SUNDOG
    B. N. BALL
    
    A power from outside our universe had imprisoned mankind in the solar system--until one man dared to confront the captors.
    
    THE CAPTIVE HUMAN RACE
    An unthinkably vast, invisible, and absolutely impenetrable screen imprisoned man within the solar system.
    Cut off from the stars, men applied their ingenuity to themselves, setting up a world of total control--where even dreams were programmed.
    
    MARKED BY A HALO!
    Spacepilot Dod liked his work. It was dull and monotonous, and that was fine for the loyal, unthinking employee of the all-powerful Dog Company-the fourth of the original governing organizations, which had long since swallowed up Able, Baker, and Charlie, the first three.
    And then, on his 71st routine trip between Pluto and Moonbase, a glowing light encircled his head. And strange, unnerving things began to enter his mind: curiosity, doubt, and even . . . ideas!
    
    
    This Avon edition is the first American publication of Sundog in any form.
    AVON BOOKS
    A division of
    The Hearst Corporation
    959 Eighth Avenue
    New York, New York 10019
    Copyright © 1965 by B. N. Ball. Published by arrangement with the author.
    All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address E. J. Carnell, 17 Burwash Road, Plumstead, London, S.E. 18, England.
    First Avon Printing, January, 1969 Cover illustration by Don Crowley
    
    For W. H. G. Armytage
    
    
    CONTENTS
    part I Renaissance
    part II Reprise
    part III Requital
    
    
    
    I. RENAISSANCE
    
    ONE
    
    Until he saw the reflection in the blanked-off screen, it was just another trip to log up: his seventy-first.
    He was two days out from Pluto on the run to Moonbase. The ship was carrying-Dod caught himself wondering what it was carrying. Immediately, he checked the thought. It was no concern of his; he was a space-pilot. He felt vaguely uncomfortable at catching himself in what was almost an error-like way of thought.
    When the time came for his afternoon's totex session, Dod's big face creased into a happy grin. He had chosen a historical romance, one he had watched a dozen times already, even though he knew it was a re-hash of a pre-totex epic and not a good one at that.
    He lowered his big athletic body into the totex globe. What more could you want out of life? He felt the suckers gently place themselves on to his forehead. As the music mellowed and the hero received his orders, he smiled a wry critic's smile. What the Companies had ordered the rock-hard hero to do was impossible-he would succeed, of -course, but still it was impossible.
    The old epics had harsh, simple outlines, he thought, suited to their immense themes. But they could have got their sets right.
    The mock-ups of the moon were all wrong. As an interested and expert selenologist, he knew that the hero's feats were impossible; the very buildings shown were quite out of keeping with the ruins he himself had explored, and on which he was an authority of interplanetary repute.
    The hero scrambled from ledge to ledge, burrowing into soft dust when the tracery of primitive atomic cannon shimmered just above his antennae. And when the heroine appeared, her space-suit was frilled.
    Still, thought Dod, the story was compelling. The old 9
    'texs about early Company days were preferable to the fantasies about the Aliens. The 'tex makers had good material to work on. After all, the Company was a noble conception. It was worth fighting for. And dying for.
    He let himself slip into the story. At last the hero blasted down the opposition by spectacularly bringing a lunar mountain fifty miles high crashing down on to the cannon's site with a skilfully lobbed T-bomb-although how he detonated it was glossed over. And when the Companies' patrols got through, the hero presented them with a scarcely damaged Luna City. Loyalty to the Companies brought fame, wealth, and the girl in the frilly space-suit who also happened to be a Fleet-Admiral's daughter. Dod swept her into his arms and felt the warm surging music rising to a mellow crescendo around him.
    His eyes were shining as the blast of sound mellowed into the prescribed interval of gentle Company march-music. When he was automatically roused and lifted from the machine, he was ready for another spell of duty, happy, inspired, confident, and reliable. It had been like this for as long as he could remember. What more could ' you want?
    Without another sigh over the heart-stirring 'tex, Dod crossed the wide cabin to the control area. He blanked off the first screen as part of a routine check. As he was about to pass on to the next screen, a shimmer of light attracted his eye. He flicked the lever which blanked off the second of the battery of screens. His feet turned to go to the third screen, but he found himself dragged to the first screen.
    Something shone back brightly in the screen.
    And it was blanked off.
    He switched it back on, and the screen at once filled with its usual image, the coiled mass of the multi-phased coaxial plasma engine.
    There was something wrong with the screen. He switched it off again. The light returned.
    Then Dod began to feel afraid. For, as his head moved slightly, so did the shimmering light in the screen.
    Frantically, he moved from screen to screen, peering into each darkened surface, but the light moved with him. Fear bit into his stomach, sending lancing thrusts of cold pain into his head. Between spasms, he suddenly thought
    10
    of the clear mirror-like reflecting surfaces of the walls opposite.
    That was when he first saw the halo for what it was. He stared, shut his eyes, opened them, blinked, and Stared again; he refused to accept what he saw. It was a halo.
     It glowed gold like a sunset over the Baltic, shimmering with energy. In diameter, he noted, it was about the size of his skull, and it stood-hovered, he thought in panic- about six inches above his head. An insignificant part of his mind tried to examine the halo dispassionately, but the Waves of panic surged over it, and he went racing about the cabin, peering into every reflecting surface, hoping 'against hope that it would disappear. He finished up in front of the screen he had first blanked off.
    It was still there.
    Gingerly, he attempted to touch it, but before his fingers reached the shimmering circle of light, he stopped, appalled by the calamity that had overtaken him.
    He was different from the other Companions. Therefore he was not like them. So he was in Error. He was ruined.
    Dod's amiable face puckered into dismay; he slid to the floor and wept. Then the uncomfortable needle of inquisitiveness he had felt when he was examining the halo began to irritate him again. How could a light operate without a source? It had to be projected from somewhere. How could-it was mad!
    Mad! He was mad! Pure relief filled him, flooding through him so that he laughed aloud. He was space-struck!
    There was no halo! It was only a case of space-sickness! A couple of tablets should cure that!
    Doubt countered the hopes that filled him as he crossed to the health-area for the prescribed tablets.
    Suppose he had a severe attack of space-sickness?
    He had seen the space-stricken in every port from Moonbase to Pluto-the shamblers, the arrogant, the idiots. Nothing could rid them of the monsters they thought pursued them, the extra limbs they believed they had grown, or the splendid delusions of empire and wisdom they supposed they possessed.
    Was he going to join them? Already he was in Error for being different. Suppose the tablets didn't work?
    He swallowed them hastily, noting the proud Dog Com-11
    pany crest stamped on them; he felt a warm glow of loyalty as he took them. The Company cared for its Companions. And hallucinations were a feature of space-flight. Maybe Psych would overlook one slight Error-his first, he thought, more happily. The halo should have gone by now.
    He found difficulty, however, in crossing to the nearest reflecting surface. He closed his eyes and felt his way to the bright wall. When I open my eyes, he told himself, it will be gone. Then all I have to do is to enter a report in the log; and that will be the end of it.
    He opened his eyes. The halo glowed back healthily. He moved his head. The halo moved, too. He nodded his head forward. The halo followed his movement. It was a hollow circle, he saw.
    Dod leaned against the wall, feeling sick. He was space-struck. Badly. Now he was one with the clowns that the tourists made a point of seeing. He thought he had a halo.
    "Halo," he breathed. "Halo."
    Again there was that unnatural flicker of scientific interest in the apparition; to his surprise, Dod felt panic receding, and curiosity replacing it. Almost, he thought, as if he were a trained scientist himself.
    He checked with the small wordbank the ship carried. "A disc of light surrounding the head of a saint; a luminous circle investing a planet or star."
    Numbness and depression returned as he realized that his successful career was at an end. What form would his delusion take? Would he imagine himself as a planet? And what was a saint?
    Despair overwhelmed him; he felt too despondent to care what the apparition meant. There was no sign yet that he felt like entering into a planetary orbit, or acting like a saint-whatever that was-but he felt sure it would not be long before he started acting irrationally.
    The voyage's days stretched ahead like years.
    Somehow they passed. Dod wondered how many thousands of times he had looked into mirror surfaces, miserably wishing to be his safe, normal self again. As he pulled his best cap on, Dod felt an inexpressible grief. The freighter was settling like an old lady into the cradle on Moonbase, and this was the last time he would be in command of her. He would never be able to serve the Company again.
    12
    The cap passed through the halo, and the Company iciest was irradiated with golden fire.
    Dod passed through the air-lock into Moonbase feeling like the hero in the 'tex he had seen that afternoon; just (like the heroic Company undercover man before the Free Spacers came to fetch him from the death-cell. The intensely moving theme-music surged inside him as he walked into Moonbase.
    He still wished he had found what a saint was.
    * * *
    A crewman was looking oddly at him; the madness must be apparent, he supposed. The man's eyes widened; -he dropped the tools he was carrying and fled in the direction of the Plag detachment.
    Dod walked on to the Merchant's office. A secretary stopped. She too dropped what she was carrying-a tray of spools-and ran. When she reached the nearest doorway, feminine curiosity won, and she peered back at him.
    The crewman came into view just as Dod reached the Merchant's office. A couple of Flagmen flanked him, their hands purposefully on the blasters in their belts.
    Dod wondered if they were coming for him; he subdued a minor panic when he realized that they must be: Errors were Rooted Out. In a way, he felt comforted that he was to be checked, since it proved the Company's interest in the wellbeing of the Companions.
    Undecided, he paused. He could wait for the Flagmen or go in. Routine carried him into the Merchant's office; he had to make his report and surrender the log of his ship.
    Bucchi's pig face registered incredulity, dismay, and finally, rage.
    "What in the name of the Great Hound have you got there!"
    Looming over him, Dod felt like the youngest recruit in Space School. He passed over the cargo manifest.
    "I'm sorry," he said. He passed a hand to his cap and guiltily withdrew it.
    "Remove it! Get it off!" Bucchi bellowed.
    Dod took off his cap reluctantly; caps were a symbol of status. His was to go. Bucchi must have heard of his madness, and already he was to be deprived of his Space-pilot's uniform. It hadn't taken long to get about, he thought miserably.
    13 
    "Off I said!" Bucchi bellowed again, his face mottled in red and purple rage. Dod felt a rush of self-pity; he ground his big fists together.
    "Off!" Dod almost wept. He had taken his cap off. What more could Bucchi want? "Remove it!" the little man shouted.
    Suddenly he realized the truth. Bucchi could see the halo.
    "This?" he whispered, pointing over his head.
    "Some would call it an Error," Bucchi said growling. "In view of good conduct previously, I'll ignore it-if you just get rid of it! What is it? Latest fashion on Venus?"
    Dod could not reply in his happiness. He was not space-struck! Bucchi-the crewmen-the secretary! They had all seen the halo! It was real! Bucchi flipped through the papers.
    He wasn't mad. He was Dod again.
    "Always something new from Venus," Bucchi was growling. "They'll be in trouble, some of those young fellows, if Plag gets to hear------" Bucchi had looked up.
    Dod missed his look. He was thinking about the Moon Ruins, and the paper he would now be able to complete; about his calm, successful life; about serving the Company.
    Someone flashed at the door.
    "Quick!" said Bucchi. "Off quick-someone might see it!" Again the door signal flashed. "Keep out of Flag's way, man! Be reasonable!"
    "I can't," said Dod happily. "It's just stuck there. I've tried to get rid of it." He couldn't tell of the anguished efforts on the flight from Pluto. "It just came."
    Bucchi's eyes narrowed. "I've always had a soft spot for you, Dod. Don't strain things. Get rid of it now! That's an order!"
    Dod felt light-hearted still, but Bucchi's tone of command jerked him back to reab'ty, setting off a series of automatic responses-he felt reassured by their familiarity; he was in Error, it was wrong for a Companion to be in Error, and so he must purge his Error! He resolved to get rid of the halo.
    He knew he couldn't.
    He thought he would weep.
    Then the Flagmen came in. "Trouble, Merchant Bucchi?"
    Their arrogant bearing was conditioned; Dod could 14
    read the menace in their pose. He knew that if he moved they would batter him within seconds. A peaceable man, for all his size, in a peaceful trade, he shuddered at the implied threat. He was afraid.
    Even as Bucchi spoke, though, that wasp of a thought came back to plague him: if the halo was real, what was it?
    "Dod here," said Bucchi, getting up. "Book him for an Error. And get that thing off him!" He looked compassionately at the big Space-pilot. "Error, third-type," he . added.
    Dod was grateful. It was the minimal charge. Bucchi had to charge him-he himself would be in Error if he failed to bring charges-but the Merchant had done his best for him. Although it meant losing his rank, the credits he had managed to save, his ticket of eligibility for the Space Games, and the right to pursue his study of the Moon Ruins, he could keep his pleasant quarters. Dod tried to thank him-tears blocked his eyes-but Bucchi glanced in a scared way at the halo and turned away.
    So what was it, if it was real? Dod found his mind working in an unaccustomed track. What data have I? First, it's an objective manifestation------
    "Move," said the second Flagman. Dod was grateful for the interruption. What had made him think like that? It was not the proper way for a Space-pilot to think.
    The Flagmen flanked him like two massive dogs.
    "Keep your hands to the side," advised the first one.
    Dod walked between them, for the second time that day in an agonizing frame of mind, alternating again between grief and despair, and wild hopes. Despair at the sudden loss of his rank; he shuddered when he thought that he might not be able to serve the Company again. Joy that he was spared the horror of being a tourist attraction in one of the dives near Moonbase as a space-struck moron.
    Dod failed to notice that the Flagmen were taking him by an unfamiliar route to his quarters. He was turning over in his mind the fact that he had hardly yet brought himself to examine the most important fact: exactly what did the halo signify if it was real? Speculation on the nature of the halo struggled with horror at the thought of being in Error-was it an Error even to think about it?
    His hand moved out in a reflex action to touch it, and 15
    he knew in the same second that he had made a bad mistake.
    The first Flagmen acted with the speed of a Venusian settler. His hand caught Dod across the throat, sending him smashing back across the corridor to where the second man was waiting; he flicked a gentle-looking blow to Dod's shoulder paralyzing his right arm. Then they grinned as they began on him together.
    Dod had heard of it before, but he hadn't believed it. They still went in for fist-fighting on Venus, but civilized people, especially Company officials ...
    When he woke up in his own quarters, an aching mass of smashed flesh; he knew he wouldn't show a mark. Plag didn't like to be thought of as a brutal organization.
    A small flare of protest flickered in Dod's mind, and he found himself bunching his big shoulders; but his anger died quickly. They had their reasons. They were men of the Company, after all. He rolled on to his back and tried to sleep.
    * * *
    Hours later, Dod woke, and in the moments between sleep and full consciousness, he had a sudden memory of himself at sixteen and Grandma telling him something important. About the Watcher, and he was straining to remember her words, clinging to the memory desperately, when he woke fully and thought about the halo.
    He jumped up, most of the stiffness gone from his muscles, and looked into the mirror; he passed his hand through the disc of light, but as usual, there was no sensation. He turned the lights off; still it shone back. Then he closed his eyes and willed it to go in the name of the Great Hound; he gritted his teeth, screwed his eyes savagely, and concentrated on this one wish. He could not sustain the effort of mind: a thin edge of thought crept into his mind to distract him. What had made him think of Grandma?
    He hadn't seen her for five years, hadn't thought about her in all that time. Was she still living in that ancient unhygienic Terran castle? He saw her old handsome face again smiling, and telling him of the equipment she would show him one day!
    What was it she had wanted to tell him about the Watcher? That she had told him. Something about the loss, one by one, of the senses; a peculiar correlation of
    16
    1
    mind and time and space; all mixed up with the idea that he should be doing something about it! But Grandma was senile, he thought. She was too old to talk sense. And her experiments were of no value. What was of no value was of no use to the Company. Dod agreed.
    He squashed hurriedly the flicker of dissent in his mind, the tiny seed of doubt that wanted to state outright that these were not his thoughts, that . . . Dod found himself repeating the Company oath fervently.
    It was all the halo's fault. If it hadn't come, he wouldn't be brooding, thinking about Grandma. Who was Grandma anyway?
    It had all grown vague in his mind; he did not struggle against the gradual blotting of his errant thought. Rather, he was grateful for the peace of mind that returned slowly.
    He did not even think about the halo. After a while, he did not even think. He waited.
    The door swung open, causing him to jerk to his feet.
    "Come with us, Dod," said the Flagman. Dod recoiled when he saw that it was the same two men. Their flat eyes looked hard at him, daring him to defy the order. The first man pointed to the screen behind Dod, who followed his hand.
    "Accompany the two Flagmen," said the burly Plag-chief. 'The Company demands it." Dod had never met Getler, but he knew him by sight; he was reputed to be a good Companion, but over-zealous.
    Looking at him in the flesh, Dod felt unafraid. Getler looked more like a comfortably-rich Martian motel-keeper than a topranking member of Plag.
    "Sit down, Dod," said Getler. The two Flagmen moved back to the door. "Now what is this?" he said pleasantly, indicating the halo.
    Dod was ready with his explanation, but the first of the Flagmen spoke.
    "We tried to get it off," he said in his flat voice.
    "He offered resistance," the other took him up.
    Getler smiled at Dod and winked; Dod felt contempt for these automatons.
    "On the second day of my journey to Moonbase," he said calmly, "I noticed this phenomenon. Immediately I made out a report and filed it."
    17
    "Correct," encouraged the Plagchief. Dod noticed the transcript of the log on his desk.
    'Thinking I had become space-stricken, I followed the
    mandatory procedure------"
    "You did," said Getler. Dod could see that he had made a good impression.
    "And on returning to Moonbase I reported to Merchant Bucchi."
    "I'd like to congratulate you on your sense of duty," said Getler. Dod glowed with pride; he looked around at the Flagmen, missing their chief's nod.
    The two Flagmen moved in on him simultaneously. Dod flung his arms out to save himself as the first man knocked his feet from under him, but he only succeeded in crashing against the Plagchief's desk, sending the tapes and papers flying. As the two Flagmen booted him about the floor, Dod felt only a strong desire to help the Plagchief pick up the tapes he had knocked off. When they had finished, Getler crossed to Dod and turned him on to his back with a smashing kick. Dod closed his eyes unbelievingly. The Company couldn't act like that. Could it? Not Dog Company.
    Getler flicked his face with a lightning blow of a touch-whip.
    "The truth," he snarled. "Quick you scum!" He pushed his heavy face close against Dod's and said quietly, "Now. Or I'll take you to pieces myself."
    Dod looked up in horror. He wanted to shriek that he had always served the Company loyally, but the words couldn't leave his swollen throat. He flapped his hand in protest.
    Getler put his heel on the hand and ground his full weight into it.
    Through the pain, Dod felt a small surge of an emotion he could not identify. It made him act. His hand closed on the heel and his arm jerked. A memory came back to him: he was good at this sort of thing.
    Getler was hardly unbalanced. He laughed at Dod and waded in. Now Dod could identify the emotion he had felt: he knew hate. The other Flagmen helped by kicking him down again when he went berserk, but a part of Dod was saying over and over again that he had hated before, but never like this. Not so much that he had wanted to kill.
    18
    The Plagchief s balled fist came towards him, stood still as Dod sank into unconsciousness thinking only of hatred and the impulse to kill. To kill Getler, and the two Flagmen, and Bucchi who had sent him to them, and anyone else who stood in his way. He laughed as the boot caught him again.
    Getler was making notes when he came round. He hadn't been out long, no more than an hour, maybe two; it was just that the fingers on the clock wouldn't separate sufficiently to let him make sure.
    "Ah, Space-pilot Dod, awake?" Getler asked solicitously.
    Dod laughed back at him, because he knew they couldn't break him as they had tried. He got up unsteadily, saw that the two Flagmen had gone, and moved forward. His body didn't want to go, but he urged it forward, looking on the desk for a weapon.
    "Coffee?" asked Getler. "You could use it, Space-pilot." He smiled disarmingly, and Dod could see he wanted to be friendly.
    He took the cup of hot coffee and hurled it in Getler's face. Then he dived for the blaster in the Plagchief's holster, but the burly man had his arm in a lock. In his fury, Dod realized that he wasn't Dod at that moment-he had never felt less like the Dod he was accustomed to being.
    "A mistake," said Getler, pushing Dod back. "We've both made one," he said as he mopped coffee from his uniform. "Be wise-forget it."
    "Not till death," croaked Dod back. He had something to live for. It was little enough, but it would do until he found something else, or until he was killed by Plag.
    "It's in the rules," said Getler apologetically. Dod sensed the two Flagmen who had re-entered the office. There would be no more chances at Getler. "Any accusation of Error must be tested. Trial by Pain is the first step. You got through. In fact, you deserve the Company's congratulations!"
    Dod searched for an insult, but there was nothing he could think of. Instead he said, "I'll kill you."
    "No hard feelings, surely?" Getler said jovially. "All for the good of the Company!"
    "-the Company," Dod said. His face blanched in confusion, as the Company oath thundered out gloriously in bis mind, and his hand touched the cut in his chest where
    19
    his blood had mingled with that of the Directors; reaction came in the form of self-contempt. "-the Company," he said again. He me ant, it.
    Getler was stupefied. Then slowly he recovered. "I'll do you a favor," he said. "I'll not hear that."
    Dod reached for the coffee and drank. He knew he was afraid of Getler and the Company; he knew also that he had broken with both. But if he had an existence separate from that of Dod, what was he? His actions were anarchic which made him a Free Spacer; but they had been exterminated nearly two centuries ago. So what was he? Who was he?
    "You go to Psych now," said Getler, dismissing him. "Your decoration," he said, pointing to the halo, "interests them."
    Dod could feel the alert, wondering, unbelieving atmosphere in the Psych lab as soon as he entered. A tall fat man with a broken face that seemed oddly comical, and familiar at the same time, helped him to take off his space-pilot's harness.
    "In here," the Psychman said. His tone was unfriendly.
    By the crowd of scientists and technologists that nocked about the glittering figure in the inner lab, Dod could see that someone must have taken the shuttle from Terra to see him, someone important. Absurdly, Dod felt a glimmer of pride in the halo. He must be important.
    "I was here immediately I heard about that," said the neat fastidiously-dressed Psychman. "I am the head of Psych, as you probably know. Sit down, won't you, Space-pilot Dod? You've been under a considerable-nervous- strain lately, haven't you? Yes, do sit!"
    Psychiarchl In person. Dod had only heard of him. A few hours ago, he thought in awe, I'd have knelt before him.
    "Thanks," he said, sitting down. He accepted a glass of alcohol, looked at it closely, and drank. The Psychiarch avoided noticing his inspection of the drink. Eiserer had tact.
    "You're here for a preliminary examination before you go on to Terra," explained the Psychiarch. "Of course you'll co-operate?"
    "Fully," said Dod. There was nothing else to say.
    "The simplest way of finding what you know of that thing"-he pointed to the halo-"is to put you in a trau-
    20
    matic state and allow you to undergo the Kindet series of tests."
    Dod hadn't heard of this new technique; he felt the thrill of interest amongst the officials present, and wished he knew what the test was.
    "Am I to know what you've found out already?" They would have examined the halo whilst he was unconscious.
    "It's your right according to the Company code," agreed Eiserer. "You'll take the tests, by the way?" he added as if it were of no importance.
    Dod stiffened. There was something he didn't like about the way the others in the lab were reacting; there was the smell of danger in the air. And the Psychiarch was being a little too casual.
    "Let me know something about this," said Dod, passing his hand through the halo deliberately to distract the Psych chief's attention.
    "All right. First, we don't know what it is yet-but we'll find out. So far it doesn't respond to any of the tests we've tried, but of course, facilities here on Moonbase are limited. One curious thing: it doesn't seem to have any physical properties."
    "And that's all?"
    "There is another thing, but that's to do with your ship. Engineer Sliepchevik," he called. "Report on the ship."
    The engineer bustled forward importantly. "Without committing myself to any definite statement, I can say that there seems to be a discrepancy somewhere in the performance of the engine, a mathematical inadequacy
    ------" He broke off. "That's as far as I can go at present.
    The rest is theory."
    "That will do," he told the engineer. "Any more questions, Space-pilot Dod?" Dod felt that this man was playing him as a man plays a clever fish. But the man intended to win.
    "The halo-no form of radiation?"
    "No."
    "Not a light wave?"
    Eiserer looked pityingly at Dod. "Don't you think we'd have found that out? All we can say at present is that it makes no impact on the space it occupies. It's got no resemblance to any physical entity."
    "I see."
    "You don't really, you know, and no more do we. Now 21
    what you can do to help us is to volunteer for the Kindet tests, and we can take it up from there."
    "How do they help?"
    "Well, they're not like the usual Psych tests-you've had those already, by the way-as the Kindet probes go deeper. On the face of it, you know nothing about that thing, but somewhere there may be a hint that even your subconscious mind has misplaced."
    "I can think of nothing." Dod wanted to hear what Eiserer had to say.
    "You don't know when it came-it might have appeared any minute after you left Pluto." The Psychiarch was not asking questions. He knew. Dod felt again that Eiserer was playing him. The Psych chief grinned cheerfully. "So there's nothing for it but the Kindet test, is there?"
    "I suppose not."
    "You agree then?" The grin had redoubled its charm.
    Once he agreed, the Space-pilot's code held him to it; there would be a tape as a record of his agreement; yet he held back.
    "Tell me why you have to use this particular type of test."
    The Psychiarch offered him more alcohol, but he refused. It would take the edge off his resolution to be his own man, to make his own decisions. Eiserer settled comfortably into his chair.
    "We've got your conscious mind fully exposed-and your subconscious. We know everything there is to know about you-your initial shock on seeing the halo, your creditable conduct throughout the voyage." He pointed to the mass of tapes. "But the Kindet test is something new. With it, we can pin-point the place and moment in time when the thing appeared. The idea is this; your whole body-physically-is open to impressions. Take the face for instance. Did you know that the cheek areas are especially sensitive to light?"
    "I read something once." Dod felt he was on familiar ground. As If he had studied this problem before.
    "There was a time in the history of our race when the cheek areas had a certain optic function, as, in another connection, the gills behind our ears once had a respiratory function; both are survivals from an early life-form. What especially interests us at the moment, is the possibility
    22
    of some kind of mental impression being absorbed and retained by the sensitive cheek areas. Something that may be dormant and unreachable by normal Psych methods."
    "Retained in the nervous system?"
    "More or less. But not just the brain. We know how to release such information, but exactly how it's absorbed we don't know yet. All you have to do is co-operate."
    "How?"
    "By agreeing."
    "The tests aren't of use if I don't co-operate, is that it?"
    Now the Psychiarch had lost his grin. "Precisely."
    "Why is this so important?" asked Dod, waving to the assembled ranks of officials. He knew the answer-it could only be one thing-but he wanted time.
    "You've a right to know that, too," Eiserer said gravely. "Space-pilot Dod, you've become a very important Companion. I hope you can live up to your responsibilities. You've encountered a unique phenomenon. The Chairman of the Company himself spoke to me about you." Dod found himself sweating with terror at the prospect of the Chairman interesting himself in him. "Yes, you see we think you may be our first contact with the Aliens."
    "Give me time," Dod found himself saying.
    "An hour."
    TWO
    alone, the problem seemed more difficult to Dod. If he accepted the test, he thought, he would be in favor with the Company, but that didn't seem important any longer; on the other hand, if he refused, Psych would go all out to pressure him into compliance. What could they do, though? He knew he wouldn't break under the threat of physical assault-but that wasn't Psych's way.
    He had gone over for himself the implications of the halo's presence. Obviously it had something to do with the
    23
    Aliens. Their screens were effective just beyond Pluto; the halo was a unique phenomenon; in fact, he remembered someone saying that the screens themselves appeared to have the same fantastic lack of physical properties.
    No one talked much about the Aliens nowadays, though -no one even made 'texs about them. The System had accepted their presence.
    Since they had appeared nearly two centuries ago, their screens had ringed the Solar System, blocking every attempt at communication or contact. Along with the other billion billion inhabitants of the System, Dod knew the story of their coming, of the breakdown of all government, and of the emergence of the Four Companies which gradually asserted their power on anarchic Terra. Dod .found himself smiling when he thought of the Company oath:
     Out of chaos came the Four To challenge the lawless, To rescue the masterless, To give hope to the hopeless, Till all of space is free again And Man shall reach the stars.
    Now it meant nothing to him, this trite piece of tub-thumping. The Company had no intention of trying for the stars; things would remain as they had been for centuries.
    The Aliens had been noticed first about a hundred and eighty years before. A robot star-probe, one of the Confederated Planets' best projects, had returned along the exact path of its outward course with catastrophic results ito the launching base on the Moon. At first it was thought to be a weird accident, but when three more probes-including a four-man ship-were sent smashing back to various parts of the System, even officialdom had to admit something was wrong.
    Probes had been successful before-several robot-ships were still on their way to Andromeda which they would reach some time this century; but why ships should suddenly" boomerang back to their pads seemed inexplicable.
    When the news broke, there was a vast sociological explosion. Every reactionary clique and revolutionary group on all the settled planets gained followers, arms, and
    24
    power; a dozen sets of antagonists opposed one another, killing off one set of enemies only to find rockets and bombs falling as another set joined in. Ships and robots filled the space-lanes. The System was shattered.
    Twenty years of agony followed until gradually on Terra the only disciplined force left, a regiment of Marines, took control; throughout the rest of the System, a loose amalgam of planets emerged as the Free Spacers. It was not long before the Four Companies decided that the Free Spacers had to go; and eventually they were liquidated. By this time, the Four Companies themselves had merged into one unit-Dog Company swallowed up Able, Baker, and Charlie Companies by a simple process of peaceful assimilation known as the period of the takeover.
    Dod had heard rumors of a new approach being tried by the Company when the idea of contacting the Aliens was brought up again: Psych was rumored to have tried some kind of telepathic communication, but no details were ever released. The official histories referred vaguely to "abortive attempts at extra-sensory projection which were proved inefficacious." Some cranks wanted to try it again, but Psych had slapped them down. Nowadays the Companies merely beamed the run of the mill stuff they had been transmitting for a century: plotted courses, mathematical and physics symbols, greetings, languages, semantic processes; and there had been no reply.
    Until now. Until Dod's seventy-first trip from Pluto.
    And I'm it, thought Dod. I'm It.
    The fat, ugly Psychman broke in on his thoughts.
    "Time's up," he said laconically. "You taking the Kindet test?" He looked sourly at Dod.
    Dod shrugged. "Do I have a choice? Really a choice?"
    "I'm just an assistant," the other declared. "You don't know what you're in for?"
    "Some kind of analysis," said Dod. Now that the time had come, he still did not know what his answer would be; at one time he had thought of consenting in order to get a higher position in the Company, but that would have been of use only if he had been Dod. He was sure now that he was not Space-pilot Dod, though. And anyway, what had the Company done for him?
    The Psychman was looking at him oddly. Dod thought, I'll have to get used to being a curiosity.
    25
    "They've not told you what it does to you?"
    "No. I help drag out some telepathic thoughts, although I don't see how, and they didn't tell me."
    The Psychman gestured to the door. "When I say 'Look' just glance in at the door where we stop. I'll push it open a few inches. Room along the second parallel. Drop this card, pick it up, and look in. Five seconds only. And don't say anything!" He pushed a Psych-Indent card into Dod's hands. "Come on."
    He moved quickly for a fat man. Dod walked alongside baffled; but he decided he could trust the Psychman.
    "Now. Look!"
    Dod stooped and groped for the card. As the door opened, he gasped at the sight of the shambles inside. The card slipped through his fingers, and he turned away.
    "Quick!" said the Psychman urgently, looking round to see if anyone was passing. No one had seen them.
    "By the Great Hound------" whispered Dod. The man-
    it must have been human once-was twisted into a grotesque shape. Skeletal limbs matched bulbous extremities, but the whole shape was unutterably distorted.
    "The Kindet test?" he said at last.
    "She was an attractive woman once," the Psychman said.
    Dod's stomach heaved. "A woman?"
    "She volunteered. A good Companion."
    "It does that every time?"
    "Sure. It's quite safe, though. Youll live through it."
    And become a thing like that, thought Dod. "How does it do that?" They were nearing the Psych labs.
    "It turns your nervous system inside out. Literally. Harnesses some peculiar aspect of the mind to a Psych machine and then it rips into the whole mind."
    Dod felt fear grip him again, cold fear; but again something stirred in his memory: this kind of experiment wasn't altogether unfamiliar to him.
    The Psychman looked almost friendly so Dod asked him what he should do. His answer was a shrug.
    "That's up to you."
    Dod made up his mind. "Yes, I guess it is."
    When he saw the Psychiarch again, he felt confident.
    "Well, Space-pilot Dod!" He signalled to the Psych officials, who left. "I told you that you were an important
    26
    Companion, Space-pilot." He waved to the big 'ceiver on the wall behind Dod. "Look."
    Dod found himself whispering the oath of loyalty when he saw who filled the screen. It was Chairman Salkind, who headed the Board of Directors of the Nine Planets.
    The Psychiarch smiled in a fatherly way. "The Chairman himself wishes to speak to you, Space-pilot." x ' Dod felt at peace. Now all doubts were resolved; he wanted only to be a loyal Companion again, to bask in the approval of the Chairman who had honored him by noticing him.
    "No more formalities, Eiserer!" the great man said. His voice~ was deep and pleasant, warm and encouraging. "Let us be friends, Dod," he said.
    Dod wanted nothing else. He listened spell-bound as he heard of the turmoil the appearance of the halo had caused. The Directors had already met; no statement was to be allowed to reach the public; a massive program of research had been prepared. For the moment he was to be held incommunicado.
    The Directors sent their greetings; Dod was to be advanced in rank within the Space Corps. The Chairman paused. Obviously he was waiting for some comment. Eiserer was looking closely at him, Dod saw. A predatory look.
    He began talking. "I am confused," he said humbly. The Chairman smiled; but Eiserer looked his contempt for an unguarded moment, and Dod saw it. Anger flared up again inside him. "I have always been a loyal Companion. I followed the correct procedure. I reported my Error." He shrugged his powerful shoulders. "Two beatings!" he said. "Two already."
    "A necessary step," put in the Psychiarch hastily.
    The Chairman looked coldly at him. "On your instructions?"
    "By no means!" said Eiserer, his bald, golden head shining with sweat. "I understand Plagchief Getler was responsible."
    The Chairman looked sympathetically at Dod. "What will satisfy you? A public apology? Demotion?"
    It couldn't be real, thought Dod, stunned. Salkind was offering to turn the regulations upside-down! Error was, as Getler had said, tried first by pain. That was the rule.
    27
    The Chairman misunderstood Dod's hesitation. He spoke briefly and quietly to someone at his side. "I think I have the right and proper answer to this disgraceful treatment."
    He looked like any other man with a problem, thought Dod, and yet he couldn't bring himself to speak as he had spoken to Eiserer, for instance. The Psychiarch hadn't the same overwhelming presence that surrounded the Chairman.
    "Eiserer tells me you're reluctant to undergo some sort of test he wants to make, Dod," he went on. "What can I say to persuade you? The Company rewards loyalty, you know! Ten thousand credits-for a start." It was more than he would ever earn in a life-time's career on the space-lanes. "The rank of Commander. Membership in your Space-pilot's council. What else can you think of?"
    It was absurd, but all Dod could think of was the paper he had been preparing on the seventh level of the Moon Ruins; it was the only thing he had ever done by himself. "I could continue my research in the Ruins?" he asked.
    "Naturally."
    "It might interfere------" began Eiserer, but he stopped.
    The Chairman ignored him.
    Dod felt panic overwhelming him now that he had to defy the Company; there was no choice, though. He noticed that the Chairman was smiling.
    'There'll be no difficulty about your paper, you know. Or about Plag in future-you could even keep your place in the Games if you wished." He waited for Dod's agreement.
    "Can you guarantee the tests are safe?" Dod burst out.
    The Chairman began to lose his air of benignity; his smile slipped. Eiserer stood up.
    "Who's been talking? Safe!"
    "Leave it to the Company," the Chairman said. "The Company cares for the Companions." He looked at Eiserer. "You did say that the Space-pilot was a loyal Companion, didn't you?"
    "He is," Eiserer assured him. "I think he's confused now. If I had a little time to persuade him-to put him in the picture, so to speak------"
    "Gompertz!" said Salkind. "Let Gompertz talk to him!"
    Dod realized that he had been given a respite. Maybe he could find a. way out if he had more time to think;
    28
    be was sure there was a way out. If only memory would come back to help!
    "Trust the Company," Salkind said. "Listen to Gompertz, and I'll wait till you reach Terra for your answer." He turned to someone out of view of the 'ceiver and spoke quietly. Dod looked around as Getler came into the lab; he was carrying two small packets. "Give them to the Space-pilot," ordered the Chairman from a quarter of a million miles away. Getler looked sullenly at Dod and passed the packets over.
    "An earnest of the Company's goodwill," said the Chairman.
    "Take them and put them in your 'trophy case."
    Dod felt the shrunken heads of the two Flagmen who had beaten him through the thick plastic cases. He shuddered. Life was of no value to the Company, he saw, neither his life nor any man's.
    "You'll retain your status, Dod, pending revision, but you'll have to keep away from the public gaze for a while. Anything else you need?"
    Dod could think of nothing. He saluted, the screen flickered, and Salkind faded. Two Flagmen quietly took up position behind Dod, reminding him that the Company was protecting its interests. The Psychiarch nodded in dismissal, and Dod was taken back to his quarters.
    The totex immediately began to pour out soothing, melancholy music; his program of 'texs, he saw, was to be arranged for him. Previously, he had been able to choose an outline program, but Psych would now want to have control. The music changed as a lone bugle note introduced a muted Company marching song. Dod glanced into the totex globe. It was time for his daily dose of fiction and inspiration, but he didn't climb into the machine. Instead he reviewed his position. He felt that never again could he suspend disbelief sufficiently to get into the totex globe again.
    He had changed. He wasn't a loyal Companion any more. He wasn't even a Companion, he thought wryly: he had more in common with the Free Spacers than with the Company; but the Free Spacers had been wiped out nearly two centuries before. He was on his own. And the trouble at the moment was that he wasn't sure who he was; he could laugh at Space-pilot Dod's simple mind, but when he tried to think objectively about his own personal-
    29
    I
    ity, a fog descended on the questions he asked himself. Had he always been a Space-pilot? What before that? When? Why was the Kindet test familiar? What had this to do with Grandma? And anyway, who was she?
    It was like trying to blast-off on the plasma engines alone; it couldn't be done. He had no data to work on, so he couldn't even start to work out what he should do.
    There was some things he could try, though. First, he could find out whether the Chairman really had taken Plag off his back by demanding a fixture in the Space Games. Then there was his work on the Ruins. If Trans sent a moonbug along when he asked for one, he could be sure that Salkind had kept his promise. He could also find out what a saint was, although that didn't seem so important now.
    "Get me the Combat Marshal," Dod said into the 'ceiver. The totex roared into the spacious room.
    Marshal Maes had had his instructions, Dod could see. The big florid face was cautiously amiable. "Can I help you, Space-pilot?" he asked.
    "I want a fixture in my own league, Marshal," said Dod.
    The answer came back pat. "Certainly, let's see now. You won three out of four on the last run, didn't you? Thought of trying in a higher league?"
    That meant a delay of several months; the Marshal clearly had been told what to say.
    "No. I only keep this up to maintain my status in the Pilots' guild." All space-pilots were expected to compete in at least one series of Space Combats during the year.
    The Marshal looked his disappointment. He wasn't good at deception. "You're a special case now, you know that, don't you? I can give you a fixture, but not for a few months."
    "Thanks," said Dod. The Marshal returned his salute and blanked the screen gratefully.
    When Trans hedged about providing a moonbug, the pattern became clearer: he was to be allowed the forms of freedom without actually being free. If he pushed it, there would be a blank wall in front of him. The big word-bank in Psych was, it seemed, temporarily out of order, so he still didn't know what a saint was.
