “Where in space are they?”

“I don’t know,” said Ortega. “They should’ve reached the Belt by now. Let’s try a long view.”

He switched over to the ship’s own cameras. The Duglaari Fleet appeared as a comet in minature once more. But it was not headed for the inhabited asteroids of the Belt; it had zigged again and was bypassing the Asteroids.

It was heading straight for Mars, Sol’s second most populous planet, Man’s second oldest domain. Surely, thought Palmer, Sol will at last counterattack to defend Mars!

“What in blazes are they doing?” muttered Ortega. “Why should they bypass the Belt?”

He switched over to a tell-tale just beyond the orbit of Mars. The red planet loomed in the viewscreen twice the size of the Moon as seen from Earth. The image was large enough to show the miles-wide strips of native vegetation growing along the ancient canals and the cultivated and regular fields of mutated terrestrial plants as well. Unlike the Outer Satellites, Mars, even from this distance, looked unmistakably inhabited, domesticated. Palmer even thought he could see a glint from one of the great Martian domes, covering cities bigger than many on Earth itself.

Which made the sight of the monstrous Duglaari Fleet bearing down on the planet infinitely more horrible.

Still uncontested, the Duglaari made orbit around Mars. The Doogs broke formation and spread out, girdling the Martian surface like a great globular net of metal.

And still there was not the slightest sign of resistance from the forces of Sol. Not so much as a single Solarian ship had yet appeared, and the Duglaari warships were unopposed, even by ground fire.

The Duglaari attack began.

Lances of lasecannon fire from four thousand warships raked the Martian surface, holing every dome, scorching the cultivated fields and the native vegtation alike.

Missiles struck the Martian surface, but they did not explode. Apparently, their warheads contained not fusion bombs but deadly gases and perhaps plague bacteria adapted to the Martian air.

Then the nuclear bombardment began. Both polar ice caps were volatized in minutes and the dry atmosphere at least temporarily contained significant amounts of water vapor, for the first time in billions of years. But this was not a rain of life, but of death, for the vaporized ice was contaminated with millions of tons of lethal radioactive fallout. Ominous mists began to enfold the planet spreading towards the equator from both poles.

Still the missiles fell, now exploding in the iron oxide deserts, dotting them with lakes of molten steel, over which hovered clouds of radioactive dust, and, ironically, large quantities of liberated oxygen.

In a matter of half an hour, Mars was transformed into a nightmare of radioactive clouds, lakes of molten steel and deadly rain, where nothing organic could survive.

In a matter of half an hour, a whole planet died.

And still the forces of Sol had not appeared.

The Duglaari ships surveyed their monstrous handiwork and then broke orbit, reforming their massive cone formation. The next stop would be Earth itself!

But….

“Look!” cried Palmer, waving his arms wildly. “Look! Look! Look! They’re turning back! They’re retreating!”

Amazingly, inexplicably, the Duglaari Fleet was not continuing sunwards toward Earth. Back outward they went instead, away from Earth, away from the corpse of Mars.

“Lingo, I take back everything I ever thought or said!” Palmer exclaimed. “I don’t know how you did it, but man, you did it! They’re retreating! Without a shot being fired at them, they’re turning back!”

But the Solarians were not shouting. Their faces were perplexed, confused, frightened.

“That makes two of us, Jay,” Lingo said softly. “I don’t know why they’re retreating either. We haven’t done anything to stop them.”

The Duglaari Fleet arced obliquely back, across the ecliptic towards the heart of the Asteroid Belt. Small squadrons detached themselves from the main Fleet and began bombarding the few settled asteroids.

Meanwhile, the main Fleet continued out to the outer fringes of the Belt and then stopped dead in space.

“What are they doing?” asked Palmer.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Ortega. “It doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t they attack the Belt before? Why Mars first?”

Now the destruction of the habitable asteroids was completed. The detached squadrons rejoined the main formation.

And the fleet began to move again.

Slowly it began to move, base forward as always, parallel to the edge of the Belt. It continued on that course for a while, then stopped and reversed direction a hundred and eighty degrees. Again it grazed along the margin of the Belt, and again it reversed itself, cutting slightly deeper into the Belt with each reversal.

“Oh my God!” cried Ortega as the Duglaari Fleet made yet another reversal. “Of course! That’s four thousand ships there, four thousand ships in one Fleet Resolution Field. The biggest Resolution Field that ever existed. It’s powerful enough to move small planetoids! Look…just ahead of the Doog Fleet!”

