THE WANDERING TELLURIAN 
ALAN SCHWARTZ
ACE BOOKS, INC.
Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y.
THE WANDERING TELLURIAN
Copyright ©, 1967, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Cover by Podwil
THE KEY TO MUNIUM
Copyright ©, 1967, by Ace Books, Inc. Printed in U.S.A.

I
AS WITH MOST Tellurian ghettos, the enclave on Lhonz 4 kept an academy, a building with two floors, in contrast to the habitations surrounding it. It was solid and impressive, built of native red stone and furnished with the usual heavy tapestries and large fireplaces found in the ghetto.
Lhonz 4 was a small, cold world, hereditarily inhabited by humanoids more notable for their hirsuteness than for their doubtful attractiveness. Relations between the locals and the sons of Tellus, the death merchants, were strictly on a cash basis.
But the Tellurians had to make do with Lhonz. Few worlds relish the establishment of a race with a reputation for viciousness and undoubted possession of weapons in advance of anything in the galaxy.
The current theory among the Lhonz 4 Tellurians held that the place was so unattractive and useless that the inhabitants couldn't imagine anyone wanting to take it away from them, so were willing to allow a small establishment to exist, so long as it was good for all the local woodcutters, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers.
Lhonz 4 was not a conflict world, one of those places where Tellurian death technology was well-received. In common with most of the peoples of the galaxy, the Lhonzians had long ago settled into an ecology that excluded any form of large-scale conflict. This was another reason for the Tellurian settlement. No one, however combative, wants his own home exposed to combativeness.
At the academy, Herbert Herbert preached the doctrine of the Ecologists: return to the home world and compulsory peace. Maikal Wendal listened to the schoolman and believed. Maikal Wendal at the age of twenty was on the verge of becoming a school man himself. Maikal Wendel intended to never leave the academy for his father's franchise, a little of the space in the galaxy within reach of Lhonz 4 to which he was licensed by the Association and in which there were five or six steady customers as well as the prospect of perhaps thirty more, petty lords and tyrants who would happily exchange whatever compact valuables they had at hand in return for gunpowder.
Enver Wendal was not happy about his son's proposed occupation or admitted Ecologist sentiments. The elder Wendal was a true conservative, a man in favor of the status quo down to the last pebble on the street, and he never missed a chance to point out his ideas to his son.
One evening when he seemed in an especially vile mood he opened the post-supper conversation with the observation that the home world wasn't fit for man or beast and was mostly occupied by the latter in any case. 
"It's still our world," Maikal said. "Your world is Lhonz 4. It was your grandfather's world and it'll be your son's world whether you like it or not."
"The locals could kick us out tomorrow. Four generations would be a record."
"You like the academy?"
"I'm going to be a schoolman. That's how much I like it."
"You're going to go to work for the first time in your life. I'm getting too old to do it so you've got to get started before we all starve."
"I'm not going to be a death merchant."
"Tomorrow you will." Enver Wendal's eyes narrowed. "I don't care whether you like it or not. Tomorrow."
"Never."
Then what his father was saying began to get into his brain.
"What do you mean 'tomorrow?'"
"Tomorrow. That's the day customarily coming after today."
"I wouldn't do it under any circumstances."
"You'll do it or tomorrow you'll move out."
"There isn't any place for me to go. Do you want me to freeze to death out in hairytown somewhere?"
"You won't have to because you'll go into space," Enver Wendal said. "Just the way I did when I was your age."
"I would rather freeze to death than do that."
"We'll see about that."
Herbert Herbert looked sleepy when he admitted the younger Wendal to his apartment in the one floor apartment house behind the academy where the schoolmen all lived. He pulled his night robe of heavy, rough fiber around him and walked into the main room, where there was a bright fire in the fireplace, with Maikal following him. 
"What is it?" Herbert's wife asked from behind the curtains of the bed built into the stone wall near the fire.
"Small crisis, love. Go back to sleep."
They sat down in front of the fire in low chairs made of metal and fiber. Lhonz 4 wood rotted too fast in warmth to be of any use for building or making furniture.
"My father said I have to go to work or hell throw me out."
"You owe obedience to him."
"You said no one should act against his principles."
"What are your ultimate principles?"
"Return and integration."
"That's a slogan," Herbert Herbert criticized.
"It's a summary of what I believe. I won't help sustain the system we have now."
"Commendable. What will you accomplish?"
"I don't know. Maybe I'll freeze to death."
"In any case you'll dishonor your father. Family ties are strong here. You'll both lose influence."
"I'll be making my ideas known."
"No one will be interested in listening to you."
"I want to be a schoolman," Wendal said. "What's wrong with that?"
"If you were prepared, nothing. But yon aren't. It would seem you have no prospect of being."
"I thought you would help me."
"You want me to tell you to be a hero. I would rather keep you alive and well."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Stop thinking with your viscera. Go. When you come back you'll have the right to speak out."
"You want me to go."
"Is that too unpleasant?"
"I never thought you would compromise."
Herbert Herbert laughed slightly. "I have compromised every day. I have taught you how to keep your books. I have taught you how to set a spaceboat course. I have taught you how to learn languages with the analyzer. I have taught you how to do everything your father wants you to do now. You can recite the tri-nitrate compounds and draw plans for dozens of weapons."
"I don't understand."
"Schools are only incidentally for sedition."
"I don't really understand. If you think it is best I'll go, but I don't pretend to understand."
The teacher shook his head.
"I haven't had the time to teach you how. Perhaps you'll learn more quickly on a conflict planet than you will in a school in any case."
Maikal Wendal sadly stared at the fire for a little while before he left Herbert Herbert.

II
BREAKFAST IN the Wendal main room was not pleasant. The father and son stared across the table at one another while the mother and daughter, awed by the depth of male silence being demonstrated, silently served chops and cereal.
"You'll go," Enver Wendal said.
"I'll go. I told you I'll go."
"You'll go."
Maikal Wendal couldn't think of anything more to say. Neither, evidently could his father.
Breakfast finished, the two wrapped their double cloaks around themselves and left the house. They went to the boat barn, at the end of Countinghouse Row. It was a long building with a sloped, slate roof, built of blue stone. Inside, it was divided into a number of stalls, most of which contained a spherical object about six feet in diameter, apparently smooth. The spaceboats each were supported by three slender legs.
Enver Wendal took a subsonic control from his cloak pocket and pushed the button on it. The spaceboat hatch, a curved rectangular piece of the hull, opened on a hinge from the top. The lights came on inside.
"There it is," Enver Wendal said softly.
"There it is," his son echoed.
"I wouldn't have put you out."
"I've got to do what you say. Even if I don't like it."
"You've got to take care of yourself."
"I'll be all right," Maikal said.
"Be careful out there. Stay away from Lahdz. That's seven-seventh, eight-tenth, five-seventh."
"Maybe I'm almost curious about what's out there."
Enver shook his head. "You won't be very long. You've got all my charts. Take care of yourself."
"You said that."
There was an equipment locker in the stall. Enver Wendal took an outersuit from it, a blue and somewhat metallic outersuit that would protect Maikal from almost any weapon likely to be directed against him on the technologically primitive worlds he would be going to. There was a needler on its belt, with charges, for Maikal to carry. The older man helped his son into the gear. The outersuit stretched in the proper places to fit Maikal. Enver Wendal gave his son the control for the spaceboat hatch.
"That's all I can do." Enver Wendal held out his hand for the ancient symbolic hand shaking, and Maikal took the hand in his.
Maikal climbed into the spaceboat. He sat down on the wide, unupholstered seat. There was space enough for another person, but, of course, no one else would be going with him.
Panels in the concave inner surface of the spaceboat led to the electronics that would generate the gravity periods that would be carrying Maikal into space. He had been on excursions for training but never had he landed on another world.
He hoped he wouldn't have any reason to open the panels. Of course, the tapes in his library would tell him what to do. But he was no tech. He did have a command of the technology of destruction up through smokeless powder, because that was what he would usually be able to sell. But his training had made him simply a particular kind of librarian, with all of the proven technology of the pre-End keyed for him in his tape library. He had learned how to understand it and how to use it.
Maikal closed the hatch. He put on the control helmet and pulled the six-panel viewer down so that he could see it. He had also been trained to use the viewer so that he could interpret its 360° view into suitable action. He thought a signal to open the roof over him. He thought the spaceboat into operation when he could see in the viewer that the roof over his stall was open. He thought the spaceboat up and was on his way. He wondered idly what the hairy-hairys thought of spaceboats shooting out of the ghetto. Then he checked himself for chauvinism and wondered what the Lhonzians called the Tellurians when they weren't being charitable.
When he was out beyond the atmosphere and then beyond the outermost of Lhonz 4's four small satellites, he thought the main drive into operation while he stared into the viewer at the multitude of stars. He thought a check that cut down the visible systems to those within fifty ly. He would not go to any of the worlds his father had surveyed. There were eighteen, in all. All but a few were hostile to Tellurian technology.
He checked through the Space Survey Navigator and decided on a system at five-one-eight-seventh, six-one-sixth tenth, twelve fifth. It had one inhabited planet listed. There had been no Survey since the End, and so all the information in the navigator was two thousand years out of date. But it was better than random exploration.
He located the system and thought the spaceboat toward it. In less than a minute he was in overspace. There was nothing on the viewer now. He had automatically set the timer when the overspacing began so there was nothing to do but wait. "There is," he had learned at the academy, "no objective time in overspace. But there is subjective time." His instruments enjoyed their own version of subjective time, one that was steady. His was not. He waited.
In what could have been an hour he came out of over-space and could see in the viewer that he was at the edge of the system, where he could make a quick jump down to the planet listed in the Navigator. He rested for a little while and then thought the spaceboat down toward the planet in question.
It took only what seemed like a few minutes to reach to within an hour of the surface. He began the descent while checking for chemical composition and radio signals. The former was within limits for oxygen-breathing life. The latter were nonexistent.
He located hydrocarbon concentrations and homed on one, hoping it would turn out to be a population center, not merely a forest fire. Soon he was close enough to see, in the viewer, marked-off rectangular fields and buildings. He dropped the spaceboat into one of the fields. It adjusted to the surface so that it was level. He thought the hatch open and went outside. The local sun was coming up and there were no people, or whatever the life form turned out to be, to be seen.
Of course they would probably be analogous to people, whatever they were. That had been the experience of the long-defunct Space Survey. There were many altogether non-analogous forms, most with a psychology so different that, coupled with their environment, there was neither any reason nor much possibility for making contact. But humanoid types controlled the oxygen-breathing part of the galaxy.
Before very long there were people gathering around him. They were as hairless as the Lhonzians were not and they seemed generally careless as to what would have been considered modesty on a colder world, but theirs obviously was not cold. They were taller and generally more slender than Maikal, and they were talkative. With reference to their talkativeness, Maikal took his analyzer from the spaceboat and closed the hatch behind him with the subsonic control.
He put the analyzer on his head. It was built to fit as a helmet. It was a specialized computing device that had been made possible by the Space Survey's landings on hundreds and hundreds of worlds. Any kind of humanoid language was almost certain to fall into a pattern the analyzer was equipped to handle, given enough samples of speech with which to work.
Of course, some races had been found communicating through telepathy. A few used light, the way Maikal and his contemporaries had played with modulated light beam telephones at the age of nine or ten. Some spoke at audio frequencies above or below the ordinary human range. But all these special examples were wild deviations from the humanoid norm.
The locals chattered, so it seemed. Maikal had to check his chauvinist impulse once again and waited for the analyzer to provide the information he would need to "chatter."
After perhaps half an hour of corps of elderly men in robes that reminded Maikal of pictures of pre-ancient Tellurian civilizations approached. They swept through the others gathered around the spaceboat and surrounded Maikal. There were ten or twelve of them. They seemed stern but not, at least, openly unfriendly. They spoke, apparently in greeting, and Maikal in return greeted them, but of course they couldn't understand him any better than he could understand them so they were at an impasse.
The analyzer was beginning to provide information at last, however. Maikal devoutly hoped it would not provide him with the means to make a serious social blunder. He settled into the proper mental attitude for using the analyzer, intense relaxation, and began to speak words that made little sense to his own ears at first.
"Good morning, gentlemen. I am Maikal Wendal of Lhonz 4. I am a Tellurian adviser and I have information for sale about many useful things."
"Good morning again, Maikal Wendal. You seem to have many clever devices. I am called Bracius and I am the man-in-charge. Be so kind as to accompany us."
The strange words in one way made no sense but the meaning was clear. Maikal had little experience with the analyzer, only enough for this minimal use. It was still strange to him. He found himself thinking that going into space was exciting. He wondered, as he walked out of the field behind the robed elders, what traveling in space would do to his political ideas.
The village was built of well-made mud huts with green thatched roofs. A few of the buildings were two stories high but most were a single story and had uncovered openings for windows and doors. The climate was obviously warm, as if he had not realized that before. He wondered whether he would be comfortable at midday.
The group with which he was walking, the robed elders, passed through the narrow, dirt-packed streets of the village toward a larger than average structure in the center of it, a building that had a tower of narrow proportions. He supposed it was either a town hall or temple.
Maikal began to wonder why no one seemed to be greatly surprised at his arrival. Of course, he had no idea of what to expect. But he had been greeted first by what seemed to be idle curiosity and next by the dignity of the elders. No one had displayed any awe or fear. It was as though these people received visitors who came down from the sky every day. And yet their village seemed obviously pre-technological. Maikal wondered if he would feel more secure if they were running screaming from him or throwing spears at him. But there were no more moments for wondering, because they had arrived at the building with the tower. It had broad, double doors that one of his escorts hastened to open. The group went through the portals and Maikal found himself in a large hall, a hundred feet long and forty feet wide.
An arcade ran down either side of the long hall. The walls were covered with mosaics. At the far end of the hall there was a symbol hanging on the wall. It was like the symbol for "male" except that the arrow had no point and the circle was slashed with a diagonal line as though to cancel it.
Also at the far end of the hall, there were rows of seats with tall backs. The men accompanying him bowed toward the symbol. Maikal did likewise for the sake of diplomacy. They all went to the seats and seated themselves. One gestured for Maikal to sit down with them.
When everyone seemed properly settled, with robes pulled into place and comfort established to the extent it could be in the hard seats, the group turned to him. The man who had spoken in the field, Bracius, began to speak.
"You have some kind of information to sell to us, young man? Tell me what it is."
"I can show you how to build devices to move large burdens."
"No need. We have draft animals." A few of the elders seemed to be giggling, as incredibly as that clashed with their physical dignity.
"I can show you how to speak to people long distances from you without raising your voices."
"It seems pointless to speak to one a long distance away, who can neither be of immediate use to the speaker nor derive any apparent benefit from such a conversation."
"You are not interested in what I have," Maikal said. 
"We are not interested."
"You have no enemies?" Maikal asked. Even the elder to whom he was speaking seemed to be having a hard time suppressing his hilarity. But the man managed to speak, at last.
"Young man, we have neither the need nor the desire to buy your devices. We almost destroyed ourselves many long years ago and since then have lived off our land and our wits, poorly but well.
"Do pardon our laughter. This is the place of laughter. It is dedicated to the absurdity of our own conflict."
"Your own race, is it nearly extinct from this desire for playthings? Have you no sense of the absurdity of the universe?"
The word "existentialist" came into Maikal's mind. He tried to divorce himself from his own preoccupations for a moment and realized that the psychological shock of near destruction could produce a religious observance of the kind he was taking part in, a demonstration of moral superiority. Over him.
"No one seems to have been greatly surprised by my arrival," Maikal said, making a statement that was actually intended as a question.
"There is a proverb that is more than a proverb, that if the sun speaks one is not to be surprised, and the sun often does speak to me. Have you seen it open its mouth? It has very bad teeth, young man."
This, then, was not existentialism. It was something more like mental illness. But the people seemed harmless enough.
If their reaction to their version of the End was psychotic, Maikal thought, what was ours? He stood up and walked out of the hall with the laughter of the sages of the community behind him.
He walked again through the narrow streets. There were no more people than he had seen before. He turned a corner and came upon a girl sitting on a doorstep staring at the wall opposite her.
"Good morning," he said politely. For the sparsity of the hair on her head she was yet attractive. He wondered if the young were as odd as the old. "You should not keep me from my studies," she said. 
"What are you studying?"
She began to giggle. "The crack in the wall there is teaching me about religion. You had best be on your way before the crack tires of me and goes away."
"I see," he said, although he was by no means certain that he actually did see.
Maikal went back to the field. There was no one in sight. He would not be impressive to people who spoke to the sun and probably were disappointed when they saw he had only the normal number of eyes. He wondered whether he was the insane man on a sane world or the people of the planet were the insane people in a sane universe. Then he remembered that the universe, so far as its population was concerned, was not especially sane.
He began to laugh and decided he would be on his way before he was as struck by absurdity as his late hosts. He found the control and opened the hatch of the spaceboat.
One planet absolutely written off. He shut the hatch behind him and removed his analyzer.
When he was in position, Maikal thought the boat up out of the atmosphere of the planet, a pretty place but no particular argument for Ecologism. How much of a price was the right price to pay for peace? he wondered.
Once out of the danger area he rechecked the Survey Navigator. After a little study he located a planet that had once been reported as inhabited. He prepared to go to five-one-nine tenth, five-nine-ninth, four-six-oh fifth.