    Dod looked across at the totex globe. It was tempting to settle down into the old patterns of stupor; that was what
    30
    Psych wanted, a peaceful, co-operative, conditioned Dod, he thought. He glanced in at the globe. The epic roared and surged; the hero was in trouble. Dod had no doubt he would get out of it.
    "Sitting this one out?"
    Dod whirled to find the fat Psychman watching him. |j|
    The man smiled and pointed to the circular hole in the floor.
    "Trick entrance," he explained. "One of Psych's ideas. All the rooms link up with the Psych block. Tricky lot, aren't we?"
    "This official?" Dod asked.
    The Psychman laughed.
    Dod looked a question at the other and put his fingers to his ears.
    "No," said the Psychman. "The sonic pick-ups don't operate now. You're in there," he said, pointing to the totex globe, "so far as Psych knows. It's scheduled for another ten minutes, then Psych will examine your reactions. A series of association tests to see if you've got the message."
    "Thanks for the tip about the Kindet tests. Why are you here now?"
    "Forget it. I'll tell you as soon as I can. It isn't time yet though. You refused the tests?"
    "After seeing that! I'm supposed to be making up my mind, but I've already decided. What's the next step?"
    "They'll take your ship apart. Something's turned up that interests the engineers, but it'll take time. The pressure's going to be stepped up on you."
    Dod felt wildly curious about the Psychman's concern for him, and more so as he avoided his questions.
    "You won't tell me your angle?" He had worked out one thing at least. "I've met you before, haven't I?"
    "Just stick it out for a while, then I can tell you. You'll be out of the wood if you just stick it out." He seemed to want to tell Dod something, without revealing too much. "Look," he said, "I used to know someone like you-a guy I liked. He got chopped." He made an odd gouging gesture with his hand. "Now watch out for yourself-they'll have one or two tricks to try on you. I'll get in touch when I think it's safe." He glanced at the totex globe, where the epic was dying into a dirge. "One more thing-can you get to the Ruins?"
    31
    "Maybe. Not certain though."
    "Try," said the Psychman. "It's important." He moved quickly to the Psych entrance, leaving Dod bewildered. Events were moving quickly now. He slipped into the totex globe, accepting the cold metallic discs, and finding, to his relief, that he could resist the heroics of the 'tex. He watched the hero's noble sacrifice with amusement, working out the questions Psych would have prepared for him. When they came, he answered glibly. What did "Company" suggest to him? Sacrifice, total and complete; the self was nothing. "Halo?" A desire only to comply with Psych.
    He thought he might be going too far, but again Psych would not think it strange for him to be woodenly compliant.
    It was soon over, but he was not allowed to rest. Two Flagmen entered without first flashing. Their gaze flickered to the trophy case where two of their comrades looked back at them.
    "A visitor, Space-pilot Dod," one said. Why did they always speak alternately? Dod waited for the second Flagman to speak.
    "Counsellor Gompertz," the second Flagman said. Both of them looked once more at the trophy case, then they left, leaving Dod alone with the old man.
    Dod recognized him immediately from his 'ceiver casts. Small, bald, physically insignificant, and eccentrically dressed in clothes of the early First Millennium, he carried authority about with him as if it were a thing you could see. He was the man who had worked out a complete philosophy of the Company's place in relation to world history, and weekly for forty years he had expounded Company philosophy to an audience of billions. Dull as his subject matter was, he enlivened it, made it jerk into hectic life for his half-hour, and kept his viewing figures even when the casts of Games Finals were beamed.
    Salkind must have spent thousands to bring the old man to Moonbase. His silence unnerved Dod. Under hooded, ageing lids, his watery blue eyes looked out malignantly. But when he spoke, his voice was pleasantly modulated.
    "A strange meeting, Dod," he said. "I've read your work-some interesting points in that paper of yours, what was it now? Yes, 'A Statistical Analysis of the In-
    32
    cidence of Rectilinear Disruption in the Seventh Level.' Interesting."
    The soft approach, thought Dod. Now Gompertz would add an apposite Latin tag. He must have checked through his publications, Dod realized, prepared himself for this interview thoroughly. If Gompertz was asked about any part of the paper, he would be able to answer at length; he had that sort of mind.
    All I have to do, Dod told himself, is to hang on. Time's on my side. Or so the fat Psychman had said-and who else could he trust?
    "I'm honored, Counsellor," said Dod. "IVe always watched your casts." He was finding that he had powers of diplomacy he hadn't realized he possessed. There could be other powers ...
    "No formality," said Gompertz, just as the Chairman had. "I want a straightforward talk with you."
    "Man to man?"
    "That's it------" Gompertz looked at him more closely,
    and suddenly grinned, revealing his own old, brown teeth. "Your record shows strong conformist tendencies-you've changed. Why? Quick."
    Without thinking, Dod answered. "Danger. Too much in too short a time." He realized he shouldn't have said as much; his answer should have been conformist, shocked bewilderment. Good Companions answered slowly and after thought: always the proper, reliable answer, and the safe, comfortable thought.
    "Even so, you've grown your defenses very quickly. You've achieved a remarkable degree of adaptation to • your changed circumstances in a couple of days. Novus homo, almost!"
    A good Companion wouldn't ask what it meant, so Dod didn't answer. He was wary. This man, of all, was the most skilled in dialectics; it was said of him that after half an hour of his analysis and critical examination, the Aliens would be glad to join the Company-if ever they were contacted.
    "So I'm changed," said Dod. Gompertz napped his toga about himself and settled into a comfortable chair.
    "I'll make my position clear," he said. "Ill talk to you as a thinking man, not as Space-pilot Dod. You think I'm here to trick you? Forget it. Chairman Salkind has asked me to tell you what that-what can we call it? That
    33
    appendage, that circular coruscation, that discous luminosity------"
    "Halo," said Dod.
    "One could say that," agreed Gompertz. Dod felt him.-self relaxing; the old man's sheer force of personality made one feel at peace. "But appendage let it be for the moment." He paused. "I've written many thousands of words," he said seriously, "on my subject, but I find it difficult to begin. Do you know how many people there are in the System?" »
    "A billion billion," said Dod. It was the text-book answer.
    "A billion billion," marvelled Gompertz. "And nine settled planets! And hundreds of thousands of years in time, millions of years in fact. And hi all that immensity of time and space we have never yet had any contact with any other intelligent life. Nothing on Mars and Venus, nothing on the outer planets. Not even lichen!" He shook his head in a kind of subdued amazement. "It shattered the science-fiction market when we got to Mars. Canals! Monstrous tape worms! Sentient plants! Can you imagine what that did to the fringe scientists? All the theorists were out of business once the planets were ours.
    "There was nothing left for us to find out. No more frontiers to ship our would-bes and has-beens to-no more dreaming!"
    Dod could see that Gompertz, for one, regretted the disillusionment that had come with progress; he was a romantic at heart.
    "And just as we became ready to reach for the nearer stars, we were stopped." No one talked like this today, thought Dod in surprise. What was the old man trying to prove? "That was when the Aliens came," he went on. "We'd sent out our robots, and they told us what we already knew-that we hadn't got a drive good enough for interstellar travel. Basically we haven't improved on late Second Millennium ideas. But we might have done!"
    This was anti-Company talk. Dod found himself liking it, but he was still wary. Gompertz could be leading him into some kind of trap, bugging his mental processes into bewildered surrender.
    "So far we hadn't got an idea that Worked, not really, but someone would have made the breakthrough. It's always been done in the past."
    34
    He was gazing at the halo, Dod saw, and this seemed to break his train of thought. Was this planned?-was this a building up of semantic bricks around him?
    "What do we know about them?" Gompertz said, looking at the halo still. "Very little. Almost nothing. There may be no Aliens at all. The screen could well be a cosmic accident, some massive build-up of forces we can't even comprehend. I don't think so, though. Do you?"
    "I'd say it was a life-form."
    "Yes, Far in advance of ours-that's the general feeling, although I think that's an assumption. Certainly they're stronger than us so far as physical force goes. They can contain the System-the whole of it!-from a few million miles beyond Pluto. Nothing's got through since they appeared. None of our attempts at contact have been acknowledged. It's almost as if they were unaware of us.
    "We've got ideas about them, naturally, theories: they're vegetables without the need of ships; they're a virus; they're humanoids or robots. They're not even there at all, but the System's in a state of mass hypnosis. All these ideas were kicked about over a hundred years ago; now, no one bothers to theorize even. There are some interesting old 'texs on them-did you see them?"
    "I wasn't impressed," said Dod.
    "No, but one or two got the idea over that always impresses me when I think about them. They're the blankest of blank walls, the most tantalizing mystery ever. We've no point of contact with them." He was still looking at the halo. "What I mean is the terrifying otherness of the Aliens. What can we say about them? Nothing. We're like a trawl full of fish with as much knowledge of the Aliens as the fish have of the fisherman."
    "You think one of the fish has found a hole in the trawl?"
    "Not exactly. The analogy breaks down there. But for the first time, we've got something. However tenuous the link is with the Aliens, it's a beginning. Psych explained that there are certain parallel features between what we know of their screens and your-your appendage?"
    "Psychiarch Eiserer put the position clearly."
    "And so we come to you, Space-pilot Dod." His watery eyes looked mildly at him, but Dod knew the old man was as cunning as Eiserer, with his own particular brand
    35
    of unanswerable logic. "Yes, Space-pilot." He seemed to have made his mind up about the approach he should take. "Have you ever heard of Captain Frost and the fight for the rocket base on Mars?-the whole story, not just the outline that's in the history books?"
    "I know he was one of the heroes in the early battles with the Free Spacers."
    "Without food and with only enough water for three days-he'd only just enough oxygen, too-he crossed nearly a quarter of the planet carrying the only explosives he could find, a case of dynamite in a wrecked Second Millennium research ship. They took ships and land craft by the hundred to look for him, but he evaded them all. He was caught in an energy net, but he blew his way out of it."
    Dod could picture the fierce drive that had led Frost to fight his way through tremendous odds. Men hadn't the same drive these days. Then he laughed aloud.
    "This isn't making any impression on you, is it?" Gom-pertz said. "You don't go for this, do you? If I went on to detail how Frost exploded his feeble charge, and paralyzed the main oxygen pipes long enough to knock out most of the opposition, you wouldn't go for that either, would you?"
    Was this the brilliant dialectician? Trying to sell him a. space-opera! Dod had expected an intellectual tiger, and they had sent him a tame kitten. It was like drawing an opponent in the Games who was scared. Dod was aware that he himself was changing more rapidly; he felt excited, sure that he was on the verge of a discovery about himself. Now he felt careless about the, impression he made on the Counsellor.
    "It sounds all right on totex," he said.
    "I was going to tell you about Frost's self-sacrifice," Gompertz said quietly. "We can't all sacrifice ourselves like that, but sometimes one man has a chance of contributing more than any other in his generation." He dropped his voice, and Dod admired the balanced modulation; it was effective. "You are the man."
    "Like hell!" said Dod cheerfully; it had been one of Grandma's' phrases, one she had culled from history books.
    Gompertz did not seem surprised. "Someone's talked about the Psych test?"
    36
    "I heard about the Kindet tests some time ago," said Dod, unwilling to betray the Psychman. "I couldn't accept that, could I?"
    "A loyal Companion might," suggested the Counsellor, but he grinned slightly at the same time. "No, Dod, something's changed you. Will you tell me what it is?"
    "If I knew," Dod said truthfully, "I'd probably tell you."
    "I'll have to report this non-co-operation to the Chairman, you understand?"
    "It doesn't bother me. I've no alternative."
    Gompertz looked curiously at Dod. "There's got to be an alternative for the Company. If you'll take my advice, you won't hold anything back-co-operate as fully as you can without actually endangering yourself."
    "What happens now?"
    "Psych takes over. My job was simply to try to get you to go in for whatever psych had lined up for you. To put you in the right frame of mind. I'm not altogether sorry I've failed. Now, I've got to cut in the Chairman and the Psychiarch to report."
    He flicked on the 'ceiver. Eiserer at once entered the room, and the chairman's bulk filled the screen.
    Gompertz addressed the Chairman. "Space-pilot Dod knows that the Kindet tests will leave him a travesty of a human being. He's not prepared to accept that, and, for one, I sympathize with him."
    The Chairman took the news calmly; Eiserer glared at Dod, but said nothing. "We'll put the Space-pilot in the picture about the implications of the halo, then," said the Chairman.
    "I've given him some background data," said Gompertz. "You want me to continue with the topics we discussed earlier?"
    Salkind nodded. "Do that, Counsellor, please."
    Counsellor Gompertz settled himself into his favorite 'ceiver casts position, lying on Dod's couch as if he were at a Roman feast. He looked at Dod, at the halo, and back at his long skinny hands.
    "We've considered the possible reasons for the appearance of this curious appendage of yours, Space-pilot," he began. "One, it could be some kind of accident. Two, it's been put there deliberately."
    "I'd gone that far myself," said Dod. "What I wanted
    to know------" He wanted to know what a saint was, he
    37
    remembered, but Gompertz was well into his stride now. "I've discounted the first hypothesis, of course. Why, for the first time in recorded history-our records go back for a long time-should such an accident occur? And only once? The odds are not simply astronomical against this being accidental-we couldn't even plot a program to calculate the odds on the. machines we use. I know. I built some of them. That throws us back on to the second hypothesis, that it is no accident." He grinned triumphantly at Dod. "We have to ask ourselves, in that case, what purpose your-appendage-you know, we really will have to find another expression. Quite unsatisfactory to talk about it as though you'd grown a third hand. Lux Dodi? I think not. But to continue, we come to the question, why has it been placed there? Why?-Dod, you tell me." The question was like a lash in its unexpectedness and sharpness.
    '1 thought I was mad at first. Then it looked like some freak radiation effect, but you don't get radiation without a source. I came to the Aliens quickly after that-you hear a lot about them in my mob. Pilots talk, like anyone else, and we get to hear about what's been tried with the Aliens."
    "Why should it be the Aliens?" asked Eiserer. "Why think of them?"
    Dod shrugged. "What else could it have been?" "Dod's a thinking man," said the Chairman. "Naturally, he would have examined that possibility."
    "I don't think the Space-pilot can help us at the moment," said the Counsellor. "We'll have to give him time. Let's go on from there. It isn't harmful, and so far as we can tell it serves no function-such as a weapon, or means of communication. It isn't alive, as we know life, at least, so we can rule out any question of invasion by symbiosis. So far, it's remained attached to you-we've considered the possibility that it's using you as a vehicle to get to Terra, but it doesn't hold water as a serious proposition." "One moment," interrupted Salkind. He spoke offscreen, waved a hand in dismissal, and looked briefly at Dod before signing to the Counsellor to continue.
    Gompertz looked sourly at him. "Taking up a different line of thought altogether," he continued, "it could be some form of warning. Such signs are associated in mythology with portents and warnings-beams of light,
    38
    discs, and so forth. My feeling, though it hasn't any other basis than instinct, is that it's functional rather than symbolical."
    "Symbolical?" asked Salkind.
    "We know that the customary association of this particular style of sign is a religious one. Saints were expected to be adorned by them in ancient times. Saints-religious mystics," he explained as Dod leaned forward to ask a question. "The significance is twofold: first, it emphasized their peculiar sanctity, and secondly, there was an element of selection; they were a race apart."
    "An endorsement of some kind," interrupted Eiserer.
    "By the Diety," agreed the Counsellor. "A kind of seal on their claims to sanctity."
    "What has this to do with me?" asked Dod.
    Gompertz would not be deflected from his explanation. "There could be a parallel here," he said slowly.
    "The Aliens have singled out Dod? Is that it?" asked Salkind.
    "Conceivably."
    The Psychiarch decided that it was time he took a hand. His field included mysticism and religions. "Whether by a prescience on the part of the ancients, or through a knowledge of the particular significance of the sign, the Aliens are using the halo as a symbol of approval?"
    "They could be warning us that Dod is a special case?" added the Chairman before Gompertz had a chance to answer.
    "I shouldn't give the theory more weight than its speculative nature calls for," replied the Counsellor. "The use of the halo could be pure coincidence. I shall give it some thought."
    They all looked with interest at the halo, and Dod was surprised to find the discussion well within his grasp; he felt like taking a more active part in it-there were several points that could be followed up-but he decided on caution; it was as if he were growing the tools of thought within his mind, although that was hardly it, he thought-just as if tools he had once been able to use well were being re-forged. He had some ideas about the possible functional nature of the halo, but he repressed them; there was time to think, all the time in the world now. His new identity was taking shape.
    Gompertz had adopted the timeless academic's pose, 39
    his finger-tips pressed together, tapping lightly against one another in unconscious stimulation of the -nervous system. "To sum up," he said at last, "we have these aspects to consider. Warning. A possibility which we can keep in mind. Communication-we don't know; if so, we must find the key. Invasion or weapon-definitely no. Which leaves us with identification."
    "Identification?" asked Eiserer. He had missed that one. "That's what we've been discussing for the past ten minutes," Gompertz pointed out astringently.
    He was right, thought Dod. He could see the pattern of the old man's ramblings now. Gompertz enjoyed the pause with an actor's sense of suspense.
    "Yes, identification. The more I think about it, the better it sounds. You see, if the Aliens want to find Dod again, they'll have no difficulty in finding him."
    Again the three men considered him. For two of them, Eiserer and Gompertz, the interview was over. They had done their part by explaining the outline situation; it was now up to Salkind to make some kind of decision. "You'll go to Terra, Dod," he said. "I've just been told everything's ready here-or will be soon. I've just arranged for general release of the news to the whole System; I expect there'll be a considerable crowd waiting to see you in person."
    "And on the Moon? Can I move about freely-for my last few hours here?"
    "I'll see to that," Salkind promised. "One last thing: you may have done the Company a service by refusing the Kindet tests. I understand the element of danger is too extreme, and I've cancelled the program. No .doubt Eiserer will find something else that will serve the purpose." His heavy eyes- flickered at the Psychiarch, who bowed suavely back; but his shining head was beaded with sweat. "I look forward" to seeing you in person, Commander," he said. Then the screen cleared.
    "Commander!" chuckled Gompertz. He found it amusing. "The Commander of the Golden Disc!"
    He had had his less pleasant side, Dod saw. For a moment he was tempted to swing out at the old man, but he saw that Gompertz was watching his reactions. Eiserer left abruptly.
    "Come and have a talk with me, young man," said the Counsellor when the Psychiarch had gone. "Just ask." He
    40
    winked at Dod, who winked gravely back. The old man walked out of the room still chuckling, muttering his last joke under his breath, "Commander-the Commander of the Appendage!"
    So he was a Commander. The ten thousand credits were, no doubt, credited to him on Terra; whatever he wanted he could have.
    It would have meant happiness to the Dod of a couple of days before.
    The door flashed suddenly. Flanked by the two Flagmen, the fat Psychman appeared. He looked worried, and a clutch of fear hit Dod, the old subservient emotions breaking out again.
    "The Psychiarch's personal recorder!" he said in an unnatural voice, his fat face quivering with anxiety. "Did he leave it here, Commander?" His eyes darted about the room without finding what he was looking for.
    The two Flagmen glanced at one another and jerked the corners of their mouths up slightly in contemptuous smiles.
    "I've not seen it," said Dod. "I think he had it with him when he left."
    But the Psychman wasn't satisfied until he had himself searched the quarters thoroughly. Finally, he left with abject apologies for the intrusion, and loud complaints about his probable fate if he should return without it. By this time, the Flagmen were openly sneering at him; Flags envied Psych the huge amounts of credits they could dispose of, and their independence from Plag surveillance; traditionally, a Flagman never helped anyone from Psych. They had stood woodenly at the door throughout the search.
    The fat man had left the card hi the totex globe. Dod had caught the quick, concealed motion of the Psych-man's hand.
    "Ruins," it read. "Today at 1500 hours. Explore Level 7."
    He had been quick, and his sources of information were good; only a few minutes before, the Chairman had authorized more or less unrestricted movement on the Moon during his last few hours there. And the Psychman knew it. He also knew that the seventh level of the Ruins was Dod's particular specialty.
    Dod looked about and realized he was getting the trick 41
    of conspiracy; that was another thing that he felt he had been good at in some other kind of life. He flicked on the 'ceiver.
    "Moonbug at 1500," he ordered.
    "Purpose of journey?" asked the Trans clerk.
    "Exploration of the seventh level."
    "Refer to Plag, please, Space-pilot," answered the clerk.
    "Commander!" snarled Dod. Hastily the clerk blanked the screen, and Getler's face filled it.
    "I'll have to send an escort craft, Commander," said the Plagchief deferentially. "Until you leave Moonbase you're my responsibility. We want you to be safe."
    Dod felt his hate welling up, the frustration of five years of being a safe, conventional, obedient automaton rising up and wanting outlet. He remembered Getler's boots.
    "No escort," said Dod. He outranked the Plagchief now. "That's an order."
    "I can't do it, Commander! On my head!"
    Dod looked round at the trophy case. Getler's head would complete the trio of Flagmen who had playfully smashed him about the Plagchief's office. Getler followed his gaze.
    "I'd keep a mile away," offered the Plagchief. "One vessel-a scout. A mile away."
    Getler could keep him in Moonbase if he was driven to it, Dod realized. But would the Psychman still come if there was a Plag scout in the area? He had no choice.
    "A mile. Be sure it's a mile and no less. And take those clowns off my door!"
    "Very good, Commander." Getler's face was creased with the effort he was making to hide his antagonism; his eyes could not conceal the sheer cold murderous loathing of his feelings. Dod looked back at him.
    If Getler wanted trouble, he was ready. When he looked up, the Trans clerk was there. Certainly, the bug would be ready, fuelled, full reserves, and did the Commander want a driver? Or anything? Was there nothing Trans could do?
    "Fifteen hundred," said Dod, hearing the ring of command in his voice with pleasure.
    42
    THREE
    most of the staff of Trans turned out to see Dod as he climbed into the waiting moonbug. The Station-master had escorted him personally to the craft.
    "Fuelled for ten hours' running," he said respectfully.
    "Air? Food?" Dod found the words snapping out with an authoritative ring; the Station-master quivered. Dod now outranked him by a dozen grades.
    "Ample, Commander," he said. "A full week's emergency supply in addition to the normal three days' reserves. This is one of our latest models, Commander, new from Terra only last week-although it's been extensively checked," he added hurriedly.
    Dod flipped the bug to flight and zoomed to twenty miles above Moonbase. The Plag vessel waited below. There was no chance of evading it-the Plag scout could at a pinch make Terra with its powerful annular-beam engine. He punched a course for the Ruins.
    At one time he would have felt a contained, intellectual excitement at the prospect of another day's delving in the Ruins of the mid-Third Millennium Ruins.
    For years, they had been his one hobby, and he had attained some distinction as a selenologist; but now that was gone. It was the fat Psychman's half-promises that kept him keyed up with interest. Instead of putting another small piece of the Ruins in its proper historical and technological perspective, he was going to find out something about the fat Psychman; and perhaps about himself.
    The Plag scout kept the stipulated mile away; it was cruising at the same speed as the moonbug, but it seemed to be moving slowly, warily, like a big cat over the dead landscape of the moon. When Dod grounded his vessel by the entrance to the ruins, and went out, miniature digger in one hand, and heat-pencil in the other, the Plag ship grounded softly, waiting.
    43
    The Ruins occupied about a square mile on the surface where the small first level had been exposed; beneath that were the many other levels; nine had been excavated so far, but it was known that they extended much deeper, honeycombing for miles outward and downward.
    The Ruins had fascinated him for as long as he could remember, exercising a strong hold on his imagination. The great caverns, the weird, torn and blistered machines -if they were machines-and the fantastic, tangled conglomerations of metals and plastics filled him with a sense of awe and purpose. Usually, anyway.
    There had always been the possibility of a really startling discovery about the machines of the people of the mid-Third Millennium, who had left no records, no monuments, nothing but these extensive remains of grand designs; maybe there was a starship drive hidden somewhere-maybe the light-drive had once been known and was concealed here. There could be a clue as to the purpose of the Ruins. Even that was unknown.
    As Dod penetrated further into the depths, the familiar tingle of excitement touched him; coupled with it was a half-wish to revert to Dod's life again-he was already thinking of Dod as another person, he noticed.
    What was the idea of meeting in the Ruins? At first, Dod had approved of the idea, since normally there would be no one excavating there; vacation time was a month away. But surely there was some less complicated method of communicating? For one thing, the Ruins had not been pressurized yet-and in all probability would never be fully pressurized since there was such a huge space to fill with air. That meant staying in suits, and communicating by radio. Dod walked on and down.
    At the fifth level, the full lighting system was replaced by the scanty, insufficient, and temporary fixtures that had been set up only recently. There was a timeless air about the Ruins which became stronger the further you went down; they looked as if they had stood since the beginning of time. '
    When he reached the seventh level, Dod put down the digger; he looked about. Should he continue with his survey of the storeroom-like caverns he had found and was working on? One or two anomalies, misproportions that seemed to have been deliberately manufactured ex-isted...
    44
    A flash of light sent him darting behind a great, twisted column of steel. The fat man had arrived. Dod walked out, and was about to speak when he checked himself.
    "Relax," said the Psychman. "At this depth-we're way down remember-we can't be picked up."
    "Is that why you said here?"
    "No. This place is dangerous now, although there's no alternative as things are."
    "And how are they?" Dod was feeling irritable now. The Psychman wasn't getting to the point.
    "I can't rush this, even though it's dangerous to stay here for long-I'm not certain whether Plag didn't put someone on to me."
    "You've helped me. I'm grateful," said Dod. "I've got my troubles though. I want to keep out of further trouble if I can."
    The Psychman's huge fat face was solemn. "You ever wondered about these ruins?"
    Dod was exasperated. "Wonder-I spend all my vacations here! I've published reports on them. I know them as well as anyone!"
    "Not that," said the fat man. "Not what you know- why you come."
    Dod was puzzled now; what was this leading up to? Surely the Psychman knew why he came. Everybody had hobbies. You went in for Games or excavation, or any one of a dozen other pursuits depending on your Psych grading; Space-pilots nearly all opted for the Games. A few, like himself, went in for more academic hobbies. As a Psychman, he should know that,
    "Ever wonder why you're so interested?" he went on.
    Dod tried to think about it: years ago he had fallen under the spell of the Ruins; the 'texs he had seen had fanned that interest. Why, he had been absorbed in them for-he had forgotten how long.
    "This important?" he asked the Psychman. Wasn't there something more important the Psychman could tell him?
    "You don't know how much. Think. When did you first come here?" He had dropped the sour note in his voice, and looked deadly serious.
    "Years ago," Dod said, and as he spoke a new wariness "crept into his mind. Was the answer too glib? Too ready?
    45
    "But when exactly? You should remember the first time."
    He was right thought Dod. One always remembered the first time for everything. Then suddenly another answer formed.
    "When I first came here!" It was obvious; he felt relieved.
    "When was that?"
    Dod found himself growing angry with this pinning down-there was no point in it! "In------" he began furiously. Nothing else came into his mind; the tone of his voice was changing as he heard himself continuing. "When I qualified in Space School." It was like listening to another person.
    "When was that? Think!"
    Dod couldn't. Thought had stopped, suspended in a jangle of emotions.
    "Step by step, then," went on the Psychman. "How old are you?"
    "Thirty-two."
    "How long have you been on the Pluto run?"
    "Five years." Or was it four, or ten, or two? His mind raced madly as if something had become detached in his head. Lights and jagged loops of fire flashed in front of him. "Does it all matter?" he shouted, trying to stop the whirlwind of mad thoughts.
    "Five is right," the Psychman said.
    "Five," Dod repeated. It sounded right now.
    "And you're thirty-two."
    "Yes." That was enough of questions. "That's right. Five years. Thirty-two."
    "And the figures add up?"
    Of course they didn't, his mind screamed back at him, but he couldn't face the implications, and his thoughts again twisted and turned like live cables.
    "You have to figure it out for yourself," the Psychman said. His voice drummed on, sounding miles away. "Space-pilots graduate at twenty-one."
    Dod felt the great cavern closing in on him, and the colored lights that flashed and blinked inside his skull blinding him; a band tightened on his brain and a cloud of swirling fire caught him, took him with it until he was falling ... and that was all.
    46
    The fat man had propped himself against the twisted column, Dod saw, when he came round.
    "You nearly went," he told him. 'They do sometimes. I thought I'd got a corpse on my hands."
    "And me," said Dod. He got to his feet. Memories filtered back, and he could put names to places and people he had not seen for over five years. Ideas and concepts he had forgotten came back, a patchwork of bright spots and grey, still unremembered, recollections.
    "You through?" asked the Psychman. Dod knew why the fat man had been unable to tell him directly of his past.
    He nodded. "I've got it now."
    "You know who you are?"
    "No." It wasn't important, though; eventually it would all come back to him, his lost identity.
    "You've beaten the block down?"
    "Partly."
    "Where've you reached?"
    "I've got the Ruins-compulsion worked out-it's sublimation of a search, some sort of investigation I was working on."
    "Yes. Kept you busy and off dangerous ground."
    "And the Space-pilot's job?"
    "I can tell you that," said the Psychman. "It's chiefly subliminal, too. Space is the ocean of knowledge. Your ship is the urge to explore. Your research into the unknown becomes driving an old freighter about the System."
    Dod reflected. "To follow knowledge like a sinking star," he quoted. From the hodge-podge of his memories this came back strongly.
    "Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought," completed the Psychman.
    "Clever," said Dod. "It was clever of them. It kept me happy-and handy, too."
    "It was a great job they did on you," agreed the Psychman.
    "Who was I? What was I?" Dod could face it calmly. But someone, he told himself, someone was going to suffer for this.
    "You know I can't say. You'll never get back if you're just told about it. Once you're blocked-chopped we call it-you never get back unless you beat it down yourself. It's got to come from within."
    47 "
    "And the work I was doing?" Dod was just thinking aloud, and the Psychman didn't answer. "You've seen many cases like mine?" he asked.
    "My job," said the fat man.
    "Why block me?"
    "You'll find the answer. It so happens that I don't know as well. I want to know-Psych was in a state of panic about it, that's all I know. You were a danger to the Company. And how!"
    "And they didn't kill me," Dod said.
    "What you know they may still want," the Psychman pointed out, but Dod was in front of him. He would have to be alert all the time to avoid showing Psych that he had beaten their block down.
    He groped in his mind for the work he had been doing, but it was like trying to home on Uranus without the guide beams. If only he could find what it was the Company had feared so much, he would find himself too. That was where to start.
    "You know why we're here now?" asked the Psychman. "Why here in the Ruins?"
    "I'm almost there. It's not the safety angle." The ugly face was smiling broadly in encouragement. Dod fought the Stardust from the whirl of his thoughts. "I know you," he said to the Psychman. The fat man had seen recognition dawning, and was happy about it.
    "You do."
    "So I'm not just a lame dog you picked up."
    "Right."
    Dod looked about the great cavern. "It's something to do with this place." He wasn't asking questions now. Things were taking shape-there was a pattern about the sequence of events. He moved along derelict passages, through tangles of heat-blasted machines, and past massive thickets of wires and cables. He was moving in the right direction, he knew. "I found something in the Ruins- you were in on it."
    "That's part of it," agreed the Psychman.
    "Only part?"
    "The part I know about. And I'd like to be in on the rest."
    "So this isn't altogether altruistic-there's something in it for you."
    48
    "For both of us, I think. I can help more than you think. Am I in?"
    Dod held out his hand and the fat man took it. Then he did a curious thing; he crossed to the lights control and cut all but one of the lights. After a few seconds, Dod's eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The one remaining light drew his attention, and he began to remember.
    Then the Psychman knocked on all the switches again, and Dod saw the odd configuration of the shattered girders spring into prominence as the lights brought it into focus. In the middle of the star the girders roughly formed would be the capsule. That was what the Psychman wanted to show him.
    "Right in the center!" he said. "How did I miss it when we got here!" Then he recalled that seconds before he had been unaware of the capsule's existence-until Scrimgouer pulled the switches down-Scrimgouer!
    When he looked at the Psychman he could see that he was aware of the change in him by the expression on his face.
    "Hello again, Scrimgouer," Dod said. He could even remember how the Psychman had collected that jagged scar that ran from his forehead to his jaw; Scrimgouer had been an instructor at the Space School, on loan from Psych, and had got into an argument with one of the weapons training instructors. There had been a fight. The Psychman had been badly slashed, but the other man was dead, broken by Scrimgouer's massive hands.
    "Glad you're back," said Scrimgouer. "It's been a long time."
    "I shouldn't ask how long?"
    "I wouldn't tell you."
    Dod moved across to the girders, jumped for a ledge, and scrabbled in the rubble for what Scrimgouer meant him to find.
    The capsule was about the same size as a space-suit helmet, and of a similar material. It was as smooth as an egg, without a scratch or break. Dod knew what to do. He let the capsule drop, broke his own fall by swinging from one fallen girder to another, and knelt by the capsule. The moon's gentle gravity let it rock for a few seconds, and then it settled on its point of balance at an unlikely angle. Reducing the beam to a minimum, Dod applied the heat-pencil to the top of the capsule.
    49
    It swung open.
    "We found this after Space School," Dod said. "You were out-they broke you down to the lowest grade in Psych." Scrimgouer grinned in agreement.
    "I'm still only an errand-boy. You'd better read and digest that," he added, pointing to the book inside the capsule.
    It was made of some kind of platinum alloy, with wafer-thin leaves; the writing had been done by hand; etched in acid? Dod wondered. The whole thing looked as if it had been completed hastily, for the writing, neat at first, sprawled jerkily after the first couple of pages. The writer had tried for objectivity, but his tone was hysterical. As Dod read on, he saw why.
    "So you have found this, my last will and testament, my confession, my apologia pro vita: my indictment, if you like, of the whole insane conception you found this in. You are in the Ruins, or maybe you have taken this to a lab somewhere. If there is anybody about, get rid of him. You have intelligence: without it, you would not have found the heat-key, or the capsule's hiding-place. But have you got integrity?
    "Let me put it this way: if you got an offer of five billion credits for a two-year contract, would you take it? And if you were told it was top secret-red-danger-signal-plus priority, cosmic-class, would you feel honored that the Company had chosen your combine for the job? I got the Moon contract, the biggest, though the Ruins on Mercury are more complicated, and I heard that some of the others are pretty big.
    "I got the team together, the best I've ever had. Seven hundred men who had flayed whole chunks off planets in their time. Some of the best and toughest men in contracting. The money brought 'them in, though they knew they would be isolated. No one minded. We were sitting on five billion. And it was an important job.
    "I could see the way it was shaping after a few months, and I was the only one. But I didn't say a word. Plag had got us ringed in with everything from sonic pick-ups to battleships.
    "First we made a twenty-mile deep hole. You're reading this now, and you don't know it, but you haven't even scratched the surface of the Ruins yet. They were built to make a'lot of work. I put the capsule in the seventh
    50
    level in the place you found it because it's an obvious dead end, and there's a peculiar configuration that you have found, since you are reading this now.
    "Then we filled the various levels with ship-loads of stuff, thousands of ship-loads, from all over the System. Crazy stuff. Machines that didn't do anything. Computers with no means of working them. Engines, guidance systems, controls-you've not seen more than a fraction of it yet.
    "We were told it was a fortified base for operations against the Aliens when some of the men got to wondering what it was all for. They never did find out; I was the only one.
    "The stuff had no use. It never had. That was the truth of it. The crazy stuff we had installed was useless. It was not new at all-not in the sense that it was an advance on what we already have. It's all nightmare stuff, planned by imbeciles. It's my belief that they put some space-struck geniuses together and gave them their heads. Because the whole thing is a fake.
    "Get that straight, whoever you are-the Ruins are a fake. And this is the only record of what actually took place. No one can get away, and within a few days now, I myself have been told the job will be completed, and I am to be returned to Terra. Most of the men have gone- their bodies will be in the furnaces as I write. I have already seen the plans for blasting the place. They are getting careless now the end is approaching.
    "They'll rip into the caverns with T-bombs and cannon, and finish the job off with a small sun-gun so that accurate dating of the Ruins through radio-active decay will be impossible. You won't be able to tell how old the Ruins are. So I have prepared this-prepared it! I have half a day to complete it.
    "What else can I tell you? My staff are all dead now. The killers themselves will be killed in their turn; a comparatively small explosion has been arranged to take care of them. There will be no witnesses. None left alive. The planners of this project are old men, all of them in their seventies. Soon they will be dead.
    "It is a good project. It deserves to succeed. The planners have integrity, and they think they know what they are doing. They will get their Ruins. Now, how old are the Ruins? You don't know of course. I will tell you: it is
    51
    eighty-nine years since the Aliens were first officially known to have come. And nineteen years ago, the last of the Free Spacers were wiped out.'
     "What are you going to do? I have done all I can.
     Thorstein"
    "I'd found this," said Dod. "We found it," he added.
    "I just did the background research," Scrimgouer replied. "It was all your idea."
    "We'd worked out the implications," continued Dod, talking to himself now. "I'd be in my early twenties," he went on. "After Space School. I was working for Psychdine and came across you. I had this idea about the Ruins, and we worked on it together. Let's see, what did we arrive at?"
    "You start off," said the Psychman.
    "First, this capsule isn't a fake. We checked back on Thorstein. It all fitted. But I wasn't interested enough to blow the Company up with it!"
    "You'd got something else to work on. As I said, I never knew what it was. All I knew about was the capsule. That seemed enough for me, but you said to hold it, so I did."
    "Something bigger than this-but what?" It had to be very big, thought Dod. "One thing at a time," he said after a moment's thought. "Let's get this thing sorted out first. We know that the Ruins were established to divert original talent from pure research-we deduced that as their function. Research would have meant new developments------"
    "New engines for space projects, attempts at contacting the. Aliens," suggested Scrimgouer. "Ninety-odd years ago, they'd worked out that the men with ideas-the ferrets of science would be trying to find ways and means of doing things in new ways. So, the Ruins."
    "And my compulsion." Dod had missed something, he was sure. If Psych had blocked him for his finding of the capsule, surely they would have moved it-"They didn't find out about the capsule!"
    "No," agreed Scrimgouer.
    Vague, unrelated flecks of information were trying to 52
    sort themselves into some kind of order in Dod's mind, but try as he would, nothing made sense.
    "It must have been the other thing they blocked me for."
    "That's logical," the Psychman said drily.
    "You used this as a key to help me break the block."
    "It was the only way I could think1 of."
    "And you don't even know what I was working on?"
    "Only that it was a sensational discovery. Like I told you, Psych went crazy when it broke. You'd have to be on the Board of Directors to get near it now."
    Already Dod was grappling with the problem. By sheer blind chance, the one man who could help him had been at Moonbase, and through him, he had begun to know of his real self; Scrimgouer had led him to the capsule. The fat man knew very little else of him, but the capsule might lead somewhere; and then there were the hints that kept teasing him, the faint recollection of work he had been on, one of Grandma's projects. What though?
    ""Well get back now," he said to Scrimgouer. He bent down, picked up the digger and heat-pencil and turned. Scrimgouer burrowed into the soft dust to hide the capsule and the book.
    "Still!" The harsh voice brought them both to their feet. "Turn slowly! Keep your hands by your sides. Easy!"
    The Flagman was alone, Dod noticed at once. Where were the rest? His thought raced; there were five in the usual scout crew. If he could jump this one-almost he leapt forward, but the blaster trained on him moved slightly downwards until it pointed at his stomach; he had no chance at all of covering the ten feet without being gunned down. He kept still. The digger weighed him down on one side, but he couldn't drop it and still have time to jump the Flagman.
    He was staring at the halo, Dod noticed, but the blaster never wavered; then his gaze swept the scene, took in the half-concealed capsule, and Scrimgouer, and returned to Dod. Out of the corner of his eye, Dod caught the Psych-man's tiny nod in the direction of the dim corridor, the other crew members would be along as soon as the Flagman called them up. This one had to be taken quickly before the others came.