Now the reason for the Doogs’ strange maneuvers became apparent. Just ahead of the fleet, well within the huge Resolution Field, a mass of rocks and small planetoids was accreting, with every pass that the Fleet made into the Belt. The Doogs were collecting a huge screen of rocks, a gigantic and deadly artificial meteor swarm.

Back and forth like a pendulum the Duglaari Fleet swung, each swing adding still more rocks to the ever-growing shield of meteors.

Finally, slowed considerably by the additional mass it was propelling, the Duglaari Fleet rose high above the ecliptic, and changed course again, crossing above the Asteroid Belt, and resuming its sunward course.

The Duglaari Fleet pushed before it the largest swarm of meteors the Sol system had ever seen; the Doogs were going to use a chunk of the Asteroid Belt itself to hurl at the Earth!

Earthward, behind its huge screen of rock, the Duglaari Fleet sped, back across the orbit of Mars, further and further sunward….

“Damn clever!” muttered Ortega, in grudging admiration. “Look how they keep the asteroids between them and Earth. The perfect shield—it’ll detonate any missiles that try to go through it, and even lasecannon fire would simply be deflected. They’re practically invulnerable now.”

Lingo shook his fist at the image of the Doog Fleet in the viewscreen. “A lot of good it’ll do you, damn you!” he swore.

Now the Duglaari Fleet was approaching Luna, the first extraterrestrial body that men had ever stood on. Surely Earth’s moon would be armed to the teeth, thought Palmer. At last, the counter-attack would begin.

The Duglaari Fleet made orbit around Luna, and they threw the great meteor swarm into orbit with them but slightly below them, so that they were completely screened from surface fire.

In fat, lazy arcs, they launched nuclear missiles into polar orbits, at right angles to the orbit of the fleet, over and around the orbiting shield of rocks.

Unerringly, the missiles began to drop, one by one, onto the domed cities of the Moon.

“Thermal differential fuses,” said Ortega. “On the dark side, Luna is so cold that our cities stick out like sore thumbs, and on the other side of the terminator, they can home in on the comparative lack of heat.”

Nuclear explosions tatooed the surface of the Moon with pinpoint accuracy.

“Like shooting fish in a barrel!” cried Palmer. “Where in blazes are your fleets? Why don’t they do something?”

“Luna has been evacuted,” Lingo said coldly. “We’re not going to waste the effort to try to defend it.”

“But Earth is next!” Palmer said. “Less than a quarter of a million miles away.”

“I know my astrogation as well as you do, Jay,” Lingo said, quietly and somehow finally. He nodded to Ortega, who switched the viewscreen over to a tell-tale about fifty thousand miles from Earth itself.

Earth hung huge, green and brown and blue and peaceful in the viewscreen. And now, like a swarm of ugly black flies spying a particularly lush and ripe piece of fruit, the Duglaari Fleet streamed towards Earth.

Cautiously, the Doogs advanced on Earth, keeping the screen of artificial meteors between them and Man’s home planet. They eased into a polar orbit, with the meteor screen directly below them, so that they would eventually pass over every point on the planet.

Twice they orbited, under full power and at a speed far greater than orbital velocity, apparently trying to draw out Earth’s defenses.

But nothing happened. Not a single ship rose to do battle, not lasecannon beam tried to penetrate the meteor screen.

The Duglaari Fleet seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain and puzzled, as well they might be.

Then they stopped dead in space for a moment, while their meteor screen passed beneath them. They rose to uge, gghtly higher orbit, accelerated at full power; caught up to the meteor screen, reversed direction and dropped down in front of it for a brief moment, facing the meteors head-on. Then they rose above the meteors again, and returned to their original polar orbit.

“What’s going on?” said Lingo. “What are they doing?”

“I think I can tell you that,” Palmer said grimly. “They’ve slowed down the orbits of the meteors so that they’re now travelling at less orbital velocity. They’ve put them into decaying orbits…. Look. Look!”

By the thousands, by the tens of thousands, the asteroids were falling to the surface of the Earth, their deadly paths ignited into fiery tracers by the heat of their passage.

Randomly, the Earth revolved under their decaying orbits. Thousands of the meteors burned up the atmosphere, but thousands more fell over the entire surface of the Earth, millions of tons of red-hot rock falling on cities, countryside, deserts, seas. The oceans hissed steam and swallowed their share of the meteors, but the land blossomed in craters, pockmarked and tortured now like the Moon—in the desert, on the land, and smoldering holes where cities had been, all with dreadful impartiality.

What had taken ages on the Moon was accomplished in minutes on the Earth—the face of the Earth was transformed into a skin pitted with huge smoldering pock-marks, like a human face ravaged by an impossibly rapid and virulent case of small pox.

And still the Duglaari Fleet orbited, unopposed.