III

MAIKAL SLIPPED the boat into the atmosphere of this planet carefully, slowly, not certain whether he wanted to go on with the job, not because of any belief but simply for the sake of mental health. He remembered the best local argument against Ecologism, Lahdz, the matriarchy. Perhaps Lahdz was just a legend made up by an imaginative Space Survey man with time on his hands. But it seeped into Maikal's consciousness more and more as he considered the problems of his faith.
It was quite dark on the surface when Maikal arrived. He could see very little through the viewer, only a little smoke rising into a dark green sky. And there was a fortification on the highest nearby point, a knoll perhaps a Lhonz-kilometer way from the spaceboat.
Maikal rested and took food tablets. After some time had passed in boredom, for him, he could see the local sun rising. He waited for a while longer and then opened the hatch. The air outside was stinging but he seemed to have no trouble breathing it. This planet was one in hundreds, basically oxygen-bearing, enough so that a form of life he could at least recognize had emerged, according to the Navigator. He would soon see.
There was a village at the foot of the knoll, which looked as though it would have been about fifty feet high except for the fortification, which added another fifty feet to it. The knoll was the only nearby break in the flat surface; Maikal assumed he was standing on what had been the bed of a lake. He could see jagged mountains in the distance.
No one came from the village, although he could see forms moving between the stone huts. The air was cool, not so cool as that on Lhonz, by any means, but cool. Maikal remembered he did not know what season of the year he was enjoying at the moment.
After more time had passed there was stirring in the village and Maikal could see humanoid forms mounted on large reptiles, long-legged lizards that were coming in his direction. They reminded him of films of ancient Tellurian cavalry. He had watched the films of such alleged pageantry when he was younger but the real thing, however modified, was more impressive, particularly when he had no idea what the intent of the riders would be when they reached him.
There were five in all, normal humanoid forms with pinkish complexions, not used to the sun, or much of it. The latitude was right for that. Four were wearing uniform clothing, red suits that fit loosely and rimmed helmets. That would mean that the bow and arrow had been invented. A rimmed helmet was not the usual thing for close combat when there was no other factor to consider, and these people looked as though they had little interest in making anything simply for show.
All five were wearing swords, long and heavy ones in scabbards made of lizard skin. The fifth man, who seemed to be in charge, was dressed with more color. He alone was not carrying a lance, and he did not wear a helmet.
The group arrived, clicking up clods of dirt as they made a stop in front of Maikal. A couple of the lancers looked as though they had little use for Maikal and would just as well be done with him. The leader leaned over and shouted at him. Maikal put the analyzer on his head. There was no way of knowing what the man was saying, but Maikal answered him anyway.
"I came from another planet. I am unimaginably powerful, so don't try anything with me." He was glad that the man could not understand.
The leader gestured and two of the lancers trotted their beasts around in back of Maikal, who closed the hatch of the spaceboat and was ready when the lances jabbed his back, a signal to get moving. He moved, although the jabbing didn't hurt through his outersuit. He was being taken, he knew, to the fortification, perhaps an actual castle, to be questioned. That was exactly what he wanted.
A couple of lightly dressed types clustered around Maikal in a room under the bottom floor of the main room in the fortification. He had demoted it back to a fortification when he saw that it had thick walls and plenty of defenders but little living space. One building seemed to serve as headquarters, barracks, and, on his level, jail.
His tormentors seemed to be the learned men of the place. He talked to them so that they would talk to him and the analyzer could work on their language. But they spent too much time going into conference at the other end of the cell.
It was not too uncomfortable. There was a bed made of wood and straw. Maikal had never seen wood in any kind of construction before. The wood on Lhonz 4, of course, was useless for any such purpose. The straw was as much of a surprise. Maikal had an idea what it was. Grains didn't grow on Lhonz 4, except in the tropics.
He wondered what line he should take with the locals. Some merchants had to allow themselves to be accepted as gods before they could display any of their merchandise. They had to be either gods or sorcerers and the former have a better image, usually. But there was no way to know until he could understand them and be understood by them. He waited and tried to get conversation out of the two men who were trying to understand his own language, his exile version of Tellurian Basic.
"You really are a couple of nice idiots and I hope you will finally come around to making some sense," he said as though he were making an intelligent answer to the question that had been asked.
The language was beginning to come through. He again let himself relax and began to speak strange sounds, or at least the sounds seemed strange to him. The others comprehended instantly and with delight.
"What place is this?" he asked.
"This is the hall of his magnificence the Lord m'Ertzl."
"In what kingdom?"
"There is no king here," one of the two said. He seemed shocked at the idea.
"Is this a-a republic?" Maikal said, and suddenly realized he had used the wrong word and there was no such word in the vocabulary he had to use.
"No peasants rule this place in their rebellion," one of them said. "Do you think we are farmers? Is that it?"
They assumed he had some past knowledge of their planet, Maikal realized. He didn't know whether he should inform them otherwise. He decided to try to get information. An older trader would have no problem but could operate from instinct. Maikal realized he had no instincts as yet. He would have to play the game, as the saying went, while trying to guess the rules.
"What is it you care to know from me, gentlemen, so that I may be on my way?"
""Where did you come from?" was the first question, the question he couldn't be certain he should answer. He decided to evade it.
"I was inside the device standing before which I was found by your Lord m'Ertzl. At least I suppose he was the gentleman who discovered me."
"That is correct. You have not answered the question." A primitive man need not be an unsubtle one.
"What is it, exactly, you wish to know?"
The second man broke in. "Have you somehow come from the enemy to confuse us? We saw no draft animals to draw your strange cart. Are you the king's sorcerer?"
The king, then, must be the enemy. Who could be the friend?
"I am much above such local misunderstandings. I have not come from any other ruler on this world." He remained flexible, either to be himself or to become a godlet if the need arose. "However, it is my business to help those who wish to be helped. If you have some conflict with this king I shall be happy to come to your aid, however I may."
This brought on a long consultation at the other end of the room. He couldn't tell much of what was being said but obviously there was an argument as to what he actually was, an enemy sorcerer or some being they could put to their uses. Finally they gave up their session and left the cell. A guard, dressed in red as the lancers had been and wearing the same sort of helmet, closed the door behind the two men who had questioned Maikal.
It seemed, from the looks of the place, that he could get some business from the locals if he was fortunate enough to avoid an attempt to burn him at the stake. He didn't know how he felt about becoming part of the history of the place, which was not itself unattractive, but seemed to have some unattractive local customs. But war was what he was selling, after all, and he couldn't complain if his potential customers were already up to the fever pitch needed for one. Which would justify, on this planet, all sorts of things, he was certain. He had heard the stories told by the merchants who came to his father's house.
A short time later the man who had first come at the head of the lancers and taken him away from the space-boat came down the stairs followed at a respectful distance by the two—what?—soothsayers? The term might fit.
"Who are you?" the man asked.
"Maikal Wendal."
"What do you want here?"
"I can help you in many ways, your magnificence. I only ask for fair value in exchange."
"Where did you come from?"
Maikal hopefully pointed at the sky he assumed was still above the fortress. He didn't know how that would fit with local ideas.
"The sky above? You came down in that little ball of a thing?"
Maikal said yes, he had.
"Then you are a sorcerer."
"I am not a sorcerer, just a poor, young merchant with knowledge to sell. Have you heard of the powder that when set afire will move large stones, and can be made to fire arrowheads without arrows?"
"Sorcery!"
"Call it whatever you will, your magnificence." Maikal wondered whether he was throwing in the "magnificence" part often enough. "Still, I can do it for you, and at a small price."
"You'll take just my soul, I suppose."
"What do you value here?"
"Scarce metals. Good food. Weed to smoke in our pipes."
Tobacco! Maikal thought. The best thing he could possibly bring back would be tobacco.
"Then let us be specific, your magnificence. If you have an enemy too strong to defeat I will promise such defeat, and glory to your arms, in return for enough of the weed to fill my little conveyance. Is that a fair bargain? Nothing more asked or expected, except food and a bed while I remain with you."
"You are sent from the gods or else the evil powers, but I don't know which. A tempting offer, this is. My overlord, the prince, happens to have just such an enemy."
"Great honor then to you if you provide the means for this enemy's defeat."
Lord m'Ertzl nodded his head.
"But while I consider with my counselors the risks involved you will remain where you are. I don't trust you yet." The mighty lord strode off up the stairs with his chattering retainers running after him.

IV
NEVER HAVING SPENT time in a jail, Maikal wasn't positive what to expect, but he had some idea he would be bored. There wasn't any jail in the ghetto, not even a court, except for the commercial court, which had met only twice in his lifetime.
But of course there wasn't what he would have called a court in the domain of the Lord m'Ertzl, either, for that matter.
And he was right. He was bored. He rested and was given soup to drink for lunch, the same for supper, which seemed to come a couple of days later. The guards changed. But guards, he learned, tend to look more like guards than like people, at least to the guarded. Finally a few of the candles in the corridor in which his cell was located were put out. He supposed that was a signal to go to sleep and he decided to try it. The bed was not uncomfortable and the cell was not altogether too cold to sleep in, but a day of doing nothing at all provided him with no reason to be sleepy. So while his guard was resting against the wall opposite his cell he was awake on his bed, trying to think of ways to impress the Lord m' Ertzl.
There was noise from above. The guard started, looked around, checked his prisoners, and ran out of the jail, up the steps, from which he fell a second later with an arrow sticking out of him.
Two slender men, dark skinned and wearing hooded cloaks, came down the stairs, walking across the moaning guard as they did. But they were followed by a couple of m'Ertzl's soldiers, and there was a short fight with swords at the steps. The strangers were seemingly winning.
They were smaller than the soldiers and their swords were smaller, but no less effective. They used the swords as foils while the lord's soldiers tried nothing more sophisticated than hacking away with both hands holding their hilts.
Maikal decided quickly he would have to do something to demonstrate his good faith. His equipment was intact. No one had dared to actually touch him with anything more personal than a lance point, and his needler meant nothing to his hosts in any case. He took it from its holster and blasted a hole in the back of one of the invaders, who, as Maikal had been taught to expect, was dead long before he could say anything. The man's sword clattered to the floor and his companion, distracted by this unexpected turn of events, was practically cut in half from his shoulder to his waist by one swoop of a soldier's sword.
The soldier, the last remaining party to the conflict able to stand, looked curiously at Maikal and ran out the door.
The noise from above ceased a few minutes later. Maikal finally went to sleep. It seemed too early when, the next morning Lord m'Ertzl asked for an account of what had happened.
One of the men Maikal had called a soothsayer came to fetch him the next day, in company with a couple of soldiers. They walked over and around the leftover bodies no one had yet come to claim. Maikal's guard was still lying face up with the arrow sticking out of him.
They went through the ground floor room to the stairs, built on the outside of the building. Below, on the parade ground, really a little space in front of the primary building in the fortification, enough to barely hold a squad of men mounted as the lord's men were, there was a man who could have been cousin to the man Maikal had killed the night before. He was suspended by a rope tied to each main member and attached to a soldier's mount.
The soothsayer saw what Maikal was looking at and laughed.
"One of your fellow prisoners. He's just a nomad. That's what they were after last night, but they missed. That's what happens to such as meet the displeasure of his magnificence."
"I see," Maikal said. The man obviously was being slowly pulled apart.
"Just one of many games played with nomads and peasants. I trust you'll enjoy your visit with us."
"More so if I don't become an object of any such a game," Maikal said more candidly than he had intended. The soothsayer laughed.
They climbed to the fourth floor of the thick tower and were admitted by a guard into the somewhat comfortable quarters of the Lord m'Ertzl, who himself was sitting on a stool combing his hair when they arrived.
They sat on the floor, on rugs.
"You did a great deed, so they say, young, poor merchant. Yes, a great deed you did."
"I did nothing. Only a token of what you can do given such knowledge as I can provide."
He wished he had done nothing. He didn't like playing any kind of god and the death of the man, the nomad was beginning to make him sick as he considered it. He had been told he would not enjoy some things he would have to do, but he did not know how much he would not enjoy them.
"I don't know what you are," the lord said. "But it would be blasphemous to consider any further. You will help my overlord defeat his enemy. I will pay as you have asked. I will strike a bargain with you."
The soothsayer interrupted. "If this man is of the evil powers he will release spirits of evil throughout and we none of us will be safe from corruption and the living death."
"I have observed," the lord said, "that the living death attacks whomever it will without regard to good or evil I reject your superstition on that regard."
They seemed to be discussing a disease. Then there would be something constructive to sell, if there were more progressive souls to be found than the counselor at hand.
"The mark of the spirits is a subtle nature. See how subtle this one is," the soothsayer pointed out.
A handy definition of evil for anyone not too confident of his own mental powers, Maikal thought.
"My mind is made up," the Lord m'Ertzl said. "Say whatever you will and it will not convince me of anything."
"To your own detriment," the man answered.
The Lord m'Ertzl turned to Maikal.
"Will you give me more of the devices you used last night?"
"I am not allowed to sell them, and in any case I have only the one. I will show you how to make other devices such as no one has imagined here, but you will have to make them yourself, or have a blacksmith do it, or perhaps a troop of them, and chemists and wood-workers as well. But the weapons I will show you how to build can defeat whatever enemy you have decided you wish to defeat."
"Any amount of effort will be worthwhile, if you are correct. If you are not, of course, that is another matter. In such a case those who are not so enthused over your plans may be listened to with more respect than at the moment."
"So be it," Maikal said.
"We must go to the castle of my overlord, the prince, Pocoshl, you know. It is a few days from here. Can you ride as well as you flap your mouth?"
"I'll go there as I came here," Maikal said. He had not been asked to do anything, as yet, that he would need the library to do. But he felt more secure close to the boat.
"I think you will come with us directly. You will ride a lizard. If the nomads attack us you can demonstrate your marvelous gadget to me at first hand."
"Very well, whatever you wish." Maikal did not look forward to the trip, but he seemingly had little choice. "Tell me, are the nomads the enemy you are so eager to defeat?"
"That is an impertinent question," the soothsayer said.
"One might suppose you did come from the sun yesterday, from the ignorance you display," m'Ertzl said. "The nomads are merely aborigines. We children of the the sun are the contestants."
Maikal wondered what was meant by "children of the sun."
M'Ertzl seemingly was finished and he gestured for them to leave him, so they excused themselves.
"You'll be given more comfortable quarters for the time being," the soothsayer said. "When you are found out, you'll go back to the dungeon. Or perhaps I can contrive a more pleasant fate."
"When did your people come from the sun?" Maikal asked.
"The king lists would indicate one hundred or more generations have passed since we came from the sun. On a golden wave of light, as the scriptures would have it. You will find that we are a venerable people with much love for honor and much hatred for thieves such as yourself."
Maikal was escorted to the first floor of the building and shown a small room with a few tapestries, a narrow window covered with the stomach membrane of some animal in a futile effort to maintain some heat while letting in light, a small hearth, and a cot much like the one he had used the night before. The room was smaller than his cell, though.
He was curious about the legend of coming from the sun. No one could have come from the local sun, obviously. But someone could have come from space.
He remembered that the legends of some of the peoples of ancient Tellus indicated a similar origin for them or for their rulers and he wondered whether that meant the Tellurian legends could mean the same thing or whether these people were simply mistaken.
But if they had come from space, where, and who were they?