    . "We wait here," ordered the Flagman. "Plagchief Getler will send instructions."
    53
    Dod remembered that the radios in the suits would not carry through the immensely thick barriers of rubble and rock. The Flagman would wait until the others came. Then one of them would go back for Getler. And that, thought Dod, will be that. The end of a promising personality. Back to the beginning again.
    Neither Dod nor Scrimgouer answered the Flagman. Maybe they could unnerve him, thought Dod. Maybe his gaze would dart onee to the corridor behind him, giving them a chance to leap the few feet that separated them, ... As if in answer, the Flagman took up a new position several yards further away, stepping back cautiously as he had been trained to do, one foot carefully feeling for obstacles, and the blaster never turning a degree from the proper angle. He could see both of his prisoners, and the corridor as well.
    Scrimgouer inclined his head again asking a question. Dod saw that the fat man intended to jump the Flagman, taking the blast himself, so that he could get away. Dod spoke quickly to stop the Psychman's suicidal attempt. "I've got the heads of two of your men in my trophy case," he said coldly to the Flagman. "Now put down that blaster, or you'll join them! Now!" The Flagman stood still, unmoving. "I want your head too," went on Dod. Like a robot, the Flagman stood motionless. Suddenly he spoke. "That does it for you," he said, waving the blaster at the capsule.
    How he knew mystified Dod-unless he had been listening in! Perhaps he had even recorded their discussion! Now the Flagman had to die.
    Dod's hands felt clammy inside the thin gloves of his suit. His left hand clenched hard on the heat-pencil; as it did, the rest followed naturally. He slip the button of the heat-pencil down to maximum, inclining the beam away from his foot, and hoping that the metal floor would stand the heat until it built up the necessary power.
    "He'll get the capsule for you," Dod said suddenly, nodding to Scrimgouer. The Flagman looked briefly at the Psychman as Dod knew he would; no one can resist the moment of curiosity when something is offered. It was the last thing the Flagman ever did.
    As his eyes slid to Scrimgouer, Dod angled the beam of the heat-pencil to the Flagman's face-mask, still keeping
    54
    his hand by his side. The lightning reflexes of the dying Flagman sent a bolt of energy over the spot where Dod had been standing before he leapt for the cover of a column. Then he died, horribly burned, and with the air rushing from his collapsing lungs, his face twisting into anguish as he tried to let out a roar of pain. It was .a quick, but a nasty-looking death.
    Dod threw the heat-pencil over to Scrimgouer, quickly dragged the Flagman's body away, and picked up the blaster. He gestured to the corridor and the Psychman nodded. They would have to wait for the rest of the detachment and then ambush them.
    Dod grinned. The long death of personality was over; he liked the feel of the blaster as he cradled its slender stock against his shoulder; all Space-pilots received a thorough grounding in weapons training, but they seldom had the opportunity of using their skill. Dod remembered now that he had been at the top of the intake; and another thing, too ... He darted quickly to the Flagman's body, and removed the long-bladed ceremonial dagger that every Flagman carried, hefting it carefully to check its balance.
    "Report, Number three," called a voice over the radio. "Report at once, Number three!" It was faint, but that it could be heard at all proved that the scout's crew was nearing; the dead third member of the party must have given a general indication of the area he was searching. Inevitably, the others must come this way; as Thorstein had implied, it was a natural route, one that he had worked out as unavoidable for anybody conducting a systematic search of this part of the seventh level.
    "No contact," reported another voice.
    "None here," said yet another.
    That made three. With the dead man, four. There was one man missing; he could have been left in the scout, of course, thought Dod, but it was unlikely. They would concentrate their forces where they were needed.
    "Close in on me," the fourth voice identified itself. It sounded nearer. It was time to act. Dod motioned Scrimgouer to stand in the middle of the cavern, where it was well-lit; he took up his own position to the right of the corridor along which the Flagmen would come, so that he had a clear view of the corridor without being blocked by the Psychman.
    55
    "Report, three!" the fourth voice demanded again. The Flagman sounded impatient although not yet concerned about the third man's failure to report.
    Scrimgouer busied himself in the cavern, as if inspecting a loose tangle of wires; he had kept the heat-pencil in his hand, Dod noticed, which was a mistake. The Psych-man was the worst hand with a blaster he had ever seen. Only when it came to bare hands did the Psychman come into his own.
    Tense and alert as he was, Dod found that he could not blanket the thoughts that now struggled for expression in his mind; it was as if his new personality, so long repressed, felt buoyantly exhilarated by the prospect of action with Plag. What made a man opt for Plag? There were thousands of interesting, even exciting, jobs to be had, hard and dangerous jobs, too; yet Plag never lacked for volunteers.
    "Level seven now," the fourth voice said. "Three! Come in!"
    There was more of caution in the voice. Dod wondered how they would enter; if they bunched together, one blast could wipe them out. If not, he would have to hunt those that survived the initial shot.
    Another few minutes passed before the first shadow appeared along the dim corridor, a thin grey shadow that snapped Dod into the tense, keyed-up mood of action; he had time to recall that he had never killed before this day. The Company had made a killer of him: the Company must take the consequences.
    The big Flagman froze as he made out Scrimgouer's figure; from the back it seemed like Dod. The Flagman signed to his companions and cautiously, one by one, they moved forward, covering each other's movements with blasters as they came. One man hung back, looking over his shoulder for the missing Flagman.
    Three of the Flagmen were now grouped together, although even as they moved up on the apparently unsuspecting figure in the middle of the cavern, they followed the regulation method of approaching an enemy. They were taking no chances. Dod had been lined up on them for several seconds and still the last man hung back. Was he the leader? There were no indications of rank on their suits, which suggested that no high-ranking Flagman was leading them.
    56
    At last, the man who had hung back stepped forward, and Dod almost had him in his field of fire.
    "Still!" ordered a loud clear voice.
    Scrimgouer jerked up comically and then stiffened. Still the last man hadn't moved into the field of fire. When he did move, he took Dod by surprise; he flashed up to Scrimgouer, the others still covering him, touch-whip in hand. Dod left him to Scrimgouer and touched the firing button as the last man shouted in surprise when he realized who it was in the middle of the cavern.
    The three men were lifted bodily and hurled against the jagged shards of metal of the Ruins, the blast of imploding atoms rending them. Then their bodies fell, slowly.
    In the same instant, Scrimgouer had seized the remaining Flagman in his hands and thrown him upwards and away, where he hung, dazed for a moment, until the light gravity brought him down; before he touched the ground, a second blast from Dod's weapon sent him rocketing away to the star-shaped pattern of girders where the capsule had been hidden.
    The cavern seemed cold with death. The tattered bodies brought to the fake Ruins an air of reality; with the ruin of the bodies, the imitation weapons and unworkable engines seemed more real. Dod looked down at the long, smooth, deadly-looking blaster; no more functional-seeming weapon existed in the System. It was the ultimate in its immense power-weight ratio.
    "Now what?" Scrimgouer wanted orders.
    "Destroy the evidence."
    "We could bury them," the Psychman suggested.
    "And have someone dig them up in a few weeks' time? No. There's a better way." He snapped his orders out, told Scrimgouer what he was going to do, looked at the' blaster and discarded it; he eased the dagger out of the sheath to see that it ran freely and loped -along the corridors to the surface.
    The Plag craft had closed in so that it rested beside Dod's moonbug; using the small vessel as cover, Dod worked his way to the open port of the scout. He wormed his way through the dust and debris of ten million visitors' rubbish, and came to the air-lock. The ship could be pressurized, or it could not. There could be another man aboard, or again the whole crew might be dead in the
    57
    caverns below. Dod took no chances. Quickly he opened the inner door, releasing the air inside; if anyone inside had been so rash as to take off his helmet for a few minutes, he would now be dead. Dod flung himself through the port as soon as the air rushed out. The advantage was always with the attacker, they had taught him at Space School; the long-bladed dagger was ready.
    Completing his roll, Dod flipped to his feet just as the man inside jumped for the hand-weapon he had incautiously put down; in the same moment, Dod recognized Getler.
    Before the Plagchief could bring the weapon to bear, Dod whipped his long, heavy body through the air, knife extended, so that he crossed the small cabin like a living lance. The blade jarred and writhed in his hand as he felt it breaking through Getler's rib-cage, but still the Plagchief struggled like a moth on a pin, aimlessly it seemed. Then Dod saw that the wildly flailing hands were trying to reach the emergency button which would set up a screaming row on all networks, and would bring scores of Plag vessels to the aid of the scout.
    Dod kicked the burly man's legs from under him, and Getler died. The brief flurry of action over, Dod had time to think about what he had become, about the changes that had taken place in his mentality during the space of fifty hours; from being a sheep, he had become a tiger; instead of thinking at a low, safe level of conditioned resignation, he was moving and acting quickly and empirically, suiting his actions to the circumstances in which he found himself. He knew he was different from the man he had been before he was blocked by Psych, also: harder, ruthless.
    Scrimgouer had worked hard whilst he had been tackling the Plagchief; yet another hour's hard work was necessary to get the corpses to the surface and obliterate all signs of the fight in the seventh level. Finally it was finished.
    "Ill get used to the changes in you," said Scrimgouer when they had completed loading the Plag scout. "But it's going to take time. You were never like this."
    Dod knew.
    "No pity," said Scrimgouer. There was no answer, thought Dod. There was a job to be done-coldly, murderously, but it had to be done efficiently; seven hundred
    58
    men had been killed by Plag, and they would do the same thing again. Whatever else had to be done, and no matter what were the obstacles, he would see it through now that he had begun.
    Dod punched out a course for the seout, set the controls to activation in five minutes' time, and joined Scrim-gouer to watch it take off.
    The Plag vessel blasted off with its crew of dead men, flipped to a height of seventy miles, described three huge loops at a speed and rate of turn which would have killed any living person on board, and flashed straight down into the seven-mile gash in the ground where nearly two centuries before the star-probe had crashed after trying to penetrate the Aliens' screens. Its engines burned out as it attained a speed for which it was never designed, and from the moonbug the two watchers could hear the emergency call from the scout as the alarm circuits were activated by the ferocious battering the craft was undergoing from its straining dive. There was a small shock wave from the chasm as the Plag vessel dissolved into dust.
    Dod was already in the moonbug when the tremors ceased. He punched a course for Moonbase.
    "Now what?" asked Scrimgouer. "Now there's a hundred Plag ships making for the wreck-what do we do?"
    "There'll be a full-scale panic at the base. You drift off in- the uproar. I'm surprised when they tell me Getler's ship got out of control. There'll be nothing left of it- you're covered if anyone asks questions?"
    "Yes. I'm in a lab working. My apparatus is set up."
    "And there's no check on your movements?"
    "I walked-remember?"
    Scrimgouer left Dod to his own thoughts. What to do now?
    Once near Moonbase he could slow down and approach the Trans bay as if nothing had happened in a completely uneventful dig in the Ruins; no one would question a Commander, in any case. If there was going to be any suspicion, it would come later, when Plag had worked out times and distances.
    Smoothly the little bug ate up the distance, and as/they neared the abandoned holes and buildings that had been set up by successive generations of lunar explorers, Dod wondered if he had done the right thing in destroying
    59
    the scout. He looked over at Scrimgouer, who misinterpreted the glance.
    "They had to be killed," he offered, thinking that Dod felt some remorse. Dod nodded. "It's tough on you," the Psychman added. ,
    "You know as well as I do that those conditioned apes would have burned us down at a word from Getler," Dod said irritably.
    "Then what's worrying you? Think we should have taken the scout and made for Terra? It would have made it."
    Scrimgouer was using his professional techniques to needle him, Dod noticed in amusement; the theory was that if Dod talked, he would be able to plan more systematically.
    "So it would have made it," he said. "And then what? I wouldn't know where to start looking, and Plag would find us in a few days."
    "There're hideouts on the Moon."
    "Not for me. Not with this," Dod said, indicating the halo. It was working, he found, and again he could plan. "No, first we need some data. No action before that. Then when there's something we can work on, we act. Fast."
    "Want to check back on what we've established?" .Scrimgouer offered. Another Psych technique, thought Dod. It was useful though.
    "Starting from the block, then," he said to the Psychman.
    "And when you've got some sort of program, you can feed it into the comps at Moonbase for analysis."
    "Maybe. From the block-here it is. I must have known about the Ruins. Why they were built. If you want to stop work in a particular field, you have to divert the available energy."
    "Right," said Scrimgouer. "That's straightforward."
    "But what about the Ruins themselves-how long would it be before they were fully explored?" Obviously they wouldn't occupy talented men's time for an unlimited period. "Thorstein!" Dod said immediately. "He mentioned a whole series of Ruins projects!"
    "Go on."
    "Another thing: when the Company system was evolved, a definite psychological pattern emerged. The
    60
    brights were put to useless research, and the mediocre had totex."
    "The Games," pointed out the Psychman.
    "They're part of the pattern. In any society you have the aggressive urge. That was how the Games came to be developed-men could fight, but there was no danger. And for the few incurable savages, there was Plag."
    Scrimgouer's professional interest was engaged. "They did a cosmic-class job on your block, but you're beating it down now!"
    For the masses, there was totex and the spurious thrill of watching the Games; for the would-be scholars, there were the Ruins; and Plag, which was a special case on its own. Dod remembered now his evaluation of the society he lived in; in many ways it was a well-balanced edifice.
    "Economical," he said to Scrimgouer.
    "Exactly," said Scrimgouer who did not know what Dod was talking about, but who was pleased with the success of his methods.
    "I got to the point where I knew the Company was a fake. I had proved it. Yet I was too busy to publish Thorstein's message! I had the chance of doing a tremendous amount of damage to an organization I detested, but I did nothing about it!"
    What must he have been working on that could eclipse such a discovery? As he thought about it, the picture became clearer.
    "Obviously they didn't block me because of the Ruins- what I'd found was only on the flea-bite level when you consider the size of the Company. If that had been my threat to the Company, they'd have swatted me down, not left me alive."
    "That's logical," said Scrimgouer. "And we're eight minutes away from the base."
    "So what I was working on was still, possibly, of use to the Company."
    "Yes."
    "And that's where I've got to start-within the Company itself."
    "At the base?"
    "No. On Terra. There's a couple of half-memories at the back of my mind that indicate Terra as the starting place, although if I have the chance I may see what the comps have to say here on the Moon."
    61
    "I've done all I can," pointed out Scrimgouer. "All I can do here-but I'm good at finding things out. I'd like to see it through with you."
    "What are your chances of getting to Terra?"
    "Good I think. There was talk of wholesale transfers to the new establishment that's being set up to investigate you-maybe the whole Psych unit will be sent to Terra."
    "Do what you can. And keep in touch." He grinned at the Psychman as the bug cruised slowly into the Trans bay. "I've no doubt you'll find a way."
    When he stopped the bug, Dod looked at Scrimgouer again. The fat man's ugly face was set in a grim, stony expression, as if he shared Dod's premonition-the feeling grew in him that the search he had undertaken was going to be a wild business, that there would be more and more of broken, shattered ships, and distorted corpses; pity touched him for a moment, but the sight of the Plag detachment making hurriedly for the patrol cruiser banished the feeling. There was no room in the Company for the faint-hearted.
    FOUR
    in the furious activity at Moonbase, Dod's arrival went unnoticed. Every available ship was being hastily manned in answer to the emergency call of the vessels relaying the Plag scout's emergency call; even battleships were diverted to take part in the search, for the loss of a Plag vessel was a momentous matter-especially as the call had been cut off so abruptly.
    The elaborate scheme Scrimgouer had devised for slipping away unnoticed from the moonbug was not needed; Dod motioned him to get away fast, as one more space-suited figure amongst so many would not be observed.
    Dod walked quickly out of the Trans bay and was immediately spotted by a worried-looking Flagman.
    "The Chairman's orders," he said hastily. "Commander 62
    Dod, you are to embark on the twenty hundred hours shuttle." Dod saw the relief at having given the message fade from the man's face, and cold hate replace it, reminding him that from now on, every Flagman would be his personal enemy.
    He nodded and walked on, feeling the needles of hatred from the Flagman's eyes in his back. The Flagman was only a young man, but he had the face of a dedicated fanatic.
    * * *
    Dod spent his last hour on Moonbase with the comps. No one tried to place any restrictions on his movements, although he had the feeling that he was under discreet surveillance the whole of the time. He had done no, packing as he wanted to cut himself off from any associations with the dead five years he had been on the Pluto run; the new life demanded a complete break with the old.
    Waiting for a series of deductive processes to be completed by the big machine, Dod leafed through the nonsensical answers the comp had already given.
    Gompertz sidled up and took one end of the tape Dod was reading.
    "Interesting," he said. "May I, Commander?"
    Before Dod could stop him, he reached for the new tape that was sliding out of the chattering machine.
    "ONE CONTACT IS ONE CONTACT IS A CONTACT-NO
    CONTACT HAS PREVIOUSLY BEEN REPORTED----THE CONTACT
    IS NOT OF A TYPE ASSOCIATED WITH HUMAN CONTACT----
    THEREFORE IT IS AN ALIEN CONTACT-IT IS ONLY ONE CONTACT AND DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A MEANS OF RECIPROCAL COMMUNICATION---------"
    "That's all," said Dod. The machine began to repeat the information.
    "It's bewildered, just as we are," said the Counsellor.
    "It's inhibited," said Dod.
    "You're becoming even less so," Gompertz told him.
    "I told you-danger does that. It sharpens you."
    "We should try it on Comp," suggested Gompertz, grinning slyly and showing his long dog's teeth.
    "Tell them the Aliens are here?"
    Abruptly Gompertz said, "You're not fooling me, Dod. You know something I don't know. And something the machine doesn't know either." He looked at the shining
    63
    halo. "There's our answer if we can only find it-what is it you've found out?"
    Dod ignored his question. "What's the program when I get to Terra?" he said.
    "Not my field," Gompertz told him. "I could guess, though."
    "Well?"
    "Look at these tapes." He passed one to Dod. It was sheer rubbish.
    "IF ONE CONTACT IS RECEIVED THE ALIENS ARE IN CONTACT----IF THEY WISH FOR CONTACT THEY WISH FOR UNDERSTANDING----THE DESIRE FOR UNDERSTANDING IS EQUIVALENT TO A WISH FOR SYMPATHY-THEY ARE FRIENDLY ALIENS . . . MET WITH SPEECHES . . . BANNERS . . . INTERMARRIAGE . . . EQUAL RIGHTS ..."
    Dod smiled as he read it. He liked the Counsellor's saturnine answering grin.
    "So?" he asked Gompertz.
    "At the moment they just haven't got enough to work on, and they're doing what they can. Psych will be hi the same position for a considerable time. They'll fall for any fanciful theory, no matter how far-fetched." He chuckled. "You could lead them a merry dance if you wanted tol" He passed another tape over. "Read this!"
    ". . . NEXT PHASE ... A CONTACT IS A CONTACT IS A CONTACT-IF ONE CONTACT IS RECEIVED THE ALIENS WISH TO LIMIT THEMSELVES TO ONE CONTACT-IF THEY WISH TO LIMIT CONTACT THEY ARE SUSPICIOUS-SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR IS UNFRIENDLY BEHAVIOR . . . PRODUCTION ON A WAR FOOTING . . . ESTABLISHMENT OF TWELVE NEW BATTLE FLEETS . . ."
    "Synotes," explained Gompertz. "An oddity of logic. Not a satisfactory way of solving one's problems."
    "Can you think of a better?" asked Dod.
    Gompertz regarded him for a moment. "You have changed!" He spoke without the dry, uninterested, scholarly tone in his voice. "Yes, I can think of a better way! I'll get in touch on Terra."
    Scrimgouer first, and now Gompertz. Dod felt he had gained a new ally; you felt you could trust a man like this.
    Something had been gained out of the last two days- out of the welter of fear, unknowledge, shock, hate, fierce driving action, and sudden blinding revelation-and again Dod was conscious of a new development in his per-
    64
    sonality. The first flicker of humor he could recall experiencing darted into his mind when he thought of how he had rushed about the cabin of the tired old freighter when the halo had first appeared. How he had peered into every reflecting surface a score of times in a minute, hoping against hope that the halo had gone. He laughed aloud.
    "What's funny? This?" asked Gompertz. He held out the latest zany tape.
    "Not that." He couldn't explain although he wanted to.
    Gompertz spoke seriously. "Let me know when you
    want to share the joke." He carefully dumped the tapes
    into the disposal chute. "Could be I'm able to help you."
    He walked away as the two Flagmen-inevitably two
    of them, thought Dod-walked up to where Dod was
    standing.
    "Shuttle ready, Commander," said the taller of the two. "Departure time," explained the other. Dod looked at their careful, killers' faces. They represented the most highly organized force in the System, and the most dedicated one; there were millions of them. You couldn't fight them all, Dod thought, feeling glad of the self-confessed weakness. It made what he had to say to Counsellor Gompertz easier to get out. He caught up with the old man, who looked wryly at the escort.
    "I may be calling on you," he told him. "Thanks for the offer."
    "Any time, Commander," Gompertz said. He looked up at the halo. "Just don't leave it too late."
    He was a strange mixture, this old man. Dod considered. When he had seen the inefficacy of the arguments he was trying to put over, he had given up easily; and yet when he scented that Dod was not what he seemed to be, he had tried pertinaciously to find what Dod knew. As if by some sort of instinct for great happenings, Gompertz seemed to be aware that Dod was on to something momentous.
    It could wait till he reached Terra, thought Dod. It could all wait. He had been waiting for five years, and he could afford a little more time for careful planning before he decided on the next step he would take.
    The last view he had of the Moon was on the 'ceiver in the shuttle. Regular passenger services had been suspended for this one flight, and only Company officials ac-
    65
    companied him; too many of them, Dod thought. They avoided conversation, looking carefully away from him, their eyes returning to the shimmering halo when they thought he wasn't looking.
    They even remembered he hadn't had his daily totex session; what would he like? Dod left it to them-whatever he asked for would not be available unless it fitted in with the pattern Psych had ordained; wearily he pulled himself into the totex globe and waited for the epic to begin. It went on for two hours.
    He heard the ancient compliments flow, and the high-sounding resolutions pour out of handsome, eager faces; saw the shimmering of antique cannon-fire and the poised terror of the heroine; tried to sleep as the small detachment battled against enormous odds; missed altogether the heroism of sacrifice that brought rescue to the little band. He woke to the sound of stirring march music.
    For a mind-splintering moment he thought he was back on the run from Pluto.
    Then he blinked into full consciousness and saw Terra on the 'ceiver. Whatever happened on Terra, he thought grimly, whether he won out in his search, or lost, one thing he was determined upon: there would be no going back to the life of Space-pilot Dodl
    66
    II. REPRISE ONE
    eager young reporters jostled the Plag guards, pushing their needle-eyed beamers through the gaps in their close ranks, whilst the older men calmly made for the best positions to view the Moon shuttle; women reporters shrieked promises to the Flagmen, and men cursed them, their calls mingling with the excited babble of three million people who were thronging the enormous port; it was going off as planned, a storming, noisy, cheerful, and above all, a reassuring affair, for the Company wanted the System to feel that this was a nine-day wonder, an amazing and fantastic event-and one which would soon be forgotten, like the tremendous series of Games years previously when van Gulik nailed four out of four opponents in the most exciting series ever; like the reception of the monster machine transhipped from the Moon Ruins at a gigantic cost in a specially constructed shuttle, and which now sprawled over half an acre in Company Park, a nightmare in alloy and plastics, and on which the children now played as their elders passed without affording its weird bulk a glance.
    The Company had built up tension and excitement over all the networks, especially the non-official sensationalist agency-run networks, "leaking" snippets of information about Dod-his loyal career, his skill as a Space-pilot, the color of his eyes, the size of the halo (they were already on sale in the shops when the shuttle landed on Terra, tiny beamers for the kids to clip on to their ears, so that when they twitched their ears a bright fluorescent halo appeared); and now, with full press and network coverage from every planet and most of the satellites, Dod's arrival was being beamed with all the ballyhoo and publicity Psych could think of; it was a bigger reception than van Gulik's, bigger than that of the monster machine. It was a field day for the commentators.
    67
    When Dod stepped out of the shuttle, he knew what to expect, having been prepared for the reception by Psych. He smiled and waved modestly. Millions shrieked, called, whistled, and howled back, but none louder than the reporters and commentators. '
    "Just a few words, Commander! Commander! Please! Sir I commander!" The Flagmen stared ahead rigidly, keeping them away from the shuttle; then the Plag commander gave the order. As he gave it, he tried to smile benignly, remembering his course on public relations and the necessity for preserving an acceptable image. It was like the leer of a hungry wolf, Dod thought.
    "You can't all come!" he said jovially. "Now can you?" A crash of protest from the reporters greeted him, bringing the response that had been decided upon. "Right! All right. Just one, then. Send one man to interview the Commander."
    After some moments of frenzied debate, a florid-faced middle-aged man was ejected from the crowd, a man the others thought equal to the occasion: the senior 'ceiver cast commentator.
    He had a fine sense of the dramatic, walking across to Dod in an unhurried fashion and pausing before he asked his first question.
    "Just tell us, Commander-tell us exactly how you felt at the moment you saw the halo for the first time."
    "Terrified," said Dod simply.
    Billions of watchers laughed, groaned in disbelief, shrieked with the suspense, or waited shocked and tense for the next question; some turned off hi bewilderment and fear.
    "When did you first know the Aliens were involved?"
    "When Counsellor Gompertz explained the situation," said Dod. Psych had approved of the answer in the shuttle.
    "It's a fantastic responsibility, Commander," said the commentator, wonder and awe creeping into his voice. "What are your plans now?"
    "I will put myself at the disposal of the Company's research teams and offer my own services to help them- I did a course at Space School," he explained.
    On the screens of the 'ceivers throughout the System, the watchers saw Dod's dedicated face, and the Company march-music welled up in the background, stronger now.
    68
    The mixers said it was the best human story of the decade later.
    "One last question," called the interviewer hurriedly as he saw that the Plag Commander's grin had slipped sideways as he watched the clock. "Just one!" he repeated. The smile was put back in its place.
    Dod held his chin higher and squared his shoulders. The next question had to come.
    'Tell all of the people watching-they're with you all the way, Commander-tell them," he said, and his voice dropped an octave, "what it feels like to be the first man to have contact with the Aliens. Tell us, Commander, please."
    "Yes," said Dod. The vast port was silent; there was no noise from the crowd-silence, except for an odd comical popping sound that Dod recognized as the metal of the shuttle cooling. He allowed a tear to form at the corner of his eye. "Proud-very proud," he said feelingly.
    A hundred needle beamers zoomed to track the tear that rolled down his cheek and on to his chin; Dod had seen the effect in an old 'tex.
    He judged that he had made an excellent impression; if the Company doesn't give me at least limited freedom for this performance, >he thought, it isn't the great soft-cored jelly I think it is.
    The great port shuddered with the released breath of the millions gathered there. Only the Flagmen stared ahead dry-eyed. Did they suspect that Getler's scout had been crashed deliberately yet?
    Certainly they looked at him with watchful, suspicious eyes. Dod waved once more to the crowd and then was escorted to the Boardroom, where a full meeting of the Board of Directors of the nine planets was in session.
    * * *
    Listening to his masters arranging his life for him made Dod feel only mildly angry; this was the way things had to be for the moment, although he didn't like it. It could be tolerated.
    They were telling him what would become of him, but it was Salkind that gave the orders. At one time, Dod thought that Cohui, the irascible Venusian Director, might demand to have a say in affairs, but the thin hard-faced man restrained himself. Obviously he resented Salkind's
    69
    dictatorial methods, but he was not such a fool as to challenge the Chairman openly.
    "It will be a pleasant life, Dod," Salkind told him. "We'll try to make it bearable. Not too much publicity, of course."
    He explained that Psych had submitted that the public's interest would wane soon, and that follow-up stories could be sent out at increasingly longer intervals without raising more than marginal interest. Nothing significant would be released, of course.
    "A confined life, though," the Chairman explained carefully. "Let's get that straight once and for all. There's no question of your being allowed to wander off unguarded." He looked at Eiserer who took him up.
    "Cranks," explained the Psychiarch. Dod thought he looked more like a model for the 'ceiver casts that ever; in his tight-fitting silver suit which matched his newly-silvered skull with the ring of dark hair shaved to a perfect circle, he could be a model for one of the more exclusive salons. "Cranks," he repeated, with a delicate gesture of his hands. "Someone gets the idea you're evil. The urge for personal notoriety does the rest-a wonderful death for them, cut down by Plag after they've killed incarnate evil."
    It was an indication of the way Psych thought, considered Dod. Just as Gompertz had told him, Psych was prepared to consider any crazy possibility; admittedly, there was an element of logic in the idea of protecting him, but to tie it up with assassination by fanatics was stretching logic to the point of absurdity. Here was one of Psych's weaknesses. Perhaps it could be turned to account-had Gompertz been hinting that?
    Whilst the Psychiarch talked on, Dod listened with only half his full attention. Here on Terra, and now, just before Psych began their full-scale investigation into the halo and its meaning, he gradually realized that he had not come to any firm conclusion about the halo himself-he had listened to others' views, but he had not contributed anything himself. Some things were falling into place, but still he could not think clearly about the person he had been before he was blocked.
    He had reached some tentative conclusions. There had been a purpose in the life he had lived and which had been interrupted; he had found that the Ruins were a fake,
    70
    as Thorstein had indicated; he had been blocked; and the Aliens had branded him.
    Two things stood out starkly in opposition to one another: the halo, and the research he had been engaged upon. The trouble was that there was no correlation between them. It should be simple, he thought, to bring them together. Call the halo x, and his unknowledge about the research y; throw in the block'-z. And form an equation. An elementary proposition in logic.
    The trouble was that the factors were unknown quantities, though, Take the halo as a start: however random the selection of himself appeared to be, it was stretching coincidence too far to suggest that it was in fact random; unquestionably this was an attempt at contact by the Aliens, and that they should have chosen a man with an inquiring mind, a man who had been given the ultimate treatment for possessing an inquiring mind-the block- pointed even more strikingly to the positive nature of the Aliens' choice.
    More data, he thought. Facts. First, a full appraisal of his past. There would be time for theorizing then.
    "You could outline the program for the Commander," Salkind said as the Psychiarch completed his speech with an assurance that Psych would find out what there was to know about the halo.
    "Certainly," said Eiserer. "The first phase will be a full, most searching examination of the Commander physically. Everything will be studied, every fibre of his body. Every cell. And then the mind." He was interrupted by the Venusian Director.
    "Heard about this Kindet test-disgusting idea," he growled.
    Salkind looked hard at Cohui, but said nothing. Dod saw the dislike in his eyes; all was not complete harmony on the Board.
    "I shall report weekly to the Board," went on Eiserer, "but I do not expect an early breakthrough. Dropping the Kindet test makes the investigation so much slower." He looked longingly at the halo and smoothed his silver scalp.
    "You have confidence," Salkind told him. "Report when you are ready-has anything been discovered about Dod's vessel yet, incidentally?"
    "Psych Engineer Sliepchevik is working on the theory that the engine's efficiency increase has something to do
    71
    with a time effect, possibly something to do with Pluto's field. He won't commit himself, of course."
    Salkind dominated the meeting, and when he dismissed him, Dod still felt a stir of response to the power in the Chairman's voice; he radiated power, where Eiserer, for instance, radiated only the meticulous aura of intellect.
    "There's no reason why you shouldn't live a normal life," the Chairman told him. "If you have any problems, I shall deal with them myself-as before!"
    There would be no petty interference, Dod knew, as the Chairman's quick action against the two Flagmen who had beaten him would be remembered. The interview was over. There had hardly been a comment even from the Directors, but Dod wondered what they were thinking; Cohui, now-once or twice he had seemed on the verge of tackling Salkind himself. Would the impact of the first contact with the Aliens upset the tight control that Sal-kind had exercized over the Board for the last twenty years?
    Theoretically, the Board was represented by the Chairman, but Salkind had enlarged the Chairman's powers until his word was the only law of the System. How did it feel, Dod wondered, to be the sole arbiter of the nine planets for two decades-in complete and absolute command, and then come up against something new, something you couldn't explain or understand?
    Salkind had been through twenty years of unchallenged supremacy, gradually whittling down even the semblance of opposition; but could he and the Company absorb and contain the impact of a new idea, especially one so explosive as contact with the Aliens?
    Dod was sure of one thing: Salkind would take no chances. He would be under twenty-four hour supervision. And he would never leave the precincts of the huge Psych establishment at Serampur.
    * * *
    That was the way Psych had planned it.
    Serampur was built on a civilized, pleasant Second Millennium plan, on the site of the old city. A ring of buildings sloped smoothly inwards to a central recreation area; beyond was open country, and, in the distance the first of the great maize fields, which swept in smooth folds over as much as a hundred miles each in size. There were no Third Millennium cloud towers, no tricks with
    72
    mirror edifices or whirl pits. Psych preferred to invest in equipment rather than in buildings.
    After two days of rest, Dod underwent the fullest physical investigation Psych had ever carried out. When Psych was finished, they could detail every cell in his body; they missed nothing. But all of the teams of Psych-men assigned to work on him obviously thought this a mere preliminary to the real task, and when the leader of the investigation team, Rudge, announced that the next phase of investigation was to begin, Dod sensed renewed, vital interest amongst the Psychmen.
    Rudge in particular was keyed-up with excitement. Dod was curious about the man who had been chosen to lead the Psych teams. He was a comparatively young man, not much older than Dod himself, but he carried himself about like a much older man, having a nervous, fretting disposition. He had Eiserer's confidence, and in turn Rudge admired the Psychiarch, copying his dress and mannerisms. He eyed Dod with the same cold, calculating gaze as Eiserer's; Dod detested him on first sight.
    Dod had to admit to himself, though, that Rudge had set out to be co-operative, falling in immediately with Dod's suggestion that he should undertake his own investigation of the halo. He had been enthusiastic about the idea in a condescending way, and Dod knew that there would be no privacy-Rudge would make sure that the comps kept a record of any queries he made.
    The truth was, Dod admitted to himself, after half the first week on Terra was gone, that he was getting no further forward in establishing his real identity. There was nothing at Serampur to jog his memory; Scrimgouer had not yet put in an appearance, and he could not ask for the fat Psychman as a matter of elementary caution; Dod felt his optimism fading.
    The nature of the Psych tests didn't help. The association tests, for instance. Nothing, thought Dod, could be more pointless.
    "Think!" one of the team would order. "Ready?"
    "Ready."
    "The word is 'Halo.' "
    The banks of machines collected his body's responses- temperatures of surface areas and internal organs, humidities, densities, circulatory and respiratory changes- and interpreted them, flashing the information on to doz-
    73
    .
    ens of screens, each watched by its earnest attendant.
    "Hallo," Dod repeated, and let his mouth run on. "Balo. Calo. Hello-hollow-billow-old bill-old book . . ."
    Psych seemed to like it, so he continued at length; alert and purposeful, Rudge mouthed a replica of Eiserer's slick smile. He was so anxious to achieve a significant success that Dod wondered if the Psychman was not building his hopes too high on the prospects of an early resolving of the mystery of the halo. Rudge looked Like a man who might crack under pressure.
    The first week passed, and Dod decided to try the big comps in an attempt to discover something of his real identity; however, he could not ask direct questions-if he were to do so, Psych would know immediately that he had beaten down the block. What he could do was to run a series of more or less routine questions about the Aliens, and slide in the odd query about the period of his earlier researches in the hope that the two fields would overlap. He was sure now that they did. It was a frustrating method of running an investigation, but it was better than marking time doing nothing at all.
    His first program was innocuous. The Psychmen in the big control room carried on with their own tasks in elaborate unconcern; Dod was not deceived by this seeming disinterest. When he punched out any query, no matter how trivial, it would be duplicated on another machine and studied by Psych.
    "Detail all available data on contact with the Aliens," Dod instructed the comp. The answer ran into tens of thousands of words, reams of tape flipping out of the comp for over three hours. Dod ploughed through it: there was nothing new. Even so, he was surprised by the tremendous amount of work that had been put into conventional methods of communicating with the Aliens. Everything had been tried: every form of radiation and energy had been converted into a rational code. But there was no lead to Dod himself.
    "Evaluate the halo as a contact."
    The answers only carried from the smaller, less sophisticated, machines on Moonbase in the length and idiocy of their content.
    "Why was Space-pilot Dod the first contact and"-Dod slipped in what was on the surface an innocent question- "is there anything significant in the choice of Dod?"
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    The machines thought the contact was random. That proved one thing, however: this particular comp had been fed with false information about him. It conjectured that the-same thing could have happened to any Space-pilot.
    Another week passed before he caught a hint of the existence of a whole new range of comps situated in another part of the comp block; he came by the knowledge in a way which suggested a plan to him.
    During the time he had been in Serampur, Dod had noticed that the leader of the Psych teams seemed to be deteriorating as a methodical scientist, and, more for his own amusement than for any serious purpose, Dod had devised a scheme to test the Psych leader's credulity.
    Bored by the dull round of seemingly aimless Psych tests, Dod had been thinking about the significance of the halo when he remembered something that Gompertz had told him: if the Aliens ever wanted to find him again, they would have no difficulty in doing just that. In turn, that suggested a historical parallel. Rudge might fall for it. Now, Dod felt a razor-keenness returning to his mental faculties, and the prospect of pitting his wits against the Psych man intrigued him.
    Dod had made quite sure that Rudge was about, and then fed in his query: "Presume the halo to be a means of identification-what historical analogies does this suggest?"
    The comp flashed, rattled, and inside it, Dod could hear the purring noise which meant the answer was about to come; but nothing came out. Instead, a loud warning bell rang shrilly, and lights flashed madly all over the great wall of indicators.
    Rudge rushed over.
    'The machine," Dod pointed out, "-it's broken." He had guessed that the machine had been conditioned to block any avenues of enquiry he might make, but this commotion amazed him. Obviously, Psych had inhibited it to the point of senility. Even the modest deviation from the norm that he had asked the machine to use as a premise had brought it to a stop.
    Rudge nipped a switch and Dod's question came out. The Psychman read it, turned red, resumed his calmness, and spoiled the effect by stammering his question. "This idea of yours, Commander-a remarkable notion! Would
    75
    you care to explain it in detail and perhaps I can find a comp which will tackle it."
    "Another set of comps?"
    The Psychman answered without thought. "Why yes- but let's get on to your idea!"
    Dod's mind was already racing. Somewhere-and it must be fairly close-was the entrance to the comps Psych used. And in all probability not one of them would be doctored like those in the big comp room he was in now.
    "Well, it's something I thought about after you'd been explaining the impact of the Aliens when they first arrived on the Confederated Planets." It was a safe bet that Rudge would not remember accurately what he had told Dod, and an even safer bet that he would be pleased to hear that he had been the real author of the idea. "It's pigeons."
    "Pigeons!"
    "It was when you were talking about folk-lore. That gave me the idea."
    Rudge concentrated and then moaned in despair. "Can't you tell me anything else?"
    "It was just a random idea," Dod shrugged. "If you could put it to your comps-about here somewhere, aren't they?"
    "Right below! But the pigeons!"
    "Well," and Dod pointed to the halo shimmering above his head, "they used to ring pigeons, didn't they?"
    Rudge shot off, calling orders to his assistants in his high-pitched voice as he went. They scattered, thought Dod, like a flock of pigeons when a cat appears. And they were all heading the same way.
