I opened the glove compartment and took out my papers. They identified me—with a description, pictures, letters of reference, fingerprints, and voice-prints—as an Arcturian lady of means, a newcomer to Berbidron and something of a hermit back home on Arcturus Ceta IV. “Is this the identity I’d have if I went to live in the city?”

“I think so. Don’t worry about the authenticity. There really was a Lady Evors Dalant.”

“Was?”

“Well, yes, we killed her as soon as she landed on Berbidron ..

Turn this book over for second complete novel

SUSAN K. PUTNEY

Miss Putney is from Nebraska, and in AGAINST ARCTURUS, her first novel for Ace, she displays the unmistakable woman’s touch.

But displayed equally well are a bright talent, a lively imagination, and a narrative style that has the ring of chilling authenticity.

We look forward to her next novel

THE EDITORS

AGAINST ARCTURUS

BY SUSAN K. PUTNEY

ACE BOOKS

A Division of Charter Communications Inc. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

AGAINST ARCTURUS

Copyright ©, 1972, by Susan K. Putney An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.

I

It was near the end of the Age of Bitter Wind, one hundred fifty-two years after Liom completed the Black Mountains Mural and barely 130 years after the death of Havril, when the Earth children came to Berbidron. The date was Spring Tenth, in consequence of which it was raining practically all across the northwestern kielin range; otherwise, more people would have seen the ship come down. As it was, the only witness is Korm the Builder. Her account follows:

Actually I wasn’t alone, but my companion was in the middle of a twenty-year term of anonymity. We had been sightseeing all over the northwestern continent, and at that time we were heading for Belim’s Pit, which is three days’ lope from the nearest berron, Stoneflower Glade. At the berron, they had given us each a sack of goldblade seeds to scatter in the mud, marking the way for later pilgrims of the year, but we were more interested in keeping an eye out for a fat kielin or a blue-tipped screamer, and it was because of this latter preoccupation that we happened to be looking up when the spaceship broke through the clouds.

It was a gray globe about 250 or 300 forearms in radius, with fire shooting out from the bottom, and it gave off a smoky smell and made a loud growling noise. We had noticed the noise before, but thought it was only thunder. The ship came down on three legs in the biggest clearing in the area—in the process of which, it withered four trees adjacent to the clearing and baked the grass to charcoal, even though everything had been soaking wet. The breeze told us that some small animal had also been caught in the flame.

Dropping our seed bags, we hid in some bushes well back from the burned zone and waited to see what would happen. Minutes later, a door opened at about the equator of the sphere and a ladder was lowered. Four plump silver shapes came out and backed single file down the ladder.

The four creatures stepped onto the charred grass and began running and jumping and dancing, evidently having been confined to their ship for some time. My friend and I tried to figure out what they were. Since their silver hides were hairless, I thought they might be a type of reptile, but my friend thought they were shaped more like long-legged monkeys. We crept through the bushes to the very edge of the clearing to get a better look.

Then we could see that the silver stuff was an artificial covering, and that inside their shiny masks their heads were more or less like ours, but with very little fur. They did look like a mangy variety of monkey, and I congratulated my friend on his acuteness of perception.

The monkey people got busy with some little devices of theirs, testing the air, the soil, and a withered leaf off one of the bushes. After a few minutes one of them took off his globe-mask and inhaled carefully. Then he turned to the other three and nodded his head at them, and they also took off their masks. After that we could hear them talking. Their language was meaningless to us, but my friend recorded the sounds and later had them translated, so I will include what they said.

The first person to take off his mask said, “There aren’t any harmful bacteria, at least not around here, Captain.”

Captain said, “Wesley, are you sure there haven’t been any previous expeditions to this solar system?”

Number three, Wesley, said, “I’m positive, sir.”

“Then how the hell did these bushes and trees get here?” said Captain. “And grass, tool It looks just like Earth.”

Number four said, “Pardon me, Captain Benson, but these plants aren’t identical to any Earth species, although they seem to be closely related. That big gray tree over there, for instance, is similar to Sequoia sempervirens, the California redwood. But it looks about fifty feet in diameter, which would make it quite a bit older than human civilization. So obviously, the plant life here could not have been left by an earlier expedition.”

Number one said, “Are you suggesting parallel evolution?”

“We’ll leave the theories to the biologists,” Captain Benson said. “Kerzyk—any animal life in the area?”

Number four, Kerzyk, looked at a big instrument he carried under his arm. “Yes, Captain. There are a few birds, but judging from their metabolic readings they’re nonaggressive, probably vegetarians or insect eaters. The insects aren’t very large or numerous—it may be that most of them are hibernating, in this cold weather. There are a few horse-sized, herbiverous reptiles with very slow metabolic rates, as if they were just coming out of hibernation. Also some small mammals, rodents probably, and … He stopped, and his hairless pink face turned several shades lighter. He turned and pointed into our bush… Over in that bush, two large omniverous mammals!”

The monkey people jumped as if they had been pinched. We, of course, thinking they had been saying something momentous, had respectfully refrained from interrupting, but this appeared to be our cue, so we stood up, smiling, and came forward into the clearing.

Wesley and Kersyk pulled little red metal things from their waist binders and pointed them at us. Pink beams came out of them. Realizing what they were, I dodged in time. But my friend went down, with his left arm and the whole left side of his body burned, from shoulder to hip. I grabbed him and jumped right out of that clearing and ran, because whatever game those monkey people were playing, it wasn’t my style. I took my friend to the nearest healing center; the poor fellow was so badly damaged he had to spend the rest of his years of anonymity flat on his back. Lasers are simply not supposed to be used on people.

Korm the Builder’s tale ends here, because after that experience she cut her visit short and went home to her berron in the Southern Hemisphere, never to have any more dealings with humans. On Spring Eleventh Donif the Healer, author of the definitive Encyclopedia of Life in the Outer Galazy, having heard about Korm and her unfortunate friend, went to the place of the spaceship to study the monkey people—from a safe distance. He brought along Agnor the Poisoner, a guardian of Rastin-arrorhin, because she could defend them against the strangers if necessary, and she brought her nephew Arlem the Actor (soon to be Arlem the Traitor), because he was good with languages.

Donifs account, minus the technical observations which are included in his encyclopedia, runs thusly:

The three of us sneaked up on the clearing, surrounded it, and climbed three small trees at a distance which, we hoped, would be beyond the range of their sensing devices. I counted on the fact that, new as they were to this planet, their eyes wouldn’t be accustomed enough to the scenery to pick out a gray Sarbril in a gray tree. We settled down to watch the creatures all day, occasionally communicating with each other by arm language when they weren’t looking.

The monkey people—humans, we later discovered they called themselves—had brought a lot of mechanical gadgets down from their spaceship and set them up in the clearing. There were about ten of them, always going up and down between the ground and the ship, though none of us was sure of the number because they all looked alike.

They weren’t wearing the silver stuff Korm had described, but they were all bundled up in many colors, with coverings even on their hands and necks and heads, except for those peculiar hairless faces. They had weak-looking jaws and puny fangs, and hardly any nose to speak of, but I thought their beady bright little eyes were rather cute.

Agnor signaled me that they seemed to be built like those rare brown apes that perished in the dead land years ago, if that was any help. It wasn’t. I already knew they were too long-legged to be apes, and too short-legged to be Sarbr.

Sitting in the tree was enjoyable at first. It wasn’t raining that day, and the sun had dried out my branch. The wind brought warmth and a faint scent of flowers from the south. I busied myself picking chunks of winter fur off my arms and legs, and later I ate a couple of beetles. There wasn’t much else to do.

One of the humans left his work in the clearing and came through the bushes straight toward my tree. I was sure he had spotted me, but when he ducked behind a bigger tree to be out of sight of the clearing, I thought he must be playing hid-and-seek. But that was a wrong guess, too, because then what did he do but drop the lower half of his coverings, squat down, and defecate. Then I understood why he’d been wearing all those covers in the first place—the poor devil had no furl

When he went back to the clearing I signaled this news to Agnor and Arlem, and then I climbed down and ran a quick analysis of the creature’s feces, which, aside from having a remarkably Sarbr-Uke fragrance, indicated that he was omniverous, nervous, and definitely related to the primates of Berbidron. In other words, these humans were almost Sarbr. I was forced to consider the possibility of parallel evolution, a theory which I have never cared for.

The day went by very slowly as we watched the humans from our hiding places. There was a light rain-shower, which sent the humans scurrying around getting themselves and all their gadgets back into the ship, but they came out again when the sun did.

One of them, wandering in the forest close to the clearing, found the two seed bags dropped by Korm and her friend the day before. With an excited cry he carried them to his associates and they took the bags up into their ship. When they came down again they seemed a lot more jittery. They constantly looked up from their work to peer into the forest, and each wore a conspicuous red laser device. Every time a wild animal made a noise away off through the trees, they jumped.

In the middle of the afternoon Arlem, who had been listening to them and trying to figure out their language, signaled to me that he thought he could make friends with them. It seemed unlikely to me, but there was no stopping Arlem; he jumped out of his tree and walked straight into the clearing.

Agnor the Poisoner was alert, and I held my breath. When the humans saw Arlem they reached for their lasers, but he held out his hands in the ancient gesture of welcome, and they kept the weapons ready but did not shoot.

Then Arlem spoke to them in their own language, which, as we later learned, was called Latin. “Welcome to Berbidron,” he said. “What are you?”

There were a hundred heartbeats of complete silence. Then one human launched on a monologue that was much too complicated for Arlem’s rudimentary Latin, but it was translated later: “My name is Captain Benson, of the interstellar ship Nina. We’re humans, representing the Earth-New Eden Alliance, and we already claimed this solar system in the name of the Alliance, but since there seem to be intelligent natives it looks like our claim is void.”

Another human murmured, “Who’d have thought the Wing-Lawrence Act would ever be more than a political maneuver?”

Arlem smiled blankly.