V
MAIKAL HAD never ridden any kind of animal. There was nothing on Lhonz 4 to ride, and so there had never been any way to prepare for the situation which was likely to occur.
But he learned quickly. The first thing he learned was that riding a long distance without having practice was a sure way to have a sore posterior. But he had decided that whatever his hosts did he would have to do, and he didn't complain, although once or twice he wondered whether they might be waiting for him to say something so that they could stop for rest.
The party was made up of the Lord m'Ertzl, the soothsayer, and a dozen soldiers and packers. There were half a dozen animals loaded with food and equipment. That seemed to indicate that the trip would take some time to make.
They rode for half of the day before they stopped the first time. There were no complaints from anyone. Even the soothsayer, who seemed stiffer than Maikal from the ride, kept quiet, although he grimaced every time he moved.
Maikal began to feel that he was involved in a contest of pride.
He realized that their silence might be the result of the kind of discipline required for a minority to impose its will on the majority of the population for one hundred generations.
They stopped at an especially pleasant point on the plain, the ancient lake bed dotted with occasional hillocks. The mountains, to which they were traveling, were far away. They stopped on a small, broad mound and the animals were allowed to graze under the guard of a packer while another man prepared a lunch over a fire made of brush naturally soaked in gum that seemed to burn well.
The plain itself was grassy, and brush and small trees were growing near the hillocks. The grass had a deep reddish-blue color. The place seemed to be colorful, but anything would be colorful compared to Lhonz 4, Maikal thought, where everything was pastel or brown, usually some version of the latter.
They ate sausage and a thick-stalked yellow vegetable. He had to assume that what didn't hurt the others wouldn't hurt him, although he was not at all certain he was right.
The meal was eaten in silence. The soothsayer occasionally glared at Maikal. The soldiers didn't speak at all, even to one another, and hadn't spoken at all during the entire journey. When everyone was through and the lord had smoked a pipe of tobacco they mounted and started off toward the far away mountains.
The day was fortunately shorter than Maikal was used to having his days on Lhonz 4. He was tired and sore even though he supposed he had not been riding more than eight hours, by Lhonzian standards, by the time the sun was going down and the party had stopped for the night.
Tents were erected. Cots were put up. A meal much like the one at noon was served by the packers. Maikal was about to go to sleep on his cot when the Lord m'Ertzl shook him wide awake.
The lord had a pipe in his mouth and smoke curled up around his head. He seemed genial. Maikal wondered what the man would look like hunting down a nomad, a sport that seemed less than humane.
"My friend the counselor seems to think you are neither a god nor a devil but some kind of imposter. What do you say?"
"I don't have to reply to him with words. Wait and see what I can do."
The lord pointed at the needler. "That's a remarkable device. Where did you get it?"
"I brought it with me from home," Maikal said.
"Where is your home? Where did you come from?"
"If I told you you wouldn't believe me."
"You didn't come from the sun. I don't believe in the gods the counselor serves. But I don't know where you did come from."
"If you don't think I could come from the sun what do you think about the legend of your race coming from the sun?"
"A legend. It isn't important to have an opinion, except of course in public. Piety is supposed to be a quality of those of us who rule."
"I came from a place called Lhonz 4. I came in a machine that can move through the air. I came to sell you what I know."
"I would care to know more."
"Nothing more is important, your magnificence," Maikal replied.
"I only hope that the priests in the city of the Prince are not more insistent than am I. They are jealous of any who would seem to defy their explanations."
The Lord m'Ertzl, obviously not satisfied, left the tent. Maikal went to sleep after a little while spent wondering what kind of reception the religionists would give him.
Maikal was hot. He could see flames. He realized he was not completely awake. He opened his eyes and the flame was actually there. His tent was on fire over his head. He rolled off the cot just in time to avoid the piece of tent roof that dropped down. He scrambled out the door and could see that a couple of other tents were in flames.
Against the flames he could see men fighting, men with nomad cloaks and hoods, carrying spears, attacking the lord's soldiers.
Maikal's needler was in his hand in a second. He aimed at the nearest of the nomads and fired. In the dark the charge made a visible spark. The nomad collapsed. But the spark drew two others who charged at Maikal with a spear in the hands of each of them. He managed to kill one of the nomads. The other rushed at him before he could fire again and he barely avoided the point of the spear. He tripped the man, who fell to the ground and turned over in time to meet a charge from the needler.
Maikal heard the voice of the Lord m'Ertzl and went toward it, not running but carefully making his way through the spaces between tents hoping to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
He came around the corner of a tent and tripped. When he tried to get up he could see that he had tripped over a body, the body of the soothsayer with blood running from the man's neck.
He crawled a few yards further. The Lord m'Ertzl and two soldiers with swords were fighting off more of the nomads.
One cloaked man at the edge of the area illuminated by the burning tents was drawing a bow. Maikal aimed the needler but the arrow was discharged first. A soldier next to the Lord m'Ertzl fell with an arrow in his eye. Maikal fired and the bowman crumpled and didn't move again.
The nomads attacking the lord and his last retainer were surprised by the sparks and turned. Two of them were brought down by swords. The others, three of them, ran, but not before Maikal fired once more and killed one of them.
Maikal ran to where the two men were standing.
"You may wonder who hunts who," m'Ertzl said, still capable of sardonic comment despite his near escape.
"Why did they do this?"
"They live by what they can steal."
Another soldier came to where they were standing.
"All the animals have been driven away, lord," he said.
"Then we are totally stranded. That is a great shame."
"What do we do now?" Maikal asked.
"Salvage what we can and move along. They may have been sufficiently intimidated by your plaything to stay away from us. A pity we don't all have some such a weapon. Why don't you show me how it is used?"
"That is not permitted, your magnificence," Maikal said, careful to include the title.
"We must all live by some book, I suppose."
The four men wandered through their camp picking up the few things the nomads had left behind for them. When m'Ertzl saw the body of the soothsayer he nodded his head.
"That was going to happen to him someday. He was an odious person."
Maikal could not help but agree with that estimate.
There was little to salvage. Some food was left, and a few men who were badly wounded were found. The lord killed them himself as they were found and explained it was his obligation to do so.
Finally they had only themselves, four men, and too little food to sustain them for more than a few days. None of the tents or other heavy equipment could be taken along without the animals to carry them.
Instead of staying at their campsite, the men began to walk, again going toward the mountains.
"This would have been another two day journey," m'Ertzl said. "Now it will be four or five days. With luck we will meet a patrol, but I have never depended upon luck."
The soldiers were as silent as before. They all walked.
Maikal attempted to spend as much time as he could awake. He had little confidence in the soldiers after what he had seen of the way the nomads handled their bows.
He wasn't afraid of being hurt as long as he was wearing his oversuit, although he could be struck in the face easily enough if he was caught without a chance to pull up the hood.
But he didn't want to be captured by them. He didn't want to spend all the extra time that would be needed to escape and reestablish relations with the people in charge.
The colorful grass seemed higher after walking through it constantly for ten or twelve hours. They began every day before dawn and quit after the sun had gone down. There was little to eat. The rations had been split into enough parts to keep them going for five days. There wasn't enough to stretch but they had made it stretch in any case.
Maikal had suggested hunting but m'Ertzl explained that there was nothing to hunt on the plain.
So they walked with little sleep and less to eat. And on the third day of their journey they met a patrol they would rather not have met.

VI
IT WAS STILL morning when they first saw the riders. They were relatively fresh, but not actually in condition for any encounter with the patrol. Maikal had sore feet to go with his sore buttocks, gained from riding the first day. They were all hungry and one of the soldiers had seemed to be ready to collapse since that morning.
Maikal saw the men first. There were twelve or fifteen of them, one man in the same multicolored clothing the Lord m'Ertzl wore. The others were lancers wearing yellow uniforms.
"Look, there," he said to m'Ertzl. The lord was stunned.
"Get down," he rasped.
They fell to the ground. The tall grass hid them while they watched the riders.
"Who are they?" Maikal asked.
"The king's men," m'Ertzl answered. "If they catch us we can expect to die in the most unpleasant way they can contrive offhand."
The lancers were coming toward them but were still hundreds of meters away.
"They will see us if we stay here," Maikal said.
"They will no doubt see us if we attempt to run."
"We must fight."
"We cannot."
"We have no choice," Maikal whispered.
They waited while the lancers came toward them. The others took their swords from their scabbards. Maikal waited until he was certain he did not have to wait any longer.
He raised the needler and fired a charge at the man not in a uniform. The man's shoulders jerked back. Maikal could not see his face clearly because the troopers were still fifty meters away, but he saw the man fall from the back of the lizard he was riding. The blue, scaly beast reared up and the man toppled lifelessly off of it.
The lancers were shocked and confused. They could not see Maikal Wendal or the others with him, who were still hidden in the tall grass. They trotted their animals aimlessly and two of them dismounted to help their leader.
Maikal chose his next shot and killed another of the men, and again the yellow-uniformed lancers paced their lizards about and looked in every direction but they had no way to imagine what was happening. Maikal fired again, and once more, never missing his shot. The needler did not have to be aimed at a vital place to accomplish its effect. The shock to the nervous system was enough to kill.
When he next fired he pulled the shot off and instead of a man his charge struck one of the animals. The beast pitched crazily and went down on its belly. It legs simply collapsed. It rolled over and its rider was trapped underneath. The screams of the man finally completed the unnerving of those with him and they left as quickly as they could at a gallop, leaving the man behind. Maikal knew the pain must be intense indeed to make the man give up such a horrible noise, if the king's men were anything like m'Ertzl's silent troopers.
The others rose from where they were hiding and without returning their swords to their scabbards they walked toward the place where the trapped man lay. Maikal followed them.
"Perhaps," mused m'Ertzl, "we can extract some information from this exhibitionist." But they didn't move any more quickly because of that. It was a slight possibility .
The four of them pushed the dead animal off its rider's legs. The yellow-clad lancer was trying to draw his sword all that time but was unable to complete the motions. When the lizard was off of him he tried to stand and found he could not even do that.
They let the injured man writhe as they captured the other animals which had lost riders.
"At least now we can ride rather than walk. I would suppose we are a hard day's ride from the prince's castle."
"If it still stands," Maikal said.
"You are curious about these men, I see. So am I. I see they were led by a high officer, a man I do not know but one at least of my own rank. Let us see what our captive can tell us about this little group."
They went to where the man was trying to lift himself high enough to crawl. M'Ertzl put his sword under the man's chin.
"You know I will kill you if you do not tell me what I require of you."
The man behaved exactly as though m'Ertzl did not exist, so the lord slapped his face with the flat of the blade. A welt was raised across one cheek. The man continued to struggle. M'Ertzl kicked him over on his back. He raised his sword.
"My king's armies will bring you all down before you see a fortnight," the man promised.
"Armies, your king has. I doubt that. I doubt he could field one company."
"You will see soon enough when you travel onward. You will die as I have. You will never live to see a better day than this one. "
"Platitudes," m'Ertzl said, and rammed the blade through the man's throat. Blood spurted out.
Maikal began to feel sick. The rush of adrenalin that had let him kill the four lancers had passed. He felt only the sickness of having killed, killed many times without blinking at what he was doing. And even though the victims were aliens, he was sick at what he was doing.
"Come now," m'Ertzl said to him. "We have a long while to travel."
They mounted and they left the dead man and those Maikal had killed where they lay.