    Dod felt that at last things were moving. He had sat,for hours in his luxurious quarters thinking out schemes and plans, but nothing had seemed viable: until by a happy chance, the pigeon idea had suggested itself. At one time he had thought of escape from Serampur, but it was out of the question. He had given up counting the sonic pickups and the beamer-bugs in his quarters; after the first two dozen, he was sure he would never be able to locate more than half of them. And it was the same wherever he went: always Psychmen watching, and Flagmen guarding him. His only chance of escape would be through an accomplice, and the only man he could trust, Scrimgouer,
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    had not turned up at Serampur; there was no way out. Only through working within the Psych organization could he hope to find out who he was; once that was accomplished it would be time to think of escape.
    Rudge had fallen for the idea. When Dod saw him the next day, the Psychman's eyes shone with excitement; the scores of section leaders and their team-members talked of nothing but the pigeon idea; Rudge's prestige had increased tremendously.
    "A most interesting theory," Rudge told him when Dod asked what he thought of it. He avoided any further mention of the subject, however, changing the discussion by asking about Dod's earlier work on the Ruins.
    Dod treated him to a half-hour lecture on the Ruins before introducing the first stage of the plan he had evolved. Rudge had accepted the cosmic pigeon theory and in consequence the Psychman must be grateful; there was at hand another battery of comps which could tell Dod about himself: if the ambitious Rudge could be persuaded that it was in his own interest to let Dod get at them...
    "Most interesting," Rudge told him. He looked anxious to get away, but Dod would not let him go.
    "You found that theory you suggested useful?" Dod asked.
    Rudge found no difficulty in accepting that the idea was his alone now. "Yes," he admitted. "In fact the Psychiarch wants a report soon, and really I must get to work on it!"
    "If anything else should crop up-if I remember anything that might be of use again . . .?" He left the suggestion in midair. The Psychman looked unimpressed, but that was only a professional trick, Dod thought.
    "You could let me know," said Rudge. "Personally."
    "These machines don't seem particularly helpful," said Dod, pointing to the row of comps and laughing.
    The Psychman's eyes narrowed. "If you have anything useful-really useful, we could get around that difficulty."
    Success meant everything to Rudge, Dod thought happily. Having sown the seed of hope, he let the Psychman go. Now all he had to do was to convince Rudge that he had something really good. And then there was the matter of persuading him that Dod should get to the other comps-alone.
    After the day's sessions of tests, Rudge sent a copy of 77
    the comps' first reaction to the pigeon theory. It made interesting reading, if only for the fact that it confirmed Psych's susceptibility to the more hare-brained of theories. "pigeons-dove family-as food delicacy amongst primitive teutonic groups---early means of communication---trained birds achieve great accuracy and
    reliability . . ."
    And so it went on, voluminously. What impressed Dod was the fantastic inventiveness of man when it came to means of communication. The survey took the ringing of pigeons, extended the subject by analogy until it had covered comprehensively every known method of branding animal life: the sonic beams in the oceans which kept all fish life surveyed; the minute beamers in birds, based on their own sense of orientation; the radioactive particles used to study insect migration-the sheer ingenuity of it all brought him to an optimistic state of mind. Wherever a problem had occurred, an answer had been found; and so it would prove in his case.
    Pacing about his quarters, Dod tried every trick of memory-jogging he was able to pick up from the Psychmen, trying to make sense of the hints that baffled him. He could remember odd incidents of Space School now- especially where Scrimgouer was concerned; but obviously this part of his life had come back because of the impact his mind had received during the stress of sudden action in the Ruins when Scrimgouer had been there; nothing more about Grandma had emerged, nothing to connect her with his growing feeling that, somehow, it had all begun with her. It would be useful to set Scrimgouer to work on the connection of Grandma with Psych-there was one, he was sure-but the fat Psychman had not yet turned up. It was beginning to look as if he was alone, as he had been when the halo first appeared.
    * * *
    In the three days that followed, Dod set himself only one target: to discover the whereabouts of the entrance to the comps which Psych used. The comps lay in the bottom gallery of the northern segment of the huge circle which was the Psych establishment at Sefampur, but these were only the fake machines; somewhere-somewhere close, Dod estimated-was the entrance to the effective machines. It hadn't taken Rudge long to run a first check on Dod's pigeon theory; in fact the Psych leader had been
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    back in ten minutes, and several minutes of that time would have been taken up with punching in queries and waiting for answers. Wherever it was, it was close to the useless comps.
    Dod watched the movements of the Psychmen, timing their absences when they went to correlate information, noting the position of each door, eliminating the exits and entrances one by one as he discovered the lay-out of the gallery; but it was of no use. The place was too big; his resources-the acumen of one man-were insufficient; he would have to take the bull by the horns. Instead of waiting for a suitable opportunity to arise, he had to create one. It was time to put into operation the second stage of his plan to use Rudge's ambition as a lever.
    "I'm bored," he told Rudge. "Not what you're thinking -it's not that I miss the life I've been used to, though sometimes I get to thinking of the Pluto run." He smiled sadly. Rudge looked sympathetic, and so he should, thought Dod-the Psychman knew that Dod, as a loyal Companion, must feel unhappy when he wasn't doing the job that he had been tailored for.
    "Just talk-say the first thing," said Rudge.
    "I've thought of trying in the Games," Dod told him. "You know, just for variety."
    "It could be arranged," said Rudge. "We could do that for you. What else?"
    "It's just that I got kicking around part of an idea------"
    "YesI" There was no mistaking Rudge's interest. His big ears had nickered back against his skull in an age-old instinctive movement.
    "Well, it's this pigeon angle set me thinking." He let Rudge absorb that, and continued, "You can get me a Games fixture?"
    "Easilyl A Games series would be an excellent thing for you--your aggression ratings are up. But this idea of yours?"
    Dod simulated deep, slow-moving thought. Rudge's eyes darted about in annoyance, yet could not risk offending Dod, as Dod knew. Too much might hang on Dod's intuitions.
    Dod shook his head after several moments. "I don't seem to be able to get anything out-if I could only have a bit of time to plan a program. There's a bundle of ideas I'd like to sort out, but these machines aren't any use!
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    I'm used to putting my thoughts into a comp, like they taught us at Space School, but every time I try anything, look what happens!"
    Rudge looked about quickly; he motioned Dod to walk with him down a busy line of Psych technicians where the background noise of the clattering computers would drown their conversation.
    "What do you want?" He was ready to trade.
    "I want to help the Company!" Dod protested.
    "Of course," agreed Rudge. He had expected no less and showed it.
    "But I can't whilst I'm treated like a dolt."
    Rudge eyed him superciliously, and Dod was relieved: it had seemed a shame to betray a confidence, but now it would be easy. Rudge despised him. Very well.
    "It's difficult," Rudge suggested. "You want to put a series through?"
    "If I could just do that and tie up my notions with the Aliens, we'd both be serving the Company. As things stand, the comps will just blow if I try it here."
    "Right." He looked about fearfully. "I'll do it. Give me the program."
    "No dice! I don't even know what the program is yet!"
    "I thought you said you'd got some notions?"
    "I'd have to do this myself," Dod said firmly. "That's the way I am."
    Rudge looked at him shrewdly. He would be thinking about the block, about the risk he was taking; and about the reward he would have.
    "I'll let you know. Keep this to yourself."
    He was back the next day with his answer. He wouldn't help Dod directly-Dod must understand his position as leader of the investigation-but he wouldn't put any obstacles in his way. And without committing himself to any direct form of assistance, nevertheless if Dod happened to be walking along the entrance to the lower galleries at exactly fifteen hours, Rudge would walk through the entrance to the Psych comps. There was another thing, too.
    Eiserer had called a conference to hear Rudge's pigeon theory; most of the senior Psych staff would attend, and Dod would not be called in for several hours. If Dod used his time to advantage...
    It wasn't as easy as that, though. Dod reconnoitered the northern area of the Psych establishment once Rudge had
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    indicated the comp entrance, and he saw that there would be several snags. Once in the comp room he would need three to five minutes to punch in the queries, and another half-minute to collect the answers; but getting into the room unnoticed was the difficulty.
    First, there were the two Flagmen who waited at the bottom of the long corridor in which was the comp entrance. They were only two of many dotted about the establishment, but they constituted the most serious difficulty. Their job was to guard him, and they took their work seriously, staring about with their hard eyes, checking off each person that passed against a mental list of persons permitted to be in that part of the building.
    Then there were the Psychmen. Whenever he walked about the Psych block, the younger members of staff watched him, partly marvelling at the halo, and partly hoping for sudden inspiration as had happened to the fortunate Rudge; a conference specially called to hear one's own idea would lift any junior Psychman high and speedily through the ranks of an overcrowded and highly privileged profession. They were only young men, thought Dod. Impressionable young men.
    Two sets of diversion were necessary, one for the Flagmen and the other for the Psych personnel. They had to miss him. And the plans had to be ready, timed for the most favorable moment in two days' time.
    The problem of the five-second distraction of the Flagmen was more difficult than that of the four-minute diversion needed to get the Psychmen away from the area of the unrestricted comps; both had to be surprise happenings, but whilst the Psychmen would react intelligently to a new situation, assessing it, analyzing it, the hard-eyed Flagmen would act as they would always act, on a level of normalcy that was the equivalent of an intestinal worm's. Instinctively. Yet it could be done-if his luck held. If the Flagmen's relief came at the same time as usual. If-it rested, finally, on his luck.
    * * *
    The day of the conference came, and Dod was ready. Rudge had been acting more nervously than ever, alternating between an unusual jocularity when the members of his teams praised his abilities, and fits of depression when he noticed Dod about the establishment; he had bitten his nails down to the quick, Dod saw. Could he be
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    trusted to keep their arrangement a secret? There was no help for it, though. If Rudge did crack, there might never be an opportunity quite like this again.
    Excitement had infected the junior Psychmen as well as their seniors. They went through the routine tests that morning in an earnest way, taking extensive notes on all Dod's answers and reactions to the series of tactile tests that had been started the previous day, relishing their unaccustomed authority in the absence of the senior Psych-men. Dod watched the hours slowly dragging by-nine hours, ten hours, a quarter past ten. At eleven the conference would begin, and his diversions were planned for twelve.
    Twenty past ten. Couldn't they devise something more original than this time-worn dabbling with electric impulses? Didn't they know enough about his reactions? Hammers! Now it was little rubber hammers! They were taking extensive notes, recording at length every minute action and reaction. Twenty-five past ten. The senior Psychmen would be reading through their notes, getting their suggestions in a more polished form. Dod looked about him. What future had these Psychmen? What original work would they ever do?
    Then Eiserer came through the entrance.
    Dod leapt off the couch in astonishment. Eiserer shouldn't be here! Rudge had said he would be busy preparing for the conference! Had Rudge cracked? Dod had his answer ready: Rudge had tricked him, led him into unCompanionlike ways-deceived him ...
    "Carry on! Please don't let me disturb you! I called in to see the Commander, but please finish what you were doing first."
    What did he want? Was he just prolonging Dod's agony before confronting him with Rudge's confession? You couldn't tell what the Psychiarch was thinking- his light, contemptuous smile could hide anything. Dod sweated, along with the embarrassed Psychmen, who raced through the remainder of the tests in the series.
    "Completed? Good! I wanted to have your opinion-informally before I heard Rudge's paper-about this theory, Commander. Now then, what views have you formed?"
    It was all right. But there wasn't much time before the 82
    diversions Dod had planned would go off: he had to get rid of Eiserer quickly.
    "It's brilliant theorizing," Dod said. If he praised the theory, Eiserer might go quickly. The thing to avoid was introducing any deviations. Stick to bewildered praise like a good, stupid, inhibited Companion. He shook his head dumbly. "I'm afraid it's beyond me, though."
    The Psychiarch did not seem surprised. "Putting it into nontechnical language, this is the idea. You appreciate that we know nothing about the Aliens other than the fact of the existence of a force-screen about the System."
    "An effective barrier," agreed Dod.
    "And we don't know why it's there. We don't know whether or not they know they're putting a barrier in our way. We don't even know if they realize we're here at all."
    "It's difficult," said Dod.
    "This theory holds that they know there's life of a kind, but that our life-form is outside their experience. They can't identify us. We're as strange to them as the minutiae of pond-life was to human beings before the invention of the optical microscope, though I'm not saying that the comparison holds. What is obvious is the tremendous degree of difference between us and them."
    "Not our sort at all," Dod put in, since a comment seemed to be called for. A quarter to eleven, he noticed. Wouldn't Eiserer go?
    "Quite right, Commander." The Psychiarch smiled encouragingly. "I see you're achieving a mastery of the subject." His contempt was barely concealed. "But to continue: one might say-as indeed Rudge is saying-that the Aliens are in the same position as man in Mid-European times when he was engaged on his first full study of the movements of migratory species on this planet between the various countries------"
    "Countries?" asked Dod, losing no opportunity to demonstrate his abysmal ignorance and thoroughgoing stupidity. Eiserer exchanged glances with the junior Psych-man who smiled back sarcastically.
    "Tribal division of Terra by area and ethnic groups," said the Psychiarch.
    "Thanks. I'm lost in this, I'm afraid. But I think I know what you mean. It's a brilliant idea." Maybe Eiserer would give up.
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    "Good! Now: when populations were transient to some degree, a check on mass movements could be made by taking a sample from every migrant group, and thus a picture of the whole could be formed. This applies as much to the movements of humans as to animals. Thus, starting from the original idea of the ringing of pigeons to check on their movements to------"
    "Me!" Dod shouted. Eiserer looked pleased with his astonishment.
    "Exactly, Commander. Comp put a number of ideas together and gave us a picture of something very like the early studies of bird migration, or population movement control. To check on the seemingly inexplicable series of bird movements, the early ornithologists caught birds and placed an identifying mark on them."
    And they were falling for this! It was pitiful. The best brains on the planet, and they could not see the inanity of the idea. Dod registered bewilderment. Ten past eleven. The conference would start late; in three-quarters of an hour the diversion in the fake comp room was timed to begin. He hoped his anxiety did not show in his face.
    "And you think this is the same kind of mark?" said Dod, pointing to the halo.
    "It could be. I want to know what you yourself think."
    "I believe you're on to something! A brilliant theory!" Eiserer stood frowning. Another two minutes gone. Obviously he wanted Dod to put forward some comment. What though? Something short-something that would satisfy Eiserer's doubts and send him away to begin the conference. What?
    "And nothing suggests itself to you------" Eiserer repeated.
    "I'm sorry," Dod told him. Then it came to him. There must be a snag-Eiserer had found a fallacy in the theory. "What did comp have to say?"
    He knew he was on the right track by the sudden blankng-off of all expression in the Psychiarch's face. He got up to leave.
    "Stand by for further haloes," Eiserer said slowly.
    He looked at the halo for several seconds and then left without saying anything else. The Psychmen looked too, and then at one another. By tacit agreement, they did not resume the tests immediately, but stood about discussing the momentous conference: it could be the
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    breakthrough they were hoping for; on the other hand, there still might be a chance for some young man to discover the answer to the halo's mystery. There was little work done for the next half-hour, and the atmosphere was tense, strained with speculation-which was helpful, thought Dod. Scientific detachment was the last thing he wanted when the diversion came.
    He moved to the entrance which led to the corridor he had to reach. Two minutes to go. The morning was almost over, and the Psychmen were ready for lunch; they were looking forward, also, to hearing how Rudge had impressed the conference-there might be a rumor going the rounds over lunch.
    Dod saw the hands of the clock edge to three minutes to twelve. The last seconds slid away. Time!
    He moved as the machines screamed.
    The Psychmen froze and looked at the huge cliff of comps at the back of the lab. A thousand lights flashed, needles swung over, back again, and rebounded in outrage from side to side of dials; fuses blew noisily, and the machines spat out clouds of tape from all their channels, the shiny tape wriggling about like a shoal of demented octopods. Noise blasted through the huge room, whining, shrieking, breaking metal. As one man, the Psychmen moved to the comps.
    Dod waited by the entrance as every Psychman in that part of Psych dashed in to the lab, hurrying in response to the emergency signals the comps were sending out: nothing like this had happened in Psych's two centuries of existence.
    Dod grinned as he reached the corridor.
    That part of the plan had worked well: and why shouldn't it? If comp suddenly screamed that it had the answer to the Aliens' presence, no one could preserve an icy detachment; and when the senior men were out of the way, no ambitious junior Psychman could keep away from the lab. They had to read the tapes.
    Over a period of days, Dod had fed in reports that the Aliens were none other than the Free Spacers; he had garbled the information so that only a key-phrase would make sense of it. And the phrase had been timed to slip into the memory-banks of the comps at three minutes to twelve.
    It all depended now on the Flagmen's instincts. 85
    Dod had found a door which led into the corridor Rudge had pointed out, which was exactly opposite the Psych's comps' entrance; in the confusion that followed the machines' uproar about the Aliens, he was able to find his way to the door without being especially remarked. Now he had to cross the four yards of corridor without being noticed by the Flagmen. It was two minutes to twelve.
    Dod opened the door slowly. He could not look out without being seen. He was waiting for a particular- sound. At last, it came: he had been waiting for only fifteen seconds, but it seemed like hours. He let the sound increase hi volume, and then darted across the corridor without turning his head to look at the two Flagmen. Vaguely, he heard the tapping of sharp heels.
    Inside the comp room, he waited for a couple of moments, but no warning shout nor rush of heavy boots came to tell him he had been seen. It had worked.
    The Flagmen had obeyed their instincts and watched the girls leaving the offices-two minutes early, as the girls added another short period to their lunch break-as Dod had anticipated. They had missed him during the few seconds that the girls had been hi their view. It didn't matter whether or not he was seen coming out of the comp room: the Plag guard was changed on the hour, every hour, and the new guards would not suspect him when he came out of the comp room: only if he had been entering the room would he have been questioned. Plag obeyed orders to the letter. And Rudge had pointed out that their orders were to keep him out of the comp room.
    Dod walked out six minutes later with a bundle of tapes stuffed down his tunic. Now it would be a matter of waiting until the day's work was over-of listening to Rudge and Eiserer, of keeping calm and outwardly undisturbed when the secret of his real identity burned his chest. This evening, thought Dod exultantly. He would know that evening.
    86
    TWO
    before Dod reached his quarters, he saw Scrimgouer. He almost missed him in the excitement of rushing back to his quarters to read the tapes. The Psychman passed him without interrupting his conversation with two other Psychmen; as they turned to look at the halo, so did he. But no nicker of recognition crossed his face.
    There must be danger, Dod thought, his excitement passing in a moment of icy detachment. Scrimgouer could have risked a shadow of a wink. But he hadn't.
    It was not until four in the morning that Dod slid the first tape out of his tunic, and then it was shielded by his body.
    "Evaluate the position of Commander Dod," was his first instruction.
    "DOD UNIQUE----FIRST ALIEN CONTACT-IDENTITY MANUFACTURED IN PSYCH-A B-CLASS IDENT-REPLACEMENT----
    UTMOST CAUTION IN WITHHOLDING SUBJECT'S TRUE
    identity------" The rest was Psych jargon, a repeat of
    the same information. Dod read on, absorbed now.
    "State the nature of Dod's block."
    "block designed by then psych leader now psy-chiarch eiserer-permanent block with reservation that deep therapy can restore brief periods of awareness of original identity including knowlEDGE of research undertaken." But it had not been as successful as they thought. What had they wanted to keep on ice in his memory, though?
    "State the nature of Dod's Error."
    "grand treason-charges not .specified-details only to the directors---state if this is director-authorized? query and give authorization ciphers." And that was all.
    It was like a game of blindfold chess, Dod thought sickly. Worse, in fact-more like the chess some bored
    87
    grandmaster of antiquity had dreamed up, with an extra piece that combined the moves of knight and queen-an impregnable piece-and with trapdoors on the board, so that when pieces were moved to them they fell to a lower board and the game continued on two levels; but he was not playing a game, Dod thought. Bitter disappointment flooded through him.
    He had lost this particular game. All his cheerful planning to get at the unrestricted comps had been wasted; he should have known, he told himself angrily, that the information he wanted would riot be available to every junior Psychman. He had made the mistake of underestimating Psych. He had gambled on getting some worthwhile piece of information, accepting the risk that Psych would be suspicious of the false program he had set up to distract the juniors. Now Psych would want an accounting; and he had gained nothing.
    The only ray of hope in a dismal prospect was Scrim-gouerT re-appearance, although the fat Psychman had ignored him.
    Action, he thought, tired from the day's tension, but unable to sleep: action-fierce, quick, sustained, and decisive action was needed. But what? He thought of the 'texs. What would Captain Frost have done? Again, what would the men who changed the world by one shocking action have done in his place? What knot could he slash? Where should he lob the T-bomb if he could get it?
    All he could think of was to work off the feeling of frustration that was burning him up by entering for a Games series, and continue his investigation of his own past by setting Scrimgouer to work. For, he felt hopelessly, he could do no more. Psych would be wary now; there would be no more opportunities like the one he had managed to manufacture.
    Dod played the model Companion for the next few days. He saw Scrimgouer twice, but made no sign to him; the fat man would contrive a meeting when he thought it was safe. Eiserer sent for him a week after the pigeon conference. As he expected, an investigating panel had been set up to consider the false program he had set up: they must have spent a week deliberating before sending for him.
    He looked about the faces. Rudge was there. Several of the junior Psychmen looked away in embarrassment when
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    he eyed them: they must have received a blistering attack from the Psychiarch when they had interrupted the pigeon conference with Dod's counterfeit and apparently planet-rocking news.
    "What made you think of the Free Spacers?" Eiserer said sharply. He was suspicious. Always Eiserer, Dod thought. The man who made the block that was the admiration of the whole of Psych. Looking at him, Dod determined to even the score between them one day.
    "I have always drawn my inspiration from our glorious Company's history," Dod told him. He thought out his line, but would Eiserer swallow it? The junior men were amused.
    "Can you explain any further?" asked Eiserer.
    "Maybe I did the wrong thing," Dod said hesitantly, "but I wanted to help. After Leader Rudge's brilliant example, I felt I might be able to do something."
    He had them interested. "And?" Eiserer prompted.
    "Well, I modeled my program on the best heroic stories of early Company days."
    Eiserer looked incredulous. Annoyed, too. That would be because he had taken the matter too seriously. He had thought that Dod was showing signs of intelligence, when really he was only aping scientific methods; he had lost face with his staff, too.
    "I think I understand," the Psychiarch said, but Dod went on blithely.
    "So I set up the program and based it on the story of Captain Frost and the fight for the bases on Mars, and Commander Gow's expedition against the pirate Free Spacers on Venus and------"
    Dod stopped and looked offended. They were laughing at him. He felt the sweat rising in his pores, and thought with relief that it was over. To them, he was a moron, harmless and helpless.
    "Thank you, Commander!" Eiserer said smoothly. "I think we've heard enough. You showed an excellent appreciation of modern methods." He could hardly contain the irony in his voice. "I trust you will continue to help?"
    "Of course," said Dod, eager now. "I'll do all I can!"
    Rudge looked more relieved than any of them. He called to Dod as he was leaving and walked with him to the lab.
    "Just for my own curiosity-did you get to the comps?"
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    It meant a good deal to him, Dod saw. This would be the first time in his life that he had ever committed an Error. When he heard this, Dod saw that he had been luckier than he had hoped. The Psych comps had not been plugged in to the memory banks, and no record had been kept of his queries-Rudge would have checked on them already; perhaps the connection with the banks had been cut because someone was engaged in confidential work, but whatever the reason, it made things much easier.
    "No," he told Rudge, who gasped in relief, "it was a crazy idea to begin with. I suppose that's what being a Space-pilot does for you-it makes you too independent. I'm glad now I didn't go through with it."
    Rudge did not even ask what Dod had wanted to test; Dod saw that the Psych leader would not even hint at their agreement again. One experience of almost falling into Error was enough for him.
    It had passed over, Dod thought, listening to the bright, eager Psycnmen discussing the latest tests they were trying on him. He was back where he had started. His only hope now was Scrimgouer.
    When the fat man passed him in an almost deserted gallery the next day, he almost walked past him, as on the last occasion. The Psychman stopped, however.
     "Only those two about," he said quickly, pointing to the Flagmen, "no pick-ups here. Just a few seconds." Aloud, for the benefit of the Flagmen, he said, "Congratulations on your promotion, Commander! I hadn't an opportunity of seeing you at Moonbase."
    "Thanks. Get details of Grandma," he added urgently. "I'd like to call on you sometime," said Scrimgouer. "Punch 'renaissance'-Lab Four wordbank."
    "Do that," said Dod off-handedly. He winked to show that he understood where Scrimgouer would leave the information. The fat Psychman's apparently chance meeting with him would be the result of days, maybe weeks, of planning; he might have had to wreck a line of pickups on that particular corridor, perhaps divert a number of Psychmen who would normally use that passage-and it was simpler to leave information under an unused word in the wordbank than to risk another meeting. Dod smiled as he realized what the word meant-rebirth. A new beginning.
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    Two more weeks passed, slowly for Dod. Every third day he punched in the key-word, but without result. And Scrimgouer had not shown up again. Surely there was no chance of Psych catching up with him? Dod dismissed the idea. All the fat man had to do was to check with manual records-he would keep away from the comps, of course-and abstract the information Dod wanted. What had gone wrong?
    Two weeks passed into a month. Still the Psychman was absent. Dod felt the inactivity crippling his energy- the latest series of Psych tests had been physically exhausting, and the malaise of mental stagnation had turned him into a morose individual. He had caught himself openly sneering when the series was under way-they were after hypothesized photo-synthetic impressions recorded by the pigments of his facial skin, and trying, ludicrously, it seemed to Dod, to establish a connection with that chimera of superficial enquirers throughout the millennia, the missing third eye, Descartes' "eye of the soul."
    All that resulted was mild burns for Dod and disappointment for the Psychmen. They had lost some of their early keenness. Rudge looked worried.
    When Dod, in a fit of acute boredom, reminded him that he had agreed to Dod's entering a Games series, he snapped back angrily that it was out of the question.
    All Dod had wanted was a couple of combats to divert himself; entering the Games meant a few days away from the eternal round of tests. There was the prospect of action, of pitting one's wits against a clever antagonist; the Games meant training schools, private instruction by past masters of the Games, ploy sellers, and sharpies, side-bets; and there was no danger.
    When Rudge abruptly refused permission, Dod took him up immediately.
    "Look, you said yourself that it was good for me-my aggressive impulses. Remember?"
    "Out of the question, Dod. You should know better than to ask."
    "It's my duty," Dod reminded the Psych leader.
    "Your duty is to co-operate with the Company!"
    "It's my duty to the Company as a Space-pilot to participate," Dod told him. Rudge referred him to Eiserer then. The Psych leader was taking no chances with Dod,
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    remembering how he had almost been brought into Error in his dealings with him.
    His very opposition made Dod more determined to go ahead with a formal challenge to the Combat Marshal, and he spent a good deal of his spare time in running through old 'texs of earlier Games.
    Take van Gulik's last series, he thought: the supreme champion of the Nine Planets was a brilliant tactician, but he had his weaknesses. Say when he put the combat craft Into his famous spin, fluttering through the arena like a falling leaf-say you beamed at an intersection which would miss him by wide margin as if you'd panicked, and then convert the craft's energy to drive, so that it flickered along the path of the bolt you'd just sent, the last place he'd expect you to move to ...
    But it was kids' stuff! Dod laughed in self-contempt The Games were as much a fake as the Moon Ruins. No one got hurt-Rudge knew that along with everyone else. The craft's source of energy, serving for drive, screens, and weapons, was of just sufficient power to blow a similar craft, but the vanadium-zirconium gamesman's cage was indestructible; the gamesman was never killed, unless he was careless enough to forget to seal himself in, and a recovery vessel simply towed the cage away out of the cloud of dust that had been the ship when a combat was over. Kids' stuff.
    Dod was ready to play kids' games, he decided. They made a change. Maybe if he worked off his aggressions, he would start thinking clearly again and the fog of malaise would lift.
    At one time he almost convinced himself that he could escape. Psych was not exactly careless, but they were so supremely sure of him-contemptuously sure that he was harmless-that they skipped up on points of security. They let him read notes they left lying about; they talked freely in front of him. He was a pet animal.
    Dod found that the Plag detachment was changed completely every month; the force left en masse. If he could find the right opportunity he might be able to work the same trick that had got him out of the unrestricted comps room again; but the Plagmen never let up. Never once did he surprise them in a moment of laxness. It was more than a matter of guarding a valuable prisoner: the Plagmen all knew that Dod was responsible for the death of
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    two of them; and possibly more. He had the feeling every time he passed them that Plag had marked him down as a victim. One day they would try to claim him.
    Escape from the fantastically secure establishment at Serampur was impossible. It was like trying to send out a star-probe against the Aliens' screens. There was a living wall of Plag around him.
    And yet he had to do something. Scrimgouer was still missing, and Dod had written him off. Either Psych had caught him or he had vanished for reasons of his own. Dod could not hope to get to the comps again, and anyway they were useless. He could only hope that Rudge would be discredited, or Eiserer; or both, and that he would eventually be allowed out of the establishment. But both Eiserer and Rudge were riding high. The Board had full confidence in them, and liked-ironically-the pigeon theory; what had started as a joke had rebounded against Dod, leaving the Psychmen exulting in their success. Eiserer had not even bothered to answer his request for a Games series.
    Dod had been on Terra, subjected to continuous testing and hoping all the time for a sudden flash of illumination that would bring his dead past suddenly, brilliantly, alive, for eighty-three days when Gompertz called him on the 'ceiver. It was twenty-nine days since he had given up hope of seeing Scrimgouer again, ten days since he had last-punched the word "renaissance" into the wordbank in Lab Four-the word was a mockery now-and his only consolation was in thinking that he had killed Getler when he had the chance.
    "Called to see the halo again," Gompertz said. "I have to tell myself I didn't imagine it."
    Dod felt like an animal on show. What did Gompertz want? Material for his next cast?
    "It's still there," said Dod. The old man's wizened face looked back from the screen sardonically.
    "And we don't know why yet," he cackled.
    "Theories," said Dod.
     "Quot homines, tot sententiae," answered the old man promptly.
    "Yes?"
    "What you said-theories. I find the pigeon idea vastly interesting-clever man that Rudge." Was he winking?
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    The heavy lid might have drooped fractionally over the red eye.
    "He is," Dod said cautiously. The old man might be sympathetic: on Moonbase he had offered help.
    "What about your own ideas? Anything come out of the work you were doing at Moonbase?"
    "No. I'm still working on it."
    "I heard," the Counsellor said. "Just like a good Companion." The sarcasm was there. Dod felt hope rising in him. Gompertz was a vastly influential man-he was hand in glove with a couple of Directors even though he was said to be against some of the Chairman's methods.
    "There're a couple of points I'd like to have your opinion on," Dod said carefully.
    "You couldn't have better advice," Gompertz said. Modesty was foreign to him, but his manner fitted him like a well-cut tunic. The lordly gestures, the easy flapping robes, the bombastic note in his voice-at once Gompertz was comic and impressive.
    "I know you've a busy life------"
    "I have. Say no more. I'll be over this week." He showed his yellow teeth in a grin. "If there's anything we can do to get this appendage of yours-still without the proper nomenclature, I feel-sorted out, I'll do it."
    "That's good of you."
    "It is," Gompertz agreed. "You know, Commander"- he rolled the title so that it sounded like an insult rather than an honorific-"I knew you'd have something to tell me. I knew it at Moonbase."
    When Dod tried to answer he found himself talking to a blank screen.
    * * *
    "Just what are you after?" There was no sardonic smile on Gompertz's face, no mocking inflection in his voice, and his eyes were like two chisel blades.
    He had solved the problem of getting away from Psych's unremitting surveillance by brushing aside the protests of the Plag guard and walking with Dod into the huge open space that was the center of the Psych establishment at Serampur, a level plain of colored concrete; the massive buildings sloped gently upwards from the dull green plain like the terraces of an amphitheatre; it s was the only private place in the establishment.
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    "What's your interest?" Dod parried. He felt the time for fencing was over, however.
    "My job, if you can call it that, is to enquire. And as you know quite well, Commander Dod, original enquiry is non-existent in the Company. I'm being quite frank with you, Dod-if that's who you are-and I think it'll pay you to be frank with me." He had dropped his Lathi tags, Dod noticed. "At my age you've nothing to live for but the unraveling of mysteries. And you're on to something."
    It made sense. Intuition, possibly inside information, or pure deduction had put the old man on the scent. Dod asked him what he knew. "First, you're not Dod." "Agreed."
    "Next, you're half-way to solving the secret of your- appendage."
    "Not even half-way," Dod told him. "I can't get started here," he added taking in the cliffs of the Psych buildings with a sweep of his hand. "Where did you begin?"
    "With your own premise, that this is not an accidental contact."
    "Which led to?"
    "Back to myself and who I was. There has to be a connection. As you said yourself we couldn't even begin to think about a program to prove this is a random occurrence." "Then what?"
    "Keep Psych busy whilst I tried to get to the unrestricted comps."
    Gompertz grinned. "I heard about that. Thought there was more to it than met the eyel The Free Spacers!" "But that was no good."
    "Of course it wasn't! You should have worked that out beforehand!"
    So I should, Dod thought. Hindsight was about all he was capable of.
    "Why don't you let me in on it, right from the beginning," the old man said. He looked around the gigantic ring of buildings. "As things stand, you're a fly in a bottle. There's no way out. When they've finished you, they stick a pin in you and put you on show." His face looked bleak. "I could take the stopper out for you."
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    He could. Dod knew. And he was probably the only man in the System who could help him. A stopper- Gompertz had it right there: the clogging, enervating, will-sapping, inhibiting stoppage in his mind would hold him back until help came.
    It took him only ten minutes to outline his story. Gom-pertz's questioning afterwards surprised him; the old man was leading to some plan, but Dod could not discern the trend of his queries.
    "You knifed Getler yourself?"
    "Yes."
    "Enjoy it?"
    Dod wondered if he had. Possibly. But it didn't matter.
    "It had to be done."
    "You didn't think of giving him an even chance-knife to knife?"
    "No. That important?"
    "You don't know how much!"
    "How's that?"
    "An idea I have. It's easier now I know you've no pity. No romantic influences in your nature where survival matters. You're what you have to be." He looked at Dod with respect. "According to the best authorities you can feel the kidneys crack when the knife breaks the skin."
    Dod shrugged. That too was of no interest.
    "Where do we start?"
    "We?" Gompertz queried. Dod nodded.
    "You're risking your head," he told the old man, "but since you think it's worth the risk------"
    "I'm an old man," he told Dod. "but I'm not senile. When I say I have a plan, it's good. I'll keep my head if you can keep your nerve." All the same, Gompertz was taking a big chance talking in this way; one slip, and Salkind would have his head.
    "So where do we start?"
    Gompertz considered for a moment, his fingers shaping themselves into the tetrahedron he favored when he was making a subtle point in his casts, the tips of the fingers tapping lightly together.
    "Tell me," he said at last, "what does the sensible man do when confronted with a superior power?"
    "He joins it." Elementary self-preservation, thought Dod.
    "Exactly. But for the abnormal man, that's an unac-96
    ceptable course. Such a man has two further courses open to him." He eyed the halo. "He opts out of the human race and becomes an isolationist-a hermit; a criminal, maybe. Until he's squashed."
    "And the other course?"
    "He tries to smash the superior organization. Tries to remold it to a pattern that suits him." He waited for Dod's comment.
    "I tried that-how I don't know, but I tried it. So I got a cosmic-class block, as Scrimgouer calls it. And he knows. He's an expert."
    'The abnormal man always fails," agreed Gompertz. "But for the supernormal man there is another range of possibilities altogether."
    "Me?"
    Gompertz looked pained for a moment, and Dod remembered his vanity.
    "You!"
    "Precisely, young man. One course of action that springs to my mind is obvious, although it may not be so to your mentality." He bared his yellow teeth in a ferocious smile. "It's quite the simplest course, too. We can't join, smash, or resign from this society of ours, this superior organization with which we are confronted."
    Dod waited. He was getting to be good at waiting, he thought. Gompertz liked a stooge to prompt him; dramatically, the old man was in a class by himself.
    "I see that," Dod said.
    "And yet would we want to destroy it?" He was being deliberately pedantic. "It's not exactly a sublime culture, but it is balanced-there's a place for art in it, even for people like me. Not you, though. There's no place for your kind. Which is why we have to do something about it."
    "Let's get down to it," Dod said pleasantly. "What do we do with the Company?"
    "We control it."
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    THREE
    the warden of the Games, Marshal Maes, looked back at Dod in astonishment, his big, open, honest face purple with dismay.
    "You can't throw out a challenge like this!"
    "No? You refusing my challenge?"
    "But the form! An open challenge to the four champions!"
    "I asked if you were refusing." Dod looked icily back at Maes, feeling sorry for him at the same time.
    "Now look, Commander-be reasonable! You've only contested minor leagues before! These are the crack Plag men you're challenging!"
    "It stands," said Dod. "Have it broadcast by the Heralds."
    Maes groaned. "But why? Why?"
    "For the honor of the Space-pDots," said Dod.
    Maes covered his face with a huge hand. He looked at Dod again, shifted his gaze to the halo, and groaned again; his face filled more of the screen as his jaw dropped open and his big cheeks sagged.
    "Look," he said, trying to sound calm. "Look, Commander. I know you're not just an ordinary pilot. That halo of yours-I mean I know Psych regards you as in their sphere of influence; I know you're a special case." He was pleading with Dod now. "What about a middle league combat?" He made it sound enticing. Full planetary coverage; special fees; the best commentators. Anything.
    Dod interrupted him gently. "Marshal, Psych has approved the challenge."
    "Psych!-Approved it!" Relief made him grin comically.
    "In principle." Maes laughed out loud now. He was in the clear: if Psych had approved, there could be no Error.
    "I don't advise it just the same," he said. 98
    "It's too late now," Dod told him. "The networks flashed the story just after I called you."
    Maes shrugged. "I'll get the Heralds to make it official then." He paused, and Dod saw that he was human. "I don't know why you're doing this, Commander, but good luck to------"
    He was cut off, and Eiserer shrieked from the screen like a bird in agony. "What's this! Your challenge, Dod!. What have you done! Are you mad?" Then he lost control of himself and squealed meaninglessly.
    He was afraid, Dod saw, afraid for his head. Rightly. When the Board heard what he had done, more than one head would roll amongst the staffs of the networks Gom-pertz had farmed out the information to.
    "You agreed," Dod told him. Eiserer stopped. "Psych," Dod explained, "in the rules-Psych agreed in principle."
    Eiserer fought for control of himself and won. "What do you mean?"
    "Did you listen to the whole challenge?"
    Eiserer gestured off-screen and a tape appeared in his hand. He read it quickly; then he began again and stopped, reading out the archaic words: "to mortal combat until I conquer or die as is the noble right of each Companion. ..."
    The Psychiarch looked afraid again: he had met a new situation and he did not know what to do. But part of his fear would be because he now knew that Dod was not the tame animal he had thought.
    "It's not possible," he said. "Just not possible."
    Classic withdrawal symptoms, Dod found himself murmuring. The subject withdraws from the reality and refuses to accept its existence. Now Eiserer would blank off the screen.
    He did, without meeting Dod's eyes again.
    Dod's spirits rose irrationally as he thought of the Psychman's discomfiture. He looked at the totex globe and laughed aloud. The globe and Eiserer-two complementary conceptions: a man who wouldn't accept reality, and a machine designed for abolishing it. He flung the cushions of his couch at the globe which was just beginning to purr with gentle music; then he threw bottles, furniture, tapes, anything movable at it.
    Things seemed to be moving, he thought happily.
    He felt so optimistic about the progress of his challenge 99
    
    that he strode out of his quarters, raced along the corridors, and burst into Lab Four and punched in Scrim-gouer's key-word.
    This time it was there.
    "Jackpot!" he roared at the astounded Psychman who left immediately.
