Return to the Stars
by
Edmond Hamilton

Table of Contents

RETURN TO THE STARS
Edmond Hamilton

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

The Star Kings: Copyright ©1949 Edmond Hamilton

A Baen Ebook
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN 10: 4-4774-6127-5
ISBN 13: 978-4-4774-6127-4

Cover art by Doug Chaffee

First ebook, February 2008

Electronic version by WebWrights
www.webwrights.com

1

The receptionist opened the inner door. "Will you go right in, Mr. Gordon?"

Gordon said, "Thank you." The door closed softly behind him, and at the same time a man rose from behind a small desk and came toward him. He was a tall man, surprisingly young, with a brisk, friendly, energetic air about him. "Mr. Gordon?" he said, and held out his hand. "I'm Dr. Keogh."

Gordon shook hands and allowed himself to be guided to a chair beside the desk. He sat, looking around the room, looking everywhere but at Keogh, suddenly acutely embarrassed.

Keogh said quietly, "Have you ever consulted a psychiatrist before?"

Gordon shook his head. "I never . . . uh . . . felt the need."

"All of us have problems at some time in our lives," said Keogh. "This is nothing to be ashamed of. The important thing is to realize that a problem does exist. Then, and only then, is it possible to do something about it." He smiled. "You see, you have already taken the vital forward step. From here on it should be much easier. Now then." He studied Gordon's card which he had filled in at what seemed unnecessary length. "You're in the insurance business."

"Yes."

"Judging from your position with the firm, you must be quite successful."

"I've worked hard these last few years," Gordon said, in an odd voice.

"Do you like your work?"

"Not particularly."

Keogh was silent a moment or two, frowning at the card. Gordon fought down an overwhelming impulse to run for the door. He knew that he would only have to come back again. He could not carry this question alone any longer. He had to know.

"I see that you're unmarried," Keogh said. "Like to tell me why?"

"That's part of the reason I came here. There was a girl . . . ." He broke off, then said with sudden fierce determination, "I want to find out whether I've been having delusions."

"What kind of delusions?" asked Keogh gently.

"At the time," said Gordon, "I wasn't in any doubt. It was all real. More real, more alive, than anything that had ever happened to me before. But now . . . now I don't know." He looked at Keogh, his eyes full of pain. "I'll be honest with you. I don't want to lose this dream . . . if it was a dream. It's more precious to me than any reality. But I know that if . . . if I . . . oh, hell!" He got up and moved around the room, aimlessly, his broad stocky shoulders hunched and his hands balled into fists. He looked like a man about to jump off a cliff, and Keogh knew that he was just that. He sat quietly, waiting.

Gordon said, "I thought that I went to the stars. Not now, but in the future. Two hundred thousand years in the future. I'll give it to you all in one lump, Doctor, and then you can call for the strait-jacket. I believed that my mind was drawn across time, into the body of another man, and for a while . . . keeping my own identity, you understand, my own memories as John Gordon of twentieth-century Earth . . . for a while I lived in the body of Zarth Arn, a prince of the Mid-Galactic Empire. I went to the stars . . . ."

His voice trailed away. He stood by the window, looking out at falling rain and the roofs and walls and chimneys of West Sixty-fourth Street. The sky was a drab blankness fouled with soot.

"I heard the sunrise music," Gordon said, "that the crystal peaks make above Throon when Canopus comes to warm them. I feasted with the star-kings in the Hall of Stars. And at the end, I led the fleets of the Empire against our enemies, the men from the League of Dark Worlds. I saw the ships die like swarming fireflies off the shores of the Hercules Cluster . . . ."

He did not turn to see how Keogh was taking all this. He had started and he would not stop, and in his voice there was pride and longing and the anguish of loss.

"I've shot the Orion Nebula. I've been into the Cloud, where the drowned suns burn in a haze of darkness. I've killed men, Doctor. And in that last battle, I—"

He stopped and shook his head, turning abruptly away from the window.

"Never mind that now. But there was more. A lot more. A whole universe, a language, names, people, costumes, places, details. Could I have imagined all that?"

He looked at Keogh. Desperately.

Keogh said, "Were you happy in that universe?"

Gordon thought about that, his square, honest face creased in a careful frown. "Most of the time I was frightened. Things were . . ." He made a gesture vaguely indicating great troubles. "I was in constant danger. But . . . yes, I guess I was happy there."

Keogh nodded. "You mentioned a girl?"

Now Gordon turned again to the window. "Her name was Lianna. She was a princess of Fomalhaut Kingdom. She and Zarth Arn were betrothed . . . a matter of state, you understand, and it wasn't supposed to be anything more. Zarth Arn already had a morganatic wife, but I, Gordon, in Zarth Arn's body—I fell in love with Lianna."

"Did she return your feeling?"

"Yes, it was the end of the world for me when I had to leave her and come back here to my own world, my own time . . . . And here's what makes it so difficult, Doctor. I'd given up hope of ever seeing her again, and then it seemed to me that she spoke to me one night, telepathically, across time, and told me that Zarth Arn believed he could find a way to bring me through physically, in my own body . . . ." His voice trailed off again and his shoulders sagged. "How insane that dream sounds when I tell it. But it made this dreary life worth living for a long while, just the hope, knowing that someday I might go back. And of course nothing ever happened. And now I don't know whether anything ever did happen, really."

He walked back to the chair and sat down, feeling strangely exhausted and empty.

"I've never told this to anyone before. Now that I have, it's like . . . it's as though I'd killed something, or killed part of myself. But I can't go on living between two worlds. If that world of the future was hallucination, and this one is reality, the only reality, then I've got to accept it."

He sat, brooding. Now it was Keogh's turn to rise and move about. He turned to glance at Gordon a time or two, as though he were having difficulty finding a point of attack. Then he made up his mind.

"Well," he said briskly, "let us look at the available evidence." He glanced at some scribbled notes on his desk. "You say that your mind was drawn across time, into the body of another man."

"That's right. Zarth Arn was a scientist as well as a noble. He had perfected the method and the equipment. The exchange was effected from his laboratory."

"Very well. Now what happened to your own body, here in the present day on Earth, while your mind was absent from it?"

Gordon looked at him. "I said exchange. That was the purpose of the whole thing. Zarth Arn wanted to explore the past. He had done this many times before. Only in my case, things got fouled up."

"Then this . . . uh . . . Zarth Arn actually inhabited your body?"

"Yes."

"Went to your place of employment, did your work?"

"Well, no. When I came back, my boss said he was happy to see me recovered from my illness. Apparently Zarth Arn had given that excuse. I don't suppose he wanted to run the risk of making some irreparable blunder. I did not have the same choice."

Keogh said. "I congratulate you on your very logical mind, Mr. Gordon. But there is no proof at all, no physical proof, that this exchange of minds actually took place?"

"No," said Gordon. "Not a bit. How could there be? But what did you mean about my logical mind?"

"You have covered all the loopholes so carefully." Keogh smiled. "It's a gorgeous fantasy, Mr. Gordon. Few men are gifted with that much imagination." He added seriously, "I understand what strength of mind it must have taken to bring you here. I think we are going to have a very good relationship, Mr. Gordon, because I think you already realize subconsciously that your dreams of star-kingdoms and nebulae and beautiful princesses were only the attempt of your mind to escape from a world that you found unbearably humdrum and dull. Dreary, I think was your word. Now, this will take work, and time, and possibly there will be some painful moments, but I don't think you have anything at all to worry about. The fact that you've had no recurrence of the dream for a long period of time is a healthy sign. I shall want to see you twice weekly, if possible."

"I can manage it."

"Good. Miss Finlay will make the appointments for you. Oh, and here is my private number." He handed Gordon a card. "If you should at any time have a recurrence, please call me, no matter how late it is."

He shook Gordon's hand warmly, and a few minutes later Gordon found himself on the street, walking in the rain and feeling nothing but an utter desolation. He knew that Keogh was right, that he must be right. He knew that he had indeed almost resigned himself to that fact and only needed someone to supply the final push. Yet somehow the act of putting it all into words had the cruelty of a surgeon's knife, performing a necessary and humane operation but without anesthesia.

And it had all seemed, and did still seem, so real . . . .

Brutally he thrust out of his mind and heart the sound of Lianna's voice, the beautiful picture of her face, the memory of her lips.

In his office, Keogh was talking rapidly into his dictation machine, getting down all of what Gordon had told him while it was fresh, and shaking his head in wonder. This case was going to be, literally, one for the books.

Twice a week thereafter Gordon visited Keogh, answering his questions, telling more and more of his dream, and under Keogh's skillful guidance learning to look at it objectively. He came to understand the underlying motivations . . . boredom with a job that did not offer him sufficient challenge, desire for fame and aggrandizement, desire for power, desire to punish the world for its frustrations and its failure to appreciate him. On this last point, Keogh had been enormously impressed, not to say startled, by Gordon's description of the Disruptor, a weapon of incredible power which, as Zarth Arn, he had wielded in the great battle against the League.

"You annihilated part of space?" Keogh asked, and shook his head. "You do have powerful desires. How fortunate that you took this one out in dreaming."

Lianna was most easily explained of all. She was the dream-girl, the unattainable, and by transferring his feelings to her as he was relieved of the necessity of seeking out or competing for the actual young women by whom he was surrounded. Keogh pointed out to him that he was afraid of women. Gordon had felt that he was merely bored by them, but he supposed Keogh knew his subconscious better than he did. So he did not dispute him.

And steadily, week by week, the dream faded.

Keogh was personally delighted by the whole case. He liked Gordon, who had proved to be an uniquely cooperative patient. And he had acquired a mass of material that was going to keep him in learned papers and outstanding lectures for a long time to come.

At last, on one soft May afternoon when the sun shone gently down from a cloud-flecked sky, Keogh said to Gordon, "We have made tremendous progress. I'm very pleased. And I'm going to let you try your wings alone for a while. Come back in three weeks and tell me how you're doing."

They had a drink together to celebrate and later on Gordon bought himself a lavish dinner and took in a show, telling himself all the while how happy he was. When he walked home to his apartment late that night the stars were glowing above the city lights. He studiously avoided looking at them.

He went to bed.

At forty-three minutes past two o'clock Keogh's phone rang, rousing him from sleep. He answered it, and was instantly wide awake. "Gordon! What is it?"

Gordon's voice was wild and shaken. "It's come again. Zarth Arn. He spoke to me. He said—he said he was ready now to bring me through. He said Lianna was waiting. Doctor—Doctor! . . ."

The voice broke off. "Gordon!" Keogh shouted, but there was no answer. "Hold on," he said to the humming wire. "Don't panic. I'll be right over."

He was there in fifteen minutes. The door of Gordon's apartment was locked but he roused the manager, who unlocked it grudgingly after examining his credentials. The apartment was empty and quiet. The phone swung from its cord as though it had been dropped in the midst of conversation. Absently Keogh replaced it.

He stood for a little time, thoughtful. He had no doubt of what had happened. Gordon had not been able to stand the loss of his glittering delusion, his dream so Gordon had run away, from his analyst, from reality. He would be back, of course, but then all that work must be done again . . . . Keogh sighed and shook his head, and went out.

2

Consciousness returned to Gordon very slowly. He had at first only a confused memory of fear, terror, gut-wrenching, mind-shattering panic that was somehow combined with the sensation of falling right off the world into a state of not-being. He thought that he could hear himself yelling, and he wondered wildly why Keogh did not hear and come to save him. Then he heard other voices, familiar, unfamiliar, far away. A liquid slid coolly down his throat and exploded into white fire in his stomach. He opened his eyes. There was a blank wash of light out of which images emerged gradually. Large forms, walls and windows and furniture. Small forms, close at hand, bending over him.

Faces.

Two faces. One was just a face, male, intent, anxious. The other was his own face . . . .

No. Now wait a minute. His own face was square and blue-eyed and brown-haired, and this face above him was dark-eyed and aquiline, so it could not possibly be his own. And yet . . .

"Gordon. Gordon!" the face was saying.

The other face said, "One moment, Highness." Gordon felt his head raised. A hand holding a glass appeared out of the mist. Gordon drank automatically. Again there was the explosion of white fire inside him, very pleasant and invigorating. The mist began to clear.

He looked up into the dark handsome face, and after a moment he said, "Zarth Arn."

Strong hands gripped him. "Thank God. I was beginning to be afraid. No, don't try to get up yet. Lie still. You were in shock for a long time, and no wonder, with the atoms of your body driven right through the time-dimension. But it's done now. After all these years of work, finally, success!" Zarth Arn smiled. "Did you think I had forgotten you?"

"I thought . . . ." said Gordon, and closed his eyes. Keogh. Keogh, he thought, I need you. Am I truly mad and dreaming? Or is this real?

Real, as I knew all along, as I never stopped knowing in spite of all your careful logic!

Real.

He struggled to sit up, and they let him. He looked around the laboratory room. It was just the same as the first time he had seen it, except that some new and very elaborate equipment had been installed, a panel of incomprehensible controls at one side and in the center a tall structure like a glass coffin set on end and suspended between two power grids that were like nothing in Gordon's experience. Enormously fat cables snaked out of the room, presumably to a generator somewhere beyond.

The room was octagonal, with tall windows in each side. Through them poured the clear and brilliant sunlight of high altitudes, and through them Gordon could see the mighty peaks of the Himalayas. Old Earth was still here, outside.

He looked down at his hands, at his familiar body. He felt the solidity of the padded table on which he sat, the texture of the sheets, the movement of air across his naked back. He reached out and took hold of Zarth Arn. Bone and muscle, flesh and blood, warm and alive.

Gordon said, "Where is Lianna?"

"Waiting." His nod indicated that she was close by, in another room. "She wanted to be in here with us, but we thought it better not. As soon as you feel strong enough . . ."

Gordon's heart was pounding. Reality or dream, sanity or madness, what did it matter? He was alive again, and Lianna was waiting. He stood up and laughed as Zarth Arn and the other man caught him and shored up his buckling knees. "It was a long time," he said to Zarth Arn. "I got a little confused. But it's all right now. Whatever this is, I'll settle for it. How about another helping of that hellfire, and some clothes?"

Zarth Arn looked at the other man. "What about it, Lex Vel? Gordon, this is Vel Quen's son. He's taken his father's place with me. If it hadn't been for him I couldn't have solved the insoluble problems that have been driving us both mad ever since you returned to your own time."

"Why be modest?" Lex Vel said. "It's true." He shook Gordon's hand, grinning. "And the answer is no, not yet. Rest awhile and then we'll talk about clothes."

Gordon lay down again, reluctantly. Zarth Arn said, "You'll find quite a welcome at Throon when you get there, Gordon. My brother Jhal is one of the few who know the whole story and he understands what you did for us. We can never repay you, really, but don't think that we've forgotten."

Lying there, Gordon remembered the day when Jhal Arn, ruler of the Empire in the place of his murdered father, had been himself struck down by a would-be assassin, leaving the vast burden of Empire diplomacy and defense upon his, Gordon's, totally inadequate shoulders. By the grace of heaven and sheer fool luck he had bulled it through.

He smiled and said, "Thanks," and then unexpectedly he slept for a while.

When he woke the sunlight was dimmer, the shadows of the high peaks longer. He felt fresh and rested. Zarth Arn was not there but Lex Vel ran a check on him, nodded, and pointed to some clothing draped over a chair. Gordon rose and dressed, feeling shaky at first but rapidly recovering his strength. The suit was of the silky fabric he remembered, sleeveless shirt and trousers in a warm shade of copper, with a cloak of the same material. He stood before a mirror to adjust the cloak, and he had never seen his own self before in this attire, which had looked natural and right on Zarth Arn but which made him smile now and feel as though he were dressed for a costume ball.

And then it hit him like a thunderbolt. Lianna had never seen him. She had fallen in love with him as Zarth Arn, a different Zarth Arn to be sure, and she had understood later that the personality she loved belonged to John Gordon of Earth. But would she still love him when confronted with his physical actuality? Or would she be disappointed, would she find him plain and dull-looking, perhaps even repulsive.

Gordon turned to Lex Vel. He said desperate, "I really do need some more of that stimulant . . . ."

Lex Vel glanced at his face and brought him a glass immediately. Gordon drank it down, as Zarth Arn came in and then hurried toward them.

"What is it?"

"I don't know," said Lex Vel. "He seemed all right, and then all at once . . ."

Zarth Arn said gently, "Perhaps I can guess. It's Lianna, isn't it?"

Gordon nodded. "I suddenly realized that she'll be seeing me for the first time . . . a total stranger."

"She's somewhat prepared. Remember, I've been able to describe you to her, and she's asked me to do so at least ten thousand times." He put his hand on Gordon's shoulder. "It may take her awhile to get used to the change, Gordon, but be patient and never doubt how she feels about you. She has spent far too much time here, away from her kingdom. Many times when she should have been at home attending to affairs of state, she was here instead, waiting for the day when we could say we were ready to try." Zarth Arn shook his head, his eyes serious. "She has ignored repeated messages from Fomalhaut, and of course she wouldn't listen to me. Now that you're here and safe, I'm hoping she'll listen to you. Tell her, Gordon. Tell her she must go home."

"Is there trouble?"

"There's always trouble when the head of state isn't attending to business," said Zarth Arn. "How much or how serious it is I don't know because she hasn't told me. But the messages from Fomalhaut were coded URGENT at first. Now they're IMPERATIVE. You will tell her?"

"Of course," said Gordon, rather glad at the moment that he had something besides himself to worry about.

"Good," said Zarth Arn, and took him by the arm. "Take heart, friend. Remember, I've described you. She's not expecting an Apollo."

He looked at Gordon in such a way that Gordon had to grin briefly. "My friend," he said, "thanks a lot."

Zarth Arn laughed and led him out. But Gordon still felt afraid.

She was waiting for him in a small room that faced the sunset. Beyond the window the snow peaks caught the light and flamed a glorious hot gold, and below them the gorges were filled with purple shadow. Zarth Arn left Gordon at the doorway, and the two were alone. It was quiet there. She turned from the window to look at him and he stood where he was, afraid to move, afraid to speak. She was as lovely as he remembered, tall and slim and graceful, with her ash-blonde hair and her clear gray eyes. And now finally Gordon knew once and for all that this was true and no dream, because no man could imagine what he was feeling in his heart "Lianna," he whispered. And again, "Lianna . . ."

"You are John Gordon." She came toward him, her eyes searching his face as though for some tiny scrap of familiarity by which she might know him. He wanted to take her in his arms, to hold her and touch her and kiss her with all the stored-up hunger of the lonely years, but he did not dare. He could only stand rigid and miserable while she came closer, searching, and then she stopped. Her gaze dropped and she turned away a little, her red mouth uncertain.

Gordon said, "Is it so much of a shock?"

"Zarth Arn told very truly how you would look."

"And you find me . . ."

"No," she said quickly, and turned to meet his gaze again. "Please don't think that." She smiled, rather tremulously. "If I were meeting you for the first time . . . I mean, really for the first time, I would think you a most attractive man." She shook her head. "I mean, I do find you attractive. It isn't that at all. It's just that I will have to learn to know you all over again. That is," she added, her eyes very steady on his, "if you still feel toward me as you did."

"I do," he said. "I do," and he put his hands on her shoulders. She did not draw away, but neither did she yield toward him. She only smiled uncertainly and repeated Zarth Arn's words to him. "Be patient with me."

He took his hands away and said, "I will," trying to keep all trace of bitterness out of his voice. He went over to the window. The flaming peaks had darkened and the snowfields were turning to pure blue, as the first stars pricked the sky. He felt as cold and empty and forlorn as the wind that scoured those snows.

"Zarth Arn tells me that you have trouble at home."

She brushed it aside. "Nothing of importance. He wants you to tell me to go home, doesn't he?"

"Yes."

"And I will, tomorrow, on one condition." She was close beside him again, the last of the daylight showing her face pale and clear as a cameo in the dusk. "You must come with me."

He looked at her and touched his arm. "I've hurt you," she said softly. "And I didn't mean to, I didn't want to. Can you forgive me?"

"Of course, Lianna."

"Then come with me. A little time, John Gordon—that's all I need."

"All right," he said. "I'll come." I'll come, he thought fiercely, and if I have to woo and win you all over again, I'll do it so good and damn well that you'll forget there was ever a time when I looked like somebody else.

3

The royal star-cruiser with the White Sun of Fomalhaut glittering on her bows lifted from the star port, beyond which lay the greatest city of latter-day Earth. It was a city of wide space and lifting beauty. Flared and fluted pylons towered at the intersections of the grid of roadways. Down through the yellow sunshine flocked the local Terran flyers, skimming like birds to roost on the pylons' landing pads. It was not like the cities that Gordon remembered.

The starship left all this behind and plunged back into her true element, the glooming tideless seas of space that run so deep between the island suns. The yellow spark of Sol, and the old green planet from which the human race had spread through a universe, dropped back into obscurity. Now once more the ranked stars shone before Gordon, in all their naked splendor. No wonder, he thought, that he had been smothered by the cramped horizons of twentieth-century Earth, after having once seen this magnificence.

Across the broad loom of the galaxy, the nations of the star-kings were marked in many-colored fire, crimson and gold and emerald green, blue and violet and diamond white . . . the kingdoms of Lyra, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Polaris, and the capital of the great Mid-Galactic Empire at Canopus. The Hercules Cluster blazed with its baronies of swarming suns. To the south, as the cruiser beat westward toward Fomalhaut, the Orion Nebula sprawled its coiling radiance across the firmament. Far northward lay the black blot of the Cloud, where drowned Thallarna lay now in peace.

Once, as the cruiser altered course to skirt a dangerous bank of stellar drift, Gordon caught sight of the Magellanic Clouds, the as yet unknown and unexplored star-clouds lying like offshore islands in the inter-galactic gulf. He remembered that there had once been an invasion of the alien Magellanians into the then-young Empire, an invasion crushed for all time by an ancestor of Zarth Arn's who had for the first time used that terrible secret weapon of the Empire, the thing called the Disrupter.

Gordon thought of Keogh and his detailed psychological explanation of what he had called "the Disrupter fantasy." He smiled, shaking his head. A pity Keogh was not here with him. Keogh could explain the cruiser as a womb symbol, and he could explain Lianna as the unattainable dream-girl, and Gordon's romance with her wish fulfillment. But he wondered just how Keogh would explain Korkhann, Lianna's Minister of Nonhuman Affairs.

His first meeting with Korkhann, which took place the night before take-off, had been a shock to Gordon. He had known that there were nonhuman citizens in the kingdoms of the stars, and he had even seen a few of them, briefly and more or less distantly, but this was the first time he had actually encountered one face to face.

Korkhann was a native of Krens, a star-system on the far borders of Fomalhaut Kingdom. From it, Korkhann said, one might look out across the vast wilderness of the Marches of Outer Space, as though perched precariously on the last thin edge of civilization.

"The counts of the Marches," Zarth Arn had explained to Gordon, "are allied to the Empire, as you remember. But they're a wild lot, and apparently determined to remain that way. They say their oath of fealty did not include opening their borders to Empire ships, and they refuse to do so. My brother often feels that we might be better off to have the counts as enemies rather than friends."

"Their time will come," Korkhann said. "Just now, my immediate problems are closer to home." And he had bent his severe yellow gaze upon Lianna, who reached out and placed her hand affectionately on his sleek gray plumes.

"I have been a trial to you," she said, and turned to Gordon. "Korkhann came here with me and he has been in touch with Fomalhaut almost constantly by stero communicator, doing his best to deal with affairs at long distance."

And Korkhann turned his round unwinking eyes and his beaked nose to Gordon and said in his harsh whistling voice, "I'm glad you have been safely delivered here at last, John Gordon, while Her Highness still has a kingdom to go back to."

Lianna had made light of that, and Gordon had been still distracted by this sudden confrontation with a five-foot-high creature who walked erect, clothed in pride and his own beautiful feathers, who spoke the English-derived language of the Empire, and who gestured gracefully with the long clawed fingers that terminated his flightless wings. But now, on the voyage, Gordon remembered.

They were alone, the three of them, in the cruiser's small but lavishly fitted lounge, and Gordon had been looking forward to the hour when Korkhann would finish his impossibly complicated chess game with Lianna and retire to his own cabin. He sat pretending to scan a tape from the cruiser's library, covertly watching Lianna as she bent her head over the board, thinking how beautiful she was and then glancing at Korkhann and trying to stifle the inner qualm of revulsion he had been fighting ever since that first meeting. And suddenly he said, "Korkhann . . ."

The long slim head turned, making the neck-plumage shift and shine in the lamplight. "Yes?"

"Korkhann, what did you mean when you said you were glad I had come while Lianna still had a kingdom to go back to?"

Lianna said impatiently, "There's no need to go into all that now. Korkhann is a loyal friend and a devoted minister, but he worries too . . ."

"Highness," said Korkhann gently. "We have never had even small falsehoods between us, and this would be a bad time to begin. You worry Just as much as I do about Narath Teyn, but because of another matter you have set aside that worry, and in order to salve your conscience you must deny that there is anything to worry about."

Gordon thought, 'He sounds exactly like Keogh.' And he waited for the explosion.

Lianna's mouth set and her eyes were stormy. She rose, looking imperious in a way that Gordon remembered, but Korkhann continued to sit and bear her angry gaze quietly. Abruptly she turned away.

"You make me furious," she said, "so what you say is probably true. Very well, then. Tell him."

"Who," asked Gordon, "is Narath Teyn?"

"Lianna's cousin," Korkhann said. "He is also the presumptive heir to the crown of Fomalhaut."

"But I thought Lianna . . ."

"Is the legal and undoubted ruler. Yes. But there must always be a next in succession. How much do you know about the kingdom, John Gordon?"

He indicated the tape. "I've been studying, but I haven't had time to learn too much." He frowned at Korkhann. "I could wonder why this would concern the Minister of Nonhuman Affairs."

Korkhann nodded and rose from the forgotten chess game. "I can show you." He dimmed the lights and touched a wall stud. A panel slid back, revealing a three-dimensional map of Fomalhaut Kingdom, a spatter of tiny suns in the simulated blackness of space, dominated by the white star that gives the area its name.

"There are many nonhuman races in the galaxy," Korkhann said. "Some are intelligent and civilized, some are brutish, some are making the change from the one to the other, some probably never will. In the early days there were some unfortunate confrontations, not without reason on both sides. You find me repellent . . . ."

Gordon started, and was aware that Lianna had turned to look at him. He felt his face turn hot, and he said with unnecessary sharpness, "Whatever gave you that idea?"

"Forgive me," Korkhann said. "You have been most studiously polite, and I don't wish to insult you, especially as I understand that yours is a purely instinctive reaction."

"Korkhann is a telepath," said Lianna. She added, "Quite a lot of the nonhumans are, so if what he says is true, John Gordon, you had better conquer that instinct."

"You see," said Korkhann, "well over half the worlds of our kingdom are nonhuman." His quick clawed fingers pointed them out—the tiny solar-systems with their motelike planets. "On the other hand, the uninhabited worlds that were colonized by your people, here and here . . . ." Again the long finger flicked. "These are the planets with the heavy populations, so that humans outnumbered nonhumans by about two-thirds. You know that the princess rules with the aid of a council, which is divided into two chambers, with representation in one based upon planetary units, and in the other on population . . . ."

Gordon was beginning to get part of the picture. "So one chamber of the council would always be dominated by one group."

"Exactly," Korkhann said. "Therefore, the opinion of the ruler is often the deciding one. You can see that because of this, the sympathies of the ruler are of more than ordinary importance in Fomalhaut Kingdom."

"There was never any real difficulty until about two years ago," Lianna said. "Then a campaign began to make the nonhumans believe that the humans were their enemies, that I in particular hated them and was hatching all sorts of plots. Complete nonsense, but among nonhumans as well as among humans there are always those who will listen."

"Gradually," Korkhann said, "a pattern emerged. A certain group among the nonhuman populations aspires to take over the rule of Fomalhaut Kingdom, and as a first step they must replace Lianna with a ruler more to their liking."

"Narath Teyn?"

"Yes," said Korkhann, "and I will answer your unspoken question also, John Gordon. No, Lianna, it is a fair question and I wish to answer it." The bright yellow eyes met Gordon's squarely. "You wonder why I support the human cause against my own kind. The answer is quite simple. It is because in this case the human cause is the just one. The group behind Narath Teyn talk very eloquently of justice, but they think only of power. And somewhere in all this there is something hidden, an evil which I do not understand but which frightens me nevertheless."

He shrugged, rippling the gray shoulder-plumes. "Beyond all that, Narath Teyn is . . ."

He stopped as someone rapped sharply on the door.

Lianna said, "Enter."

A junior officer entered and stood at rigid attention. "Highness," he said, "Captain Harn Horva respectfully requests your presence on the bridge, at once." His eyes flicked to Korkhann. "You too, sir, if you please."

Gordon felt the small shock of alarm in the air.

Only an emergency of considerable importance would bring such a request from the captain. Lianna nodded.

"Of course," she said, and turned to Gordon. "Come with us."

The young officer led the way. They followed him down narrow gleaming corridors and up a steep companionway to the ship's control-center, still archaically called "the bridge."

Aft was a long curving bulkhead filled with the massed panels of the computer banks, the guidance systems, the controls that governed velocity, mass, and the accumulator banks. Here under the steel floorplates the throbbing of the generators was as close and intimate as the pulsing of one's own blood. Forward a series of screens gave visual and radar images of space along a 180-degree perimeter, and at one side was the stereo-communicator. As they entered the bridge Gordon was aware of the complete silence, broken only by the electronic purlings and hummings of the equipment. The technicians all appeared to be holding their breath, their attention fixed half on their instruments and half on the taut little group around the radar screens, the captain, first and second officers, and radar men.

Harn Horva, a tall vigorous gray-haired man with very keen eyes and a strong jaw, turned to greet them. "Highness," he said. "I'm sorry to disturb you, but it is necessary."

To Gordon's untutored eye the screens showed nothing but a meaningless speckle of blips. He turned his attention instead to the visual screens.

The cruiser was approaching an area of cosmic drift. Gordon saw it first as a sort of tenuous dark cloud occluding the stars beyond it. Then as he looked he began to see its individual components, bits and pieces of interstellar wrack gleaming faintly in the light of far-off suns. Rocks as big as worlds, rocks as small as houses, and every size in-between, embedded in a tattered stream of dust that stretched for a parsec or two across the void. It was still a long way off. The cruiser would pass it on her port beam, with distance to spare. Nothing else showed. He could not understand what the excitement was about.

Harn Horva was busy explaining to Lianna.

"Our regular radar is picking up only the normal blips associated with drift. But the hot-spot scanners are getting some high-energy emissions that are not all typical of drift." His face was grim, his voice driving on to a harsh conclusion. "I'm afraid we'll have to assume that there are ships lying up in there, using the drift as a screen."

"Ambush?" asked Lianna, her own voice perfectly steady. And Gordon's heart jumped and began to pound. "I don't see how that could be possible, Captain. I know that you've been following the tactical evasion course required by security regulations, which means that you yourself have been improvising the coordinates at random intervals. How could anyone plan an ambush without knowing our course?"

"I could postulate a traitor," said Harn Horva, "but I think it highly unlikely. I would guess instead that telepaths are being used." His voice became even harsher. "Narath Teyn has the pick of them on his side."

He turned to Korkhann. "Sir, I would appreciate your assistance."

"You wish to know if there are indeed ships there," Korkhann said, and nodded. "As you say, Narath Teyn has the pick, and my race is not among them. Still, I'll do my best."

He moved a little apart and stood quietly, his yellow eyes going strange and unfocused. Everyone was silent, waiting. The generators throbbed and thundered.

Vagrant blips sparked and were gone on the hot-spot screens. Gordon's mouth was dry and his chest felt tight, and the rest of him was sweating.

At last Korkhann said, "There are ships. Narath Teyn's."

"What else?" asked Lianna. "What did you hear?"

"Minds. Human, nonhuman, a babble of minds on the edge of battle." His slim clawed fingers opened in a gesture of frustration. "I could not read them clearly, but I think . . . I think. Highness, they are waiting not to capture, but to kill."

4

Instantly there was an outcry in the bridge room, of anger and shock. Harn Horva quelled it with one sharp order.

"Quiet! We have no time for that." He turned again to the screens and studied them, his body taut as a drawn bow. Gordon looked at Lianna. Whatever she felt inside, she was showing nothing to the men but cool self-possession. Gordon began really to be afraid.

"Can't you message Fomalhaut for help?" he asked.

"Too far away. They couldn't possibly get here in time, and in any case our friends ahead there in the drift would attack instantly if they intercepted such a message. Which of course they would."

Harn Horva straightened, the lines deep at the corners of his mouth. "I believe our only hope is to turn and run for it. With your permission, Highness . . ."

"No," said Lianna, unexpectedly.

Gordon stared at her. So did the captain. She smiled, briefly and without humor.

"There's no need to spare me, Harn Horva, though I thank you for the intent. I know as well as you do that we might outrun their ships, but not their missiles. And the moment we change course, showing that we're aware of the ambush, we'd have a cloud of missiles after us."

Harn Horva began talking fiercely about evasive action and missile-destroyer batteries, but Lianna was already beside the communications technician.

"I will speak to the Royal ComCenter at Fomalhaut. Make it a normal transmission."

"Highness!" said the Captain desperately. "They'll intercept."

"I want them to," said Lianna, and Gordon was struck by the look in her eyes. He started to speak but Korkhann forestalled him, his feathers ruffled with emotion.

"Your plan is a bold one, Highness, and sometimes boldness pays. But I urge you to think very carefully before you commit yourself."