VII
DESPITE THE PROMISES of the yellow-uniformed trooper they met no further opposition that day and before nightfall they were met by a patrol from the prince's stronghold. M'Ertzl and the patrol leader identified themselves to one another and they grouped together all their men for a dash to the castle.
It had been a long day and Maikal looked forward to sleep at last and food. He was more hungry than he could remember ever having been before. He was lost in in a reverie over the idea of eating something, of eating anything, when they came down the plains to the beginning of the hills, and an hour later to higher cliffs, upon one of which was a gray shadow that had parapets and towers and pointed defensive works around it. It was several times larger than m'Ertzl's little collection of stones which seemed quite crude by comparison. They went through a gate for which there were iron-bound wooden doors three feet thick. They proceeded into a courtyard large enough to contain a maneuvering mounted platoon. There were men all around taking care of horses and polishing weapons. A groom took all the animals and m'Ertzl and Maikal Wendal went into the largest building within the fortress, four stories high with iron bars on the small windows and guards in the halls and at the narrow door. This was not a catch-all, multipurpose housing for everything. It was clearly the royal palace of the Prince Pocoshl.
They were taken up two flights of stairs and into a long hall lined with translucent stone, a gallery in which a table was set up and half a dozen men were having their suppers. Mounted on a high-backed chair was a man younger than the rest, with drooping eyes and a slightly protruding belly. He seemed to be the center of the group. He motioned to m'Ertzl and his charge to have seats at the table, while at the same time he munched a thick biscuit and held a leg, that could have come from a small mammalian, in his hand.
"Now why have you come all this distance, oh noble m'Ertzl?" the young man asked.
"I have brought a kind of wizard with me, highness. His name is Maikal Wendal and he has come from I know not where and he claims all kinds of knowledge of weaponry. I have no idea whether he can do all he has said, but he has himself a unique device with which he killed four of the king's men just this morning while I watched. We should have been dead twice without him."
"Tell me first about your encounter with the king's men, m'Ertzl," the prince said through a chunk of meat from the leg that was in his mouth.
"Perhaps twenty lancers, highness, and led by a lord of manor, no doubt. They were frightened away by the remarkable weapon. One survivor claimed he was part of an army. I have seen no more of the king's men since then, however."
"Do not doubt such a thing, m'Ertzl. The king would dearly love to strike at me. He still holds to that ridiculous promise my father made that I should present him with part of the plain for a bride price. It was not my beloved father's intention that the king should steal my land without making me his heir, but that is clearly what the king intends to do. In any case I want nothing to do with his daughters. Any of them are worth a man's life if he gets close enough to let them strike at him."
Another man at the table spoke up. "Highness, it is said the king has made them men because he had no sons."
"The king is a precious fool who would leave his kingdom to women. But never mind. I have no taste for discussing the three vile daughters of Gaft's vilest king. Tell me about the weapon, young man." The prince pointed his finger at Maikal.
"I cannot make others like it, highness. That is not permitted. I can show you how to make other weapons nearly as astonishing."
"One wonders whether we have time for manufacturing. I wonder over your claims, with all due respects to m'Ertzl. Tell me what you can do."
"Your smiths can make an iron tube sealed at one end. Into it is put a powder. When the powder burns essences are given off and those essences gather behind some obstacle placed in the tube and push that obstacle out with such speed that it can break down a stone wall."
"Other devices can be made that are slightly less powerful. They can be in whatever size you desire, large enough for castle walls or small enough to kill a man at a hundred paces."
"And I am told you have a certain curse in this land that is called living death."
"Quite so," the prince said.
"I may be able to help you get rid of it."
"I am sick of incantations," the prince said. "I believe the living death is simply some variation of the spring heat that comes on most men and makes their noses and eyes run. It is the big snake compared to the spring heat's little snake."
The prince seemed to be an enlightened man, for his environment.
"I do not offer incantations. Let us suppose you are correct. But the snakes you speak of are of different species. Then suppose we could find a small snake of the same species that causes the living death. If one were to allow this small snake to bite him he would suffer some discomfort, but the snake could never bite him again because its venom could take effect only once before a body protected itself with an anti-venom."
"That seems quite hypothetical."
"It is true with many kinds of illness. I have observed it myself."
"Better keep away from the priests, young man," the prince said. "They are not favorable to such ideas as these."
"I will endeavor to avoid their censure."
"What is this marvelous weapon?"
Maikal took the needler carefully from its holster, being especially careful to keep from pointing it at anyone. Then he realized that no one except m'Ertzl had any idea which end was the deadly one in any case. He set it on the table.
"That is the weapon. You must be careful with it. Only a few people can use it without danger. Your priests might say it has a spell that destroys it unless it is used by one allowed by the spell-maker to hold it. That, of course, is not the strict truth of the matter."
"Of course not. I prefer not to touch it in that case."
All needlers had to be tuned to a few people. More than one for the sake of emergencies, but never to anyone outside the Association. There is no sense in having a weapon that can be used against its owner if that can be prevented.
"But," the prince said, "I require a demonstration. Let us see what we can do for a subject. Pull that cord, will you, Gernitz," he said to a man next to the wall. The man took a coarse cord in his hand and pulled on it. Somewhere a bell rang. Seconds after that a waiter appeared, or he seemed to be a waiter, because he bowed politely and asked what was required. But Maikal decided the man would be a major-domo, because he was obviously the same physical type as the others. The servants, Maikal supposed, would be the serfs, of whom he had seen none but who, he had been told, were like the nomads.
"Send out some serving girl, will you, or whatever expendable you have about the kitchen."
"Very well, highness," the man said, and he was gone as quickly as he had come.
"Now I shall see for myself the wonderful things the engine of yours can accomplish. Take it in your hand, young man."
Maikal had no idea what would be coming next.+ He didn't want to know because he was afraid he did and he kept the knowledge blocked out in a part of his mind he used for storing the horrors he was collecting in space. As usual he had no choice but to comply. Or risk someone else trying to use the needler, a fatal procedure for both the other man and for him, in all likelihood. Or perhaps he would be marked as a fraud and get the treatment promised by the long-dead soothsayer. Long enough dead for Maikal to have forgotten the threat. He remembered it now vividly and wished he were somewhere else, perhaps freezing in the cold in hairytown.
A slightly-covered girl came into the room. Her face was too sharp for her to be pretty and she was smaller, lighter. Her skin seemed to have a texture different from that of the men around Maikal. She looked as though she would be awkward but she was not.
"That is very little for a target, highness," Maikal said. He was tired of killing, even though the girl was thoroughly alien in an indefinable way.
Then he realized how non-alien his companions seemed. They would not have been very out of place back in the ghetto, given language and clothing. But their thoughts were nothing like his, it seemed.
"She will do well enough," the prince said. "You know these serfs are good for little else anyway."
Maikal Wendal quickly raised the needler and, without taking the time for regret that would only have been confusing, he pulled the trigger. The girl was dead in a heap on the floor with her skirts still falling when he realized what he had done.
The prince and two otters went to see what had happened. They examined the blackened spot on the girl's rib cage where the charge had hit.
"Remarkable," the prince said. He and the others came back to the table, their inspection complete. The prince took another joint from the plate in front of him and began to gnaw on it.
He glanced at Maikal as he did so and noticed that Maikal was pale.
"Are you sick, young man?"
"Highness, in my country it is not considered proper to eat in the presence of the dead. My people are great ones for propriety."
"Yes, well you are not in your country now and we have a more sensible view of things."
Whatever you wish to inflict, Maikal thought; people like you always consider it sensible.
"Have you forgotten that our lamented ancestors banqueted on such as that?" the prince said, pointing to the form on the floor. "Of course, it was wasteful and nothing more than occasional. They really are nothing like us at all, you know."
Of course they aren't, Maikal thought. He no longer felt hungry. He watched the others eating but the pain he felt had nothing to do with wanting food. He more and more despised what he was doing as time went by, it seemed.
When everyone had finished, a chamberlain was called to show Maikal and m'Ertzl where they were to sleep. The prince told Maikal to come in the morning and tell what would be needed to make the weapons he proposed. Maikal went off down a hallway behind the chamberlain and found himself put in a cold, stone room, a typical one it seemed, but with glass in the window instead of membrane. He had seemingly reached the peak of local civilization. He went to sleep quickly and he blocked his dreams.

VIII
A SILENT VALET woke Maikal the next morning. The valet was one of the serfs. He was the first of that people Maikal had seen at close quarters when not engaged in killing them. The man was more slightly built, much more, and Maikal supposed the man's arms could be broken over one of his lord's knees with less effort than it would take to bend a piece of aluminum sheet.
Maikal dressed and walked through the hallway in the direction he had come the night before. There was no one to be seen. He entered the hall where the dinner had been held. The dishes and the body, all that had been left of the dinner the evening before, had been cleared away, no doubt by dutiful servants, perhaps brothers or sisters of the serving girl. Maikal was curious about their reactions. Would they accept it as easily as the lords had accepted it, thinking such treatment was normal? Of course they might.
M'Ertzl came behind him into the hall. They stood looking at one another.
"No one seems to be here," Maikal said.
"I have never been to this place and seen it as quiet as it is now. We'll go out into the courtyard."
They walked together through more halls and out the small main door into the courtyard. Men were gathered about it in groups, armed and waiting, but their mounts were not with them. M'Ertzl and Maikal walked through the courtyard and went into the gate tower, up its steps past rooms of men waiting as silently as the others, to the firing step at the top, where they could look out on the field around the castle, a bare space for two hundred meters. There were archers on the firing step with full quivers and there was one of the prince's companions from the night before observing what was happening below.
Squadrons of yellow-clad lancers wheeled on the plain just beyond bow range, showing off their maneuvers.
This was seemingly the army of the king, the army promised by the dying lancer the day before.
Maikal spoke to the observer. "What has happened?" he asked.
"It seems old King Clshl has us in his grip. He has twice as many men as we can muster. We cannot call upon our reserves in time to save ourselves. The thought of what may happen to us is not appealing to me."
"How long can we stand up under siege?" Maikal asked.
"If the king chooses siege we can stand for months. I doubt that is his mind on the matter. He can take us by storm if he chooses, given his superiority in numbers. Every other man will die but he can take the castle before the sun has gone down. If I were him I would choose storm over siege."
"Where is the prince?" Maikal asked.
"He and his generals plan. They are in his palace somewhere, perhaps the tower. If I were the prince I would plan for escape. This position is as good as lost."
Maikal and m'Ertzl walked back down to the courtyard and into the palace. There seemed to be little point in finding the prince. There seemed to be little point in doing anything at all.
"Do you have anything to save us?" m'Ertzl asked.
"I have nothing. I could, perhaps, if I had my device, that which you would not allow me to bring. There are other weapons in it. But I might be violating the rules of my Association if I used them."
"Legalisms. Our lives are the stake here. And yours no less than the others. King Clshl knows nothing of you. His men will kill you as quickly as the rest of us."
"I will fight with what I have. What else can I do?"
They sat at the table where they had eaten supper the evening before and they waited. There was nothing to wait for except attack and capture, and there seemed to be no alternative. But Maikal knew that what m'Ertzl said was not true: he would be noticed. And he was not likely to be hurt, let alone killed.
M'Ertzl, who had seemed so confident and strong a short time ago, was almost visibly drawing into himself, apparently drawing back into the shell of discipline that kept his soldiers so silent and so machine-like. After they had silently waited for some time the lord stood up and took his sword from its scabbard.
"It is nothing against so many," he said, musingly. "Yet I have my duty."
Maikal would have been sorry for the man except for the inevitable facts of their situation. If what had been said was true m'Ertzl had very little future.
"There has to be some way out of this place," Maikal said.
"I am sworn to defend the prince. I have no choice except to do so." He could have been made of wood for all his responsiveness to Maikal's suggestion. He was prepared to die, in fact, almost eager in a way, as though he were fulfilling his expected fate, as casually as a Lhonzian expected to shed part of his hair in the spring.
They went back into the courtyard. Men were still gathered there, waiting, waiting for the attack. There were more men inside the castle then needed to defend it. Maikal quickly could see that they would merely be in one another's way when the attack came. But there were far too few to take the field against the army outside. 
"This place cannot be defended," Maikal said. "It is just as the man on the wall said."
"What would you do?"
"If we were to attack there would be some chance for escape. With luck many of these men might get away to form a new army in the king's rear."
"We must stand and fight. We have no choice."
Again that unresponsiveness from m'Ertzl. There was no chance for escape.
They went back up onto the wall and looked down. The king's cavalry was no longer putting on a show. The lizard-riders were gathered into ranks just beyond the field in front of the castle, and the infantry was in front of them. Maikal guessed that the attack was near.
The infantry was armed with spears and bows and he could see ladders being carried by the king's soldiers, obviously for scaling.
There was movement behind them. Maikal turned to see the prince himself and two of his high-ups taking their places nearby on the wall. The prince turned to him.
"Any solution for this in your bag of tricks?" the prince asked.
"There is hardly time."
"Then we may expect to lose."
No one seemed shocked at the defeatism that was being expressed. The soldiers stayed at their posts waiting to have something to shoot their arrows at. The prince watched the movement below, as men were shifted into position in the king's line.
"What do you make of all that," the prince asked his men, pointing at the troops gathered below.
"They are prepared to attack."
"Why don't you surrender?" Maikal asked, but he was instantly sorry he had. His quickly-acquired knowledge of the local language did not always serve him well enough to let him choose the word with the proper connotation, and in any case the word "surrender" had roughly the same meaning as "treason" to these people. Maikal apologized and attributed his mistake to his language problem, properly.
Down below, the line began to move forward at that same moment. It came slowly until the first of the archers on the wall began to find marks among the soldiers attacking them. The cavalry held back. The infantrymen came faster, trotting and then running toward the wall. Maikal easily made out yellow-uniformed foot soldiers falling with arrows in them, many of them falling often, but always there were more. He estimated the number of the troops attacking at three to five thousand. Not a a spectacle, according to what he had been told of other wars, but he was not used to seeing one man die, let alone hundreds.
The soldiers covered the two hundred meters very rapidly, it seemed, but they had left at least a tenth of their number lying on the thick-bladed grass in the field. There were screams.
Maikal realized there could not be a thousand men inside the castle. Half that number could be accommodated along the wall. The others milled in the courtyard. There was very little call for replacements. Few of the prince's men had yet been killed, because none of the attackers
seemed to be bothering to stop long enough to use a bow.
Maikal took his needler from its holster again. He had never taken it from his holster all the time he had been on the planet without killing someone with it. He wondered whether he was bound to do what he was doing, or whether he was responding to the abnormal human impulse (in his Ecologistic opinion) to engage in battle. He wasted no more time considering it, except to decide to make a display that would suitably impress his prospective captors.
It was too easy to fire into the milling crowd of yellow-clad infantrymen below. He didn't have to aim, simply point the weapon in the proper general direction and shift slightly after every charge. He had rapidly killed all the men at the base of the ladder they had been trying to put up near the spot he was occupying on the wall.
The prince and m'Ertzl, and all the prince's men, held back, just as the cavalry of the king was holding back beyond bow-range. Maikal had an intuition of the reason for that. He was quickly confirmed in his belief.
"Come," the prince said. "Back to the stronghold. There is no use in a defense here."
The noblemen, and Maikal with them, left the top of the wall and made their way through the troops in the courtyard back into the prince's palace. They left the outer door open and went into the main room on the ground floor. They sat around the table waiting and not speaking. Through the small doorway Maikal could see the battle taking place outside. The king's troops were inside after having fought their way up to the top of the wall.
The gates were being opened. Maikal could hear the sound of the huge wooden objects swinging back on their hinges. The sound from the courtyard was ominous. The men there knew what was about to happen to them. There seemed to be no way out of conflict in the kind of war these people fought aside from winning or being killed.
Then the cavalry came. The sounds of the lizards running through the gates, trampling infantrymen without reference to their uniforms, could be heard. There was more screaming. It was strange to be seated at a table as though after a summer holiday afternoon supper, sun shining through the door and the high, small windows, listening and watching the carnage just beyond the door while it had no relationship, at the moment, to the men at the table. Maikal had never contemplated dying in the past in just the way he now was.
The cavalry, and the noblemen, reminded him of an ancient Tellurian quote. "The purpose of the cavalry," it went as he remembered it, "is to give tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl." The death the men sitting at the table with him were about to die, and the death he was risking, had as little relationship with reality as that statement. It would be real, but it would not mean anything.
A few men in yellow uniforms came through the small door, then into the main room itself. The nobles didn't stir themselves. Then men dressed in the multicolored costume that seemed to mark the upper classes regardless of allegiance came through the door with swords drawn and dripping red blood.
The men around the table stood, as though making an effort to properly receive guests. They drew their own swords. Maikal again removed his needler from its holster. He aimed and fired a charge and one of the attackers crumpled. The others were surprised and looked at their colleagues. They spent enough time looking at the man for Maikal to kill two others. Then they rushed the prince's nobles.
The fight was brief. Maikal easily killed another attacker and then pulled his hood over his face to protect himself. He took a sword blow at his neck and the sword rebounded out of the half-millimeter field and flew out of the hand of the man who had tried to use it.
M'Ertzl was surprised at that, so surprised that he stared for long enough to be killed with one thrust through his neck by one of the attackers.
Maikal withdrew, in effect, not firing again but offering defense to anyone who approached him. No one chose to make the attempt again, and so the conflict was finished without his further participation.
The king's nobles seemed to be uncertain as to what they should do with Maikal, once they had done what they had intended to do with the others, who were lying around the table on the floor and across chairs missing parts and bleeding hideously. Finally one of the men spoke to Maikal.
"Who are you?" That question was simple enough.
"I am the merchant Maikal Wendal of Lhonz 4. I have come to this place to sell war-making devices. I would as soon sell them to your king as to any other man."
"I have never before heard of this Lhonz. Where is it?"
"I greatly regret you do not know where my home is but that is basically your concern and not mine." Again, Maikal did not relish the idea of having, in strained circumstances, to explain the concept of the universe, to the small extent he knew it, to a group of people who did not seem to be entirely certain that their world was not flat, or that it was not the center of everything, if they were more sophisticated than they seemed to be.
"I say kill him along with the rest," one of the nobles said.
Another man, more active of disposition, hacking at Maikal with his sword with the same results that the last man to try it had obtained, except this one was given to keeping a tighter grip on his sword and went down with it.
"Sorcery!" someone cried out.
"Take me to your king," Maikal Wendal said.
A voice from the doorway answered him, a penetrating alto voice.
"Let him alone. Even sorcerers have their uses."
The person attached to the voice came into the room, a stately presence, to whom the king's nobles bowed slightly from their waists.
She was no older than he himself, Maikal decided, after looking at her. She was the first woman he had seen during his entire time on the planet, and he doubted she could be typical. Her hair was cut almost as short as that of the men and she was dressed in the same kind of clothing they were wearing.
"My father sent me in his place," she said to Maikal. "You will return with us to him."
This, then, was one of the daughters Clshl was training to take the place of the sons he did not have. The training would never be altogether successful, Maikal thought. Despite the hair and the clothing, and the stained sword in her hand, the princess was coldly and malevolently very feminine.