    He read the short tape slowly. "Arabella Alice Det-weiler: educated Shu-Main with post-graduate work at Capua. Publications: Synoptic Analysis of the Sutras; The-osophical Quantities and Early Jainism; two more works suppressed by Psych. Several 'tex scripts censored by Psych. Family details: only daughter killed with husband in research accident; one surviving relative, son of those latter." Summaries of her Psych gradings followed. She had been allowed a certain amount of latitude because of her expertness as a student of Mid-European and Asiatic religions; but she was not allowed to publish her work, and had been a recluse for many years.
    It meant nothing to Dod. The information, so long hoped-for, had not brought the pieces of the pattern together. Her name should mean something to him, so should the titles of her works and the fact that Psych had suppressed her later publications. Scrimgouer had done what he could, but it was not enough.
    Dod watched the tape disappear into the disposal chute. Then he went through the labs to his quarters to wait for Salkind to send for him.
    * * *
    The Chairman was curiously stolid, oddly unmoved by Dod's unaccountable and revolutionary challenge.
    "This challenge," he said. The Flagmen behind him stared at Dod like gun-dogs waiting for the shot.
    "It's in order," Dod told him. "I explained to Psy-chiarch Eiserer. It's in the Company regulations."
    Salkind knew intuitively just as Gompertz had known, Dod saw; the Chairman looked calmly at him as if he could penetrate Dod's inmost thoughts. "You can tell me what you want, Dod."
    Dod felt he could for a moment. The great, clear voice impelled him to speak out, to trust the Chairman as he had in the days when he was Dod. The name itself saved him-Dod! What a name to inflict on him! Dod- dead mind Dod, the name of an idiot. Eiserer would have
    100
    thought it up for him. He shook off indecisions and irresolution.
    "I've been thinking a lot about the Aliens," Dod told the Chairman, "and about the Company, especially our way of life." This had to sound utterly convincing. "And I've come to the conclusion that the way we live now is utterly wrong."
    "This your own idea?" asked Salkind.
    "Entirely." Salkind's perception was uncanny. "I investigated the causes of this wrongness and I know what to do."
    "This links up with your challenge?"
    "It does. I found, on checking through the Company's history, that the Games have been the chief formative influence in our Company's character."
    "Go on."
    Dod allowed a gleam that he hoped would pass for fanaticism to enter his eyes. He drew himself up proudly. "The Games which are now fought are not the true Games."
    Salkind sent Rudge scurrying off to the comps. "You found this out yourself?"
    Dod ignored the question. "Only by mortal combat can I serve the Company now! It is only lately that I have understood the full significance of the Company Oath."
    The Directors craned forward, eager to hear his every word: much depended on the impression he created on them.
    "This Oath-explain, Commander!" Salkind was angry.
    "This is the Oath. The true Oath:
     'Out of chaos came the Four To challenge the lawless To deadliest combat------' "
    "Blasphemy! Not true!"
    The Directors were on their feet-except Cohui, Dod noticed, who was smiling sardonically at his infuriated co-Directors-shouting that Dod was wrong, that the Oath was being blasphemed; but Dod went on, to their growing amazement, to complete a version of the Oath they had not heard before. Gompertz had insisted that he must finish the whole of it once he had begun. The most important thing of all was to emphasize the lines that up-
    101
    held Dod's actions: the lines which declared that it was every Companion's duty to issue a challenge to a fight to the death once in his life.
    "Where in the name of the Great Hound did you get that from!" bellowed Salkind when he had finished. Already a dozen Psychmen had been dispatched to help Rudge check on the historical accuracy of Dod's quo-, tation.
    "That is the true Oathl" Dod thundered back at him, feeling a glow of satisfaction that for once he had shouted down authority. Now his full histrionic talent was engaged, for he strutted around the Boardroom in a parody of the Space-pilots' march, singing at the top of his voice the pilots' anthem; in silence now the Directors watched him.
    "Space-struck," Dod heard as he finished. "Block broken," a Psychman remarked. Dod saluted gravely and walked out; no one tried to stop him.
    Dod lay back on his couch thinking about his challenge.
     It all depended now on Psych's nerve.
    They would check with comp on the ancient form of the Company oath and find that he had quoted it correctly; and they would have to admit to- Salkind that he was entitled to make the challenge as he had done-in fact, that it was his duty to do so.
    Gompertz had been certain that the challenge would stand.
    "The Company wasn't so much a political organization as a military organization at first," he had explained. "We" all know how the Four Companies, the only effective instrument of government left after the mad years were over, gradually asserted control over Terra; and they were a military machine. Remember that. Now a military organization differs in one extremely important fundamental from any purely political unit-whereas politics is concerned with a wide diffusion of aims, freedom and the dignity of man, agriculture, drains, taxes, welfare, and so forth, the military has only one aim: conquest.
    "You can't have a fighting force unless you fight. Look at world history. Oppressed, people learn to fight; and then they become the oppressors. And only by continuing to fight did they remain oppressors. Combat became the philosophy of the Four Companies. Do you know whom they had to fight, and keep on fighting?"
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    "The Free Spacers."
    "Yes. Terra versus the rest. The Free Spacers controlled the rest of the System, and they were content to leave things as they were. There was some righting, but both sides realized that each was too strong to conquer the other with the weapons they then had. Is all this new to you?"
    "Not the outline," Dod told him. "I knew there was sporadic warfare for some decades-I've seen plenty of 'texs about the period-but your interpretation of the facts is new to me."
    "There was a period of several decades when the status quo was maintained by both sides, and during that time single combat was evolved to satisfy the Companies' urge to fight; the Free Spacers saw that only by siphoning off this urge in some way could the equilibrium of the balance forces be kept. Fighting had to be contained to minimum -when the Companies offered to fight with fleets, or armored cities, or satellites, the Free Spacers refused; they would accept only single combat-mortal combat."
    "And that's how we came by the Games."
    "A bastard survival of a great and courageous conception," Gompertz said. "The Free Spacers didn't want to fight; but they sent their young men out to fight and die to preserve their cities. What makes it pitiable is that they were wiped out because of their trust in the system that had been accepted by both sides."
    "Not by single combat!" Dod said.
    Gompertz finished his thesis. "Thus, in the Companies -and amongst the Free Spacers, too, single mortal combat became the highest form of sacrifice a man could attain to; many thousands of men died, the Companions fanatically in pursuit of glory, and the Free Spacers resignedly, to keep their families safe. Better that a few should die than the race."
    "Fine people," said Dod. He could see that Gompertz too admired these long-dead people.
    "They thought it would go on like that until the Companies fought amongst themselves, but they misinterpreted the situation"-he spoke angrily-"they couldn't see that there was something to hold the Companies together still, a common enemy. The period of the take-over began immediately there was no external threat."
    "You know how the Free Spacers were killed?" The 103
    'texs told only of pitched battles, tremendous heroism, and brilliant strategic moves. The truth, Dod saw now, would be different.
    "Through their trust in the System's apparent safety. A subtle thing, it had to be."
    "Some new weapon?"
    "Surprise," said Gompertz. "They were all watching the Games Finals, never noticing the additional combat craft that had swarmed out of Terra."
    "They used the combat craft as offensive units?" Surely not, Dod thought. They were too small to face even a scout.
    "Against the pumping stations," Gompertz said. "Tiny robot craft wiped out the major oxygen-plants on the settled planets, and it was all over in four minutes-except for the mopping up. That was nasty."
    Dod felt cold when he thought of the death of the sane race of pleasant people who had only wanted to live in peace; horizons of corpses pressed in on his luxurious quarters.
    You couldn't trust the Company, he thought viciously. Not even when they made rules of conduct and declared they would abide by them; you could only be harder, more acute, more vicious than the Company. He would be. Meanwhile, he could only sit and wait.
     It all depended on Psych's nerve.
    By now they would have found that Dod's right to challenge the leading Games champion was undisputable; they would be trying desperately to find out how Dod was able to contact the agencies, and they would have at least an inkling that they would not be able to get at the truth. And they would be coming to various conclusions about the impact Dod's challenge had made on the inhabitants of the System. Comp would tell them that there was only one course they could take.
    When the coming of the halo had first been announced, a masterly public relations campaign had been carried out by Psych: the System had reacted as predicted, and the interest aroused immediately, though hectic, had soon died off. The general feeling was that the mystery of the Aliens might at last be cleared up, but that it would be a long -and slow process-and one should be grateful that Psych was there to handle the problem. Most people had already forgotten the name of the man who had the halo.
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    Dod was no longer news. The picture Psych had gradually built up, the image they had painstakingly developed, was of a dedicated staff of Psychmen working around the clock with the full co-operation of a simple, true-hearted Companion.
    Now Dod had thrown a 'brick at the image.
    Gompertz had foreseen several possible reactions. You'd get a few submerged cliques of eschatologists who would show their hand and get blasted down at once; but they would only be the fringe response. There would be suicides, and that was unfortunate. A few people would be sickened by the idea of gratuitous violence; they might even try to demonstrate, and then they, too, would be cut down by Plag. But mostly people want to see a fight. A mortal combat, a fight to the death.
    Psych would have to contend with a public that knew the full facts-that Dod had made his challenge, and that by the Code of the Company he had the right to do so; and the public that was inflamed with patriotic fervor, pride in the Company's ancient traditions, shocked by the strange challenge, apprehensive about Dod's revival of the custom, the public that was bewildered, excited, touched by terror and inspired with horror, was also the public that knew Dod as the first man to contact the Aliens. It made a potent psychological situation, Gompertz had said happily. Dod was unique; and he had acted as no other man had acted. The man with the halo had challenged the four Games champions to a fight to the death. Together these two separate issues were as explosive as the collision of two mighty stars. Everybody wanted to see the fight. Everybody, Gompertz had assured Dod, would know it was right to stage the Games. It had become a tabu, a mystery, a weird conjunction of forces.
    'The prospect of battle blocks all other emotions," Gompertz had explained. "Take your case-you had to knife Getler, but it wasn't your intention to use the knife on him when you went to meet Scrimgouer. You acted instinctively, and if you had acted in any other way you'd be dead meat. The fight's emotions shifted all logic, all calmness, all intelligence and decency. There was just pure action left. And Psych will know that once your challenge has been issued, the prospect of battle will cause psychosis of the System. Psych has no choice in the matter."
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    Dod flexed his muscles. The thought of battle stimulated him, it made up for the stagnation of the months at Serampur, and he found that his mind was flexing too as he ran through combat ploys, working on his plans of battle.
    "Which champions should I challenge?" he asked.
    "Don't name anyone. Just the four best. You'll get plenty of response-the top men are in Plag remember, and they hate you and all you stand for."
    "And if I'm killed?" Gompertz knew what he meant.
    "Don't worry. You'll win."
    "You can't be sure."
    "No." said Gompertz. "There's always the random factor."
    "A new ploy?"
    "No. Don't trust Plag-and even when you're coming in for a kill, don't trust them. It's to the death, and you've got to kill. Don't trust even dead men. Blast the craft out of the arena." He hesitated, and Dod waited for him to say what Dod wanted him to tell him. "If you die," he said, and Dod saw that he was deeply moved, "if Plag breaks all the rules and play it false, I'll take this up where you left off. I'll find this grandmother of yours." He grinned. "But I'd much prefer you to make the introduction. She sounds a formidable woman."
    He had the quality of time itself. Endurance, no sympathy, the calmness of centuries, the detachment of silent aeons. But he was more than an erudite philosopher, Dod thought. He was a rogue, too. Who else would have discovered that the successful challengers of the Free Spacers' period had been granted Director status? And Director status led to a place on the Board.
    There had to be a prize for the hero who blasted down the maximum number of opponents permissible in one series, and the Companies had themselves fixed on the reward: as a Director, Gompertz had said, Dod could soon control the Board.
    Salkind stood in the way.
    Would Psych dare tell the Chairman that the System was on the boil, that everywhere men's minds were disintegrating as conditioned machines under the impact of two utterly strange conceptions? Could Eiserer face Sal-kind and say that if the Games did not take place there would be anarchy?
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     It all depended on Psych's nerve.
    Dod had seen a copy of Comp's answer.
    "all honor victor ludorum-commander dod's challenge in best traditions of dog company---imbalance in psychological situation make early combat essential---pre-combat publicity begin imMEDIATELY program follows . . ." The softening-up program by which the more violent enthusiasts would be calmed, and the disinterested aroused, followed a pattern that had been established nearly two centuries before, as the comp rather prissily pointed out. It had been quite definite about when the combats should be staged. "games must take place minimum ten days maximum twelve days from now." Psych had a little time in which to prepare a case. Dod laughed when he thought about the comps' assessment of the probable outcome of the series. "on present data dod killed in second
    COMBAT-DESPERATION GIVES HIM ADVANTAGE IN FIRST COMBAT-IF WINS SECOND COMBAT CERTAIN DEATH IN THIRD-PRESTIGE AS COMMANDER AND PRESENCE OF HALO COMPLICATE ISSUE-DETAILED ANALYSIS OF PROBABLE RESULTS FOLLOW . . ."
    The comps didn't think much of his chances of survival, Dod thought as he waited for Eiserer to make up his mind; but what the comps couldn't take into consideration was the iron that had entered Dod's spirit.
    * * *
    ". . . and so, Chairman Salkind, I put it to the Board that there is only one course of action we can take." He had read the exultantly bellicose sit-rep that Comp had sent out, and the Directors themselves looked excited at the prospect of battle. "There is nothing we can do, but let the Games take place."
    Salkind looked with dull loathing at Dod. "It's a clear choice," he said, speaking to Eiserer, but not looking away from Dod, "And no way of avoiding it. The probable collapse of the System or the Games. Our first contact with the Aliens killed, or chaos on the nine planets."
    "Unless the Commander withdraws his challenge," pointed out the Psychiarch. A dull growl of disapproval went up from the Board.
    "Impossible," Dod said promptly.
    "And even if he did withdraw," Eiserer went on, "it would take years to get the System back to normal."
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    "You hear that, Commander?" said Salkind.
    "I can't do it," said Dod.
    The Flagmen present glared at Dod, and Salkind looked round at them; they stood tense, waiting for his word. There would be trouble with Plag, Dod saw, the trouble Gompertz had told him to watch out for; Plag had wanted to deal with the challenge in their own way, and but for the intervention of a group of Directors led by the Venusian, Cohui, Salkind would have taken their advice. It was too late now, though. One man could be quietly disposed of, but discretion was impossible when every 'ceiver in the System had blared out Dod's grim challenge.
    "You don't feel," Salkind said, "that what you're doing is an out-dated sort of thing? These are modern, civilized times, Commander."
    Dod contrived a gasp of horror, and the Directors echoed him. As Gompertz had foreseen, the centuries of conditioning in Company procedures had produced leaders who would revere the rediscovered ancient custom of mortal combat. What Salkind had said verged on blasphemy.
    "Don't misunderstand me," Salkind went on hastily, "I appreciate your motives-but hasn't it occurred to you that no one need die? It's over a hundred years since anyone was actually killed in a Games series-we've progressed since then, and anyway, the Free Spacers have been wiped out."
    As he finished, the dull growl of protests from the Directors swelled to a roar. Salkind looked round to make sure that the Flagmen were still with him, but he could not shout loudly enough to control the infuriated Directors. His control was broken.
    Cohui joined in the bellowing, and at last he was heard.
    "I speak for myself," he said meaningly, drawing his great skeletal frame to its full height, "as does the Chairman. And I say this: what was the rule for the early Companions is the rule for me. And the rule for Commander Dod." He paused, and the hate in his eyes was directed at Salkind. "And it's the rule for our Chairman, too."
    "I wish I had your courage," burst out the Portly Director of Saturn. "If I was thirty years younger------"
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    "Let him fight!" shouted someone. Then there was a general disturbance again.
    "For the honor of the Company-Fight! Fight! Fight!"
    Dod saw Salkind look helplessly round at the Flagmen again, and Cohui pulling at the blaster in his belt. Here was one man prepared to stand up to Plag. Salkind saw the move and shook his head at the eager men behind him.
    Salkind held up his hand for silence. It came, slowly and reluctantly. "It's the Commander's choice," he said. In that moment Dod knew that the Board was split for good. But with that realization came new knowledge: the clash between himself and Salkind had only just begun. Here was a man who would now be spurred on by personal vengeance-Salkind knew that he had to deal with a person who was not the heroic buffoon he had pretended. He knew that Dod was dangerous.
    The Directors were waiting for him to speak, Dod saw.
    It was a moment for sheer raving drama-and besides, Gompertz had arranged for the 'ceivers to cut in on the scene at this point, so the agencies could beam it to the System.
    He looked directly at Salkind, squared his big shoulders, and said loudly, "Fight!"
    Back came the roar from the Directors: "Fight! Fight! Fight!"
    For an old man, Dod thought, Gompertz had an amazing grasp of juvenile emotional reactions.
    FOUR
    the slim combat craft-there were scores of them in the depot on Venus where Dod was standing-tapered like a barracuda, but like one which had swallowed an indigestible octopus; the lump in the middle was the energy unit. The,craft differed in only two respects from those he was accustomed to fighting in the minor leagues: the pow-
    109
    er unit was increased by a thousandfold, and there was no protective cage around the cabin. At the tapering tip of the hundred-yard long craft was the control cabin, an odd-looking blip like the barb of an arrow; if the craft received x degrees of damage in a normal engagement, the cabin would zip oft the body of the ship, propelled by its own simple drive. The victor would then blast what was left of the craft whilst a recovery tug went for the defeated combatant who was safe in his cage. But from these craft, Dod thought, there was no escape.
    There was no escape either from the ploy-sellers. Two hundred and nineteen of them offered their services free, and another sixty offered him credits if he would accept their aid-naturally enough, as the man who sold the first mortal combat ploy this century would never need to hawk his wares again. Customers would flock to him.
    Out of curiosity, Dod looked at one or two battle-plans the dealers were offering, and when one of them got through the close guard Combat had placed round him, he let him have his say.
    "This one, Commander!" he boomed. Dod found the huge man interesting. Khan Hitler Alexander Tse-Tung, as he called himself professionally, was dressed in all the glorious tinsel of his calling-animal fur hat, red jacket, Sam Browne, breastplate, thigh boots, and with weapons from a dozen periods festooning his person; and for all his cheapjack appearance, thought Dod, one of his ploys wasn't at all bad. It had the merit of originality "You'll like it, Commander! Watch!"
    He flicked a switch on the tiny totex globe. Then two craft emerged, swung towards one another on a collision course, beams at maximum but each nullifying the other. What made this ploy interesting was the way one craft gradually lost speed as it sped across the arena.
    "YouTl need dead-pan for this," the Khan said eagerly, sensing Dod's interest, "but you could do it! Hold off speed, put the defense screens to max, and suddenly switch the lot to beam!"
    "This is for real," Dod reminded him. "We haven't got instant drive on these things either-they take four microseconds to build up speed-you've no reserve of motion to swing away with if things go wrong." All the same, it wasn't at all bad-not the way the ploy-seller wanted to see it done, but something more subtle.
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    Suddenly Dod wheeled to look at the Khan; another thought had struck him. Suppose Plag had sent the ploy-seller? If so, and if Dod used it, the first opponent would vaporize him when he let the screens down. v "I'd like to re-name this ploy the Dod Special-that is if you'll agree, Commander," the Khan said. He looked honest, but if he wasn't Dod would be set up like a hen on a wall.
    "Usual confidence and penalty?"
    "Naturally!" Now the ploy-seller was offended. He was shocked by the question-Dod was questioning his professional integrity: a ploy-man who sold a battle-plan never let a hint get to the opposition of the tactics his client would use; and the ploy-sellers' guild was strict about the penalties for a man who betrayed his client. He lost his head. It was the most exclusive trade union in the System, and the severest.
    "I'll give it a run," Dod promised.
    "I'm honored," said the Khan. Instead of leaving, however, he stood eyeing Dod. "This is going to sound crazy, Commander------"
    "Go on," said Dod.
    The Khan flourished a huge red beard. "I'd back you to win all the way, Commander, but I've heard a rumor." Now he was deadly serious, and the comic get-up took on its implications of grim warfare. "So far it's just a rumor -but watch out for Plag."
    Another warning, thought Dod, when he had gone; Gompertz, too, had told him to beware the unscrupulous-ness of the Company. Dod shrugged. You did what you had to do as well as you were able.
    The curve of tension that Comp had forecast had built up to a mammoth peak twelve days after the challenge had been issued; and on this, the twelfth day, the Games were to be held, in the Venus-Arena.
    Billions ordered their lives by every word and gesture of Dod and the four champions. What he ate, where they trained, his battle advisers, their hairdressers; the 'ceiver casts tried anxiously to be impartial, but with a Flagman in every studio Dod received much adverse publicity. It didn't alter his popularity ratings, however; most people still wanted to bet on him, and many said in public that the casts were angled.
    There was enough money staked on the Games to have 111
    financed the exploitation of the deposits on Pluto, with plenty left over to bring really effective weather control even to Venus's trick atmosphere. And most of it was on Dod.
    He trained hard, working through a score of standard battle situations every day; but he never deviated from the routine ploys. He was saving his tactics for the Games themselves.
    According to Combat, the Plag champions were relying on standard tactics, plus their razor-keen responses to give them the advantage. They had been carefully selected by Plag, and they included, of course, the redoubtable van Gulik; another of them, it had been discovered, was a descendant of a champion of the Free Spacers era, and a cult had been formed around him.
    Crazy things happened. There was a wave of suicides on Uranus; a crowd of charismatics on Jupiter adopted Dod as Leader; and on Venus itself, roaring, wide-open, independent-minded Venus, Flagmen were roughly handled by the settlers.
    Dod had agreed to allow Psych to continue their testing of his mental processes, but the Psychmen gave up several days before the Games were due to begin, having lost their nerve. The electric atmosphere of Venus was too much for them, and they left hurriedly for Terra.
    A contained excitement filled Dod. He had been meaning to contact Scrimgouer-now that he was in the hands of Combat instead of Plag he could do as he wished-but all thought of the fat Psych man had slipped away. Like every other man on nine planets, Dod wanted the fight.
    * * *
    The two craft stood together, and, before them, the two antagonists. There were certain ritual formalities, Comp had indicated.
    Combat officials inspected them, hard-eyed men who had been Games champions in their day, and who were determined that this series would be handled immaculately.
    "You know the terms of the combat?" Marshal Maes asked each man.
    "No quarter once begun," said Dod. The Flagman echoed him, and Dod felt the blind malice in his voice.
    "No hatred, spite, or anger in your hearts?"
    The Flagman laughed. He was a short, broad man, with 112
    flat killer's eyes; he went through the remainder of the responses calmly, full of confidence.
    Maes read out the rules of battle. "Craft to be monitored on control from Combat until in position when on receipt of 'Ready' signal from each contestant..."
    Something was pressing on Dod's mind, and angrily he pushed it back; this was no time for any irrelevancies.
    ". . . and should either contestant call in any aid from outside or introduce any unCompanion-like and treacherous weapon the offender will be cut down by the Marshal of the Games upon the shout of 'Foul traitor!' "
    There would be a small, fast, heavily-armed cruiser at the periphery of the arena under the command of the Marshal which would shatter in an instant the craft that broke the rules. Listening to the rules, Dod could hear the sane, decent, and civilized voice of the Free Spacers: this was combat, impartial, scrupulous, and mature.
    "Victory to the brave!" the Marshal thundered.
    "-to the brave!" rolled back the wild voices of the assembled Combat men.
    The pageantry was overdone, thought Dod, but nevertheless it was impressive.
    The System waited, tense. Fires burned blocks down; wives forgot to complain, drunkards sobered; children raced about unchecked; and according to their mul-titudinously diverse natures, a billion billion people reacted in horror, shock, excitement, ferocity, anguish, bitter denunciation, and blazing eagerness for blood.
    'To the brave!" the Heralds took up the cry over the networks.
    "To me," Dod said. "To Kinsella------"
    As he turned with the Flagman to enter his craft, he knew what had been pressing on his mind. He knew his own name.
    * * *
    It was a feeling of solitude. Not a blank, unheeding solitude, but a tense and tearing feeling that all human hopes had been left behind, and all that was here was the negation of feeling. Dod-he still thought of himself as Dod-watched the buttons being pressed, and the levers moving of their own accord. It would not be long before he was watching the face of his enemy.
    Dod let the accumulated tensions of the past months clatter through his mind-the sudden knowledge that he
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    was more than the cardboard Dod; the blinding agony of realizing that he had been blocked; Scrimgouer's fat face screwed up in sympathy when he was being taken for the Kindet tests; the dead faces of the Flagmen in his trophy case; hope and fear at Serampur as the comps churned out information which was useless eventually; the way Getler had died; and the live, stone face of the enemy-always back to the face of the enemy.
    Dod knew his first opponent by reputation only. He was hard, cold, and ruthless. And successful. The next man, Dod thought, would crack. Van Gulik was third-if he was to die, thought Dod, he would prefer to die at the hands of van Gulik rather than the others. The fourth man Dod didn't know of.
    "Ready?" asked Maes on the screen.
    "Closed up for action," Dod said. It was the ritual reply, a phrase from another age. His opponent was ready, too.
    'Then fight!" bellowed the Warden.
    For an instant of time, Dod's craft was without motion, protection, or armament.
    He was just in time as he punched wildly at the button which activated his screens, for a microsecond later a ferocious blast hit them as the Flagman's faster reflexes, shown as a blur of action on Dod's 'ceiver screen, beat him.
    He looked quickly at the 'ceiver and saw the Flagman grinning at him. He wanted to beat him quickly, for even as Dod diminished the supply of energy to his screens to allow his craft to move sluggishly in a spin away from the Flagman's ship, a second, then a third, blast shook his screens. At this rate, thought Dod, it will soon be over: defense made heavy inroads on the power unit, which served for defense and drive, as well as for armament; and by the very nature of the craft the aggressor had the advantage since the power unit was far more efficient in offense than in defense.
    He had to move.
    The banks of counters and rows of registers which recorded his enemy's levels winked and flashed at him: his own were less active. Then he saw the Flagman's hands jump over his control panel in a classical coup-de-grace pattern-a flank attack at the vulnerable point where the
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    screens met; the attack was called Goodbye Jack and no one knew why.
    It looked bad to the watchers.
    The two craft were specks of silver in one corner of the totex screens, the two men's cabins filling the rest. At the same time, the audience could watch the actual battle as well as each of the combatants; and the combatants could see one another. There was no totex experience that had half the immediacy of a Games series; and this series had the added thrill of impending death. But to the connoisseurs, Dod's challenge was shown up as a lunatic's flamboyant suicide.
    He avoided another lunge of energy, and found himself acting instinctively. His combat craft slipped out of the way of a furious bolt in a long, almost straight trajectory away from his opponent's; the death-blow trellised space where Dod's craft had been.
    In this kind of contest, the man who kept his nerve won; and Dod, to the audience, seemed to be losing control of both his ship and himself. It looked a straightforward case of stumbling amateur against lightning-quick professional.
    The Plag craft darted in close to Dod, coming to within a couple of hundred thousand miles, and then fluttering away again instantly as Dod loosed an almost unaimed blast at him.
    The Flagman laughed outright and sent his ship careering around Dod's in a mocking salute. Again and again, Dod ineptly rocked space. He let his face grow taut as if with strain and anxiety; he hoped he wasn't overdoing it.
    Many of the watchers pitied him. The fight had lasted for three minutes, and already it was over.
    Again the Plag craft chased Dod to the edge of the cosmic arena, inhibiting his movements, goading him into wasting energy, and trying to make him so blinded by fear and anxiety that for a moment he would be trapped into converting the hold of his power unit into one great sustained bolt of energy which, by his wider field of action and control of space, the Flagman would easily be able to avoid, paving the way for an annihilating counter-blast.
    The watching billions pitied or despised Dod. They watched Dod's personality crumbling; discipline was about to prevail, and an ambitious hornet would turn out to be stingless.
    115
    Dod frenziedly stared round his control cabin, and then glared at his opponent in the screen. Suddenly the Flagman saw what he had been waiting for as Dod desperately lunged for the glittering control panel and punched out the huge bolt of power his enemy was expecting.
    Away flickered the Plag craft out of danger in a graceful curve, one that was much admired. But the watchers stopped in the act of cheering.
    Dod's power-blast lasted for only seconds, and he converted to maximum drive, shieldless and weaponless in a direct line for the Plag vessel. The Flagman reacted quickly, lashing back at the unprotected craft, only to fill space with useless energy as Dod turned slightly away. That's when Dod's gamble paid off.
    Faced by an unorthodox attack, the Flagman converted to a cruiser-type pattern, heavy armament, light screens, and a fairly fast drive; and he waited to see what Dod would do.
    Dod grinned for the first time at his opponent, lined up the beams on the Plag craft and stopped his own ship dead as the massive power unit was converted into pure energy and a great, dazzling, blistering bolt danced out and glowed incandescently around the Plag vessel for a moment.
    For almost no-time-some impossibly small fraction of a microsecond-the billions watching saw the face of the Flagman distorted in frustrated rage, and then the screen cleared, blank, as his vessel swirled away as dust.
    A few fortunate observers saw the flash as the ship imploded, but most people were so shocked by the face of the dying Flagman that they missed it. Even the agency men stopped their commentaries.
    One gone, three to go, thought Dod.
    * * *
    "But your right is a new craft for each combat!" protested Marshal Maes.
    "This will do," said Dod. It meant that he would have a power unit fractionally inferior to his next opponent's, but against that his opponent would face a man who was so confident of success that he was prepared to give him an advantage; and it was a successful ship, too, Dod had reasoned, one which had already reduced another to dust.
    Dod looked at the handsome head in his 'ceiver screen 116
    and wondered as Maes slipped off the monitors. Then he acted.
    It was the original sucker punch. The Flagman was too conscious of the adulation he had received-he was the descendant of a hero of the Free Spacers time-and he came in too agressively, too contemptuously of Dod.
    Starting equidistant from the exact center of the arena, the two craft moved forward; the handsome Flagman's vessel flashed forward in a rolling maneuver to salute the billions watching, and to impress the millions of his admirers, and as he moved in to consume Dod's vessel, Dod moved faster. The Flagman's eyes were not on the instruments which recorded Dod's blinding bolt; his vision was fixed on eternity, on fame through the ages, of rolling cheers and jubilant crowds, and on himself in the Games Tables-he did not even know of death. The combat had lasted for eight seconds.
    * * *
    Dod rearmed before facing van Gulik.
    Marshal Maes was purple-faced with excitement, desperately anxious to congratulate Dod, but unable to do so' because of the etiquette of the Games.
    "Most enjoyable," he got out, with some effort.
    The Combat technicians and armorers were more partisan, breaking out into a babble of enthusiasm.
    "Great, Commander, just..."
    "I've lost a year's credits, but they're welcome to . . ."
    "Never seen such . .."
    "... action! Like I mean ..."
    "... you fooled him so ..."
    "... that first win was great but the ..."
    "... could have split my seams when ..."
    "... two to go and ..."
    "... no chance! I saw ..."
    "... great stuff! Terrific stuff ..."
    "... great!"
    "... just great!"
    Dod waved to them and turned to face the unbeaten champion of champions, van Gulik. But he wasn't there.
    "A change in the combat order," Marshal Maes explained. "Flagman van Gulik was asked that the fourth contestant should be next, and he has agreed." This was something new.
    "And if I don't agree?"
    117
    Maes shrugged his shoulders. "Plag checked with Comp -there's no ruling against it. They don't even have to give a reason. I'm sorry, Commander."
    Dod felt relieved. Whatever van Gulik's reasons, he had not wanted to kill the champion Flagman who had, alone of Plag, endeared himself to most men by his fairness in combat.
    The substitute was a round, cheerful-faced man with a thick bull neck and a pleasant smile; but his eyes showed the Plag mark-watchful, half-closed, hard.
    This combat, Dod thought, would be different. And it was.
    Warned by Dod's duplicity against the first Flagman, and his lightning destruction of the second opponent, the round man moved cautiously. For a moment, Dod felt fear touch him, and angrily he dismissed it.
    The Flagman came in as a destroyer, fast, lightly-armed, and lightly-armored; Dod met him, his power unit concentrated on defense and weapons. He was an armored, hard-hitting crab, a cosmic dreadnought, all heavy weapons and armor. Both his blasts missed the enemy, and only by heeling away in a vicious tight turn did he avoid the Flagman's counterblow to the vulnerable flank of his craft.
    The odd sensation he thought was fear seemed to be slowing him, and now he was angry at himself for his blundering efforts. Billions watching approved of his show of anger, thinking it a ploy; but Dod knew what was troubling him: fatigue.
    In an hour he had lived the excitement of a dozen normal lives, and the strain on his seared, over-active brain was too much.
    Again a bolt laced across the cosmos, and now the craft's power unit screamed out that the danger-point was reached. On Mars an old man died of excitement, whilst deep under Saturn two steady drinkers clutched so hard on their glasses that shards of glass splintered and drove, unfelt, into their hands.
    Dod was ready to clutch at straws when suddenly he remembered the ploy-seller's plan. Immediately he put it into execution. If Plag had got to the Khan, he thought, he was a dead man now.
    The success of the plan-his own variation of the Khan's idea-lay in his ability to convince his opponent
    118
    that he intended to fight with the utmost caution, concentrating on wearing down his opponent's energy by inviting attack; the Flagman's reply would, of course, be to burn down his screens.
    But the Flagman was cautious, too. Dod looked at the cheerful grocer's face, and at the stubby ringers poised for a new program of attack. Dod almost converted to speed, total drive, to escape the new onslaught; but his anger gave him new life. Just as Gompertz had said, battle brought total involvement, total power totally for the time it was needed.
    He concentrated, and the plan cleared in his mind. Soon he was an oyster in a hard impenetrable shell, and as the Flagman loosed a heavy, but not overwhelming bolt, he let the screens take it; he lowered his speed still further, and the registers in the Plag craft showed that he had reduced his attack potential to almost nil.
    Dod's face showed utter concentration; and fear, too.
    The Flagman came in and unleashed a tremendous blast of fury at the sitting target; now Dod's craft rocked, and one of the screen's registers blinked off for a moment coming on again afterwards only intermittently. One screen was now unreliable, it told him.
    Still the Flagman was wary. A third blast, accurately delivered, should shatter Dod's craft, but he was cautious, this happy-looking killer, Dod saw. He waited for the third pass. As the Flagman completed his turn, Dod thought of the fiery brace of alcohol. Another sign of weakness, he told himself angrily.
    The brilliantly-handled Plag vessel swept forward. It all rested on the duff screen, Dod knew-and so would the Flagman. He must have seen it, and realized that one more well-aimed blast would split his opponent's craft. But it would have to be delivered at a close range, and at the last possible moment.
    Dod thought of the red-bearded giant. You have to beat him to the draw, the Khan had said. What draw? Another survival from the past, he thought. Really it was a button that had to be pressed. That was what he had to beat the Flagman to; and even then he had to let the Flagman move first.
    The two antagonists looked each other squarely in the eyes as the two sleek deadly craft closed.
    A million miles. Half a million. 119
    This man was an automaton, Dod thought. Utter, icy control.
    Two hundred thousand miles.
    Dod licked his lips, never taking his eyes from his opponent's, waiting for the tiny movement, the infinitely small contraction of the cornea, which would tell him that the Flagman was about to make his move.
    Fifty thousand. Twenty thousand. Ten thousand.
    Buz/ers shrieked in the cabin-in both cabins. Bells rang, metallic voices cackled out warnings.
    Seven thousand.
    Three thousand.
    For an instant, Dod admired the Flagman's courage.
    Two thousand.
    One of them, maybe both, had seconds to live.
    One thousand miles.
    "collision course!" bellowed the chorus of voices.
    Then for the first time ever two combat craft registered space distance in hundreds, of miles. Pandemonium filled the cabins.
    Eight hundred.
    Dod almost missed it.
    The Flagman must have had a most fantastic muscular control to keep that unblinking stare even as his hand covered the inches to the button.
    But Dod saw the sweat. It stood out momentarily on the Flagman's face. He could not control his own sweat glands. Through the minute orifices perspiration stood out in stark relief.
    Dod dabbed down first.
    His own craft was blown bodily a quarter of a million miles by the destruction of the Plag vessel which was consumed by Dod's enormous bolt of power; in the moment of the explosion, only a thin screen had stood between Dod's craft and the Plag ship. Paradoxically, it was the duff screen which saved him from the full force of the explosion, for when Dod converted his defensive screens to a massive jolt of force, it responded so slowly that it had still been in operation when its power should have been withdrawn.
    Tired, Dod punched a course for Venus.
    Now van Gulik, he thought sadly. He had always admired van Gulik.
    120
    Khan Hitler Alexander Tse-Tung threw himself through the Combat crews and embraced Dod in a bear-hug. "You did it! My ploy won for you!" He roared round the huge bay, "The Khan's plan triumphed!"
    "I beat him to the draw," Dod agreed. He pushed the big man aside as the Marshal of the Games came to him with the half-liter of brandy he had asked for to calm his fatigue-jangled nerves.
    Suddenly the noise of the jubilant crowd was drowned as the Heralds called for silence. Marshall Maes began to say something to Dod, but stopped.
    "Flagman van Gulik has withdrawn from the Games!" the enormously amplified voice of the Herald called. "The fourth combat will be delayed until the challenge is taken up by another contestant. Van Gulik is branded Craven!"
    Dod looked at the familiar face of the champion. He didn't look like a coward.
    The crowd was shocked into silence, absolute stillness and silence. Van Gulik was the hero of every young graduate of Space School-van Gulik, the man who was to avenge the deaths of his three comrades: he had turned coward.
    "Claims he's unworthy to fight you," muttered Maes. "Unworthy! Despicable cowardice!" He turned to look at the craggy face of the Flagman who returned his contemptuous gaze equably.
    What had happened, the Herald continued, was that the Plag champion had been so impressed by Dod's skill and courage that he did not wish to proceed, preferring perpetual disgrace to the risk of killing such a brave man. It was his right, the Herald said ironically. So long as the combat had not yet begun, a contestant could withdraw at any stage.
    Van Gulik crossed to Dod through a crowd of stunned Combat men. He was a big man, thin and hard, with the Plag stamp of observant mistrust in his bearings; but he had a calm, amused look on his face which Dod had never seen before on a Flagman. Had Gompertz got to him? It was unlikely. When he spoke Dod knew that here was a man who had beaten the Company and become a human being.
    "There's no need for us to fight," he said simply. "I took up your challenge because I wondered who was the better man. Now I know."
    121
    "But the disgrace?" asked Dod.
    For answer he removed the blaster from his belt and handed it to Marshal Maes. Dod saw the relief on his face as Maes took the weapon.
    "Shoot," said van Gulik.
    This, too, was his right. The Marshal had no powers to refuse. If a contestant chose an honorable way of declining a combat, the Marshal became his executioner. An ancient rule had been framed to meet the contingency of two friends clashing, unawares, in a mortal combat. Maes quoted the rule. Then he raised the weapon.
    Dod kicked out instinctively. The blaster flashed upwards and rattled on the craft van Gulik should have used. He held out his hand, and the Flagman took it. Then two burly Flagmen edged van Gulik away to a waiting scout.
    Remembering his duty, Marshal Maes looked round and bellowed in a stentorian voice that the next and final combat in the Games series would begin immediately a new contestant came forward to take up Dod's challenge.
    Dod watched van Gulik stepping into the Plag vessel and waved; the Flagman grinned and waved back. He was a brave man, Dod thought. And now he would face a Plag court that had only one penalty for cowards.
    * * *
    It was impossible, the commentators were saying in ten thousand shocked whispers that swelled in tone and volume until all over the System men were taking up the shout and croaking hoarsely that what had happened on their screens was impossible!
    The fourth and final combat had been under way for three seconds. Dod felt the iron weight of fatigue clamp down on him immediately the fight began, and for want of a better ploy he sent his craft spinning into a crazy butterfly gambol about the arena. He had no plan at all, he realized desperately.