"And all of you as well. I understand that, Korkhann. I have thought. And I can see no other way." Looking at them all, she explained. "I will message Fomalhaut that I am going on to visit my cousin Narath Teyn at Marral, for an important conference. Then I propose to do exactly that."

For a moment there was a stunned silence. Then Gordon said, "What?"

Lianna continued as though she had not heard him. "You see what this will do. If it's known that I'm heading for Marral, and anything happens to me on the way, my cousin would certainly get the blame. At the very least it would rouse enough feeling against him so that his hopes of succeeding me would be pretty well ruined. Which stalemates our friends there in the drift. Narath Teyn won't dare let me be killed under circumstances that would shatter all his plans."

"That's all very fine," said Gordon, "but what happens after you get there? You know the man wants to get rid of you, and you're putting yourself squarely in his hands." He was close to Lianna now, intent only on her and quite aware of the frozen stillness around him. "No. The captain's idea is better. The chance of escaping may be small but it is a chance. This way . . ."

Lianna's eyes were very wide, very cool, very gray. She smiled, a small curving of the mouth. "I thank you for your concern, John Gordon. I have considered all the objections, and this is my decision." She turned to the technician. "Fomalhaut, please."

The technician looked uneasily at Harn Horva, who made a helpless gesture and said, "Do as Her Highness wishes." Neither he nor anyone else appeared to notice the coloring of Gordon's face, which was first red and then white. In fact, it was as though Gordon had suddenly become invisible.

Gordon moved forward a step, without quite realizing it Korkhann's fingers closed tightly on his arm, and then more tightly, the sharp talons digging just a little. Gordon stiffened and then forced himself to relax and stand easily. He watched the screens while Lianna made her transmission to Fomalhaut. Nothing happened. The dark drift ahead remained quiescent, concerned with its own cold and ancient affairs which had nothing to do with humanity. The thought crossed his mind that Korkhann might have invented the lurking ships and the death-wish.

"But see here," whispered Korkhann's voice beside him. The clawed fingers pointed to the hot-spot screens and the vagrant sparks that glittered there. "Each spark is a ship's generator. The drift moves. Nothing is ever still in space. As the drift moves, so must the ships, and there scanners can see where radar is as good as blind."

"Korkhann," said Gordon softly, "my friend, you make me just the least small bit nervous."

"You'll get used to it. And don't forget . . . I am your friend."

Lianna finished her message, spoke briefly to the captain, and left the bridge. Gordon followed with Korkhann. Once below, Lianna said pleasantly, "Will you excuse us, Korkhann?"

Korkhann bowed and strode away down the passage on his long thin legs. Lianna flung open the door of the lounge without waiting for Gordon to do it for her. When they were inside and the door closed again, she turned and faced him.

"You must never," she said, "question my judgment or interfere with my orders in public."

Gordon looked at her. "How about in private? Or are you ruler in the bedroom, too?"

Now it was her turn to redden. "It may be hard for you to understand. You come from a different age, a different culture."

"I do indeed. And I will tell you something. I will not give up my right to say what I think." She opened her mouth, and he raised his voice, not much, but there was a note in it that held her silent. "Furthermore, when I speak as a friend, as a man who loves you and is concerned only for your safety, I will not be publicly slapped in the face for it." His eyes were as steady as hers, and as hot. "I'm beginning to wonder, Lianna. Perhaps you'd do better with someone who isn't such a lout about protocol."

"Please try to understand! I have obligations above and beyond my personal feelings. I have a kingdom I must worry about."

"I do understand," Gordon said. "I once had an empire to worry about, remember? Good night."

He left her standing. Out in the passage, in spite of his anger, he could not help smiling. He wondered how many times she'd been walked out on. Not often enough, he thought.

He went along to his own cabin and lay awake wondering if her harebrained scheme would work, if they would be allowed to pass quietly on their way to Marral, wherever that might be. He half expected every minute to feel the impact of a missile that would blow the cruiser's fragments across half this sector of space. But time went by and nothing happened, and after a while he began to think about Lianna and what might lie ahead.

When he slept at last his dreams were disturbed and sad. In all of them he lost her, sometimes in the midst of a lurid darkness where strange shapes walked, and sometimes in a vast throne room where she walked away from him, and away, and away, gliding backwards with her face toward him and her eyes on his, the cool, remote eyes of a stranger.

The cruiser skirted the edge of the drift, altered course slightly to the southwest and continued on her way unmolested.

The next "day," arbitrarily so-called in the ship's log, Korkhann met Gordon in the captain's mess, where he was toying with a gloomy breakfast all alone, having purposely waited until Harn Horva and the other officers would be finished. Lianna always took her breakfast in her private suite.

"So far," said Korkhann, "the plan seems to be working."

"Sure," said Gordon. "The victim is walking right into a trap; why shoot her on the way?"

"It might be difficult for Narath Teyn to find a way to kill her on his own world without being accused of it."

"Do you think so?"

Korkhann shook his head. "No. Knowing Narath Teyn and his world, and his people, I don't think it will be difficult at all."

They were silent for a time. Then Gordon said, "I think you'd better tell me all you can."

They went into a lounge and Korkhann opened the map panel, where the tiny suns of Fomalhaut Kingdom glittered in the dark.

"Here along the southwestern borders of the kingdom is a sort of badland, of rogue stars and uninhabited, uninhabitable worlds, with here and there a solar system capable of supporting life, like Krens, from whence I come. The peoples of these scattered systems are, like myself, nonhuman." He pointed out a tawny-yellow star that burned like a smoky cairngorm on the dark breast of drift-cloud. "That star is Marral, and its planet Teyn is where Narath keeps his court."

Gordon frowned. "It seems a strange place for an heir to a throne."

"Until recently, he was only sixth in line. He was born at Teyn. Intrigue runs somewhat in the blood, you see. His father was banished for it, some years before Lianna was born."

"And what makes Narath Teyn so much more popular with the nonhumans than Lianna?"

"He has lived his life among them. He thinks like them. He is more of them, indeed, than I am. Nonhumans are of all sorts and kinds, John Gordon, children of many different stars, products of the evolutionary conditions decreed by the environments of our separate worlds. Many are so alien as to be quite unacceptable not only to humans but to other nonhumans as well. Narath loves them all. He is a strange man, and I think not entirely sane."

Korkhann closed the map panel gently and turned away, his plumage ruffling as it did when he was deeply disturbed.

"Lianna would have done well to listen to you," he said, "and protocol be damned. But she's too brave to be sensibly fearful, and too much her father's daughter to stand for threats. She's angry now, and determined to put a stop to her cousin's activities." He shook his head. "I think she may have waited too long."

Lianna gave him no chance to try and alter her decision. In the time that followed, while the tawny star grew from a distant spark to a flaming disc in the screens, she avoided being alone with him. He caught her looking at him with a curiously speculative expression once or twice, but apart from that her manner was correct and outwardly friendly. Only Gordon knew that between them now was a wall ten feet high. He did not try to climb it. Not yet.

The cruiser went into deceleration and landed on the second of five planets that circled Marral. Teyn.

Narath's world.

The dust and the searing heat died away. In the bridge room Lianna stood with Harn Horva and Korkhann beside the visor screens that now scanned the area outside the ship. Gordon stood a little apart, trying to calm his jumping nerves.

"They did receive your message?" Lianna said.

"Yes, Highness. We have the acknowledgement on tape."

"I'm not doubting your word, Captain. It's just that it seems strange . . ."

It did seem strange, even to Gordon. The screens showed an empty land beyond the primitive and obviously little-used port with its shuttered building and cracked pads that could only accommodate a bare handful of ships. Away from the blast area there were open gladelike forests of very thin and graceful trees that were the color of ripe wheat and not unlike it in shape. The light was strange, a heavy gold that darkened to orange in the shadows. A breeze, unheard and unfelt, swayed the tall trees. Apart from that nothing moved.

Lianna's mouth was set but her voice was silken. "If my cousin is unable to come and greet me, then I must go and greet him. I will have the land-car, Captain, and the guard. At once."

The orders were given. Lianna came and stood before Gordon. "This is a state visit. You don't need to come with me."

"I wouldn't miss it," Gordon said, and added, "Highness."

A faint color touched her cheekbones. She nodded and went on and he went with her, down to the airlock to await the unloading of the car. Korkhann, beside him, gave him one bright oblique glance. Nothing more was said, and in a short time the car appeared.

The guard formed ranks around Lianna, and incidentally around Gordon and Korkhann. The airlock opened. The standard-bearer shook out the banner of the White Sun on the strange-scented wind and marched them down the ramp to the car, where he fixed the standard in its socket and stood stiffly at attention as Lianna climbed in.

The car was a longish vehicle, unobtrusively armored and equipped with concealed firing-ports. The guard was armed. All this should have made Gordon feel more at ease. It did not. There was something about the tall swaying trees, and the way the glades led the eye along their open innocence into sudden panic of confusion and honey-colored gloom. There was something about the air, its warmth like an animal's breath, and its smell of wildness. He did not trust this world. Even the sky offended him, closing him in with a shimmering metallic curve that was almost tangible, like the roof of a trap.

The land-car sped away along a rude and unpaved track, gentling the roughness to nothing with its airfoil cushion. The land glided past, the character of it changing swiftly from flat to rolling and then to hilly, with forests thinning on the rocky knolls. The shadows seemed to deepen, as though the planet tilted toward night.

Suddenly someone, the driver or the standard-bearer who sat beside him or one of the guards, gave a yell of alarm and all the weapons in the car clacked to the firing-ports, even before Gordon could see what had caused the outcry. Korkhann pointed to a long hill-slope ahead.

"See over there, among the trees . . ."

There were things standing in the shadowed glades, a sinuous massing of shapes completely unidentifiable to Gordon's eyes. The men in the car had fallen silent. The soft thrumbling hiss of the airfoil jets sounded very loud in the quiet, and then from the slope there came one clear cry from a silvery horn, sweet and strange, running like fox fire along the nerves.

And at that moment the host swept toward them down the hillside.

5

Lianna's voice sounded close to Gordon, sharp and urgent. "Do not fire!"

Gordon was about to protest. Korkhann nudged him and whispered, "Wait."

The creatures poured in a lithe and sinuous flood along the slope, spreading out and around to encircle the car, their strange shapes still made indistinct by the barred shadowings of the trees. The air rang with cries, a hooting and shrilling from inhuman throats that seemed to Gordon to be full of triumph and cruel laughter. He strained his eyes. They were large creatures. They went an four feet, but softly, not like hoofed things, springing instead like great long-legged cats, and they appeared to carry riders . . . .

No. He could see some of them now quite clearly, burnished copper and ring-spotted and smoke-colored and glossy black, and his stomach gave a lurch. Not because they were hideous. They were not, and even in that moment of shock he was struck by their outlandish beauty. But they were so improbably strange. Animal and what he had taken for rider were, centaur-like, one flesh, as though a six-legged form of life had decided to walk at least partly upright, adapting head and torso and forelimbs to a shape almost human except for the angular slenderness. Their eyes were large, slanted and glowing, cat-eyes with keen intelligence behind them. Their mouths laughed, and they moved with the joy of strength and speed, their upper bodies bending like pliant reeds.

"The Gerrn," whispered Korkhann. "The dominant race of this planet."

They were all around the car now, which had slowed almost to a standstill. Gordon caught a glimpse of Lianna's profile, cut from white stone, looking straight ahead. The tension inside the car was rapidly becoming painful, tangible as the build-up of forces just before one small spark sets off the explosion.

He whispered to Korkhann, "Can you get from their minds what their intentions are?"

"No. They're telepaths too, and far more adept at it than I am. They can guard their minds totally. I couldn't even sense that they were there, before we saw them. And I think they're shielding someone else's mind as well . . . ah!"

Gordon saw then that one of the Gerrn did in fact carry a rider.

He was a young man, only a few years older than Lianna, and as light and lithe and spare as the Gerrn themselves. He was clad in a tight-fitting suit of golden russet and his brown hair fell long around his shoulders, wind-roughened and streaked by the sun. The silver horn that had sounded the one sweet cry was slung at his side. He clung to the back of a huge black-furred male, who bore him lightly to the forefront of the host. He lifted his arms and flung them wide, smiling, a handsome young man with eyes like sapphires, and his eyes seemed to Gordon to be more strange and fey than the cat-eyes of the Gerrn.

"Welcome!" he cried. "Welcome to Teyn, cousin Lianna!"

Lianna inclined her head. The tension ebbed. Men began to breathe again, and wipe their sweaty hands and faces. Narath Teyn raised the horn to his lips and sounded it again. The Gerrn host dissolved into fluid motion, sweeping the car along in its midst.

Two hours later, Teyn Hall blazed with light and skirled with music. The hall itself stood high on the slope of a river valley, a great sprawl of native stone and timber with many windows open on the night. Wide lawns ran down to the river bank and the Gerrn village that sheltered there among the trees. Above, the night sky dripped fire from the wild auroras born of proximity to the stellar drift, and in the shaking light strange shapes fled and gamboled across the lawns, or passed in and out through the open doors, or roosted on the broad sills of the windows. Incongruous and ill at ease, six of Lianna's guardsmen stood by the car and watched, and the radioman spoke at intervals into the mike.

Inside, fires burned on huge hearths at each end of the massive hall. Chandeliers poured light from the vaulted ceiling. The air was heavy with the smells of food and wine and smoke and the mingled company. There was only one table, and Gordon sat at it with Lianna and Narath Teyn and Korkhann, who was dignifiedly able to cope with a chair. Most of the guests who filled the hall preferred the rich rugs and cushions on the floor.

In a cleared space in the center of the hall three hunched and hairy shapes made music, with a panpipe of sorts and a flat-voiced drum, while two bright red creatures with more arms and legs than anyone needed swayed around each other with mannered grace, their gestures as stylized as Kabuki dancers, their long faces and many-faceted eyes resembling red-lacquered masks. The drumbeat picked up; the pipes shrilled higher. The scarlet legs and arms moved faster and faster. The dancers swirled and swayed hypnotically, dissolving into a blur before Gordon's eyes. The heat was terrific, the dry fauve smell of the packed nonhuman bodies almost terrifying.

Narath Teyn leaned over and spoke to Lianna. Gordon could not hear what he said, but he heard Lianna's retort.

"I've come here for an understanding, cousin, and I mean to have it. All this is by the way."

Narath Teyn bowed his head, all grace and mockery. He was dressed now in green, his long hair smoothed and held with a golden circlet. His dancers reached an impossible climax, followed by an abrupt and stunning cessation of both movement and music. Narath Teyn rose, holding out flagons of wine. He shouted something in a hissing, clacking sing-song and the scarlet ones answered and came scuttering toward him, to accept their flagons with a bow. A storm of noise burst out as the guests applauded in their several ways.

Underneath the racket Gordon spoke to Korkhann. "Where does he get his ships?" he asked. "And his men?"

"There is a town and a spaceport on the other side of this world. There is much trade between these wild systems and he controls it all. In his own way he is rich and powerful. Also he . . ."

The noise in the hall died away as another sound intruded; the long whistling far-off roar of a space cruiser dropping toward a landing. Gordon saw Lianna stiffen, and his own nerves snapped even tighter.

"Well," said Narath Teyn, glancing skyward with innocent amazement, "it seems that more guests are on their way. Always a flood after a long drought!"

He dropped into a guttural tongue and pounded on the table, laughing, and the big black-furred Gerrn who had carried him sprang into the open space deserted by the dancers. He had been introduced to Gordon as Sserk, chief of the local clan of Gerrn and second under Narath Teyn. He moved around the circle now in a ritual movement, slowly, lifting each lion-clawed foot in turn. His hands were crossed above his head and each one held a knife. The rhythm of his movement was picked up by the voices of the Gerrn, becoming a sort of yowling chant that ended every so often in a deep grunted cough!, only to begin again when Sserk resumed his pacing. Narath Teyn, looking flushed and pleased, spoke again to Lianna.

"Also," whispered Korkhann dryly, "as I was about to say, I suspect that he has allies."

Gordon swore very quietly under his breath. "Can't you read anything in his mind?"

"The Gerrn guard him. All I can read is satisfaction, and that you may see for yourself, in his face. I'm afraid we're in for . . ."

A harsh scream cut across the chanting and a second Gerrn, a young male with spotted flanks and very powerful haunches, leaped into the circle and began a prancing counter movement, holding his two knives high. His eyes were fixed on Sserk, drunken amber, wide and shining.

The chanting took on a deeper note. Elsewhere in the room it grew quiet. Grotesque heads craned forward, strange limbs shifted and were still. The two Gerrn circled, balancing. The servitors, mostly young females of the tribe with the baby fur still fluffy on them, stopped running about and stood watching.

Sserk sprang. The knives flashed, were caught and parried, and instantly Sserk's rump dropped and his forepaws rose, one feinting with quick strokes while the other lashed. The spotted male spun lightly out of reach and reared up himself, his knives darting and clashing as Sserk parried in his turn, then leaped clear of the raking claw. They began to circle again, stamping softly, their haunches quivering.

Only Narath Teyn was not watching the fencers, Gordon saw. He was waiting for something or someone and his strange fey eyes were bright with a secret triumph. Lianna sat as proud and undisturbed as though she were in her own hall at Fomalhaut, and Gordon wondered if underneath that calm she was as frightened as he.

The duel went on, it seemed, interminably. The clever hands, the murderous swift paws, the sinuous bodies darting, bounding high. The eyes alight with the pleasure of battle that was not quite to the death. After a while there was blood, and a while after that there was a lot more of it, so that the spectators close to the circle were spattered with it, and the chanting became more of a simple animal howling. In spite of himself, and ashamed of it, Gordon felt the ancient cruel excitement rise in him, found himself leaning over the table and grunting with the blows. In the end the spotted male flung down his knives and took his torn flanks dripping to the door and out of it as fast as he could go, while Sserk screamed victory and the Gerrn crowded around him with wine and praise and cloths to stop his wounds. Gordon, feeling a little sick now that the excitement was past, was reaching for his own wine-cup when he felt Korkhann touch him.

"Look, in the doorway . . ."

A tall man stood there, clad in black leather with the symbol of a jeweled mace aglitter on his breast, and a cap of black steel with a plume in it, and a cloak of somber purple to sweep to his heels.

There was someone, or something, behind him.

Gordon caught Lianna's sharp intake of breath, and then Narath Teyn sprung up and was pounding for silence, shouting a welcome to the newcome guest.

"Cyn Cryver, Count of the Marches of Outer Space! Welcome!"

The count strode into Teyn Hall and the Gerrn made way for him respectfully. And now Gordon saw that the count's companion was dressed in a cowled robe of shimmering gray that covered him, or it, completely from head to foot. The form beneath the flowing cloth seemed to be oddly stunted, and it moved with a fluid gliding motion that Gordon found distinctly unpleasant.

The count removed his cap and bent over Lianna's hand. "A most fortunate coincidence, Lady! Fortunate for me, at least. I hope you'll forgive me for choosing the same time you chose to visit your cousin."

Lianna said sweetly, "The ways of coincidence are indeed marvelous. Who shall question them?" She withdrew her hand. "Who is your companion?"

The cowled creature bobbed politely and made a thin hissing sound, then glided away to a relatively quiet corner behind the table. Cyn Cryver smiled and looked at Korkhann.

"One of the Empire's more remote allies, Lady, who out of courtesy keeps himself veiled. He occupies with me much the same position as does your minister, Korkhann, with you."

He acknowledged introduction to Gordon and sat down. The feasting went on. Gordon noticed that Korkhann seemed tense and distracted, his fingers opening and closing spasmodically around his wine-cup. The air grew hotter and noisier. In the cleared space two young Gerrn, without knives, began to circle and prance, batting at each other only half playfully. At the far end of the hall a fight broke out between two members of different species and was promptly smothered. The pipers and drummers were at it again, and a ragged-looking creature with leathery wings flapped up on to the carved balustrade of the great stair and began a rhythmic screaming that might have been song. Yet underneath all this Gordon seemed to sense an uneasiness, as though a shadow had crept across the festivities. Sserk and some of the other mature Gerrn appeared to have lost their desire for drink and jollity. One by one they began to withdraw, melting away unobtrusively through the unruly crowd.

Gordon wondered if they, like himself, felt the presence of the cowled stranger as a breath of cold wind along the spine. The corner where the creature squatted was now otherwise deserted, and the area seemed to be widening. Gordon shivered, unable to rid himself of the feeling that the damned thing was staring straight at him from behind its blank gray draperies.

Out in the circle one of the young Gerrn clipped his opponent too enthusiastically, bringing blood, and in a moment the claws and fur were flying in earnest. Lianna rose.

"I will leave you to your pleasures, cousin," she said icily. "Tomorrow we will talk."

Grabbing at the chance to escape, Gordon was at her elbow before she had finished speaking. But Narath Teyn insisted on escorting her, so that Gordon had no choice but to trail them up the great staircase, with Korkhann stalking beside him. The noise from the hall below diminished as they walked down the vaulted corridor.

"I'm sorry if my friends offended you, cousin Lianna. I forget, having lived with them all my life, that others may not. . ."

"Your friends don't offend me at all," said Lianna, "if you mean the nonhumans. You offend me. Cyn Cryver offends me."

"But, cousin. . .!"

"You're a fool, Narath Teyn. And you're playing for stakes far beyond your capacity. You should have stayed content here in your forests with your Gerrn."

Gordon saw Narath Teyn's face tighten. The fey eyes shot lightning. But his composure never wavered. "It is well known that a crown conveys all wisdom to its wearer. I shall not argue."

"Your mockery seems ill-placed, cousin, since you are willing to do murder for that crown."

Narath Teyn stared at her, startled. He did not deny, nor did she give him a chance to. She pointed to the other half of her twelve guardsmen, who were posted outside her door.

"I would advise you to explain to Cyn Cryver, in case he does not understand, that I am well guarded by loyal men who cannot be drugged, bribed, or frightened from their posts. They can be killed, but in that case you must also kill their comrades below, who keep in constant touch with my cruiser. If that contact is broken, Fomalhaut will be instantly notified, and a force will come at once from the cruiser. Cyn Cryver might use his forces to stop it, but neither you nor he could gain anything by that but ultimate destruction-"

Narath Teyn said, in a queer husky voice, "Have no fear, Lady."

"I have none," she said. "I bid you good night." She swept into her apartment and the guard closed the door behind her. Narath Teyn gave Gordon and Korkhann a blank glare and then turned and strode away down the corridor.

Korkhann took Gordon's arm and they walked on toward their own quarters. Gordon started to speak and Korkhann stopped him. He seemed to be listening. His urgency communicated itself to Gordon and he made no protest when Korkhann urged him on past their own doors, on faster and faster toward the far end of the corridor where it was deserted and quiet and almost dark, and there was a back stairway, winding down.

Korkhann pushed him to it with a strange desperation.

"For the moment we're not being watched. I must get down to the car, get word to Harn Horva . . ."

Gordon hesitated, his heart thundering now with alarm. "What . . . ?"

"I understand now," Korkhann said. "They don't plan to kill Lianna." His yellow eyes were full of horror. "They plan something far worse!"

6

Gordon started back. "I'm going to get her out of here."

"No!" Korkhann held him. "She's being watched, Gordon. There are Gerrn hidden in the room next to hers. They'd give the alarm at once. We'd never get out of the building."

"But the guards . . .!"

"Gordon, listen. There is a force here that the guards can't fight. The gray stranger who came with the count . . . I tried to touch its mind and was thrown back by a shock that half stunned me. But the Gerrn are stronger. Some of them got through, a little way at least. I know, because they were so shaken that they dropped their own guard. Did you see how Sserk and the others left? They're afraid, sick-afraid of that creature, and the Gerrn are not a timid folk." He was speaking so rapidly and in such desperation that Gordon had difficulty understanding him. "Sserk looked at Lianna. As I say, his own mind was unguarded, for the moment. He was seeing her as a mindless, blasted doll, and feeling horrified, and wishing she had not come."

Now Gordon felt a cold sickness in himself. "You mean that thing has the power to . . ."

"It's like nothing I've ever felt before. I don't know what that being is or where it comes from, but its mind is more deadly than all our weapons." He started down the stairs. "Their plan still depends on secrecy. If Harn Horva knows, and sends word to Fomalhaut, they wouldn't dare go through with it."

Probably not, Gordon thought. But Harn Horva could do more than send word to Fomalhaut. He could send men and guns, too many for even the gray stranger to handle all at once. There was a 'copter in the cruiser's hold. Help could be here in no more than thirty minutes, perhaps less. He flung himself after Korkhann.

The stairway led them winding down to a stone passage and a small door. They went through it with the sounds of revelry dim in their ears, into the warm night behind Teyn Hall, and then they ran, keeping close in the shadows. When they reached the front corner they stopped and looked cautiously around it.

The front of Teyn Hall still blazed with light, and merrymakers still swarmed in and out of the open door, though they seemed fewer now. The ground-car stood exactly as before, with six guards around it and the driver and radioman visible inside.

Gordon started forward.

Korkhann pulled him back. "It's too late. Their minds . . ."

In the instant Gordon lingered he saw what might have been the flicker of a gray robe gliding past a group of Gerrn and back into the hall. Then inside the car the radioman leaned forward and spoke into the mike.

"Look there," said Gordon, "they're all right, he's keeping the contact." He pulled free and ran toward the car.

He had taken perhaps five full steps when one of the guards saw him, and turned, and raised his weapon, and Gordon saw his face clearly in the window-light. He saw the others turning one by one. He set his heels in the grass and fled, back to the shelter of the corner. The guards lowered their weapons and resumed their posts, watching with glassy and uncaring eyes the shapes that leaped and scurried across the lawns and through the groves of trees.

"Next time," Korkhann said, "listen to me."

"But the radioman . . !"

"Contact will be carried on as before. Do you suppose the Gray One can't manage so simple a thing as that?" They retreated along the dark back wall. Korkhann beat his hands together softly, in anguish. "There's no hope now of getting word through. But we must do something, and quickly."

Gordon looked up at the high windows, where Lianna was. Where perhaps the gray stranger was already bobbling up the great staircase to the corridor, to strike the minds of Lianna's guards into passive jelly. Where the Gerrn lay hidden in dark rooms, watching the prey.

The Gerrn.

Suddenly Gordon turned and ran away across the wide lawns that sloped to the river and the groves of trees and the odd round roofs of the Gerrn village. Korkhann ran beside him and for once Gordon was thankful for telepathy. He did not have to waste time explaining.

They went in among the trees, into alternate shadow and bursts of shaking light from the aurora, amid intimate unfamiliar sounds of a village going about its affairs. And then there was a gathering of half-seen forms around them, the menacing soft tread of great paws. In the fire-shot gloom above him Gordon could see the narrow heads looking down at him, cat-eyes eerily catching the light.

He was fleetingly astonished to realize that he was not in the least afraid. There was no longer any time for that. He said to the Gerrn, "My mind is open to you, whether you understand my words or not. I come to see Sserk."

There was a rustling and stirring among them. A black shape drifted to the fore and a slurred harsh voice said, "Both your minds are open to me. I know what it is you want, but I can't help you. Turn back."

"No," said Gordon. "For the love you bear Narath Teyn, you will help us. Not for us, not for the Princess Lianna, but for his sake. You have touched the mind of the gray stranger . . ."

The Gerrn stirred uneasily, growling. And Korkhann said suddenly, "Cyn Cryver and the Gray One. Who truly leads, and who follows?"

"The Gray One leads," said Sserk grudgingly, "and the count follows, though he does not know it yet."

"And if Narath Teyn is king at Fomalhaut, who will lead then?"

Sserk's eyes glowed briefly in the aurora light. But he shook his head. "I can't help you."

"Sserk," said Gordon. "How long will they let Narath Teyn rule—the Gray One and Cyn Cryver and whoever is behind them? Narath Teyn wants power for the nonhumans, but what do they want?"

"I could not see that far," said Sserk, very softly, "but whatever it is, it is not for us."

"Nor for Narath Teyn. They need him now because he's the legitimate heir, if the princess dies or is rendered unfit. But you know what will happen to him in the end. You know, Sserk."

He could feel now that Sserk was trembling. He said, "If you love him, save him." And he added, "You know that he's not altogether sane."

"But he loves us," said Sserk fiercely, and his great paw rose as though to strike Gordon. "He belongs to us."

"Then keep him here. Otherwise, he is lost."

Sserk was silent. The breeze rustled in the tall trees, and the Gerrn swayed where they stood, uneasy and disturbed. Gordon waited, his mind strangely still, occupied distantly with the last resort. If the Gerrn refused, he would find a weapon and try his best to kill the gray stranger.

"You would not live to press the firing stud," said Sserk. "Very well. For his sake . . . For his sake, we'll help."

Sweat broke out on Gordon. His knees turned weak. "Then hurry," he said, and turned to run. "We must get her out before . . ."

The Gerrn blocked his way. "Not you," Sserk said. "Stay here, where we can guard your minds, as we've done since you came." Gordon started to protest, and Sserk grabbed him roughly, shook him as an impatient father might shake a child. "Our people watch her. We may get her out, you can't. If you go back you'll give us all away and all will be lost."

"He's right," Korkhann said, "Let them go, Gordon."

They went, four of them with Sserk at their head, and Gordon watched them bitterly as they raced away along the slope of the lawn. The other Gerrn closed around them, and Korkhann said, "They'll try to shield our minds. You can help them by thinking of other things."

Other things. What other things were there in the world that mattered? Still, Gordon did his best, and the minutes trickled by with the beads of icy sweat that ran on him, and suddenly there was an outcry, rather faint and confused, from Teyn Hall and then a crackle of shots. Gordon started wildly, felt the same shock run through the Gerrn, and a moment later Sserk came plunging in among the trees. He bore a struggling figure in his arms. Behind him came only three of his companions, and one of them lurched aside and sank to the ground.

"Here," Sserk said, and thrust Lianna into Gordon's arms "She does not understand. Make her, quickly, or we all die."

She fought him. "Are you behind this, John Gordon? They came through a secret door, pulled me out of bed . . ." She strained against his hands, her body warm and angry in a thin nightdress. "How dare you presume to. . ."

He slapped her, not quite dispassionately. "You can have me shot later if you want to, but right now you'll do as I tell you. Your mind depends on it, your sa . . ."

It hit him then, a hammer stroke that stunned his mind and rocked it quivering toward the edge of a dark precipice. Lianna's stricken face faded before his eyes. Someone, Korkhann he thought, let out a strangled cry and there was a deep groaning among the Gerrn. Gordon had a dim sense of forces beyond his understanding locked in terrible struggle, and then the darkness lifted somewhat. He heard Sserk crying, "Come, quickly!"

Gerrn hands pawed and plucked at him, urging. He helped swing Lianna up onto Sserk's back, and was half lifted himself onto the furred lean withers of another big male. The village seemed to have exploded into panic. Females with their young were running wildly about. Sserk sprang away through the trees with eight or ten of the older males following. Gordon hung on with difficulty as his mount fled through belts of forest, lunging and scrambling up and down the steep places. He saw Korkhann borne more lightly on the back of another Gerrn and ahead Lianna's nightdress fluttered in the wind of Sserk's going. Overhead the aurora flamed, scarlet pink and ice green and angelic white, remote and beautiful.

Behind them there was noise and commotion, and there was something else as well. Fear. Gordon's inner being crouched and cringed, awaiting a second blow. He could picture the gray stranger, moving with that queer stunted agility, the cowled robe fluttering . . . .

And it came again. The hammer stroke. It was bearable to Gordon, but he saw Lianna reel and almost fall as the Gerrn closed around her. This time the bolt had been discharged directly at her.

Then, more quickly than before, the force weakened and fell away.

"Thank the gods," said Korkhann hoarsely, "the thing does have its limitations. The power weakens with distance." Sserk said, "But our minds lose strength also, from weariness."

He ran faster, bounding through the glades with the girl clinging tightly to his shoulders. The others quickened their pace to match his, their bodies stretching. Yet it seemed to Gordon that they were crawling through endless miles of golden woodland under the burning sky.

All at once he said, "Listen."

There was a new sound, far away, a soft rushing noise as though a wind blew through the trees.

Korkhann said, "Yes, the ground-car. The Gray One follows."

The Gerrn sped faster, circling farther from the roadway. But they could not lose the rushing whisper that came relentlessly closer. And Gordon knew without need of telepathy that the Gerrn were afraid, already flinching from the next blow before it fell.

A last scrambling of clawed feet up a slope and the edge of the forest was there. The shuttered building of the port, the long slim shapes of the two cruisers, one blazoned with the White Sun, the other with the Mace, stood silent in the shaking glare of the aurora. Both ships had their ports open and lighted. Gordon slid to the ground, catching Lianna as she half fell from Sserk's back.

"The Gray One is close," said the Gerrn, his flanks heaving.

Gordon could no longer hear the air-jets. The car had stopped somewhere short of the cleared space. The hair on his own neck bristled. "We're grateful," he said to the Gerrn. "The princess will not forget."

He tightened his arm around Lianna and turned with her to run. Behind him he heard Sserk's voice, saying, "What we have done, we have done. So be it." And then Korkhann cried out, "Don't leave us now, or you'll have done it for nothing. I can't protect her all alone."

Gordon fled with Lianna across the cracked concrete apron, his whole mind and soul fixed on the light of the open port. He heard Korkhann's lighter footfalls pattering behind him. For a moment he thought that after all the Gray One had given up and that nothing was going to happen. And with a silent thunderclap the darkness came and beat him down floundering to his knees.

Lianna slipped away from him. He groped for her by sheer instinct, hearing her whimper. He fought, blind and squirming, across vast heaving blacknesses toward a far-off spark of light.