IX
THERE WERE very few other prisoners. It was overly obvious that he was a prisoner. While none of the captors dared get close enough to him to be affected by what they assumed was his sorcery one had ventured close enough to skillfully drop a noose around his neck and he was being towed behind a cavalry just as were the few others, practically all wounded, who had also been captured.
He was sickened by his fellow captives, who reminded him of all the dead and dying who had been left behind in the courtyard, so that there was no way to walk through it without taking each step on the body of a dead man. Flies buzzed around the running wounds of the men. He had no way to help them and he had some understanding of why they were being taken back to the king's castle. Given the ideas the locals seemed to have about honor and the treatment accorded to one's fellow man the idea behind taking them back was obvious and could only be amplified by the fact of what would happen to them when they arrived.
Fewer yet were likely to arrive. The cavalrymen seemed to resent being put to the job of hauling the prisoners along and every so often one accidently strangled on the rope around his neck, and there were others who died of their wounds and were dragged along just the same for a few kilometers.
The walking went on for hours, before the sun was up and after it had gone down, and Maikal estimated after the first two days of it that they had gone at least sixty kilometers. From what he knew of the political structure of the area the king's castle could be anywhere, could be half a world away, although he doubted that.
It only went one more day, and then the walking was through, because the next day the men were standing in front of the gates of what was more than a city, but a mass of rabbit-warren huts piled one on top of another inside a fortress and surrounding another one. They went through the gate, past the first fortifications, stone walls slanted back at an angle, twenty feet thick, over a canal on a bridge, and through another portal into the city itself.
He had no idea what to expect. He had thought the populace would turn out to curse at the prisoners and cheer the victorious army, but the populace turned out to be made up of more of the converted nomads, more peasants, slight, dark people who looked from their windows but stayed a good distance away from the troopers, neither cheering nor cursing anyone.
The trip through the narrow streeted town was without any kind of incident, and the party soon reached the castle at the center of the town, a structure much larger than the prince's meager (it seemed now) fortress which had been so quickly breached by the king's men. Maikal was yanked by his rope through a set of doorways and into a courtyard twice the size of the late prince's courtyard.
The prisoners were prodded into the windowless structure against the wall, and Maikal with the others, although he wondered what was going to be the outcome of what was happening for him. He was more certain about what would happen to the others, who seemed more silent, if possible, than the soldiers of the places he had been in usually seemed.
No one bothered to feed them, speak to them, or recognized their existence. They were shut in the dark in the building and left to wait.
There was no way of knowing when the next day had arrived, except that someone came to get them, a troop of soldiers who pulled the men out of their prison one at a time and marched them away through the courtyard and past a gate into what seemed to be a small arena.
Maikal didn't know what time it was, only that he was hungry and thirsty and also worried about what was planned. He assumed his companions knew that, but he of course did not.
The arena was circular, made of stone, and at one end there were canopies and couches for, probably, the local royalty. Why had he been brought to this place instead of being taken to the king? he wondered. Probably for someone's amusement
More specifically, probably for the amusement of the cold princess, he thought.
The nobles were arriving, sitting near the high wall that separated them from their prisoners below. And in good time, while the prisoners waited, royalty arrived as well. The king himself looked very much like the late m'Ertzl. He was dark, short, heavy, and generally jolly and cruel appearing. His three daughters were there as well, but they did not all look like the one Maikal already had met. One seemed much younger, with long hair and dressed in skirts more becoming than the coarse clothing her sister had been wearing. But her sister, apparently the oldest of the three, was this day dressed more in accord with what seemed to be the style of the moment, skirts and a light, contour-revealing top. The other sister seemed to be a female copy of her father, with the same cheerful monstrousness about her that struck Maikal when he looked at the king.
There were other women, many of them. And there were their consorts, the same, grim-looking nobles who had captured Maikal. They all waited, and he wondered what they were waiting for.
A man came from a small door beneath the section reserved for the royal family. He was dressed in the usual fashion, in the frilly (by Maikal's standards) multi-colored clothing the nobles affected. In his hand was a sword.
"Being as you have denied death its proper time," he announced to the prisoners, "we have prepared a second opportunity for you, so that you may die as befits a man."
The man came to where the little group of prisoners was standing. Maikal pondered the sanctimonious quality of the speech. He noticed that among the crowd there were a few of the more plainly-dressed men of the type who had been soothsayers to the late m'ErtzL They looked on very soberly, as though witnessing a rite, while the other spectators seemed in a more carnival mood.
The master-of-ceremonies, so he seemed to be, cut loose one of the prisoners, one who had been wounded in the leg, and handed the sword to the dazed man. Out of the door through which the first man had come came a second, this man also carrying a sword but with an obviously different intent. This one swaggered across the small arena to where his erstwhile opponent was standing and casually hacked the man to pieces while the crowd laughed and shouted to the swordsman.
The master-of-ceremonies repeated the procedure with another of the prisoners. There was a new antagonist. The result was basically the same, although the prisoner tried to fight. Now there were two men dead in the arena.
"It's better than dying like a peasant," one of the remaining prisoners muttered. To Maikal it seemed that dying was dying regardless of any surrounding circumstances.
The master-of-ceremonies came forward again, and this time he cut Maikal loose. When he tried to hand a sword to Maikal, Maikal refused it. He still had the needler, which had been left to him when no one had had the temerity to take it away from him.
The new opponent was a young man, not as young as Maikal, but still a young man. He seemed to swagger more than the others and he bowed to the cold-eyed princess before he approached Maikal. Then he noticed that Maikal had no sword.
He shouted to the master-of-ceremonies: "What am I supposed to do? Fight a man who won't fight back?"
The master-of-ceremonies came to Maikal and insisted that he take the sword.
The crowd was no longer laughing and shouting. Some of the men who were watching knew that the contest was not the obvious victory the other two had been. There was whispering in the audience as the fact was communicated.
Maikal decided he would at least give them the show they had come for. He had little idea how to use the sword, which he noticed was not especially sharp, but once his hood was pulled down over his face he had no reason to be afraid of the other man, however skillful.
The other man waited at his end of the arena and Maikal obliged his pride by walking toward him while he stared proudly, perhaps beginning to wonder what the whispering was all about.
The cold-eyed princess watched without looking away or opening her mouth. Maikal wondered why she wanted to see the man in front of him die.
Maikal's opponent struck at him. Maikal got out of the way. The next slash was met with Maikal's dull sword. Maikal thrust at the other man and he slipped by the thrust and would have stuck his sword into Maikal's stomach, except that the blade was stopped suddenly by the oversuit.
His opponent was surprised, and Maikal took advantage of that to strike at the man's arm. The dull blade would not cut through the cloth. So there was no chance to win with the sword. Maikal threw it away and stood in front of the other man waiting while the man slashed at his throat.
The blade rebounded from the thin force field and the man almost fell. Maikal took his needler out and pointed it at the man, who looked up soon enough to see the weapon.
"Sorcery!" he cried.
Maikal fired and the man crumpled, fell to his knees and then over on his face, with his sword under him.
Most of the crowd, by this time, was not actually surprised by what had happened. The uninformed master-of-ceremonies had no idea what he was to do next. The arena was silent, altogether silent.
The king stood up and motioned with his arm to Maikal. Maikal walked to where the king could look down on him. That jovial, vicious-looking personage stared for a moment, not certain what to say.
Then he found the proper words. "You are free from the contest. You may leave this place. But you must stay within the castle until I call for you."
"Very well."
"Is this sorcery?" the man asked.
"It is not sorcery." No one would entirely believe that, Maikal supposed, given the state of so-called civilization they enjoyed.
"Let him free!" the king called to the master-of-ceremonies, who ran to do as he was told. Maikal was let out of the arena. He wandered back into the courtyard to wait for someone to find him.
He had done without much sleep or food for several days and he wished he had a soft bed upon which to collapse, but he sat on a stone in the courtyard for several hours, waiting, sometimes drifting off into semi-sleep.
Finally the man who had acted as master-of-cere-monies in the arena in the afternoon came walking through the outer courtyard and found Maikal dozing, sitting on the stone.
"Young man!"
"Oh yes. I suppose you want me."
"Come along."
Maikal followed the man through a labyrinth of rooms, halls, and doorways to a room with an arcade down either side, the usual crude tapestries on the walls, and a table at one end at which were sitting the king, a few nobles, and the three daughters. The meal was apparently just over. There were gnawed bones sitting on wooden plates on the table and some of the men were stuffing something into pipes so that they could smoke. Seeing the refuse did little to make Maikal less hungry. It only made the idea of eating not so appealing as it had been.
"You have a device to kill I have never seen in the past," the king said, leaning over the table to stare at Maikal.
"I can show you how to make devices that kill, king. It is my occupation to do so."
"You were working for the prince."
"The prince is dead. I work for whoever pays me."
"You don't seem to have done the prince any good," the king observed.
"I cannot produce these things by myself, or overnight."
"What is your price?"
"I must have the machine in which I came. You will find it near the fortification belonging to the late Lord m'Ertzl."
"Is that all you ask? That is certainly enough. It will occupy many men for many days and they will risk the nomads."
"If you will do as I say I promise you the weapons you need to forever end that menace," Maikal said.
"It is no menace, simply an inconvenience," the king said.
Again that confidence, and Maikal wondered why everyone found it necessary to say that the nomads were no force. Perhaps to keep spirits up.
"I also ask for enough of the leaf you smoke, if it is good, to fill my machine, or if it is not then I will accept copper or silver, if you have much of them."
"The weed and the metals are all precious. I must consider your offer."
"Be so kind as to provide food and quarters while you are making up your mind," Maikal said.
"Oh, yes, of course." The king motioned to the man who had brought Maikal to him, who seemed to be some sort of a chamberlain.
While they discussed which room to put him in Maikal looked at the three princesses at a small enough distance to be able to see them.
The oldest was what he had thought when he first saw her, like a delicate sword compared to the hammer of her father. Maikal still wondered what had impelled her, or it seemed she had something directly to do with it, to send his strutting opponent against him.
One of the sisters was a female caricature of her father, with his features and his greedy look but without the masculinity that almost excused them.
The third was much more what he would have thought a princess ought to be, as delicate as her older sister without her coldness.
The chamberlain, or whatever he was, led Maikal away down more corridors, through more rooms and doors, until he found what he was looking for and Maikal was shut into another room, at least a room with a bed on which to sleep. That was what he decided to do, and his decision was not difficult to implement.

X
SOMEONE WAS knocking on the door. Maikal was not really awake, only enough to wonder who, in such a place, cared enough about his privacy to take the trouble to knock on his door.
He shook himself awake and knew he was not really ready to stop sleeping, but he called out to whoever was on the other side of the door to enter.
The door opened a little, only enough to admit a girl, a girl he recognized as the younger sister, the one with long hair, the king's failure at masculinization.
"You are the man who spoke to my father last night?" she asked him.
"Yes, I am. What do you want?"
"Only to speak to you. Are you a sorcerer?"
She seemed partly interested and partly frightened by him. Maikal asked himself who could have sent her. He decided there was no answer and nothing to do except play along and see what would happen.
"I'm not a sorcerer."
"Of course, if you were you wouldn't tell anyone you were," she said.
"I suppose that's true. Then why did you ask the question to begin with?"
She had nothing to say for a minute, and then seemed to forget all about it. Maikal had noticed in his slight experience that girls often behaved just that way.
"I want to take you to see someone."
"Your father?" Maikal asked.
"Oh no, not my father."
"Does your father know?"
"My father wouldn't approve."
"Then I'll stay here."
"I want to take you to a religious man," she said, as though that should have some special significance to him.
"So?"
"Please come. It is very important."
Maikal didn't want to go, particularly if the king wouldn't approve, but he supposed he would, for whatever reason men do foolish things, because of the intuition he was never supposed to use. He wondered if he could learn something from the "religious man" about the planet. Or about the people, the two groups of people, the lords and the serfs, two obviously distinct races.
Something bothered him about it, and he wanted to find out what that something was.
Again it was the maze, the labyrinth.
"Why do they have to make these places so complicated?" he commented to the girl as she led him down a hallway.
She had no idea what he meant. She had never lived anywhere else.
They went into the courtyard and she ordered a groom to bring mounts for them.
"We are going to a very holy place," she said.
"What would that be?"
She looked at him as though she were disappointed with what he had said. He wondered what part he was supposed to be taking: "young god," "sorcerer," or perhaps "messiah."
They rode a little ways beyond the town, after passing through the tortuous streets of it and out through the outer wall and his defenses.
Beyond the town there was only farm land, and much of that fallow, at least not being plowed at the moment and apparently not being used for pasture, because there seemed to be nothing to put in pasture excepting the lizards.
Then, when they were almost out of sight of the town, they came to a low hill on which was built a dome, a plastic dome. A plastic dome.
Maikal tried to imagine where it had come from. He recognized it. It was part of a life support system dating from the period before The End. It was a device characteristic of Tellurian colonization, a temporary shield for the people who came to the surface of an apparently friendly planet, to give them time to learn whether there was any danger to be faced that they could read on their instruments from the atmosphere. But what, he wondered, was it doing here?
There was a man waiting for them, an unmounted man wearing soldier-like clothing, but he was not a soldier. He was too old to be a soldier, for one thing.
They dismounted and went to where he was waiting for them, just outside the open air lock of the dome.
"This is the young man, Maikal," the girl said to him, To Maikal she said, "This is Supervisor Korl, who studies the ancient books. When we go inside the dome you are not to speak to anyone. Merely look and listen. We will talk later."
And they went through the air lock where Maikal saw what he had been led to expect he would see if he ever came upon such a device.
There was very little inside the dome. There were a few long-cold machines, the devices that had provided the life support under the dome. And there was the ship around which it had been built, not a sphere like Maikal's, but a ship capable of carrying twenty people and the equipment and food they would need on a strange planet.
It was square-shaped, like a cube, standing on three thick legs protruding from its bottom surface, and it had only three antennas, all on the bottom, where Maikal's spaceboat had dozens, scattered all over the surface. But his spaceboat had been modeled after a military model from a later period.
Its surface was the cold ceramic-like material, though, and the same dead shade of gray.
Sitting in the hatchway of the ship there was a man mumbling, a man in flowing red robes. The priest of the sun, Maikal supposed.
Korl went to the man in the hatch. "Oh, father, pray may we disturb you a moment?"
The old man rumbled and looked up to see what was disturbing his rest. "Oh, oh, what is it? Oh, Supervisor Korl. Come in, my son. Come inside."
"You need not be troubled. I have come to show the wonderful house of our fathers to this stranger." Korl pointed to Maikal.
"Yes, quite right. You may proceed, supervisor."
They went past the old man. The ship looked as Maikal expected it would. He had seen it all before, in pictures.
There was a core for the electronic devices and for the cells to power them. The rest of the interior of the cube was divided into quarters, two filled with seats, five each on two levels, the other two emptied of what had once been the vital equipment carried along for colonization.
In addition, one quarter was occupied by two seats on one level. These were the control seats, and there were viewers swung out of the way over them and manual controls in front of them, manual controls of the kind that had been made obsolete by the direct controls of the type Maikal used. Between the seats there was a viewer. But, in case that failed, there was a book next to it, the Space Survey, 324th Edition. Maikal's was only the 326th.
"The old man cannot hear us," Korl said.
"What is a 'supervisor'?" Maikal asked.
"I am in charge, over serfs. It is not the best work but it must be done."
"He is a humble man but he is wise," the girl said. She, Maikal supposed, was Korl's disciple. Did he have others?
"You are not from Gaft. I do not know where you came from but you came in a device much like this one, in every essential way, if I am to believe what I have been told."
"So what?"
"We know nothing except what is written in books no living man can read. Some few of us have realized and preserved a few truths."
"What would they be?"
Then the man began his spiel. "There are many suns and many worlds around them, and Gaft is but one of these. There are many men and all brethren and we are but a few of these. Once when men were more wise there was no killing. There were machines to bring men together. Men read the great books and were free. Perhaps outside Gaft there are yet men who do these things." The supervisor looked at Maikal significantly. "Perhaps you are one of those."
"Just where do the serfs fit into all this?" Maikal asked.
"They are serfs. They were here before we came and they shall remain as long as we do not unite and kill them all."
"A humanitarian doctrine," Maikal said, realizing the double irony.
"It is indeed," answered the supervisor, who did not realize anything.
"What do you want from me?" Maikal asked.
"I must explain our problem. I am sorry to have to become so involved." The supervisor seemed to be a man for becoming involved. "The orthodox doctrine holds that we came down from the sun and that because of our weaknesses we were condemned to live without knowledge of these holy devices and the holy books herein. When we have all accepted our responsibility to be strong and to believe in the true doctrine, a messiah will come and will teach us what we lost in our fall from glory.
"This is patent nonsense. You no doubt realize this. I don't believe in a holy messiah. I can only piece together the threads and our oldest writings and try to synthesize the truth."
A synthetic truth, Maikal thought.
The man continued his talk. "We are a remnant left behind through an oversight of some kind. It is obvious that we are of the race to which the universe must belong. You are from the civilization that lost us. Perhaps you have been sent to find us, or perhaps merely by accident. But you can help us. You can show us the machines and we can escape from this place, and perhaps return to our home world."
"Let us suppose you are right," Maikal said. "But your people have been here thousands of years. You don't even speak the language of the rest of us. Your culture is thousands of years behind ours. Even if I told you how to operate this machine, you would not have much chance of getting it anywhere."
"Do you mean it is broken?"
"I doubt that." Machinery made before The End commonly was built as well as that made afterward, and never actually wore out completely. "But you have no understanding of what is involved. You could put yourself into the middle of a sun. I wouldn't try to take this thing anywhere myself because I was never taught to operate manual controls."
"Then you admit you have come from the outside," the supervisor said.
"I didn't exactly say that. Think whatever you want. But even if you could go somewhere with his thing you could only take two operators and twenty other people."
"That is correct. Only a few can escape. Is that sufficient reason for staying here?"
"You don't know what is on the outside," Maikal said, finally.
"Tell me what I must do to make the device operate and let me make the decision," the man insisted.
Maikal said down and looked at the controls in front of him. They were extremely simple. There was a joystick and there was a throttle. There was a course indicator. There was a digitbox for feeding in coordinates.
He pulled down the viewer in front of him. This machine would not turn on automatically, as did his, and he was Jooking for the on-switch. It was behind the viewer.
At least he assumed it had to be the on-switch. He showed it to the supervisor.
"I won't turn it on. I don't know what would happen if I did. There is no point in trying to show you how this thing works. I don't know that well myself, to begin with. And it takes years to learn to operate one of these machines."
"I know all I need to know. You would do well not to mention this conversation. We would be heretics if the priests knew our beliefs. We would be given the most harsh treatment possible. We might even be hunted like serfs, to shame us. Even the princess could not escape. The priests have some hold because they claim to hold keys to knowledge from the ancient books. But they lie."
They all left the ship, going out past the sleepy priest on the hatch sill, who was not even awake enough to say good-bye.