Palmer was too numbed with horror to speak. Where were the forces of Sol? Why weren’t they fighting to save Man’s home planet? What could they be waiting for?

Now the Duglaari Fleet let loose a tremendous barrage of thousands of thermonuclear missiles. Palmer’s heart sank…and then rose, as he saw how badly the Doogs had aimed.

For the great fusillade had missed the continents entirely! Unexploded, harmlessly, they were falling into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, off the western coast of the Americas, around the great eastern crescent of Asia. The Pacific swallowed them all with barely a ripple.

Had the Solarians some fantastic defensive weapon that had caused it? Did they have some unimaginable way of protecting the continents from bombardments?

Suddenly, the Pacific Ocean, in a great semi-circle arcing up the Asiatic coast, across the Bearing Straight and down the western coast of the Americas, seemed to rise in a titanic ridge. Monstrous clouds of radioactive steam shot forth as if every volcano in Earth’s great Pacific ring had erupted at once, as if the molten bowels of the Earth were pouring forth, deep below the ocean, in the great fault that rimmed the Pacific, as if….

“Lord!” whispered Ortega. “The Pacific fault! They’re bombing the Pacific fault underwater!”

<

As the clouds of steam mounted like a forest of malignant toadstools into the stratosphere, the entire Pacific coast of the Americas seemed to shudder, to shiver like a great beast awakening after an aeons-long sleep. The entire Pacific fault was shifting!

With calm and horrid majesty, the Pacific coasts, to the very slopes of the Rockies and the Andes, began to slide down under the steaming waters of the Pacific.

And across the vast mother of oceans, the islands of Japan began to break up and subside into the deeps. Indonesia, the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, slid downward into the Pacific. Every volcanic island in the vast Pacific erupted rivers of lava, boiling the already-tortured Pacific into new clouds of steam.

The entire Pacific basin was a hell of subsiding land, flowing lava and quaking chaos, veiled in all-encompassing clouds of billowing steam.

The Duglaari Fleet fired two more barrages, in opposite directions at the poles. The polar icecaps vaporized into great radioactive mists as thousands of thousand-megaton thermonuclear explosions rocked them in minutes.

Four times the Duglaari Fleet orbited the steaming, erupting, quaking that was Earth, surveying their dreadful handiwork.

Then they began to fire missiles again, thousands upon tens of thousands, wave after wave.

These missiles never reached the tortured surface of the Earth. Instead, they exploded at all levels throughout the atmosphere, releasing tens of thousands of huge clouds of deadly radioactive elements: sodium, cobalt, carbon 14. Radioactive elements with half-lives of decades, centuries, millenia, spreading throughout the Earth’s atmosphere, mixing with the all-encompassing clouds of super-heated steam.

Perhaps it was possible that there were living creatures down there which had unhappily survived the holocaust. Unhappily, because their deaths would be the worst of all.

Both of Earth’s icecaps had been vaporized. Cubic miles of the Pacific had been steamed into the atmosphere. As the heat of the explosions dissipated and Earth began to regain its temperature equilibrium, all that vapor would condense and fall back to Earth as rain.

Already, the rain was beginning to fall, all over the Earth, with unbelievable fury. The rain would last for months, perhaps for years. It would rain until the Pacific regained the waters it had given up; until the great polar icecaps reformed. All over the Earth the rain fell and would continue to fall.

And it was a rain of death.

It was a rain permeated with radioactive isotopes of cobalt, sodium, carbon and dozens of other elements. It was a planet-wide bath of radioactivity from which there could be no escape. It would continue for months; it would drench every square inch of the planet with radioactive death. Nothing organic could survive and nothing organic would be able to exist on the planet for a thousand years.

Earth was dead.

Only slowly could that enormity burn its way into Palmer’s consciousness. Earth was dead. Man’s home planet was no more.

There was no way to comprehend it. It was the end of everything. It was as if he had lost his father, his mother, his family unto its ultimate ancestors, everything he had ever loved or cared for in one gross and terrible instant. It was that, and it was more.

It was the death of a religion, a hope, a Promise. It was the death of all Man had ever fought for and the triumph of evil incarnate. It was the death that could not be—the death of the human race itself.

It was the midnight of the soul.

Palmer was dimly aware that his body was wracked with sobs. The tiny fragment of his mind that still bothered to think noted without comment that tears were streaming down his cheeks, the first tears that he had shed in two and a half decades.

Earth was dead. He stared transfixed at the steaming ball of destruction, floating like the decomposing corpse it was in the viewscreen. Earth was dead, and something within him had died with it—hope, meaning, the future, all that made life matter. It was over…everything was over….