Captain Benson said, “Eh—we came in a big bird in the sky.” He pointed up at the spaceship, and flapped his arms. “Big bird.” He pointed at the sky. “Sky.” He pointed at himself and his friends, who looked amused. “Humans.” Then he pointed at Arlem with a questioning look.

“I am a Sarbril,” said Arlem. “My name is Arlem. What planet is your spaceship from?”

“It represents four planets: Earth, New Eden, Lila II, and Olympia. What did you say this planet’s name was?”

“Berbidron. The great home.”

“Oh. We were going to call it Benson.” The human gestured toward the ladder. “Well, come upstairs. I have some friends who would like to hear about your people. Are there very many of you Sarbrils?”

“Sarbril is one, Sarbr is many. There are more than a million Sarbr.”

They went into the ship and didn’t come out until evening, by which time Agnor and I were pretty nervous (also uncomfortable; it had been raining hard). When Arlem finally came out he was on excellent terms with the humans, and his Latin was fluent.

“The humans are fine people,” he told us, as we slogged through the mud in the direction of Stoneflower. “Very intelligent, very subtle, extremely imaginative. Do you know what? They told me that each of the four planets they represent has a population of over four billion humans, and that there are other planets with even more than that, and some of these others are liked by the first four and some are not, and if the ones that aren’t should happen to send representatives here, we’re supposed to demobilize them.” He went into a long explanation of human politics and plots and wars, which I still don’t understand, and we all agreed that the humans were, indeed, imaginative. We began looking forward to many entertaining interactions with them.

II

The next five years were years of learning. Those Sarbr who were interested in the affairs of humans set to work studying movies and 3D-vision shows from the human planets and reading everything they could get their hands on that had to do with human life. For five years Berbidron teemed with human anthropologists and economic developers, whose purpose was to help clarify the complexities of the human system. (Since we no longer enjoy the services of these individuals, anyone who doesn’t understand portions of this necessarily condensed narrative, and wants to, should refer to City Life, by Reylo or Ryl.)

At the end of five years, the Sarbr had built four cities and one small town. A city is a collection of buildings which are called, variously, office buildings, shopping centers, legislative houses, hotels, colleges, hospitals, mansions, and tenement slums. Each city also contained a park, which is a patch of ground with no building on it. The largest city, Benson, had a spaceport. All four cities soon boasted crime rates, unemployment rates, divorce rates, aircar accident rates, ulcer rates and birth rates unequaled by any but the most magnificent human cities. The population explosion in our cities far outstripped any human precedent, in spite of our late start. As for the small town, Center Junction, the function of its twenty inhabitants was to gape at visiting city slickers, or, on occasion, to go to a city and be gaped at. In short, although no Sarbr-il had ever traveled to a human planet—due to a quarantine law which required that we be isolated for ten Earth Standard, or more than seventeen Berbidronian, years—in order to see everything firsthand, we were already beating the humans at their own game.

That was when the Arcturians came into prominence. Near the star Derin-arth, known to humans as Arcturus, is a smaller star which they call Arcturus Ceta, and on the fourth planet of Arcturus Ceta there lived a group of humans. They spoke a different language from the other humans, discouraged visitors to their solar system, and showed signs of increasing militarism, which is a tendency to push people around with violence or threats of violence. One symptom of this was the stockpiling of instruments of violence such as laser projectors and explosive devices, and another was the training of large numbers of humans in the use of these instruments. This was tsk-tsked about on the other human planets, but none of them did anything about it for fear that their own militarism would show. Because Berbidron was considered a rich planet, well-endowed with minerals, oil deposits, timber, and soil in which crops will grow— the humans placed much political importance on the occupation of such a planet—and the planet Arcturus Ceta IV was not so rich, the Arcturians decided to get control of the cities of Berbidron—by force, naturally.

On the first of Spring, five years after the arrival of the first human spaceship, the Arcturians appeared in a fleet of thirty big ships and a lot of little ones. The humans of the New Eden Alliance did not relinquish control of the cities without a fight, but they were caught unprepared; their warning systems had been sabotaged by Arlem the Traitor, who had switched sides when the Arcturians offered him a job as a spy. The Arcturians killed over three hundred Allied humans, and shipped them and the survivors to a neutral planet. From that time on, the cities of Berbidron were under martial law; that is, the Sarbr had to do what the Arcturians told them to do.

The exact date on which the human Beth Goodrich became involved in the affairs of Berbidron is not known, but she estimates it to be at about the end of Spring, the same year the Arcturians came. At that time she was living on New Eden, and she received an invitation to visit an important human, Admiral Herman of the Allied Defense Fleet. We have obtained her firsthand account of the occasion, translated from Latin by Zhan the Young, because ever helpful Reylo the Wanderer had already departed on the return journey to Ryl, bearing the Warning, before the original Latin version was composed.

First I’d better explain my power of sympathy, which was the reason for my getting invited. Either I was born with it or I learned it when I was quite young, because I can’t remember ever not having it. Through most of my early childhood it was nothing more than a dim awareness of my own body; I could sort of influence things, like making a wart fall off my toe, or swelling up my tonsils so I wouldn’t have to go to school. I caught a few of the regular childhood diseases, but only mildly, and whenever I was too sick to go to school it was by design. Also, early in my childhood I began to be able to feel the relationship between myself and other people, more acutely than was normal for a child. By the time I reached my teens I had identified these two abilities as aspects of the same power—sympathy. Up until the age of about seventeen I could only sympathize—in anything but the normal human way —with things closely connected with me. My body, of course, was so intimately interdependent with my mind that I could control it quite easily—I knew about cells and what went on inside them long before I had my first class in biology. I was even able to set up a suggestion deep in my subconscious mind: shock notwithstanding, as long as there is any possible way for them to keep operating, my heart will go on beating and my lungs will go on breathing. I had also provided for a sort of suspended animation, in the event that no other measures worked.

With other people, my ability to sympathize was much weaker. Often I could get a dim sense of their motives and emotions somewhat more than a normal person could detect just by observing. I was comparatively sensitive to group attitudes, so that I got along well in groups, especially ones that depended on a strong bond of common purpose. I hoped someday to extend my sympathetic ability to the point where I could feel a blade of grass growing, or even feel a rock just being a rock, but after the age of seventeen my sympathy just sort of stopped growing. The only bond I’d ever managed with a nonhuman was with a pair of squirrels I’d raised from babyhood, who went with me almost everywhere.

At first I didn’t intend to answer the invitation from Admiral Herman, because I belonged to a group that frowned on collaboration with the Defense Fleet. But I didn’t know Admiral Herman and I couldn’t figure out what he wanted to talk to me for, so I showed up on the appointed evening in order to find out.

He was waiting for me in his study in full dress uniform, to show that this interview was official business. I remember looking at his starched black jacket with all that gold braid on the shoulders, and at the lintless beret which he doffed when I came into the room, and wishing I’d put on something a little dressier. But in my set, Polarian boots, baggy overalls and an inkstained blanket were the correct attire for keeping an appointment with an Admiral. Also I had a squirrel on each shoulder. Their names were Nutmeg and Elf.

“Good evening, Miss Goodrich,” he said, showing no reaction to my getup. Then I sensed that I looked exactly as he had expected, except for the squirrels. It was all right then; I was correct. He said, “I’m glad you could come. Sit down, please, and make yourself at home.”

I did. “Well?” I said.

He crossed the room to close the door, which was made of nice dark wood like the paneling. It was just like in the movies, a very studyish, study, only not quite so glamorous, and the wastebasket overflowed on the rug. Then he went back to sit behind his desk with his hands folded in front of him, just looking at me. I thought he was having second thoughts about whatever he’d called the meeting for. He said, “What do you think of the Arcturians?”

Instantly I thought up the right retort. “I think they stink. I suppose you like their style.”

“Don’t insult me,” he said, evidently forgetting that my friends and I existed for the delight of insulting him and his friends. “I take it you disapprove of their invasion of the planet Berbidron?”

“Sure. We bom—I am in complete sympathy with the people who bombed the Arcturian embassy the day after the invasion.”

So far, I couldn’t figure out what he expected of me, or exactly what he thought of me. The two squirrels, sensing my confusion and reacting in the manner of all rodents to almost anything, indicated that they needed to go to the bathroom. Usually they didn’t go without my permission, so I just let them suffer.

Admiral Herman said, “How would you like to be in a position to do something constructive about the Arctuarian problem?”

Here was a bad question. I couldn’t tell what he wanted. The two squirrels moved restlessly. I took a guess. “If you ask me, bombing the—well, these people who bombed the embassy were doing something pretty constructive. Slum clearance. You want to donate some bombs or something?” I hoped he was taking this in the light vein in which it was intended.

The Admiral muttered something through his teeth, then said, “Look, you’re a professional revolutionary. I’m offering you a chance to start a revolution where it would do some good.”

My friends were counting on me to defend our honor. I jumped to my feet. “Listen, Herman, don’t ever say we don’t do any good. The only thing that keep you gold-braided pigs and your bedfellows in the High Council from taking that one little step that makes you just like the Arctuarians—”

“That’s not the issue!” he roared, surging up from his chair. Nutmeg and Elf ducked under my blanket with their little sharp claws digging into my flesh, but like the Spartan boy in the story, I didn’t show the pain. I thought I was on solid ground at this point, as I called him a few nasty names, but then Herman said unexpectedly, “Now sit down and listen to what I have to say—it’ll interest you.”

I sat. “Okay, I’m listening.”

He glared at me for a while. Then, sitting down, he explained, “We want to sneak you onto Berbidron to start a popular revolution. We can’t just blast the Arcturians out of there, because we don’t want to break off the diplomatic relations with them. Besides, it might look wrong to the other planets.”

I gave the standard response. “You wouldn’t care unless you had something to gain from this. What is it?” “Berbidron is loaded with natural resources. The Arcturians are shipping in men and machines to start stripping the planet, to get money, to build a bigger fleet, to take over all the free planets, starting with the Allies.”