    The last of the Plag contestants showed a thin, ascetic face and as his long, elegant hands swept over the controls to set his ship racing after Dod's in a destroyer setup, Dod knew that his end was near; he had not the mental equipment to meet this fanatic. He was too tired. There had been too much strain, too much that was new------
    Then it happened.
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    From the Plag craft came a sunburst of glory, a furious lazily-rolling cloud of flaming gas which swept across the arena towards Dod's tiny vessel. Dod moved. Fast.
    The watching billions saw it in horror and their horror was redoubled as they saw a delicate smile on the face of the Flagman as again he fired the outlawed sungun and again a rolling, coruscating cloud swept towards his opponent's madly twisting craft.
    In that moment Dod-and many of the audience- knew why van Gulik had refused to fight. The whole fabric of the Games collapsed in that instant; it was the first time ever that a combat craft had used the forbidden sungun, the first time that meticulous inspection every craft received had failed to find a piece of illicit equipment.
    Plag had broken the rules. Again, Gompertz had been uncannily accurate in his assessment of the Company. But no one knew the extent of the implications of Flag's abandoning of the rules; not for some time did the far-reaching effects of Flag's mad action become apparent.
    Knowing his screens to be hopelessly ineffective against the sunbursts, Dod shifted his craft's power potential to drive, and by straining the tiny power unit to its uttermost, he got away; only for the moment, however, as the Plag vessel followed swiftly to range on him. Safe for the moment, Dod realized that a voice was calling him again and again in the small cabin: "Foul Traitor!" Marshal Maes was bellowing.
    On the screen, the Flagman's face, calm, relaxed, and happy, looked up for a moment to Dod; the Flagman smiled.
    What was the use? Dod almost gave up. But he found his hands had moved and his craft was moving too. Maes' words came back to him: the rules had foreseen this contingency.
    On the periphery of the combat arena, a cruiser stirred, flickered into movement, and vanished as its main drive sent it lancing through space towards the far rim of the cosmic arena where the pirate Plag craft was lining up on Dod's co-ordinates.
    The cruiser was a deep-space vessel, light, fast, and armed with a sungun that matched its size.
    It darted through the still-surging blast from the pirate's sunburst, its screens scorning the clouds of consuming
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    fire, and loosed its own tremendous broadside. Blistering space in a dazzling thousand-mile cube of energy, reducing the rubbish of space, the tiny meteorites, the microscopic specks of dust, into its component molecules, the sunburst consumed the pirate in a vast, awe-inspiring, glowing cloud.
    Dod watched for a moment. The great hammer-blow had tumbled a way of life.
    "Thanks," he called to the cruiser's captain, who appeared in the blank screen.
    There was a curious formality about the salute the captain was giving him, Dod noticed; and the Combat man hadn't spoken.
    He realized what he should do.
    "Excellently handled, Captain," he said. "Report." The captain could speak now that the new Director had authorized him to make his report.
    "I didn't think you got through that second blast, Director," the captain said. He didn't need to add that he was glad Dod had survived-his face was split by a huge grin.
    Marshal Maes' voice cut in. "Congratulations!" His face too was broadly grinning. Dod stripped off his commander's epaulettes, reminding the Marshal of his rank. "Congratulations, Director!" the Marshal repeated. "Never in all------"
    "A ship to Terra. Immediately. Private. I'll expect it standing by when I make Venus." He spoke with some asperity, choking off the Marshal's speech. Time was the essence of the thing now.
    "Quicker by cruiser," cut in the cruiser captain.
    Maes, a man of action when he knew what to do, said, "I'll clear everything for you. Proceed to base at once," he ordered the captain.
    "This ship's modern!" protested the captain. "I can pick the little ship up with a grab-screen right where it is!"
    "Do that," said Dod.
    Within minutes the little vessel shuddered as it was fed into the great belly of the cruiser. An excited captain was ready with a battery of questions.
    "What's your best time to Terra?"
    "Two hours, but------" Time!
    "Make it faster."
    The captain knew when to obey. "With all despatch!" 124
    he said and to Dod the phrase had a happy, time-honored ring about it. But when he had given his navigator the course and subdued the navigator's wondering half-expressed questions, he turned again to Dod, who only wanted sleep. "This is important," he said apologetically. Dod roused himself to listen. The captain was not the sort to concern himself overmuch with trivialities, but as it happened there was no need for the captain to explain: a dishevelled figure came pushing into the cabin. The captain's hand was on the butt of his blaster, and behind the man two crew members covered him. Dod had difficulty in recognizing the wild, bloodstained face of van Gulik, but it was he, no longer calm and contained, but angry and truculent.
    "I thought you should see him," the captain said, motioning to the crewmen to put their weapons away.
    "What happened?" asked Dod.
    ' "I was scheduled for correction-Error," explained van Gulik. "I was a coward, remember? I would have been shot."
    "Killed his escort," said the captain. He made no comment. Combat men had no interest in the internal affairs of Plag.
    "So?" asked Dod.
    "He gave us the tip about the sungun," the captain told him.
    "Couldn't say anything," van Gulik said, and Dod saw that his shoulder was coated with heavy bandages through which the blood shone brightly. "Both of us would have been blasted on the spot-made to look like an accident. This way you had a chance."
    "Would we have got to you so quickly if we hadn't got a tipoff?" asked the Captain. The Plag champion hadn't finished, but he was swaying on his feet. "Something else?" asked Dod.
    Van Gulik tried to square his shoulders. What he was trying to say hurt him worse than his torn shoulder.
    "Just when I got away news came through on the Plag channels-the Chairman's taken over. Joined with Plag. And you're dead." Then he passed out.
    They picked up the Plag orders on the 'ceiver which the captain-illegally-had installed, and got the full story. Three Directors shot as traitors; two had sided with Salkind and might live; Plag had taken over all
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    forts and bases, and mobilized their reserve forces; only Cohui, who had got away on a fast cruiser to Venus, had any sort of backing as yet that could give Plag any trouble; several uprisings had been put down. Gom-pertz was right once more.
    At last the System was crumbling.
    And me, thought Dod. Me? I have to sleep.
    * * *
    When he awoke an hour later he assessed his situation after hearing the captain's sit-rep. He had enough power to match anything Plag could send up in this sector at short notice; as Director he ranked equal with Salkind in theory, so the captain would take his orders whatever they were. There was no immediate danger.
    He could, if he chose, continue to Serampur as he had ordered-and, after all, wasn't that why this whole crazy scheme had been planned? It was aimed simply at getting to the big comps Psych used.
    Or was it? Dod suddenly felt that Gompertz had known all along that getting to the comps was only a small part of the elaborate scheme, and that the chief aim had been the collapse of the System.
    "Stationary over Serampur," reported the captain. There was a note of pride in his voice as he said it.
    "Good going," said Dod.
    "All weapons in position, all screens activated. Orders, Director?" He wanted action. That was what he had been trained for, and at last, against all his expectations, there was to be sudden, quick, deadly action; and he was to be led by the man who had triumphed over a whole series of adversaries-to the death, to the death-in one day.
    He was noticeably disappointed when Dod ordered a light scout down and went alone into the Psych headquarters.
    Eiserer almost grovelled. His department was at Dod's disposal. Had he been in touch with Salkind? It didn't matter, and Dod brushed him aside and strode through the deserted corridors ready to blast down any opposition; but no Flagman came to challenge him.
    He realized that the Games had changed him again, just as he had changed when Scrimgouer had shocked him into casting off Dod's identity. He was not the subtle, intellectual figure that had tricked Psych; no longer a
    126
    % sS
    creature of refined, introspective emotions that tried to deduce a reason for the glittering halo that set him apart from the rest of humanity. Now he cut directly through to the heart of the matter.
    "director-status?" shrilled out the comp when he punched in the first of the questions that still baffled him.
    He banged in the status-equivalents Eiserer had obviously presented him with. The machine scanned the information and confirmed his rights.
    "What work was Kinsella engaged on when arrested and blocked?" The name still meant nothing to him. He was neither Dod nor Kinsella, but Dod stuck somehow.
    "first alien contacti" Naively, the machine marvelled. "subject studied under blood-ancient relative," It thought for & moment. "grandmother. family
    NAME DETWEILER. TOGETHER FORMULATED THEORY OF BIPARTITE PSYCHE BASED ON ANTIQUE CONCEPT OF SANKHYA
    from early------" Dod knew the rest, so he speeded the
    machine until what he wanted came out. ". . . evaded
    CAPTURE FOR TWO YEARS UNTIL RAID ON PSYCH ESTABLISHMENT AT NEW MUNICH IN SEARCH OF EQUIPMENT . . ."
    It chattered on, but Dod remembered the raid now. The waiting surface-craft; the rain and sleet, and his bare feet on the rough concrete; a soft cosh he carried- he still wouldn't kill at that time-he remembered; the flashes of lightning he had to avoid revealing himself in and which finally betrayed him; and, lastly, the blundering attempt to fight off the trained killer. If he had had a weapon-but he wouldn't have used it.
    Then the interrogation. Endlessly. And the block. He felt his brain shaking inside his skull.
    He asked the machine why Psych hadn't blocked Grandma.
    "subject senile. shock of capture of only surviving RELATIVE COMPLETED BREAKDOWN. HARMLESS. PSYCH RECOMMENDATION NO PUNISHMENT. SUBJECT NO LONGER ABLE TO CONDUCT EVEN SIMPLE RESEARCH."
    "Why was this research dangerous?" It involved delving into ancient literatures; a study of light and its effect on the mind; time and dimensions came into it too.
    "proceed with caution!" The comp was anxious. "refer PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT COMMUNICATION WITH
    aliens!"
    127
    He asked where Grandma was now.
    "unknown! investigate! disappeared when ktn-sella-dod returned serampur for halo investigation. query---made contact with renegade scrimgou-
    ER?"
    So he had got away. That was something, Dod thought. He flicked the tapes away; as they fluttered down, a name caught his eye. He picked out the shining tape and read it. lit was a portion of the answer to his first question, a part he had missed out in order to get to more vital information.
    ". . . SUBJECT AND KINSELLA-DOD FIRST PROPOUNDED THEORY LEADING TO PSYCH APPLICATION OF WITHDRAWAL-WILL TECHNIQUE IN KINDET TESTS . . ."
    Dod turned away from the comp.
    It had come back. Not memory, because that was only a small part of a mind; not techniques of thought, for they could be learned afresh. What was thrust upon him painfully was a personality.
    Now he was Kinsella. A hardened, embittered Kinsella, but Kinsella nevertheless. Now he wanted to continue with his work. That came first. Dod had been a frustrated co-action of two conflicting halves of a personality, a man who did not know what he wanted, but who knew how to act. Kinsella was a man of thought, too.
    The immense shock of becoming invested with his personality weakened him, though. He remembered the agony of the block, the years of his life as a dead man. He realized, too, that he had caused the living deaths of countless men and women who had suffered the tests Psych had mockingly named after him. And he thought of Grandma, whose fine intellect had been shattered by the news of his capture. He collapsed and sat with his back to the comp. Despair flooded through him.
    He looked round the vast cliffs of comps and got up wearily. All the blood that had been shed, all the ruin of many lives, pressed on his spirit. There was nothing left.
    It was finished.
    He glanced up suddenly. A movement, quick and furtive, had momentarily cast a shadow. Someone was waiting for him outside the comp room.
    Should he walk out on to the waiting knife or gun? He walked forward, mesmerized by the thought of death.
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    His steps became firmer. It was a way out. An exit through an exit.
    His reflexes let him down. He had forgotten Dod.
    As the Flagman crouched in the approved gun-slicing position, and swung, the slender blade arcing upwards in an almost gentle motion that was a perfect symmetrical co-ordination of knife and arm, Dod rolled away on to his back, back-heeled into the pit of the Flagman's stomach, and took his neck in a strangle-lock.
    There was something to live for after all, thought Dod, as he pushed the corpse away; the dead man went reluctantly, dead fingers still entangled in Dod's tunic.
    Hate had awakened him from his trance, Dod saw. Dod had kept Kinsella alive, and, together, they could work for his own ends. He caught a glimpse of the halo in a silver screen. Dod could live for revenge, and Kinsella for research.
    * * *
    As he climbed into the scout, Dod heard the cruiser captain's voice calling anxiously.
    •Trouble?" asked Dod.
    "Routine check," answered the captain. "We'd heard nothing for over an hour. Where to now?"
    "Peenemunde," Dod told him.
    "Again?" Dod told him once more.
    "Somewhere special?" asked the captain.
    "That's where it all began."
    The captain's face wrinkled with effort. "Rockets! Chemical rockets! Back in the Second Millennium!" He thought again. "Someone special?"
    Dod punched a course for the cruiser. "We're going to call on an old lady."
    "An old lady," agreed the captain.
    "My grandmother," Dod explained.
    "Your grandmother."
    "She may not be there," Dod pointed out.
    "No," said the captain.
    "But that's her last address."
    Dod wondered if the captain would ask him why he intended calling on an elderly relative in a deep-space vessel, which, weight for weight, was the best in the System. And it was a considerable weight of metal. But the captain passed on his instructions without comment. Any man who was a Director and who could survive a
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    deadly Games series and still look as self-controlled as Dod did was good enough for him. If he had been ordered to make for the Aliens' screens, he told himself, he would do it.
    The cruiser's screen reached out to grab the small scout, and Dod faced the captain. When the captain saw the torn tunic he looked once, hard, at it, but asked no questions.
    "You should know this," he reported. "While you were at Serampur, we plotted the rest of the heavy stuff Plag has on Terra-just as a safeguard, we're not scared," he went on hurriedly. "Most of the ships are orbiting over Moonbase."
    "Stay out of trouble if you can," Dod told him. There was the job hi hand to complete before thinking about intervening in a system-wide revolt. "We'll work out, something when we're through at Grandma's."
    The cruiser gained speed.
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    III. REQUITAL ONE
    dod stood in front of the ruined castle that rested on a stony hill like a battered crow. It had weathered the primitive wars of the Second Millennium, and survived both the nuclear storms of the early Third and the more furious holocausts of the late Third Millennium when all the immense flower-like cities of the Seventh Asiatic Confederation spread neatly over Europe and Asia had been whirled away in ashes and light, deadly, murderous white dust: the castle took it all, acquiring a new patina of scarred, blistered age. For over five centuries it had been the home of the Detweilers, and now, looking at the silent ruin, Dod felt at peace. The crackling anxieties of the Games and the sprung tensions of the weeks at Serampur were soothed. It should come to an end here, the long search.
    "Cruiser in position," reported the eager voice of the cruiser's captain, breaking in on his thoughts. "I've got the area covered by a force eight shield. Orders?"
    Dod spoke decisively. No further orders; remain in touch; report new developments.
    He jumped the holes in the shattered drawbridge and crossed the hall, with its mounds of grassed-over rubble open to the sky. What he wanted was in the dungeons-• it was obvious that Scrimgouer had moved out of the castle with Grandma from the first look he had had at the place: no robot arms worked the doors as he neared them; no warning eyes flashed a warning. But there would be a message.
    Thoughtfully he regarded the solid zinc door facing him. First there was the safety circuit to disconnect-if he tried to burn down the door with a heat-pencil or to force it with a blaster, half the castle would fall in on the dungeons as the wired explosive charge was detonated. He snipped gently in a concealed recess.
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    There was another thing too. What had Grandma said? He had been a boy, his parents dead not long before, and she was showing him the secrets of the castle. She must have realized then that her brain was turning to cardboard through sheer age; and she must have been hoping desperately that he would take up where "his parents had left off, that he would have the nerve to continue what they had left unfinished.
     "It's a simple idea," she had scud. "But then all good ideas are simple. One of the Detweilers thought of this." Then she had pushed on the dungeon door and stepped back.
    Dod pushed, stepped back and waited. A soft mechanical click was followed by an appalling scream of heavy machinery as a dozen spear-like bars crashed on to the concrete floor where an unwary visitor would have stood. When the Detweilers had taken over the castle, a devious-minded ancestor had taken the ancient mechanism apart and lovingly renewed it. The grill rumbled up again, and Dod passed through.
    The cell was bare in the light of the small flash he carried. Too bare. The rows of shelves for his micro-Jilms were empty. There was nothing.
    Before Dod's mind registered more than bewilderment, a voice rang out behind him and he turned, hand thrusting down to the blaster at his side.
    "Hello again!" called the voice. Scrimgouer's voice. But he was not there. Dod was alone.
    Scrimgouer chuckled fatly. "Look up! And put that blaster away! Over the door-got it?"
    Dod grinned. This was the Scrimgouer he remembered -a man who enjoyed tricks. The pea-sized recorder unit blared again.
    "Briefly, this is the situation. Psych got on to my investigation into your Grandma's history almost as soon as I began, so I cleared out and moved her. I took all your files, too. It took some time to persuade her"-it would, thought Dod, for the old woman detested bustle, change, movement-"but when I said you were following she told me about the hide-out. Under one of the Seventh Confed city-sites-I don't know where it is, so I can't direct you. But she says you'll know it."
    It was a good choice. The unfortunate citizens had not had enough time to get to their secret stronghold when
    132
    the cyclonic bombs began to fall, and it was in perfect condition, probably the greatest fortress on Terra. Plag had been looking for it for decades. Three miles down, defended by old-fashioned but massive screens, it could laugh off anything but a fleet's massed fire-power. Grandma was safe.
    "There was no point in trying to reach you-I left some information in wordbank, but I put a delay-circuit in with it in case someone in Psych had seen me there- because you looked able to cope by yourself, and if I'd tried to approach you, Psych's suspicions would have been confirmed. Keeping the old lady out of harm's way seemed a better idea."
    Scrimgouer, Dod recalled, had always had a high opinion of Dod's ability to look after himself.
    "By this time you'll have beaten the block down completely. I'm assuming, though, that some of the detailed research you did will have slipped out of your memory altogether, so if you look down a yard due north of the recorder you'll find a small Psych opening. Just give the key-word-the same as the wordbank key, and watch."
    More tricks, thought Dod. Couldn't the fat Psychman have left the film lying about to hand? Common-sense would say so, but Scrimgouer liked the game for its own sake. "Renaissance," he said.
    A small circular hole appeared in the wall.
    "Good, eh!" called the Psychman's fat metallic voice from the tiny unit. "I'll be seeing you!" More quietly he added, "By the way, don't expect too much from your Grandma. She's been through a lot, and she's an old woman now."
    Dod ripped the tiny unit from the wall, crunched it under his heel, and picked up the reel of tape Scrimgouer had left. Then he played a heat-pencil on the Psych opening and on the tiny, glittering pieces of the recorder unit. If Plag got to the castle, they would find nothing of value. Even though the end was in sight, he was scrupulously cautious. Even with a planetary System disintegrating as a political unit, he would not neglect the remotest possibility of Flag's learning of his plans.
    The Asiatic fort lay a thousand miles away and he wanted to get back to the cruiser quickly; he would take the ship deep into space and pursue a seemingly random course so that the Plag tracking stations would not be
    133
    able to pin-point his objective with any certainty; and would have time to look through the tape.
    Dod emerged into the cold afternoon sunshine-he had forgotten the short winter day and the keen wind blowing inland over the Baltic-and he found himself shivering.
    In the sky above, the cruiser was a tiny diamond. With it, he thought optimistically, he could get to the fort, join up the cruisers' screens into an integrated defensive pattern with the massive screens already there and------
    Suddenly he ran as he heard the scout's alarms ringing.
    He threw himself into the cabin and heard the cruiser captain's voice calling a warning.
    "Come in Director Dod! Red danger alert! Come in------"
    Cursing himself for an over-confident fool, Dod answered at once. He must have lost his personal 'ceiver- dropped it, possibly, as he scrambled through the castle; or maybe it had been jolted.
    "Report," he said quickly.
    "Battle fleet orbiting Terra bearing Solar Grid twenty-three T-one-nine, distance nine million miles. They've even brought the Starbreaker! Orders, Director?''
    "How much time?"
    "Minutes-two. Then they can range on the cruiser."
    "What are your chances?" Already Dod had dismissed the possibility of reaching the cruiser. It would take at least four minutes to get within reach of the cruiser's grab-screen.
    "We can take half-a-dozen of those cans with us," the captain said, laughing, "but the-Starbreaker!"
    Dod understood his reluctance to fight the Starbreaker. The old dreadnought that the Free Spacers had used to keep the Companies' ambitions within limits was reputed to mount solar torpedoes, cyclonic boosters, and the biggest sungun ever built.
    "Get moving," said Dod. "Check back daily."
    "Will do," said the captain. The cruiser vanished, but the captain's voice came through again. "I hear Cohui's mobilizing a scratch fleet-I'll see what I can do there,"
    "Good hunting," said Dod, as he punched out a course which would take him directly away from Peenemunde. With the main fleet on the way this part of Europe was not a healthy place.
    134
    Over the Pripet Marshes, the main motors died. They were not designed for atmospheric flight at speed, and the drag of Terra's dense envelope of air was too much for them.
    On his screen, Dod saw a burst of flurrying lights which would be the fleet on its way to the castle. A pair of slivers of light detached themselves from the cluster. Two fast cruisers, Dod reasoned, hot on the trail of the cruiser. He felt sorry for them. They were no match for the battle-hungry Combat captain with the superb vessel.
    He had his own problems, however. The captain could well look after himself.
    The emergency drive cut in and whined with a teeth-edging scream-how could the ancients have stood jets for the couple of centuries they lasted? They were reliable, true, but they left him a sitting duck even at this height-nought feet to escape detection-since the jets had not the power to produce the erratic corkscrew roll he had been using. And the jets' fuel was being rapidly burned up: the scout was a liability.
    It bumped down gently in the gathering gloom, and the noise of the jets gradually ceased. Then Dod walked away as it moved off again on automatic. It would climb straight up for as much as twenty, maybe thirty, miles, and then its fuel load would be exhausted, and the Hound alone knew where it would go then. Plag might find it and blast it, taking the heat off him for a while. He hoped so.
    Dod reviewed his position.
    From being one of the small number of men on the Board of Directors, the men who ruled the System, he had sunk to running as a fugitive; it was no consolation to think that others of the Board were dead, although Cohui's rebellion might eventually be of value to him; as things stood at the moment his situation was unrelievedly bad. He was thousands of miles away from the Asiatic fort, and when he got there he would have to begin again on the research that had been blocked five years before; he had not even read the tape Scrimgouer had left.
    He wondered whether Gompertz had made any plans to meet the new state of affairs. Certainly the wily old man had known of the coming collapse of the Company system, where Plag and Psych between them, working
    135
    closely with Chairman Salkind, had been in control of the nine planets. But had Gompertz the necessary strategic skills to take advantage of the split in the Company?
    As he tramped along the perimeter of the agricultural station near by which he had landed, Dod thought in wonder at the ease with which the whole fabric of Company government had been rent.
    Few spared a thought for the Aliens: they were a part of life. They had been a part of their fathers' lives, and their grandfathers'. No one got through their screens. And who wanted to get to the stars, anyway?
    Gompertz had seen what the effect of Dod's halo would be. He alone knew that the immense shock of having at last achieved a form of contact with the Aliens would damage the Company's structure; and that when Gamesmanship came to an end through Flag's being forced to break the code of the Games, the Company would collapse.
    The old man had vision, but could he control the present situation?
    Not that it concerns me just now, Dod thought, as he came to the depot. His immediate aims were far more prosaic. He had to get some form of transport-steal a craft from the agricultural station, and then get to the fort; and when he had evaluated the work he and Grandma had been engaged upon into the possibility of contacting the Aliens, he would get in touch with Gompertz. That was the plan.
    He could not concern himself with what was happening on Venus-whether or not Cohui had evicted the Plag guards from the fortresses; whether anyone else was holding out; what would happen to the fleets of reservists on the periphery of the System; whether there was peace or blazing war from Pluto to Mars, or whether there had been a simple acceptance of the new Plag dictatorship under Salkind. For the moment his life was centered upon getting a vessel from a hick station in the middle of nowhere so that when he travelled the ring of fire over his head would not be noticeable.
    The halo! It all came back to the halo. Dod stood absolutely still, watching for signs of activity in the darkness ahead. The halo had brought down a two-centuries old system of government. One man moves a billion billion! It was a sobering thought.
    136
    Then he began laughing quietly, seeing the joke: he had been attributing the collapse of the Company to himself! It needed Kinsella to point out Dod's presumption.
    Obviously any system which could crumble so easily was already cracked wide open. And had been for years!
    He-or the halo-was just the catalyst. The spark that fires the gas in the chamber. The one neutron that triggers the chain reaction, sending the whole mass into bunding, cosmic fire. The Company had been a mass which could go critical at any time.
    It had contraverted the first principle of human existence: life is dynamic. Inaction is followed by atrophy.
    Dod stood staring into the near-dark.
    Out of the gloom a robot came humping towards him. There was no point in trying to avoid it. Its job was to question callers and apprehend the suspicious. You couldn't argue with it, and certainly you couldn't escape it. Not without field weapons.
    "Lead me to the station craft!" ordered Dod.
    The guard robot stopped and considered.
    "Identify yourself," it said.
    "I am the Regional Engineer. Status Three-One. You will now remove transceiver panel plate for inspection!"
    "Must report to Regional Headquarters," began the full, rich voice-they must have introduced new voice units whilst he had been on the Pluto run, thought Dod. Previously they had spoken with a halting lisp. Someone in Psych, a bright boy with a theory, would have recommended, this new, more commanding, voice. And that's all we have been able to do, Dod told himself: minor refinements to the existing structure.
    "Full weapons inspection!" he shouted. "De-fuse blas-ters! Remove main engine plates! Disconnect transceiver!"
    "... orders state, 'Report all contracts'. .."
    "All agricultural guard robots are to be re-equipped with more powerful energy units and upgraded," Dod explained rapidly.
    The robot digested the information.
    "Will become more reliable," it pondered.
    "Needing less maintenance," Dod pointed out.
    "Orders state . . ." it began, but it was already obeying, stripping off its plates at the same time. Clearly, its
    137
    mind was divided. Pride won, and abruptly it died as its energy unit was cut off.
    Dod spoke into the robot's 'ceiver.
    "Routine inspection," he said. No sense in alerting the rest of the stations in the area by asking for emergency action. "Engineer, Status Three-One identified. Station craft will report to boundary fence"-he looked around for the flashing marker that was the homing beam for the robots-"location North seven." Seven flashes flickered into the night at the marker Dod had noticed in his survey of the station.
    The 'ceiver burbled once in the robots' own shorthand code. Then the light craft settled comfortably alongside the marker.
    Dod looked back once at the inert black hulk of the guard robot, black and solid against the sky-line. It symbolized the Company's vulnerability: it had never had an idea of its own. All it could do was to respond predictably to a limited number of eventualities. Faced with a new concept, it folded.
    The little atmospheric vessel bumbled across the darkened fields which rolled in great hundred-mile sweeps across the continents. Dod had no eyes for the sight as early dawn broke softly and mistily, and the belts of wheat and barley gave way to maize. He was listening to the Psych broadcasts, getting up to date on the progress of Salkind's take-over of the System.
    "... no need for alarm, no cause for panic," a smooth, pleasing voice was saying, "all is in order. Only a few non-Companions have been tricked into going berserk, and when caught they will be brought back to the ways of the Company." He didn't say how. "Our aim is the establishment of order, not the persecution of a few unfortunates who have been tricked and deceived. Cooperate, and the Company will continue to uphold the traditions . . ." And on and on. The Company Oath featured several times: not the dangerous original that Gompertz had found, but the newer, safe version.
    If Plag had maintained control of all the main 'ceiver channels, obviously Salkind was in more or less full control. Confirmation of this came when Dod picked up a broadcast from one of the satellite boosters for Venusian emissions: ". . . and only one rebel unit has escaped
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    the activities of the preventive forces, a cruiser, formerly of Combat. But not for long will the anarchic ..."
    It seemed that Cohui's force had been overpowered, and that only one cruiser was still resisting. Apparently. But the caster's voice had not carried conviction. Dod had the feeling that the revolt had barely begun, and that once he got in touch with Gompertz, the various factors in the situation would be changed in value.
    It seemed that the Combat captain's brush with the two Plag cruisers had ended happily-whilst even one lone cruiser was able to form a focal point for revolt, the situation was not hopeless. It was a reserve card that Gompertz could hold in his hand, and whilst the cruiser could not face the fleet, it was a considerable force to have at one's disposal. It wasn't a trump card. Nothing could be done yet about the dominance of the System by the fleet, but should there be modifications hi the situation...
    As the old Counsellor said, the sensible man doesn't buck authority: he manipulates it. That was the way to win through, the way to mate in one, to glorious nine, to unbeatable vingt-et-un, to the grand slam and the straight flush. What would the old man do?
    * * *
    It would take just over half a day to reach the Asiatic fort, Dod estimated. There was little fear of being stopped: no one would go near the agricultural station for days, weeks even, to find the de-activated robot; and Plag had an immense area to cover, so the little craft could well escape detection altogether.
    Dod wolfed the rations in the craft, and then set up the little tape projector. He could sleep when he had gone over the analysis Scrimgouer had prepared of his research.
    "Me again," Scrimgouer began. "I selected a few of the chief lines you were working on-time's important now, I have to tell you, because now I'd say you're sufficiently detached from your own personal problems to accept the news that your grandmother is dying. I'm sorry," he added.
    There was another complication, thought Dod bitterly. But this time, more than frustration and anger welled Up inside him; he could remember the old lady's wisdom, her calm, cultured manners, and her warm charm-es-
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    pecially her warmth. When she died, he was on his own. And when she died, the decades of stored wisdom died with her.
    "I give her about two months-from the week after you sent me after her."
    And that was over two months ago! "Here it is then." Scrimgouer's voice was brisk again. Then Dod heard another voice beginning to talk, and with difficulty he recognized it as his own. It sounded like a dead man's from the grave. "Some notes on attempts at communication with the Aliens," it began cheerfully. "My father and mother died almost twenty years ago in an attempt to contact the Aliens. Their failure-and their deaths-were due to one thing: insufficient knowledge of what they called the Kinsella-Detweiler effect. Under the direction of my grandmother, I have continued their1 work.
    "Considerable research remains to be undertaken, but the basic proposition is undoubtedly well-founded: there exists within the framework of most human minds a dual consciousness. This has nothing to do with Freud-derived conceptions of consciousness, but comes nearer to the ancient oriental concept of Sankhya.
    "To understand the postulated dual consciousness demands some knowledge of Second and First Millennium enquiries into the nature of the mind. In the first place, the chief Brahminic development, Buddhism, went through six evolutionary stages which can be compared with the evolutionary development of man himself.
    "The first stages were based on simple animistic beliefs-they compare with the pre-reptilian period of life on this planet; but when the development of Buddhism reached the concept of the dualistic mind, this is equal in importance only with the reptilian pineal gland. What might have become some form of telepathic sense in reptiles through the development of the third eye-the eye of the soul, as Descartes termed it-gave way to the emergence of sight, and now the pineal gland is merely an unused adjunct of the nervous system. It was bypassed."
    Quite scholarly, Dod thought approvingly. The voice of a talented student, but one who was due for a fall. Five years' freefall. It seemed, he noted, that Psych had not been too far away from achieving the break-
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    through they so desperately wanted-some of the tests they had applied were not unconnected with his old research.
    "In the same way, Buddhism by-passed the full implications of Sankhya. Telepathy was thus by-passed twice: once by the reptiles who needed light more than inter-thought; and again by Buddhist theosophists, who preferred a less mystical approach to religion.
    "It is doubtful if the theory of extra-sensory perception was put forward by any Buddhist------*'
    Now Dod remembered as he let the words flow on. Before the senseless nuclear brawls of the early Third Millennium, the cult of Buddhism had at last achieved a rationalization of its widely-divergent beliefs. The millions of works, some scholarly, some wild and scatterbrained, many acutely perceptive, many deliberately random, but all devout, had been gathered together and a definitive version of the whole corpus was almost ready. It had taken centuries even to design the machines to do the work of translation and conflation, but it was done. And then the wars began, and most of the original documents, and all of the finished defective texts, were destroyed, burning with the cities of the early Asiatic Confederations. Grandma had found what was left-fragmentary works, the millennially-aged orginals, and by a freak of chance they related chiefly to the work she was engaged on as a junior research assistant in Psych: the dualism of consciousness.
    ". . . what distinguishes Sankhya from the other attempts of the Buddhists to reach a state of release- Nirvana-is the postulation of the existence of a free agent separate from the mind, a brooding, timeless, non-mortal spirit..."
    The Watcher, thought Dod. A strangely appropriate name. When the mind sleeps, the Watcher is somehow in command of the mind, reacting to existence about it, ranging freely in time and space. Such was the theory, anyway. Actually, it could well prove to be something much more subtle altogether if the thesis Grandma had put forward, that the Kinsellas had worked upon, was valid.
    He listened attentively to the young man he had been.
    ". . . no possibility of releasing the potential of this 141
    metaphysical agency without some kind of advice for coordinating its random, aimless pattern ..."
    His parents had tried to control it. He remembered the seared, blistered walls of the room of the castle where the vast machine his parents had designed had vaporized. And it had all been so unnecessary! There was a simpler method altogether.
    His parents had tried to force a control on the Watcher when it wanted release; Psych had forced a crude kind of control on it, too, and produced the Kindet tests. Dod shuddered when he thought of the distorted figure at Moonbase that Scrimgouer had shown him.
    All it wanted was release. And only then, guidance, a kind of sign-posting through the association of ideas; some method of recording the impressions it received would be needed, too ...
    "Craft bearing course south-east! Identify at once!" The stringent voice rang round the small cabin, bringing Dod to immediate readiness for action, snapping him out of his reflections.
    "I repeat, identify yourself!" the voice repeated.
    To be checked now! Dod felt sweat dripping from his face.
    "I have a three-grade sungun beamed on you, craft bearing south-east! You have five seconds to answer or I fire!"
    It was a cruiser. You needed a cruiser's weight to mount a three-grade. Dod thought rapidly.
    "Engineer Tarbin, Area Engineer on routine inspection," he shouted back in a terrified voice. "My 'ceiver's not too good. I am getting a lot of interference. I think the metatonic tube's------"
    "Take up new direction. Bear two-one-seven degrees, I repeat two-one-seven degrees, height, two miles," snapped the voice. "All vessels in this area to be inspected."
    "But I'm only on a routine------"
    "Now! Or be burned!"
    "Immediately!" replied Dod. He scrambled into the harness of the emergency jet 'chute hoping that it had been serviced properly, set the craft on its new course and jumped. Here we go again, he thought. And kids do this for fun.
    The night sky was now rapidly giving way to a fine 142
    dawn as the small vessel's jet whined away in the direction of the cruiser, the twin exhausts glowing cherry-red. Would his story hold up long enough for him to get away? Or would the cruiser put out a feeler and wind him hi like a fish?
    He was gliding in a long, level path, the tiny jets whistling and howling alternately like a pair of angry cats. Suddenly he cursed as an air-pocket flung him end over end, his jets shrieking as he fought for control. He was a thousand feet higher in seconds.
    Then he felt the. slow insidious grip of a feeler. Miles away, some skilful operator was taking over control of the minute jets that powered his 'chute.
    Dod fought for control, but he knew he was beaten. The steady pulses of a feeler could not be resisted. His only hope was to wreck the 'chute and hope for a glide path.
    Quickly he found the 'chute's power unit. He raised the protective panel and reached for his knife.
    He did not make it. A furious freak rising current plunged him down, and he lost sight of the slim knife, of the twisting, lightening horizon, and the dark green of the maize-fields below. They blended into a bright red blotch as he felt consciousness slipping away.
    He noticed a curious white rectangle in the darkness, and he laughed as he crashed.
    * * *
    Birds woke him.
    They clustered around his sprawling form in dozens. Hungry, aching, with slashed cheeks and begrimed face, Dod opened his eyes. He was lying in a curiously-patterned mudpatch.
    The patterns were formed by the interlaced shadows of the maize plants. The mud was the Marshes. Dod grinned and threw a handful of mud at the birds. They screeched back unbelievingly.
    So the feeler had been cut off. Dod examined the harness. SomehoWj the jets had failed, and he had glided, unconscious, into the fields. He remembered the ugly buffeting of the aircurrents-had he managed to wreck the 'chute's engine, or was it simply that the 'chute had not been maintained properly?
    It did not matter. He ate the tasteless food which he found in the survival kit. Then he made a precarious
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    perch from the harness so that he could survey the countryside.
    The birds screeched and clustered around his head. They could betray his position he realized. He broke off a couple of maize-heads and flung them hard at the swooping birds. It was time to move on.
    As he looked over the immense fields, he began to feel despair.
    They stretched for miles, unbroken save by fire-breaks. One last section of the horizon was left for him to scan. He moved carefully on his crazy perch.
    What he saw sent him sprawling once more in the thick mud.
    A mile or so away, the maize gave way to lawn. And in the middle of the lawn was a villa! It must be some high official's private retreat, he realized.
    Flat, white in the clearing mist, it represented hope. Through his mind, Dod felt a momentary flash of recognition-this was the odd rectangle he had seen as his 'chute had failed.
    It was his only hope. Whatever the dangers of this villa, it was a contact with civilization. Dod looked up once at the birds and crashed forward through the maize. He had to reach the fort in time to hear Grandma's message. And she was dying.
    After half an hour, Dod cursed his impetuousness. He was wandering hi circles, for twice he had come across his own footmarks.
    When he worked out a practicable plan, it still took him three hours to reach the edge of the field; before he could step out, the clean, whistling sound of a scout sent him dropping to the ground full-length against the hard stems of the plants. He listened anxiously, but the sound died away.
    The birds found him and screeched madly to one another. Dod wondered whether to blast them, but their incredulous screams amused him finally.
    After several minutes waiting for the scout to reappear, Dod moved out of the maize to the perimeter of the villa.
    Should he cross?
    If he crossed the perimeter, guard robots would come. If he did not cross, he faced a walk of maybe hundreds of miles.
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    He might be able to talk his way past the robots as he had at the agricultural station; and he knew that even a day's delay might mean he would be too late to question Grandma about the Kinsella-Detweiler effect.
    He crossed.
    Nothing happened.
    He advanced cautiously to the immense brazen gate of the villa. Still no voice challenged him. Could this place be deserted? Abandoned? In the general upheaval of the System had someone left the villa hurriedly and not taken the usual precaution of activating the guards?
    He was about to climb the gates when his first grasp of them pushed them easily open on silent hinges. He walked through.
    He was in a courtyard that had been copied from an ancient original. It was like treading the millennia, coming to this pleasing villa; a small fountain sent a thin jet into the morning sunlight. Lilies were growing in the pool. Bushes and small trees made a pattern of light and shade.
    It must belong to some eccentric, anachronistically-minded official, someone rich enough and powerful enough to be able to indulge his fancy-and even do without the conventional robot guards. Maybe someone without a transceiver, thought Dod hopefully. There again, there might be no craft either. ,
    "Early riser," a measured voice remarked behind him.
    TWO
    dod swung, ducking and reaching for his knife, remembering at the same time that he had lost it.
    "What took you so long?" asked Gompertz.
    He looked peevishly at Dod.
    "Your feeler?" said Dod after a few seconds.
    "Of course. I won't say my little place is as well 145
    equipped as a cruiser, but it has the main basic conveniences of modern life."
    Dod looked around. There must be acres of installations below this peaceful villa.
    "You knew where I was?"
    As he said it, Dod could picture how Gompertz had followed the cruiser's reports.
    "Of course. Once you'd left the craft you stole, I knew you would make for your fort."
    "When Dod's glance showed puzzlement, Gompertz grinned, his canine teeth bared in a yellow grin. "I'm not without elementary reasoning powers, and I do have my sources of information."
    "You could have picked me up in the field," complained Dod.
    "I relied on your well-tried resource," said Gompertz. "I turned off the robots and waited."
    "Doing nothing?"
    "I supervised the preparation of your breakfast."