There were hands and voices. The spark brightened, growing dizzily. Gordon surfaced through cold ringing dimensions of dread; saw faces, uniforms, men, saw Lianna upheld in Harn Horva's arms, felt himself lifted and carried forward. Far off there was a whistling rush as of a balked and angry wind retreating. And two men carried Korkhann past him, half-conscious.

Harn Horva's voice roared out above all, "Prepare for take-off!"

Gordon was only partly aware of the clanging hatches, the warning hooters and the roaring thrust of the launch. He was in the lounge and Lianna was clinging to him, trembling like a frightened child, her face bloodless and her eyes wide.

Later, after the cruiser had leaped up into the sky and Teyn was dropping fast behind them, Gordon still held and soothed her. By then, Korkhann had come back to consciousness. His eyes were haunted but he said, with a kind of haggard pride, "For a moment . . . for a moment I did it, all alone!"

"Korkhann, who . . . what . . . was it?" said Gordon. "The Gray One."

"I think," whispered Korkhann, "that it was not of this universe. I think an ancient evil has awakened. I . . ."

He bent his head, and for a moment would say no more. Then he said somberly, "If Narath Teyn has allies such as that, he is far more dangerous than we thought, Highness."

"I know that now," said Lianna. "We'll hold council of war when we reach Fomalhaut. And I think that on our decision, my kingdom will stand or fall."

7

Outside, in the light of the flying moons, the old kings of Fomalhaut stood and dreamed in stone. All the way from the far-flung lights of the city up to this massive palace the great avenue of statues ran, eleven dynasties and more than one hundred kings, all towering up much larger than life so that the envoys who came this way would feel a sense of awe. No one came at this hour, all was silent, but in the changing light of the racing moons, the stone faces seemed to change, to smile, to glare, to brood.

In the vast darkness of the throne hall, looking out at that mighty avenue, John Gordon felt small and insignificant. From the shadowed walls other pictured faces looked down at him, the faces of further great ones in the long history of Fomalhaut Kingdom, and it seemed to him that that there was contempt in their glance.

Man of Earth, man of the old twentieth century that is now two hundred thousand years ago . . . what do you here out of your own place and time?

What indeed? And again that question came to plague him . . . reality or dream? With the question came fear, and the overwhelming desire to run for the security of Keogh's office and the calm voice explaining away all his problems. He felt a passionate homesickness for the old drab familiar world in which he had spent most of his life, and a terrifying sense of alienation took him by the throat.

He fought it, as he had had to fight it before. Sweat was on his forehead and his whole body trembled. At the same time he could jeer at himself savagely. All the while you were in that nice familiar world, you did nothing but whine and cry to get back here.

He was not aware that Korkhann had come into the hall, and started violently at the sound of his voice.

"It is strange, Gordon, that you tremble now, when there is no danger . . . at least for the present."

Korkhann was so vague in the shadows that he might have been human. Then his feathers rustled and his beaked face and wise eyes pushed forward into a bar of the shifting moonlight. It was hard to be angry with Korkhann, but Gordon managed it.

"I've asked you before not to read my mind."

"You do not yet understand telepathic powers," Korkhann said mildly. "I have not violated your mental privacy. But I cannot help receiving your emotions." After a moment he added, "I am to bring you to the council. Lianna sent me."

The black mood was still on Gordon, and Lianna's name brought a fresh surge of anger. "What does Lianna need of me?" After that moment of closeness, when she had been a frightened girl he could hold in his arms, she had become again the princess, remote, aloof, beautiful, and very busy with affairs of state. She seemed, in fact, to be deliberately avoiding him, as though she were ashamed of that lapse and did not wish to be reminded of it. And after all, damn it, he was still the stranger, still the primitive lout.

"In some ways," said Korkhann, this time shamelessly reading his thoughts, "you are. Lianna is a woman but she is also a reigning princess, and you must remember that your relationship is as difficult for her as it is for you."

"Oh, hell," said Gordon. "Now I get advice to the lovelorn from a . . . a . . ."

"From an overgrown mynah bird?" said Korkhann. "I assume that is some creature of your own world. Well. The advice is still good."

"I'm sorry," said Gordon, and meant it. He was behaving like a petty child. He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. "It's just that every once in a while . . ."

"You feel lost. This is natural. You have chosen a very strange road, John Gordon. It will never be an easy one. But you knew that. Now . . . will you come?"

"Yes," said Gordon. "I'll come."

They left the vast echoing hall and went along spacious corridors. It was late and there were few people about, but Gordon had a feeling that there was tension in the silence that enwrapped the palace, a brooding sense of danger. He knew that that was in his own mind, the danger was not here, not yet. It was still in the Marches of Outer Space, the far frontier of the galaxy. Yet the fact that the council of Fomalhaut Kingdom was meeting this late at night, only hours after the cruiser had landed on the throne-world, was evidence enough of how gravely that danger was regarded.

In the small paneled room they came to, four faces looked up at Gordon with expressions between irritation and hostility. Korkhann was the only nonhuman member of the council, and Lianna, at the head of the little table, nodded to Gordon and spoke the names of the four men.

"Is this necessary?" asked the youngest of them, a middle-aged man with burly brows. He added bluntly, "We've heard of your attachment to this Earthman, Highness, but I fail to see why . . ."

"I'm afraid," said Gordon pleasantly, "that I also fail to see why. Nevertheless, I was sent for."

Lianna said quickly, "It is necessary, Abro. Sit down, John Gordon."

He sat down at the far end of the table and bristled inwardly until Korkhann whispered, "Must you be so fighting?" That startled Gordon into a brief smile, and he relaxed a little.

The man called Abro spoke, ignoring Gordon in a way that was a studied insult.

"It stands thus. The attempt that Narath Teyn made against you, his daring to use force against the sovereign of Fomalhaut, shows that he's dangerous. I say, hit him. Send a squadron of heavy cruisers to Teyn to teach him and his Gerrns a lesson."

Inwardly, Gordon rather agreed. Anyone who would call in an ally like the Gray One deserved destruction. But Lianna shook her pale-golden head slowly.

"My cousin Narath is not the danger. He has long conspired to replace me, but with only his wild, barbaric nonhumans to call on he could do nothing. But now, he is simply being used as a pawn by others . . . among them, Cyn Cryver, a count of the Marches of Outer Space."

"Hit the Marches, then," said Abro harshly. Gordon began to like this blunt, tough character who had given him such a hostile greeting. But Korkhann spoke, in his hesitant, whistling voice.

"There is something hidden here, some veiled, unknown forces working behind Cyn Cryver and Narath Teyn. One such was at Teyn and would have destroyed us if the Gerrn had not changed sides. Who or what the creature was we could not tell, but it is powerful beyond belief . . . and is the true leader. Cyn Cryver is also a pawn."

"Use force against Cyn Cryver and we'll find out who or what is behind him," said one of the other councilors. "Abro is right."

"I think you are forgetting something," said Lianna. "The counts are allies of the Empire."

"So are we," said Abro, "and better and more dependable allies!"

Lianna nodded. "I agree. But all the same, we can't go into the Marches without first taking the matter up with Throon."

They didn't like it, Gordon saw that. Like most of the citizens of the smaller star-kingdoms they had an inordinate amount of pride, and asking anyone's permission went against their grain. But all the same, the Empire was the Empire, the greatest single power in the galaxy, ruling an inconceivable vastness of suns and worlds and people from the imperial world that circled the mighty sun Canopus. Like it or not, they would ask.

Lianna succeeded in silencing them for the moment. She added, "I'm sending Korkhann to discuss it with them. John Gordon will go with him."

Gordon's heart gave a great beat of excitement. To Throon! He would see it again . . .

An angry protest had already formed on Abro's lips, but it was Hastus Nor, oldest of the councilors, who voiced the objection. He looked down the table at Gordon and then turned to Lianna.

He said, "It is no concern of ours if you have favorites, Highness. But it is our concern if you let them meddle in statecraft. No."

Lianna stood up, her eyes blazing. The old man did not flinch from her anger. But before she could speak, Korkhann interrupted so smoothly and swiftly that it hardly seemed like an interruption at all.

"With your permission, Highness, I would like to answer that," he said. He looked around the hostile quartet of faces. "You all know, I think, that I have certain powers and that I have not often been wrong in stating a fact."

"Get to it, Korkhann," growled the old councilor.

"Very well." Korkhann's wing unfolded and his clawed hand rested on Gordon's shoulder. "I will say this, as a fact. No one . . . I say, no one, in the whole galaxy, would have as much influence in the councils of the Empire than this Earthman, John Gordon."

Gordon looked up at him, astounded. "So you have been mind-reading?" he muttered. "Or did she tell you . . ."

Korkhann ignored him, and looked steadily at the councilors. In their faces, hostility faded into puzzlement.

"But why . . . how?" demanded Abro.

Korkhann did the odd shrugging movement that made his feathers ruffle as in a wind.

"I have given you the fact. I will not explain."

They stared, frowning and curious, at Gordon, until he was sorely tempted to shout at them, "Because for a time I was your emperor!" But he did not, and finally old Hastus Nor rumbled, "If Korkhann says so, it must be true, even though . . ." He stopped, then went on decisively. "Let the man Gordon go."

Gordon said softly, "Thank you. But has anyone asked me whether I want to go?"

He was mad clear through at being treated like a pawn, being argued over and challenged and defended, and he would have gone on to say so, but Lianna spoke very firmly.

"Gentlemen, the council is ended."

They went out with no more said, and when they had gone, Lianna came toward Gordon.

"Why did you say that?" she asked. "You want to go."

"Why should I?"

"Don't lie," she said. "I saw the eagerness in your face when it was suggested that you go to Throon."

She looked at him, and he saw the pain and doubt in her clear eyes.

"For a little while, after death had just passed us by at Teyn, I thought we had come closer," she said. "I thought it would be as it had been before with us . . ."

"So did I."

"But I was wrong. It's not I you care about."

"That," said Gordon angrily, "is a fine thing to say to a man who risked his life to get here to you. All I know is, you treat me like a . . ."

She did not let him finish. "Did you risk your life to reach me, John Gordon? Was it I you remembered and longed for, back in that distant age of yours, or was it the adventure, the starships, all that our age has that yours had not, that you really longed to return to?"

There was just enough truth in the accusation to take the anger out of Gordon, and the moment of half-guilt he felt must have shown on his face, for Lianna, looking up at him, smiled a white and bitter smile.

"I thought so," she said, and turned away. "Go to Throon, then, and be damned."

8

All the way to Canopus, Gordon spent his waking time in the bridge of the fast scout. Through the windows that were not really windows, he watched the star-groups rise up and change and fall behind. After the arid years on little Earth, he could not get enough of stars.

The titanic jumble of suns that was Hercules Cluster, the seat of power of those mighty barons who looked on star-kings as mere equals, dropped past them to the west. The vast mass of faintly glowing drift that was known as the Deneb Shoals, they skirted. They plunged on and now they were passing through the space where, that other time, the space-fleets of the Empire and its allies had fought out their final Armageddon with the League of the Dark Worlds.

Gordon looked and dreamed. Far, far off southward lay the sprawling blotch of deeper darkness that was the Cloud, from which the armadas of the Dark Worlds had poured in their prideful menace. He remembered Thallarna and he remembered Shorr Kan, the master of the League, and how he had surrendered to defeat.

"You think too much of past things and not enough of the present ones," said Korkhann, watching him shrewdly.

Gordon smiled. "If you know as much about me as I think you know, can you blame me? I was an impostor. I hardly knew what I was doing in that battle, but I was there, and who could forget that?"

"Power is a heady wine," said Korkhann. "You had it once, the power of a universe in your hand. Do you long for it again?"

"No," said Gordon, startled by the echo of Lianna's accusation. "I was scared to death of it when I had it."

"Were you, John Gordon?"

Before Gordon could frame an irritated answer to that, Korkhann had gone away from the bridge.

His irritation faded and was forgotten as, in the time that followed, the heart-worlds of the mighty Mid-Galactic Empire brightened far ahead.

The stunning blue-white flare of Canopus was arrogant in its hugeness and intensity. And as the scout rushed on, there came into view the planets that circled that truly royal sun. Gordon's eyes clung to one of those planets, a gray, cloud-wrapped sphere. Throon . . .

He was remembering how he had first seen it, amazed and bewildered by this future universe, playing a part for which he had no preparation, a pawn in the hands of cosmic political powers whose purposes he could not dream.

Was he anything more than that right now? Wasn't he brought here to Throon so that Korkhann might exploit his supposed influence with Jhal Arn, sovereign of the Empire? Yes, he thought, it's true. But it's not just for Fomalhaut policies, it's for Lianna and against whatever mysterious, menacing things was hatching out in the Marches that threatened her most immediately.

The planet rose up to meet him, its gray-green bulk immense, the sprawling continents starred with glittering metropoli that flared in the white sunlight. Then a mighty ocean, and then, far head, what his gaze leaped to meet, the dazzling radiance that almost blinded the eye, the Glass Mountains of smooth silicates flinging back the sunset light in shaking spears and fans and banners of glory. They went over that radiance, through it, and ahead of them there loomed the cluster of fairylike glass towers that was the greatest capital of the galaxy.

Over its starport, the traffic was of tremendous volume. Gordon had forgotten how many ships came and went to this center of the Empire. Clocked smoothly in by the director-computers, the bulky arrogant liners from Deneb and Aldebaran and Sol came down to the inport like a parade of giants, while the smaller craft poured like a cataract of shining midges. But their own craft, being official, skirted all this and descended toward the naval port, where the giant warships of the Empire loomed like dark thunderclouds above their docks.

An hour later, they stood in the huge building that was the seat of dynasty and the administrative center of the Empire.

Zarth Arn came to meet them, a tall figure, his dark face breaking into a smile and then becoming serious as he took Gordon's hand.

"I could wish your return to Throon had been on another occasion than this," he said. "Yes, my brother knows why you have come. You're not the first on this errand."

Korkhann asked quickly, "The others are worried about the Marches, Highness?"

Zarth Arn nodded. "They are. But that's to be talked of later. To hell with diplomacy, Gordon and I have some drinking to do!" He led Gordon to a smoothly gliding motowalk. It carried them on into another hall, a vast chamber whose glass walls were adorned with flattened reliefs of dark stars, burned-out cindery suns, ebon cosmic drift, and overpowering impression of gloom and majesty. Gordon remembered this somber magnificence, and he remembered also the equally splendid hall beyond it that seemed encompassed by the glow of a flaming nebula. The motowalk bore them upward on a smooth slant.

Everywhere, courtiers and chamberlains bowed deeply to Zarth Arn. It seemed to Gordon that they looked a little askance at him, walking familiarly with a prince of the Empire.

"Does it seem strange to you?" he asked Zarth Arn. "To walk with me, knowing that once we inhabited each other's bodies?"

Zarth Arn smiled. "Not to me. You must remember that I crossed many times before, and dwelt in many other bodies on those occasions. But I suspect it is very strange to you, indeed."

They came to Zarth Arn's chambers, that Gordon so well remembered, high-ceilinged and austerely white except for their silken hangings. The racks of thought-spools still stood at one side of the room. He went to the tall open windows and out onto the balcony that was like a small terrace jutting from the side of the huge, oblong palace. He looked again across Throon City.

It might have been that other time all over again, he thought. For Canopus was setting, flinging a long, level radiance across the fairylike towers of the metropolis, and the heaving green ocean, and the Glass Mountains that now were a rampart of dazzling glory.

Gordon stared bemused, until Zarth Arn's voice woke him from the spell.

"Do you find it the same, Gordon?" he asked, handing him a tall glass of the brown liquor called saqua.

"Not quite," muttered Gordon.

Zarth Arn understood. "Lianna was here that other time, wasn't she? I hadn't meant to ask yet, but now . . . tell me, what of you two?"

"We haven't quite quarreled," Gordon answered. "But we seem to go on being strangers, and . . . she seems to think it wasn't for her I came, but for . . . this."

And his gesture took in the whole vista of the magnificence of the great city, the flashing radiance of the mountains, the majesty of the starships rising from the distant starport.

They were interrupted by the opening of the door. The man who entered was tall and stalwart, dressed in black with a small blazing insignia on his chest. His eyes were level and searching as he came toward Gordon.

Gordon knew him. Jhal Arn, the elder brother of Zarth Arn, and the sovereign of the Mid-Galactic Empire.

"It is strange," said Jhal Arn. "You know me, of course, from that other time. But I see you . . . the physical you . . . for the first time."

He held out his hand. "Zarth has told me that this was the gesture of greeting in your time. You are welcome in Throon, John Gordon. You are very welcome."

The words were quiet and without emphasis, but the handgrip was strong.

"But more of this later," said Jhal Arn. "You've brought a problem to Throon. And not you alone. We have important visitors from some of the Empire's strongest allies, and they too are troubled."

He went over and looked thoughtfully out at the city, whose lights were coming on as the sunset faded into dusk. Two moons shone out in the twilit sky, one of them warm golden and the other one ghostly silver in hue.

"A whisper has gone through the galaxy," said Jhal Arn. "A murmur, a breath, a sourceless rumor. And it says that in the Marches of Outer Space there is a mystery and a danger. Nothing more than that. But the very vagueness of it has disturbed some who are high in the star-kingdoms, while others scoff at it as mere fancy."

"It wasn't fancy that we encountered at Teyn," said Gordon. "Korkhann can tell you . . ."

"Korkhann has already told me," said Jhal Arn. "I sent for him, straight after you two arrived. And . . . I don't like what I heard."

He shook his head. "Later on, tonight, a decision will have to be taken. It is one that could shatter the political fabric of the galaxy. And yet we must make it, knowing so little . . ." He broke off, and turned to leave, and at the door he turned round and gave Gordon a crooked smile. "You sat in my place once, for a little while, John Gordon. I tell you that it is still a painful place."

When he had left, Zarth Arn said, "I'll take you to the suite assigned to you and Korkhann. I saw that it was close to this one. We have much to talk about."

He parted from Gordon at the door of the suite. Gordon went in, and was surprised by the luxury of the big room he entered. By comparison Zarth Arn's was spartan. But Zarth Arn had always been more the austere scholar-scientist than anything else.

He noticed the back of a feathered head above a metal chair, and saw that Korkhann sat by the open window looking out at the flashing panorama of lights, the brilliant lights of Throon City and the distant lights of great star-liners coming down across the star-decked sky.

Gordon walked toward the window and around the chair, saying, "I don't like what I've been hearing, Korkhann. I . . ."

Then Gordon stopped, and suddenly he shouted.

"Korkhann!"

The feathered one sat in unnatural immobility. And his face, the beaked face and wise yellow eyes that Gordon had first tolerated and then come to like, was strangely stony. The eyes were as opaque as cold yellow jewels, and they had not the faintest flicker of expression in them.

Gordon gripped Korkhann with his hands, feeling the astonishing slightness and fragility of the body beneath the feathers.

"Korkhann, what's happened to you? Wake up . . ."

After a moment, there was something in the eyes . . . a passing ripple of awareness. And of agony. A damned soul looking out for a split second from a place of everlasting punishment might have such an expression.

Sweat stood on Gordon's forehead. He continued to shake Korkhann, to call his name. The agony reappeared in the eyes, it was as though there was a mighty straining of the mind behind those eyes, and then it was as though something snapped and Korkhann huddled in Gordon's hands, sick and shaking, his wings quivering wildly. Inarticulate whistling sounds came from his throat.

"What was it?" cried Gordon.

It was a minute before Korkhann could look up at him, and how now his eyes were wild.

"Something that I, and you, have experienced before. But worse. You remember how the Gray One at Teyn hammered us with the power of his mind?"

Gordon shivered. He was not likely ever to forget.

"Yes," whispered Korkhann. "Whatever they are, one of them is here. Here, I think, in this palace."

9

The imperial palace of Throon throbbed and glittered in the night. Out of hundreds of windows poured soft light and drifting music and the hum of many voices. The arrival of dignitaries of other star-kingdoms was occasion for a state ball, and in the great halls a brilliant throng feasted and drank. Nor was that throng all human. Scale and hide and feather brushed against silken garments. Faces humanoid but not human, eyes slitted and saucer-like and pupil-less gleamed in the light. Gargoyle shapes walked the dark gardens in which glowed great plantings of luminous flowers of Achernar.

As though in grim reminder that the Empire was not all a matter of pleasure-making, the music and hum of voices were drowned by a vast, thunderous bellowing as a full score of warships went up into the starry sky. The smaller scouts and phantoms had already screamed heavenward and now the great battle-cruisers lifted, dark bulks against the constellations, out-bound toward the Pleaiades and the big fleet-bases there.

Gordon had seen little of the festive part of the palace. He had walked with Zarth Arn behind Jhal Arn as the sovereign made an appearance there, and then they had come up here to the private chambers of Jhal Arn.

He had noted the curious gaze that the throng below had directed against himself. They were wondering, he knew, why an untitled Earthman should accompany an emperor.

He said now, "I feel I should have stayed with Korkhann. He was pretty badly shaken."

"My own guards are watching over him," said Jhal Arn. "He'll be here soon for the meeting. And there's someone else I've sent for, whom I think you'll remember, Gordon."

Presently a man entered the chambers. He wore the uniform of a captain in the imperial space-fleet, and he was a big, burly man with bristling black hair and a craggy, copper-colored face. At sight of him, Gordon leaped to his feet.

"Hull Burrel!"

The big officer looked at him puzzledly "I can't remember that we've met . . ."

Gordon sank back into his chair. Of course Hull didn't recognize him. To both his best friend and the woman he loved he was a stranger. He felt bitterness at the impossible situation he had put himself in when he came to this age in his own physical body.

"Captain Burrel," said Jhal Arn. "Do you remember that when the League of the Dark Worlds attacked the empire, and attempted assassination had already stricken me down, so that my brother acted as ruling regent in that crisis?"

A glow came onto Hull Burrel battered coppery face. "Am I likely to forget it, Highness? It was Prince Zarth Arn we followed when we smashed the League, in that last battle of Deneb!"

Jhal Arn went on. "When Shorr Kan sent the armadas of the League to attack us, he broadcast a galaxy-wide propaganda message. I want you to see a tape of part of that."

As Zarth Arn touched a button beside his chair, against an opposite wall appeared a sterovision picture of lifelike vividness. The picture was of a man speaking. Gordon tensed in his chair. The man was tall and broad-shouldered, his black hair clipped short, his eyes keen and flashing. His voice cut like a sword blade, and the whole impact of that ruthless, amoral, mocking personality came through even in this reproduction.

"Shorr Kan," whispered Gordon.

He was not likely to forget the dictator of the League, the utterly cynical, utterly capable leader with whom Gordon had struggled for the fact of kingdoms.

"Listen." said Jhal Arn.

And Gordon heard it again and seemed transported back to that terrible moment. Shorr Kan was saying, "The Empire's regent, Zarth Arn, is not really Zarth Arn at all . . . he is an impostor masquerading as Zarth Arn. Star-kings and barons, do not follow this imposter to defeat and doom!"

The sterovision scene vanished. Hull Burrel turned, looking puzzled, and said, "I remember that, Highness. His accusation was so ridiculous that no one paid any attention to it."

"The accusation was true." Jhal Arn said flatly.

Hull Burrel stared at his sovereign with incredulity written large on his face. He started to speak, then thought better of it. He looked at Zarth Arn.

Zarth Arn smiled. "Yes. Shorr Kan spoke the truth. Few know it, but in past years I used scientific means to exchange minds with men of other worlds and times. One such experiment was with the man beside you . . . John Gordon of Earth. It was Gordon, in my body, who was regent of the Empire at the moment of crisis. And Shorr Kan had found it out."

He touched a control again and said, "You'll remember that after the League fleet was smashed, the men of the Dark Worlds admitted defeat and asked for truce. This was their telestero message of surrender, which you've seen before."

Another scene flashed into existence against the wall, one that was etched forever in Gordon's memory. In a room of Shorr Kan's palace appeared a group of wild-looking men, and one of them spoke hoarsely.

"The Dark Worlds agree to surrender on your terms, Prince Zarth! Shorr Kan's tyranny is overthrown. When he refused to surrender, we rose in rebellion against him. I can prove that by letting you see him. He is dying."

The scene switched abruptly to another room of the palace. Behind a desk sat Shorr Kan. Men around him had their weapons trained on him, and his face was marble-white as he clutched at a blackened wound in his side. His dulled eyes cleared for a moment and he grinned weakly.

"You win," he said. "Devil of a way to end up, isn't it? But I'm not complaining. I had one life and used it to the limit. You're the same way, at bottom." His voice trailed to a whisper. "Maybe I'm a throwback to your world, Gordon? Born out of my time? Maybe . . ."

And he sprawled forward across his desk and lay still, and one of the grim-faced men bent to examine him and then said, "He's dead. Better for the Dark Worlds if he'd never been born."

The reproduced scene snapped out. After a moment of stunned silence, Hull Burrel spoke in a voice that echoed his stupefaction.

"I remember that. I couldn't understand what he meant by addressing Prince Zarth as 'Gordon.' None of us could." He swung around until his dazed eyes stared into Gordon's face. "Then you were the one who was with me in that struggle? You . . . the one who defeated Shorr Kan?"

Zarth Arn nodded. "It is so."

Gordon drew a long breath, and then he held out his hand and said, "Hello, Hull."

The Antarian . . . for Hull Burrel was a native of a world of Antares . . . continued to stare dumbly, then seized Gordon's hand and began to babble excitedly. He was cut short by the entrance of Korkhann.

To a question from Jhal Arn, Korkhann answered, "Yes, Highness, I am quite recovered."

Gordon doubted that. The yellow eyes were haunted, and there was a fear in the beaked face he had not seen there before.

"The palace has been searched and no trace of this mysterious attacker has been found," Jhal Arn was saying. "Tell us exactly what happened."

Korkhann's voice dropped to a whisper. "There's little I can tell. It was the same sensation of overwhelming mental impact I felt at Teyn, but stronger, more irresistible. I could not fight it this time, not even for a second. I knew nothing, then, until Gordon's shouting and shaking of me brought me back to consciousness. But . . . I believe that while I was held in that grip, my mind was being examined, all my memories and knowledge ransacked, by a telepath compared to whom I am as a child."

Jhal Arn leaned forward. "Tell me, when this power seized you, was there a sensation as of mental cold?"

Korkhann looked astonished. "How could you guess that, Highness?"

Jhal Arn did not answer, but between him and his brother flashed a look that was grim and somber.

A chamberlain entered the room, announcing dignitaries whom Jhal Arn greeted with formal protocol. Gordon, hearing the names of some and recognizing others, felt a sharp wonder.

No fewer than three star-kings had come to this secret meeting . . . young Sath Shamar of Polaris, the aging long-regent of Cassiopeia, and the dark, crafty-looking sovereign of the Kingdom of Cepheus. There were chancellors of two other kingdoms present, and also one of the mightiest of the powerful Hercules Barons, Jon Ollen. His domain stretched so far from the Cluster to the edge of the Marches that it was actually bigger than some of the smaller kingdoms.

He now looked like a worried man, his cadaverous face gloomy in expression. Gordon remembered his galactography well enough to realize that every realm represented here lay near the Marches of Outer Space.

Jhal Arn began without preamble. "You've all heard the rumors that certain of the counts of the Marches are preparing some mysterious and dangerous aggression. It threatens all of you but first it threatens Fomalhaut, which is why Korkhann and my friend John Gordon have come here."

Jhal Arn emphasized the word "friend," and the men who had ignored Gordon until this moment, glanced at him sharply.

Jhal Arn went on, "Tell them what happened at Teyn, Korkhann."

Korkhann told them. When he finished, there was a silence. Then young Sath Shamar said troubledly, "Of mysterious cowled strangers we have heard nothing. But lately the counts of the Marches have become highhanded with us at Polaris, and have threatened us with powers they say could destroy us."

The tight-faced ruler of Cepheus added nothing, but the old regent of Cassiopeia nodded confirmation. "There is something in the Marches . . . never have the counts been so insolent with us."

Korkhann looked at the baron and said softly, "You have something more than this, Jon Ollen? It seems to me that you are withholding something from us."

Jon Ollen's cadaverous face flushed dull red with anger and he exclaimed, "I will not have my mind read, telepath!"

"And how," asked Korkhann deprecatingly, "could I do that when you have kept a guard upon your thoughts since you entered this chamber?"

Jon Ollen said sullenly, "I don't want to hunt for trouble. My barony is close up against the Marches, closer than any of your domains. If there is danger, I am most vulnerable to it."

Jhal Arn's voice rang decisively. "You are an ally of the Empire. If danger attacks you, we come in with you at once. If you know anything, say it."

Jon Ollen looked undecided, worried, troubled. It was a minute before he spoke.

"I know but little, really. But . . . inside the Marches, not far from our frontier, is a world known as Aar. And mysterious things have happened that seem to focus on that world."

"What kind of things?"

"A merchant ship returned to my barony from the Marches, traveling on an insane course. Our cruisers could not understand its behavior. They ran it down and boarded it. Every man aboard it was raving mad. The automatic log-recorder showed that the ship had touched down last at Aar. Then another ship that passed near Aar sent off a distress call that was suddenly smothered. And that ship was never heard from again."

"What else?"

Jon Ollen's face lengthened. "There came to my court Count Cyn Cryver of the Marches. He said that certain scientific experiments had made Aar dangerous and suggested we order all ships to avoid it. But "suggested" is hardly the word . . . he ordered me to do this."

"It would seem," muttered Jhal Arn thoughtfully, "that Aar is at least one focal point of the mystery."

"We could send a squadron in there to find out quickly," said Zarth Arn.

"But what if there's nothing really there?" cried Jon Ollen. "The counts would hold me responsible for the incursion. You must understand my position."

"We understand it," Jhal Arn assured him. And to his brother, "No, Zarth. The baron is right. If there's nothing there we'd have angered the counts by an invasion of their domain, to the point of starting a border war all through the Marches. We'll slip a small unmarked scout into the Marches with a few men who can investigate the place. Captain Burrel, you can lead them."

Gordon spoke up for the first time in that meeting. "I will go with Hull. Look, I'm the only one except Korkhann, who's not fitted for this kind of mission, to have seen one of the counts' cryptic allies. At Teyn, remember."

"Why am I not fitted for such a mission?" Korkhann demanded, his feathers seeming to ruffle up with anger.

"Because no one else is so well fitted to be Princess Lianna's right-hand man, and she mustn't lose you," said Gordon soothingly.

"It's a risky thing," muttered Jon Ollen. "I beg of you one thing . . . if you are caught, please don't implicate me in this."

"Your concern for the safety of my friends is overpowering," said Jhal Arn acidly.

The baron disregarded the sarcasm. He got to his feet. "I shall return home at once. I don't want to be mixed up in this affair too much. Your Highnesses . . . gentlemen . . . good night."

When he had gone out, Sath Shamar uttered an oath. "It's what I'd have expected of him. In the battle with the Dark Worlds, when the other barons gave the galaxy an example of space-fighting it can never forget, he held back until sure that Shorr Kan was defeated."

Jhal Arn nodded. "But the strategic position of his domain makes him valuable as an ally, so we have to put up with his selfishness."

When the star-kings and chancellors had left, Jhal Arn looked a little sadly at Gordon.

"I wish you were not set on going, my friend. Did you come back to us, only to risk your life?"

Gordon saw Korkhann looking at him, and knew what was in his mind. He remembered Lianna's bitter farewell, her accusation that it was the danger and wild beauty of this wider universe that had drawn him back here, and not love for her. He stubbornly told himself it wasn't true.

"You have said yourself," he reminded Jhal Arn, "that this danger most threatens Fomalhaut. And whatever threatens Lianna is my affair."

He was not sure that Jhal Arn believed him, and he was quite sure that Korkhann did not believe him at all.

Three days later a very small ship lay at the naval starport of Throon. It was a phantom scout, with all the insignia removed. The small crew did not wear uniforms, nor did Hull Burrell, who was to captain it.

In the palace, before he left, Gordon had a final word from Zarth Arn.

"We hope you come back with information, John Gordon. But if you don't . . . then in thirty days three full Empire squadrons will head for that world of Aar."

Gordon was surprised and a little appalled. "But that could lead to war in the Marches. Your brother admitted it."

"There are worse things than a border war," Zarth Arn said somberly. "You must remember our history that you learned before. You remember Brenn Bir?"

The name rang in Gordon's memory. "Of course. Your remote ancestor, the founder of your dynasty . . . the leader who repelled the alien invasion from the Magellanic Clouds outside the galaxy."

"And who wrecked part of the galaxy doing it," Zarth Arn nodded. "We still have his records, archives that the galaxy knows nothing about. And some detail in the description you and Korkhann gave of the cowled stranger at Teyn made us look into those archives."

Gordon felt a terrifying surmise, and it was verified by Zarth Arn's next words.

"The records of Brenn Bir described the Magellanian aliens as having a mental power so terrific that no human or nonhuman could withstand it. Only by disrupting space and hurling them out of this dimension were those invaders defeated. And now . . . it seems that after all these thousands of years, they are coming back again!"

10

The Marches of Outer Space had been, originally, an area only vaguely delimited. Early galactographers had defined it as that part of the galaxy which lay between the eastern and southern kingdoms, and the edge of the island universe. For when, in the twenty-second century, the three inventions of the faster-than-light sub-spectrum rays, the Mass Control, and the stasis-force that cradled men's bodies so that they remained impervious to extreme speeds and accelerations . . . when these made interstellar travel possible and the human stock poured out from Earth to colonize the galaxy, it had been toward the bigger star-systems they had gone, not the rim. Millennia later, when distant systems had broken away from Earth government and formed independent kingdoms, hardy adventurers in those kingdoms had gone into the starry wilderness of the Marches, setting up small domains that often were limited to one star and one world.