He forced his eyes away from that terrible sight and looked at the Solarians.

They stared stonily at the spectacle, but their cheeks were wet with tears.

With the last bit of rage left within him, with the waning dregs of his caring, he shouted at the Solarians:

“Monsters! Fiends! Beasts! Madmen! You did this! You killed the human race! You….”

“Shut up!” Lingo roared, with unbelievable fury, with the full power of his trained voice of command. “Shut up!“

Such was the power in that terrible voice that Palmer instantly fell silent, the last measure of defiance, of caring leached from him.

Like a man in some nightmare, who emotionlessly observes a wall about to fall on him, Palmer was incuriously aware that the Duglaari Fleet, filled to overflowing with its triumph, was breaking orbit.

Slowly, majestically, as if savoring each moment to the fullest the Duglaari Fleet left the scene of carnage and made its way Solward once more, going forth to complete the destruction of the Sol system, to wipe out what pitiful remnants might remain on Venus and Mercury.

Without taking his eyes from the viewscreen, Ortega switched cameras to a tell-tale just beyond the orbit of Venus. From this point of view, the corpse of Earth was only a bright blue star, the same bright blue star it had been for billions of years. The heavens would not erec monument to Earth’s passing.

And then a great cloud of black ships appeared on the viewscreen. The Duglaari Fleet was approaching Venus.

But what does it matter? Palmer thought, staring numbly at the viewscreen, which now showed Venus, the Doogs, and the flaming ball of gas that was Sol itself. What does anything matter?

The Duglaari Fleet arced arrogantly towards Venus.

Woodenly, Palmer glanced away from the viewscreen at the hateful figures of the Solarians. Suddenly he noticed, in uncomprehending confusion, that the Solarians were watching neither the Duglaari Fleet nor Venus.

They were staring stonily and tight-lipped at Sol itself. And their faces were not softened by despair, but hardened into granite as if with some terrible triumph.

He followed their gaze, and at first he was puzzled. There was nothing to see save the globe of incandescent gas that was Sol, seen through the heavy filter of the tell-tale camera.

Then a curious optical illusion seemed to occur. The image of Sol in the viewscreen seemed to shimmer momentarily, as if something had jarred the tell-tale camera out of focus. Then, incredibly, Sol seemed to contract, to shrink for an instant, to fall in on itself, reducing its diameter by a noticeable fraction.

As it happened, Palmer suddenly realized what was happening; and as he realized, he began to understand.

And as he understood, he and the universe were transformed….

For another moment, Sol continued to contract. Then some kind of equilibrium point seemed to be reached.

But the equilibrium lasted less than a second. Suddenly monstrous prominences of flaming gas and plasma shot spaceward from the entire surface of Sol. The whole surface of Sol seemed to suck up into the forest of prominences, and in moments, the prominences were the surface, expanding spaceward with terrible speed and force.

That too happened in instants. Then, suddenly, finally, in one incredible, unimaginable, soundless explosion, Sol shed its surface like the skin of a bursting balloon. Trillions of tons of flaming holocaust, travelling at incredible speed, roared off into space, an ever-expanding globe of destruction….

Sol went nova.

Mercury was engulfed in seconds and vaporized like a snowflake in a blast furnace. Venus was vaporized moments later, and still the globular wave front of destruction, monstrous and hot beyond comprehension, grew and expanded like an opening into hell.

And as it grew, the full, total truth grew in Palmer, with that strange, manic calmness that turns seconds into hours—The War had turned around at the moment of that titanic explosion.

For the Duglaari Fleet was trapped.

The holocaust that had been Sol expanded outward towards the huge Duglaari Fleet far faster than their Fleet Resolution Field could possibly propel them. Only by going into Stasis-Space could the four thousand Duglaari warships flee fast enough to save themselves.

But they could not go into Stasis-Space. They were far too close to the nova that had been Sol. Their Stasis-Field generators would explode, leaving the fragments that would be all that would be left of the Doog ships trapped in the nothingness of Stasis-Space forever.

The four thousand Duglaari warships were doomed. The only choice open to the Doogs was which terrible death they would die.

In one instant of massive destruction whose echoes would resound for a thousand years, the human race had been saved. Now it was Man who had the superiority in ships; now it was the Doogs who faced inexorable extermination.

Even as the realization that The War had just been won dawned on Palmer, the wave front of the stellar explosion vaporized the Duglaari Fleet like a swarm of moths caught in a flamethrower.

Man was saved; man was saved, but the price was incredible.

The price was Man’s home solar system. The price was the planet that had given him birth. The price was Fortress Sol itself.

And five billion lives.