    After ham, eggs, kidneys, tomatoes, more ham, more eggs, fritters, waffles, and back again to kidneys, Dod told Gompertz what he had learned from the tape Scrim-gouer had left; the old man heard him in silence, nodding in agreement at Dod's assessments.
    "How soon can you complete your program?"
    "Impossible to say .There are so many contributory factors to the experiments my grandmother was working on that what result we're going to achieve and when we're going to achieve it are things it's impossible to be certain of."
    "You'll have to get me something-soon," said Gompertz grimly. "I'm relying on you to upset the balance of power."
    "What balance?"
    "There's a growing revolutionary party opposing Plag. But it's grossly inadequate to face the Plag fleets. So it's up to you to come through with something new- something that will put Plag out of its stride long enough to let Cohui and his Venusians in."
    "They're still holding out?"
    "And can do for several days. Plag isn't fully mobilized yet."
    "You're expecting a lot," said Dod. And yet Gompertz seemed to know what he was doing. That was the dis-
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    concerting thing about the astute, unpredictable old man. He was always right.
    "What you don't seem to have realized fully, Dod," Gompertz said, "is the way the Aliens' screens have affected human behavior-it's the ultimate in inhibiting factors. It's the wall of the womb, the barbed-wire-fences, the shell of the egg, the rock round' the tomb. It's the biggest block of all time."
    'That's obvious," agreed Dod. "And so is the reaction- we tried to get out."
    "Only at first. Afterwards the block was rationalized by our minds which are ultra-conservative at root. What we've done-what the Company has done-has been to accept the inhibition and even work to keep it. Preserving our status quo is our aim. And as you've probably realized, that's why our civilization has crumbled so easily."
    "And if the screens are removed?" Gompertz grinned unpleasantly. "There's going to be the greatest flare-up in our history. The want-outers against the stay-inners."
    "And it's the stay-inners who're in control now-Plag and Psych?"
    "Yes. But with a certain amount of luck, with successful timing, and with your contribution, we can win through."
    Bandying philosophical gossip with Gompertz, Dod thought suddenly, whilst the System rocked! Such was the old man's spell that you didn't notice time slipping by. Too much time had slipped away. He got up, but Gompertz detained him. "Quick! What is the strongest single unit in the present strategic situation?"
    "The Starbreaker," Dod answered immediately. You didn't need to have been through Space School to know that. The super-battleship was the ultimate weapon.
    "Right. I thought you'd agree. With the Starbreaker,
    do you------"
    Dod's jaw dropped open in amazement. "You're serious! Can you get it?"
    It changed the whole pattern of the distribution of power. With the Starbreaker as a spearhead, and the Venusians behind, the revolt had a chance of surviving
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    for the first crucial days until it spread throughout the System.
     "Mutatis mutandis," the old man said, preening himself.
    "Oh, for------!"
    Gompertz translated quickly. "An archaic term-forgive an old man his harmless hobby. 'Having made the necessary changes,' Plag made the mistake of using a reserve detachment from Venus to make up the war complement. A friend of yours is aboard."
    Gompertz had the trick of moving immense forces to advantage. Dod saw the relief. He had wondered if the old man would crack like the tired old Company when pressure was exerted; but he wouldn't.
    "Friend?"
    "The Khan."
    Gompertz never missed a chance. Under his veneer of sophisticated intellectualism, he concealed a strategist's foresight, and a tactician's grasp of opportunism.
    "He's a useful man," Dod agreed. "Now what?" He had committed himself to serving Gompertz. This man you could only follow.
    "You go to the fort. Authorize the Combat captain to take my instructions, and get moving on that effect -fast!"
    "And the Starbreaker?"
    "Leave that to me." He paused outside the false roof that hid a hangar for several small, fast ships. "There's got to be a lot of fighting-many deaths. But we owe it to humanity to try to avoid a full-scale war, the sort of thing that dragged out for many years between the Companies and the Free Spacers until they thought of the Games. We must try to limit the fighting to actions in space. And we've no chance at all if you don't find something to jolt Plag and Salkind. Do that, and well finish them off whilst they're still reeling."
    Looking back, thought Dod, all this had been inevitable: the Games and bis challenge leading to Flag's reaction. The unreadiness of the capital units of the fleet, and the use of reservists. The small revolts which could explode into full-scale rebellion.
    And yet Gompertz had seen it all coming months before. Looking back, it was as inevitable as sunset, as un-
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    avoidable as gravity; but Gompertz had seen it beforehand.
    "You wouldn't be safer at the fort?" Dod asked suddenly.
    "No. This place is safe enough, and I have what I want here." He waved a hand at the building housing the massive communications installation he had mentioned earlier. "The thought is kind, but unnecessary. Keep hi touch. And good luck!"
    * * *
    Under the cover of the -ionic interference set up by Gompertz's massive 'ceivers, Dod swept the small craft up vertically, cut off the drive, and planed down in a locust's crazy flight; but it brought no curt commands to halt. The freak thunderstorms that rolled over the fields helped to cover him too.
    Now was the testing time. For himself, for Scrimgouer; and for Grandma Detweiler. And for the theory his parents had died trying to prove.
    In a sudden panic, Dod cut in the drive again. Time was running out, he felt desperately, in the vastness of the Asiatic fort.
    * * *
    Death seemed to be waiting in the room.
    Dod looked down at his grandmother's tiny thin body which just moved as she breathed the last few of her near-century's millions of breaths.
    For him, the years rolled back, and he saw her as she had been when he first remembered her. She would be old then, but her personality was still a bright flame, though her mind was fogged by the years, and by disasters.
    "How long?" Dod asked Scrimgouer.
    "Hours only."
    "Can she talk?"
    "She'll rally once before the end. She knew you were coming, so she'll hang on as long as she can."
    "Can you wake her?"
    "Better not."
    "Drugs?" Time was precious, and Grandma held the key.
    Scrimgouer shook his head. "Her life-force will bring her round."
    It had to, thought Dod. It had to. With all his par-149
    ents' brilliant technical skills, and his own flair for intuitive perception into the processes of the mind, it still needed Grandma's pure genius to solve the problem. The Watcher could be released, but how could you control it?
    They moved away from the bed. "How's she been, these last months?" asked Dod.
    Scrimgouer scowled. f'In a state of shock when I found her and brought her here. Plag told her you were dead when they blocked you. Just like that. Executed for an Error. She hadn't spoken for years to anyone."
    "How did you get through to her?"
    "Convinced her I'd broken with Psych-it took time, and then gradually I explained about you. The halo, your block. Finally she took an interest and that's when she tied it up with, the Aliens."
    "What was her explanation?"
    Scrimgouer laughed. "She wouldn't tell me! But she threw out a theory which looks good on the surface, and for a while it took me in. Then I realized she was just leading me up the garden path."
    "Go on." This sounded like Grandma, thought Dod. . "It seemed that when your parents died, they might have got through to the Aliens in the split second of time before their machine blew. Whatever image was in their minds would have made an impression, your grandmother said, on the Aliens."
    "It's possible."
    "And your father had a particular phrase for the expression of amazement."
    "Tying up with this?" Dod said, indicating the halo. What phrase?
    "An old phrase he'd picked up from somewhere."
    "Holy Saint Michael!" exclaimed Dod.
    "So your grandmother said. He died with it burned on his mind-a shadow effect, like the imprints of shadows burned by nuclear explosions."
    "And the imprint on his mind could have got through. A saintly halo!"
    "She didn't tell me anything else. She kept it all for you. I kept off the subject, since it tired her and she'd drop into the past. Not that I'd understand what she was working on. I'm strictly a conniver, not a thinker- I've seen quite a lot of apparatus that's been used in the Kindet tests, but I didn't understand that even."
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    "So we wait," said Dod. It was all he could do.
    "We wait," agreed Scrimgouer. His ugly face showed sympathy for a moment, and then he looked away.
    The tired, faintly-respiring body on the bed hardly showed through the covers. Dod looked at his grandmother's fine head and thought of his boyhood in the Detweiler castle, how she met him at the gate every time he came home from Space School; the way she had gradually stimulated his interest in her pet subject. And the way she had explained about his parents' death. She made the continuation of their work sound like a crusade.
    Dod looked up suddenly. "Can you put the main 'ceivers through to here?" he asked Scrimgouer.
    "Can do!" He moved his corpulent figure away, and as he went he called, "You won't need me for a while?"
    Scrimgouer's tact again, thought Dod. "No."
    After giving the Combat captain his new instructions, Dod asked him how the fight with the Plag cruisers had gone.
    "They tried to take my ship in a pincer movement," said the captain gleefully. "They never knew what hit them! This ship's always been a pet of Combat and they thought we couldn't match their sunguns." His only complaint was that there wasn't enough action. "I could start picking off the fleet, one by one," he said. "Hit and run -when the big ships come after me, I can run."
    "Ask Gompertz," said Dod. The old man would not allow it, though. One cruiser could last only for a few days once the fleet was tully mobilized. When you wanted to win, you had to be bigger, faster, stronger than your opponent. Now the Starbreaker, thought Dod-with the Starbreaker, something might be attempted. But one cruiser was of nuisance value only.
    The captain was much less deferential after Dod had ordered him to place himself at the disposal of Gompertz. It was not until Dod explained that the old man was more than he seemed that the captain showed any enthusiasm whatever.
    "Remember he thought up the challenge by mortal combat," Dod said finally. "If anyone brought Salkind and Plag into the open, he was the man."
    "He did?" When he signed off the captain pondered for a while. And after he had listened to Gompertz's plan- reluctantly at first, and then with wild acclamation-he
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    came to the conclusion, that, as Director Dod had said, it was better to have the cunning old devil on your side. Then he remembered that he had not told Dod of van Gulik's sudden disappearance with a scout vessel in the middle of the flight; he would tell Gompertz and see what he made of it.
    * * *
    Dod had watched all through the night in the infirmary room, and just as dawn registered on the bare, bleak landscape three miles above him, Grandma stirred into consciousness, as if her body knew it was time for movement and the vitality of day. She knew him, he saw.
    "A long time," she whispered. Tired eyes looked up at him.
    "I tried to get here sooner."
    Her eyes cleared suddenly, and sparkled with intelligence as she summoned up what little was left of her strength.
    "He said you would come, and I believed him." Then there was a return to her familiar tone of command: when she had something of importance to say, invariably she spoke in a ringing, sure voice; but though she tried, she had not the power to sustain it. As her voice faltered, Dod knew she realized she was dying. "Check the impulse-emitter!" she said. "Your father would have it that I was wrong, but he wouldn't listen! They both tried to get through together, and it was wrong . . ." Her voice sank.
    Routine, thought Dod in dismay. This was all stuff he had checked and worked out for himself. Surely Grandma had got on to something else! There must be something better than his parents' ham-fisted approach!
    "Think, Grandma," he said patiently. This was what the old lady had forced herself to stay alive for. But she only looked blankly back at him. The halo seemed to fascinate her.
    "They tried, you know, but they were wrong."
    "What is the control?" he said quietly. "It's most urgent that you tell me. How do we guide the Watcher?"
    With an amazing suddenness she became alert again. "I told that Psychman a terrible lie! Now listen Lewis, because I can feel myself slipping away." Lewis, thought Dod. He hadn't remembered his first name. Lewis Kinsella.
    "All right, my dear." He should add some more words, 152
    but what? She would know how he felt-the agony of his approaching loss-because she herself had suffered in the same way.
    "In my jewel case," she said calmly, "you'll find a control you can use. A micronic continuous impulse-emitter. I had only one made and never used it. You see, I thought you were dead, and I didn't want them to have it." Should he tell her the Company's days were numbered, that the System had cast off the rule of Plag and Psych?
    He listened instead. Grandma Detweiler lived for research, for the grand aim of at last communicating with the Aliens. Not for revenge.
    "It transmits a continuous pattern of auto-suggestive impulses and it has to be sunk into the central ganglia immediately above the junction of the cerebral hemispheres. It's dangerous, Lewis, but you're strong now- you weren't ready before, dear, or I would have given it to you then." She smiled up at him, but her breathing was shallower, and she spoke in a whisper again. "You were on the track all those years ago-remember the Fourth Brahmana?"
    " 'He is becoming one,' " Dod quoted.
    "So you will, my dear. Soon you will know." Her lips stopped moving, the light left her eyes, and as Dod leaned forward to ask the question that pounded inside his skull, he knew she was dead. He felt cold and empty in the big, well-lit room, with its rows of silent beds, and its one dead patient. "A magnificent lady," said Scrimgouer behind him.
    "Thanks for looking after her," said Dod. Scrimgouer did not reply. He covered the peaceful dead face.
     "Now what?" he said. "Her jewel case," Dod told him. "You know where it is?"
    "I dumped a load of stuff she told me to bring in a storeroom."
    Dod looked back once at the last of his family, the old woman who had forced herself to live on until she could pass on her secret to him. He could feel sorrow when there was time, but now, he thought, he could not give Way to grief. Gompertz, and more than Gompertz, was waiting.
     He found the jewel case in a hastily-dumped mass of
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    personal possessions, jumbled with heaps of micro-films and glittering equipment, whilst Scrimgouer went to prepare the surgical machinery which would insert the impulse-emitter into Dod's skull.
    Dod pressed the button that opened the massive hand-carved antique case, but the lid stuck. He tapped old, copper hinges and suddenly the top sprang up, and the vast store-room rang with incongruous, tinkling music. The fragile melancholy of the Pathetique theme had survived through the millennia where grander works had been forgotten.
    No blaze of jewels shone from the box. Instead it was crammed tight with yellowing, hand-written notes. Dod pushed them out and saw at the bottom of the box, nestling in its cushioned recess, the tiny glittering device; he noticed, as he reached for it, that a card had dropped to the floor.
    Dod picked it up automatically and was about to flick it amongst the papers when he saw that its unfaded surface was covered with a single, scrawled line: "Scrimgouer blocked. He doesn't know it. Don't harm him. Good fortune, my dear."
    There it was again, Dod thought bitterly. The toad-like, grimacing bad luck was still with him. He felt sick.
    He had to burn Scrimgouer down.
    "Don't harm him," Grandma had written-but she didn't know that there was only one way with the Company. There was only the final solution for those that stood in your way. He eased the blaster in its holster and waited for his friend.
    "Food!" shouted Scrimgouer without entering the storeroom. "You haven't eaten!"
    Dod's hand moved away from the weapon. It would be like killing a faithful dog.
    "You coming?" Scrimgouer shouted, poking his head around the door. "The operation kit's ready, but you have to eat first!" His face smoothed into sympathy as he saw Dod standing silently.
    Dod couldn't go through with it, block or no block. Scrimgouer was a deadly danger, no less dangerous and deadly for being unaware of it. Somewhere there would be a Psych control in the fort, a secret, well-hidden 'ceiver-maybe more of them as decoys-by means of
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    which he would receive his instructions from Psych. And Plag.
    Mistaking his silence, Scrimgouer said, "You should eat-even though you're cut up. She said you'd need strength."
    Dod had to find out what Scrimgouer had passed on to Plag, and that meant searching for the hidden 'ceiver. It meant delay, delay once again! But the alternative was blasting the Psychman.
    Dod took the food. "Get these on film," he said to Scrimgouer, thrusting the pile of yellow papers in his hands. "Quickly, then we can try out the device. But I must have these done first."
    Scrimgouer looked at the old papers and shrugged. "Will do," he said. But he looked puzzled.
    "Process them individually," added Dod curtly. It would take the inexpert Scrimgouer an hour at least; but that time might save his life. And Dod owed him a life, he thought.
    "You're the boss!" muttered Scrimgouer.
    Dod hurried from the store-room as he saw Scrimgouer slouch away intent on the job in hand. Where should he start looking in the vast fort? What would Plag do?
    Scrimgouer's block might be a precise and simple thing, a "Stop all attempts at Alien contact" which would mean that the Psychman would kill him if necessary; on the other hand, it could be a permanent instruction to report all Dod's movements. Again, thought Dod, it------
    Then he was pounding along the corridors that stretched ahead of him bathed in the pale pink light the Asiatics had favored. He had just thought of another instruction Scrimgouer could have been given.
    He reached the battle-room and knew his intuition had been right.
    The weird unfamiliar banks of controls were empty of life. Everything had been de-activated and immobilized. Even the vital perimeter alerts were off. Scrimgouer must have reacted sharply to Dod's discovery of the micronic device-as he slammed down switches and cut in circuits, Dod had a momentary vision of Scrimgouer leaving the death-bed, as Dod thought, to leave him alone, tactfully, with Grandma; his block had obviously sent him racing for instructions, and this was the result.
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    Cursing, Dod watched relays burning themselves out in a sullen glare as he sent out chains of impossible commands to the screens of the fort, but suddenly the great panoramic battle viewer lit up and he could see .the enemy. That seemed to lift the fog from his mind, the sight of the Plag cruisers lazily flipping down, and the clouds of scouts indolently descending to the fort's wide-open ports.
    He acted instinctively.
    The Asiatics had catered for the possibility of sabotage and treachery-even for ships that got inside their screens.
    Dod stabbed down at the buttons which armed the cyclonic torpedoes, and a battery of lights glowed dull-red, winking twice and turning to flaming scarlet as the deadly, massive, sluglike cylinders crawled out of their centuries-old holes and stood poised waiting for their instructions.
    There was no effort to move speedily: the scouts rolled in deliberately, for they were taking part in a mopping-up operation against an unarmed fort. Carefully Dod chose his targets.
    The Asiatics should have seen it.
    As the first torpedo struck the leading scout, a tremendous upheaval shook the atmosphere and millions of tons of earth and rock swirled upwards, white-hot, swallowing up the cloud of scouts, and burying them in glowing, bubbling rock as the masses of debris crashed down again; the devastation was appalling when the rest of the flight of torpedoes added their fury to the sun-obscuring holocaust. It was the most impressive weapon of all, the cyclonic torpedo, overwhelming in its battering immensity.
    Not a faint shudder disturbed the solid impregnable mass of the underground fort. It made you feel like a potent devil from the Pit, thought Dod, as the screen cleared. A thousand trained, alert, and courageous men had died in a flicker of time, their sleek craft pulverized over a dozen miles of landscape before being interred. Chaos at the touch of a button.
    The torpedo lights winked again as the tubes were refilled from the central armory. Dod had seen it once. The Asiatics could have warred for centuries with its im-
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    mense stocks. But they had never reached their refuge, not one of them.
    Two of the five cruisers were left, Dod saw, but they were moving off at maximum speed. He let them go. They would warn the fleet, but the fort's screens could hold off almost anything the fleet could do.
    By the dull-golden battle clock, Dod saw that the action had taken only three minutes. Scrimgouer would be working on, unaware of the catastrophe that had overwhelmed the forces he had unwittingly summoned.
    It was time to look for the Psych control.
    But where should he start looking?
    Here I am, thought Dod, the first man to be contacted by the Aliens, with the possibility of contacting them myself-here am I, wracking my brains trying to puzzle out where in dozens of square miles of Asiatic fort Psych had directed Scrimgouer to hide a tiny 'ceiver. With the System waiting for Gompertz to make a move, and Gom-pertz waiting to hear from me before he plunges the Nine Planets into the greatest blood-bath in human history; and with the micronic impulse-emitter in my pocket, the thing that had taken the devoted labors of three generations, and two lives, to produce-with all these vital matters hanging fire, I have to sit. And think.
    It could be anywhere in the fantastically-complex fortress-anywhere from places like the battle-room in which he was sitting to store-rooms three miles away: in weapons systems, or in a kitchen; in any of the bare, dry, ageless caverns lined with toughened steel that housed the enormous power units that produced the forces needed to sustain the fort's screens.
    It was hopeless. Reaction hit Dod like a kick in the chest. He sat at the control-desk-rather small for his bulk, he thought inconsequentially, since the Asiatics had never reached Nordic proportions-a tired and despairing man. The weight of the blaster at his side seemed a burden, though it weighed only a couple of pounds. He took it off his belt. And regarded it.
    There was a way out. All he had to do was kill one man. One man stood in the way.
    Finally, you came to the moment when you realized you were on your own and that no one could help you make up your mind. That was the way it went. Then what had to be done had to be done.
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    Dod flicked the blaster to its maximum power. The least he could do for the fat, ugly, loyal Psychman would be to make sure that it was quick: and to give him no hint that he was a traitor. One quick blast. And then he could get on with the experiment, and report to Gom-pertz, and watch what happened to the Company, hoping that its collapse and utter destruction would make Scrim-gouer's death less painful.
    The viewing room. That would be the best. Scrimgouer would have to proof the prints he had made, and there would be a certain amount of editing to do. As he entered with the trays of spools, Dod would cut him down. He would never know the blast was on its way.
    He would be grinning, thought Dod. He looked through the optical sight and got up heavily from the control desk. As he made his way to the viewing room, he walked flat-footed and tried to whistle the melody from the jewel case, but the notes came out wrong, and his mouth dried with the effort.
    It was easy to see which viewer Scrimgouer had been using when he was working for Grandma. One cubicle was littered with the untidy Psychman's boxes, trays, and files. What had he been doing? Checking on work Grandma had done half a century before?
    Idly Dod flicked on the switches that re-set the machine. It flowed smoothly, humming slightly. He put his blaster down on a convenient desk.
    Suddenly the cubicle rocked with sound and the viewer filled with images. But it was the wrong sound; and they were wrong images.
    This wasn't Grandma's stuff! He was watching a demonstration-an old newsreel, one that had been old when the Asiatics had built this fort, and now its two-dimensional jerkiness with the slick, over-stylized cutting had the inappropriateness of snow on Venus, of a rainstorm at Moonbase, of athletic sports on Saturn!
    The clatter stopped abruptly, and a low, subtle voice, half-commanding, half-pleading replaced it.
    "Scrimgouer!" The one loud exclamation was succeeded by a meaningless jumble of words in the oddly appealing voice. The Psych code, thought Dod, a pattern of sounds and symbols that would correspond with a similar pattern imprinted on Scrimgouer's mind. It was the
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    simplest type of block, an uncomplicated command-response situation. Each time a message was left for the Psychman he would be given orders to report for his next assignment.
    Dod looked at the blaster on the desk. He would not have to use it. His eyes closed in sheer relief. Then he heard the last order issuing from the viewer.
    "Lower all screens in the fort. Immobilize all weapons. Make no further contact through the 'ceiver. Avoid the location of the 'ceiver from now!"
    Plag must have decided that the experiment was too near to successful implementation for comfort. They wanted to catch him alive with his equipment intact.
    It was the cleverest plan Plag had thought up: they wanted Dod, but they had suspected all along that only Grandma could lead them to the full solution of the prob7 lem of contacting the Aliens. They wanted the impulse-emitter too.
    Dod laughed at himself. He had underestimated Plag. They had known that all they had to do was to wait until he reached the fort. Even when he had escaped and reached Gompertz, they had been sure of success.
    Plag had shown an unnatural perception-maybe they had even let Scrimgouer take Grandma away, he thought suddenly.
    Eisererl
    Dod smiled. Eiserer could have thought this up. It had the smell of the kind of situation the Psychiarch could conceive.
    Psych and Plag working together made a formidable combination, Dod thought. Eiserer in particular knew what effect the first contact with the Aliens would have on the billions of people that had lived in apathetic quietude under the Company's rule; and he knew that he must control the man that made the first contact.
    Dod fingered the tiny cylinder in his pocket. Plag wouldn't get it. But they might have done. Luck had been with him, he thought: in all other matters, the toad of bad luck had sat on him, but in this one vital affair be had beaten misfortune.
    In the safety of the fort, he could test the effectiveness of the micronic device. Things had looked grim-and the grimmest moment of all was the instant when he realized he had to kill a friend-but now he could act.
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    Scrimgouer was no danger now. His block centered on the 'ceiver over which^no more instructions would come. Of course, he could not use Scrimgouer's help in working the surgical machinery that would put the tiny device in his brain, but the fort was sure to be equipped with automatic neurological tools. The surgery was no problem.
    Dod picked up a gleaming, heavy tool to smash the viewer and its hidden 'ceiver, and quickly he reduced the installation to rubble; he would take no more chances with Eiserer.
    Footsteps rang on the corridor floor. Scrimgouer back with the proofs. Would it be safe to tell him of his block, Dod wondered as he crunched the last few components of the viewer. Maybe the Psychman would know how to counteract the block and make himself fully reliable again-self-surgery might be tricky. He turned to face Scrimgouer.
    Instinctively Dod hurled the heavy tool he had been using, but the Flagman side-stepped and it went skittering through the entrance with a loud clang.
    He stood rigid as the Flagman covered him with a blaster.
    Dod knew in a sickening moment of despair the full extent of his negligence. The years of endeavor, the struggles, and the sacrifices were all wasted, all thrown away, because he had failed to check the internal monitors of the fort to see if any of the Flagmen, against all the odds, had got in whilst the screens were still down. One man had made it.
    And he was taking no chances.
    He motioned Dod to raise his hands high. Then his left hand carefully slid along his belt until he took out the stunner.
    His cold, smoke-ringed eyes, bloodshot and unwavering, never left Dod's.
    If there was to be any chance for him, Dod realized, he had to jump now. Now! But even as he tensed for a lunge the Flagman whipped up the stunner and Dod felt himself freezing as though he had taken ice into his lungs, and the cold was spreading.
    Too slow, he thought sadly and, with a feeling of self-pity. But it had been too much for one man. Not
    alone------
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    THREE
    he was dreaming, he felt sure. It was just a wish-fulfilment dream. Like you have about jet-'chutes when you're a kid.
    You get to sleep thinking how much you'd like to flip over the cities at two thousand in the latest super 'chute, and so you dream about it-intensely, violently, then you're riding high above the low-base clouds, and you see a break and you slide down, and suddenly the jets falter and their whine ceases, and you're falling, falling. . .
    Out of bed.
    Take now, for instance.
    He was lying on a low couch, and a yard away was the face of the Flagman who'd taken him prisoner and put him to sleep with a stunner. Only the face was fixed in the stillness of death, mouth open, and the eyes rolled up satisfyingly, and the throat neatly sliced in the sort of wound only a quick, efficient slash could make.
    Dod felt sorry for himself again. He closed his eyes and waited for Plag to fetch Eiserer to him.
    Then a thought trickled into his mind.
    Scrimgouer was good with a knife.
    He jerked upright as the fat Psychman breezed into the room.
    "Awake! Good!" His cheeks quivered with pleasure.
    "What happened?" It wasn't a dream, so he would ask the prosaic question. Blood didn't glide over the floor like that in dreams. "Tell me."
    "He told me to get through to Salkind, so I waited till he turned." He .weighed a tiny glittering something in his hand. "He found this," Scrimgouer added, passing the impulse-emitter to Dod.
    Was Scrimgouer safe? "You found the "ceiver?"
    Scrimgouer grinned. "And the last message. You didn't make much of a job busting it-I played it back in bits and found I'd been blocked-me!"
    "I couldn't tell you," Dod said. 161
    The Psychman's face grew serious. "You took a chance -not killing me."
    "I couldn't."
    "No."
    They regarded one another for a moment. Then Scrim-gouer went on. "I cleared the block. It was just a simple thing. Two minutes' therapy and I had it beaten."
    "That makes things simpler," Dod said cheerfully. "Care to assist in a rather interesting experiment?"
    "The Aliens." The Psychman shook his head; but he looked eager. "Contact with the Aliens! Is there a chance?"
    "Well find out. You can set up the surgical------"
    "All ready to start," interrupted Scrimgouer. "I thought you wouldn't want to waste any more time."
    The dead face of the Flagman regarded them emptily. He had an the time he wanted, thought Dod. He was just another stumbling block, another annoyance that had been brushed aside. Another thread of life broken through so that the men who wanted to try could have their chance, and the men who wanted to keep things as they were didn't altogether crush them.
    Plag would keep on trying-fighting, snarling, lashing out fanatically, to keep things as they wanted them: comfortably safe, predictable, ordered. And themselves to do the ordering.
    * * *
    They were checking Grandma's instructions from the original yellowed pages when Scrimgouer found the dark brown, wrinkled vegetable-fibre paper. Dod pointed to it. "That was the first thing she found. We don't know anything about it but that it came from a longer work. The Fourth Brahmana. But Grandma deduced, from that one burnt page, a whole new concept of the human mind."
    "Want me to read it?" Dod shook his head. "I know it. Listen.
    He is becoming one------
    He does not see; He is becoming one. He does not smell; He is becoming one. He does not taste; He is becoming one.
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    He does not speak; He is becoming one. He does not hear; He is becoming one. He does not think; He is becoming one. He does not know .. .
    The self departs, either by the eye, or the head. He becomes one with intelligence." "Right?"
    Scrimgouer nodded. "Right."
    "Mixed up with mysticism as it was, it still contained the grain of insight into the true nature of the mind that a mind like Grandma's could pick up. She ripped out the essence of the Buddhist conception of dual consciousness by working back from this quotation. How could the mind detach in the way suggested? It was possible only if the mind contained a separate identity within itself-only if the mind contained a distinct and independent psychical apparatus, possibly outside space and time, something unaffected by, and not affecting, the mind as it was generally known..."
    He paused. Kinsella, earnest Lewis Kinsella, was lecturing. Dod wanted action.
    "Want to go through the notes one by one?" asked Scrimgouer.
    "No. I've got the rest of it back. I must have wanted to hear myself talking. We'll get on." In surprise he heard his own voice shaking. Now that the moment had come, he was afraid-not for himself, but for the success of the experiment.
    "Scared?" asked Scrimgouer. "In a way. It's taken so many lives." "And it might not be worth it?" Dod nodded. "That's what scares me." "As you said, there's only one way of finding out." Then a thought struck him. "I could be the subject," he
    said slowly. "That is, if you're------"
    "No. We'll start now. You know what to do?" "Sure! I read the instructions!" Scrimgouer's professional pride made him answer sharply. "Go through it then."
    "You'll be under deep anaesthesia for an hour after the impulse-emitter's been placed in your skull. That takes care of any post-operational shock."
    163
    "Then?"
    "Light hypnosis before you come round."
    "And?"
    "I activate the emitter."
    "How?"
    "I've got a trigger-pulse set up ready."
    "Go on."
    "I watch the charts of your facial expressions and your word-patterns. Then there's the tricky part."
    Dod did not ask Scrimgouer whether he felt confident or not; what was humanly possible, the fat Psychman would definitely do.
    "When I see there's no shock or damage to the mind I monitor direct through the impulse-emitter."
    The Psychman had to decide when it was safe to activate the micronic device that would be lodged in Dod's cranium, so that he could tell when the Purusa, the Watcher, was in command of Dod's mind.
    And all he had to go on in deciding when to trigger the impulse-emitter's activator were the few half-incoherent remarks that would penetrate the conscious mind as Dod lay in deep anaesthesia, together with an analysis of his emotions through his facial expressions and physical movements. From those few hints, Scrimgouer had to work out what was passing in Dod's mind-and only when the Watcher stirred, could he activate the impulse-emitter.
    That was the moment of danger. If the emitter were to be started too soon, it would press too hard on the unready mind, search too closely, and enquire too strongly; the mind could react violently, and death or permanent brain injury could result.
    And there were the unknown factors, too, those about which Grandma could only conjecture. They were the trapdoors on the chessboard.
    If the Watcher ranged freely through space, could the micronic device effectively monitor it? And if so, might not the strength of the emissions keep the Watcher away? That was the way to insanity, thought Dod, as he saw Scrimgouer watching him anxiously. Too much work had been done, too many lives blasted, to back out now. He looked at the gleaming, skeletal surgical machinery. This had to be faced, just as the next question had to be faced. He had to be sure Scrimgouer knew exactly what
    164
    to do, and even though he was fully confident of the Psychman's ability, still he had to ask.
    "And when the monitors are operating satisfactorily?"
    "I suggest, through the impulse-emitter, that the Aliens want to get in contact, introducing the ideas in accordance with the pre-arranged semantic pattern." He pointed to the relevant page. "Your grandmother said I was to tell you not to alter any of it-she said you'd worked it out together."
    So they had. But the overall plan was Grandma's.
    "I'm ready," said Dod. There was nothing else to wait for.
    The Psychman busied himself. Machinery whined.
    As a snaky, metallic arm advanced towards him, Dod saw his halo reflected in the gleaming surface of the anaesthesia machinery.
    Scrimgouer's face blurred, and suddenly Dod felt afraid, more frightened than he could ever remember. Space expanded about him. Black space reeled back before him, and he rushed to fill it. Only one star that was sinking away from him offered a hint of understanding. He tried to follow it.
    * * *
    A billion miles beyond Pluto, the outermost planet of the System, an intelligence stirred. Excitement made its cells tingle, faintly at first, and then in a great welling surge of emotion; it communicated with its dependent cells which hung at vast intervals around the old sun and its nine randomly orbiting planets, out of which for an instant a spark of life had shot-unidentifiable life, unimaginably strange and weak, oddly unitary, yet unquestionably it was life.
    // speaks? No. Urges? No. Has thought? No. Exists! Yes.
    Incredulity splurged back from numberless cells, but they were told again the impossible had happened. There was life.
    Against all expectation, evaluation, and against all hope even, were told again the impossible had happened. There was life.
     Sentient life? queried the cells.
    * * *
    Three miles below the surface of Terra, Scrimgouer 165
    began to feed the first sequence of associated ideas into the machine beamed on the impulse-emitter deep in Dod's skull.
    "Deep space. Deep space. Beyond Terra. Beyond Mars, Saturn. Beyond Pluto . . ." The machine into which he spoke hummed smoothly as it translated the words into impulses that would be absorbed into Dod's mind.
    He sat back heavily when he had finished, his pendulous cheeks running with sweat. Dod was under hypnosis only. The next minutes were the crucial period. He watched the banks of registers intently to see if the metaphysical agency that should detach from Dod's mind and float free, leaving taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight, and then all thought behind, had gone; but it was still earth-bound.
    "Calling Director Dod!" The breezy voice of the Combat captain rang through the room, and Scrimgouer cursed aloud. He had forgotten to put the 'ceivers to "record". "Report on latest developments coming up, Director! We're just going into action!"
    Dod had warned Scrimgouer of the captain's predilection for playing to the grandstand, but a second voice cut in bitingly before he could get to the 'ceiver.
    "Keep your 'comments off the air, Captain! This is a secret operation, not a public display of your intrepidity!" Gompertz rasped.
    Scrimgouer quickly adjusted the 'ceivers. If Gompertz and the cruiser captain had started a private war, they would have to get along without him. He had enough on his plate at the moment.
    He tensed as the needles of the registers moved slightly.
    The Watcher was moving.
    The fat Psychman moved swiftly, as the instructions required, feeding in the whole of the carefully-graded association pattern designed to direct the Watcher towards the Aliens, and suggest that contact should be made.
    It was going well so far-at least, it looked all right.
    He relaxed. All he could do now was to watch and wait. On Terra, Gompertz and the Combat captain were deciding the political future of the System; but somewhere outside the gently respiring body in front of him an elusive, subtle part of Dod's mind was deciding the future relations of humanity with the mysterious omnipotent force that had kept man from the stars for almost two centuries.
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    The intelligence quivered with growing hope.
    Its dependent cells sensed the impending contact, too, and clamored for information, their ringing pleas deafening the central mass. It appealed for patience, and they grew quiet.
    At last it was sure, and it called back.
    Intelligent life!
    * * *
    Aboard the Starbreaker, the Plag Fleet-Admiral relaxed. He was in command of an impregnable vessel, and a few minutes before Chairman Salkind had singled him out for special praise for his plan of action against the Venusian rebels. If all went well, he could look forward to a Directorship.
    Reflectively he turned the plan over in his mind-had Salkind but known it, a full-scale assault plan was hardly necessary, but it looked well on the battle-screens.
    Phase 1, the Venusian scratch fleet annihilated. Cohui was reported to have a few old cruisers and the Combat vessel. He was sending a squadron of battleships against them.
    Phase II, selected targets wiped out in a demonstration of strength. After two or three cities had been razed, the rebels should be properly humble.
    After that, Phase III, a mopping-up operation of the few rebels that didn't surrender. And the rehabilitation of those in Error by Psychiarch Eiserer.
    But there was Phase IV, the phase that would not be needed. And he wanted to use that part of the plan. It included the sungun's use.
    Like a good military man, he knew that an untried weapon was a contradiction in terms. He wanted to play with his toys-and the Starbreaker's sungun had never been fired. What, he wondered, would be its precise effect at extreme power?
    Landscapes would fuse and boil; seas would vaporize; mountain ranges melt like slabs of butter in a fire. It would be the Creation all over again, a purification of the System, as the Chairman had said: through suffering, peace: through fire, wholesomeness.
    Another thought disturbed him in the middle of his pleasant reflections.
    When would his ship be called in against that mad Space-pilot who had gone to earth in the Asiatic fort?
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    Before the Venusian operation? From all accounts, the Asiatics had understood the art of fortress-building; and secretly he was pleased that the operation against it had failed. He wanted to measure the Starbreaker against it. The sungun on Terra!
    'Take over," he told his first officer.
    "Going to rest, Admiral?"
    "No. Over the battle-plan again."
    His conscientiousness in once more revising the plan would look well when his report went in. He left the bridge of the great vessel.
    His first officer looked enviously after him. He had heard the Chairman's commendation when Salkind had called the Admiral from the flagship, Plag I. Maybe the Admiral would remember his former officers when he was the new Director of Venus; but he doubted it.
    Then he settled himself comfortably into the Admiral's chair, turned the ship over to a junior officer, and slept. The ship was impregnable. It could look after itself.
    Far below, two reservists met at a prearranged time and place. One was huge, a great freebooter of a man with a flaming red beard; the other was small, thin, and would have been insignificant but for a face, thin and alert like a ferret's. They did not speak, but the small man looked a question. In answer the Khan-dressed in regulation blue, but having the presence of a Morgan hi spite of the drab clothes-pulled a haft out of his pocket, pressed the button, and smiled dreamily as a thin blade flashed out. The small man showed him a piece of wire that ran snakily through his hands.
    The crew was on stand-by alert, most of them soaking up glory hi the totex globes. They were not needed, however. The screens were served by robot control and the massive fire-power of the greatest ship the System had ever known was ready to meet any threat; it would take only seconds to get the ship into action. The Khan and the small man thought that was plenty of time. They needed only seconds.
    From the recreation bay where they had met, they crossed the width of the amply-built ship until they emerged cautiously beside an opening which led to the bridge.
    The Khan suddenly knocked the other man back into a recess as the Admiral stepped briskly through the opening.
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    The- Khan would have let him go, but the small man had a personal grudge: his family lived in the Venusian city which was first on the list for the Admiral's demonstration. And the small man had seen the plan.
    He jerked free from the Khan's restraining hand and leapt like a cat on to the Admiral's back. The Khan shrugged.
    In the seconds he lived, the Fleet-Admiral knew that he would never be a Director, never again see the Chairman's steady, firm face, never serve the Company. Never fire the sungun ...
    The wire ripped tendons, constricted pipes, and blocked arteries, and the small man fell neatly on the Admiral's corpse. The Khan bundled it into a recess, and the two men went up to the bridge.
    They grinned at one another when they saw the first officer asleep. The only other occupant of the bridge opened his mouth to order the two ratings below, but his expression changed as the Khan's knife took him in the throat, cutting off the roar for help. The small man strangled the first officer, and the two reservists grinned at one another.
    Steadily they disarmed the vessel.
    Precisely twelve seconds later, the Combat cruiser nudged alongside. The Combat captain himself led the boarding party through the hole which had been sheared through the hull by a skilfully-controlled burst of energy. They were in the heart of the ship, the engine-rooms.
    At first they met only the grim faces of the dead, caught in the vacuum of space without suits, but a lancing burst of flame from a hastily-rigged atomic weapon decimated the first wave of boarders, leaving only the captain alive with three lucky men who had been sheltered by a massive engine housing.