“So it’s the fate of the Allies you’re worried about, eh? I don’t suppose you personally have any investments in Berbidronian industry which you’d like to recover?” He shook his head. “There is no Berbidronian industry”

“What? But they have cities and businesses and everything. They even produced their own 3dv shows. I’ve seen Sarbr-produced documentaries about Berbidronian industries. Do you mean to tell me the government pulled another fast one?”

It was the Sarbr who faked it. “Miss Goodrich, didn’t you ever think there was something abnormal about the way those natives soaked up our human culture so thoroughly in less than three Standard years?”

“I figured they were just fools. They had a better deal going with their own original culture … I suppose.” “You suppose,” he said, with significant emphasis. “We all suppose, but the fact is that nobody really knows anything about the Sarbr.” He put his hand on the little glittering globe of New Eden’s constellations, mounted on a stand next to his desk. His finger slid along the curve of its transparent surface, leaving a trail in the dust, and stopped in the constellation of the Teardrop, which is where Berbidron is, from New Eden. (It also happens to be my birth sign, a fact which I considered highly significant.) He frowned at the globe, and at his dusty finger, for a little while, then said, “Miss Goodrich, are you aware of the fact that forty-some renowned anthropologists studied their culture for those three years?”

“I read about it somewhere; the results weren’t conclusive.” By this time I’d forgotten to pick on him. I always forget my responsibilities when I get interested in things.

“Not conclusive!” he said, with a short laugh; it was the first time I’d ever seen an Admiral laugh. “They were pure gibberish! Those scientists never figured out whether the Sarbrian culture is simple or complex, idyllic or savage, settled or nomadic, advanced or primitive-even multiple or singular! In fact, although they recorded language samples from all parts of the planet, they couldn’t even decide whether the dialects were quite dissimilar, or all one and the same.”

“How could they not find out all that?”

“Well, for one thing, the Sarbr welcomed them in the cities, but any scientist who tried to study them in their forest habitat got an emphatic cold shoulder. For another thing, not even the city Sarbr would make the least effort to try and teach their native tongue to any human; they kept saying it was a dead language. But the main problem was that, no matter how much they dress like us and talk like us and mimic us in every way, these creatures are not human. They don’t think like humans; I think half the time they don’t understand the questions you ask them, even when they give what appear to be the correct answers. They do all sorts of inexplicable things.”

“Like what?”

“Well, they never bring their children to the cities; not even if they live in the cities themselves.”

“That’s understandable. If I had a kid, I wouldn’t want him to grow up in the city.”

“But they pretend they do have children in the cities. They use trick photography to put them in movies and 3dv commercials—well, you’ve seen the newsreels. They mention them in newsreels and magazines. They even build schools and playgrounds, and the stores have toy departments, and yet there are no childrenl” “That’s weird,” I admitted. “What else?”

“They lie about their population. The first humans who landed there were told that there were over a million Sarbr, and yet subsequent planetwide sensor survey revealed that they have a maximum of eighty thousand people.”

“On the entire planet?”

“That’s right.” He glanced ruefully out the window, where, even this far out in the suburbs, the city glare blotted out the stars. “Must be nice. Yet they complain that their cities are overpopulated. Benson, the capitol, is supposed to have a population of over three million. An actual head count reveals only three hundred and twenty Sarbr in that city—give or take thirty; it varies—and even fewer in the other cities. The craziest thing is, they stick to their fake populations even under truth drugs, and the most sophisticated lie detector in the galaxy can’t find any insincerity in them. They actually believe there are millions of them!”

“Do they do anything else crazy?”

“Well, as I said, their industry is fake, just like their population. I don’t know how they scraped up the materials and labor to build those big, empty cities. Everything they do is either the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for no reason at all. I was there and I talked to them; I know. I’m telling you all this so you’ll know what to expect, when you get there.”

We were the Admiral versus the revolutionary again. “If I go there,” I said.

His eyebrows went up. “Can you refuse a chance to engineer your own revolution?”

Where would a revolutionary stand on a revolution against tyrants, but set up by other tyrants almost as bad? I knew my position ought to be the opposite of his, so I tried to sense his position.

He was saying, “Of course your primary function will be to get rid of the Arcturians, but before you form the Sarbr into an army that really fights, you’ll have to figure out what makes them tick.” He didn’t seem to have any position—maybe this talk with me hadn’t been his idea. He added, “That’s why we picked you, instead of one of the more prominent revolutionary leaders. You have a degree in psychology, and sometimes you show signs of trying to understand people who don’t think as you do. Sometimes, Miss Goodrich, you’re capable of sympathy, even with minds as alien to yours as, for instance “—we smiled—” a Defense Fleet Admiral. Or a big hairy alien with fangs an inch long.”

He waited for me to acknowledge the compliment.

I shrugged and said, “Thanks.”

He waited for me to say something else.

“When’s the next ship for Berbidron?” I said.

He smiled. “Not for a couple of months. We have to train you in self-defense, weaponry, military strategy, the Arcturian language, all orts of things. Do you know how to pilot a space cruiser? I didn’t think so. And you’ll have to get your shots, of course.”

“Will my squirrels need shots?”

Quick disapproval. “You aren’t going to take them along.”

But I had to, of course, because they were my only link with the part of the universe that wasn’t human. He didn’t exactly understand when I explained, but he finally said it would be all right, if I really needed them to help understand the Sarbr.

“When you finally arrive on Berbidron,” he concluded, “You’ll be met by an underground Sarbrian organization, the Berbidronian Liberation Committee. They’ll provide you with anything you need, and hopefully they’ll become the nucleus of your army. Report to the President’s office at the U. of N.E. at nine in the morning, for your first briefing. And, in case I don’t see you again before you leave—good luck, Miss Goodrich.”

We shook hands, although I thought he was carrying the buddy-buddy business a bit too far. Elf ran down my arm to bite his thumb. I tasted blood.

News of this development evidently did not reach the Arcturians immediately. It wasn’t until Autumn Tenth that they contacted their best Berbidronian undercover agent, Arlem the Traitor, with news of the expected arrival of Beth Goodrich. We have obtained his testimony:

Deep underneath Desker Memorial Spaceport in Benson was the Berbidronian Headquarters of the Imperial Protective Guard, the space force. There was one small office complex which represented the Berbidronian Intelligence Division. That was where I went on the foggy afternoon of Autumn Tenth.

I strode jauntily into the outer office and gave the secretary a quick, careless kiss. The first time I’d done that she’d objected on the grounds that we were of different species. I had pointed out that making out with every beautiful woman in sight was part of my responsibility as the best secret agent on the planet, and it wasn’t my fault she’d had the misfortune to be bom human, and then she laughed and said oh all right. I don’t know what she thought was so funny. Anyway, that day I kissed her and waited while she tuned in Colonel Sein on the intercom.

“Sir, agent N-73 is here. Shall I send him in?”

The intercom blared, “Yes, damn you, how many times do I have to tell you? Send the creature in at once!”

The door to the inner office slid open silently to admit me, and closed after me. I faced Darf Sein across his big black plastic desk.

Behind him, incongruous in his shiny office, grew a hoary old black tree root, as big around as a man, reaching down through the ceiling and the floor as if the office didn’t exist. It belonged to the great gray tree that obstructed traffic in the middle of the spaceport, which nobody had ever gotten around to cutting down. I think Sein resented that root, even though it had a couple of stiff tendrils that he could’ve hung things on, if he’d wanted to.

As the head spy, he had always been a disappointment to me. In the first place, he didn’t look the part. He was a thin, jittery little man, with wispy hair and pale bulging eyes, and a face and hands as soft-looking as a woman’s. He didn’t act like a head spy, either.

“Uh, sit down, please,” he said humbly.

I bent my legs and lowered my center of gravity as if to sit down on thin air, and a section of the cushioned floor rose to the occasion, to my great relief. Sometimes the chair mechanism didn’t work. I never knew. “You called me a creature just now,” I said.

‘‘Oh—I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean you, of course. Uh, I was referring to someone else entirely.” He fought with a desk drawer, got it open, pulled out a brown folder, dropped it on the floor, ducked down to pick it up, opened it over his desk, and slowly edged down behind it until I couldn’t see anything but his feathery hair. His voice continued, “I would never say such a thing about—”

“All right, just tell me what you want.”

With a final apologetic mumble, he sat up straighter and peered over the top of the folder to meet my eye—I think he must have been sitting on a couple of dictionaries. I tried to look reassuring, and he lowered the folder. “N-73,” he said, “I—uh—well, there’s a job for—uh, which we’d appreciate your doing for us, if— uh—if you don’t have any other plans, and I don’t mean that sarcastically.”

“I think I can find time for a job,” I said tiredly, “so long as it doesn’t interfere with my weekends.”

“Uh—yes, that’s, uh, fine. That is, I don’t know about weekends, but I’m sure—well, it depends on how things turn out, you see. If you can get away on weekends, by all means do so, uh, if you want to. Uh, we don’t pay by the hour.” He giggled halfheartedly, and I laughed to put him at his ease, but it made him flinch.

I said encouragingly, “So what’s the job?”

“We’ve—that is, our agents on New Eden have discovered that the, uh, New Eden Alliance has dispatched a special agent to, uh, spearhead a revolution designed to, uh, negate the, uh, influence of the Arctuarian Empire on this planet. This agent will land on a remote part of the planet late tonight—uh, early tomorrow morning, and we want—er, that is, we’d appreciate it very much if you could arrange to, uh, be there.”

“Do you want me to kill him?” I said, perking up and smiling in a way that flashed my fangs in the light. I had a reputation of bloodthirstiness to live up to.