These counts of the Marches, as they called themselves, had always been a tough, insolent breed. They owed allegiance to no star-king, though they had a nominal alliance with the Empire which prevented the other kingdoms from invading their small realms. The place had long been a focus of intrigue, a refuge for outlawed men, an irritation on the body politic of the galaxy. But each jealous star-king refused to let his rivals take over the Marches, and so the situation had perpetuated itself.

"And that" thought Gordon, "is too damned bad. If this anarchic star-jungle had been cleaned up, it wouldn't harbor such danger now." He wondered how many of the counts were in the conspiracy with Cyn Cryver. There had to be others, because Cyn Cryver alone could not provide enough ships for any significant action. If a significant action was what they had in mind.

The little phantom scout was well inside the Marches now, moving on a devious course. By interstellar standards, the phantom's speed was slow. Its defensive armament was almost nonexistent and its offensive weapons were nothing more than a few missiles. But it possessed a supreme advantage for such a stealthy mission as this one . . . the ability to disappear. That was why there were phantoms in the fleet of every kingdom.

"It'd be safer to dark-out," said Hull Burrel, frowning. "But then we'd be running blind ourselves, and I don't like doing that in this mess."

Gordon thought that if it was a mess, it was an impressive one. Scores of stars burned like great emerald and ruby and diamond lamps in the dark gloom. The radar screen showed shoals of drift between these star-systems, and here and there the Marches were rifted by great darkness, loops and lanes of cosmic dust.

He looked back the way they had come, at the Hercules Cluster that blazed like bright moths swarming thick about a lamp, at the far dimmed spark of Canopus. He hoped they would live to go back there. He looked ahead and his imagination leaped beyond the stars he could see to those out on the Rim, the spiral, outlying arms of stars that fringed the wheeling galaxy, and beyond which there was nothing until the distant Magellanic Clouds.

"It's too far," he said to Hull. "Zarth Arn must be wrong; there can't really be Magellanians in the Marches. If they had come they wouldn't have come as stealthy infiltrators, but in a great invasion."

Hull Burrel shook his head. "They came that way once before, so the histories say. And they got annihilated, when Brenn Bir used the Disrupter on them. They might try a different way, this time." The big Antarian captain added, "But I can't believe it, either. It was so long ago."

For a long time the little phantom threaded its way into the Marches, skirting great areas of drift that flowed like rivers through space, tacking and twisting its way around enormous ashen dark stars, swinging far wide of inhabited systems.

Finally there came a time when, peering at the viewer, Hull Burrel pointed out a small, bright orange star glittering far away.

"That's it. The sun of Aar."

Gordon looked. "And now?"

"Now we dark-out," grunted the Antarian. "And from here on it'll be cursed ticklish navigation."

He gave an order. An alarm rang through the ship. The big dark-out generators aft began droning loudly. At that moment all the viewer-screens and radar-screens went dark and blank.

Gordon had been in phantoms before, and had expected the phenomenon. The generators had created an aura of powerful force around the little ship, which force slightly refracted every light ray or radar beam that struck it. The phantom had become completely invisible both to eye and to radar, but by the same token those in it could see nothing outside. Navigation now must be by the special sub-spectrum radar by which the phantom could slowly feel a way forward.

In the time that followed, Gordon thought it was remarkably like a twentieth-century submarine feeling its way through ocean depths. There was the same feeling of blindness and semi-helplessness, the same dread of collision, in this case with some bit of drift the straining radar might not catch, and the same half-hysterical desire to see sunlight again. And the ordeal went on and on, the sweat standing out in fine beads on Hull Burrel's forehead as he jockeyed the little ship closer toward the single planet of the orange star.

Finally, Hull gave an order and the ship hung motionless. He turned his glistening face toward Gordon.

"We should be just above the surface of Aar, but that's all I can say. I hope to God we don't come out of dark-out right over our enemies' heads!"

Gordon shrugged. "Jon Ollen said there wasn't much on this world, that it was mostly wild."

"One thing I love is an optimist who has no direct responsibility," growled the Antarian. "All right. Dark-out off!"

The droning of generators died. Instantly there poured into the bridge through the viewer screens a flood of orange sunlight. They peered out tensely, blinking in the brilliance.

"I apologize, optimist," said Hull. "It couldn't be better."

The little ship hung level with the top foliage of a golden forest. The plants . . . Gordon could not think of them as trees, although they were that big . . . were thirty to forty feet high, graceful clusters of dark-green stems whose branches held masses of feathery golden-yellow leaves. They bore a remote but disquieting resemblance to the trees of Teyn and Gordon shivered, hoping it was not an omen. As far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but the roof of the forest glittering in the light of the orange sun.

"Take her down fast," ordered Hull. "We could just be ranged by radar up here."

The phantom dropped through the masses of lacy gold and landed in a grove of clustered stems, upon soft ground covered with a copper-colored brush that bore black fruits.

Gordon, peering fascinated through the viewer, suddenly shouted. "Something!"

The Antarian jumped to his side. "What?"

"It's gone now," said Gordon. "Something small, almost invisible, that darted away under the brush."

The other looked doubtful. "In the star-log, this world Aar is listed as uninhabited. An attempt was once made to colonize it but the colonists were driven away from it by dangerous conditions. This could be some formidable creature."

Gordon was doubtful. "It seemed too small."

"Nevertheless, we'd better have a look around before we go thrashing through these forests," the Antarian said decisively. He spoke to the crewmen in the bridge. "You and I will go out, Varren. Full armor."

Gordon shook his head. "I'll go with Varren. One of us has to stay to complete the mission if something happens to the other . . . and the one who stays had better be the one who can navigate the ship back out of here."

When Gordon and Varren stepped out of the ship they wore the suits that did double duty as space suits and defensive armor, complete with helmets. They carried guns.

Looking uncertainly around, Gordon began to feel a bit foolish. Nothing moved except the golden foliage high above, waving in the breeze. His helmet sound-pickup brought no sounds except the faint sounds of a forest.

"Where was this thing you saw?" asked Varren. His voice was very polite.

"Over this way," Gordon said. "I don't know . . . it could have been a leaf blowing . . ."

He suddenly stopped, looking upward. Twelve feet above the ground, fastened solidly inside a crotch of one of the trees, was a curious structure vaguely resembling a squirrel's summer nest. Except that this was no ragged thing of twigs and leaves but a solid little box of cut wood, with a door in its side.

"It was going toward this place," said Gordon. "Look."

Varren looked. He looked up for a long time and then he remarked quietly that he would be damned.

"I'm climbing up there to take a look," said Gordon. "If it's what I thought I saw, it won't be too dangerous. If not . . . cover me."

The climb would not have been difficult if it had not been for the clumsy suit. But he was sweating by the time he reached a crotch on which he could stand with his face level with the little box.

Gently, Gordon pushed at the little door. A faint snapping told of a tiny catch breaking. He continued to push but it was difficult . . . something, someone, was holding the door on the inside.

Then the resistance gave way, and Gordon looked inside. At first he could see nothing but a purple gloom. But the hot orange sunlight pouring in through the open door revealed detail as his eyes adjusted.

Those who had been trying to hold the door against him now cowered in terror at the far side of a little room. They were not much more than a foot high and they were quite human in shape. They were naked, one man, one woman, and the only strange thing about them apart from their size was the fact that their bodies were semitransparent, as translucent as plastic. He could see details of the wall-surface right through them.

They cowered, and Gordon stared, and then he heard the man speaking in a tiny voice. He could hardly hear, but it was not a language he knew.

After a long moment he slid back to the ground. He pointed upward and said to Varren, "Take a look. Maybe you can understand their language."

"Their what?" said Varren. He looked at Gordon as though he doubted his sanity. Then he too climbed up.

It was a long time before Varren came back down. When he did, he looked sick.

"I talked with them," he said, and then repeated that as though he didn't quite believe it. "I talked with them. Oh, yes, I could understand them. You see, a few thousand years ago they were our own people."

Gordon looked at him incredulously. "Those creatures? But . . ."

"The colonists," said Varren. "The ones Captain Burrel read about in the log, who were driven away from here by harmful conditions. They didn't all go away. Some had already become victims of the danger . . . a chemical constituent in either the air or the water here which, after a few generations, makes the human body evolve toward smallness."

Varren shook his head. "Poor little beggars. They couldn't tell me that but I could guess it from the few scraps of legend they did tell me. It's my guess that they mutated toward that semi-transparency as a camouflage defense against other creatures here."

Gordon shivered. There was beauty and wonder in the stars, but there was also horror.

"One thing I learned." Varren added. "They're terribly afraid of something out there in the west. I got that out of them, but no more."

When they went back to the ship, it was the last statement that interested Hull Burrel the most.

"It checks," he said. "We've been making a sweep with the sub-spectrum radar and it definitely showed large metal constructions several hundred miles to the west. On this world, that can only be the place we're looking for."

The Antarian thought for a little, then said decisively, "We'd never make that distance on foot. We'll have to wait until night and move the ship closer. If we hug the treetops, it might fool their radar."

Night on Aar was a heavy darkness, for this world had no moon. The phantom purred along over foliage glistening in the light of the stars, the scattered, lonesome stars of the Marches. Hull Burrel had the controls. Gordon stood quiet and watched through the viewer-window.

He thought he saw something, finally, something far ahead that glinted a dull reflection of the starlight. He started to speak, but Hull nodded.

"I caught it. We'll go down."

Gordon waited. Instead of going down at once, the little ship slipped onward, he supposed in search for a clear opening for descent into the forest.

He put his eye to the 'scope and peered. The glint of metal ahead sprang closer, and now he could see that the vague metal bulks were the buildings of a small city. There were domes, streets, walls. But there was not a single light there, and he could see that long ago the forest had come into this city's streets, and its ways were choked with foliage. Without doubt, this would have been a center of that tragically doomed colony of many centuries ago.

But there were a few hooded lights beyond the city. He touched the 'scope adjustment. He could see little, but it appeared that the old spaceport of the dead city had lain beyond it, a dark flat surface that the forest had not yet been able to overwhelm.

Gordon could just descry the glint and shape of a few ships parked there. They were small Class Five starships, not much bigger than the phantom scout. But there was one ship that had something queer about its outlines.

He turned to say so to Hull Burrel, and as his eye left the 'scope, he saw that their craft was still gliding straight forward and had not begun to descend.

Gordon exclaimed, "What are you doing? Do you figure to land at their front door?"

The Antarian did not answer. Gordon took hold of his arm. Hull Burrel yanked it free and knocked Gordon sprawling.

But in that moment, Gordon had seen Hull's face. It was stony, immobile, the eyes vacant of all emotion or perception. In a flash, Gordon knew.

He bunched himself and launched in a desperate spring at the Antarian. He knocked Hull away from the controls, but not before the Antarian had managed to give them a hard yank in his desperate attempt to cling to them. The phantom scout stood suddenly on its head and then dived straight down through the foliage.

Gordon felt the metal wall slap him across the temple, and then there was only darkness in which he fell and fell.

11

In the darkness Gordon heard the voice of a dead man speaking.

"So that's what he looks like," said the voice. "Well!"

Whose voice was it? Gordon's pain-racked brain could not remember. Then how did he know that it was the voice of a dead man? He did not know how he knew, but he was sure that the man who spoke had died.

He must open his eyes and see who it was that spoke after death. He made an effort. And with the effort, the pain and blackness rolled back across his mind more strongly than before and he did not know anything.

When he finally awoke, he felt that it was much later. He also felt that he had one of the biggest headaches in galactic history.

He did get his eyes open this time. He was in a small metal room with a solid metal door. There was a very tiny window with bars, and orange sunlight slanting through them.

Across the room from him, Hull Burrel sprawled like one dead.

Gordon got to his feet. for a while he stood perfectly still, hoping that he was not going to fall. Then he moved painfully to the Antarian and knelt beside him.

Hull had a bruise on his chin, but no other perceptible injuries. Yet he lay like a man in deathly coma, his coppery face no longer like the side of a rough rock but gone all slack and sagging. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open and spittle dribbled from it.

Gordon took him by the shoulders and said, "Hull," and all of a sudden the living log turned into a maddened wildcat. Hull scrambled up, thrusting Gordon away, glaring at him as if he were an attacking enemy.

Gradually Hull's eyes cleared. His muscles relaxed. He stared stupidly at Gordon and said. "What's the devil's the matter with me?"

"You were slugged," said Gordon. "Not with a club, but with mental force. You were taken under control when we were nearing this place."

"This place?" Hull Burrel looked around, at the small, dusty metal room. "I don't remember," he muttered. "This looks like a prison."

Gordon nodded. "We're in the dead town of the old colonists. And you can't have a town without a jail."

His head ached. And more than his head was hurt. His pride was severely bruised. He said, "Hull, I was a sort of hero back in that other time, when I lived in Zarth Arn's body . . . wasn't I?"

Hull stared. "You were. But what . . ."

"I was going to be a hero all over again," said Gordon bitterly. "To show that I could be good as John Gordon, too. I've done fine haven't I? Throon, Lianna . . . they'll be proud of me."

"You weren't leading this mission, I was," growled Hull Burrel. "It was I who fell on my face." He went to the little window and looked at the street choked with golden foliage. He turned around, his brows knitted. "Mental force, you said. Then there must be one of those damned Magellanians here."

Gordon shrugged. "Who else could do a thing like that? We've been taken like children. They were sitting here waiting for us."

Hull suddenly shouted loudly. "Varren! Kano . . . Rann. . . are you here?"

There was no answer from the crewmen whose names he had shouted.

"Wherever they are, they're not within earshot," muttered Hull, plainly worried. "What next?"

"Next, we wait," said Gordon.

They waited for more than an hour. Then the door opened without warning. Outside it stood a supercilious young man whose black uniform bore in silver the design of the Mace.

"The Count Cyn Cryver will see you now," said the young man. "You can walk, or be dragged."

"All right, we'll walk," said Gordon. "I've enough headache already."

They walked out into the hot sunlight, and along a street that had once been wide. But time and weather had cracked its pavement and seeds had lodged to grow into the feathery trees, so that now it was more like following a path in a forest.

The corroded metal fronts of buildings showed through the foliage, silent and dead. And Gordon glimpsed a statue, the figure of a man in space dress, looking proudly down from the middle of the street. It would be, he thought, the star-captain who had led the ill-fated colonists here, in the long-ago centuries.

Look and be proud, star-captain. All that you wrought died long ago, and the last descendants of your people are the furtive little hunted things in the forest. Be proud, star-captain, be happy, for your eyes are blind and cannot see . . . .

They were taken into a building that looked like a municipal center. In a shadowy big hall, Count Cyn Cryver lounged in a chair at a table, drinking a tawny-colored liquor from a tall goblet. He wore black, with his insignia arrogant on his breast, and he looked at Gordon with amused eyes.

"You kicked up quite a stir at Teyn, but it seems we have you safe now," he said. He drank and put the goblet down. "A word of advice . . . never trust a coward. Like Jon Ollen, for instance."

A light burst upon Gordon. "Of course. That's why you were waiting for us. Jon Ollen is one of you."

Nothing else could explain it. The cadaverous baron was a traitor, and it was a safe assumption that the super-telepath who had come to Throon had been hidden in Jon Ollen's ship.

Hull Burrel demanded harshly, "Where are my men?"

Cyn Cryver smiled. "We had no need of your men or your ship, so they have been destroyed. As you will be destroyed when we no longer have any use for you."

Hull's fist clenched. He looked as though he was about to spring at Cyn Cryver, but the men with the stunners stepped forward.

"You will be examined later," Cyn Cryver said. "You are here now only because an old friend of yours wishes to see you. Tell their old friend that they are here, Bard."

One of the men went through a door at the rear of the hall. Gordon felt his skin crawl as he heard steps returning a moment later. He thought he knew what was coming.

He was wrong. It was not the cowled shape he feared that came into the hall. It was a man, broad-shouldered and tall, black-haired, tough-faced and keen-eyed, who stopped and look at them, smiling.

"By God," said Hull Burrel. "Shorr Kan!"

"Oh, no," said Gordon. "Can't you see, it's an impersonation they've got up . . . Lord knows why. We saw Shorr Kan die, killed by his own men."

The man who looked like Shorr Kan laughed. "You thought you saw that. But you were deceived, Gordon. And if I do say so myself, it was a neat piece of deception, considering how little time we had in which to dream it up."

And it was the voice of Shorr Kan. It was also the voice of a dead man speaking in the darkness and saying, "So that's what he looks like!"

He came closer and spoke earnestly, as one explaining something to a friend. "I was in the devil of a spot, thanks to you. Your damned Disruptor had shattered our fleet, and you were coming on toward the Dark Worlds, and my faithful subjects had got wind of it and were rioting in the streets. It was my neck, if I didn't think of something pretty quick."

He grinned. "It took you all in, didn't it? I still had a few faithful officers, and when they sent out that stereo-vision message of surrender, they could show you poor old Shorr Kan, with a big fake wound in his side, putting on a death scene I'm really proud of."

He burst into laughter. Stupefied, because he did not want to believe this and was beginning to do so, Gordon exclaimed, "Shorr Kan's body was found in the ruins of his palace!"

The other shrugged. "A body was found. The body of a dead rioter, who was my size and wore my uniform and decorations. Of course there wasn't too much left to identify because we fired the palace before we got the devil out of there . . . which little incendiary feat was blamed on my rioting subjects."

Gordon could no longer disbelieve. He stared at Shorr Kan at this man who had made himself master of the Dark Worlds and then, with their power, had almost shattered the star-kingdoms.

"And you've been hiding here in the Marches ever since?" he cried.

"Let me say instead that I've been making an extended visit to certain of my old friends here, among whom I number first the Count Cyn Cryver," said Shorr Kan. "When I heard you were among us, the Gordon whom I had never physically seen but whom I had known only too well . . . well, I had to give you a greeting for old time's sake."

The insolent brass of the man, his complete, mocking, light-hearted cynicism, had not changed.

Gordon said, between his teeth, "Why, I'm glad you saved your neck . . . even though it's a comedown from master of the League of the Dark Worlds, to hang onto the coattails of a Cyn Cryver. Still, it's better than dying."

Shorr Kan laughed, in honest enjoyment. "Did you hear that, Cyn? Do you wonder I admired this chap? Here he is at the end of his rope, and he tries to slap my face in a way that'll make bad blood between you and me!"

"Look at him, Hull," said Gordon mockingly. "Isn't he the one to put a brave face on? Lord of the Cloud, master of the Dark Worlds, almost the conqueror of the Empire itself . . . and now that he's reduced to skulking in the Marches and mixing up in filthy plots with ragtag one-world counts, he still stays cheerful."

Shorr Kan grinned, but Cyn Cryver got up and came over, looking at Gordon with livid hatred.

"I've heard enough of this," he said. "You've seen your old enemy, Shorr, and that's that. Bard, shackle them to those pillars. The Lord Susurr will come this evening and examine their minds for what they may contain of value, and after that they can be tossed on a dunghill."

"The Lord Susurr," repeated Gordon. "That would be one of your creepy little allies from Magellan, would it? Like the one we so sadly disappointed when we foxed you at Teyn?"

The rage left Cyn Cryver's face and he smiled in a deadly fashion as Gordon and Hull Burrel were shackled each to one of the slender ornamental metal pillars that ran in two rows down the hall.

"Even for you," said Cyn Cryver, "I had still a spark of pity, considering what will happen to you soon. But now it is gone." He turned his back on Gordon and told the young captain, "Guard them until the Lord Susurr comes. It will be some hours, for the lord likes not the sunlight."

Shorr Kan said brightly, "Well, lads, I fear it's goodbye now. I can see you're going to meet your end like men of courage. I've always said, 'Die like a man . . . if you can't find any way of avoiding it.' And I don't think you can avoid it."

Hull Burrel continued to swear, using profanity from a dozen different worlds. "That devil-born fox! All these years the whole galaxy has thought him dead, and now he bounces up here to laugh at us!"

"It's all history now," said Gordon. "Of more concern is what happens tonight, when the Lord Susurr who does not like the sunlight comes to visit us."

Hull stopped swearing and looked at him. "What's the creature going to do to us?"

"I imagine you could call it mental vivisection. I think it will take our minds and turn them inside out for every scrap of information we possess, and that it'll be only two mindless wrecks who are killed later."

Hull shivered. After a little silence he said, with an age-old hatred edging his voice, "Small wonder that Brenn Bir blasted the Magellanian invaders out of the universe, that other time."

No more was said, for there was nothing to say. Gordon stood against the pillar, with the shackles cutting his wrists behind him, and looked out through the open doorway as the long hours of afternoon crept away. The orange rays of sunlight that cut down through the interstices of the branches slanted and shifted. The breeze ruffled the leaves like autumn aspens on faraway, long-ago Earth. Beyond the trees the metal star-captain stood stiff and valiant, staring forever across his ruined city.

The guards lounged and shuffled in the doorway, glancing in now and then at the two captives. But Gordon could hear no sound of any activity from the dead city around them. What was going on here at Aar? That it was a focus for the intrigue that had hatched between the counts and Narath Teyn and the aliens from outside, he had no doubt. But it could not be a vital center of their plot, or the treacherous Jon Ollen would not have named the place and baited them to it.

Had Jon Ollen been setting a trap, not just for Hull Burrel and himself and their little ship, but for the main squadrons of the Empire? Jhal Arn had said that those squadrons would come here, if they did not return with information. If that was so, he and Hull had really messed it up. Lianna would be proud of him when she heard of it.

He thought of Lianna, and how they had parted at Fomalhaut. He did not want to think of her, and he made his mind go blank, and in a kind of stupor watched the rippling golden leaves outside. The time slipped slowly by.

The gold dulled. Gordon woke from his stupor to see that twilight had replaced the sunlight. And the guards in the doorway were now looking nervously along the street. As the dusk deepened they stepped farther away from the doorway, out into the street, as though they were doing everything possible to keep from being too near this room when the Lord Susurr came to do what he would do to the captives.

The hall was darkening, faster than the outside street. Gordon suddenly stiffened against his shackles. He heard a sound approaching.

Something was in the shadowy hall with them, something that came softly toward them from behind.

12

The skin between Gordon's shoulders crawled. He heard the sound shift position as whoever had stealthily entered moved softly around in front of them.

Then, close in front of him and silhouetted against the last twilight of the open doorway, he saw the profile of Shorr Kan.

"Listen, and keep your mouths shut," whispered Shorr Kan. "You'll be dead, and worse than dead, before morning comes unless I get you out of here. There's a chance I can do it."

"And why would you do a thing like that?" asked Gordon, keeping his voice well down.

"He loves us, that's why," muttered Hull Burrel. "He's so full of loving kindness that he just can't bear to see us hurt."

"Oh, God," whispered Shorr Kan, "give me a smart enemy rather than a stupid friend. Look, I may have only minutes before the cursed H'Harn comes."

"H'Harn?"

"What you call the Magellanians. The H'Harn is the name they call themselves. The Lord Susurr is one of them and when he comes here, you're through."

Gordon did not doubt that. But all the same he asked dubiously, "If the creature is such a terrific telepath, won't he know that you're here right now?"

There was contempt in Shorr Kan's answer. "You people all think the H'Harn are omnipotent and omniscient. They're not. In fact, they're a bit on the stupid side in some ways. They do have tremendous parapsychical power, but only when they concentrate it on one object. They can't spread their mental power to encompass everything, and it fades out at a certain distance."

Gordon knew that from his own experience at Teyn, but he made no comment. Shorr Kan jerked his head around to peer at the guards who waited uneasily out in the dusky street, and then continued in a hurried whisper.

"I have to be quick. Listen . . . I've been here in the Marches ever since the defeat of the Dark Worlds. I figure that sooner or later I could manipulate these popinjay counts the way I wanted to . . . set them against each other, get them to fighting, and when the smoke cleared away, Shorr Kan would be king of the Marches. And I would have done it, but for one thing.

"The agents of the H'Harn came from outside the galaxy, and made contact with Cyn Cryver and Narath Teyn and certain other counts. The H'Harn took a beating when they tried to invade long ago and it's taken them all that time to recover from it, but they're strong again and they still mean to come into our galaxy, in a different way."

"What way?" asked Gordon.

"I don't know," answered Shorr Kan. "I'm not sure that even Cyn Cryver knows. I do know that the H'Harn are preparing something big out there in the Magellanic Clouds, something against which our galaxy will be defenseless. What it is, I haven't the slightest idea."

He went on. "Those of the H'Harn who have come here so far, like Susurr and others, are agents sent ahead to make alliance with the counts and prepare the way for some kind of assault. The H'Harn have assured Cyn Cryver and the others that they'll be given half the galaxy for their aid. And the bloody fools believe it!"

"But you don't?"

"Look, Gordon, did you find me an idiot when we fought each other in the old days? The H'Harn are inhuman, so inhuman that they take good care not to show themselves bodily least they scare off their allies. Of course they'll use the counts, and of course they'll brush them aside when they've succeeded in their plans, and what will their promises be worth?"

"About as much," muttered Gordon, "as the promises of Shorr Kan."

Shorr Kan chuckled briefly. "I asked for that. But no matter. I've had to guard my thoughts carefully. The moment that damned alien gets suspicious and probes my mind I'll be through, and I can't keep my guard up forever. I've got to get out of here. But one man can't operate a ship. Three men could. That's why I need you." His whisper was emphatic. "Give me your word that you'll go where I want to go, once we get a ship, and I'll free you right now!"

"Give our word to Shorr Kan?" said Hull. "That would really be a brilliant thing to do . . ."

"Hull, listen!" said Gordon swiftly. "If Shorr Kan double-crosses us the moment we're out of this room, we'd still not be as bad off as when that alien gets through with us. Give him your word. I do."

The Antarian sullenly muttered. "All right. It's given."

Shorr Kan produced something from under his coat that glistened dully in the last light from the doorway. It was a heavy semi-circular metal hook whose inner cutting edge was serrated.

"I've no key to your shackles but this should cut them," he whispered. "Hold your hands wide, Gordon, unless you want one of them sliced off."

He slipped around behind the pillar and began sawing at the shackle. The sound seemed loud to Gordon's ears but the shadowy figures of the guards out in the street did not move.

"Almost through," muttered Shorr Kan after a few moments. "If you'll . . ."

His whisper suddenly stopped. The sawing stopped and then there was a stealthy sound of rapid withdrawal.

"What . . ." Gordon began, and then his heart throbbed painfully as he saw.

Out in the dusk-wrapped street that was still not as dark as the interior of the hall, the guardsmen were moving away, shrinking back until they met the wall of a building on the opposite side and could go no farther.

And a cowled, robed figure of shimmering gray, not quite as tall as a man, appeared in the doorway. In complete silence it moved, with that horridly fluid gliding motion that Gordon had seen once before, into the darkness of the hall toward them.

Gordon's whole body stiffened involuntarily. He heard a sharp indrawing of breath from the Antarian, who had not seen one of the H'Harn until now. There was a moment in which the shadowy figure seemed to hesitate between them, and then the choice was made and it swayed toward Gordon and he waited for the blasting mental force to burst into his brain.

A shadow skittered in the darkness, a low anguished hissing came from the H'Harn, and its body swayed unsteadily aside. And against the dim oblong of the doorway, Gordon saw Shorr Kan's silhouette as he dug the serrated hook deep, deep into the Gray One's back.

In an access of revulsion, Gordon strained violently and the almost-severed shackle snapped.

He could not see clearly the nightmare that was going on now in the dark hall. The H'Harn seemed to be tottering away, mewing and hissing, as Shorr Kan stabbed and stabbed.

"Help me kill it!" panted Shorr Kan. "Help me . . .!"

There was no weapon, but Gordon grabbed up the chair beside the table. He rushed and struck. The mewing thing went down.

Pain. Pain. It shot the terrible waves though Gordon's brain, coming consciously or unconsciously from the stricken alien. He staggered, fell to his knees.

A wave of black agony swept over him and receded. He got up, shakily. He glimpsed the dark figures of the two guards in the street, running now toward the doorway of the building. There they hesitated.

"Lord Susurr?" called one, his voice high-pitched and shrill.

Shorr Kan's stunner buzzed in the dark and the two men in the doorway dropped.

"Saw Burrel's shackle, and hurry," said Shorr Kan hoarsely, handing him the hook that was now wet to the hilt.

As Gordon worked, he saw Shorr Kan stoop and tear open the robe of the huddled heap on the floor, but he could not see what the dead H'Harn looked like. He heard a sharp sound from Shorr Kan.

The shackle parted. Shorr Kan hurried them toward the rear of the hall.

"This way. I don't think we have all the time in the world."

The little spaceport beyond the dead town lay dark and silent under the stars, when they reached it. Shorr Kan led them toward one small ship that lay apart from the others. Its black bulk loomed before them, and to Gordon it seemed oddly strange in outline, with thick vanes sprouting from its sides such as he had seen on no other starship.

"It's the ship in which the four H'Harn agents came to this galaxy," said Shorr Kan, fumbling with the lock-catch. "The other three went to Teyn and other worlds, but the ship was left here with Susurr. From what I've heard, it's far faster than any ship we know of, so if we get away in it, they'll never catch us."

When they had got inside and the hooded lights in the control-bridge were on, Hull Burrel uttered a grunt of astonishment.

"Well, don't stand there," said Shorr Kan impatiently. "You're the professional spaceman here. Get busy and take us the devil out of here."

"I never saw a control-board like this," Hull objected. "Some of those controls don't seem to mean a thing. They . . ."

"Some of the controls are familiar to you, aren't they?"

"Yes, but . . ."

"Then use the ones you know, but take off!"

Hull Burrel, his professional soul outraged by the sloppiness of such a suggestion, nevertheless took the pilot chair. It was far too small for him and his knees came almost to his chin as he poked and prodded and pulled.

The little ship went away from Aar very fast, bursting out of the darkness of the night side of the planet into the brilliant sun.

"What course?" demanded the Antarian.

Shorr Kan gave him the bearings. Hull Burrel cautiously set them up, swearing at the unfamiliarity of the calibrations.

"I'm not setting a course, I'm just making an educated guess," he grumbled. "We'll likely pile up in the drift somewhere."

Gordon watched the lonely stars ahead, as they rushed, and his shakiness left him.

"We're heading out toward the Rim of the galaxy?" he asked, and Shorr Kan nodded. "Where will we swing back in, then?"

"We won't swing back in," answered Shorr Kan calmly. "We're going right on."

Hull swung around. "What do you mean? There's nothing but intergalactic space beyond . . . nothing!"

"You forget," reminded Shorr Kan. "There are the Magellanic Clouds . . . the worlds of the H'Harn."

"For God's sake, why would we want to go there?"

Shorr Kan laughed. "I feared this would be a shock to you. But I have your word, remember. It stands thus: The H'Harn are preparing something out there, with which to strike at our galaxy. So . . . we go out on a reconnaissance. We find out what it is. And we bring back that knowledge so the star-kings can prepare against the H'Harn. After all . . . isn't that the mission on which you two came?"

"But why should you risk your neck to save the star-kingdoms?" Gordon demanded.

Shorr Kan shrugged. "The reason is simple. I couldn't stay much longer with the counts without betraying my suspicions of their H'Harn allies . . . and the moment any H'Harn saw that in my mind, I'd be dead. But I couldn't go back to the star-kingdoms . . . they'd hang me for certain when they found out I was still living."

Gordon was beginning to see the light.

"But," Shorr Kan continued, "if I risk all to go to the Magellanic Clouds and come back with a warning of the H'Harn plans, the past will be forgotten. I'll be a hero, and you don't hang heroes. I gamble that I'll be on a throne again in a year."

Hull Burrel appealed to Gordon. "Do we let him take advantage of the fact that we've given our word to do this?"

Gordon answered thoughtfully, "We do. Hull. Not just when he reminds us that this is our mission."

Hull Burrel uttered a loud curse. "You're a fool, John Gordon, but I'll go along with it. I've lived long enough anyway, so I might as well commit suicide going on an impossible mission with a damned fool and the biggest villain in the galaxy!"

13

The ship flew at incredible speed through the Marches of Outer Space. Everywhere about it were suns, flaming suns and ashen, dying stars and dark cindery hulks, with their planets and moons and dangerous trailing shoals of drift. A cosmic jungle, far beyond the demesne of the great star-kingdoms; a jungle not to be invaded without due caution.

Yet the men inside the ship were not worried by their demented progress.

John Gordon, at the moment, was too shaken to be worried about anything. He stared out through the after view-screen, at the wilderness in which the orange sun of Aar had already vanished, still not believing their escape. He was only faintly aware that the chair he sat in was too small for his muscular, stocky frame, or that the ceiling curve of the control-room was much too close over his head. Or that the metal surfaces around him were of a sickly and unpleasant blue, like the skin of a drowned man.

After a while he turned from the view-screen to look at Shorr Kan, who looked back at him; the dark, well-remembered face with the lean bones and sardonic eyebrows. Shorr Kan grinned.

"Yes we did," he said. "We made it. Thanks to me."

Gordon let out a long breath and passed his hand over his own face, rubbing the angles of it like a sleeper waking. "Yes," he said, "I guess we did. Hull?"

Hull Burrel looked perfectly placid and content now, even though he was perched in that ridiculously small chair. "Coping," he said. "At least, for now."

It was only then that Gordon began to get the perspective. The control-room was like the inside of a polished egg, made to hold much smaller birds than these.

"Well," said Shorr Ran, "the H'Harn are a small race. No reason for them to build for our comfort."