Palmer could not pull his eyes away from the terrible spectacle in the viewscreen, a solar system consuming itself, Sol the source of all life transforming into a flaming, irresistible pyre of death.

More was being consumed in that awful funeral pyre than five billion human beings or four thousand Duglaari warships. As he watched, transfixed, he remembered, with terrible immediacy, the music-odor composition that Robin had called the Song of Earth. The Composer must’ve known, Palmer suddenly realized. He must’ve known this was going to happen.

For now Palmer completely understood the meaning of the composition. It had spoken for the Solarians then; it spoke for all men everywhere now. It spoke of a loss so great that it would take centuries for its full extent to become fully known. It spoke of a million cities, rich to bursting with history and memories, a thousand cultures seething for millenia in fecund ferment, incandescent gas now, and lost forever.

The human race had been saved from the greatest menace in all its history, but the price was equal to the prize. Man would survive, but his primal home, the greater part of his history and culture, his most basic and fundamental roots, and the last and greatest of his sustaining myths, Fortress Sol, had been torn from him.

The price of survival, Palmer thought grimly, is always the loss of illusions. The human race has left its childhood things behind it. We are now on our own.

And now he understood, he understood so much. This was the secret weapon Lingo had spoken of. “Fortress Sol itself…” he had said, but who could’ve thought he had meant it so literally?

And this was why Lingo had refused to tell him anything in advance, this was why Lingo had so desperately wanted to be judged. But who am I, Palmer thought, to judge him? How does one weigh five billion lives and the youth of a race against survival itself?

He was ashamed of how glad he felt that no part of such a decision had been his. Now he understood the final dimension of the humanness that the Solarians had tried to explain to him with mere words. Such was the humanity of the Solarians that they could weigh the life of Fortress Sol against the fate of the human race, come to the right decision, and yet still care enough about one human being to spare him the awful guilt of sharing, however remotely and indirectly, in it.

Now Palmer knew that the Solarians had kept the secret from him, not to tantalize him, but to spare him.

How can I judge these people? Palmer thought. No one has a right to judge them! No one will judge them, if I have anything to say about it!

Quite suddenly, and with no surprise, Palmer realized that at that moment, he had really joined the Solarian Group. He was one of them, with no doubts, no reservations.

If they would have him.

Chapter XIII

FOR LONG silent silent moments the seven of them stared at the expanding globular maelstrom of gas that had been Sol—from the point of view of a tell-tale camera far outside the Solar System, for the Solar System was now no more.

Finally, Palmer turned away from the hypnotic spectacle and looked at the Solarians. Robin and Fran and Linda were crying soundlessly, almost tearlessly. Max was staring woodenly at the viewscreen as if turned to stone. Ortega was grinding his teeth and pummeling his left palm with his right fist.

Lingo’s face was set in a grim, impassive, controlled mask. Only the corners of his mouth, twitching downward, convulsively, displayed any emotion. Then he realized that Palmer was looking at him.

He turned to stare directly at Palmer. His large green eyes seemed like openings into some bottomless abyss. He grinned at Palmer mirthlessly. “Now you know, Jay….” he said softly, “now you know.”

Palmer stared back at Lingo. “Now I know, Dirk,” he said. “Now I really know. The whole thing, every step of the way, was just to lead up to this. The greatest trap in all history. But…just how was it sprung, anyway?”

Lingo sighlobular mavily. “That was the simplest part,” he said. “The only simple part. The station on Mercury was nothing but a Stasis-Field Generator with a proximity fuse. The code word ‘phoenix’ armed the fuse so that the next time any ship approached the orbit of Venus….” He let the sentence hang, there was no need to complete it.

“We built a better mousetrap, that’s all…” Ortega said, with bitter, exaggerated harshness. “Biggest and best damned mousetrap in all history.”

“With the most valuable bait!” Palmer said.

“Jay, there’s one thing you’re just going to have to accept,” Lingo snapped. “One thing we’re all going to have to accept. One way or another, Fortress Sol had to die. Sooner or later, Doogs or no Doogs. The future of the human race is out there, in the Galaxy, not in the past, not in the womb. The Confederation is the future of the human race, or rather what the Confederation is now free to become. Fortress Sol…The Promise…all legends…once they did serve a purpose, once the human race did need comfortable illusions, mythical outside forces, just to keep going. But we’re not children any more. We’re winning The War, and we’re going to expand out into an entire Galaxy and there’s no place in a future like that for myths. Man must finally get it through his thick skull that there is only one thing in the Universe that will ever be worthy of his belief—himself. For unless Man learns to put his faith in his own greatness, we will remain children forever. The myth of Fortress Sol, like all the other myths, was a fairy story for children, something to scare away bogey men. It had to go if Man was ever to grow up. We haven’t lost the past; we’ve gained the future.”