XI
MAIKAL WAITED patiently in the room given him for several hours, considering what he had seen and also wondering what would happen if, or when, the supervisor tried to turn on the machine. At best the chosen few would learn the truth: that there was no point in going to any world but their own, most especially the old home world.
At worst something would malfunction and they would all die, or be lost in space.
And he wondered about the curious social customs of these people, especially what a "hunt" was, although what it was seemed too apparent: the kind of barbaric game he should expect to find among long-lost Tellurians, the bloodiest race in space.
He was worn out with thinking and tired of resting when finally the chamberlain came to fetch him, and take him through the halls to the room he had seen the evening before, where the same people were again finishing their supper. He waited to learn what kind of freak show he would be called upon to perform to demonstrate his powers this time. But the reaction was different.
"Young man," the king addressed him. "I have carefully considered your offer. I do not know where you have come from but my advisers suggest that if you are a god you do not need my wealth and if you are a devil I should not give you anything, lest I lose my soul to the clan of devils."
"I take it you are trying to tell me you aren't buying any." Never matter. There were other people on the planet who might. Or he could just get off of it completely, an appealing thought.
"I want what you have. I simply do not intend to pay for it. Do I make myself clear?"
"I sell. I do not give away."
"I offer you only one thing in return for your help. I offer you survival. For a young man life means much."
"No member of my Association has ever given away information. No member ever will."
So the king's intentions had become clear.
"You don't intend to cooperate?" the chubby man asked.
"I do not."
The king raised his arm. There suddenly was a rope around Maikal's neck and another was slipped around his legs when he was pulled to the floor. Several of the king's troopers were standing around him.
"I would not attempt to simply kill you. That would not do. Past experience has shown there is something about you or your clothing that makes any such process most unlikely to succeed. But I can restrain you until such a time as you have decided it is better to live than to starve."
"That time will not come."
"We shall see."
The imperious older sister rose and came down from her place at the table to where Maikal was lying on the floor. The troopers made space for her, as though they were afraid to touch her. She took the needler from its holster.
"We have this, Maikal Wendal."
"Don't try to use it."
The girl walked back to the table and set the device in front of her father.
The sister who had taken Maikal to the spaceship looked on as though she were not interested. Have I served my purpose to her? he wondered. He knew he could not expect any help.
The other one greedily grabbed the needler.
"Whoever uses it will die," Maikal promised.
"Does a sword strike its holder?" the cold-eyed princess asked.
"That is not a sword. It can only be used by me, or by my father."
The other girl pointed it at him and looked at it wondering how to make it work.
"Perhaps this device can penetrate to your skin," the king said.
"It cannot."
The girl seemed satisfied she had found what she wanted and she stood up and aimed the needler at the troopers. They scattered, but needlessly.
She pulled the trigger and her hair sparked with electricity. The needler fell from her hand and she sighed and fell across the table.
All the people jumped up and gathered around the girl. She was prodded, pushed, and shouted to, but there was no way to reach her. She had died.
"My sister has died," the oldest said. They all demonstrated the stoicism Maikal had seen before. No one shouted or cried. All the eyes of the people in the room stared at him.
"You will die," the girl said. "You must die. You will not like your dying."
"Bloody Tellurians," Maikal said. No one recognized the reference.
"Get that devil-cloth off of him," the girl said to the troopers.
They gathered around him and their hands clawed at him. He knew if they succeeded he had little to look forward to. They reached all over him and he thought no one would have the imagination to find the fasteners.
"It is his true skin," one of the men said.
The impact of the hands was dulled by the field in the suit, but it could not turn back hands. It was specifically designed to stop weapons, only weapons, implying hardness and velocity.
"It is not his skin. Look, it has a hood attached. That should show you it is not his skin."
"He is a devil."
One finally did find a fastener, and the second was easily found. There were discussions over what the fasteners were, but finally one man decided there was a way. The suit came off. There was nothing to save him now.
He was carried out of the room by the troopers, carried out into the courtyard to be left for the night. He wondered what the morning would be like. He tried to sleep, on the theory he would probably need the rest, but his exposed skin left him too cold for it, aside from his nervousness. He was left in a cage made out of heavy wood. No one bothered to guard him and he quickly found there was no way out of the cage. Again he waited.

XII
THE MORNING ARRIVED quickly enough, too quickly, Maikal thought. He did not know exactly what his erstwhile hosts had planned for him but he was certain it would not be pleasant.
The activities he expected for a morning in the courtyard began as the local sun was rising. Grooms were bringing out lizards, brushing them and washing them down. Troopers were busily polishing their crude weapons.
The younger daughter of the king wandered through the courtyard, but abruptly came toward the cage when she saw Maikal.
"Good morning, fair princess," he said.
"You must be insane," she replied.
"There is no use in worrying."
"Do you know what will happen to you?"
"I don't know. Why don't you tell me?" He hoped she would, and possibly tell him how to avoid it in the bargain, although there was something about her manner that suggested she had not come to help. Perhaps for some far more personal purpose, but not to help.
"You'll be taken out and hunted down. It's a great sport."
"You'll help."
"Oh no, not me. But my sister will. My sister will probably be the one who catches you. On a lance. She is very good at that sort of thing."
"You don't regret what she will probably do to me?" Maikal asked, half bitterly and half hopefully.
"No," the girl said.
"As the ancient expression goes," he said sourly, " "That's life."
"Good-bye," the princess told him, and she walked away.
There was little more waiting. A few of the king's men were already in the courtyard, and the king and his eldest daughter followed, he hearty as usual and as charming as a stainless steel animation. Neither bothered even to look in his direction. In good time, when the entire party was mounted and gathered together, his door was opened and the chamberlain who had served as master of ceremonies in the arena asked him if he would kindly step outside.
A rope was fastened to his neck and the chamberlain, once mounted, took the other end. The party left the courtyard, with Maikal being practically dragged along at the very end of it. They went through the town.
As usual there were few people on the streets, few of the peasants, who Maikal supposed feared being too handy when the lords and ladies of the castle were riding through their streets carrying assorted lances and swords enough to hunt down half a block of people.
They proceeded through the outer wall, once the proprieties were observed between the guard captain and his monarch, and they continued on into the countryside for at least two miles.
They had left the plowed fields near the town. The country was covered with low brush. Before they stopped, they were out of sight of the town, the fields, and any other living creature aside from themselves.
Maikal wondered if something about isolation made people become more sadistic, or if the isolation was merely a condition that brought out natural traits. He wondered about some of the things he had thought about natural human goodness, and then realized he might have little time left for musings. He decided to leave philosophy behind in favor of survival for at least a little while.
They had stopped. The chamberlain dismounted and slipped the rope off from around his neck. He had no impulse to run. The breaths of the lizards were still making his cold skin moist.
"The rules are quite simple," the chamberlain said. "You run. We follow. We catch. We kill."
"Do you mount the head?" Maikal asked, but no one knew what he was talking about.
"You had better begin. You have a few minutes before we will follow."
Maikal took a last look at the icy princess and her happy entourage and ran, ran "like hell," as the saying went.
But there didn't seem to be anywhere to go in the dense brush. He ran over the top of a low hill with the idea of getting out of sight of the hunting party. The brush caught at his skin and scratched, and the rocky ground cut his bare feet, but he kept going.
If he had known which direction it was in he would have gone toward the obsolete colonization ship, that religious relic that had looked passably spaceworthy and certainly was a better risk than staying where the hunting party could catch him and kill him, as the master of ceremonies had put it with so little ceremony.
It seemed someone was watching him. He looked around and saw nothing. But he could hear the hunting party's lizards shaking the earth as they ponderously galloped somewhere beyond the hill behind him.
He kept running, through more brush and up another hill. But this hill brought him into the view instead of putting him out of it, and he could see the hunting party wheel and turn to come after him.
There was nothing to do except keep running. He did, going up and over the hill, but the hunting party was less than two hundred meters behind him and gaining rapidly.
The faster he ran the more the brush grabbed at him. He was bleeding from thorn scratches and his feet ached. He tried to keep from thinking about it and concentrated on making the next hill.
But as he was climbing it the hunting party came closer over the hill he had previously climbed and as quickly as the lizards could manage in his direction. He made it to the top of the hill and was on his way down when a lance was thrown and missed.
There was a creek flowing through the gully he found himself in, and the brush was thicker still. He plunged into it and could make no progress.
The hunters were too close now. They were only a few meters behind. They had seen the thick brush and were coming into it after him.
He looked up and could see them coming after him and slowly coming to a halt. The brush was a poor medium for the lizards. Some seemed to be dismounting.
Then he heard the voice of the elder princess. "It's mine," she was saying to someone. He didn't hear anything then except his own cry of pain.
He didn't stop to look but he could feel a lance in his leg. He made his way through the brush and got into the creek. He couldn't run any longer. Then he looked behind him. Several people were breaking out of the brush, including the owner of the lance that he was spindled to. She was drawing a knife from her belt.
Just as he was about to reach the other bank he fell on the wet rocks. He shouted out again. The hunters were gathering around him. There was no way out of it.
They watched with little concern. Two of them were having an entirely unrelated conversation. The chamberlain made his way through them and looked at Maikal.
"He's not dead yet," the man complained.
"Patience, chamberlain," the girl said, and she moved closer.
"You are animals," Maikal shouted at them. "When my father finds out he will take care of all of you."
"Babbling," one of the people said.
The princess raised the knife. At the same time something fell on top of Maikal's writhing body. He felt to see what it was. It was a body, this one dead, and in its back was an arrow. The princess retreated from him.
Through his half-closed eyes Maikal could see others fall, two more within the range of his sight, and the others were mounting again and riding away as stragglers, brave hunters who didn't care to be hunted.
That was all Maikal remembered. Except the bush he was staring at when he lost consciousness.