Hull, who towered even over Shorr Kan, lifted his head, bumped it on some overhanging equipment, and retracted it, swearing. "They didn't have to overdo it," he said. "And I wish they hadn't been quite so damned cryptic about their controls." He continued to poke and prod cautiously at the unintelligible knobs and dials, marked with alien symbols. If Hull Burrel could figure those out, Gordon thought, he was even better than the best spaceman in the galaxy.

And he had better figure them out, Gordon thought, because all our precious necks depend on it.

Shorr Kan was watching the forward view-screen now, the sub-electronic mirror that converted mass impulses from the normal space they were tearing through, literally, at FTL+, into images the eye could see. He appeared fascinated by what was pictured there.

"At a guess," he said, "what would you estimate our speed to be?"

Gordon looked at the screen. The stars, dead and living, and the banks of drift, all the tumbled splendor of the Marches, seemed to him to be almost stationary.

"We don't seem to be moving at all," he said. "Or at least, not much."

But Hull was staring at the screen as well, his copper-colored face rapt. "We're moving all right," he said. "No ship in our galaxy can move as fast as this." He answered Shorr Kan's question. "No, I couldn't guess. I'd have to have another point of reference and . . ."

Shorr Kan said, "Is it safe, in this smother?"

The Antarian turned around, his eyes just a trifle vague. "Safe? Why, I suppose . . ."

Gordon felt suddenly very nervous. If Shorr Kan, that tough and seasoned veteran, was worried about their velocity, it was something to worry about.

"Hull," he said, "why don't you slow down?" And that, he thought, must be an all-time first; back-seat driving in a starship.

"Mm," said Hull, and scowled down at the child-sized controls. "I can't read these blasted things." His voice went up a notch. "How am I going to set a course out of the galaxy and all the way to the Magellanic Clouds," he demanded, "when I can't read the instruments?"

"Set a course 'where'?" said Gordon, astonished, "What are you talking about?"

Hull shook his head. "The Magellanic Clouds. Where the H'Harn come from. Weren't we going there to reconnoiter them?"

"This little ship reconnoiter a sub-galaxy?" exclaimed Gordon. He rose and went to Hull, looking at him anxiously. "Hull, are you dreaming?"

Shorr Kan joined them, stooping slightly under the ceiling. "That," he said, "is the most idiotic suggestion I ever heard."

Hull turned on him furiously, his eyes quite normal now. "Idiotic, is it? You were the one who proposed it! You said we'd go out to the Clouds and learn what the H'Harn are planning against the Empire!"

Shorr Kan's body suddenly stiffened, as though with shock. "That's ridiculous. But . . . but I did say that."

There were times when his dark face could get as hard and cold and keen as a sword blade. This was one of those times.

"Tell me, Hull," he said swiftly. "Why did you choose this H'Harn ship for our escape?"

Gordon said, "You chose it, Shorr Kan. You said it was faster."

"Ah," said Shorr Kan. "I did, didn't I? But how have you been able to fly the thing, Hull?"

Hull looked puzzled. "Why, I just guessed at the controls . . ."

"Guessed?" mocked Shorr Kan. "You took off like an expert, in a ship whose design is completely alien to you."

His black eyes flashed from Hull to Gordon. He dropped his voice.

"There's only one answer to the things we've been doing. We've been under alien influence. H'Harn influence."

A feeling of terrible cold swept though Gordon. "But you said the H'Harn couldn't use their mental power at any great distance!"

"And that's true," said Shorr Kan. He turned, his gaze going to a closed bulkhead door that was the way to the after part of the ship. "We haven't been back there yet, have we?" I

The implication hit Gordon squarely in the center of his being. There are different sorts of fear, and many degrees of fearing, but what he felt for the H'Harn was the ultimate in sheer sickening terror. He found difficulty in pronouncing his words.

"You think there was a H'Harn in this ship? That there is one in it now?"

He stared at the door, seeing the creature in his mind's eye . . . the small, oddly distorted, oddly boneless thing with its limber bobbing gait, a faceless, softly-hissing enigma veiled in gray, hiding a dreadful power . . . .

"I think so," muttered Shorr Kan. "Lord knows how many of the little monsters are loose in our galaxy, although four was the number I heard. But I heard it from Cyn Cryver, and Cyn Cryver is a liar, because he told me there was only one at Aar."

Hull Burrel and Gordon looked at each other. It was still fresh in them, the horror they had felt when the H'Harn named Susurr had come toward them. Gordon said flatly, "Good God."

Then he turned to Shorr Kan to ask what they should do. And he was almost too late.

"If there's a H'Harn on this ship," Shorr Kan said, "there's only one thing to do. Find it and kill it."

With a decisive gesture, he drew the stunner from his belt.

Gordon lunged.

He brought Shorr Kan to the floor in a crashing tackle and grabbed the hand that held the stunner. He clung to it while Shorr Kan fought him like a tiger, and all the time Shorr Kan's face was blank as something carved from wood and his eyes were fixed and glazed and unseeing.

Gordon yelled, "Hull, help me!"

Hull was already leaping forward. "Then he is a traitor? I always knew we couldn't trust him . . ."

"Not that," said Gordon, panting for breath. "Look at his face. I've seen that before . . . he's under H'Harn control. Get that stunner out of his hand!"

Hull carefully peeled back Shorr Kan's fingers until he let go of the weapon, and as soon as it passed into the Antarian's hands Shorr Kan sagged and went limp. Like someone coming out of a faint he looked up at them and mumbled, "What happened? I felt . . ."

But Gordon had forgotten about him. He wrenched the stunner away from the startled Hull and disarmed it feverishly by withdrawing its charge-chamber. Then, just as quickly, he tossed the useless stunner back to Hull.

"You keep it. I'll keep the charge-chamber, and that way neither one of us can use it if the H'Harn takes control of . . ."

He never finished the sentence. A bolt as of black lightning, the cold paralyzing force that he had felt before at Teyn, exploded with terrifying silence in his brain. There was no shield against it, no possibility of struggle. It was like death. And simply, he died.

Just as simply and suddenly, he lived again. He was on the deck and his hands were around Shorr Kan's neck, throttling him, and Hull Burrel was pulling him away with such force that he could hear the sinews cracking in the Antarian's back and shoulders.

"Let go," Hull was snarling. "Let go or I'll have to knock you out . . ."

He let go. Shorr Kan rolled over and slid away, his mouth wide and his chest heaving. "All . . . all right, now," Gordon stammered. Feeling sick and shaken, he started to get up. But instead of releasing him, Hull's grip abruptly tightened. His knee slammed into Gordon's back and Gordon fell hard forward and his skull rang on the steel deck.

The H'Harn had shifted its attention once more. Glassy-eyed and blank as a statue, the Antarian left Gordon and flung himself on Shorr Kan and tried earnestly to kill him. Shorr Kan managed to fight him off until Gordon could collect his wits and help. Together they got Hull down and held him, and then between breaths he went flaccid and lay looking at them, his eyes wild but quite sane.

"Me, too?" he said, and Gordon nodded. Hull sat up and put his head in his hands. "Why doesn't it just kill us and get it over with?"

"It can't kill us," said Shorr Kan. "Not with mental force. It could destroy our minds, one by one, but I don't think it wants to be flying through the Marches with three mindless maniacs. It seems to be trying to get two of us to eliminate each other so it'll only have one left to control. I expect it needs someone to help it fly the ship."

He stared at the closed door aft. "If we try to get back at it we'll never make it . . ."

Gordon glanced up at the view-screen, where the thronging stars and shoals of drift crept with such deceptive slowness. This was one of the most crowded regions of the Marches, and Shorr Kan had worried about their velocity. Perhaps . . . .

With desperate inspiration, so desperate that he did not pause a second to think about it, Gordon sprang to the control-board. He began at random to hit the enigmatic controls, punching, twisting, turning them this way and that.

The little ship went crazy. It flashed toward a great belt of drift, then veered wildly off toward a blue sun and its planets, then zoomed zenithward toward a double-double whose four suns yawned before them like great portals of flame. Hull Burrel and Shorr Kan were tumbled against the bulkheads, crying out their surprise.

The H'Harn hidden aft must have been startled, too startled for the moment to stop him.

Hull scrambled toward him. "You'll wreck us!" he cried. "Are you daft? Get your hand off those controls, for God's sake!"

Gordon shoved him aside. "It's our only chance to deal with that creature. Get it scared. Both of you, keep hitting the controls at random. If we all three do that, it can't stop all of us."

Hull stared at the view-screen and the dizzying whirl of suns and worlds and deadly drift. "But we'll crash. It's suicide!"

Shorr Kan had seen Gordon's point. "He's right, Hull. It's risking a crash, but it's the only way." He pushed Hull toward the control-board. "Do it!"

Dazed and only half-understanding, Hull obeyed. The three of them pushed and pulled at things like madmen. The ship corkscrewed, stood on its tail. The protective grav-stasis operating inside the ship shielded them from the worst accelerative effects, but the sheer insanity of flying in this mad fashion was terrifying.

"All right back there!" Gordon yelled. "You can read my mind, you know what I'm saying! If we crash and die, you die with us! Try to take control of any of us again and we will crash!"

He waited for the icy mental bolt to hit him, but it did not. And after a minute there came into his mind a telepathic feeler that was cold, alien, and . . . fearful.

"Stop!" thought the hidden H'Harn. "We cannot survive if you continue this. Stop it!"

14

Sweat stood out on Gordon's forehead. He saw in the view-screen that the ship was now heading with all its tremendous speed toward the irregular sprawl of a filamentary nebula. That nebula would be rotten with drift.

He took his hands off the controls. "Let be," he told the others. "But be ready to hit them again any moment."

An anxious thought came from the H'Harn. It could see quite clearly, Gordon knew, what was ahead of them, using his eyes as a viewer. "You must change course or we will perish."

"Change course to where?" said Gordon harshly. "To the Magellanic sub-galaxy? That's where you were taking us with your hypnotic suggestions."

"It is necessary for me to return there," came the sullen thought. "But we can make a bargain."

"What kind of bargain?"

"This," thought the hidden H'Harn. "Set a course toward an uninhabited world I know of that is not too distant, and land there. You may then leave the ship."

Gordon looked at the others, Hull's coppery face sweating and haggard, Shorr Kan's a mask of grim doubt.

"I got the thought." Shorr Kan nodded. "You too, Hull? Anyway, I don't think much of it for a bargain. The thing will try to trick us somehow."

"No!" came the sharp thought.

Gordon paused, undecided. He could see no other arrangement that might even possibly work. The situation was fantastic. The three of them in the racing ship, each of them vulnerable to the colossal mental power of the creature back there, but only one at a time.

A thought crossed his mind but he instantly suppressed it. It was nothing he wanted to think about even for one moment. He look at the other two and said, "I think we've got to risk it."

"Very well," came the quick, eager thought of the H'Harn. A little too quick, a little too eager. "I will direct your companion how to fly the ship to that world."

"As you did before?" jeered Gordon. "Oh, no. You're not putting Hull under again and then using him in some underhanded fashion."

"But how then . . . ?"

Gordon said, "You will explain to Hull the controls of the ship, by direct telepathic statements. He will repeat aloud to us each of your explanations. If at any moment Hull shows the slightest sign of being under your mental dominance, we'll hit the controls and keep on hitting them until we crash."

There was a long pause before any answer came. Hull was looking agonizedly at the screen, and Gordon saw in it that the filamentary nebula was terribly close, winding across space like a gigantic ragged serpent. The serpent was diamonded with points of light that came and went, bigger fragments of drift that caught the light of distant suns and then lost it.

He thought grimly that if the H'Harn did not make up its mind soon, there was not going to be any escape for any of them.

That thought pressured the H'Harn into hasty decision, as Gordon had hoped it would.

"Very well, it is agreed. But your companion must take over at once."

Hull Burrel seated himself at the controls. Gordon and Shorr Kan leaned on either side of him, watching his face for any sign of change, watching the controls, and watching each other.

"It says this is the main lateral-thrust lever," said Hull, putting his hand on a little burnished lever. "Fifty degrees east . . . seven of these little vernier marks to the left."

The gigantic snake of the nebula slid out of their view in the screen.

"Zenith and nadir thrust control," muttered Hull, touching still another of the small levers.

The star-fields changed in the screen. The ship, still running at a velocity far higher than that of any craft ever known in the galaxy, moved again with apparent sanity through the jungle of suns on a course parallel with the rim of the galaxy, arrowing slightly zenithward in the starry swarm.

Gordon felt a tension that was now unbearable. He knew that the H'Harn did not mean to let them escape, that the thing had something up its sleeve, some trap that would close directly they landed . . . .

Don't think of that, he told himself. Keep your mind on Hull and what he's saying about the controls.

After what seemed an endless time, a yellow sun very like Sol lay dead ahead, and its disc grew as the ship flew on. Presently they could see the planet that swung around it.

"Is this the world?" Gordon demanded.

"Yes," came the H'Harn's answering thought.

The creature then gave Hull further telepathic instructions, and Hull said, "Deceleration control . . . two notches," and touched another lever.

Gordon watched Hull closely. If the H'Harn meant suddenly to seize their pilot, it was likely to be fairly soon. So far, Hull's face remained normal. But he knew how swiftly the change could come, to that inhuman stiffness. And if that happened . . . . Don't think about it. Don't think!

The planet rushed toward them, a green-and-gray globe, its surface hidden here and there by belts of cloud. Gordon caught the glint of a sea, far around its curve.

"Deceleration . . . two more notches, to reach stationary orbit," repeated Hull, voicing the instructions of the H'Harn.

And after a few minutes, "Needle centered on third dial . . . orbit stationary. Trim lever, four notches . . ."

He touched the trim lever and the ship rotated, then began descending tail first toward the surface of the planet. Hull Burrel said, "Descent control . . . three notches." They went down through streaming clouds, and a little muted bell rang somewhere.

"Friction alarm," said Hull. "Reduce descent velocity by two notches." He moved the lever under his hand.

They looked downward, through the aft view-screen, and saw the planet rising toward them. There was a green landscape, with forests and plains, and the silver ribbon of a river. Gordon heard the quick breathing of Shorr Kan and thought, He's as keyed up as I am . . . . think about Shorr Kan . . . think whether you can trust him . . .

"One-half notch less," said Hull, and moved the lever again.

They were a thousand feet above the forest when Gordon struck. He did it with the abrupt ferocity of a man who will not have a second chance and knows it. Hull Burrel's hand still held the lever. Gordon hit it and smashed it downward. The lever went wide open and there was a shrieking roar of air.

Hull shouted something and the next moment the tail of the ship hit the ground. Gordon went flying, with the sound of the ship's collapsing fabric loud in his ears. He caromed into the control panel and the breath went out of him. There was a long falling cadence of grindings and crackings and metallic screamings. Gradually they ceased. By the time Gordon got his head cleared and his breath back, the ship was quite still, canted drunkenly over on one side.

Shorr Kan was picking himself up, streaming blood from a cut on the forehead. Hull Burrel lay on the deck, limp and motionless. In a panic, Gordon pawed at him, rolled him over and felt for the pulse in his throat.

"Dead?" asked Shorr Kan. He had opened his tunic and was tearing a strip of cloth from his undergarment.

Still gasping for breath, Gordon poked up one of Hull's eyelids and shook his head. "Unconscious. I don't think he's badly hurt."

Shorr Kan pressed the bit of cloth over the gash on his head. It rapidly became crimson. "Lucky," he said. "We could all be dead." He glared at Gordon. "Why in the name of hell did you crash us . . . ?"

He suddenly fell silent. Shorr Kan had one of the quickest minds that Gordon had ever met. He was now looking at the after part of the alien ship.

The bulkheads back there were crumpled like tin. The tail of the descending ship had taken the full force of the impact. Shorr Kan turned again to Gordon, with an arctic light in his black eyes.

He whispered, "Do you get anything now?"

Gordon too had been listening, straining not only with his ears but with his mind.

"Nothing," he said. "Not the faintest flicker. I think the H'Harn must have died in the landing."

"It would pretty well have to be dead, the way the ship is wrecked back there," said Shorr Kan. "Of course. That's what you were trying to do, kill the H'Harn in the landing."

Gordon nodded. He felt horribly shaky, a reaction from the ordeal of mental battle.

"It was never going to let us walk away free," he said. "That was sure. I took a chance on getting it first."

Shorr Kan refolded the sopping cloth. He nodded, and the gesture made him wince. "I'll say for you, Gordon, you have the courage of your convictions. But I think you were right. I think it would have blasted our minds . . . or at least two of our minds . . . before it let any of us go free. To coin a phrase, we know too much."

"Yes," said Gordon. "I only wish we knew more."

Hull Burrel remained unconscious so long that Gordon was beginning to worry. Finally he came around, grumbling that every bone in his body was broken, then adding that it was worth it to be rid of the H'Harn. He looked at Gordon with narrowed, appraising eyes.

"I'm not sure I'd have had the nerve to risk it," he said.

"You're a spaceman," Gordon said. "You know too well what might have happened." He nodded to the crumpled hull plates. "Drag your fractures over here and give us a hand."

Hull laughed and shook his head, and came. It took them a long time to lever the plates wide enough so that they could edge through, but was no other way out . . . the lock was hopelessly jammed . . . and the impact had already done most of the work for them. They climbed out at last into warm yellow sunshine and dropped to the green-turfed ground.

Gordon looked around wonderingly. This world, or at least this portion of it, had a startling similarity to Earth. The men stood at the edge of a green forest, and not far from them the forest thinned and they had glimpses of a rolling plain. The sky was blue, the sunshine golden, the air sweet and full of the dry fragrance of leaves and grasses. It was true that the individual shrubs, trees, and plants he saw were quite unlike terrestrial ones in detail, but the overall resemblance to a scene in the temperate zone of Earth was very great.

Hull Burrel had other thoughts. He was frowning gloomily at the wreck of the ship that had brought them so far across the void.

"That one will never fly again," he said.

"Even if it was undamaged, you couldn't handle it," said Gordon. "It was only through the H'Harn that you managed."

Hull nodded. "So here we are, without a ship, on an uninhabited world."

Gordon knew what he meant. Stranded.

"But is it uninhabited?" said Shorr Kan. The cut had now ceased to bleed. "I know the H'Harn said it was, but those creatures are the fathers of lies. Just before we crashed I thought I saw a distant something that might be a town."

"Mm," said Gordon uneasily. "If this world is inhabited, and the H'Harn was making for it, it's extremely likely to be one of the nonhuman worlds in this part of the Marches that follow Narath Teyn . . . and the counts."

Shorr Kan said, "I've considered that. I think we had better reconnoiter, and I think we had better be blasted careful about how we show ourselves." He pointed. "The town was off there somewhere."

They started along the edge of the forest, keeping a little way back within the trees for cover. The green plain out beyond them remained empty, rolling away to the horizon. There were a few odd birds and small animals in the forest, making small sounds, and the wind rustled the trees in a familiar way. But there was a quietness here that Gordon did not like. He handed the charge-chamber back to Hull.

"Put it back in the stunner," he said. "It isn't much, but it's something."

"What I don't understand," Hull said, while he did that, "is the why of it. Why did the H'Harn direct us into his ship by mental influence and then take us back with it to the Magellanic Clouds? What use would we be to it?"

"You and I would be no use at all," said Short Kan. "It dawns on me that the thing didn't just want a copilot. I think it wanted Gordon."

"Good Lord," said Gordon, and stared at him. In the stress of the moment he had not thought that far, but he knew what Shorr Kan was driving at. He broke out in a cold sweat. "But how would it . . . of course, it's attention was aroused when we killed the other H'Harn and started to escape. It would undoubtedly have probed our minds then, even though we were not conscious of it. That's how it came to be hidden in the ship."

"So . . . it probed your mind," said Hull. "What is there about you that would make it want you so badly?"

Shorr Kan smiled ironically. "Tell him, Gordon."

"Look, Hull," Gordon said. "You learned about me so recently, at Throon, that you haven't yet realized the implications of what you learned. The Emperor himself told you how I . . . that is to say, my mind . . . was in possession of the body of Prince Zarth Arn at the time of the star-king's great war against the League."

Hull said irritably, "I'm not likely to forget that. How it was really you who led the Empire fleet, and used the . . ."

He stopped abruptly. His mouth was still open and he forgot to close it.

"Exactly," said Gordon. "It was I, and not Zarth Arn, who used the Empire's secret weapon, the Disruptor."

"The Disruptor," said Shorr Kan, sharpening the point, "which was used by the Empire thousands of years ago, to repel the H'Harn when they first tried to invade this galaxy."

Hull closed his mouth and opened his eyes wider, looking at Gordon. "Well, of course. If the H'Harn could get their hands . . . or whatever they use in place of them . . . on anyone who knows the secret of the Disruptor, which only the Empire's royal family are supposed to know, they'd be awfully happy. Yes, I see. But . . ."

"I suggest," said Shorr Kan, "that you defer further discussion and take a look out there."

The edge of his voice cut them silent. They peered out of the trees at the great plain.

Miles out from the forest, and far away to their left, a group of specks moved across the surface of the plain. At first Gordon thought they were running game animals. But there was something wrong about their gait and pace and the way that they rose and fell a little above the ground.

The group swept along, not coming any nearer to the forest but heading in a straight line in the direction that Gordon thought of as north. As they passed by, he could see them more clearly. And he did not like what he saw.

The creatures were neither running nor flying, but doing a little of both. They were stubby-winged avian bipeds, much bigger than Korkhann's people, and lacking the civilized amenity of feathers. They had remained closer to the reptile; the equivalent, say, of the pterodactyl. Wings and body were leathery smooth, a gray or tan in color, and their heads were hideously quasi-human, with bulging skulls above long cruel beaks that seemed to have teeth in them. As with Korkhann's folk, the wings served also as arms, with powerful clawed hands.

Gordon got the impression that those hands were carrying weapons.

15

The yellow sunshine poured down, and a little breeze ruffled the green foliage of the trees around them, and it was all so much like a June day on Earth that Gordon could hardly believe he stood upon the planet of a distant star.

That was what made the winged bipeds out there so frightening. It was like encountering these grotesqueries in Ohio or Iowa.

"They're Qhallas," said Shorr Kan. "When Naath Teyn came to Aar to confer with Cyn Cryver, he brought a motley lot of his nonhumans along . . . and there were two of these brutes among them."

The men crouched and watched. The nightmarish group went on, looking neither right nor left, heading straight north. They became distant dots and vanished.

Shorr Kan shaded his eyes squinting. "There . . . in the distance," he said.

They could just see another group of flying, racing specks. They too were heading north.

In the same direction the men were taking. Not, Gordon thought, a comforting idea.

"At any rate," Shorr Kan said, "it confirms my belief that I saw a town of some kind. Probably a landing field there as well." He frowned, his eyes abstracted but very keen. "I think there'll be some of the count's ships arriving here soon, and the Qhallas are going to meet them. I think that this is part of the gathering of Narath's inhuman clans."

Something tightened painfully in Gordon's belly. "Gathering . . . for what?"

"For the long-planned attack," said Shorr Kan quietly, "by the counts of the Marches and Narath's hordes, on Fomalhaut."

Gordon sprang to his feet. He set his hands around Shorr Kan's neck. He was shaking, and his eyes were ferocious.

"Attack on Fomalhaut? You knew this and you didn't tell me?"

Shorr Kan's face remained calm. So did his voice, though it was difficult enough to get it out from between Gordon's throttling hands.

"Has there been one minute since I helped you escape from Aar when we didn't have all the trouble we could handle without borrowing more?"

His gaze met Gordon's steadily, and Gordon let go. But he remained tense, gripped by a terrible fear. And with the fear came an overpowering sense of guilt. He should never have left Fomalhaut, and the Princess Lianna.

He had known, from the time when Narath trapped them on Teyn, that this attack was inevitable. He should have stayed by her, to do what he could. She had reproached him once that he loved adventure more than he did her, and had been angry with her. But perhaps she had told the truth.

"How soon?" he asked. His voice was unsteady, so that he scarcely recognized it. He was aware that Hull was talking also, and that he looked agitated, but he could not spare attention for anything but Shorr Kan's answer.

And Shorr Kan shrugged. "As soon as the combined forces are ready . . . whenever that may be. Cyn Cryver didn't tell me all his plans. But the ships of the counts will go as a fighting escort for transports carrying the hordes of Narath Teyn."

"I see," said Gordon, and clenched his hands hard and forced himself to think. Panic now was not going to help either Lianna or himself. "What part are the H'Harn going to play in this?"

Shorr Kan shook his head. "I can't answer that. Cyn Cryver was very secretive about his relations with the H'Harn." He paused, and then said soberly, "My own feeling is that the H'Harn are using Cyn Cryver and all the others as cats'-paws, in some fashion. As, of course, I had planned to do myself."

"Have you ever played straight with anyone in your whole life?" demanded Hull Burrel.

Shorr Kan nodded. "Oh, yes. Often. In fact, I never use deceit unless there's something to be gained by it."

Hull made a sound of disgust. Gordon hardly heard them. He was walking back and forth, his mind whirling.

"We've got to get back to Fomalhaut," he said.

"That," said Shorr Kan, "will not be easy. The people of this world do not have space travel. You saw them. They're a pretty squalid lot."

Gordon's face set and tightened. "You said that some of the counts' ships would likely land here soon, to take off these Qhallas for the campaign?"

"Ah," said Shorr Kan. "I think I see what's in your mind. We'll steal one of those ships when they come and take off to warn Fomalhaut Good God, man. Be sensible!"

Hull said, "He's a blackhearted rascal, but he's right, John Gordon. Those winged devils will be swarming where the ships land."

"All right," said Gordon. "All right. The fact still remains. We need a ship. Tell me how we get it."

Hull's big coppery face reflected nothing but baffled anger and distress. But Shorr Kan said, after a minute, "There is one way it just might be done."

Both Gordon and Hull kept quiet, afraid to break the tenuous thread of hope. Shorr Kan stood biting his lip and thinking. They waited. Suddenly Shorr Kan said to Gordon, "Suppose we swing it. Suppose we get to Fomalhaut. If I know the Princess Lianna, she'll want to hang me at the earliest possible moment."

Gordon answered, "I'll see to it that she doesn't."

That was a large promise. Shorr Kan smiled, with a certain unpleasant humor.

"Can you guarantee that?" he demanded. "Can you guarantee that if she doesn't, someone else . . . say the emperor . . . won't do it for her?"

It was no good lying and Gordon knew it, much as he wanted to. "No, I can't guarantee it. But I'm almost sure that, if you've earned it, I have enough influence to save your neck."

"Almost is cold comfort," said Shorr Kan. "However . . ." He studied Gordon for a moment, and Gordon knew that he was mentally going over all the alternatives, checking them swiftly once more before he committed himself. Finally he shrugged and said, "It'll have to do. Will you give me your word of honor that you'll do everything in your power to save me from execution or punishment?"

"Yes," said Gordon, "If you get us to Fomalhaut, I'll do that."

Shorr Kan considered. "I'll accept that. If I hadn't known from the past that you're a bit stupid about always keeping your word, I wouldn't trust you. As it is, I do."

Hull Burrel gave a grunt. Gordon ignored him and asked quickly, "Now . . . how do we get away from here?"

Shorr Kan's black eyes sparkled. "There's only one possible way and that's the ships of the counts that will be coming to pick up the Qhalla warriors."

"But you said yourself we could never capture a ship . . . ."

Shorr Kan grinned. "That's right. But I have a certain talent for these things, and I've thought of a way."

He talked rapidly. "Listen. I helped you escape from Aar, and together we killed the H'Harn Susurr there. But nobody on Aar, none of the counts, really knows what happened. All they know is that a H'Harn was found dead, the two prisoners—you and Hull Burrel—were missing, and that I also was missing."

"What are you getting at?" demanded Hull.

"This," said Shorr Kan. "Suppose I reappear here on the Qhalla world. Suppose I tell the counts, when they come, that it was you two who killed the H'Harn, and that when you escaped you took me along as a captive?"

"Would they believe that?" asked Gordon. "Wouldn't they want to know where we are and how you got away from us?"

"Ah, but that's the beauty of my idea," said Shorr Kan. "I'd have the two of you right with me, you see . . . your wrists bound, me covering you with the stunner. I'd tell them that when you wrecked the ship on this world, I turned the tables on you and overpowered you, and how could they doubt it with the proof right before their eyes? Isn't it ingenious?"

Hull Burell let out a sound that was like a roar. He jumped for Shorr Kan, got him between his hands, and started trying to break him in two.

"Hull, stop it!" Gordon cried.

The Antarian turned a flaming, raging face toward him. "Stop it? You heard the bastard, didn't you? He's the same Shorr Kan as ever!"

Shorr Kan was a strong man but the big Antarian shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. "He's got a beautiful idea, surely. He'll march us in as prisoners, and since his escape didn't work he'll claim he never tried it, and he'll throw us to the wolves!"

"Wait a minute," said Gordon, pulling at Burrel's arm. "Let him go. Too much depends on this, Hull! Let's talk about it." But the seeds of suspicion were flourishing in Gordon's own mind, and he looked very coldly at Shorr Kan, as the latter stepped quickly back and away from Hull's reluctantly opened hands.

"It does," said Gordon, "sound exactly like the kind of clever double cross you've always been good at."

"Doesn't it, though," said Shorr Kan, and smiled. "And I'll have to admit that I considered doing it just that way."

Gordon watched him narrowly. "But you changed your mind?"

"Yes, Gordon, I did." There was an odd note of patience in his voice now, as though he were explaining something to a very small child. "I've told you this before and I'll repeat it again. I could stay with the counts and deceive them all down the line, but I cannot deceive the H'Harn, and one stray thought would be the end of me. So I prefer to take my chances at Fomalhaut. It's simple arithmetic."

"With you, my friend," said Gordon sourly, "nothing is simple. That's why I find this difficult to believe . . . because it is simple."

"Then let's find something else to pitch it on," said Shorr Kan brightly. "Friendship, for example. I've always rather liked you, Gordon. I've said so in the past. Doesn't that count for anything?"

"Oh, my God," said Hull Burrel softly. "Here's the biggest scoundrel in the galaxy, and he asks you to believe in him because he likes you. Let me kill him, John Gordon."

"I'm tempted," Gordon said. "But wait a bit." He paced up and down, trying to force himself to think clearly against the doubts and the agonizing apprehension that filled his mind. Finally he said, "It comes down to one thing. The only starships that will be coming to this world are the counts' ships. And this is the only possible way we could hope to get one of those ships. We have to gamble, Hull. Give him the stunner."

Hull Burrel eyed him incredulously.

Gordon said, "If you can think of another way, tell me."

Hull stood a moment with his head down like an angry buffalo. Then he swore and handed the weapon to Shorr Kan.

Instantly Shorr Kan leveled the stunner at them.

"Now you are my captives," he said, smiling. "Hull was absolutely right, I am going to turn you over as prisoners to the counts."

Hull's fury went quite beyond reason. He rushed forward bellowing, in the face of the stunner, his hands raised for a killing blow.

Shorr Kan stepped agilely aside and let him blunder past. Then he laughed, a laugh of pure and wicked delight.

"Look at him," he said. "Isn't he lovely?" Hull had turned around and was standing uncertainly, his big hands swinging, staring in dumb amazement as Shorr Kan laughed again. "Sorry, Hull, I had to do it. You were so sure. I didn't have the heart to disappoint you." He tossed the stunner in the air, caught it again expertly, and shoved it into his belt. "Come along now. Before we encounter anyone, human or Qhalla, I'll have to bind your hands, but no need for that yet."

He gave Hull a friendly clap on the back. Hull turned dusky purple, but Gordon could not help grinning a little.

They started out across the rolling plain, headed northward in the direction in which the grotesque Qhalla bands had been hurrying. The sun sank down across the sky, and then as a rosy sunset darkened into twilight, there was a distant flashing and a rolling crack of thunder, thrice repeated in the clear evening, and they saw three shining starships come down.

Two hours later, they stood in the darkness of night and watched a scene that might have been lifted straight out of hell.

16

Red-flaring torches illuminated the crowded streets of what was less a town than a planless huddle of huts and shanties and ramshackle warehouses dumped haphazardly beside a ford of the river. The Qhallas were not civilized enough to need anything more than a meeting place and marketplace, and it was not a very big one. But it was thronged now with thousands of the winged bipeds, shuffling in the dusty lanes with such a press of bodies that the hut walls creaked at their shoulders. The shaking red light picked out their leather wings and glistening reptilian eyes. Their hoarse voices made an incessant squawking din. They made Gordon think of a horde of demons, and they stank beyond belief.

The focus of all this big crowd was the three starships that rested on the plain outside the wretched town. Two of them were big cargo ships whose gleaming sides loomed up far beyond the torchlight, into the darkness. The third ship was much smaller, a fast little cruiser. The Qhalla horde milled between the town and the two bigger ships.

"Transports," said Shorr Kan. "The smaller cruiser will be one of the counts directing his end of the operation."

Hull Burrell said contemptuously, "That mob couldn't do much against a modern star-world."

"Ah, but this is only part of it, a very small part," said Shorr Kan. "All through the Marches, on wild worlds like this, the same sort of gathering will be going on. All the nonhuman peoples will answer the call of Narath Teyn."

Remembering how the Gerrn had idolized him, Gordon had no doubt of that.

"The counts' fighting ships will take on Fomalhaut's navy," Shorr Kan added. "While they are engaged, the massed transports will go through and land these hordes for a direct assault on the capital."

The words conjured up a nightmare vision in Gordon's mind, and he felt again an agony of guilt for having left Lianna.

"The Empire is the ally of Fomalhaut," said Hull Burrel. "They'll have something to say about it."