“That’s a very pretty speech, Dirk,” Palmer said quietly. “Who are you trying to convince—me or yourself?”

Lingo forced a smile. “Again I underestimate you, Jay,” he said. “When you make a decision like this, between two terrible alternatives, no matter how right you know you have been, you can never quite convince yourself…. Jay, did I ever tell you how Douglas MacDay finally died, years after he had made his terrible decision, the decision to plunge Sol into chaos, the most important and the rightest decision a man ever made?”

“No.”

Lingo turned to stare once more at the holocaust in the viewscreen. “Even though he knew he was right,” Lingo said, not looking at Palmer, “even though he knew that he had given the human race the only chance it could have, he couldn’t live with it. He killed himself, Jay, he finally killed himself.”

“What do you want from me, Dirk?” Palmer said quietly.

Lingo turned to face him, his eyes hollow and burning. “What do I want, Jay? I want you to tell me something. Tell me we were right, or tell me that we were wrong. I want to know, Jay. I suppose I want to be judged.”

“This is why you refused to tell me what was going to happen, isn’t it, Dirk?” Palmer said. “You didn’t want me to have to live with what you’re living with now.”

“Yes. Of course. The fewer heads a thing like this is on, the better all around.”

“I can’t judge you, Dirk,” Palmer said. “I can’t judge you because I can’t imagine what I would’ve done in your place. No one can judge you. No one has the right. But I respect you, Dirk, the way you respect MacDay. That should be enough for anyone.”

Lingo smiled grimly. “You’re right, Jay,” he said. “That’s all we can ever expect, and all that we should ever want. Thanks.”

“One thing that can be said for sure,” Ortega said, glancing at the viewscreen. “We had better get out of here fast, before that wavefront hits.”

Lingo sat down in the pilot’s seat. “Take a good look at what’s left of Sol,” he said. “It’s the last anyone will ever see of it.”

Then he pressed the button, and they were in Stasis-Space.

Palmer had been lying on his bunk for hours, trying to digest what had been, what would be. Three centuries of history had been turned around in an instant, three centuries of history and three decades of his life.

Man was master now. Though they did not know it yet, though the blaze of light that was the only monument Man’s home system would ever have would not reach the worlds of the Confederation for decades, the people of the Confederation had inherited the Galaxy. And inherited was the right word.

For it had taken a great death to destroy the power of the Duglaari Empire—the death of Sol and the death of five billion Solarians. The price of life was, as always, death.

Despite anything he had told Lingo, Jay Palmer felt the weight of those deaths. For it was up to him, and men like him, to give them meaning, to see to it that they were not in vain.

Fortress Sol had met the test of history. Now it was up to the rest of the human race to justify that greatest of all sacrifices. Fortress Sol was dead, and now the Confederation too must die a death of a kind. It must give way to a new order, an order where men ruled themselves and were not ruled by machines, an order where men gloried in their humanness and did not deny it out of fear.

“This too shall pass away,” was the only universal truth of history. But a corollary must now be added to that ancient law: This too shall pass away, but Man shall prevail.

There were no more Solarians, and there must be no more men of the Confederation, either. Only Man.

There….font>

“Come on up to the control room,” said Robin Morel, sticking her head into his cabin. “We’re coming out of Stasis-Space.”

They were still in Stasis-Space when Palmer reached the control room. Everyone else was already there.

“Why are we coming out of Stasis-Space now?” Palmer asked. “We’ve only been in for a few hours. This is the middle of nowhere.”

“So it is,” Lingo replied, with much of the old jauntiness returned to his voice, “so it is.” The rest of the Solarians seemed to have recovered also, and seemed to be almost grinning to each other.

Yet hours before, five billion people had died.

Fran Shannon nodded to Lingo, and Lingo turned off the Stasis-Field Generator. The chaotic maelstrom of Stasis-Space flickered and was gone. The stars came out. They were in normal space, in the vast, lightless dead space between the suns, almost midway between Sol and Centaurus. There was nothing here, nothing at all. Even nova Sol was not visible—for the image of that terrible event was travelling outward only at the speed of light, and would not reach this point in space for another two years. Sol was just another point of light among the thousands of anonymous stars speckling the empty blackness.

Palmer stared out into the endless darkness. Why did they come out of Stasis-Space here? he wondered. There was something about the very nowhereness of this empty void that chilled him to the core of his being. Why…. ?

“Over there,” Fran Shannon said, throwing a red indicator circle around a cluster of five specks of light that just barely showed discs.