He twitched, and the folder went up again. “Uh, no, that is, please don’t, if you can avoid it. What we would like best, uh, if you could manage—that is, if you would manage—is for you to get into the underground—I mean, the Berbidronian Liberation Committee—and gain the, uh, confidence of the Allied agent. Then you could, uh, pass along to us, if you would be so kind, any information regarding the, uh, Allied fleet and whatever, uh, activities they may have planned in the, uh, vicinity of this solar system.”

“Okay, I’ll let you know when I get into the BLC.” I got up and started to leave.

“Uh, wait… .” He seemed to shrink in his chair as I turned to face him. “Pardon me for detaining you, but, uh, we’d—that is, my superiors—would appreciate it very, very much if you would get into the, uh, BLC, soon enough to meet the, uh, Allied agent when he arrives on Berbidron.”

“You mean tonight?” I said in disbelief.

“Um, well, yes, if it’s possible.”

I frowned, which sent him so far down in his chair that he was practically sitting on the floor. “Well, I can’t manage it by tonight without cheating a little bit.”

“Cheating? Oh, that’s fine. Uh, whatever you decide is necessary, the Empire will, uh, back you up a hundred percent. Is there, er, anything you need? False identity papers? Money? Uh, a new transciever?”

“No, thanks, I’m all set.” I gave him a big smile that made him shudder and turn pale. “See you, chief.” The door slid open, and I walked out.

The receptionist looked up from some typing as I passed by. “Well, you’re still in one piece,” she said. “Was the monster in a good mood today?”

I laughed as the outer door opened. Before it closed behind me I heard Sein’s voice, almost unrecognizable with harshness.

“Miss pimple-faced incompetent,” it snarled, “I have had to look at one example too many of your fumble-fingered typing! If you don’t get that report in here on the double, and with no mistakes, not only will you lose your job, but I will personally see to it that no reputable Arcturian business will ever hire you with a ten-foot pole! Now get to work!”

With a disconsolate feeling, I left headquarters. Why couldn’t he be that tough on his Sarbr spies? You can’t

feel like a real spy when your boss is a milksop.

Turning up the collar of my trenchcoat, I walked down a fog-shrouded street and disappeared into the bowels of the great, cruel city.

III

Beth Goodrich arrived on Berbidron on the night of Autumn Tenth, but she saw it for the first time three days before that:

The space cruiser Adamant switched out of shortcut space 280 million miles from Berbidron. In relation to Edensus, our vector was nil, but this was a different part of the galaxy, closer to the center, plus a good deal to the right, facing center. Adamant was moving across the Sarbrian solar system at several hundred miles per second. Before I even had time to read the galloping digits on the odometer, the computer turned on the propulsion unit and we began to slow down.

Most interstellar ships use rocket power in normal space, but since rockets are highly detectable and I was trying to arrive in secret, Adamant had a gravity selector. It was based on the principle that the sum of all the gravitational urges from all the matter in any given direction in space is tremendous, so that if you screen or nullify most of the gravity in all the directions you don’t want to go in, you will go in the direction you do want to go in. This is a nice way to travel, because, as far as physical sensations are concerned, it’s totally without inertia—provided that the whole ship is screened, not just the engine. Some people get nauseous from it, but it’s all in their heads; personally, I found it deeply gratifying to be so attracted by a whole huge slice of the universe. They’d put gravity selection in all spaceships, if it wasn’t so expensive. The g.s. system on the Adamant was worth about one eighth of New Eden.

The computer headed us in the right direction. At

our present speed of 543 1/3 miles per second, we would rendezvous with Berbidron in six Standard days, or about three Berbidronian days. The ship could go faster, but there was no point in getting there ahead of the time the Berbidronian Liberation Committee was going to be there to meet me.

After checking over the instruments to be sure the computer had done everything right, the first thing I did was take the shutters off the front viewplate. Nobody wants to continue looking at shortcut space once they’ve satisfied their curiosity, but long space is something else again. I turned off all the lights in the cabin— except the instruments, of course—in order to see outside better. Then I buckled into my swivel harness in the focal point of the ring of glowing and blinking instrument panels and stared out from the small darkness of the ship into the bright black sky.

My gosh, space is big! Think of a daisy decal compared to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; that’s the difference between seeing the sky at night from a planet, and seeing it in person, from a spaceship. It was always bigger than I remembered. Some day, I hoped, I might be able to share a sympathetic bond with all those stars.

Nutmeg dog-paddled past my head. The air current in her wake told me it was time to change her diaper— the only way to deal with squirrels in free fall. I took care of both of them and fed them some peanut butter. They had adapted pretty well to space travel. I had taught them how to get around in free fall by kicking against the walls, though I think they still secretly believed it was the dog-paddling, and not the wall-kicking, that got them where they wanted to go. They were a great comfort to me in those six days—the only relief from the emptiness of my own company.

Later in the first day, I had the computer find our destination in the telescope, and that was how I first saw it. Berbidron drifted through space, a thin luminous cusp of white and pale blue, with a fuzzy halo outlining the side that was dark in its own shadow. No cities glittered in the night, and no moon shone. It looked like a cold, forbidding place.

I shivered and reached out to stroke a passing squirrel, then gave him a helpful shove in the direction of the water dispenser. Peanut butter makes you thirsty.

After a seemingly interminable time, Adamant drew close to Berbidron. I switched off the computer and took over the helm. Breaking orbit, we dropped through a high cloud cover toward the forest, about two hundred miles northwest of Benson. Gravity, distressingly heavy after all those weightless days, descended on the squirrels and me.

The space crusider settled down on its three legs, with a crunch and crackle of bushes that made me wince. Switching on the outside lights, I looked through the viewport.

I seemed to have landed in the middle of a thicket. Tall bushes frothed around the ship, all autumny and familiar in their gold and brown leaves. A few yards away, the bushes left off and there were colorful trees. Beyond the range of my lights in the misty air loomed an immense shape, towering above all the trees like the leg of a giant. I knew it was only another tree—one of those big gray ones I’d read about. But it had a feeling of unwelcome, or something. I didn’t like it.

No people were there to meet me. I checked the rendezvous coordinates on my map, against where the automatic navigator said we were, and we were there. The ship’s chronometer said fifteen minutes till rendezvous time.

Drawing the shutters’ over the viewplate, I changed into my long underwear, put on a fresh set of coveralls —black, for spy work—and my good old Polarian boots, and a heavy parka. Then I strapped on the big knapsack which contained spare clothes, batteries for my laser pistol, some concentrated food, a canteen, a map, a tranquilizer-dart blowgun—which I actually knew how to use—various clever little explosive devices, and some personal items. On my belt were my laser pistol, a neon glowglobe (a Sarbrian invention. They weren’t exported, but the Admiral had reluctantly given me his, which he’d brought home to New Eden as a souvenir. I kept it on a chain in a drawstring bag, because I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off), more laser batteries, my purse, a secret compartment full of cyanide pills, a hand grenade, a smoke bomb, a stink bomb, and a nylon rope. There was a knife sheath strapped to my right thigh, with a knife in it. I felt weighted down, but ready for anything.

After fixing my hair in a French twist and anchoring it with a warm wool scarf, I dropped Elf and Meg into the hood of my parks, turned off the ship’s power, took the keys out of the ignition, and went outside. I had three antidetection field projectors, which went in a triangle around the ship—I put the keys under one of them—and a leafy camouflage net, which went over it. With the ship hidden, I set out to search the vicinity for signs of the BLC. I couldn’t take waiting all alone in that dark forest, with the monster trees around.

It was cold and windy, and the bushes kept whipping against my arms. I pushed through the foliage for a few yards, then stopped and yelled, “Anybody here?”

There was a deep growl ahead of me that slid to my right and’faded under the sound of the wind. I froze. There were wild beasts in these woods.

The bush right behind me rustled. It wasn’t the wind. I turned around quickly and said, “Who’s there?”

“Identify yourself,” came a deep voice, in Arcturian.

I drew in a sharp breath. Then, in Arcturian, “Hail the Premier of the Empire.” At the same time, I sent out a sneaky mental feeler. But all I could sense in the owner of the voice was caution.

“Bagurrid the Premier of the Empire,” replied the voice, in a tone that would have shriveled the Premier right down to the toes of his ruby slippers.

“The stars shine brightest on a free planet,” I said in Latin, hopefully.

Then a warm rush of welcome swept through me. There were three of them nearby, and they were on my side. “The sun scorches the fur of a slave,” replied the bush, also in Latin.

“Apple,” I said in English.

“Pie,” said the bush.

There was a whole book full of passwords, and if I had cared to go on, I think that bush would have enthusiastically given the correct response to every one, but I said, “My name’s Beth.”

There was a pause, possibly while someone tried to remember the answer to that one, and then the bush rustled and a tall, dark shape towered out of it. “My name’s Jahor. Welcome to Berbidron. Our camp’s a short walk from here; just follow me.” He raised his voice. “Imilon, I want you to scout ahead. Arlem will bring up the rear.”

We started through the forest. If there was any path, I couldn’t see it. It was all rocks and bushes, which were rough going for me, although the Sarbr, with their longer legs, didn’t seem to be having any trouble. They went pretty fast, and I had to almost run to keep up. Twice I tripped in the dark. The second time, Arlem, coming up behind me, said, “You should pick up your feet.”

I flashed him a mean look which I thought he couldn’t see in the dark, but he said sharply, “You’d better keep a civil expression on your face.” He was bigger than me, so I did.

After a few minutes of running and tripping I was panting, and the Sarbr were more in a hurry than ever. “Don’t slow down,” Jahor told me. “We want to get under cover before a patrol flies by and detects our body heat, and there’s one due soon. There’s a curfew, you know, which we’re violating.”

“A curfew, out here in the middle of the forest?”

Jahor shrugged. “The Arcturians are like that. Not too bright, but nasty.”

“Oh, no, they’re smart,” said Arlem. “Only the low-ranking ones are dumb. The higher up in their hierarchy you look, the more diabolical they get.”