"But this will be a surprise. By the time an Empire fleet can get there, Narath Teyn may sit on the throne of Fomalhaut. It won't be easy then to unseat him."

Shorr Kan did not go on to voice the inevitable corollary, though it was in all their minds . . . that Lianna might not then be alive to reclaim her throne, leaving Narath Teyn as the sole and rightful heir.

Gordon demanded harshly, "Are we just going to stand here and talk about it?"

Shorr Kan looked thoughtfully down from the low hill where they were hidden, above the town.

"If I take you two in as prisoners, I can convince whatever official of the counts is in charge that I'm still Cyn Cryver's ally. But there's another problem." He indicated the milling, squawking, stinking Qhallas. "The way they look, and from what I've heard of them, they'd tear us to pieces before we ever reached the ships."

"On that I believe you," said Hull. "They're a wild lot anyway, and they're worked up now to the point of madness."

Shorr Kan shrugged. "No use asking for a sticky end like that. We'll just have to wait until we see a better chance of getting through. But I'd better bind your hands now. When the chance does come, we'll have to move fast."

Gordon submitted to having his hands bound behind his back, though the prospect of being helpless among the Qhallas was not one he relished. He consoled himself with the realization that his hands wouldn't do him any good anyway. But Hull Burrel flatly refused.

"Oh, for God's sake," snarled Gordon. "What do you want to do, sit here and die?"

"I think we'll do that anyway," he muttered, looking at the Qhallas. But he put his hands behind him and let Shorr Kan tie them.

Then they sat in the grass and waited, hoping for some way to open for them to the ships.

The blazing stars of the Marches looked down from the sky. The wind brought the sound of hoarse shouting from where the torches flickered. Gordon smelled the pungent smell of the warm grasses on which they sat, and it was so familiar that it startled him.

Then he remembered. Long ago, when he was still John Gordon of New York, he had visited a friend who lived in the Ohio countryside. They had sat at night in a summer-warm meadow, and there had been fireflies, and the smell of the sun-scorched grasses had been just the same.

Gordon felt a sudden shuddering pang of disorientation. Who was he and what was he doing here, in this wild strange place? The sweet grass smell tortured him with longing to be home, on his own familiar world, where the beasts of the field did not speak with the voices of nightmare, nor form themselves into uncouth armies; where there were no H'Harn and the stars were a long way off, and life held neither splendor nor gut-wrenching, soul-destroying fear.

But then a memory came to him. A memory of Lianna. His moment of hysteria passed. He knew that only one thing mattered now; he must live long enough to get to Fomalhaut with the warning.

Shorr Kan suddenly stood up. "There!" he said, gesturing toward the Qhalla town.

Gordon and Hull also stood up. Two men—two human men—had emerged from the milling crowd of Qhallas. They stood a little apart from the throng, as though they wanted air.

"One of them wears the insignia of the Mace," said Shorr Kan. "An aide or vassal of Cyn Cryver. We'll have to take this chance. Get going!"

He gave Gordon and Hull a hard shove, and they started down the grassy slope, Shorr Kan coming behind them with the stunner leveled at their backs.

"Hurry, damn it," snarled Shorr Kan. "Before they go back to the ship."

They staggered and stumbled down the slope. The light was bad and their bound hands made them clumsy. Now Gordon saw that the two men were turning around as though to go back through the swarming Qhallas to the ships.

Shorr Kan shouted, a loud call. The two men turned. And the uproar of the Qhallas quieted suddenly as they also turned to see.

"Run!" said Shorr Kan.

They ran, toward the two men. But the Qhallas had started running also, toward the strangers, their wings half-spread. They brandished weapons and their toothed beaks uttered barking noises of anger.

Shorr Kan triggered his stunner. The foremost Qhallas fell and rolled. The others held back for a moment.

The two men were staring in amazement. Now, by the torchlight, Gordon could make out their faces. One of them, who wore the emblem of the Mace, was a compact, stocky man with a dark, tight face. The other was younger, taller, and much less sure of himself.

Shorr Kan shouted at them. "Hold off your pets! I'm an ally of Cyn Cryver, bringing in prisoners."

Rather doubtfully, the older man turned and barked something at the Qhallas in their own harsh tongue. They began to gabble between themselves, confused and a little disconcerted by the stunner. The three went past them and pulled up, Gordon and Hull panting, in front of Cyn Cryver's men.

To the proud and haughty one, the man apparently in command, Shorr Kan demanded, "What is your name?"

"I am the Count Obd Doll," answered the stocky man, and stared at Shorr Kan as though he could not believe what he saw. "You . . . you are Shorr Kan. You disappeared from Aar with the Empire captives . . ."

"These same two," said Shorr Kan, "and not from choice, I assure you. They took me as a hostage. Fortunately, they crashed their ship not far from here and in the confusion I was able to turn the tables on them."

"Why didn't you kill them?" asked Obd Doll. "Why bring them here?"

"Because Cyn Cryver wants them alive. Especially alive and able to talk. Where is he?"

Hesitantly, Obd Doll answered, "At Teyn."

Shorr Kan nodded. "Of course. The gathering place of the horde. Take us there at once."

"But," said Obd Doll, "I am on orders here." He went on with other objections, and Gordon sweated in an agony of impatience. The count appeared to be not too bright, and consequently unable to adjust to, or evaluate, a set of unexpected circumstances.

"Besides," said the count, sticking his jaw out farther in a show of strength, "how am I to know . . . ?"

Shorr Kan's face darkened and his voice sank to a kind of tigerish purring.

"Little man," he said, "these two captives may hold the key to the whole campaign. Cyn Cryver is waiting for them. Just how long do you think it wise to keep him waiting?"

Obd Doll looked shaken. "Well," he said. "Well, in that case, yes, of course. May I suggest, sir . . . call the Count Cyn Cryver from our cruiser . . . ."

So far, so good, thought Gordon . . . but it was just a little late. The Qhallas had got over their first shock and settled their confusion. They wanted the prisoners to play with, and they were closing in.

Shorr Kan had made a good try. But it was not much of an epitaph for them.

Only it seemed that Obd Doll had also made up his mind. He roared at the Qhallas, obviously ordering them to stop. Apparently they had some rudiments of discipline, for they fell back a little, and Obd Doll said hurriedly, "We had better go to the cruiser at once. These Qhallas . . . savage . . . unreliable . . . hate all humans except Narath Teyn . . . ."

It came to Gordon that the man was worried about his own skin. He didn't blame him. Narath Teyn might have calmed the Qhallas' bloodlust, but not these two men of the Marches. In fact, the younger one practically invited attack, staring with unconcealed loathing at the bird-things, and he reeked so of fear that even Gordon could smell it.

They began to move toward the cruiser. The Qhallas pressed after them, hopping, shuffling, flapping, edging a little closer with every step. They squawked among themselves, their unlovely voices edged with mounting anger. Their eyes were bright with brainless fury, watching their prey move closer to sanctuary. They had a simple desire to tear these man-creatures into small pieces and peck at them like robins at chunks of suet. Gordon thought that their shaky discipline was not going to hold out another ten paces. And now the reek of his own fear was acrid in his nostrils.

The younger of the two men had frankly given way to panic. He drew a small gray egg out of his pocket and said in a high voice, "I'd better use the numb-gas."

"No!" said Obd Doll. "Put that thing away, you idiot. We could numb a few but the others would be on us in a minute. Just move on, we're almost there."

The men staggered, buffeted by stubby wings, grabbed at by wicked hands. Obd Doll kept up a barrage of orders and Gordon guessed that he was reminding them of their allegiance to Narath Teyn and their duty to obey, disperse, and load themselves into the transports. Whatever he said, it stopped their making up their minds to take the prisoners, at least until the men had reached the cruiser. The air lock door slammed shut on the horde outside, and Obd Doll mopped his brow with his hand, which was visibly shaking.

"A difficult lot to handle," he said. "Without Narath Teyn around, it's not a job I care for."

"You did well," said Shorr Kan. "Now call Teyn at once, and inform the Count Cyn Cryver that I have recovered the captives and will bring them to him there at once."

The ring of authority in his voice was such that Obd Doll all but saluted, "At once." Then he looked at Gordon and Hull Burrel, oppressed by a fresh doubt. "What'll we do with them? We have no brig . . . this is a dispatch and command cruiser . . . ."

"Put them in one of the air locks," said Shorr Kan. "Take all the spacesuits out of the lock first. Then if they want to break out into space, they're welcome."

He laughed. Obd Doll laughed. The younger man laughed. Gordon did not laugh, and neither did Hull Burrel. They looked at Shorr Kan, but Shorr Kan's back was turned and he was already on his way, a man with important matters to attend to, a man in a hurry with no time to spare for two dupes he had deceived for his own purposes. Maybe.

Hull started to curse, but smothered it. They were shoved along by Obd Doll's men. toward an air lock on the other side of the cruiser. They were kept waiting until the helmets and suits were taken out of the lock, and then were thrust into the small coffinlike chamber. The inner door closed hermetically upon them, with a soft hissing sound that was very like mocking laughter.

Hull Burrel looked heavily at the immovable door. "Neat," he said. "They've got us nicely cooped up, and any time they decide to execute us, all they have to do is use the remote control to open the outer door of this lock." There was a manual control as well, almost suicidally handy. They carefully avoided leaning on it.

Gordon shook his head. "They won't do that. You heard Shorr Kan tell them that Cyn Cryver wants us alive."

"Yes, I heard him," said Hull. "I also know we're the only living beings who can tell the truth about how he got away from Aar. Of course, if he's really on our side, that's not important. But if he isn't . . . I don't think he'd want Cyn Cryver to hear it. Because of course the H'Harn would move in and examine him. I think he'd just blow us out into space and say we did it ourselves, two loyal Empire men choosing death before dishonor." Hull's face was set and very hard. "Do you honestly believe Shorr Kan is on your side, John Gordon?"

"Yes. Not out of nobility, but because we're his own best chance."

Hull remained standing for a time, frowning at Gordon. Then he sat down on the floor and leaned wearily against the bulkhead. "I wish," he said, "I had your simple faith."

17

The cruiser throbbed and hummed, flying through the Marches at highest speed. To Gordon, prisoned with the Antarian in the lock, it seemed to have been flying thus for interminable period. Several times the inner door had been opened and a scant ration of food and water thrust in to them by armed and careful men. But nothing else had happened, and they had not seen Shorr Kan again.

Gordon began increasingly to share Hull Burrel's skepticism about the reliability of Shorr Kan as an ally. So much so, that each time he heard the sound of a lock door opening he looked quickly at the outer one to see if this was not the moment that Hull had predicted, when they two would be catapulted on a blast of decompressed air into space and eternal silence. So far, it had always been the inner door that opened.

So far.

Agonized worry about Lianna and his own gnawing sense of guilt added to Gordon's personal torment.

"Gordon, I understand, but will you please shut up?" flared Hull Burrel finally. "There's not a damn thing we can do about it now, and you're getting on my nerves."

Gordon's own temper flared, but he refrained from uttering the words that came to his tongue. Instead he shut his jaw hard and went and sat with his back against the wall of the lock chamber . . . a posture that had now become practically permanent . . . and thought what the hell of a man of action he had turned out to be.

A thin, almost undetectable odor roused him from his brooding. It was pungent, unfamiliar, and it had to be coming into the lock from the air-vent connected with the main life-support system of the ship.

Gordon jumped up and approached the vent and sniffed. And that was the last thing he remembered before he fell on his face on the hard deck and never even felt the impact.

He awoke vaguely to a thin hissing noise and the sensation of being shaken. Somebody was calling his name.

"Gordon! Gordon, wake up!"

The somebody sounded urgent. There was a tickling in Gordon's nostrils. He shook his head and coughed, trying to get away from it, and the effort caused him to open his eyes.

Shorr Kan was bending over him, holding a small tube that hissed and tickled as it released gas into Gordon's mouth and nose.

"Oxygen," said Shorr Kan. "It should clear the cobwebs. You've got to come out of it, Gordon. I need you."

Gordon still felt remarkably stupid, but his mind was beginning to function again.

"Gas . . . from the air duct," he mumbled. "Knocked me out . . ."

Shorr Kan nodded. "Yes. Numb-gas. I managed to slip some canisters of it out of the ship's armory and drop them into the main air-supply of the life-support system."

Gordon stumbled up to his feet, hanging on to Shorr Kan for support. "The officers . . . the crew . . . ?"

"Out like lights," said Shorr Kan, grinning. "Of course, I thoughtfully put on a spacesuit beforehand, and then vented and replaced the air supply before I took it off. Feeling better?"

"I'm all right."

"Good The officers and crew are sleeping like babies, but they won't sleep much longer. I need your help to secure them, and I need Hull to pilot the ship while we're doing it. I've got the cruiser on automatic now, but the Marches are a risky place for that."

He went over to Hull, who was still sprawled unconscious on the deck, and held the oxygen tube under his nose. Then he looked up at Gordon and showed his teeth in a smile.

"Didn't I tell you I'd get you free?"

"You did." Gordon shook his head, which ached blindingly. "And you have. I congratulate you. The only trouble is, my head is going to fall off from being saved."

When Hull Burrel opened his eyes and saw Shorr Kan bending over him, his reaction was almost comically instinctive. He blinked once, and then put up his big hands and closed them around Shorr Kan's throat. But he was still weak as a kitten. Shorr Kan slapped his hands away and stood up.

"A grateful pair you two are," he said.

Gordon helped the Antarian to his feet, speaking urgently as he did so, explaining. He wasn't sure how much Hull understood until he said, "The ship's on autopilot, and you're needed in the bridge."

First and last a spaceman, Hull pulled himself together by main force, forgetting everything else.

"On auto-pilot? Here in the Marches?" he thrust Gordon aside and went with violent, if unsteady, haste out of the lock and down the companionway to the bridge.

Shorr Kan took a roll of tough wire from stores, and then he and Gordon set to work securing the officers and men.

Obd Doll, who lay in his own small cabin, was the last of them, and when they had him bound Shorr Kan looked thoughtfully down at him.

"I think I'll bring him round now with oxygen," he said. "He'd know the schedule that Cyn Cryver and Narath Teyn have set up for the attack on Fomalhaut, and that's something we've got to know."

"What," said Gordon, "if he won't talk?"

Shorr Kan smiled. "I think I can persuade him. You go on up to the bridge. You're the high-minded type and you'd only get in my way."

Gordon hesitated. It sounded like torture to him. But he thought of Lianna and what could be going to happen to her, and hardened his heart. He turned and went out of the cabin.

When he entered the bridge, Hull Burrel spoke without turning from the controls.

"I've laid as direct a course as possible for Fomalhaut. It'll take us too close to Teyn for comfort."

Gordon peered at the viewplate. The little cruiser was edging along the coast of a gigantic cloud of glowing dust, whose minute particles were so excited by the radiation of the stars drowned in it that it looked like a great mass of flame.

To Gordon, it seemed that the ship was merely crawling. He tried to contain his impatience. He also tried not to think of what Shorr Kan was doing.

After a while Shorr Kan came into the bridge. He took one look at Gordon's face and said seriously, "Could you hear the cries all the way up here?"

Gordon started for the door. "What did you do to him?"

Shorr Kan caught his arm. "I wouldn't go down there, Gordon. Not unless you . . ."

"Not unless I what?"

Shorr Kan's brows went up and his eyes laughed at Gordon. "Unless you want to be frightfully disappointed. Obd Doll has nothing worse the matter with him than a severe case of fright."

"You mean," said Gordon skeptically, "that he talked just because you threatened him?"

Shorr Kan nodded. "He did. You see the value of a reputation of ruthlessness. He believed I'd do exactly what I said I would, and so he told me all he knew without my having to do it. We'd soon find out if he lied, so I think he told the truth."

"When does the fleet leave Teyn?" Gordon asked.

"Obd Doll couldn't narrow that down too definitely. He said it would depend on when the last contingents of nonhumans came in . . . and they've been coming in, from all over the Marches, in answer to Narath Teyn's summons."

The words evoked in Gordon's mind a swift, ominous vision . . . of those alien hordes from worlds that had no human tradition at all, the scaled ones, the winged ones, the hairy ones, streaming through the Marches to foregather for an assault on a great star-kingdom. Yes, they would come at the call of Narath Teyn. Narath was mad. Gordon was sure of that. But there was some quality in him that had made him a leader of not-men such as the galaxy had never seen before.

"But from what Obd Doll told me of the forces that have already gathered," Shorr Kan was saying, "I'd hazard a guess that they'll leave Teyn very soon, probably in the next few days, on their way to Fomalhaut."

"What about the H'Harn," asked Hull Burrel. "Where do they come into this?"

Shorr Kan shook his head. "Obd Doll swears he doesn't know. The H'Harn have no fleet in this galaxy. He says that only Cyn Cryver and one or two others know what part, if any, the H'Harn will play."

Gordon, desperate and tense, tried to clear his mind of emotion and think calmly.

"Hull, will the communication equipment of this ship reach as far as Fomalhaut?" he asked.

Hull Burrel went into the little communications room behind the bridge. After a few minutes he came out again.

"It'll reach, but the power is so limited it would have to be audio only, not telestereo."

Shorr Kan said sharply, "You're planning to warn Fomalhaut by communicator?"

"Of course," said Gordon. "You must see it yourself . . . the time element, and the very strong possibility that we won't make it to Fomalhaut."

"Before you leap to the transmitter, think of this. Teyn and the Count's fleet are between us and Fomalhaut. They will be bound to pick up our transmission. They'll have fast cruisers after us at once . . . ."

Gordon made a brusque gesture. "We'll just have to take our chances. Fomalhaut has got to be warned."

"You didn't let me finish," said Shorr Kan. "The counts are liable to hit Fomalhaut right away, before any strong defenses can be organized. In their position, that is what I would do."

Gordon had not thought of that possibility. He was racked by doubt.

Hull said, "I'm with Gordon. Warn them, and gamble. The counts, praise be, have neither your guts nor your gall."

"I am touched," said Shorr Kan softly. "But what about us?"

"Take your chances, as Gordon said."

"What chances? They'll have us cut off within minutes after they pick up our transmission."

"I have an idea about that," said Hull.

He touched a control. On the big chartplate a sectional chart of the whole region of the Marches slid into view.

"All right," said Shorr Kan. "Look here."

Even Gordon, unused to reading the charts, could see when Shorr Kan pointed out their relative position that they could hardly hope to get past the fleet at Teyn once it was alerted. Not even by a miracle.

But Hull put his finger on a massive swarm of red flecks—a great reef, as it were, marked in the color of danger. The reef lay equally between them and Fomalhaut, one curving wing of it reaching out almost to Teyn.

"We could take a short-cut," Hull said, "through here."

Shorr Kan stared at him astonished. "Through the Broken Stars?" Then he uttered a short laugh. "I revise my opinion of you, Hull."

"What," asked Gordon, "are the Broken Stars?"

Hull said, "Did you ever stop to think why the Marches of Outer Space are such a mess of debris?"

"I haven't had very much time to consider cosmic origins."

"The scientists tell us," said the Antarian, "that long ago two fairly large star-clusters were on a collision course. When they met, of course the looser parts of the swarms simply went through each other with only a minimum of actual hits. But even those few were enough to strew debris all along the Marches.

"However, in each cluster there was a much tighter, denser core of stars, and those high-density cores collided. The result was terrific. Stars tore each other up in such a high incidence of collisions that they formed a spinning mess of half-stars, bits of stars, shattered planets, whole planets . . . you name it. Scarcely anyone ever risks going into that jungle, but at least two scientific survey ships have in the past crossed through it. If they had a chance, so do we." As a sort of afterthought he added, "I don't have to tell you how thin it is."

Gordon said, "Take it."

"Do I have a vote?" asked Shorr Kan.

With one voice, Hull and Gordon answered, "No."

Shorr Kan shrugged.

Gordon said to the Antarian, "When you send your message, tell Fomalhaut what we know about the counts and the impending attack, but don't mention Shorr Kan. They'd never believe that story, and they might put the whole warning down as a fake."

Hull nodded. "Since you're persona grata at the court of Fomalhaut, I'll send it in your name. Have you any recognition signal, so they can be sure it's you?"

Gordon thought. "Tell them it's from the man who once called Korkhann, their Minister of Nonhuman Affairs, an overgrown mynah bird. Korkhann will know."

The little dispatch cruiser crawled on the chart until it was close to that ominous reef of red dots. Only then did Hull Burrel send his message.

That done, they plunged headlong into the Broken Stars.

18

The place was like a star-captain's nightmare.

To the eye, the Broken Stars would have seemed only a region where the points of starry light were somewhat denser, through which the small ship seemed to creep.

But the radar and sensor instruments saw it differently. They saw a region where the debris of shattered suns, long, cool, and dark, whirled in small ovaloids, in spinning little maelstroms, in cones and disks and nests of wreckage. Splintered stones and dust that had once been planets lay in drifts. And the many surviving suns of the wrecked star-clusters flared out fiercely as background.

The computers that took the radar impulses and directed the cruiser's flight along the chosen course were clacking like the chattering teeth of hysterical old women. Hull Burrel, hunched over the board, listened to that uproar and watched the rapidly changing symbols, only occasionally reaching out his hand to give the computers a new course. But when he did so, it was done with all the speed of which he was capable.

Gordon and Shorr Kan, standing behind him, looked at the viewplate which showed only the swarming points of light through which they seemed barely to move. They looked then at the flashing radar screen, and were awed.

"I was in Orion Nebula once, but that was child's play compared to this," said Gordon. "Have we got a chance at all?"

"We have," said Hull, "if we don't run into a bit of it too complicated for the radar to sense in time. But I'll tell you how you can improve our chances about a hundred percent."

"How?"

"By getting off my neck!" Hull roared, without turning. "Go and sit down. I can fly this damned suicide mission better without jawbone help."

"He's right," said Shorr Kan, and nodded to Gordon. They drew back. "There's nothing you and I can do now . . . but wait! Yes, there is one thing we can do. Back in a minute."

He went aft. Gordon sat down wearily in one of the chairs at the rear of the bridge that were intended for top-brass to sit in and harass worried pilots.

Hull had told them that radar showed no sign of pursuit at all. He had explained that when the counts saw them dive into the Broken Stars, they would write them off as finished. And, he had added, they were probably right.

Shorr Kan came back holding a couple of plastic flasks filled with a pale, slightly milky-looking liquor. He grinned sardonically at Gordon.

"I was pretty sure that Obd Doll would have something stored away. The counts of the Marches are a hard-drinking lot. Here, have one."

Gordon took the flask, but stared up at Shorr Kan in amazement. "A drink? Now? In this?" And he jerked his head toward the radar screen. "Any minute, one stray chunk of drift . . ."

Shorr Kan sat down. "Quite right. And can you think of a better time for drinking?"

Gordon shrugged. Maybe Shorr Kan made sense, at that. All Hull wanted them to do was to keep quiet and let him make his long-shot gamble for life. Very well, then. He would keep quiet. He lifted the flask and drank.

The liquor might look a little like milk and it was bland going down, but it was hellfire when it hit his insides.

"Better than anything we had in the Dark Worlds," said Shorr Kan.

"I remember," said Gordon, "when Lianna and I were your prisoners at Thallarna . . . how long ago that seems! . . . you said you'd offer us a drink but you didn't keep the stuff around because it would spoil your pose as the austere patriotic leader."

Shorr Kan smiled wryly. "And much good it did me in the end." He looked at Gordon with a kind of admiration. "I had the whole galaxy in my grasp, and then you came along. By God, I have to hand it to you. You really were a spoiler."

Gordon turned and looked, startled, toward the view-plate. Nothing there seemed to have changed but there was a new sound, a screeching and screeking along the hull.

"Relax, Gordon," said Shorr Kan. "Just tiny particles, probably no bigger than atoms. Nothing to get jumpy about." He added, "When I think about it, in spite of the remarkable things you've done, you've nearly always had the jumps."

Gordon said between his teeth, "It seems a natural reaction when one's life is in danger."

"Look at me," said Shorr Kan. "I'm in as much danger as you. More, because if we get out of this mess there's more trouble waiting for me. I'm flying for my life . . . the second time . . . me that was lord of the Dark Worlds. But do I get upset? Not a bit. If Shorr Kan has to go, he'll go with his head high."

He raised the flask with a theatrical gesture, but the smile on his dark face was mocking.

Gordon shook his head. There were times when Shorr Kan just reduced him to silence.

"So drink up and be of good heart," said Shorr Kan. "We'll get through, all will go well with you, and you'll save my neck when we get there . . . I hope!"

The computers were chattering even more wildly, and when Gordon glanced forward he saw that the symbols were flashing in a swift stream across the radar screen. It seemed to him that Hull Burrel, hunched over the board, had his head bent in resignation, bowing to the inevitable end. Gordon turned his own head quickly away.

He thought of Lianna. It was strange how, when everything was getting unreal to him in the slow freezing terror of approaching dissolution, she remained quite real. Even if he survived, he felt that she was lost to him. But he thought of her, and was glad.

"You know, I've had an idea for a long time," Shorr Kan was saying, "that you're sort of a grain of sand in the machine, Gordon. I mean, you take someone out of his own context, his own time-frame, and hurl him into the future where he's got no business to be, and you put everything out of kilter. See how your coming, from the very first, has upset things all across the galaxy."

Gordon said dryly, "What you mean is that I upset the private plans of one Shorr Kan, that's all."

"Possibly," said Shorr Kan, with a courtly wave of his hand. "But tell me, what the devil was it like, that past time you came from? I asked you that before, but then you were lying to me and I couldn't believe a word of it."

"To tell you the truth," said Gordon, "it's getting just a little vague in my own mind." He drank and considered. "There was a man named Keogh who told me that this future I had been in before was all a dream. I just hated the Earth as it was, he said, so I made up fantasies about star-kingdoms and great wars beyond the suns. Of course at that time we didn't have anything approaching star-flight, so it must have all seemed pretty wild to him."

"We have a name for people like that," said Shorr Kan. "Planet-huggers. Hang tight to your mother-world's apron strings, because if you get away from it you might find something awfully nasty and upsetting."

Gordon glanced forward again. "Right at this moment," he said, "I'm not so sure that people who take that view are so awfully wrong."

Seen past the dark, hunched silhouette of Hull Burrel, the scene in the viewplate had slowly changed.

The points of fire that were suns seemed to be closer together. It was as though the ship was moving toward a rampart of suns, and surely they were not going to try to go that way. Hull would surely change course soon.

But time went on and he did not. Gordon drank again. The mighty blazing rampart of suns seemed closer, and still Hull did not alter course. Gordon felt a growing impulse to go and pound on Hull's arm, to make him veer off, but he fought it down. He didn't know a bloody thing about piloting a starship, and they had put the ship and themselves into Hull's hands and there was nothing to do but wait.

Shorr Kan seemed to understand how he felt. He said, "Less drift between the suns. Their attraction tends to gather up a good bit of debris. That's why he's going that way."

"Thank you for reassuring the nervous novice," said Gordon. "It's good of you."

Shorr Kan smiled. "I'm an awfully sympathetic person. Have another."

They sat, and drank, and Gordon tried not to look at the viewplate again or listen to the computers clacking. Time seemed to run on forever and it was almost a painful shock of change when the viewplate showed that they were out of the star-swarm and into the dark, clear deeps of open space.

Hull Burrel's great paw slammed down on the automatic pilot control. The big Antarian turned to them and for the first time in that flight they saw his face.

It was wild, exalted, and his voice came to them as a kind of hoarse triumphant shout.

"By God, I did it! I ran the Broken Stars!"

And then, as he looked at them, sitting with the nearly-emptied flasks in their hands, the wildness and excitement left him. He came back and stood over them, towering.

"I'll be everlastingly damned." he said. "While I did it, you two have been sitting here and drinking your heads off!"

Shorr Kan answered calmly, "You asked us not to bother you. Well, have we?"

Hull's craggy face turned scarlet. His chest heaved, and then he roared with laughter.

"Now," he said, "now I've seen everything. Get me one of those flasks. I think I want to get a little drunk myself."

They were out of the Marches, and the pure white fire of Fomalhaut gleamed like a beacon ahead.

It was many hours before Hull Burrel came back to the bridge, stretching and yawning. He started laughing again as he looked at Gordon and Shorr Kan.

"Through the Broken Stars with two topers," he said and shook his head. "Nobody will ever believe it."

"The whole fleet of Fomalhaut is on alert," he told them. "We're to land at the royal port on Hathyr."

"Any message for me?" asked Gordon.

The Antarian shook his head.

So that, Gordon thought, was that.

The radar screen showed ships far out from Fomalhaut cruising in stand-by formation.

"It's a good fleet," muttered Hull. "It's awfully good, and proved it in the fight off Deneb. But it's not very big, and the counts will eat it up."

The diamond sun swept toward them, and then the growing sphere of its largest planet. Hull brought the ship down over the far-spread towers of Hathyr City, toward the vast hexagonal mass of the royal palace. They landed in the small port behind it.

It seemed very strange to Gordon to step out and breathe natural air again, and look at a sun without a filter window in between.

A party of officers awaited them. They bowed and escorted them toward the huge bulk of the palace. Others boarded the cruiser to take charge of Obd Doll and his crew.

The old kings of Fomalhaut coldly looked down once more at Gordon, and this time he felt like snarling up at them.

"I know my place now," he wanted to tell them. "So the hell with you!"

But Shorr Kan strode along with a approving smile on his dark face, as though he were a visiting royalty who found the palace small but rather nice.

Despite his despair, Gordon had cherished a little hope. He did not know he had until suddenly it died, and that was when they three came into a small room where Lianna and Korkhann waited for them.

She was as beautiful as ever and her face was cold and hard as marble when she looked at him.

He started to say something, but before he could speak Lianna had looked beyond him and her eyes went wide with shock.

"Shorr Kan!"

Shorr Kan bowed magnificently to her. "Highness," he said, "it gladdens me to see you again. True, you and I have had a few small bothers and fusses, but that's all in the past, and I can say that it's forgotten now."

Lianna stared at him, absolutely stunned. Gordon felt an unwilling but tremendous admiration for Shorr Kan at that moment. Raise up the armadas of the League of the Dark Worlds, smite the Empire and its allies, bring about an Armageddon of the whole galaxy, and then dismiss it all lightly as a few small bothers and fusses!

"I have to state," Gordon said, "that Shorr Kan . . . who, as you can see, did not die at Thallarna but escaped to the Marches . . . was the one who rescued us and enabled us to give warning of the counts' coming attack."

He added forcefully, "I have promised Shorr Kan, because we owe him our lives, that he is safe here."

She looked at him, quite without expression. Then she said tonelessly, "If that is so, you are welcome, Shorr Kan, as our guest."

"Ah, a return of hospitality," said Shorr Kan. "It was not so long ago that you were my guest at Thallarna, Highness."

This grandly-spoken reference to the time when Gordon and Lianna had been Shorr Kan's prisoners brought a cough from Hull Burrel, who sounded as though he were choking on suppressed laughter.

Lianna turned to him. "Captain Burrel, we have been in touch with Throon. Jhal Arn has told me that elements of the Empire fleet are already on their way here."

Hull shook his head. "I'm afraid that will do no good, Highness. The counts and Narath Teyn will know that they must strike at once."

All this time Korkhann had said nothing, peering at Gordon with those wise yellow eyes that seemed to pierce straight through to the brain. Now he stepped forward, feathers rustling as his wings swept up and the delicate clawed hands at their tips caught Gordon's arm.

"But the Magellanians?" he cried.

"The H'Harn?" said Gordon startled.

"Is that what they call themselves?" Korkhann had an intensity about him that Gordon have never seen before. "Listen, John Gordon. Before I left Throon, the emperor and his brother, Zarth Arn, let me read the old records of Brenn Bir's time, when the Magellanians came to this galaxy before. They must not come again. What I read . . ."

He stopped, his voice quavering out into silence. When he spoke again, it was in a low, carefully controlled tone.

"You know that I am a telepath. Not one of the strongest ones, but . . . I have felt a shadow over the galaxy . . . a shadow that deepens with each hour, dark, cold. . . ."

Gordon shook his head. "We met only two of the H'Harn. One we never even saw. Shorr Kan killed the other one, to free us . . . we were in deadly danger . . ." And I hope that guarantees your neck, Shorr Kan, he thought. "But apparently there are only a few of them in the galaxy."

"They will come," whispered Korkhann. "They will come."

Lianna spoke. "One thing at a time. Narath and his beasts, and the counts, are enough to deal with now. Korkhann, will you see that our guests are made comfortable . . ."

She emphasized the word "guests" but Shorr Kan never turned a hair. He made another courtly bow and said to her, "Thank you, Highness, for your welcome. I've always wanted to visit Fomalhaut, for I've been told it's one of the most beautiful of the minor star-kingdoms. Until later!"

And with that truly regal wipe in the eye, he turned and went out with Hull Burrel and Korkhann.

Gordon saw Lianna turn toward him. Her face was still stone-white and there was no expression at all now in her eyes.

She came closer to him and her small hand flashed and gave him a stinging slap across the mouth.

Then her face changed. It moved like that of a nasty little girl having a tantrum. She put her head on his shoulder, and she said, "Don't you ever leave me again, John Gordon. If you do . . ."

He felt the wetness of tears against his cheek.

Incredulous, caught by wonder, Gordon held her. Not Zarth Arn, he thought. John Gordon.

That long trip back across the ages had been worth it, after all.

19

The street was familiar. Gordon knew every one of the brownstone fronts. He walked on the gritty pavement toward the office building where he spent his days. In the doorway he met Keogh, who laughed at him and said, "I told you it was all a dream, that rubbish about star-kings and beautiful princesses. All a dream, and now you've awakened, you're back in the real world. The real world . . ."