But that’s impossible! Palmer thought. Nothing can be showing a disc out here!

For they were two light years from Sol, and Sol was the nearest star. There could be nothing close enough, out here in the space between the stars, to show a disc! There couldn’t be! Yet there were five discs clearly visible within the indicator circle on the viewscreen.

“What are they?” Palmer murmured. “There can’t be planets out here….”

“They’re not planets,” Lingo said, changing the ship’s attitude in space so that the discs in the indicator circle were centered in the ship’s line-of-flight indicator.

“But we’re nowhere near any multiple star system like that!” Palmer exclaimed.

“They’re not stars either,” Lingo said, turning on the ship’s Resolution Drive. “And they’re a lot closer than you seem to think. Watch.”

Faster and faster they accelerated towards the enigmaticodies, and the five closely clustered discs grew and grew, until they became globes, until detail was visible, until the five discs became five globes, until it became clear that the things were…what?

Palmer saw, but he did not comprehend.

They were far too small to be planets, but they were globes. Five small planetoids, in tight formation, each one perhaps ten miles in diameter.

As they moved ever closer, Palmer realized that these globes were like no planetoids he had ever heard of. All five of them were absolutely regular, perfect spheres, five perfect spheres floating together in the middle of nowhere.

They approached to within a mile or two of the formation.

Palmer’s jaw dropped. He gaped in amazement.

They were metal.

Not metallic rock, but metal. Metal plates. They were artificial. They were five identical metal globes. They had no markings, no external features except…except what looked disconcertingly like Resolution Field antennae distributed evenly about their equators. They were patently manufactured!

“What…what in space are they?”

Lingo laughed. “Someone, in a black mood, dubbed them ‘Meatwagons.’ The name sort of stuck. They’re spaceships.”

“Spaceships…?” exclaimed Palmer. “But it can’t be! I’m no mathematician, but I know that there’s something called the Hayakawa equation which limits the size of Stasis-Fields to bubbles with fifteen hundred foot diameters. Otherwise, everything would be very different…. We could build ships as big as we wanted, since there’s no limit to the theoretical size of Resolution Fields. Why, theoretically, you could fly a planet, I suppose. But it’s simply impossible to throw up Stasis-Fields big enough to take things like those…those ‘Meatwagons,’ whatever they are, from star to star!”

“You’re right all the way, Jay,” Lingo said. “Nevertheless, the Meatwagons are spaceships. After all, what do you think happened to the population of Fortress Sol?”

Palmer stared dully at Lingo. The price that Man had paid, that Sol had paid, for victory was something he had tried hard to forget. Now Lingo had brought it back, and he was reliving those terrible moments once more.

“I…I thought there was no point in saying anything about that, Dirk,” he said softly. “I understand that the sacrifice had to be made, if the human race was to survive, but even so….”

Lingo stared at him incredulously for a long moment. Then comprehension came into his face, followed by surprise, then by a strange, almost stunned look that was unreadable.

“Once again, I’ve underestimated you, Jay,” he said. “When you were so willing to forgive and understand, I naturally thought you realized…. But you seem to have seen more deeply into our minds than we have ourselves. Yes, we would’ve sacrificed five billion Solarians to save the human race, if that had been the only choice. Now I realize that; if we had had to do it, we would’ve. Even that’s a horrible thought to have to face. But Jay, don’t you remember, I told you that the outer satellites, Mars, the Moon, had all been evacuated?”

“Yes, but to where else but Earth? And Earth….”

“You don’t understand, Jay. The whole Sol system was evacuated. Every last human being on every last inhabited body, including Earth.”

“But how? To where?”

“There,” said Lingo, pointing to the five huge metal globes floating in space. “There, in the Meatwagons.”

“What! But as big as those things are, five billion people can’t live on them. They could never carry enough food or water or air. And even if they could, the people on them would die of old age before they reached the planets of the Confederation. Those things can’t go into Stasis-Space.”

“You’re right and you’re wrong, Jay,” Lingo said. “You’re right—the Meatwagons can’t travel faster than light. You’re right, they can’t carry enough food or water or air for five billion people. And you’re right, they’ll take so long to reach the Confederation that people living in them would die of old age. But, Jay, but! Remember your ancient history. Men did go to the stars before the Stasis-Field was discovered, at least to the nearer stars. And how did they do it?”

“Why, they used some kind of suspended animation, didn’t they? Deep Sleep they called it?”

“I don’t know what they called it, but I know how they did it. They simply froze themselves in liquid helium. Since they were traveling only through interstellar space while frozen, the cold of space kept the helium at near-absolute-zero, and they remained in suspended animation until they reached their destination.”