“That’s true,” Jahor admitted. “I’ve seen some excellent diabolicalness. But they aren’t as consistent as they might be.”

I had a feeling both of these Sarbr were simpleminded. I hoped they weren’t big in the Berbidronian Liberation Committee.

Then I tripped again and fell flat on my face. “Oh, damn!” The end of the smoke bomb had poked me right under the rib cage, and even though I didn’t think the skin was broken, it sure hurt. “Damn, damn!”

“Hush!” said Jahor, slowing down and looking back.

“Be silent!” Arlem told me as he helped me to my feet. “How about if you ride on my back? We could go a lot faster that way. You’re too little to weigh anything.”

He was a good two feet taller than me, and well filled out, so I thought I probably wouldn’t be a burden, at that.

Riding on Arlem’s back was like riding on a roller coaster, because when a Sarbr-il is loping his center of gravity goes up and down like a sine wave, and these Sarbr were loping right along. With my legs around Arlem’s waist and my arms around his neck, I watched the giant shadows flash by. I felt the cold pine-scented wind—or was it after-shave? but no, where would a Sarbr-il shave?—and the muscles of his body working tirelessly. I remember wishing human men could run like that.

IV

Half an hour later, without having seen any Arcturian patrols, we arrived at the secret headquarters of the Berbidronian Liberation Committee. He were challenged by three pairs of sentires, all of whom felt it necessary to jump suddenly out of the dark bushes with a shout, the cumulative effect of which nearly gave me a nervous breakdown—but my companions thrived on it. We exchanged reams of passwords. By the time we reached the main camp, I knew that either the Arcturian regime was a lot more thorough than Allied intelligence had led me to believe, or else the Sarbr had let their imaginations run away with them, which, after what Admiral Herman had told me, I considered to be entirely possible.

The main camp wasn’t much to see. There were a few camouflaged tents, and also, Arlem said, an ammunition cache, but the BLC was not large. The camp was in a clearing of sorts, but there were no unshielded lights, and when Arlem set me down I had to stumble around the same as before. One good thing: the morale was high. I felt it all around, and was strengthened by it.

“This way,” said Jahor, leading the way toward the biggest tent, where a warm light showed through the partly open doorway.

A sentry announced us quietly to someone inside the tent, and then an old voice said, “Enter.”

Jahor pulled back the door flap and I went inside, followed by Arlem and then Jahor. Imilon went off somewhere.

The first thing that caught my eye was a head-sized, pinkish-orange glowglobe hanging by a chain from the peak of the tent. Its light was garish neon sign light, and yet in this uncommercial setting it was almost friendly. There was a ruddy cast on everything, as from firelight. Other than that, the tent was not impressive. It was as cold inside as out. About as big as a normal sized room, it had a dirt floor, and the walls and roof were of a scaly material that might have been reptile hide or tree bark, or a plastic imitation of one or the other. There were a few wooden stools, and one table with some papers on it.

Behind the table stood the biggest Sarbr-il I’ve ever heard of. She wore a gray leather playsuit—the traditional native dress—as if it were an ermine mantle. In that light her fur was fire colored, but judging by the comparative darkness of Arlem and Jahor, she must have been quite light—probably, I thought, she was old and time bleached. It was the first good look I’d ever had at a Sabr-il, in person. To me she was not beautiful, but then, it wasn’t a face to be judged by human standards. Her head was long, to accommodate the jaws full of big teeth, and there were bulges in the cheeks at the comers of her wide mouth, where the fangs were. There was a rather wide space between her upper lip and her nose, and the nose was of Cyranoid proportions, high bridged, with nostrils wide and flared like a bull’s. Her large eyes were deepset, her forehead high and broad. The strangest feature, to me, was the crest in her skull, starting at what would have been her hairline if she hadn’t been furry all over, and going back like an Indian scalplock, to the top of her spine.

When this woman first set eyes on me, for all the built-in ferocity of her looks, her expression was touchingly open. With something of a start, I realized that the appealing thing about her was that she looked so human—as humans look in those rare moments when we are seen, unbooby trapped by the thousand little games and illusions with which we amuse ourselves. Then something clamped’ down in her mind; her expression closed and she was strictly the revolutionary leader.

Jahor said, “Lady Ryl, this is the agent from the New Eden Alliance. Her name is Beth… ?”

“Goodrich,” I said, going forward to shake the old freedom fighter’s hand. She expected me to be a typical spy type, businesslike, but rather brash on account of my youth. It was a new role to me, so I thought I ought to work into it gradually. “You must be the Lady Reylo Ryl. I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re practically a legend back at Allied Intelligence” This was an exaggeration.

The old lady bent her head in acknowledgement of the compliment. “The trouble with legends is that they are so hard to live up to,” she smiled. “Please sit down. I think we will work well together. The Allies inform us that you are well trained and very experienced, though young. Tell me, have you made specific plans, concerning your activities here, or do you prefer to, as they say, ‘play it by ear’?” The soft old voice had great natural

dignity, and almost no accent.

Jahor and I sat near the door, facing her. Arlem stood by us for a while; as we talked, he began to move about the tent, looking at everything. I thought it was rude of him but they didn’t seem to notice. I said, “Well, what I do depends mainly on what the BLC is doing. I wouldn’t want us to be working at cross-purposes or anything.”

All three Sarbr looked sheepish. Lady Ryl said, “Actually, you won’t have to worry about interfering with the activities of the Committee. We’ve done hardly anything, so far.”

“Oh?”

“Well,” said Jahor, “the trouble is, we’ve never had a revolution on this planet before. We don’t know how to go about it. It never occurred to any of us to read up on the subject, until suddenly the Arcturians invaded, and now they won’t let us have any books about revolutionary tactics, so we don’t know what to do.”

So I explained to them about bombing and sabotaging strategic installations, or people, about hit-and-run fighting, and the importance of propaganda. I suggested that they start a secret propaganda headquarters in each city, and that they find out where some strategic installations might be.

“I don’t know if we have enough men for all that,” said Ryl.

“How many do you have?”

She cleared her throat delicately. “Well, about thirty, in all.”

Jahor pointed out, “Our morale is good, though.”

I could hardly believe it. “Only thirty, on the whole planet?”

“Counting you, thirty-one,” said Reylo Ryl. “Of course, officially we have thousands, and we’ll probably be recruiting hundreds of thousands more, now that you’re here and we can promise them some action.”

Admiral Herman had said the total population of Berbidron was less than eighty thousand, but he’d also said it was impossible to get them to admit it. “Well,” I said tactfully, “I guess we ought to recruit as many a we can, and gain the sympathy of the majority of the people. Then we can sabotage the Arcturians’ communications and so on, in order to weaken them. Then we mount an all-out attack on their military bases. In the attack, we’ll have support from the Allied Defense Fleet. All I have to do is radio the date, time, and locations we’ll need them here at, and they’ll send a squadron to prevent the Arcturians from shipping in reinforcements. They may even drop a few bombs, if I ask them to, but they can’t be too obvious about it. They’ll be disguised as pirate ships, to avoid interplanetary diplomatic repercussions.’’

Arlem, standing behind Lady Ryl and looking over her shoulder at the papers on the table, said, “Do they know your voice? And is there a code?”

“Oh, yes, they have voice-prints of me, and the messages have to be in four codes all at the same time, and scrambled too.”

“It sounds like a good system,” Jahor said. “You Allied people are as good as espionage as the Arcturians, and that’s going some.”

“Oh, thank you,” I said faintly, making a mental note to ask Reylo Ryl about Jahor sometime, in private. He was peculiar.

“Well,” said the Lady, “what are your immediate plans? Will you need our help?”

“I’d like to start first thing in the morning, I guess, working up some public support for the BLC. But I’m not familiar with the land, or the customs. Do you have any idea how I ought to go about it?”

The revolutionary leader tilted her chair back and looked thoughtfully at the glowglobe dangling on its burnished chain. After a minute she said, “If I were you I’d assume an Arcturian identity—we can get you one— and live in Benson and just start meeting people and converting them to the cause.”

I was disappointed. “But the cities contain only one percent of the population! I was thinking more along the lines of a grass-roots movement.”

They looked blankly at me. Then Reylo Ryl smiled. “Oh, you must be thinking of the forest people. But they don’t count; they’re not involved. For our purposes, the city people are all the people.”

I’d been warned about that attitude, but I thought the city people just considered the forest people to be hickville nobodies, and I protested, “But they’ll make a great army] I mean, pardon me, Lady Ryl, but it’s a mistake not to make use of them. Once we alert them to the threat of the Arcturians to Berbidronian freedom, they’ll be invaluable to our cause.”

Arlem said doubtfully, “You mean, you want to go around to all the berrons and bring the forest people to life, on our side?”

“Yes, I guess you could put it that way.”

Reylo Ryl said uneasily, “I’m not sure that’s—” then she lapsed into Sarbrian, and the three natives carried on a hasty discussion.

I listened anxiously. The warm security of our shared purpose shrank to almost nothing. Something funny was going on.

Reylo Ryl looked at me and said, “All right, you can try it, and we’ll even help you, provided you’re willing to claim all the blame in case they don’t like it.”

“Well, all right. Why are you so concerned, anyway? Are the forest people dangerous or something?”

“Of course not. They aren’t anything. But if you try to make something out of them and they don’t like it, they might get mad.”

“What would they do then?”

“It depends on the circumstances. Well, if you want to cover the whole planet you’ll not want to go on foot. We’ll get you an aircar, and an interpreter.” She paused, and smiled—what big fangs she had! “Arlem, you ought to do nicely for that. You two can go over the maps and choose a route in the morning, and leave as soon as you’re ready. In case you do get any recruits, we’ll have follow-ups ready to send along to teach them the languages and so on. And in case you change your mind or give up, we’ll also have a city identity prepared for you.” The old lady motioned for us to leave. “Arlem will show you to your sleeping quarters. Good night. Jahor, you stay. We have things to talk over.”