XIII
FROM TIME TO TIME Maikal was conscious enough to realize that he was slung across the back of a lizard moving rapidly across the moor land he had seen on his way to the fortress of the late prince. But he could not move his head enough to see who was taking him wherever he was going.
Then he woke up, and he wasn't being bounced up and down on the back of an animal. He was lying on the dirt floor of a hut, a hut built mostly underground, with rough stone walls and a lizard-hide roof. He was not alone in the hut. There was a young girl cooking at a fire near the door, where the smoke would be, to a small extent, carried away. There were voices from the outside, male voices speaking a musical language, but even though he did not know what they were saying he felt a sense of conflict between the voices. He listened and could pick out five. He had lost the analyzer with his oversuit and had no way to even begin to learn the languages.
The girl noticed he was awake. She came to where he was lying under a thick hide and looked at him. She put her hand on his forehead. Then she called out. The conversation from outside the hut ceased and two men came into it.
They were both nomads, not more than a meter and a half tall and fragile-appearing, with dark complexions. He had never been any closer to them. They were obviously humanoid, but equally obviously not human. Their ears were small, pointed at the ends, and high on their heads. Their eyes were large and red-purple. Their skin had a dusty appearance. He guessed that they could not conceive children with his late would-be friends, and there was nothing in the history he knew of the place to suggest he was wrong.
One of the men, young and fragile-looking like the others, came closer to him and stared in his face and tried to speak to him. Of course, he could not make himself understood. He turned to the others and spoke to them. Then he turned back to Maikal again.
"Do you speak the Gaft tongue?" the man asked.
"I do."
"Who are you? You do not look exactly like the others."
"I am Maikal Wendal of Lhonz 4," Maikal said.
"I do not know of this place. It seems the Gafts did not like you so very well. They have not very often hunted others besides our brethren they call the serfs."
"Do you know what a planet is?" Maikal asked, plunging in faster and deeper than he knew it was wise to do.
"Our philosophers once said there are many worlds with many suns."
"I have come from another planet."
"Yet you do much more resemble the Gafts than you resemble us, Maikal Wendal."
"I believe we share common ancestors on our home world, which we left thousands of years ago."
"Do you feel a bond toward them?"
"No."
The man turned back to the others and talked to them in their musical language, and the man who had come in with the one to whom Maikal was talking seemed to be doubtful about Maikal's feelings toward the people these nomads called the Gafts, the human population of the planet.
"He does not believe you," the man told Maikal. "He says you are of them and you will be against us. Is there some way you can help us, Maikal Wendal?"
"The Gafts took my weapon and my clothing. I have nothing left except what I know and I do not think you have the ability to make use of that." Maikal remembered the spaceboat. "But I have one thing left, if I can go to get it. Have you heard of a Lord m'Ertzl?"
"No. There are many lords among the Gafts. There are at least a hundred of them."
"This one was the vassal of a Prince Pocoshl."
"I know of that prince. Our people say he is dead and all of his with him and King Clshl has overtaken all his lands."
"If I can get back my machine I can help you very much."
"I believe you for some reason, Maikal Wendal. Perhaps because there is no choice. I am called Di-Lak." The young man held out both his hands, palms up. Maikal guessed what was expected of him, did the same.
"I will explain to you, because you have come from another place. You know there is war between us and these distant cousins of yours, who style themselves our overlords. This war began when the Gafts first came here. We do not know where they came from. It is all legend and no one knows the truth today.
"The legend says the Gafts were very few, not even a whole tribe of people, and few women. For a long while they lived on a few hills and did not ask us for land or help. Then one day, many years after they had come, they attacked a band of our people with amazing weapons that shot out fire. They carried away women. But they could not breed. The women were thrown out of their camp when they learned of this. Still we did not attack them.
"There were more of them as time went by, but they had so few to begin with. Then one of them brought some of our people to his farm to help him. That was when some of our people became serfs.
"We were in fear of the strange weapons for a long time. But the Gafts seem to have lost the use of these things. No one knows any more of them than legend.
"They grew slowly and took more of our people in. They were stronger. They had ways of making simple weapons that we did not have. They first tamed animals to ride.
"We have always been a peaceful people. From the beginning of our race we have been hunters and had our herds. We have never been farmers. We have had thinkers but have never had the techniques the Gafts had always had for making tools and weapons. We have never wished to have war. We have never been organized for war and we do not know the ways of it.
"They have forced it on us. Every year they have taken more land. They have cut us off from the streams where we have always watered our herds, and they have kept us from taking our usual routes from the plains to the mountains.
"They have hunted us down and they have killed us whenever they could not make us serfs.
"So we have no more thinkers because we have no time for meditation. The spirits of the sun and the earth are offended by our inattention and our herds are not properly tended. Even though there are many more of us than of the Gafts, they are killing us. They are killing our own ways and making us slaves on their farms, and we do not seem to be able to stop them, although we have learned from them and now make war against them wherever we can.
"They are thousands and they are strong. We are thousands of thousands and we are weak.
"Some of our people are saying now that we must become strong by forcing the men to fight as the Gafts do, to be ordered about as are serfs.
"But if we kill the old life ourselves the spirits will not help us any longer. The Gaft sickness attacks us now and the spirits do not come to our aid.
"If we kill the old life we will do all that the Gafts could do to us. This is my belief."
The situation was classic, out of a textbook, practically. A native population built into the ecological structure was stable and organized loosely. No population pressure, no technology, and stability. Then the Gafts, the humans, came. They had organization and the greed to use it, and they expanded slowly without the native population being able to react, because it could not classify what was happening on the basis of all of its years of past experience, perhaps as many years as the humans, but spent peacefully, not spent in insistent expansion and conflict on a thousand planets.
Factions had developed among the nomads, evidently. On other worlds the same situation had come up after a long period of Tellurian occupation, where the local population was allowed to live as it had for any period of time at all. The Gafts had begun in a very small way as colonization had been carried out before the End. Perhaps they were not really colonizers, but escapees from the End itself. Most of the remaining colonies had retreated into the ghettos, like Maikal's own, when the social dynamics of the End became obvious and a repeat performance became too certain to allow any further versions of what had gone before.
The Gafts, though, had come with only a few people, little equipment, and less knowledge. They were everything a group of colonizers was not supposed to be.
And they had gradually come into control of the planet, for practical purposes, although they had lost any idea of what their antecedents had known. They had organization and aggressiveness.
And the disease had come up again, possibly the same one Maikal had heard the Lord m'Ertzl talk about. The nomads obviously were having an epidemic. Either it was a new strain that attacked them or the disease was cyclical and the nomads had forgotten the last time it had happened, or a combination of both, more probably.
"You take thought, Maikal Wendal."
"I take thought. I can help you, but I must have the machine I left behind at the place of the Lord m'Ertzl. I can help you attack the Gafts, even though I must break the rules of my people to do it. But I have personal reasons for wishing to see them done away with."
Genocide, Maikal thought. But one way or another there would be genocide. If the military power of the Gafts was broken then they might live for thousands of years without becoming a threat again.
"I can also stop the disease, perhaps. I cannot promise. But I may be able to do it."
"You know some kind of magic?"
"Do you remember the fire weapons in the legend?" Maikal asked. "It is not magic that makes these things work. It is knowledge. The weapons are like sunlight, which can burn and comes from a great distance."
"I do not understand."
"We must go and get my device," Maikal said.
"I will go with you, and I have a lizard you can ride. Perhaps others will go as well. But there will be those who oppose this. They will not understand better than do I and they have their own solutions to our problems. I accept what you have said because I see little chance, not because I believe you. I would try to fly from the top of a hill if I thought it would help. Some are desperate."
Maikal started to stand and realized he had no clothing. He wrapped the hide around himself.
"I will prepare," Di-Lak said. He spoke to the girl, who brought a sack made of hide from a corner and took a heavy cloak from it, the same sort the nomads all wore. She gave it to Maikal, but when he put it on both she and Di-Lak laughed at him. It was ten centimeters too short for him.
"What will I do for boots, I wonder?" Di-Lak said. "There is no time. I will take them from the first Gaft I catch." Maikal wondered at his own aggressiveness.
They went out of the hut. The sun was going down and a fire was being laid in the center of an area surrounded by similar huts. There were men discussing something (Maikal?) around the fire area.
Di-Lak spoke to the men. There was a conversation that seemed to turn ugly. "What is happening?" Maikal asked. "Some of the others of us can speak the monster language, outsider," one of the men said. "I am called Ra-Sev. I do not believe this expedition you propose would bring anything to us. You are cousin to the Gafts, not to us. I do not believe this machine of yours exists. You perhaps only wish to return to your own friends at our expense."
 The argument became more nearly violent and the participants were staring at each other from a few inches.
"I go in any case," Di-Lak said. "What other hope is there?"
A few others seemed to agree with him. When he stood they also stood.
"We leave within one hour's time. You will take note of this."
The man called Ra-Sev also stood. "You leave us with fewer to protect the herds. You may not return and your foolishness will cost us all our place. This outsider should mean nothing to us. We should kill him just as we would kill any of the Gaft."
"He is my guest."
One of the men still sitting took a long knife from his cloak and looked at Maikal.
"The community cannot stand the loss of all of you. If the outsider dies you have no reason to chase his wild dreams. You cannot protect him against your own people."
The knife-fingering friend of Ra-Sev stood and approached Maikal.
"Let it be quick," Ra-Sev said.
The attacker raised the knife but before he could bring it down Maikal caught the slender arm and bent it backward. Both he and the other man fell. The knife was out of reach, gone.
"You violate hospitality, Ra-Sev," Di-Lak said.
"There is no hospitality to the enemy."
"I did not save this man from the high king to lose him to you. We leave now."
Di-Lak and the others walked away from the fire with Maikal. They went beyond the circle of huts. Di-Lak gave orders to the others and they left.
"You see that not everyone holds my views," Di-Lak said.
"How will we find the place where I left the machine?" Maikal asked.
"That will be difficult, but yet possible. We will find the country of the Prince Pocoshl, which I believe I can find, and there learn from his former serfs where this lord of yours had his place. There will be danger in traveling if the king's troopers are scattered about taking control of his new domain, but we are as much a danger to them as they to us. We have killed many troopers caught on the roads about here. We will kill many more, although as many of us die. They have not as many to lose."
"Do your people so easily commit suicide?" Maikal asked.
"Only those who know we must kill the Gafts. Some raid the farms for animals. Others do not come near. They shrink from the Gafts wherever the devils are found and let their watering places and their villages fall without ever making a defense.
"And there are the others who dream of a great army while they sit around their fires, but do not know any way to bring it to pass. They poison the rest of us with their thoughts."
The other men, three of them, returned with extra clothing and food in lizard hide bags. They all went to the animals and got up to go. The others were also carrying weapons, some swords and most bows, but Maikal had nothing. They rode away from the village, off across the hilly plain.

XIV
THE RIDING was as hard as it had been before and Maikal was no more used to it than he had been. They rode all that night, Maikal not even being able to see where they were going. He stayed directly behind Di-Lak and in that way kept from losing his way.
When the morning came they stopped and rested for several hours, and pieces of dried meat were passed as well as a pipe of whatever it was they smoked, a plant that could be smoked but did not taste like what Maikal knew as tobacco. But he thought it would still have some value if he could ever get back to Lhonz 4 with it. It had been several days since he had really thought about ever getting back to Lhonz 4. Sometimes he had been very certain he would not get back at all.
After noon they began again, riding more quickly in the daylight. The nomads were hard riders. Maikal kept up at the expense of more saddle sores. He was happy to think he would not have to be riding anything for very much longer.
He did not recognize the plains they were riding through, but all the plains seemed to look alike. There was the off-color grass. There were hillocks. There were mountains in the distance. There was very little else to mark off one section of the plains from another. They sometimes, rarely, came upon herds of reptilian animals, ordinarily the prey of the nomads, but these nomads weren't taking the time to stop for hunting or for anything else.
They rested again, rode through the night, rested and rode further. Maikal was certain they had covered much more area than they would have if they had been the king's troopers, who took things more easily for all their close-lipped discipline.
Finally they came to fields and herds of animals with herdsmen, serfs dressed in a drab imitation of the manner of the Gafts, with pants and tunics and shorter cloaks, all woven from coarse hair or made from mottled hides, sometimes not even tanned, but scraped and still rough-looking. The serfs did not pay attention to the travelers. They seemed not to be aware of the existence of the travelers.
They stopped to question a herdsman and at first Di-Lak tried to speak to the serf in the nomad tongue, but the man's answers were slow and clumsy, and so Di-Lak tried the Gaft language.
"Yes, this was the land of the Prince Pocoshl. He is dead. We have a new ruler. We do not know who our lord is to be now," the man answered.
The nomads were slightly scandalized at the man's lack of ability to converse in what should have been his native language.
"Do you know of the Lord m'Ertzl?" Maikal asked.
"I have heard that name. He is dead as well."
"Where were his lands when he was living?"
"In that direction," the man said, pointing with his finger over the hills to their right.
Maikal and the nomads left the man to his herds, or rather the herds of his master, and they went in the direction he had pointed out, and within a few hours Maikal vaguely remembered the territory as the same he had passed through on his way to the prince's castle. They were riding along what amounted to the road, although unmarked except for the people who used it, to the place that had belonged to the Lord m'Ertzl. Maikal was able to be of some use in pointing out the way they should go.
They rested again and rode and, when it was getting dark, stopped to eat, smoke, and briefly rest again.
The fire was set and they were sitting around it when one of the men heard a sound and spoke to Di-Lak, who doused the fire with dirt and told Maikal what was happening.
"Vo-Evo hears a cart coming. Can you hear it?"
They were all silent. Maikal listened carefully and could hear wheels creaking. They all waited for something they could see to be connected with the sound. The usual voiceless troopers appeared, riding slowly, and behind them a cart, pulled by more of the lizards, on which was the spherical spaceboat, still on its legs, and held by ropes to the cart. There were twelve troopers in all, lances high, and an officer riding by the cart. There was a serf driving the cart and another leading the two animals in front of it, dwarfed by the beasts.
"That is the machine," Maikal said.
"Quiet, or they'll hear us."
Maikal whispered: "We'll have to get it away from them before they can take it to the king. Otherwise we'll never have another chance at it."
"There are only five of us and thirteen of them. We haven't got a chance."
"Give me your knife," Maikal said.
"What can you do?"
"If I can get into the machine before they can stop me we'll have it."
"We can draw them away," Di-Lak said. "We'll start a new fire. Then we'll go to the cart and keep the troopers down while you get to the machine."
Maikal stared toward the cart, fifty meters away. When he was half the distance to the machine, he saw a fire twenty meters to his right. He kept going. Four of the troopers started out in the direction of the fire and the cart stopped.
Maikal went to the rear and found there were four men between him and the cart. He shouted and they tried to turn on him. A lance nearly missed him and he ran between two animals. A trooper drew his sword and slashed at Maikal, and Maikal dodged and climbed up the back of the cart. A lance was directed at him but missed and he grabbed it while the trooper holding it was trying to back off. He pulled the trooper off his horse. One of his antagonists was struck by an arrow and the others looked around them to see where it had come from while Maikal was opening the door to the machine.
He crawled into the spaceboat. It was naturally undisturbed, since no one could have gotten through the field around it, although the field had not prevented it from being handled, any more than the field around
Maikal's oversuit had prevented some of the treatment the king's men had subjected him to. He put on the control helmet and started the machine. It rose from the cart a few centimeters and then the ropes holding it down pulled tight. Maikal applied the extra force to lift the cart and the ropes began to strain at the weight of the massively-constructed cart with its tree trunk wheels. Through the viewer he could see men falling, but there were no details in the dark, only outlines. 
The cart broke loose and dropped on a couple of troopers. Maikal could not hear them but he could practically feel the screams of the men.
Troopers were riding away, terrorized by the space-boat and the deaths of their colleagues. Maikal could not see the nomads but he guided the machine to a position from which he could put it down next to the fire that had been set.
When he had landed and opened the door again the three nomads were waiting for him. They were awed by what the spaceboat had done.
"This is indeed a wonderful machine, Maikal Wendal. What are you going to do now that you have it back?"
"We have to get back to camp."
The three men agreed to go back with the extra mounts and Di-Lak climbed into the boat with Maikal. There was only space for two people in the machine. Di-Lak looked at the viewer, the library, and the control helmet and said nothing.
"Well be back in a few minutes. Tomorrow we have to get started on the disease," Maikal said.