In a panic, Gordon said, "No, no, I won't come back." And then he cried out, "Lianna!"

The cry seemed to echo down endless corridors, but it had an effect. Everything slid and tilted and flowed away, leaving him confused and giddy in a tumultuous nowhere. He floundered wildly, like a drowning swimmer, and called Lianna's name again, and suddenly he was looking in bewilderment around an unfamiliar room.

Through an open window he could see the vast orb of the setting sun, and the sun was Fomalhaut, not Sol. It threw a shaft of brilliant light into the room, and by it he saw Lianna sitting silently in a chair, watching him.

He sat up on the couch where he had fallen asleep, brushing beads of perspiration from his forehead. The echoes of that nightmare were strong in him, and for a moment he could not speak.

"You dreamed you were in that other time?" she said.

He nodded.

"I thought so. I was watching your face. I'm glad it was my name you called." She added after a moment, "I've talked to Captain Burrel. I have some idea what you two went through I'm not surprised you have bad dreams."

They were still, Gordon thought, just a little awkward with each other. He was sure now that she loved him, but the trouble was that they didn't quite know each other well enough yet.

"When the H'Harn touch you," he said, "it seems to leave a kind of mental scar. Twice I've dreamed that the one who held us there in the ship had actually carried us away to the Lesser Magellanic, and each time . . ."

Suddenly Gordon stopped. His mind, just aroused from sleep had abruptly perceived for the first time something that he had never thought about before.

He jumped to his feet. "There's no sign of the fleet of the counts coming out of the Marches?"

She shook her head gravely. It was not for the sovereign to Fomalhaut Kingdom to show fear, but he saw the strain in her eyes.

"Not yet," she said. "But Abro thinks that if they are going to attack they'll come soon. He agrees with Captain Burrel that they would alter their timetable in order to strike before help can get here."

Gordon said, "I think I've overlooked something that may be tremendously important. I've got to see Hull and Shorr Kan."

The softness left Lianna's eyes and little stormy lightenings gathered in them.

"Shorr Kan," she said. "The man who nearly destroyed us all . . . and yet you speak of him as though he were a friend!"

Patiently Gordon said, "He is not a friend. He is an ambitious opportunist who thinks only of his own ends. But since his only opportunities now lie with us, he threw in with us. He's going to try to use us, and we are going to try to use him, and time will tell who uses whom."

Liana answered nothing, but he saw the set of her small chin. He ignored it and asked, "Is there some place here where we can make some galactographic computations?"

"The royal chart room," she said. "It's linked directly with all the screens in the Defense Ministry."

"Will you take me there, Lianna? And will you have Hull and Shorr Kan brought there?"

The room was deep in the palace. It had screens on every wall, all of them dark now. An officer saluted Lianna when she entered with Gordon behind her.

Presently Hull Burrel and Shorr Kan came in, and the latter swept a deep bow to Lianna, wishing Her Highness a very good evening. She regarded him with lambent eyes and an arctic smile.

"Let me say at once, Shorr Kan," she told him, "that if I had my way you'd have been executed within five minutes after you landed here. I live in hope that you will yet do something to make that possible."

Shorr Kan grinned crookedly. He looked at Gordon, and said, "Women are realists, did you know that? If you hurt one or threaten to hurt one, she'll hate you forever. Only men can make a game of it."

"Will you for God's sake quit talking about games," said Gordon. "The counts are not playing a game. Narath Teyn is not playing a game, and for certain the H'Harn are not playing a game. Or if they are, it's a game that nearly crushed the galaxy back in Brenn Bir's day."

Shorr Kan shrugged. "I'll admit that, but there's no evidence that the H'Harn are here yet in any strength."

"Are you quite sure of that?" asked Gordon.

Shorr Kan's mocking air dropped from him like a cast-off garment. "What do you mean?"

Gordon turned to Hull Burrel, who was frowning in puzzlement. "Hull, you piloted that H'Harn ship."

"You don't have to remind me," said Hull irritably. "I remember well enough."

"All right. Now, can you remember whether or not, before we realized what was happening and began to fight the creature, you were flying at top acceleration?"

Hull frowned again. "I don't see what . . ."

"Were you?"

"I don't know, damn it. Everything I did was put into my mind by the H'Harn, and I . . ."

"Yes?"

"Well, just wait a minute. I'm trying to think . . . I did seem to know that I must move a certain lever to the farthest notch. I did that, and from the way the ship responded, of course it had to be the main thrust control." Hull's face cleared. He nodded, satisfied. "Yes, we were at top acceleration."

"And what would you guess that to be?"

Hull pondered a moment, then named a figure. The officer's mouth fell open, and Lianna said instantly, "But that isn't possible!"

"I'm sorry, Highness . . . it is. The H'Harn ships are faster than anything of ours." Hull shook his head regretfully. "I'd have given a lot to bring that ship back so we could study it. Because if we do ever have to fight them in space . . ."

Gordon turned to Lianna. "Can we see a detailed chart of the portion of the Marches that contains Aar?" In a belated remembrance of protocol, he added "Highness?"

She spoke to the officer, who went to a bank of witches. Presently a great screen broke into light and life, with the bewildering complexity of star, planet, and drift markers showing in their various colors.

Gordon shrugged. "It makes no sense to me, but you can tell me, Hull. How far did we go from Aar to that point where we became aware of the H'Harn presence, and changed course?"

"Oh, look, Gordon!" Hull said. "We've got enough troubles ahead of us without rehashing the ones we've left behind."

"Answer him," said Shorr Kan, and it was the hard, cold voice of the one-time master of the Dark Worlds who spoke. His face was grim with foreboding, and Gordon thought again that he had never met anyone with the lightning awareness and comprehension of this man. Shorr Kan had already guessed what he was driving at.

Hull sweated over the chart like a sulky schoolboy, grumbling. Finally he named a distance. "It's only a rough figure . . ." he began, but Gordon cut him off.

"Using that as an average, and with that approximate velocity, how long would it have taken us to reach the Lesser Magellanic?"

Hull looked a bit startled. "So that's it. Why didn't you tell me?" He went over to the computer and started punching keys. Presently he came back with the answer.

"Between four and five months," he said. "That's Galactic Standard, of course."

Gordon and Shorr Kan looked at each other, and Lianna said with regal impatience, "Could we perhaps be told the object of this discussion?"

"Four or five months to reach the Magellanic, and as much again to return," said Gordon slowly. "Eight to ten months before the H'Harn fleet could reach this galaxy, utilizing the information they hoped to get from us . . . It's too long. We know the H'Harn are behind the counts in this move against Fomalhaut . . . they must have had a hand in timing it. Whatever their plans are for their own strike against the galaxy, I don't believe they would include that much of a delay. Especially . . ."

"Especially," said Shorr Kan bluntly, "when their logical time to strike would be at that exact moment when the galaxy is already engaged in a massive civil war." He looked around the circle of faces. "The H'Harn have gone to a deal of trouble to foment that war. I doubt if they plan to throw away the fruits thereof."

There was a dead silence. When Gordon spoke again, he could hear his worlds dropping into it as stones drop into a cold still lake.

"I don't think the H'Harn was taking us to the Magellanic at all. I think it was taking us to somewhere a whole lot nearer. I think it was taking us to the H'Harn fleet, lying close outside our galaxy."

The silence became even deeper, as though even breathing and heartbeat had been suspended. Then Hull said almost angrily, "How could they be out there without the radar-sweeps of the Empire's warning system detecting them? Don't you realize how thoroughly we have monitored outer space ever since the time of Brenn Bir?"

"Yes," said Gordon, "but . . ."

Shorr Kan finished for him. "You've met the H'Harn, you have some idea of their powers. And you know they must realize how thoroughly outer space is monitored. So the first prerequisite of any large-scale invasion plan would be some means of evading radar search."

Hull Burrel thought about that, and he began to get a haunted look.

"Yes, I see that. But . . . but if they can evade radar, then the H'Harn fleet could be out there off the galaxy right now, waiting . . ."

"Waiting for the counts of the Marches to launch their attack," said Gordon.

"Good God," said Hull, and turned fiercely to the communications officer. "Call Throon. The Empire must be warned."

The officer looked at Lianna, who said quietly, "Do as he asks."

"Your pardon, Highness," said Hull, and the stark look of horror on his face was apology enough. "But when I think of those . . ."

"Yes," said Lianna. "Remember, I have had experience of them myself." She waved Hull on, to where the communications officer was busy at one of the screens.

Presently it sprang to life, and an officer in Empire uniform spoke to Hull Burrel.

His name, rank, and reputation got him switched through to the palace in record time. The aquiline face of Zarth Arn, brother to the Emperor, looked out of the screen at them.

"Captain Burrel . . . Gordon . . . you're safe, then. We were concerned . . . ."

He broke off sharply, looking beyond Gordon, with eyes that had suddenly become points of fire. He was looking at Shorr Kan.

"What kind of a masquerade is this?"

"No masquerade," said Shorr Kan. "Happily for me, the reports of my death were sheer fraud." He met Zarth Arn's bitter glare with calm amusement. "The bad penny has turned up, only this time I'm on your side. Doesn't that please you?"

Zarth Arn appeared to be too stunned to speak for the moment. Gordon seized the opportunity to make a swift explanation.

"Our lives, and quite possibly the life of the whole galaxy, may be saved because Shorr Kan got us free to bring a warning," he said. "Try and remember that, Highness."

Zarth Arn's face was perfectly white, his mouth set like a vise. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, mastering himself. Then he looked at Lianna and said, "Highness, my advice is to hang that man at once."

"Ah, but you must hang Gordon first," said Shorr Kan smoothly. "He gave his word to protect me."

Hull stepped closer to the screen. "Highness, with all due respect, the hell with Shorr Kan and what happens to him! The H'Harn . . . the Magellanians . . . may be at the throat of the galaxy!"

Zarth Arn's anger faded into something else. "You learned something in the Marches?"

Hull told him. Gordon watched Zarth Arn's face, saw the shadow that came there grow and deepen, and when Hull was through it seemed to Gordon that Zarth Arn had aged ten years in those few moments.

"Theory," he said. "Only theory, and yet . . . The H'Harn. Strange that we never had a name for them before." He looked at Gordon. "This is your considered opinion?"

"Yes," said Gordon, and Shorr Kan spoke up unbidden.

"Mine too. And whatever else I may be, Zarth Arn, you know that I am neither a fool nor a coward. I believe that this strike against Fomalhaut is nothing less than the spearhead of an attack by the H'Harn on the whole galaxy."

After a moment Zarth Arn said, "This must go to my brother at once, for his decision. And since this is a chance we dare not take, I think there can be only one answer. The Empire fleet must go outside the galaxy and use every possible means, either to locate the H'Harn fleet or make absolutely certain that it is not there. And I must be with it. For if we do find the H'Harn . . ."

A coldness came into Gordon's spine. "You'll take the Disruptor?" Gordon remembered how he himself had once unloosed the awful power of that weapon. He remembered how space had quaked, and how stars had trembled in their orbits; how the whole fabric of the universe had seemed to twist and tear.

Zarth Arn said, "I must." He turned his somber gaze to Lianna. "You know, of course, what this will mean to you?"

She nodded calmly. "You will need every ship to sweep the Rim . . . including those you were sending here. I understand that. But surely the H'Harn are the ultimate enemy. We'll fight our battle here alone." She even smiled. "It's no matter. Captain Burrel assures me your ships could not get here in any case until after our fate has been thoroughly settled."

The screen blanked out. They were turning to leave, Lianna silent and preoccupied, when another screen came to life. In it was a burly-browed, thickset man with scarred hands, whom Gordon had met before, Abro, Defense Minister of Fomalhaut. Abro wasted no time on protocol. "Highness, they've come out of the Marches. The counts' fleet. They're more than twice as strong as we expected . . . and they're coming full speed toward Fomalhaut!"

20

Gordon felt a chilling dismay. The counts of the Marches were throwing everything they had into this. And whether their gamble succeeded or not, in the dark background brooded the unguessable purpose and menace of the H'Harn.

"They outnumber our fleet by three to two, in heavies," Abro was saying. "Commander Engl has planned to draw back, to cover Fomalhaut and give time for the Empire squadron to arrive."

Lianna said calmly, "The plan is good. But tell him not to count on any assistance from Throon. There will be no squadron."

Abro looked stunned. "But Highness, I myself was present when . . ."

"I will not discuss this on a communicator," said Lianna. "I am summoning the council. Get to the chamber as quickly as you can, Abro."

The screen went dark. Lianna turned, her face icy and composed. But her eyes were tormented, and Gordon wanted to put his arm around her shoulders. He did not. He doubted that she wanted any of that kind of encouragement in public.

She smiled a little wanly at him and said, "I must go, John Gordon. Later."

When she had gone, Hull Burrel strode to the screens and activated those which showed the Marches and that whole region of space, studying them feverishly.

Shorr Kan shrugged. "It doesn't look good, Gordon. Other star-kingdoms will hold back when they hear that Throon isn't sending help. I'm worried."

"Nice of you to be concerned," said Gordon acidly. "About us, I mean."

Shorr Kan looked blank. "About you? Hell, I'm worried about myself! When I helped you and took that dispatch cruiser away from Obd Doll, I committed myself. No explanation will ever convince Cyn Cryver that I didn't betray him. If he wins out and gets his hands on me . . ."

He drew his fingers expressively across his throat.

Gordon admitted that this did seem to be one box that Shorr Kan couldn't talk his way out of.

"Damn right," said Shorr Kan, and added thoughtfully, "The transports will follow the counts' fleet, with Narath's army. They're the real danger. If the Fomalhaut commander—what's his name, Engl?—If Engl has sense enough to keep some of his heavies out of the battle, they can be used to hit the transports and cut them up as they try to land."

Gordon thought that made good sense, and said so. Shorr Kan grunted. "You try to propose it, Gordon. They'd never take any suggestion from me, even if it was a good one, and even though I know more strategy than any of them . . . as I once proved. They might take it from you."

"I doubt it," Gordon said. "But I'll try."

Hours later that night, when he had sat for a long time in an antechamber of the council room, the council broke up. When Lianna came out at the head of the worried-looking knot of men, she saw him and came to him.

"There was no need for you to wait all this time," she said, but he thought she was glad that he had.

"I just wanted to know what's happening. That is, if you can tell me."

Abro frowned all across his hard face, but Lianna ignored him. "You brought the warning, and you have the right to know. The main fleet of the Empire has already left Throon, on its way out of the galaxy. With it goes every possible sensory device that might enable them to locate a H'Harn fleet, including the Empire's finest telepaths."

Gordon did not think too hopefully of the chances of tracking the H'Harn by telepathy. The H'Harn were super telepaths, able to shield their minds from any probing.

Lianna continued, "We've appealed for help from the smaller star-kingdoms, but they're too far from here, most of them, to come in time. We did get a reply from the barons of Hercules . . . they're considering the matter."

Abro said brusquely, "Not for love of us. The great barons are afraid the counts of the Marches are getting too big. If they help us it will be for that reason only. And they're liable to be too late in any case."

Gordon said hesitantly, "A possibility occurred to me, but it seems out of place for me to suggest anything."

Lianna did not seem happy about it, but she said steadily, "You risked your life to help us, you have the right to speak."

Gordon outlined Shorr Kan's strategic idea of holding back a part of the fleet to hit the transports when they came.

To his surprise, Abro, who disliked him intensely, nodded thoughtful approval. "An excellent move . . . if we can manage to hold back any forces when we meet the counts. I'll pass it on to Engl."

When the others had gone, Lianna looked at Gordon with a faint smile.

"That was Shorr Kan's suggestion, wasn't it?"

Hours later, he sat with her on a terrace high on the vast wall of the palace. Soft darkness was about them, and the heavy scent of flowers. But there was no quiet in the great city that lay below them in the night.

The city flared with lights. Armed bodies of men were moving with swift precision, to and fro. Missile batteries were being set up in the palace grounds. In the distance, where the spaceport lay, huge, tubby space-monitors were rising up growling into the darkness to take their places in the network of defenses around the throne-world of Fomalhaut.

Gordon looked up at the starry sky. Out there two great star-fleets were drawing fatefully together, and what happened when they met would probably seal the fate of this whole star-kingdom, and possibly many more besides. There had been no further word from Hercules, and if the barons were moving to help, they were keeping it secret from everyone.

His mind reached farther out, beyond the edge of the galaxy, where the mighty Empire fleet would be searching for the H'Harn force that might or might not be hidden there. If they could find it, the Disrupter would unloose its cosmic power again and the threat from Magellan would disappear. But would they find it? Gordon felt a deep hopelessness, an almost prophetic certainty that they would not. The H'Harn would not have returned without the strongest kind of armor, offensive and defensive.

They would not have forgotten how they faced the Disrupter before.

It seemed that Lianna too was thinking of the H'Harn. She had been silent for a long time, but when she spoke it was about them.

"If Narath does invade, will he have any of those creatures with him?"

"I feel sure he will have."

"How can you be so sure?"

Heavily, Gordon explained, "The H'Harn know that I once operated the Disruptor . . . that time when my mind was in Zarth Arn's body. They think I could tell them all about it. I can't, of course. I only operated the thing by mechanically following Jhal Arn's instructions. But they think I can, so they want me."

He felt Lianna shiver, and he knew that she was remembering the stunning mental assault of the H'Harn who had nearly destroyed them at Teyn.

Gordon said somberly, "A great deal of everything that has happened in the galaxy seems to stem back to that one freakish fact—that I happened to exchange minds with Zarth Arn, one of the three men who knew the secret of the Disruptor. That was why the League of the Dark Worlds kidnapped me, and when that failed, got me . . . and you, too . . . to Thallarna."

He went on, looking out into the clamorous city. "That one fatal thing was what led the League to attack the Empire . . . they knew by then that I wasn't really Zarth Arn, and thought I couldn't use the Disruptor. And now the deadliest enemies of all—the H'Harn—they think I can tell them what they want to know about the only weapon that bars them from the galaxy. They won't stop at anything to get their hands on me."

He shook his head. "Through that one fatal coincidence, I've been a curse to this whole future time . . . as Shorr Kan said, the grain of the sand in the machine."

"No," said Lianna. She took his hands. "And even if that were so, the fault is not yours, but Zarth Arn's." She was silent a moment. Then she said softly, "I'm glad you came here, John Gordon. Very glad."

After a while she drew away from him and said, "I must go down and show myself to the defenders of my world. No, don't come with me. I have to do this alone."

After she had gone, Gordon sat for a long time looking past the moving lights and the uproar and clamorous confusions of the great city, toward the starry sky. A star-kingdom might fall, Narath might realize his ambition and sit on the throne of Fomalhaut, and he, John Gordon, and Lianna might be sent to their deaths. And that would be a world tragedy as well as a personal one.

But if the H'Harn succeeded, that would be tragedy for the whole galaxy, a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions. Thousands of years before the H'Harn had come from the outer void, bent on conquest, and only the power of the Disruptor, unloosed by Brenn Bir, had driven them back. Out there in the Magellanic Cloud they had brooded all this time, never giving up their purpose, filtering back gradually in secret, plotting with the counts, plotting with Narath Teyn, making ready some tremendous stroke.

Doomsday had come again, after these thousands of years.

21

The starships were fighting, out between the great suns of Austrinus and the Marches of Outer Space. Two fleets of heavy cruisers flashed side by side, and their missile broadsides seemed to light up that whole part of the galaxy with their bursting flares. On the outskirts of this mighty running battle, ghostly jackals on the heels of the tigers, the phantom cruisers hung, emerging from the invisibility of dark-out to loosen their swift volleys and then retreating into invisibility again.

In the screen which Gordon watched, down in the Defense Room of the royal palace of Fomalhaut, the whole flashing struggle seemed almost incomprehensible, reduced as it was to a swarming of electronic fireflies-fluid, swirling, ever shifting. But after a time it became evident that the heavier column of the counts' fleet was pressing hard against the ships of Fomalhaut, pressing them slowly to the west and away from the star and planet they had tried to cover.

Abro's face was glistening with sweat and he muttered oaths and entreaties as he watched.

"Engl's a good man but he just doesn't have enough weight," he groaned. "Three to two . . . and their ratio is increasing. They're pushing our fleet away from Fomalhaut to make clear passage for those!"

And his thick finger stabbed toward the upper right-hand corner of the screen, where a new swarm of radar-dots had made its appearance and was crawling steadily down toward Fomalhaut.

The transports. And somewhere in them would be Narath Teyn, his mad and beautiful face alight with the coming triumph, and with him would be the nonhuman hordes that he had gathered from scores of worlds.

It gave Gordon a feeling of agonized impotence to be forced to wait here and watch the attack come toward them. But if Lianna felt that too, and had no doubt that she did, she permitted no trace of it to show in her white face.

"Still no word from the barons?" she asked, and Korkhann answered, "No," and moved his wings with a sighing sound. "No word from them, and no sign of them, Highness. It seems we must meet this attack alone."

Abro said bitterly, "If Engl had only been able to detach enough heavy cruisers, we might have had a chance to turn them back. But I don't think we can prevent a landing now."

Gordon thought that Shorr Kan had had the right strategy, and it was a pity that Engl either could not or would not follow it.

"That is out of our hands now," said Lianna, gesturing toward the tremendous battle on the screen. "We must be ready to defend our world. Come."

She spoke like a queen and she walked like one as she led the way up through the palace. Along the way, Shorr Kan stepped in beside Gordon. He had not attempted to enter the Defense Room during this crisis, knowing that he would not be allowed. Hull Burrel glared at him and went on, but Gordon paused.

"It's clear enough in all your faces," said Shorr Kan. "The Fomalhaut fleet is losing out there, isn't it?"

"It is," said Gordon, "and it's being pushed westward, and presently this place will be absolute hell when Narath's transports land."

Shorr Kan nodded gloomily. "No doubt of that. Too bad. I've been cracking my brain trying to think of a way to get myself out of this trap . . . ."

Gordon said in mock amazement. "Why, I thought that since we're all at the end of the string, you would prefer to die nobly, fighting to the last."

Shorr Kan shrugged and said, "I've about decided I might as well die like a hero. Because to tell you the truth, I can't see a single bloody way out of this one. So what have I got to lose?"

The hours whirled by, and Gordon felt caught in a web of activities of which he knew nothing. Officials and officers streamed in and out of the palace. Lianna had no time to give him. There was nowhere to go and nothing for him to do. He had become a totally useless supernumerary.

"But I think," said a familiar voice behind him, "that you are the key person here, John Gordon."

Gordon turned and saw Korkhann regarding him with a troubled look.

"Lianna told me what you had said to her. Are you sure there is no information about the Disruptor which the H'Harn could extract from you?"

"Look," said Gordon, "I thought I made it clear. I know what the Disruptor force-cones look like, and how they're mounted on a ship, and how you balance six needles before you release the force, and that is all I know. Why do you bring this up now?"

"Because," said Korkhann bleakly, "much as I like you, it might be my duty to destroy you if you were about to be taken by the H'Harn."

Gordon was silent. Then he said, "I can see that. But there is nothing."

And he thought, Damn the thing; will it follow me right to my death?

"Come with me," said Korkhann. "There is nothing for you to do here, and you might as well know how we stand."

Night had fallen, and the two came out of the palace to see the flying moons race up the sky, casting their shifting glow. The palace grounds, like the city beyond, were a hive of activity. Men and vehicles moved along the great avenue where the ancient kings of Fomalhaut loomed on their pedestals. Missile batteries were evil, hulking shapes in the gracious gardens.

Shorr Kan came up to them and asked, "Where's Hull?"

"On the telestereo talking to Throon. You certainly put the fear of God into him with your notion of a H'Harn fleet ready to pounce."

Gordon said, "The fear of God is in all of us when we think of that."

"Not in this man," said Korkhann, who had been looking curiously at Shorr Kan. "Not really. He fears neither God nor man nor devil."

He added, "Your pardon for probing you just a little."

Shorr Kan waved that aside. He said to Gordon, "With my considerable military abilities . . . you'll admit that I did damn near conquer the galaxy . . . I thought my services would be welcomed in this fight. But Abro wouldn't listen to me, so I'll stick with you. You can rely on me to stand back of you in the pinch."

"I would much rather," Gordon said carefully, "that you stood anywhere else than in back of me. I'm allergic to knives."

Shorr Kan grinned. "You will have your little Joke. You're the one I rely on to keep my neck out of a noose, so don't you think . . ."

Whrroosh-boom! The rushing booming sound cut sharply across the night, blotting out Shorr Kan's voice. It multiplied itself with incredible swiftness, and things visible only as streaks of light raced skyward from three different points beyond the city.

"Missiles," said Shorr Kan coolly, as soon as he could make himself heard. "If the invaders are within range, things are going to get warm in a hurry."

Now the missiles began to go out from other points, in rapid and continuous volleys. The streaks of light criss-crossed all up the heavens. Above the turmoil the moons climbed higher and higher, stately and unconcerned.

From the whole of the city came a cry. Korkhann pointed with his winged arm. High up but sweeping downward in a long slanting curve, a glowing object came.

It was, or had been, a starship. Now all its vast bulk was breaking from a red-hot glow into actual flames. It shot down toward Hathyr like a plunging comet.

With a tremendous crash, the flaming star-wreck hit the planet far beyond the city. There was a shock-wave and a blast of searing wind that knocked them staggering.

"That was close enough," said Shorr Kan. "I wish the boys would be a little more careful where they drop their birds."

"There," said Gordon. "How's that?"

Much more distant, a second comet came flaming down out of the moonlit heavens. The impact was barely noticeable. Shorr Kan nodded.

"Much better. And hope they keep them that way. A direct hit in the city . . ."

He did not finish. There was no need to. Gordon had been thinking the same thing.

Now all at once there was a new sound, a crying of voices from the city. Gordon said in alarm.

"What's that?"

"Listen," said Korkhann. "They are cheering."

The sound came nearer. Presently they could see a great crowd surging toward them down the Avenue of the Kings, where the proud and time-stained statues seemed almost to have sprung to life, as the stroboscopic flashing of the missiles gave them a semblance of movement. In the midst of the crowd, in an open hover-car, Lianna moved slowly toward the palace. The people ran alongside, cheering her, and she raised her hand and nodded to them as calmly as though this were any ordinary peaceful procession.

In the past Gordon had resented her royal status and the protocol that surrounded her. Now he saw the other side of that, and his heart swelled with pride as she came up the steps, very erect and graceful, and turned and waved to the shouting crowd. Live or die, she seemed to be saying, you and I will go together, for we are Fomalhaut.

She left them, motioning to Gordon to follow her inside.

The missile salvos had now become unceasing, and the whole palace trembled with their vibrations. Gordon and Korkhann followed Lianna down to the Defense Room. This time Shorr Kan trailed coolly at their heels, and Gordon noted that the guards outside the room did not think to challenge him. In this hour when Fomalhaut Kingdom rocked on the brink of disaster, things were slipping a little.

Abro came through the knot of excited, sweating officers clustered by the screens. He spoke quickly to Lianna.

"No doubt about it now, Highness. The barons' fleet is headed in this direction at full speed."

Gordon felt a wave of sudden hope. The mighty Hercules barons were a match for almost any star-kingdom.

Abro must have seen a similar hope in Lianna's face, for he said grimly, "I regret to add, Highness, that their course is not toward Hathry, but toward Austrinus Shoals, where what is left of Engl's force is still fighting the counts."

With a sinking heart, Gordon realized that from a detached point of view that was the wise, indeed the only, course. Veterans of many a campaign, the barons were not going to rush to the rescue while a hostile fleet remained in space and able to catch them flat.

"I also have reports," Abro continued, "of at least twenty-four separate landings of Narath's transports in this quadrant of Hathyr. We destroyed many of the ships but we couldn't handle them all, and now they are coming in increasing numbers, while our missile installations are being put out of action."

"We will defend the city," Lianna said. "We can hold them until the barons are free to help us."

Gordon hoped she was right. He thought that if she was not, he had come a long way to die.

Looking into her eyes, he thought that if it came to that, it was worth it.

22

A Walpurgis Night of horror held Hathyr City, as one after another of its lines of defense went down.

For a night and a day and part of another night, the starship transports had continued to land on Hathyr. A great many of them landed as fusing, flaming wrecks. But as the advance forces spread and knocked out more and more of the missile batteries, increasing numbers came down intact, and out of these poured the seemingly endless hordes.

From a hundred wild worlds in the Marches of Outer Space they came, the not-men who followed with fanatical devotion the crimson banner of Narath Teyn, The Gerrn from Teyn itself, the giant four-footed cats with their centaurlike, quite human upper bodies, their slit-pupil led eyes aglow, springing with swift joy toward the battle. The Qhallas, a rushing winged ride of alienness, their raucous battle-cries rising in squawking fury. The Torr from far across the Marches, furred, towering, four-armed. The Andaxi, like great dogs trying to be men, teeth and eyes gleaming as they came toward the kill. And others, innumerable and indescribable others—hopping, gliding, vaulting—a phantasmagoria of nightmare shapes.

They had good modern weapons, supplied by the counts. Atom-pellets exploded like a bursting wave of white fire ahead of them, burning through the streets of Hathyr City. The guns of the men of Fomalhaut answered them. Inhuman shapes were scythed down, cindered, swept away, heaped up in tattered mounds to choke the crossings. But there were always more of them, and they always pressed forward. In the battle-fury many of them threw away their weapons and reverted to the simple, satisfying use of claw and fang. They came from all sides, a ring, a noose closing slowly around the heart of the city. And in the end there were just too many of them.

Fires burned red in scores of places across the city, as though a funeral pyre for the kingdom of Fomalhaut had been lit here and was majestically, slowly growing. The stately moons looked down upon a city illuminated by the flames of its own progressive destruction, and the pressing hordes became a macabre silhouette against the fire-glow.

Gordon stood with Lianna and Korkhann and Shorr Kan on the great balcony high in the palace that looked straight down the avenue of the stone kings. The fires and the fury and the clamor of battle were creeping closer to the palace area. Against the fires they could see the hover-cars of the Fomalhaut soldiery swooping down in desperate, continuous attacks.

"Too many of them," murmured Lianna. "Narath has worked for years to win the loyalty of the nonhumans, and now we see the fruit of his labors."

"How can a human man like Narath influence them so greatly?" Gordon gestured toward the smoke-filled, tortured streets. "They're dying, God only knows how many thousands of them, but they never even pause. They seemed to be glad to die for Narath. Why?"

"I can answer that," Korkhann. "Narath is truly human in body only. I have probed the edges of his mind, and I tell you that is an atavism, a mental throw-back to a time before the evolutionary paths diverged. Before, in short, there was any difference between human and nonhuman. That is why the beastlings love and understand him . . because he thinks and feels as one of them, as no normal human ever can."

Gordon stared out at the panorama of destruction. "Atavism," he said. "Then we can blame all this on one infinitesimal gene?"

"Do me one favor?" said Shorr Kan sourly. "Please. Spare me the philosophical lectures."

An officer, young and a little wild-eyed, hurried onto the balcony and made a hasty salute to Lianna.

"Highness, Minister Abro begs you to leave by hover-car before the fighting comes any closer."

Lianna shook her head. "Thank the minister, and inform him that I will not leave here while men are fighting and dying for me."

Gordon started to expostulate. Then he saw her face and knew that it would be useless. He held his tongue.

Shorr Kan had no such inhibitions. "When the fighting ends you may not be able to leave. Best to go now, Highness."

Lianna said coldly, "That is the advice I would expect from the leader who ran away from Thallarna when the battle went against him."

Shorr Kan shrugged. "I'm still alive." He added, in a rueful tone, "Though that may not be for long." He had a weapon belted to his waist, as Gordon had, and he glanced down at it distastefully and said, "The closer I get to this business of dying heroically, the more dismal a prospect it seems."

Lianna ignored him, her brilliant eyes searching across the smoke and flame and uproar of the city. Gordon knew how she must feel, looking down that mighty avenue on which stood the statues of her ancestors, the embodied history of this star-kingdom, and seeing her people struggle against the tide of inhuman invasion.

She turned abruptly to Korkhann. "Tell Abro to send a message to the Barons. Say that if they do not send warships to our assistance at once, Fomalhaut may be lost."

The winged one bowed and left quickly. As Lianna turned back toward the city, a big hover-car with the insignia of Fomalhaut swept down through the drifting smoke and landed smoothly on the great balcony. The hatch doors opened.

"No!" exclaimed Lianna angrily. "I will not leave here! Send them away . . . ."

"Look out!" yelled Shorr Kan. "Those aren't your men!"

Gordon saw that the men who came pouring out of the open hatch wore, not the insignia of Fomalhaut but the rearing symbol of the Mace. They ran across the balcony toward the little group.

They had not drawn their weapons, apparently counting on sheer physical numbers to overwhelm the three. But Shorr Kan, dropping into a sort of gunman's crouch, drew and fired, cutting down the front rank of the attackers with exploding atom-pellets.

Gordon pulled out his own weapon, cursing the unfamiliarity of the thing as he tried to thumb off the safety. It went off in his hand. He saw that he had fired high and he triggered again more carefully and saw the pellets explode among the men of the Mace.

Those who survived kept right on coming. They were still not shooting, and it dawned on Gordon that Lianna was their target and they wanted to take no chance of killing her.