Arlem and I ducked out of the tent into the chilly darkness and started walking. I could feel the camp’s morale rise around me again, like a feather mattress. It was the same as when I was back home with my friends. Maybe the Sarbs weren’t so different from humans, after all.

“We figured you wouldn’t want to sleep under a bush,” said Arlem, smiling, “so we put a little tent for you. It hasn’t got a heater or anything, but it’s insulated and your body heat ought to warm it up pretty fast.” He cleared his throat and added, “I could help you warm it up, if you want.”

“Nol But thanks anyway.” I changed the subject quickly. “Uh, Arlem, would you mind telling me what that was all about in there?”

“What what was all about?”

“When you all got so upset and had to talk Sarbrian and everything. Why would the forest people object to my trying to recruit them?”

“No special reason. It’s just that they aren’t alive,” said Arlem. “Here’s your tent. I’ll wake you at breakfast time, and then we can go over the maps. Good night.”

“Good night.” Uncovering my glowglobe, I crawled into the tent, which was actually a pup tent for a Sarbr-il, and consequently quite roomy for a human. It had soft animal pelts all laid out for a bed. Stripping down to my long underwear, I crawled in among them quickly. Elf and Meg, who had huddled nervously in my parka hood all that time without even squirming much, stepped outside the tent with little noises of relief. They wanted to stay outside and poke around a little bit, but I was afraid something, or someone, might think they were good to eat, so I had them come back inside. When they snuggled under the covers next to my stomach, I put the light back in the bag and closed my eyes. Usually in new surroundings I don’t sleep very well, but in the friendly security of that camp I slept like a log.

“Wake up, Beth Goodrich. The coffee is on the fire and the cans are being opened.”

I opened my-eyes and looked down the length of my bedding to the furry gray head silhouetted in the triangular tent-flap doorway. Sunlight and cold air streamed in.

“Close the door! It’s cold!”

“So will breakfast be, if you don’t hurry up. Dress warmly—the wind is from the north today.” He let the flap drop back into place, and I heard his soft footsteps going away.

I dug a mirror out of my knapsack and tried to fix my face. By humans I’m considered to be nice looking, really. Humans think brown skin and long black hair go well together, and they like women to be a little on the skinny side. Anyway I put some dark marks on my eyelids—not to impair my vision, just to make my eyes look bigger—and painted a light green cross on my right temple. The light green was supposed to accentuate my skin. I don’t know why I bothered; maybe I wanted to impress the Sarbr, but actually it wasn’t likely to make much difference to them. I combed my hair, got dressed, picked up Nutmeg and Elf, and went outside.

It was very cold, but the sun was bright and the immense blue-gray trees looked less forbidding against the blue sky. I could see their topknots of bluish-green needles blowing in the north wind high, high above. The wind had a faintly bitter scent, something like formaldehyde, but it also bore the aroma of breakfast.

There were ten or twelve Sarbr moving around among the tents and around the campfire, talking in cheerful voices and heating cans of something appetizing on a grill over the fire. They were all scantily clad in those leather playsuits, and two of them had on three-cornered leather hats with ostrich feathers evidently imported from Earth (or possibly plastic). I waved hello to all of them, because I had a hard time telling which ones were ones I’d met before. Glancing around, I saw a tent with a crescent moon painted on its flap, and crossed over to it quickly.

“Anybody in there?”

Nobody was. The seat was so cold I almost froze to it. Breakfast was a can of hot mush, something like oatmeal and something like sandwich spread, plus a cup of strong coffee. There were folding chairs around the camp and I sat on one to eat. A young male Sarbr-il came over and sat beside me, and I smiled and said good morning, and after a minute I recognized him as Arlem and said good morning again. I took note of a rift in the fur of his neck that might have been a scar. It would be useful for telling him from the other Sarbr.

He gulped his mush, washed it down with coffee, and grimaced. “Gaal I’ve never gotten used to human food.” I smiled and shrugged. “Sometimes I don’t like it either.”

He went on, “Any time you want to look at those maps, I’m ready.”

“Fine, we’ll look at them as soon as I finish eating.” “I hope you don’t mind if we chart our course to include a small berron northeast of here. It’s only twenty-eight people, but that’s where I used to hunt from.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “the cities were only built three years ago, so all of you grew up in the forests, didn’t you? But if I didn’t know better I’d swear you were a city boy.”

“Thank you,” said Arlem, looking down at his clawed toes with becoming modesty. His claws, by the way, were more like ordinary fingernails that folded together at the ends to make a point. Not that that technicality would make any difference to the victim. He said, “You also are just like a real city kid.”

“I ought to be. I’ve spent the past twenty-five Earth years in Smith, which is the capitol of New Eden.”

“Wow. I guess you know all about living, then.” Thinking he was being sarcastic, I sort of froze up then, and Arlem finally collected his spoon and can and cup and walked away. I finished my breakfast, feeding about half of it to Elf and Meg, and wondering if he

was going to be snotty all the way around the world. After putting my dishes in the heap where everyone else was putting theirs, I looked around for Arlem, to go over the maps.

Most of the Sarbr were playing idle games, like poker and some sort of Sarbrian word game that evoked a lot of laughter. As I watched, Reylo Ryl was checkmated by a Sarbr-il who might have been Jahor. Then, laughing, she stood up and clapped her hands for attention. Everyone pulled their chairs close to her, and she began to lecture on bombing and wire-cutting and propaganda: the things I’d told her about the night before. I was trying to figure out which one was Arlem, but them somebody came out of the big tent and I knew it was him by the scar on his throat and the armload of maps he carried.

We went around behind the tent in order not to disturb Lady Ryl’s lecture.

“I’m sorry if I offended you at breakfast,” I said, even though in my opinion he was the one who should apologize.

“You didn’t,” he said. “It’s just that sometimes when I’m talking with humans I get the idea we aren’t really getting through to each other.”

The maps were fun. I love new places with interesting names. He translated a few names for me: Stoneflower Glade, Valley of the Fountain, Third Cascade. He was surprised to hear that Earth also has a Pacific Ocean, not named after the one to Berbidron. We wouldn’t be crossing this one, but we did get to go over a smaller one, the Sea of Riddlemeree. That reminded me of something and I told him as much as I could remember of the old legend of Atlantis.

Arlem seemed pleased when I showed so much interest in the maps. He started telling me stories about the different places, just to see my reactions. Then just as we got to the other side of the Window Mountains (riddle: How is a window like a mountain?) where the broken ends of Blackmere Arch don’t quite meet over Deepfall, and just as I was getting really caught up in

Berbidronian geography, Elf scrambled up onto my shoulder. With a flirting flick of his tail, he sat down to scratch at what may have been the first flea on Berbidron, but not the first one under the arm of Elf.

Arlem stopped talking to gape at him. “That’s a squirrel, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded. “I saw a picture of one somewhere. We don’t have them here, though I understand there was something like them on this planet a long time ago.”

“Your woods must be awfully quiet without them,” I said, bringing out Meg so he could admire them both. They wanted to run on the ground, so I set them down. But then they both headed straight for one of the big gray trees.

I called them back with my mind. I didn’t care if they played on the smaller trees, but I didn’t like those tall gray ones. Arlem seemed to know what I was doing. “You shouldn’t control the creatures like that,” he said. “It’s bad for you and them both.”

“It doesn’t hurt anything,” I replied, rather sharply. “Life benefits from sympathy with other life.”

We went back to the maps.

Before we finished plotting our course, a Sarbr-il arrived in an Arcturian aircar. It was an enclosed disk-form about thirty feet in diameter, with a dome on top for the people to sit in. Fuel and a few supplies were loaded onto it, but we expected to get most of what we needed from friendly locals, or, if they weren’t friendly, from Arlem’s own hunting ability, which, according to him, was second only to that of Tarzan of the Apes.

Shortly after brunch—six hours after breakfast, and as long before the planet’s solar noon—having decided on a course that would take us to most of the major berrons, Arlem and I climbed up the ladder and through the hatch in the bottom of the car.

Reylo Ryl came out of her tent to see us off. “Have a safe trip, children,” she said. “When you find you’re wasting your time, don’t be too proud to admit it—just come back. And watch out for Arcturian patrols.”

“Thanks!” I said above the rumble of the airjets as Arlem revved up the engines.

V

Arlem was in the pilot’s seat, because I wanted to be free to admire the scenery; or at least, he said I’d want to. During that whole expedition he never did let me drive, and I think male chauvinism had something to do with it. He gunned the airjets and we rose slowly, blasting dust and leaves at the spectators on the receding ground. We leveled off just above the tallest treetops—about six hundred feet—and then we were pinned to our acceleration seats as the aircar gained speed eastward. The sun glinted on our transparent dome, and on the treetops flashing past more and more quickly underneath us.

As we sped away from the BLC camp, with its terrific esprit de corps, I began to feel a lack of roots, or purpose, or something. Arlem wasn’t much help. He hadn’t brought any morale with him.

He pointed to the south, where there were no trees. Some tall, brightly colored spires looking like knitting needles stuck into the sky. “That’s Benson,” he said. ‘If you look closely you can see the airships darting around.”

“I do! But aren’t they likely to spot us, on their infra’ screens?”

“I’d be disappointed if they didn’t. But it’s no problem. You’re just an Arcturian lady out for a pleasure cruise, and I’m your chauffeur. Your i.d. papers are in the glove compartment. You’d better look them over.”

I opened the glove compartment and took out my papers. They identified me—with a description, pictures, letters of reference, fingerprints, and voice-prints —as an Arcturian lady of means, a newcomer to Berbidron and something of a hermit back home on Arcturus Ceta IV. “Is this the identity I’d have if I went back to live in the city?”

“I think so. Don’t worry about the authenticity. There really was a Lady Evors Dalant.”

“Was?”

“Well, yes, we killed her as soon as she landed on Berbidron, about a week ago—before she was introduced to anybody. It’s a good identity. People like her rub shoulders with all the big military brass.”