XV
THE NEXT MORNING Maikal was wakened by Di-Lak and they went out to the fire, around which many people were sitting, having breakfast, including Ra-Sev and the man who had tried to kill Maikal.
"You have done as you said you would," Ra-Sev said. "Now the test."
"What do you mean?" Maikal asked.
"We have heard of the plague from others. It has come here now. I am told that it kills every fourth person and weakens all the others. It is something of the Gafts. It is another of their things, their oppressions on us. You are said to be able to cure the disease."
"I do not know whether I can cure it or not."
"You must attempt it, and we then will know whether you can do any part of what you claim."
Ra-Sev's attitude did not seem to have changed very much. He was demanding proof. Maikal wished the proof was something he could be more certain of. He went to the spaceboat and took a small machine from a recess in a panel and went with it back to Ra-Sev.
"Take me to this victim, Ra-Sev. I will do as well as I can, but I cannot make promises."
The little machine was not meant to be much more than a self-help testing device for merchants, and Maikal had not had anything resembling extensive training beyond a first-aid stage. The machine was a quick analyzer, for tests without the drawn-out processes that would be used in a full-scale laboratory.
Ra-Sev took Maikal to a hut and they went inside to find a woman tending a young boy, perhaps twelve years old. The boy was shivering between hides on the floor. Maikal aimed the device at the boy and inexpertly worked with it, recording the results in numbers that were meaningless to him with a nine-key device and a viewer screen. Then he took the machine back into the spaceboat, with Ra-Sev following him.
"What an ingenious device," Ra-Sev said, pointing to the spaceboat. "How does it work?"
"I don't know exactly, certainly not well enough to tell you," Maikal said shortly.
Maikal attached the medical analyzer to the library and operated the library. He found the references he needed, which told him as well as he could understand what the disease was and what could be done about it.
"It is basically one of the viruses that composed what the ancients called the 'common cold.'"
"What can you do for it?"
"This disease is not supposedly serious. Perhaps it is a more dangerous type, or perhaps it is something about this place or your people that makes it deadly. Are you certain this is the Gaft disease?"
"I am certain as well as I can be," Ra-Sev said.
"I have a small quantity of a general antibiotic that can be used. But there is no way to duplicate it here and I cannot make more. It would be against the rules of the Association."
"What is this Association?" Ra-Sev sneered.
"Do you suppose I am the only one of my kind? There are many of us. Our business is to trade knowledge for whatever we can get to people like the Gafts. For your people there is little I can do. What I know is useless because I have no way to show you how to make weapons or medicines. You don't have the ability to do these things."
"If your profit is in the Gafts why do you help us?"
"I don't know." Maikal had some ideas why. He was not going to explain Ecologism, or the feeling he had against the people who had almost killed him like a wild animal.
He took the oral antibiotic from a wall recess, returned the medical device to its proper place, and handed two of the capsules to Ra-Sev.
"I cannot promise what will happen. There isn't enough data here to be certain, even slightly certain. Try these. He is to swallow them. We should know by tomorrow. I cannot promise anything."
"We shall see," Ra-Sev said. He walked away.
Maikal and Di-Lak, and his sympathizers, discussed what they could do, and Maikal went through the routine of eating, conversation, sleeping, more conversation.
"We only need success and we can overthrow the Gaft. But we have never won anything from them. We have no experience of victory."
Maikal thought about that. "Then you will have a victory and you can take it from there."
"There will be no chance if Ra-Sev is not quieted," one of the men said.
Maikal slept, then in the morning waited, waited as he had done so often, and decided he would rather fight than wait constantly. If he ever went back his school friends would ask him about his adventures. Even though he had never wanted to be a merchant, he had always thought it was interesting, much more interesting than he found it to be when he had to sit and wait.
Ra-Sev came into the hut where Maikal was lying down. The narrow man squatted there and stared at Maikal for several minutes before he finally spoke.
"The boy is better. I ask you for the rest of the things you gave me, to protect us all when we face this again."
"Very well. I will give them to you when I can get them from the machine."
"Very well," Ra-Sev said.
But he didn't move. He stayed where he was and kept staring at Maikal.
"What more do you want from me?" Maikal asked.
"You have said you can help us drive off the Gaft. What do you propose?"
"Gather all the men you can. I will break down the walls of the castle. I will break down the walls of all the fortresses I can find and then you can easily attack them. Before the others have rebuilt their walls they will be your prey."
"Have you no sympathy for your cousins?"
"Do not kill them all, only those who resist. Take their weapons, except what they need for hunting. Prohibit them from returning to their fortresses. From those who will teach learn how they work their metals."
"What do you want for doing this?" Ra-Sev asked.
"The Gaft promised me smoking-weed."
"Is that all you want?"
"It is a great luxury on our world. Nothing like it can grow there."
"I shall support you, Maikal Wendal, although I do not know whether it is best to do so. It may be Di-Lak is correct about you."
"Gather all the men you can as quickly as you can and we will strike quickly."
"Very well, young man," Ra-Sev said, and he left.

XVI
THERE WERE MORE than a thousand of them, nomads mostly with mounts, armed with bows, swords, and some captured lances and javelins with the colors of various kings still attached. Maikal had waited for three weeks worth of deadening camp life, each day like the day before, and now the tribes had arrived, ready for the assault he had promised to back up with weapons no one of the Graft had seen since the first landing of the former Tellurians.
Chiefs were speaking to their men. They had been briefed and had worked out the plan of the battle over a map drawn in the dust in the camp while their men waited on the plain.
This must be done quickly, Maikal thought, before they run out of food and decide to go home. It was not more than half a day's ride to the castle. That meant an easy assault, providing the king did not learn what was happening and send out troopers to make a fight of it in the open, where the inexperienced, untrained, and leaderless nomads would have less chance, despite the fact that they would have some advantage in numbers. And in the open Maikal could do little to help them.
He doubted the king would waste men, from the viewpoint of the king, in an open assault, when he only had to hold off the nomads for a few days before they would give up, as they always had, from what Maikal could learn. The king could not know that his castle could be a disadvantage given a certain sort of weapon to use against it.
It occurred to Maikal that if he had managed to introduce gunpowder the end result would be the same as it was actually going to be. With the castles useless, shattered by sieges with cannon, the nomads would eventually, perhaps in a century, acquire the weapons to make their numerical superiority count.
Maikal considered waiting for men to gather, to be certain that the attack would succeed, but decided against that because at some point, and he didn't know when it would come, his irregular troops would lose as many going over the hill as they gained coming.
Everyone was prepared. He went to the spaceboat and found Di-Lak waiting for him there.
"A good fight we should have now," the nomad said.
"I'll go to the castle and wait for you," Maikal said. "Or simply wait here. But I think I had better go now. Seeing this thing should impress your friends with the probable success of this project."
"Yes, I believe you are correct."
Maikal climbed into the spaceboat and put the helmet on his head. The hatch was closed. He could see the milling troopers around him. As he rose he could see a few of the king's men in the hills nearby. He hoped there would not be an open fight.
He moved over the countryside slowly, noting the hills and the distant mountains, moving until he was going over cultivated land, and then he could see the castle waiting for him, a huge set of walls and towers surrounding the town and the palace.
He studied the scene to see what he should do. He would need to have a precise knowledge of it, but he did not want to allow the spaceboat to become visible to the people below, so he stayed up very high.
Even if the spies returned and reported, he reasoned, they could not come back quickly enough to allow the king to change his plans to include an assault in the open.
He waited, waited again…
The nomads were coming over the horizon. There were few signs of activity from the castle. Maikal felt sleepy and didn't really seem to be excited by the prospect of battle. He had seen it before.
The cloud of dust rising from the thousand-man army should have been visible from the castle. Maikal waited for something to happen. He took the spaceboat down lower on the theory that no one could guess what he was about to do even if they did notice him.
It took only a few minutes for the nomads to finally reach the castle. The gates were closed. Soldiers were running through the narrow streets in the town like insects, from his view.
He thought to separate a drive antenna, a ring concealed in the apparently uniform surface of the space-boat, from the system that was keeping him up, and he had enough to spare. There were sixty-four of the small rings in all, enough scattered regularly across the surface to push him instantly in any direction he thought to go.
He thought the phase of the antenna, and its balancer opposite it, to keep its effect from unbalancing him, so that there were two cycles of waves being aimed from it. He put himself into position and thought the waves 180 degrees apart. The surface of the ground where the waves came into contact with it rocked back and forth. He turned the machine slightly and the waves came into contact with the outer wall of the fortress. The rock was shuttled up and down by the invisible force. Troopers ran in all directions away from the curious disorder, an earthquake confined to about ten square meters.
He hit the wall in five places in all, and then turned the beam on the main walls around the palace itself. Rock crumbled and fell from the walls, and the walls themselves slowly collapsed as the force of natural gravity pulled them away from his beams, which were slightly less intense by design to accomplish that purpose exactly.
Mounted nomads were pouring through the breached outer wall. Some soldiers were retreating from the outer wall, but others were standing and hopelessly fighting. They were outnumbered five to one, from what Maikal could see, and they were on foot, while the nomads were mounted. Their organization and training did them very little good.
Maikal, on impulse (he had been, he noticed, having many impulses lately), set the spaceboat gently down near the main hole in the Gaft wall. The nomads waiting to ride in made space for him. He climbed out and shut everything up. Even without his oversuit and needler, he wanted to take some part in what was going on.
An animal was found for him to ride, and a sword as well, a recently captured Gaft sword whose owner had not been able to use it quite well enough. Maikal let the animal have its head and the well-trained beast demonstrated a combative nature, for it started for the wall. A little group of nomads stayed with Maikal.
They went through the confused battle without getting involved in it, and once past it they rode through the town. There were faces showing through little cracks between shutters and sills. The serfs could see what was happening. They were not out in the streets cheering. Maikal hoped they would be.
He and the few men with him rode to the castle, where they found more opposition, troopers from the walls with bows shooting arrows at anything that moved below and others trying to build barricades where the walls had cracked.
There were more and more nomads gathering behind Maikal. He thought of Di-Lak and hoped he was safe. When there seemed to be enough men gathered in the shelter provided by the buildings nearest the castle the nomads rushed the barricade builders, who put up little resistance, and got past the archers with some men lost. Nomads swarmed through the broken wall and climbed up to the firing steps to kill. Maikal had a more defined objective.
It was simple enough to gain the courtyard, in which many soldiers had gathered to wait for their chance to fight. The scene was one Maikal remembered from the siege he had been through as an observer from the other side of the coin. The soldiers were systematically slaughtered by mounted nomads who had no trouble crushing and slashing at the groundlings at will. When the courtyard was basically cleared Maikal waited at the entrance to the palace itself.
More nomads poured into the courtyard. He wanted to warn them away, for fear they could be counterattacked, but from what he had seen he did not really think there was anyone to counterattack or any place to mount one from.
Di-Lak and some others he knew came into the courtyard and found him easily.
"We have done it," the nomad said.
He was not jubilant, but confident. "This is only a start. The serfs will not work for the Gafts now. The word of what we have done will spread and the serfs will run away and join us. We have the Gafts at our mercy now."
"If you want to keep any alive at all then show mercy to them or there will be more war, always war," Maikal said.
"Where is the king?" someone asked.
"He is probably inside," Maikal said. "I think I know where to find him." He knew what this was going to be like too. He looked at his sword and noticed that it was covered with drying blood. He was not sickened as he would have been before. He had killed without thinking to be first into the castle.
"Some have escaped," another man said.
"Escaped to where?"
"They went toward the hill where the sacred objects are kept."
Maikal looked at the man and realized he was not a nomad, but a serf mounted and carrying a sword. Di-Lak was right about that.
"What are they going to do?" someone asked.
"Pray," Di-Lak said.
"I know what they will do," Maikal said. "I do not want to take the trouble to stop them. Why save them when we kill all these others."
"Let us go to the king," Di-Lak said firmly.
Di-Lak, Maikal, and several others dismounted and walked into the castle. There was no resistance. Maikal guided them in the direction of the great hall and it took only a little time to reach it.
The king and some of his men, as expected, were waiting, and waiting with the princess, the short-haired princess who probably had put the lance through his leg, Maikal realized, and remembered it had not altogether stopped hurting.
"So you have come back to us," the girl said. She was less lovely in defeat.
"You should have expected me," Maikal said.
He and the others advanced toward the table around which the king and his people were waiting. Swords were drawn. There were enough nomads to overcome any amount of ability, and more coming in.
The king stepped out and lunged at the nearest man. The man was caught across one side of his head and went down, and the king stuck his sword into the man's breast. But while he was watching what he was doing someone else stuck a sword into him.
The princess waited for Maikal. "I'll have you now, Maikal Wendal," she said. He met her. She stabbed lethally at him and he parried inexpertly, so that a split second later she was free again and slashing at him. He dodged and realized she was a match for him and better, so far as swords were concerned.
"No pretty machines to help you now, sorcerer," the girl said. Her short hair was swinging as she slashed at him and sun through the high windows was caught in it. She was wearing skirts, probably had not had enough warning to change, but she moved as lithely as she would have with nothing to hinder her.
Maikal parried, but struck at the hilt of her sword as hard as he could as he did it, struck hard enough to make the sword sting in her hand, and she hesitated for a second. If he did not have skill, he did have force, at least.
Then he moved again, not to thrust but to hit at the hilt once more, and the sword dropped from her hand. He held her where she was with his blade against her throat.
"Then kill me, Maikal Wendal. I see you have killed others to get to me."
"Keep her," Di-Lak said from behind him.
The rest of the Gafts, Maikal could see from looking around the room, were dead, and some of the nomads as well.
"I would not keep you, Maikal Wendal. If I had you now where you have me I would kill you slowly, a little at a time. You would be sorry you were ever born."
"Keep her and she will make a good wife once you tame her. You are old enough to marry," one of the others said.
The girl moved so quickly there was no time to react. She pulled a small knife from somewhere in her skirts and stabbed at Maikal. He thrust with the sword and it penetrated and more blood was spurting out on it.
"Well, she is dead," Di-Lak said. And just as well.
The girl lay on the floor with the dagger still in her hand and blood flowing from a wound in her throat. She seemed to be quite dead. Her eyes stared at him. Maikal turned away.
A man came running in. He spoke to Di-Lak in the nomad language. Di-Lak turned to Maikal.
"He says a machine has risen just as yours did from the sacred hill."
"I knew about that," Maikal said.
"What shall we do?"
"There is no need to do anything. Some of the Gafts are going to look for their brothers. They will probably never find anyone. They could be dead now, in relative time."
He tried to remember the numbers on the guidance-box in the old colonization ship, but he could not. He would never be able to do anything to help them again. He had never been able to do anything to help them at all.

XVII
THERE WAS a normal cold wind blowing down the streets in the ghetto. Maikal made his way to the apartment behind the academy and knocked on the door while wedging his foot on the sill to keep himself from blowing away.
A man answered. Herbert Herbert.
"Maikal! Come in. I had heard you came back today."
"I have been visiting my mother and father and the rest. They wanted to look at me again. I never thought they would have the chance."
"What did you bring back with you?"
"Half silver and half some weed that will serve for tobacco. I am no smoker so I don't know whether it is good or bad. I lost an oversuit and a needler in the process."
"You look fit."
"I made a little profit," Maikal said.
"There is no such thing as profit. You have earned everything and more."
Maikal smiled at the pendantic tone.
"Come and sit down," the schoolman said.
They went to the fire and sat in the chairs before it. Herbert Herbert found his pipe. He lit it thoughtfully and looked at Maikal.
"What have you to report of academic interest?"
"I found a people totally insane, but at peace and not apparently starving. I found another more to my taste but dominated by a colony of Tellurians who had lost everything they ever knew about. They fought with lances and arrows."
"Lost colonies are very rare."
"This one will not last for very much longer. I saw to that. I have lost a customer, I suppose. But there will be others."
"You will go out again?"
"I am only beginning to learn. I am learning feelings to go along with facts. Some of the feelings don't match the facts. I wonder whether we can ever live in peace. I wonder whether we would not degenerate into insanity."
"All societies will not be desirable," the schoolman said. "Remember the matriarchy Lahdz. The economy is based on cannibalism. There is no thought and no love and nothing except a rigid system made up of sullen people marching to an early end. It all works perfectly and there is no hunger, either, or war, or old age, or population problem. It is up to us to decide what system we will have."
"I don't know as much as I did."
"I suppose you feel that way," Herbert Herbert said.
"But I am going to go to the home world. I am going to see it for myself. There has to be something better than being a merchant and teaching people to kill one another."
"Be very careful of yourself," Herbert Herbert said suddenly in a different tone. "Perhaps you can come back to us and teach us how not to kill one another."
Maikal sat thinking. Then for some reason he began thinking about a long-haired girl somewhere in space in a cubical machine, aching for some destiny, and destined to have none. And he decided he did not know anything at all.


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