They came fast, reinforced by more men from the hover-car. They spread out in a ragged half-moon that closed rapidly into a circle, and they were so close now that neither Gordon nor Shorr Kan dared to shoot because the back-flare of the pellets would engulf them and Lianna also. Gordon shortened his grip on the weapon and used it as a club, flinging himself at the men and laying about him furiously, shouting all the while to Lianna to run back into the palace. He heard Shorr Kan roaring, "Guards! Guards!" But Shorr Kan was smothered under a press of bodies, roughed and battered, wrestled to the ground, and Gordon found himself going the same way; there were too many hands, too many boots and bony knees. He could not see whether Lianna had made her escape, but he did see that from the great hall inside the balcony a file of Lianna's guards were running desperately toward them.

The men who remained in the hover-car had no compunction at all about shooting the guards, since that did not endanger Lianna. They shot them with stunning efficiency, using heavy-caliber mounted guns that swiveled and poured crashing fire, powdering the men to nothing, along with spouting dust and powdered glass. It got quiet again, and then the whole scene spun slowly around Gordon and flowed away into darkness, accompanied by the ringing of his skull as something struck it, hammer-like.

He woke, lying on the balcony. His head no longer rang, but simply ached. Nearby he saw Shorr Kan standing. His face was bloody. The men wearing the Mace stood around them, grim and tense.

"Lianna!" muttered Gordon, and tried to sit up.

Shorr Kan jerked his head toward the inner hall, beyond the tumbled bodies of the guards. "There. Not hurt. But the palace is theirs. That car was only the first of a fleet tricked out with the sign of Fomalhaut." One of the men struck Shorr Kan across the face, bringing more blood. Shorr Kan forbore to wince, but he stopped talking. Gordon became aware now, as his senses cleared, of a vague, inarticulate roaring, like the beating of the sea upon rocky cliffs. Then, as he was jerked to his feet, he looked out over the low rail of the balcony and saw the source of the sound.

The city had fallen. Fires still rose redly from many points, but there was no more firing, no more sounds of battle. The whole area around the palace seemed filled with the nonhuman hordes . . . the Gerrn, the Qhallas, the Andaxi, all the grotesque, nightmarish mobs, capering in triumph smashing the gardens, howling, roaring, gesticulating.

But the loudest roar came from a solid, tremendous mass of creatures making its way down the Avenue of the Kings. They voiced their frantic joy in hissing, purring, squawking voices. And they looked ever at one human man who rode ahead of them upon the black-furred back of a giant Gerrn—Narath Teyn, with his handsome head held high as he rode to claim his kingship.

23

The big hall, the one that opened onto the balcony, was quiet. Gordon stood, with guards behind him, and Shorr Kan stood beside him. The men who wore the Mace stood also, their weapons prominently displayed.

But Narath sat, as befitted a king.

He sat very straight, and there was a dreaming smile on his face. His brown hair fell to his shoulders, and he wore a glittering, close-fitting garment, He looked royal, and he looked mad.

Lianna sat a little distance from him. There was no expression at all on her face, except when she looked at Gordon.

"Soon," said Narath gently. "We will not have to wait much longer, cousin, for the Count Cyn Cryver and the others."

And Gordon knew who "the others" would be, and the skin crawled between his shoulders.

From the open doors that gave onto the great balcony, threads of acrid smoke drifted into the room. There came also from outside a distant, confused sound of voices, but not the roaring clamor of before. The bodies had been cleared away, both Lianna's men and Narath's. And now Gordon heard the soft hum of a hover-car descending.

Then Cyn Cryver came.

His bold, arrogant face blazed with triumph as he looked at them. He looked longest at Shorr Kan.

"It's well," he said. "I was afraid they might have killed you. And we don't want you to die too soon."

Shorr Kan made a derisive sound. "Do you have to be so damned theatrical? That was the most boring thing about my stay with you, listening all the time to your meaty, crashing statements."

Cyn Cryver's smile became deadly, but he did not answer. Narath had risen to his feet and was speaking in his gentle voice, "You are welcome, my brother of the Marches. Very welcome. And where are our friends?"

"They are here," said Cyn Cryver. "They are coming." He looked at Lianna and his smile deepened. "You're looking well, Highness. Remarkably well, considering that your world is in our fist and your fleet is being hammered to pieces in the Shoals."

He did not, Gordon thought, seem to know yet about the Hercules barons. Not that the barons' coming would make any difference to them now . . . .

Three shapes, robed and cowled, glided silently into the hall. The H'Harn had come.

It was curious, the different reactions to them, Gordon thought. Shorr Kan looked at them with frank open disgust. Lianna paled a little, and Gordon was pretty sure he himself did the same. Even Cyn Cryver seemed a trifle ill at ease.

But Narath Teyn bent toward the cowled figures with the same dreaming smile, and said, "You come in good time, brothers. I am to be crowned."

It was only then Gordon realized the depth of alienation in Narath's mind. He, whom the not-men worshipped, who greeted the Magellanians as brothers, was less human than anyone here.

The foremost of the H'Harn spoke in a sibilant whisper. "Not yet, Narath. There is something first to be done, and it is most urgent."

The H'Harn came, with its curiously limber, bobbing gait, to stand before Gordon. And it looked up at him from the darkness of its cowl.

"This man," it said, "possesses knowledge that we must have, at once."

"But my people are waiting," said Narath. "They must hear my cousin Lianna cede the throne to me, so that they can acclaim me king." He smiled at Lianna. "You will do that, cousin, of course. All must be right and fitting."

Cyn Cryver shook his head. "No, Narath, this must wait a little. V'ril is right. The H'Harn have helped us greatly, isn't that so? Now we must help them."

A bit sulkily, Narath sat down again. The H'Harn called V'ril continued to look up at Gordon, but Gordon could see nothing of the face that was hidden by the cowl and did not much want to see it. All he wanted was to be able to run away. With an effort he restrained himself from an hysterical attempt to do so.

"A while ago," said the H'Harn, "I went secretly to Throon in the ship of Jon Ollen, one of our allies. While I was there I probed the mind of one named Korkhann."

That was no news to Gordon, but it made him think of Korkhann for the first time since recovering consciousness. What had become of him? Dead? Probably . . . and probably Hull Burrel also, for they were not here.

"I learned," said the whispering voice, "that this man called John Gordon had in the past undergone a transfer of minds with Zarth Arn, so that for a time he dwelt in Zarth Arn's body. And during that time he operated the Disruptor."

Here it came again, Gordon thought. The damned Disruptor and the secret of it that everyone thought he knew . . . the curse that had dogged him all through both his visits to this future time, and was now about to drag him to his death.

Or worse. The H'Harn moved closer to him, a swaying of gray cloth.

"I will now," it whispered, "probe this man for the secret of the Disruptor. Be silent, everyone."

Gordon, in the clutch of ultimate terror, still tried to turn his head and give Lianna a look of reassurance, to tell her that he could not give away something he did not possess. He never finished the movement.

A bolt of mental force hit him. Compared to the mental attack of the H'Harn in the ship, this was a thunderbolt compared to an electric spark. Gordon passed into the darkness between heartbeats.

When he recovered, he was lying on the floor. Looking up dazedly, he saw Lianna's horrified face. Narath, sitting near her, looked merely bored and impatient. But Cyn Cryver and the H'Harn called V'ril seemed to be arguing.

The voice of the H'Harn had risen to a high, whistling pitch. Never before in his brief contacts with the creatures had Gordon seen one display so intense a passion, "But," Cyn Cryver was saying, "it may be that he just doesn't know any more."

"He must know more!" raged V'ril. "He must, or he could not have operated the mightiest weapon in the universe. And I will tell you what I did learn from his mind. The main fleet of the Empire is outside the galaxy, searching for our fleet. Prince Zarth Arn is with them . . . and the Disruptor."

That seemed to stagger Cyn Cryver a little. Presently he said, "But you told me they could never locate your fleet . . ."

"They cannot," said the H'Harn. "But now they are forewarned, and when we attack Throon and the key worlds, then they will know where we are! And they may use the Disruptor, even though in doing so they sacrifice some of their people. So now it is more important than ever that we know the range and working principles of that weapon before we move!"

Narath stood up and said firmly, "I have had enough of this. Settle this matter later. My people are waiting out there to acclaim me king . . ."

V'ril's cowled head turned toward Narath. Narath went gray, and suddenly sat down and was silent.

"An expert telepath could have hidden the key knowledge deep in this man's mind," said V'ril, looking at Gordon. "So deeply, so subtly, that he would not be consciously aware of it even though he used the knowledge . . . so deeply that even a powerful mental probe would not reveal it. But there is one way to search it out."

Gordon, not understanding, saw that for the first time, when they heard this, the other two H'Harn moved and wavered and tittered a little, as though in sudden mirth. Somehow that mirthfulness chilled him with a horror deeper than anything before.

"The Fusion," whispered V'ril. "The merging of two minds, so that nothing in either mind can be hidden from the other when they are twinned. No mental trickery can hide a secret from that."

The creature hissed a command to the guards, "Force him to his knees."

The men grabbed Gordon's arms from behind and forced him down. From their quick breathing, Gordon thought that even though they were men of the Mace and allies of the H'Harn, they did not like this.

The robed creature now stood with his head a little higher than Gordon's.

Then V'ril began to unwind his robes, and they came away, and also there came away the cowl which was part of them, and the H'Harn stood naked.

Glistening, moist-looking, like a small skinned man with gray-green flesh, and a boneless fluidity in the arms and legs. The damp gristly flesh seemed to writhe and flow of its own accord. And the face . . .

Gordon wanted to shut his eyes but could not. The head was small and spheroid and the face was blank and most horrible in its blankness. A tiny mouth, nauseatingly pretty, two holes for breathing, and big eyes that were filmed over, dull, obscurely opalescent.

The blank face came toward Gordon, bending slightly. It was as though the H'Harn bent to kiss him, and that completed the horrifying abnormality of the moment. Gordon struggled, strained, but was held firmly. He heard Lianna cry out.

The eyes were close to his, the cool forehead touched his forehead.

Then the eyes that had become his whole visible universe seemed to change, the dull opalescence in them deepened into a glow. Brighter and brighter became the glow until it was as though he looked into a fiery nebula.

Gordon felt himself falling through.

24

He was John Gordon of old Earth.

He was also V'ril of Amamabarane.

He remembered all the details of Gordon's life, on Earth and then in this future universe.

But he also remembered every detail of his life as one of the people of Amamabarane, the great hive of stars which the humans called the Lesser Magellanic.

Utterly bewildering, was this double set of memories, to the part of him that was Gordon. But the part of him that was V'ril was accustomed to it.

The memories came easily. Memories of his native world deep in the star-cloud Amamabarane. The cherished planet where the mighty and all-conquering H'Harn had first evolved.

But they had not always been mighty. There had been a time when the H'Harn had been only one of many species, and by no means the cleverest or the strongest. There were other races which had used them contemptuously, had called them stupid, and weak.

But where are those races now? Gone, dead, wiped out by the little H'Harn . . . a great and satisfactory vengeance.

For the H'Harn had found that deep in their minds they had the seed of a power. A power of telepathic force, of mental compulsion. They had not understood it and they had used it at first in petty ways, to influence others stronger and quicker than themselves, to protect themselves from predators.

But in time, they realized that the power could achieve much more if they could strengthen it. There began a secret, earnest attempt to bring about that goal. Those of them who had more of the power were allowed to mate only with those of a similar grade. Time went by, and their power grew and grew, but they kept it secret from others.

Until they were sure.

And then a great day came. A day when the despised H'Harn revealed their mastery of mental compulsion, using it on those they hated. Breaking them, mastering them, driving them mad, hurting and hurting them until they died.

The triumph of the H'Harn, the golden legend of our race! How good it was to see them writhe and scream as they died!

Not all of them. Some were spared to be the servants of the H'Harn. And among these were the clever ones who had built cities and starships.

They were used now, these clever ones and their starships, to take the H'Harn to other worlds. And so began the glorious saga of H'Harn conquest, that did not stop until all the desirable worlds of Amamabarane were under the H'Harn yoke.

But there were still other worlds, far off, in the great galaxy which was like a continent of stars, to which Amamabarane was merely an off-shore island. There were countless worlds there, where countless peoples lived who did not serve the H'Harn. This was intolerable to contemplate, so vast had become the H'Harn appetite for power. So the preparations for conquest were begun.

The subject peoples of Amamabarane were forced by the H'Harn to labor until they died, preparing an armada of ships. And after a time, that armada departed, to bring many H'Harn to the galaxy which was to be taught to accept its masters.

But then . . . the one great catastrophe, the dark and ugly scar that marred the glory of H'Harn history. The peoples of that galaxy, with incredible impudence, resisted the H'Harn. And with a weapon that disrupted the space-time continuum itself, they annihilated the H'Harn armada.

That had been long ago, but no H'Harn had ever forgotten it. The wickedness of men who dared to resist the H'Harn, who dared even to destroy them, must be punished. The black scar of defeat must be healed with their blood.

Through thousands on thousands of years, the subjects and servants of the H'Harn, in all Amamabarane, were driven to toil on this project. Their cleverest minds were set to devise new weapons, new ships of a swiftness hitherto unknown. But the project lagged. The servant peoples often preferred to die rather than to serve the H'Harn longer. They did not realize that they were mere tools which the masters used, and that it mattered not at all if the tool were broken.

But when thousands of years had passed, the time came when the H'Harn were ready again. Its mighty fleet of invasion had weapons and speeds and devices hitherto undreamed-of, including a shield of cunning force that hid the ships, and which no detection device could penetrate. Secret, unseen, the fleet approached the galaxy.

And secretly, unsuspected, it waited now outside the galaxy, beyond the end of what the humans called the Vela Spur. For the moment had not yet come.

Agents had gone ahead from Amamabarane, to foment war and trouble in the galaxy. War would bring the main forces of the Empire and the star-kings far from their capitals.

And when that happened, the H'Harn would strike.

Secret, unseen, unsuspected, their ships would land upon the greatest worlds of the star kings, upon Throon where the Disruptor was still kept against a day of adversity. Taken unaware and more or less defenseless, the people of Throon would fall an easy prey, and the Disruptor would be in the hands of the H'Harn. The Emperor could hardly use it in his own defense, since it would mean the destruction of Throon itself, with its sister planets and its sun.

Only now the picture had changed. This contemptible human had given a warning, and the Disruptor was in space, once more a threat of destruction to the H'Harn. It was vital to know the range and nature of the Disruptor's force, so that means could be found to neutralize or combat it.

But . . .

But . . .

Astonishment and anger and a sudden ripping apart of the mental fusion, and John Gordon, again quite alone within himself, looked dazedly into the raging eyes of the H'Harn.

"It is true," hissed V'ril. "This man used the Disruptor without knowing anything of its nature. It is incredible . . . ."

Into Gordon's whirling mind came a remembrance of a time when Shorr Kan had said contemptuously that the H'Harn, for all their powers, were stupid.

He knew now, from sharing the mind of a H'Harn, that it was true. The race that sought to conquer galaxies was a low, stupid, detestable species which in the ordinary course of events would have come to nothing. But the possession of one key power, the telepathic power of mental probing, mental compulsion, had given these creatures dominance over races far superior to them.

Gordon had always feared the H'Harn. He began now to hate them with a bitter hatred. They were leechlike, unclean, intolerable. He knew now why long ago Brenn Bir of the Empire had taken the chance of riving space itself to destroy these creatures.

As his mind cleared, Gordon found that the guards had pulled him back to his feet. V'ril had put on the robe and cowl again and Gordon thanked God for that. He did not want to see that ghastly body. He felt defiled to the soul by the sharing of that creature's mind and memories.

V'ril raised a shrouded arm and pointed at Gordon. "This man must die at once," he said. "Because of the Fusion, he now knows where our fleet is hidden. Kill him!"

Cyn Cryver nodded and the guards stepped back and raised their weapons. Still hardly able to take it in, Gordon flashed at last a look at Lianna.

Lianna had sprung to her feet. "No!" she exclaimed. She swung around to Narath. "If this man is killed, I will not cede the throne to you, Narath Teyn!"

Cyn Cryver laughed harshly. "A lot of difference that will make! Narath will be king in any case."

But the dreaming smile left Narath's face and it became troubled. He raised a hand to the guards who were aiming their weapons at Gordon, and said, "Wait!" He spoke then to Cyn Cryver. "My cousin must formally cede the throne to me, before the people, or all will not be lawful. I must have this submission from her. I have waited so long for it. I must!"

His handsome face was quivering now, and storm clouds gathered in his eyes. Cyn Cryver looked at him narrowly, and then said to V'ril, "The ceremony is important to our brother Narath. We had better let the man live."

Looking at Cyn Cryver's flinty expression as he stared fixedly at V'ril, Gordon was absolutely sure that he was adding, in thought, "Until the ceremony is over. Then we'll kill him at once?"

For V'ril made no objection. He whispered, "Very well. But there are messages that must be sent to our brothers in the fleet."

V'ril looked toward the other two H'Harn. Gordon thought he could guess what the message would be. "Warn the fleet that the Empire armada is searching for them! Tell them to strike now at Throon!" The two H'Harn bobbed and glided away out of the hall.

Narath took Lianna by the hand, in as courtly a fashion as though he were leading her to a ball.

"Come, cousin. My people are waiting."

Lianna's face was stony, expressionless. She walked with Narath, out onto the great balcony.

The others followed, the four guards keeping their weapons trained upon Gordon and Shorr Kan. But when they were out on the balcony, Narath turned and spoke with sharp annoyance.

"Not beside me, Cyn Cryver . . . this is my triumph. Stay back."

A crooked smile crossed Cyn Cryver's face but he nodded. He and V'ril and the guardsmen remained at the back of the balcony.

Shorr Kan made as though to join them but Cyn Cryver shook his head. "Oh, no," he said. "Keep your distance, so that we can shoot you down without danger to ourselves."

Shorr Kan shrugged and fell back. And now Narath had led Lianna to the front of the balcony, and the white sun of Fomalhaut blazed down on his glittering figure. He raised his hand.

A tremendous roar went up. From where he stood at the back of the balcony, Gordon could see that the palace grounds were crammed with the grotesque hordes of the not-men, a heaving sea of them that lapped against the walls and swirled up onto the columns of the stone kings, where leather-winged creatures perched and screamed. Mingled with them were the lesser number of humans who wore the uniforms of the counts of the Marches.

He wondered what Lianna was thinking as she looked out on that roaring crowd. None of her own people were there; the people of Hathyr city were dispersed, hiding or slain. And the human and inhuman conquerors shouted and cheered, and the old kings of Fomalhaut looked down with calm faces upon the end of all that they had wrought.

Again Narath raised his hand, and the roaring acclaim swelled up in a greater cry than before. He had reached the summit of his life, and the not-men whose fanatical devotion he had won were hailing him, and his whole bearing expressed his joy and his pride, and his great love for these his people.

The wave of sound died down, and Narath said, "Now, cousin."

Lianna, her figure rigidly erect, spoke in a clear, cold voice that Gordon could hardly recognize.

"I, Lianna, Princess Regent of Fomalhaut, do now cede my sovereignty, and recognize and affirm that sovereignty to have passed from me to . . ."

The thin whistling of small missiles interrupted her, and then Gordon saw Cyn Cryver and his guardsmen reel and fall as tiny atomic pellets drove into their bodies and flared there, blackening flesh and garments.

Gordon swung around. In the otherwise empty hall behind the balcony stood Hull Burrel and Korkhann, and they held the weapons that had just been fired, cutting down all but the H'Harn. V'ril, warned by some telepathic flash at the last moment, had darted aside in time to escape.

Narath turned around angrily. "What . . . ?"

Korkhann fired, his yellowbird-eyes clear and merciless. The tiny missile went deep into Narath's side.

Narath swayed, but did not fall. It seemed that he refused to fall, refused to admit death and defeat. He turned with a strangely regal movement to face the crowd below . . . a crowd unable to see what was happening above them. He tried to raise his arm, and then fell forward across the balcony rail and hung there. A silence began to spread across the gardens and down the Avenue of Kings.

Hull Burrel cried abruptly, "No!"

Korkhann, his eyes now glazed and strange, was swinging his weapon around to point at the Antarian.

Gordon saw V'ril, and knew instantly what was happening. He rushed forward over the smoking bodies of the Mace-men. He grasped the robed H'Harn in his arms . . . and he ran forward and hurled it out over the rail, swiftly, before it could think to stop him. In the brief seconds of its fall, mental force, not directed this time, merely projected as an instinctive reflex, slammed at him. It was cut short with shocking finality, and Gordon smiled. The H'Harn, it seemed, feared most dreadfully to die.

Korkhann lowered his weapon, unfired.

Down below the silence had become complete, as though every throat held breath, and the crowd stared up at the glittering figure of Narath Teyn doubled over the low rail, his bright hair streaming, his arms outspread as though he reached down to them in an appeal for help.

In that frozen moment, Shorr Kan acted with a lightning swiftness that Gordon was never to forget.

Shorr Kan rushed to the front of the balcony. He threw his arms skyward in a wild gesture, and he shouted to that stunned crowd in the lingua-franca of the not-men of the Marches.

"The counts have killed Narath Heyn! Vengeance!"

Gerrn and Andaxi and Qhalla, all the nameless others, the inhuman faces, looked up toward him. And then it sank in.

Narath was dead. Narath of Teyn, he whom they worshipped, whose banner they had followed, had been slain. A heart-stopping cry of rage and sorrow went up from them the coming led cry of all those thousands of inhuman throats, growling, hissing, screeching.

"Vengeance for Narath! Kill the counts!"

The crowd exploded into violence. The not-men fell, with fang and talon, beak and claw, upon the men of the Marches who a moment before had stood beside them as allies.

The cry of sorrow and of vengeance went out from the palace, spreading until it seemed that from the whole city of Hathyr there came a great inhuman baying.

Hull Burrel had run forward, while Korkhann still stood a little dazed by the H'Harn assault that had almost made him kill his comrade.

"This way," cried Hull. "Quickly! They'll be up here in minutes. Korkhann knew all the secret passages in the palace and that's how we saved ourselves when the palace fell. Hurry!"

Gordon took Lianna by the hand and ran with her. Shorr Kan delayed long enough to pick up weapons from the dead guards, one of which he tossed to Gordon He was chuckling.

"That set them going, didn't it? They're not too bright, those nonhumans . . . begging your pardon, Korkhann . . . and they reacted beautifully."

A seemingly solid section of the wall at the side of the great hall had been swung open, revealing a passageway. They crowded through and Shorr Kan slammed shut the panel behind them.

Lianna was sobbing, but Gordon paid no attention to her. He cried to Korkhann, "Can you take us to a communications center. I must send a message . . . ."

Korkhann, unused to violence, seemed still a little dazed. "A message to the . . . the barons . . . ?"

"A message to Zarth Arn and the Empire fleet!" snapped Gordon. "I know where the H'Harn armada is, and I must get that word through!"

25

Korkhann led them down by narrow, twisting ways buried within the walls of the palace, illuminated dimly by an occasional bulb. He brought them at last through another concealed door, into a long corridor.

"The palace Communications Center," said Korkhann. "The fourth door ahead."

There was no one in the hallway, and they went down it rapidly, Gordon and Shorr Kan in the lead. And now, even through the massive partitions of the palace, they could hear a growing uproar above them.

"The horde is inside the palace," said Korkhann. "They will be killing all the counts' men . . ."

"And us too, if they find us," said Hull Burrel.

They flung open the fourth door. Beyond it was the large room filled with the instruments of galactic communication. They went in very fast. A man who wore the uniform of the Mace sat at the bank of controls, which he touched with a curious uncertainty. Behind him stood two robed H'Harn, the ones V'ril had sent with the message for the H'Harn fleet. The man froze with his hands in mid air. The H'Harn turned swiftly, and died with the motion uncompleted.

Gordon aimed his weapon at the frightened operator. "Did you send that message for the H'Harn?"

The man's face was greasy with sweat. He looked down at the small gray crumpled mounds and shivered. "I was trying to. But they use different frequencies . . . modulations . . . all different from ours, and that takes time. They told me they'd take me over and hurt my mind if I didn't hurry, but I couldn't . . . ."

The stupid H'Harn running true to form, thought Gordon. Use all other peoples simply as tools, and break them if they do not instantly perform.

He turned to Hull Burrel. "You were in touch with Zarth Arn's fleet until the attack came. Reach them now."

Hull threw the operator out of the chair and began punching buttons and turning vernier controls.

The uproar in the palace above them was penetrating more loudly to this level. Shorr Kan closed the door of the Communications Center and locked it.

"They'll get down here eventually," he said. "But it may hold them for a while."

Gordon watched the door, sweating, until Hull established contact with the fleet. Telestereo was not possible at such distances, but Gordon could hear the voices of the fleet communications officers as they acknowledged and cut through channels to the top, and presently the voice of Zarth Arn was speaking to him.

"Just beyond the end of the Vela Spur," said Gordon. "That's where the H'Harn fleet is lying. They've got some new form of radar-concealment." He went on to give every scrap his memory recalled, from the time his mind was twinned with V'ril's. "I don't know," he finished, "if even this will help you to pin them down, but at least it's something."

"I'll tell you, Gordon," said Zarth Arn, "we'll give it a damned good try!"

The contact was instantly broken.

So that was done. Everything was done that they could do. They looked at each other, not saying anything, and Gordon went over and took Lianna in his arms.

The uproar in the palace was louder and closer. They could hear doors being smashed in. There were screeching and yowling and barking voices, the flap of wings and the clatter of running hooves, always coming closer.

"It looks to me," said Shorr Kan, "as though we're getting near to all this heroic dying you've been dwelling on in such a morbid fashion." He shrugged. "Oh, well. At least Cyn Cryver got his. I could have forgiven the man his rascalities, but oh God, what a bore he was!"

Suddenly a new sound penetrated the palace. It was less a sound than a deep bass vibration, growing rapidly stronger, shaking the whole fabric of the great building, then passing overhead and away.

Shorr Kan's eyes flashed. "That was a heavy battle-cruiser! Now I wonder . . . ."

A second mighty ship went over the palace, shaking it till it trembled, and then a third.

Then, upon the telestereo plate, there appeared the image of a man . . . an elderly man, hard-faced and cold-eyed, wearing on his cloak the flaring emblem of the Hercules Cluster.

"The Baron Zu Rizal speaking," he began, and then saw Lianna and said, "Highness, I rejoice that you are safe!"

Shorr Kan had instantly turned his back to the tele-stereo, an action that did not surprise Gordon in the least.

"We smashed the counts' fleet in the Austrinus Shoals," Zu Rizal was saying, "and we are now over Hathyr with our full forces and what is left of the Fomalhaut Navy. Your city is obviously occupied by Narath's hordes . . . shall we blast them?"

"No, wait," said Lianna. "Narath Teyn and Cyn Cryver are dead, and I think . . ."

Korkhann stepped forward and spoke to her in a low voice. She nodded, and then spoke again to Zu Rizal.

"With Narath dead, I think the horde will return to its own worlds, if they know that destruction is their alternative. Korkhann has said that he will offer them the terms."

"Very well," said Zu Rizal. "We will cruise on standby until further word from you."

The image disappeared, and only then did Shorr Kan turn around again.

A sudden silence had fallen on the palace. The great warships were still thundering by overhead, but the screech and yowl and crying of the horde had faded away. It seemed that the coming of the ships had sent them scurrying outside, as though they felt that the palace had become a possible trap. They wanted running room.

"I think," said Korkhann, "that they will listen to me, because I am not human either." He pointed to the communicator panel. "Get word to the officers of the counts' transports, to be ready to receive these peoples and take them back to the Marches."

He started away and then stopped for a moment and said, "One more thing, Highness. I regret to say that Abro was killed in the attack on the palace."

Gordon felt a sense of loss. Abro had disliked him thoroughly, but he had respected the man even so.

Hull Burrel remained with his ear to the instrument on whose wave-length he had communicated with the faraway Empire fleet His face was gray and lined with strain.

"Nothing yet," he said. "There may be nothing for a long time."

If ever, thought Gordon. The H'Harn were powerful. If they should strike first, from their refuge of invisibility, and destroy the ship that carried Zarth Arn and the Disrupter . . .

He forced himself not to think of that.

The hours went by, and the great ships thundered past above, and Gordon and Lianna and Hull Burrel waited. At one point, Gordon realized that Shorr Kan had quietly disappeared.

Long later, Gordon would learn the story of what happened beyond the rim of the galaxy. Of the Empire fleet, with Zarth Arn's flagship in its van, racing toward the Vela Spur. And of how Zarth Arn had unloosed the terrible force of the Disruptor, time after time, bracketing with cold precision an area of space where there was nothing to be seen, until the continuum itself was bent and twisted and torn and all the stars along the rim quaked in their orbits, and the force that had concealed the H'Harn fleet was shattered. And still the Disruptor struck its vast invisible bolt, now aimed unerringly at the fleeing ships, until the H'Harn fleet had vanished forever from the universe.

All Gordon knew now was that these were the longest hours of his life, until the shaken voice of Zarth Arn came through.

"It's done. The H'Harn are smashed, and what's left of them are in flight, back to the Lesser Magellanic."

For a moment, none of them could speak. Then Gordon, remembering the foulness of the life he had briefly fused with, muttered a heartfelt, "Thank God!"

"They will not come again." Zarth Arn's voice, thready with distance, held an iron resolve. "We shall gather a force from all the star-kingdoms, to go after them and smash them on every world where they rule."

He added, "Gordon?"

"Yes?"

"I know now what you meant when you told me how using the Disruptor shook you. I've known about the thing all my life, but I never used it till now. I hope I never have to again."

When the contact was broken, they looked at each other, too exhausted to drained of emotion to feel much of anything. The relief, the joy, the triumph . . . all that would come later. In the meantime, it was enough to be alive and know that hope lived too.

Lianna led the way out of the room, up the ways of the palace, all empty now.

They came out onto the great balcony and in their faces was the diamond flare of Fomalhaut, setting toward the horizon. Across the ravaged city its brilliant rays struck down into the streets, and everywhere the hordes were moving out, out across the plain to where the transports waited.

Down the great Avenue of the Kings, away from the palace, went a little troop of the Gerrn, not running now but walking slowly. They went apart from the others, as a guard of honor, and across the back of their giant leader lay the body of a man in glittering garments. Narath of Teyn was going home.

Down from the sky rolled the massive thunder, as the barons continued their grim patrol. And, as she looked out over the scarred city with the forlorn smokes still rising from it, Lianna's fingers tightened on Gordon's.

"It will live again," she said. "The people will come back, and you and I will help them to rebuild. And . . . it's a small price to pay for the defeat of the H'Harn."

There was a discreet cough behind them. They turned and found Shorr Kan standing there, ignoring Hull Burrel's frown.

"Highness, I'm glad that all came well," said Shorr Kan blandly. "You will admit that I was of some help."

"I'll admit that your quick thinking about Narath's death saved us, yes," said Lianna, as though the words were wrenched from unwilling lips.

"Good. Now I have a small favor to ask." Shorr Kan came closer, speaking in a confidential voice. "It's the damned barons I'm thinking about. They're a tough lot, not like you and Gordon. No sense of humor at all. If they catch me, they'll hang me in a minute."

He added, "And there's Jhal Arn to think about as well. He must still believe that I was concerned in the assassination of his father, although I wasn't . . . that was all Corbulo's idea, and stupid as Corbulo's ideas always were. But I shouldn't care to fall into his hands, either."

Lianna looked at him coldly. "I quite see your point. Now what is this favor?"

"Well," said Shorr Kan, "you'll remember that I overpowered Obd Doll and the rest of the crew of that little cruiser and we brought them here? Yes. Obd Doll and his men are down in the palace dungeons . . . luckily for them, since the Horde couldn't get to them. The cruiser is still in the royal spaceport, and I have ascertained that it's undamaged."

"Go on."

"I've been talking to Obd Doll and his men. They're pretty disgusted at the mess Cyn Cryver led them into with his plotting. They'd like to go back home and start their world going again under new leadership . . . sane, conservative leadership."

"In other words," said Gordon ironically, "Shorr Kan's leadership."

He nodded. "It does so happen, that not only do they not hold it against me that I captured them, but they think I'd be just the man to bring things to order on their world. They think they can convince their people."

"Go on," said Lianna.

"The favor I ask, Highness, is simply that you let me take Obd Doll and his men with me in that cruiser, and send word to the barons . . . without mentioning me, of course . . . to let the ship through."

"So that you can start new trouble in the Marches?" cried Lianna. "You . . . !"

"Please, Highness!" said Shorr Kan, looking pained. "I'm all through with that now, an older and wiser man. All I want is a little planet where I can live at peace, nothing more."

"Oh, Lord!" said Gordon. "You ought to put that to music."

"I think," said Lianna, "that you will raise a racket in times to come, all through the Marches, and I will live to regret this day. But I am a queen, and a debt is a debt. Take your people and go."

Shorr Kan gallantly kissed her hand. He shook Gordon's, and turned away. He stopped when he saw Hull Burrel glaring at him. He went up to the Antarian and took him by the hand.

"It's hard to part this way, old friend," he said. "We've been through a lot together, and I know how you must feel to see me go."

Hull's coppery face flushed scarlet and he began to make inarticulate growling noises. But Shorr Kan wrung his unwilling hand and said, "Don't try to express your sorrow at my leaving, Hull. No tears, old friend, no weakness! Farewell."

He went away with a jaunty stride, heels clicking on the marble floor. Gordon, turning to Lianna, was amazed to see a half-smile on her face.

"At last I see what it is in that devil that attracts you," she said. "One hardly ever meets a man who is perfect at anything . . . but Shorr Kan is the perfect rogue."

In a short while, a small dispatch cruiser went skyward from the royal spaceport, and they watched it streak away across the flaring heavens.

And the white sun went down.

THE END

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