I put the papers back in the glove compartment. “What’s your city identity?”

“As opposed to when I’m in the forest, or as opposed to being an agent of the BLC?”

“An agent of the BLC, I guess.”

“Well, then, I’m an insurance salesman.”

“Really! My, you Sarbr have gotten to be awfully bourgeois in only three years!”

“Thank you, yes, we have. I understand even other human cultures weren’t able to assimilate themselves into the mainstream as fast as we did.”

“That’s true,” I said, realizing I had complimented him without meaning to. Talking to Arlem was rather unsettling.

In a few minutes we saw an aircar coming toward us, and Arlem shut down the throttle and hovered, waiting. “Remember, you’re a hermit,” he told me. “Let me do most of the talking.”

The other aircar slowed down and sidled close to us, on our right and higher up. Its hatch opened and a man with a jet pack on his back dropped down to our level. He was human, very ugly, dressed in a purple uniform with a gold-visored cap, and wearing a big hand laser at his hip. Arlem touched the switch that opened our hatch, and the man jetted under and up into our ship, along with a formaldehyde-tasting wind that made me wince.

When he came into the control room he was to the point and not very courteous. Ignoring Arlem, he said to me, “Let’s see your papers.”

I took them out of the glove compartment and handed them to him; he glanced at them and gave them back.

Then he said, “What are you doing this far from the city?”

I shrugged, and Arlem said, “Just cruising around, sir. We camped out north of here last night. We’re looking for another good spot.”

“Hm. Well, sorry to bother you, Lady Dalant. Watch out for kiebodlins and wild ovrets—and wild Sarbr. Some of them stole an aircar this morning. Don’t leave yours unlocked.” He glanced at Arlem. “The young ones are the worst.”

I nodded solemnly. He was the first human I’d seen in days and I was getting into a very good sympathetic rapport with him—the best I’d ever had.

The Arcturian went back to his ship and the ship flew away, and I said, “So that’s an Arcturian. He’s the first I’ve ever met.”

“Now you know what to expect. None of them are any nicer than that one—but you’ve got to give them credit for knowing how to live. In fact, I guess meanness is a part of their lives, but they must get tired of it.”

“Well, he wasn’t really so mean,” I said. “He might have been a little grouchy, but the plastic cover of his acceleration seat squeaks all the time, and it makes him irritable. Anyway, he never asked to be a patrolman.” Arlem said nothing for about twenty seconds, and I watched the scenery, not realizing he was less than pleased by my remark. Then his voice came coldly, “You ought to stop snooping around in other people’s minds.” “Well, it’s not like eavesdropping or anything,” I said. “In order to catch a glimpse of a person’s mind I have to concentrate and sort of become that person—merge with him. So it isn’t as if an outsider were looking into his mind.”

“Sure, but—”

Anyway, I consider myself honored to possess even such a small ability to sympathize. It helps me to get along in life. After all, everything good in life is based on cooperation, which is a product of sympathy. Don’t you agree?” Thinking I had really out-reasoned him that time, I glanced over at him smugly.

“You’re right,” he said expressionlessly, without looking at me. “Still it’s a mistake to sympathize with the bad guys.”

“Well, maybe.” I thought he was in a bad mood and that I ought to try and cheer him up. “Speaking of Arcturians, did you ever hear about the 2252 Parade of the Winter Solstice?”

He hadn’t, so I told him about an Arcturian military review of the year 2252. It was on live interplanetary 3dv, and the Arcturian Premier stood on a platform reading a long, dull speech while fifteen thousand spacemen stood at attention on the parade grounds before him. Sometime during the third hour, one of the soldiers in the front row dozed off and fell against the man beside him, who fell against the next man, in accordance with the domino effect, and seconds later the whole first row sprawled sheepish-faced on the ground, while the Premier breathed heavily into the microphone. A 3dv camerman got a close-up of his face, which at that classic moment looked exactly like the face of an Edonian mountain mouser that has just discovered the moon it was singing to is really an electric sign.

Arlem seemed mildly amused by that story, and said, “What’s an Edonian mountain mouser?”

“Well, when humans first came from Earth to New Eden, we brought some white mice for experimental purposes, and they got away and started spreading and multiplying all over the planet, because they had no natural enemies and we’d already planted a lot of crops they could eat. So we brought in a bunch of cats and let them run wild, to hold down the mouse population. Some of these cats started living in the foothills of one of the mountain ranges, hence the name, Edonian mountain mousers. They had a peculiar habit of sitting on the mountain peaks and howling whenever it was dark and one of New Eden’s moons happened to be full. I doubt if it was instinctual; probably one of them just hit on the idea, and taught it to the others. Anyway nobody down on the farms minded it. The cats weren’t very melodious, but they were a long way off.

But then, the city of Smith was built right at the edge of the foothills. The first few small neighborhoods didn’t attract the attention of the cats, but as those tall buildings and bright signs started going up, the mountain mousers began to be a little divided in their loyalties. Then one day a gambling casino finished a thousand-foot spire, on top of which was an enormous replica of a roulette wheel. That night all three moons were full, and the mountain mousers were up on their peaks, howling as if it was their life ambition to put a crack in one of those moons. People could even hear them down in Smith, if they stood outside their houses.

“Then the gambling casino turned on that new sign. It lit up in red and white and black and started spinning and rolling and tilting this way and that with the wind whistling all around it, and there was a glowing golden ball like a little sun that raced around inside the rim, making a great whizzing sound.

“Well, those mountain mousers looked down at the roulette sign, then up at the three moons that did nothing except just sit there, and they knew which they ought to be yowling at. So they all marched down to the city—about five hundred of them—and paraded through the streets, climbed up on top of the tallest buildings and sat on the roofs and all raised their voices simultaneously in religious ecstasy to that sign. They drowned out the whistling and the whizzing and the popping of the firecrackers. They drowned out the traffic noises and the mechanical noises and all the people talking in the entire city. In a few seconds all the aircars had landed, because they thought they heard every fire engine on the planet coming right behind them. Some people thought it was an invasion from space, and they ran for shelter. But then somebody spotted all those cats up on the rooftops, and he went over to the gambling casino and asked them to turn off their sign, as it was creating a nusance in the neighborhood. They did. As the sign stopped spinning and the lights faded and went out, the cats stopped in mid-howl with sort of a faint gasp. At that point, they looked pretty much the way the Arcturian Premier did when the spacemen fell over.” I stopped for air.

“But what happened to the mountain mousers?” said Arlem. He sounded as if he really believed the whole story. Some people don’t, but actually it really happened, though it’s gained much in the retelling.

I said, “Oh, they got discouraged and went back to the mountains. After that they never howled at the moons, though. I guess they figured they weren’t worth it. But speaking of the moons of New Eden, have you ever heard about the shortest month in the history of the planet?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Arlem, expectantly.

“Well, I had a hand in that event, myself. It was about three standard years ago, when I was with a revolutionary underground movement in Smith. We needed 3dv equipment so we could inject our own comments into local broadcasts, and film public relations documentaries—propaganda, that is—and besides, we could use the spare parts for other things. Well, there was a very old 3dv station orbiting New Eden. It had been abandoned for years and years, and it was just drifting, not being useful to anybody. We decided to appropriate it. It happened to belong to someone, so we figured we ought to use a subterfuge. We went up to the old station in a detection-shielded space cruiser, fitted the whole thing with antidetectors, and towed it away, leaving a bunch of metallic debris in its place, so any astronomer who happened to look would think it fell apart or was hit by a meteorite or something. We were going to spiral it down to an uninhabited part of New Eden, and our course took us past the smallest of the three moons, Niflheim. This was such an unimportant moon it didn’t even have an active radio base on it, or any people. It had its dark face turned to New Eden as we approached it. We were looking through the tape stores of our new station when, what did we find but an early time-lapse study of that very moon, showing it going through all its phases—which takes about nine standard days. Naturally, we set up a wide-beam projector, aimed it at the moon, and ran the tape through at high speed, from dark to full to dark again. From the planet it looked like that little moon was going along at its normal speed, then suddenly twirled around once in only five minutes, then settled back into its normal routine. Of course that didn’t make any sense at all, and people soon realized it must have been a prpjected picture. But they still don’t know who did it, or from where.”

I had made Arlem smile, but still no trickle of sympathy leaked through the wall that enclosed his mind.

We flew over two rivers, and a lot of trees, and when it was almost noon we found a nice wide, grassy clearing and landed. Arlem translated the name of the neighborhood: Pinchbar. I fed Elf and Meg and let them run on the grass a little bit, but when they wanted to run on the big gray trees I put them back in the aircar.

“Our first potential recruits should be around here somewhere,” Arlem said. “They probably figured this was an Arcturian ship and vacated the area, but they’ll be back.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed a string of Sarbrian words.

Answering shouts came from the forest, and pretty soon thirty or thirty-five naked, thickly furred Sarbr came trotting through the forest from various directions.

Arlem started talking to them in Sarbrian, and as they listened to him and looked me over curiously, I tried to tune in on their communal consciousness. This was a phenomenon I’d found to be present in any group of two or more people, based on whatever it was that they had in common: political views, age, hobbies, skin color, planetary origin, the flu, or even simply the accident of being in the same place at the same time, doing approximately the same thing. Union with a group consciousness was always a very good move. It helped me to think and act in a way that was normal to the group, thus gaining acceptance rather than meeting with the standoffishness a newcomer usually has to face.

Of course, I couldn’t just snap my fingers and be instantly tuned in. As Arlem talked to the Sarbr, presumably telling them about our mission, I tried to discover their area of union. Was it the fact that they all lived in the same part of the forest? I concentrated on our surroundings: the formaldehyde smell, the bright autumn trees around the edge of the clearing, the red leaves in the dying grass, the creeping warmth of the sun whenever the wind faltered, and even the straight tapering trunks and dark branches of the biggest trees, high in the noon sky. But there came no feeling of becoming part of the group.