“You mean….?”

“Yes, Jay,” Lingo said. “The Meatwagons are little more than tanks of liquid helium, with Resolution Drives attached. Don’t forget, we knew what was going to happen years ago. So the entire population of the Sol system was frozen in liquid helium two years ago, and the Meatwagons were given long head starts. You know, people in suspended animation require no food, water, air or even space to move around in. And five spheres, each ten miles in diameter, can hold a hell of a lot of people when they’re all in suspended animation and stacked like cordwood.

“But…but…where are the Meatwagons going? What are you going to do with…with five billion supermen?“

“Not supermen, Jay!” Lingo snapped. “Men, Jay, men. Not superhuman, but totally human. Those five billion people represent about a billion Organic Groups. And as long as the Organic Groups are kept together, there’ll be no need to thaw out all five billion people at any one place. As you well know, an Organic Group is a complete unit, a little culture in itself. Every one of those people has at least one Talent. Don’t think of the Meatwagons as problems, Jay. They’re not. They’re the greatest storehouses of treasure in the history of the human race—the kind of treasure that really counts: people. There are hundreds of planets in the Confederation. Each one can easily accomodate a few million more people. Those five billion Solarians will be spread throughout the entire Confederation. They’ll become one with the rest of humanity, five billion merging with hundreds of billions, like a drop of water into the sea.”

“Not exactly a valid analogy,” Palmer said dryly. “They aren’t five billion ordinary people, Dirk, no matter what you say. They’re different, and as I have to admit, they’re better. They’ll transform the human race completely…if the human race will let them survive.”

Lingo smiled slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “But is that something to be afraid of? What we have learned, what we have become, will be the heritage of the entire human race. Intrinsically, there is no difference between the people of Sol and the people of the Confederation. The people of the Confederation have potential Talents too, but they’ve not been developed. You, Jay, for example, are probably a latent Game-master and Leader as well. Kurowski is a latent Leader, or he could never have become a High Marshal. Yes, Man is going to change—he is going to awaken. He is going to awaken to the full potential of his humaness, he is going to become something beyond his wildest dreams. And you, Jay, are the key.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You’ve proven that it can be done, that a man of the Confederation can become integrated into a Solarian Organic Group. You were an experiment, and the experiment has been a success. Now you know the full significance of the experiment. For in the decades to come, all mankind will organize itself into Organic Groups. You were the first, but you will not be the last. The great unknown in our plan has been resolved: the people of the Confederation are capable of change, of growth. The history of the human race is just beginning. What we will eventually become, no man alive can imagine. But one thing is certain, Jay: it will be men like you who will lead your people…our people. Men who can stand apart from both the Confederation and the memory of lost Sol, and be simply human beings…. Which, of course, is not a simple thing at all.”

And Palmer knew deep within him that it was so. Together, he and the Solarians had fought and won. Together, in that no-longer-distant day when the human race would be united and whole, they would go forth, Solarians and men of the Confederation alike, to meet the future.

Palmer gazeoff into space, at that insignificant point of light that was Sol, at a Sol whose image was almost two years old, the light of whose passing would not illumine the worlds of the Confederation for decades.

Arid when at last the light of nova Sol would reach the worlds of the Confederation to shine for a few brief days in the heavens, men would recognize it not as the funeral pyre of the human race, but as the dawning light of a brave tomorrow.

A light that would never die.

END

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Also By Norman Spinrad

Novels

The Solarians (1966)

Agent Of Chaos (1967)

The Men In The Jungle (1967)

Bug Jack Barron (1969)*

The Iron Dream (1972)

Riding the Torch (1978)*

A World Between (1979)

Songs From The Stars (1980)

The Void Captain’s Tale (1982)

Child Of Fortune (1985)

Little Heroes (1987)

Russian Spring (1991)

Pictures at 11 (1994)

Journals Of The Plague Years (1995)

Greenhouse Summer (1999)

He Walked Amongst Us (2003)*

Collections

The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (1970)*

No Direction Home (1975)

The Star-Spangled Future (1979)

Other Americas (1988)

Deus X and Other Stories (2003)

Non-Fiction

Science Fiction In The Real World (1990)

Norman Spinrad (1940 – )

Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1941. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to New Worlds magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad&apos;s work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of Star Trek. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in Frances, where he now lives.

Copyright

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Norman Spinrad 1966

All rights reserved.

The right of Norman Spinrad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 11719 8

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of thithoutlisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

* Not available as an SF Gateway eBook

Table of Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Website

Also By Norman Spinrad

Author Bio

Copyright