    "Fuser rockets!" bellowed the captain, and a great dull black mass of machinery broke through the hull and advanced slowly and terrifyingly on the defenders. They fired repeatedly at the attackers, so that the basalt-like shield of the rocket battery was bathed in incandescent fury as the fire from the primitive cannon concentrated on the advancing black mass. It stopped, and a few men broke away from the shelter of the pile.
    "Behind the engine shieldings!" directed the captain, and the dull mass moved again like a living cliff-face.
    It blossomed with blue petals 'of flame, yellow stamens 169
    
    of fury sinking into the defenders, lapping them up, and leaving tiny heaps of rubble where they had stood.
    "Rat-hunt!" the captain bellowed. He roared out an improvised war-cry as he led the rest of his crew through the labyrinthine depths of the great ship.
    Men died quickly for the most part, for Plag stood firm and fought in anger, sheer blind rage at the defeat of their great vessel; only a few skulked, waiting for a chance to rig an improvised bomb in one of the drives so that the whole ship would fly apart in fragments. But none survived the hour.
    Combat had too many grudges to settle with Plag for the hunt to be haphazard or merciful. Satisfied at last that the ship was theirs, they set about repairing the Starbreaker.
    The two reservists handed over to the Combat captain, who had lost much of his dashing air. He was doing a job now, one he was trained for. "Screens up?" he asked.
    "From the moment you boarded," said the Khan. "Can you handle her?"
    "Try me," the Khan said. He had the air of a man who knows what he was about, thought the captain. "You're first officer," said the captain. "We go for the fleet now?"
    The captain looked wryly at him. He should be thinking the same thing, but instead he had to contact Gompertz. It didn't seem strange to be asking the old man for instructions any more. He pulled out the card on which he had written the code-word Gompertz had told him to send, and passed it to the Khan. "What would this mean?"
    The Khan shrugged. "He's a scholarly little man," he said, pointing to the small ferret-faced man. He flipped the card to him.
    " 'Mutatis mutandis"-'Having the necessary changes." That's it, more or less."
    They regarded one another for a few moments. Then the captain burst into laughter.
    "Send it," he said at last, still laughing. "So what's funny?" the small man asked the Khan quietly.
    "No respect for classical learning," growled the Khan who revered the past.
    "It's this," the captain explained. He looked around at 170
    the shambles they had created. "I'm taking my orders from a little, dried-up old man who walks around in a bathrobe. Gompertz. He tells me what to do-I do it. He gives me crazy plans-they work. And now I have to jabber to him in gibberish."
    "I still don't see the joke." The small man spoke for both of them.
    "I don't mind. That's the joke."
    * * *
    Scrimgouer looked at the motionless body. He checked the instruments which measured Dod's metabolism. Soon he would give Dod an intravenous injection of a glucose compound; the registers which checked Dod's emotional state hovered gently in one position.
    The Watcher was not having an exciting time in its first hour of release. It was as if it had not yet come up against the Aliens, as it passively discovered the new dimension it had found.
    With time to spare, Scrimgouer had followed the progress of the battle for the Starbreaker, but he had to endure Gompertz's frequent demands for information.
    "But the Hound rend itl" the old man's querulous voice insisted, "I've got to have something! Look, Scrimgouer, I've got the greatest vessel in the fleet waiting, I've got a cruiser concealed near the fort ready to rush Dod here- can't you waken him? Surely he's got through nowl Man, there's a billion billion people waiting!"
    Scrimgouer cut him off. Dod had been under for an hour now, and the tension was beginning to be unbearable. He looked again at the unconscious body. Then he moved.
    What he saw sent him across the room at a speed Dod would not have believed him capable of.
    The registers, formerly hovering daintily over a safe level of activity, had suddenly swung over; some were spinning madly, and Dod's body was twitching, thrashing, contorting itself madly, almost free of the mild force bands of the operating couch.
    Scrimgouer jerked the oxygen input over to double its previous level, and increased the force bands which wrapped themselves invisibly about the hard, knotted muscles of the straining body.
    He stood back: something had happened whilst he had been listening to Gompertz. A physical change.
    He felt Dod's heartbeat. It was racing, but Dod could
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    stand it; his respiration was steadier, the increased oxygen supply helping to calm him. How had he changed?
    It was nothing bodily------
    The he saw it. The halo was gone.
    * * *
    Dod emerged from the black hole he had been falling into with a strange feeling of confidence, of laughter at his fears and pleasant anticipation of what was to come.
    It was an utterly new dimension.
    It needed time-time? to orientate, to appreciate the subtleties of this new dimension he was travelling in- travelling?
    They had been wrong about the Watcher. Grandma. Himself. His parents. It was something again than what they had thought.
    It wasn't the observer they had all thought, a free agency that wandered about haphazardly and without regard to the intellect; it wasn't the blithe spirit they had all thought.
    It was the life-force of an individual.
    Dod saw his body lying beneath him. The dull golden clock hung still, its fingers frozen. Now he was outside time.
    He concentrated on time. Fast time. The fingers spun. Scrimgouer flashed about the chamber. The body on the table panted like a fly-wheel.
    For hours of subjective time Dod flitted about the confines of the fort, slipping through walls, probing long-lost secret wells of knowledge, admiring strange safety devices and weird, deadly weapons.
    But tricks with time soon palled. He went back to his body. Almost. He was being nudged away, he saw, gently pushed away from the body; it was a considerable effort even to wander in the direction of the chamber where his body lay. Without further concerning himself with the odd phenomenon of being kept away, he slipped upwards through the rocks to the surface of Terra.
    What was he? He paused and looked down at the planet. An intense curiosity filled him. What was this thing he was now?
    According to Grandma's theory, he was the Purusa, the Watcher, detached from the subconscious, the unconscious, the preconscious and the conscious mind; but he was in'control of all of them! And other parts for which there was no name.
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    He had at his disposal the wild fancies of the id, the practical cautiousness of the ego, and the rough, granite power of the preconscious. ' ,
    Then he saw what was nudging him. The impulse-emitter.
    He was irritated at first by its dull pressure-it was an annoyance, so he slipped away from the System altogether and crept into clear space. The pressure was less, but it remained dully insistent. Move, it said. Move.
    He ignored it, and explored the past. The exact moment when he had been blocked stood out starkly as the worst moment of his life; the immense totality of sadness his spirit had experienced with the death of personality hung like a cloud in his subconscious.
    And yet he could not hate Eiserer, who had designed the block. Nor could he hate Plag. Life went on, he saw, whatever they had done to him. He read on in his past, the episodes unfolding like the pages of a delicately-illustrated manuscript from an antique age.
    Ranging through his past life soon palled, too, and Dod found he could travel fast. Faster than the few vessels he could see trundling about the System, faster than pellets of rock that flung aimlessly from nowhere to nowhere.
    Why not push on to the stars?
    He laughed and moved out. Immediately a huge force-wave sent him rolling back through the no-space he occupied as he realized that he had a purpose. He was not a connoisseur of sensation whose sole delight was to enjoy the multitudinous powers this new existence had brought with it; not to wander like a bee, or wonder at the grotesque impulses from his own subconscious.
    He pushed on, but cautiously, aware.
    Out past glowing clouds of gases, past silent graveyards of asteroids, past tiny clumps of clustering meteorites..
    That was just before Scrimgouer shot the laboring body full of oxygen and watched the struggles of Dod's tormented mind.
    * * *
    He paused as he saw-perceived, somehow-the presence of the Alien. It was as surprised as he, but not so cautious.
    It advanced to meet him, and he felt his first thrill of 173
    surprise change to pleasure. It was expressing friendliness from all its cells^how did he come to think of cells?
    He knew that it was not a unitary being like himself, but a composite thing, and that the aura it projected, the miasmal composite of its consciousness, was trying to soothe his fears.
    No fear had touched him, however. He was beyond fear. But caution still prevented him from crossing the distance between them; for some reason, he had to make the first move.
    The impulse-emitter drove him forward.
    * * *
    Scrimgouer drowsed now, fatigued through too much watching and listening. He had kept his gross body awake for over ten hours by drugging himself, but his energy had drained away and he sagged in his seat.
    * * *
    Gompertz anxiously watched in the communications block under the villa. He had started something that he could not finish by himself, and if Dod did not answer soon-and with the right answer, too-it would mean the end of independent man for another thousand years. At any time Salkind could work out the dispositions of the feeble forces aligned against him: he might give a thought to the Venusian revolt, to the way the Starbreaker was lost, and the talks Dod had had with him.
    It wasn't a far step from that point to the villa.
    * * *
    The Combat captain was taking reports from the crews that were repairing the damage they had made earlier. But his mind was not fully occupied.
    With one part of his mind he was wondering when the inevitable battle would occur, and going over battle-plans in his mind. The Khan had come up with some interesting suggestions, but they were more suited to individual contests, duels between equal adversaries: the Starbreaker had no equal, but it would be up against the massed firepower of the fleet.
    He considered the weapons at his disposal. He could blast a battleship, screens and all, with one concentration of fire; but was a sungun, however enormous, enough to oppose a fleet?
    Other questions chased through his mind. He looked at them again one by one and found himself eager to test the answers.
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    If Plag fought, would they face the Starbreaker?
    How many battleships could they moblize?
    Would the Pluto reserve fleet be ready for the battle?
    Certainly there would be the main fleet with its score or more of capital vessels, but what about the fleet of smaller vessels that pursued a lonely, useless patrol around the periphery of the System, and which were a relic of the days of the Free Spacers? •
    It would not be long before Plag made a move, he felt sure. He wished Gompertz would give the word.
    One idea of the Khan's could be effective, he thought suddenly. It meant the sacrifice of the cruiser, but the Starbreaker could get into the middle of the fleet, inside the screens ...
    "Ship closed up for action," reported the Khan.
    The captain murmured, "Yes," realized that he was mumbling and nodded briefly. He was ready, too.
    * * *
    It was like talking to a man through a long pipe: you had to call hard down at him, then put your ear to the pipe to listen to his reply. At no time could you keep up the rapid cross-fire that makes up a conversation.
    "Greetings!" Dod had the idea that the Alien-the Aliens?-was laughing at him. "I am glad------"
    They had spoken together. Politely, the Alien waited.
    "Greetings!" returned Dod.
    "I am glad you are," said the Alien. Are? Yet Dod felt pleased.
    "I wanted to communicate," he said.
    "I believed you non-sentient!" remarked the Alien inconsequentially. There was no answer to this, but Dod understood the other's pleasure.
    The other replied with the ringing voices of all its dependent cells. "All one! Evolved together, and from one." There was pride in the voice.
    "You. are all one?"
    "I am one-unitary. Single. There are more."
    "More?"
    Dod used the concept of the dependent cell and imagined it as severed from the rest. "As many," he said. "Detached. Separate."
    Disbelief was only slowly replaced by sadness and pity. Sympathy for Dod welled from the Alien. Then admiration replaced the pity.
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    "Yet you speak------" and "it showed the notion of
    thought winging through space and time. ,
    "Haltingly," Dod said.
    The Alien spoke sympathetically, at the same time trying to avoid making Dod feel hopelessly inferior.
    "Ask," it said. It knew of the immense gulf between them, and invited Dod to cross at his own pace.
    "Why the force screen about our System?"
    Gently, the Alien diverted his question. He should ask about basic matters first.
    "Where are you from?"
    "See." Dod watched the System recede as he was swept up by the Alien and hurtled through space to the other end of the Universe. A grey-looking planet patrolled a lonely, sunless course. Then came the journey back.
    "What are you?"
    Dod saw an interplay of forces that meant nothing to him.
    "How long have you existed?"
    "In this phase, twice the life of your sun."
    This was getting nowhere, Dod decided.
    "Why did you put a halo on me?" He thought of his body on Terra.
    "Your ship suddenly materialized in our"-it was difficult to express, but it sounded like lobster-pot-"time-phase translator, so I spoke to your computer!" Laughter rang through space as the Alien dissolved into self-mockery. "I knew there was something sentient aboard, so I looked everywhere. I spoke to your engine!"
    Dod listened, and then joined in the laughter. The Alien had argued that there must be intelligent life to create the ship, and that as there was no sentient life as they knew it, there must be intelligent life of a kind they could not understand.
    An insistent voice clamored to be heard. The Alien went on, "Yes. Yes! A part of me that has only lately formed caught a hint of yourself-it asked to"-"trawl" came into Dod's mind, the trawling of a kind of net, or the using of a fantastic spatial lobster-pot-"to find you."
    Dod understood. A juvenile cell had shown imagination when it caught a whisper of the ghost of the Purusa that even the block had not been able to stifle. And when the strange trawl had caught him he had been given a mechanism, a semantic tool that would help him to realize the
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    existence of the Watcher. But the block had kept him from using this weird device.
    Every other theory about the halo collapsed. It was merely a device to help him communicate with the Aliens. Even though the Aliens had not believed in the possibility of there being intelligent life on the planets, they had thrown bait out.
    "So that's why!" said Dod.
    "I have to tell you that the part of me only lately created believed there to be a pattern in the hints of intelligent life in your system," said the Alien.
    Dod remembered the Pluto run. Again and again. The Aliens had plotted the hints the Purusa had thrown out, and, intrigued, tney had trawled where the odd manifestations of life were strongest.
    "But why a halo?" asked Dod.
    "It had to be some shape," said the Alien.
    "A halo, though!"
    The Alien explained. It was a familiar, perhaps a reassuring sight, for a member of a planetary system whose sun often created the image of a halo.
    "Parhelia!" exclaimed Dod. That was it. Parhelia were haloes-common optical effects that occurred when particles were suspended at high altitudes in the atmosphere. By marking him with a common, easily-recognizable device, the Aliens were trying to ease away any fear he may have had.
    Dod laughed. It was curious that a young part of the composite that was the Aliens should have reached across to him, a young man who alone amongst his race believed that the Aliens could be contacted.
    "Why have you stopped us from reaching for the stars?"
    The answer was purely visual. Dod saw, strung limit-lessly about space, a slender screen of cells, each engaged in trying to appreciate the nature of the Solar System, and each trying to contact any life there; each patiently hoping for some kind of success, and accepting failure philosophically. They were so distributed as to form a force-screen, but such, he was assured, had not been their intention.
    It so happened that their presence created a barrier.
    "But why for so long?" insisted Dod.
    "You think it a long time? How long? Tell me in terms of your own life-cycle."
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    Dod let the memories of his family tumble out in an unordered sequence: the slow leisure of old age; the first hesitant ponderings of the adolescent's mind; a child seeing, for the first time, that solidity was a third dimension; marriage, and the acceptance of a family. He showed a life span of eighty full years, and compared it with his parents' early death.
    Then he showed the Alien the unwinding of the two centuries during which they had inhibited man's life.
    "Why?" Dod asked again. "For two centuries!"
    The Alien said gently, "I have only just arrived. Our preliminary survey of your system has only just begun."
    It had been broken to him gently, Dod saw, but he was still shocked. Compared with the life-cycle of the Alien, human beings lived for hours only; they were mayflies, brief summer insects that lived a life in a day. Gom-pertz had been right in this one instance: he had grasped their grand otherness, the gigantic disparity between human and Alien.
    "Will you take down the screen now?" Something could be gained.
    "Of course!" Pleasure came across like a warm wind. The Alien wanted to help-to do anything it could. Dod asked questions at random, as a friend would.
    "Why did you leave your own planet?"
    "I was the only form of existence. It seemed there might be other forms. I searched." Time hurtled by in a rushing gale; stars wheeled, fiery in the universe; planets blossomed, white, red; novae burst and faded. "I searched for great lengths of time." The Alien spoke sadly.
    "And there was no other form of life?"
    "I found the remains of what could have been a wonderful race. Just ruins, and a few devices-I used one of them to catch your ship." Dod watched the ruins as the Alien projected images.
    "But you found nothing alive?"
    "Not until you came out of the red sun."
    Both paused, and Dod made up his mind.
    "There may be other life-forms," he said.
    "There may."
    "We could search together," suggested Dod. "My race could identify life-forms you could not."
    "We could do it." Dod was surprised at the full, ready, approving rush of feeling that echoed back from
    178
    the constituent cells of the Alien. Politely, the Alien waited for him to frame the question that had been growing in his mind.
    "Our aloneness-it is a handicap," Dod said.
    "My oneness helps us," agreed the Alien.
    Dod showed the sense of separateness that cursed the human race: the helpless, cut-off feeling. The clumsiness of speech, the confusion of language; how words and sentences veiled, concealed, and hindered meaning. How a man tried to communicate his thoughts by using an apparatus of symbols that was totally inadequate. He compared the marvelous immediacy of the mind with the ineptness of speech.
    "You could help," said Dod.
    Eagerly the Alien said, "I will try. Immediately!"
    That was when the halo disappeared from Dod's body in the Asiatic fort.
    "And our short lives-you could help there, too?"
    The Alien tried to show him what life and life-span meant to it. Life was continuous. They didn't know when it had begun, although they could trace the course of their evolution back to multi-cellular but simple life-forms; their history was an open book. They knew what the simple cell forms had felt, how they had reacted to their environment, and all the sense-impressions the cells had ever experienced were part of the Alien's makeup.
    They did not understand what Dod meant by death, but they agreed to investigate the phenomenon of death. He sensed the Alien's pity now that they knew of man's twin horrors, the fear of death, and the fear of being alone.
    It was a poor thing, Dod told the Alien, to find that the only other life-form they had found in their aeons of searching was a short-lived race that had to re-grow itself every few years; and one that was afraid of being alone.
    ".Not alone," the Alien reminded him. "Existence is now a shared thing. We can work together. When we have achieved an objective contact with your race, there is much that we can do. But at present, contact is impossible from what you say."
    "I believe I can do it," Dod said.
    That seemed to be all there was to say. As if by an understood and agreed signal, they parted.
    Dod saw the Solar System sweeping towards him; then 179
    he was watching noctilucent clouds over the Asiatic fort, admiring the interplay of light and color. He moved on and down.
    FOUR
    dod sat up. He felt cold and tired, and was irritated to find Scrimgouer snoring opposite; but he let him sleep.
    He crossed to the 'ceiver, saw that it had been switched off, and rejoined the circuit. Immediately Gom-pertz's voice filled the chamber, anxiously asking for information.
    Scrimgouer crossed to him, all fatigue wiped away.
    "He's called a dozen times an hour."
    "I'll answer now."
    "You made it!" he shouted.
    "Didn't you think I would?"
    "No. But still you made it." He looked at Dod's head. "That's gone," he said. "The halo."
    "I'll explain later. Right now I want you to get to work on the time-flow charts-work out what happened when it disappeared. There's something I can't just put my finger on at the moment, but I'm sure the answer's in the time sequence."
    "Any sense of time passing in the dream-state?" Scrimgouer was preparing to take notes professionally.
    "Later." There was all the time in the world if they lived through the next few hours.
    "Any scale of comparison you can think of for how distance seemed?" begged the Psychman. But already Dod had got through to Gompertz.
    . "No, you .listen to me," he told him. "First, this is what the Alien screen was. Yes, was. It's a composite of their own force-impulses. They just can't help it. They've been trying to contact us since they came. And they think they came only yesterday."
    "Their life-span's greater?" Gompertz came to the point.
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    "They don't understand 'life-span'. They just continue. And they're all one-multi-cellular, but composite."
    "Peaceable?"
    "They're lonely. Glad they found us."
    "And the screen's gone?"
    "Yes. They've stopped trying to contact us, so there's no screen now. It's up to us to get in touch with them."
    'Technologically in front of us?"
    "Not in the sense you mean," said Dod unhelpfully.
    "Better ships-light-drive," Gompertz explained.
    "They don't need ships."
    "So a better technology," Gompertz insisted.
    "They don't need one."
    Gompertz gave it up.
    "They'll help us?"
    "We're partners now. We're going star-roaming with them."
    "How?"
    "Would I know-my field's narrow."
    "Can you get in touch again?"
    "/ can."
    "Not others?"
    "Maybe. You have to know what you're aiming to do. But I think I can do it. I'm working on it now."
    "Any direct way of contacting them?"
    "No."
    'They could broadcast to the System," Gompertz said hopefully.
    "Not a chance."
    "You'll have to do the broadcast then." So the villa was well-equipped. A System-wide broadcast took powerful equipment.
    "Will do. Anything else-I want some sleep."
    "How else can they help us?"
    "Small things. Telepathy maybe. Immortality."
    Gompertz chuckled. "I meant in our present situation."
    "They couldn't intervene."
    'That's all right. We can tackle Plag ourselves. With luck, I think I can swing the battle."
    "Do I sleep now?"
    "No. You record your broadcast. Stay there. I'll have it written for you in ten minutes."
    But there was no sleep for Dod. A battle was about 181
    to start, and he sat at the controls in the battle-room in case a Plag vessel should venture too near the fort. Scrim-gouer was working frantically at the charts, but Dod felt that there was something he had overlooked-a vital link he had forgotten.
    For the moment, however, the battle was the overriding issue. He was under no illusions about the coming fight. Even with the Starbreaker, it was an unbalanced conflict. Without some major mistake-some massive error of judgement or failure of morale-Plag must blast the scratch forces ranged against them out of the skies.
    He adjusted controls, armed weapons, checked screens. Then he waited for Gompertz to give the word.
    * * *
    "No news from the Asiatic fort?" asked Chairman Sal-kind.
    "No ships have left, Chairman, And they don't know the Pluto fleet is on the way." The Plag officer who had become Fleet Admiral on the presumed death of the commander of the Starbreaker spoke deferentially, the more so since the flagship, Plag I, had been checked in its first engagement.
    It had had to run when the Starbreaker had appeared, and run fast to the fleet which was orbiting over Moon-base. There was enough fire-power to overwhelm even the Starbreaker in the massed batteries of the fleet, and the Combat captain had reluctantly sheered off.
    "There's a chance we can nullify Dod before he commits the unnameable Error," Salkind said.
    "The fleet from Pluto's quite adequate for the assignment," the new Admiral assured him. He gritted his teeth as he said it. He had known how to nullify Dod when the Error was first detected, and with the death of Getler he had made known his wishes; but not to the Chairman. That was dangerous.
    The communications officer interrupted. He knew when news was important. It might mean his head if he delayed.
    "Gompertz is speaking to the System, Chairman," he reported. "You left orders to be told if that happened."
    "Cut all 'ceivers!" snapped Salkind. "No fleet ship to listen in. One 'ceiver in here." The officer ran.
    "And me?" asked the Admiral. It was best to be sure.
    "You stay."
    In the roomy cabin, the voice of the Counsellor grated 182
    out harshly. There were no Latin tags, and no insincerities. No tricks of presentation. It was convincing.
    "What we have hoped for has happened. There is no Alien screen around our System," he announced. "Today, the man you know as Dod finally achieved contact with the Aliens."
    There was a pause. Neither man spoke.
    "They are our friends."
    The Admiral looked helplessly at Salkind, his heavy face rigid with shock and terror. He looked for a lead from the most powerful man in the Company.
    Salkind had nothing to offer.
    "I shall repeat that," continued the harsh voice.
    Salkind drew his blaster and poured blast after blast into the 'ceiver. Alarm bells rang, and guards poured in, alert, self-contained men.
    "Attack!" howled Salkind. The heavy figure remained motionless, and in his rage the Chairman pointed the weapon at the Admiral.
    "Attack!" he mouthed again, the word incoherent.
    The Admiral moved slowly to the weapons control system. He had not refused to carry out orders: he was simply shocked to the point where he had relapsed into apathy.
    The guards watched, fascinated by the spectacle of violence.
    At last the Admiral spoke. "All units," he said. "Attack!" Then he began to detail the plan of battle.
    The vast fleet moved towards Venus. It was at last to fulfil its function, and not one man aboard had a moment of regret or pity.
    Space recoiled before the massed drives of the great armada.
    No one checked the course of the fleet from Pluto, which had swung, unnoticed, on to a new bearing.
    * * *
    From Venus rose the scratch fleet. Its spearhead was the Starbreaker, but the vessels, behind the mighty leader were not an impressive sight.
    The Combat captain half-wished the Venusians would keep out of the fight altogether-together with his own immaculate cruiser under the command of the small strangler, the Starbreaker would give the fleet a hard fight. The end was inevitable, of course, but what a defeat! It would ring down the centuries.
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    And fighting was, after all, for the professionals. He looked around the crowd of derelicts. It wasn't war, he thought regretfully.
    There was a huge, old freighter fitted out with an obsolete ionbeam and an unpredictable battery of cyclonic torpedoes which had lain rusting for three centuries. True, there were scouts in plenty, and half-a-dozen cruisers which had been undergoing major repair in the dockyards, and rushed into some sort of order.
    But the great lumbering vessel that brought up the rear! He shuddered when he saw it in the screen.
    It was an ancient veteran from the Free Spacers' fleet, something between a cosmic bulldozer and a refuse-collector; yet its gabby old commander claimed that it was just the thing to gobble up the fleet's advance scouts if they were so contemptuous as to get within the field it used to sweep space of rubbish.
    The captain hoped its weird heavy particle colloid thrust would not break down under the strain of the maneuvers that Gompertz's plan of battle called for.
    He tensed as he saw the Plag fleet drive toward Venus.
    * * *
    The Grand Fleet divided at a point twelve million miles from Terra. Plag I headed the bigger detachment towards the Venusian fleet, whilst a heavy force of cruisers with one older dreadnought peeled ofi in a wide swinging arc for Venus itself; its task was punitive.
    The Admiral was himself again. Whilst his main force took the rebels head-on, the reserve fleet from Pluto, after reducing the Asiatic fort, would rip into what was left of the rebels from the flank.
    He saw himself as a man of destiny, the Flagman who Rooted Out Error on a grand scale. It was the first major engagement for over a century.
    "Contact!" he heard the leading scout vessel report. Then silence.
    "Enemy dreadnought iden------" a second scout began,
    and again silence.
    "Unidentified era------" a third crisply said.
    "Report!" bellowed the Admiral. What was happening to the scouts?
    "It looks like a------" another said wonderingly.
    "Refuse------" yet another shouted in disbelief as the
    antique disposal vessel shovelled it into its glowing nuclear maw.
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    The Admiral detached a heavy unit to close with the lumbering ship; its over-confident captain, delighted with his success against the scouts, mistook the battleship for a light cruiser and attempted to claw in the enemy. Instead of being absorbed, the battleship loosed a titanic bolt from its sungun, sending the Venusian crazily back through space until its shallow screens imploded and it disappeared in a welter of boiling gases.
    The Starbreaker hung back as the Grand Fleet ploughed on towards the depleted Venusian concentration.
    The Plag Admiral exulted, and Salkind's cold face gleamed with something like pleasure. The cruisers raced for the kill, and outpaced the battleships. They were almost within range of the scratch fleet.
    Then, like a steel comet, the Combat cruiser darted from its shelter behind a group of asteroids straight for the heart of the Plag fleet, its total armament showering gouts of fire and blowing cruisers left and right; a battleship, faster than the others, came in for a crippling cloud from the cruiser's sungun, and reeled away into space reaching for the abyss beyond Mars, out of the battle. On lanced the cruiser, through and beyond the fleet, a score of hastily-aimed bursts of fury from guns of all kinds following it; its destruction seemed assured, but it spun free to join the Starbreaker.
    "Close up!" bellowed the Admiral uselessly to his inflamed commanders. "Screens up! Link defenses! Leave the cruiser!"
    He had seen the danger, alone of the ten thousand men in the Plag fleet, but a score of vessels followed the cruiser.
    Then the Starbreaker met the light vessels that followed the cruiser. Glittering ponderous fire rolled from the huge vessel, and in ten seconds an equal number of ships had been consumed. Panic claimed two more as they crashed flame at one another in blind frenzy.
    The Starbreaker had to withstand the battleships that followed. It had not the speed to withdraw. Now, it was fight or die.
    The Venusians died gloriously, as their vessek ripped into the Grand Fleet's linked screens, the fury of their onslaught allowing them to pass through before they were snuffed out, one by one, like so many tapers. But each had taken an opponent into gleaming dust as it died.
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    Eight battleships still remained, and the Fleet Admiral had lined them so that they could mass their concentrated fire on the Starbreaker; but their maneuvering had opened a gap in their screens, and, seeing his opportunity, the Venusian strangler flashed into the gap and blasted two of them. The Combat captain took the Starbreaker into the gap, ready to pick off the battleships that were scattering, dismayed at the sudden reverse. He sighed. This was the ideal target for the huge potential of the Star-breaker's sungun: a cluster of heavy vessels moving away from him.
    "Maximum," he ordered. "Send the lot."
    The sungun stopped firing after one short gobbet of glory had turned the space between the Plag battleships and Starbreaker into a boiling fury.
    The Fleet Admiral was able to control the flight of his ships by pointing this out to them. In his desperate anxiety to bring his diminished fleet back to the attack, he pleaded with the commanders.
    They turned when they saw the Starbreaker was helpless.
    Two cruisers spotted the Combat cruiser, and flung off after it. The end was approaching. Order was to be restored. Error would be Rooted Out. On the Starbreaker, the Combat captain waited for death.
    Reconciled to his fate, he noted the efficient way the Pluto reserve fleet clustered in a saucer formation a million miles away. They were coming in for the kill after neutralizing the Asiatic fort. He wondered if he could knock one or two out with his minor armament-torpedoes? If he had another two minutes, the sungun would be repaired, but two minutes' grace was out of the question.
    When an officer came to tell him that a hundred seconds would suffice, he complimented him, realizing the hard truth behind the bare statement: men would have died willingly handling the glowing coils with only makeshift tackle. He couldn't tell them to stop even though in three or four seconds at most the joint fleets would be on them.
    The Fleet Admiral had waited for the reserve fleet before advancing to finish off Starbreaker. Always cautious, the Combat captain remembered. Thorough.
    "Take station behind Starbreaker," ordered  the Admiral.
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    There was no acknowledgement, but that did not perturb him; the first officer wondered whether he should comment, but thought better of it.
    "Not long, Chairman," assured the Admiral. "This is the end."
    Salkind ignored him, and the Admiral knew he would never be a Director. He hoped he would keep his head, though.
    "No acknowledgement from the Pluto fleet," the communications officer said.
    'Take station behind Starbreaker!" ordered the Admiral sharply.
    On board the Starbreaker, the Combat captain felt hope. A few more seconds.
    "No acknowledgement!" reported the communications officer.
    "Off course!" shouted the first officer.
    'They're heading for us!"
    Salkind had seen the pattern of the reserve fleet's approach.
    "What in the name of the Pit are you doing?" bellowed the Admiral.
    "They are heading for us!" the first officer said incredulously.
    "Mutiny!" bellowed the Admiral, turning purple with rage.
    "Fire at the Starbreaker!" shouted the Chairman, who saw the supreme importance of destroying the dreadnought.
    The Admiral ignored him. "All units," he shouted. "Independent action. Objective-Pluto fleet. It's mutiny!" All thought of finishing the Starbreaker was wiped from his mind at the horror he felt as his own vessels made for him.
    "Fire on Starbreaker now!" Salkind said desperately. "Now!" he shouted, turning his blaster on the officers on the bridge.
    "Mutiny!" repeated the Admiral, his eyes popping as he saw on the battle-screen that the Pluto ships had destroyed a cruiser. He toppled forward as the Chairman cut him down.
    Pandemonium filled the bridge, as, leaderless, the officers milled to watch the course of the battle. Salkind foamed at the mouth and blasted them as they scattered.
    187
    Then the Starbreaker moved forward into the holocaust, a tyrannosaurus rex amongst smaller predators* its sungun again contributing the dominant theme to the interlacing chaotic pageant of light across the gulfs of space.
    Limping back to the action, the Combat cruiser hurtled frenziedly at the Plag capital ships, and, fantastically, again it survived; but it was the shock of betrayal by the Pluto fleet that took the heart out of the Flagmen. Ship after ship tried to withdraw from the Starbreaker's titanic sunbursts, but always the Pluto ships shot through to cut off deserters. The Plag vessels dissolved, one by one, into boiling gases, or were left, gaping and ruined; as a fighting unit, the Grand Fleet was disintegrating fast.
    The end came when the Plag I turned away, its gibbering commander, the Chairman of the Board of Directors gasping out his life in a froth of blood after being hacked down by the crew of the ship.
    But the Combat captain had seen the great flagship sidling away.
    The huge sungun flared once at maximum, burning the flagship, its dead Admiral, its mutinous crew, and the dying, insane Salkind.
    Ships tried to surrender, but no procedure had even been established for surrendering hi space, so they burned with those that chose to fight on.
    Victory came at a high cost.
    Of the Venusian fleet, only the Starbreaker and the Combat cruiser survived; over half of the Pluto reserve fleet was destroyed.
    The victors turned for Venus.
    * * *
    Gompertz clamored for news, but the Combat captain shouted him down. He had two questions of his own.
    "We've won. Some of the ships can't go farther than Venus. Now tell me this: how did you get the Pluto reserves to join us?"
    "My dear Captain------"
    "Now! Tell me!" There was time later for elaboration and the careful weighing of words.
    "Dod's speech did it."
    "No!"
    On the Starbreaker's screen appeared a figure the captain had not seen for some time. When he recognized
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    the man, he knew what had brought Flagman to fight Flagman. He realized that, during all of the battle's fury, the Pluto Admiral had not spoken to him; and that afterwards he had only been a voice.
    "Van Gulik!" he said.
    "Obviously," put in Gompertz. "Who else?"
    "Even without Dod's broadcast, I'd have brought the fleet against Plag," said van Gulik. "We've been sick of Plag for many years. And Pluto has been the center of unrest in Plag for a decade."
    "But Dod's news helped," pointed out Gompertz. "My analysis of the situation was that it must .create a third factor, and a decisive one at that. There was the rebellion, Salkind's assumption of power-and the imponderable effect of the removal of our cosmic inhibition."
    "It could have helped," admitted van Gulik.
    "You had some trouble?" asked the Combat captain.
    Van Gulik nodded, and said no more. If there had been opposition to his leadership he had smashed it down.
    The Combat captain looked at Gompertz's image. What he had to ask now made him shudder.
    "Has much of Venus been destroyed?"
    Van Gulik replied. "We took care of the Plag detachment. I sent one of our best battleships."
    "Naturally," Gompertz said. The captain found his assurance irritating.
    "You were sure that would happen?" he asked him.
    "Of course! My analysis------"
    ~ "You'd seen it all?"
    "Not exactly. But I wasn't surprised. Ipso facto," he said, and van Gulik grinned, "and fortiori presentium, the circumstances demanded that there------"
    "You know what I think?" interrupted the Combat captain.
    "Naturally," said Gompertz. "You think we were lucky. And do you know what I think?"
    "You think we were lucky, too," replied van Gulik.
    "Yes," said Gompertz reluctantly, "but you have to manipulate your luck."
    * * *
    At the first meeting of the newly-formed Interplanetary Parliament, Gompertz, Dod, van Gulik, and the Combat captain sat as observers. All had refused membership of the inner Council, Gompertz because he said he preferred to criticize rather than to legislate-it was good for his
    189
    complexes; Dod because he had work to do; van Gulik because he wanted to go back to his favorite occupation, building a star-ship; and the Combat captain because he wanted to help him.
    Cohui was unanimously chosen as first President. His towering skeletal frame hovered like a great stork; yet he was not a comic figure. He had spoken of the damage the System had suffered first, not minimizing the tremendous devastation that riots and burnings had brought.
    "But what of the credit side?" he asked. He glanced all round the immense assembly. "Simply this: we are men again. We have lived all our lives-so have our fathers and their fathers-under a most unnatural regime, where no man dared to think. But now we can think. And we can act, too." He used no actor's tricks, but his voice sank as he communicated the awe he felt. "We can reach out for the stars."
    The delegates started to applaud quietly at first, but soon the low-hand-clapping was replaced by a growl of assent, a low, sullen roar that gave way to a swelling tide of shouting until the huge hall reverberated with the gale of bellowing approval.
    It was the breaking of a great dam in the minds of the assembled men.
    * * *
    When Dod reported to Cohui the last piece in the puzzle had slipped into place. For hours after the battle he had checked the time-flow charts against what he recalled from his communication with the Alien; but it was not until he remembered the cautious Psych Engineer, Sliep-chevik, that it all fitted together.
    Sliepchevik had been his usual prudent self. Yes, he had made certain investigations-the unhappily deceased Psy-chiarch Eiserer, who had been cut down by some unknown but obviously infuriated victim of his, had not seen fit to publish the result of those investigations-and, yes, he would be glad to work with Commander Dod.
    He had found what the lobster-pot was, or at least he had a good idea that it existed, and from there he_had deduced something of its nature. After a good deal of hedging, he admitted that he believed he could duplicate some of its characteristics-given time, money, energy and enthusiasm.
    Sliepchevik had worked on unswervingly when he had discovered the inadequacy, the subtle mathematical non-190
    co-ordination of integers, in the freighter on the Pluto-Moonbase run; at first it seemed that the ship had found a way of running on less fuel, but one thing had led to another, and Sliepchevik ended up by discovering a time-warp in Pluto's field. He was worried, however. Would he be able to continue his investigation?
    "We've been waiting for two centuries for this!" Cohui said when he heard. "Think of the time and money we must have spent on creating the Ruins! And your Engineer wants money, does he, Commander Dod?"
    "There's only one way to deal with this situation," said the gross ex-Director of Mars, who had survived and was now Ms planet's representative on the Council, testifying to his indestructibility not only as a man, but as a politician. ' "And that?" asked Cohui.
    "How did the phrase go?" the gross man considered, "-that's it! Crash program!"
    "The total resources of nine planets," Gompertz said aloud-his observer's status did not prevent him from offering advice. "A highly civilized and efficient race. And directed at what aim?" He looked at the Council members sarcastically. "Establishing the existence of, and analyzing, one faulty stitch in the skein of time and space in our speck of the Universel" He laughed. "And why? To contact a race that wants to take us roaming the constellations to look for another stitch!"
    It wasn't right thought Dod. Gompertz presented a picture of an imbecile's quest. But maybe it was.
    The Council hung on his words.
    "Is it worth it?" demanded Gompertz.
    No one answered, but Cohui glowered.
    "The only justification we have for doing a thing," the small, wizened, eccentrically-dressed, powerful old man said hectoringly, "the only justification we have for living even, was enunciated many thousands of years ago, and by a vastly more civilized race than ours, I might add. Quo Vadis?"
    His showman's instinct told him to wait for the cue. It came.
    "Which means?" The Martian had spoken.
    " 'Where are you going?' "
    "So?" said Dod.
    "So this," said Gompertz standing up. "So let's go! Fast!"
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    The Council waited and someone began to applaud, but the old man had not finished.
    "So long as we are going somewhere, let's go. That's all we can do."
    There was no applause, but his words had already been adopted.
    Suddenly Dod remembered the comment the Alien had made, a half-hint, half-joke, that had puzzled him momentarily at the time, and which he had forgotten afterwards.
    'They did say this about us," Dod told them, apologizing for his interruption.
    "Let's hear it," said Cohui.
    Dod felt Gompertz's red-rimmed eyes staring critically; the rest of the Council craned forward to listen. He found himself smiling as he understood the Alien's acute insight into human behavior.
    "After only a few hours' knowledge of only one man, they got to the root of our motivations-if we have any, and Counsellor Gompertz doesn't think so." Gompertz forgot his academic pose of nonchalance and craned with the others.
    "They said what they liked about me-us-was our impulsiveness. The way we rushed into things. They think we're like puppies, and that's one reason why they like us -we're a young race: a race of pups!"
    And Dod was not aware of any sense of offended dignity in the gathering. Rather a resolution to enjoy the race to the stars.
    If we had tails, thought Dod, we'd be wagging them!
    Grandma's words came back to him, the joyous heartfelt words of a forgotten poet. He thought of reciting them aloud, and then recalled that when he had been Kinsella he had shared the two lines he knew only with his friends. Scrimgouer was one. He could tell Gompertz, who would appreciate them:
     "To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought."
    The old man might even translate them into Latin.
    
    THE END