Arlem finished what he was saying, and sat down. A few of the Sarbr walked away, but most of them sat down with him. Usually when a group sits down, there is sort of a consciousness of all-sitting-down-together, but I couldn’t sense any such feeling among these Sarbr. It was as if each one sat down whether anybody else was going to or not. I stood puzzling over this for a moment; then, realizing I was the only one left standing, I also sat.

Arlem said, “I’ve explained a little bit about the cities and everything, and these people are willing to listen to your sales pitch—if you’ll pardon the expression. I’ll translate.”

Suddenly stricken with stage fright, I met the cool gray eyes of the Sarbr and began in a hesitant voice, “As you all know, the Arcturians control this planet and they are planning to exploit it to the fullest. Even now they’re shipping in men and machines from their own planet, to plunder the forests and decimate the wild game and strip the mountains. By the time they’re finished, you won’t have any decent place left to live in, and you won’t be able to get help from the Allied planets because the purpose of the Arcturians’ exploiting this planet is to accumulate enough wealth to finance a fleet to conquer all the free peoples of explored space, so if they succeed there won’t be anybody to help you. Now, you’ve done an admirable job so far, in refusing to work for the Arcturians. You’ll make a terrific guerrilla army, because I’m sure you realize by now that the only way to stop the Arcturians is to come right out and fight them. We’re here representing the Berbidronian Liberation Committee, and- anybody who wants to join up with the BLC will be more than welcome.”

There was a wait while Arlem, who had been translating right along, finished the spiel. Then the Sarbr looked at him blankly, and he looked at me. “Is that all?”

“Well ……” I had the unpleasant suspicion that I

had made a faux pas. “You add whatever’s necessary.”

Arlem launched on a long monologue, gesturing frequently at me, and rolling his eyes and shrugging. A couple of things he said brought laughs from the forest people. Occasionally he made violent stabbing, slugging or neck-wringing motions with his hands, and they were interested by that. When he appeared to be finished, a few of the Sarbr commented, and one of them pointed back in the direction from which many of them had come. Most of them started moving in that direction, though a few wandered off elsewhere. The thing that really surprised me was that they never even looked to see what the others were doing, before they went along on their own way. I know that sounds like good old rugged individualism, but it was very spooky to see. It was as if each one was alone in the clearing.

“Come on,” said Arlem, pulling me by the arm. “They’re going to have a meal.”

“What was all that violent stuff you were telling them about?” I asked, trotting to keep up with his leisurely walk.

“Oh, I just told them what they’d get to do if they signed up, and also described some of the Arcturian atrocities.”

“Atrocities! I didn’t know there were any.”

“Naturally, the news you’d get on New Eden would be whitewashed. When the Arcturians first came, there were some killings before the other humans agreed to leave. There’ve been a fair amount of executions since then, not to mention torturing—for secret information,

you know: spy stuff. The forest people like to hear about those things. It makes life sound interesting.” “Do they get bored easily, or something?”

He nodded. “Pretty bored, yes.”

We reached a big clearing where there was no grass, only hard-packed gray dirt. In the center was a campfire with a large whole animal roasting on a spit, and two more carcasses were skinned and waiting to be cooked.

“What kind of meat is that?” I said. “Ovret?” Ovret meat was exported from Berbidron in small quantities, and on New Eden it was a gourmet dish.

“Oh, nol” Arlem laughed. “Ovrets are bigl Bigger than elephants, and a lot meaner. Those dead things are kielins—a species of herbiverous lizard. That’s what we had for breakfast, too.”

“Lizard, huh?” I looked away from the meat, although it smelled good. “Where do all these people take shelter when it rains?”

“Under a bush, if they aren’t in a mood to get wet. Just sit down and make yourself comfortable, till the meat’s ready.”

I sat cross-legged on the ground and looked around; Arlem walked over and chatted with some other Sarbr. There was a cluster of them—fully grown adults— playing a complicated game with a red ball and what looked like a bedspring. Off under a large bush at the edge of the clearing, one Sarbr-il fiddled around with a weighted piece of string and a transparent maze box. Three others were staining the tips of their fur with paint in bright patterns. Five people chased each other in and out of the clearing and around the trees, laughing and shouting. Then, as if on a prearranged signal, they rushed toward one big tree and climbed upward as fast as they could, digging into the bark with the strong claws on their fingers and toes. I noticed that the bark that flew off was old, discolored, sick-looking bark. Some of the other Sarbr were sitting around talking, and many more were under the bushes a few yards from the clearing, sleeping soundly in spite of the clatter of activity. The whole scene reminded me of what I imagined the recreation room of an insane asylum might be like, with organized games and arts and crafts and stuff. There was no sense of community that I could detect. It seemed unhealthy for there not to be any. I almost thought I sensed an aura of evil in the place, but that must have been my imagination.

Someone went over and poked a claw into the roasting meat. Evidently deciding it was done enough, he tore off a piece and sank his teeth into it.

All the fun and games stopped, and the sleepers woke instantly. There was no uncivilized quarreling over the meat; those who got there first tore off large chunks until it was all gone, and those who didn’t get there in time spitted another carcass and heaped more wood on the fire.

I hadn’t gotten any meat. In the first place, I didn’t understand what they were up to until it was too late, and besides that I didn’t know how openminded they might be about such matters, and thought it best not to give any hungry, hairy eight-foot tall person with fangs and claws any reason to dislike me.

Arlem sat down next to me with a big chunk of roast lizard in his greasy hands. “Here, have some. I figured you wouldn’t be fast enough to get any on your own.”

“Thank you.” I took some meat, and it tasted exactly like that morning’s breakfast, only stringy instead of mushy. Between mouthfuls, I said, “Is this all the forest people ever do—Just eat and sleep and play games?” “Oh, no. That would be pretty dull. They wander through the world and do all sorts of great deeds, and only come back to their berrons every few years, when they need a period of rest and relaxation.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking that ‘’his was a very surprising custom. I took another bite of kielin and said, “By the way, why is everybody except us naked? I thought those leather things like you’re wearing are supposed to be the native dress.”

“Yes—well, before humans came we never wore anything, except special ornaments in some of our games. But once the cities were built, then we realized we needed something to call a native outfit, as opposed to human dress. You know, something to sell to tourists, or that the big magazines could print full-color pictures of the natives in. So somebody whipped up a few sets of these leather outfits, and now everybody in the city wears them to relax in at home, or when they go on camping trips. And the BLC sort of adopted them as a uniform, to give us a feeling of unity, and to strengthen our sense of cultural identity. After all, this outfit is uniquely Sarbrian. You don’t see humans going around in ovret leather. Not without five or six layers of underwear.”

“That’s true. If very many humans dressed like that, I think there would be a lot more crime than there is.” I took a bite of meat. “Well, how many of these people said they wanted to join the BLC?”

He shook his head. “None, but they wouldn’t be hanging around the berron if they weren’t tired and wanting a rest. They’re expecting more people back this afternoon, from a big—well, I don’t think there’s a Latin word for it. It uses the sun and the shadows, and it goes all through the forest, and it falls into certain mathematical patterns—it’s almost choreographed. It’s sort of a cross between an art form and an ecological survey. It’s not very strenuous, so they’ll be looking for something to do when they get back, and our offer might be just what they want. Anyway they’ll pass the word along to the smaller berrons in the area.”

All the meat was eaten by the time the other Sarbr arrived, but that was all right, because they’d brought some small game, and had eaten nuts and berries and bugs while they were out. There were fourteen of them, all fresh as daisies, and they laughed and clowned around a great deal as they roasted their little animals. It was peculiar to study their interrelationships. They were amused by each other’s jokes, and for the most part they liked one another, but there was a certain touch-me-not aloofness in the way they behaved toward each other. Arlem went over and talked with them. Some of them knew some of the same people he knew, since his tribe—or, more precisely, a large percentage of his closer friends and relations—could usually be found only a day’s lope north of Pinchbar.

Soon he brought me over and introduced me to the newcomers, and when, more or less at the same time, they each sat down to eat, he and I sat among them, and he went on talking and gesturing as he had done with the other Sarbr. They listened with interest. Once one of them made a comment and then they all looked at me. I asked Arlem why they were staring at me, but he said I wouldn’t understand, and went on talking to the Sarbr.

I wasn’t used to being so lonely in the middle of a group. As far as my ability to sympathize was concerned, they simply weren’t there. There was something really unwholesome about it. Maybe they had a dreadful secret to hide, or maybe they were so inhumanly selfish they couldn’t form cooperative bonds. At any rate, while they talked to Arlem in their own language, I felt pretty lost.

Feeling something like fear, or a desire to cry, welling up in my mind, I forced my attention to something else: the clean-picked bones that were scattered in the dust from this and previous meals of the day. They gave me an idea. I glanced around and nobody seemed to be requiring my presence in the group, so I got up and went over to the edge of the clearing, where some tall brown grass grew.

Pulling up a strand of grass—it was dead anyway, from the cold—I tested its strength. It was as tough as good string. When I went around the clearing examining the old bones and collecting some in my arms, a few of the Sarbr gave me curious looks, but an unexpected twist of rebellion made me not care if I was violating a custom or not. I found more old bones in the bushes near the clearing.

About an hour later I heard Arlem’s voice, calling, “Beth, where are you?”

“Here,” I said, waiting for him to come, instead of heading for his voice. I was still in an unusually uncooperative mood.

His footsteps sounded in the dry underbrush and then he pushed through the tangled bushes into my little clear space and stopped short.

The animal I’d built of bones tied with grass looked at him with sightless sockets, its lipless teeth exposed in a rather appealing grin. It was about four feet tall to the top of the skull, with a long S-curved spine, two pelvises, and six legs, the longest pair being in front and the shortest in back. Due to the insecurity of its joints, its position was quite relaxed. It had a stiff, grass hackle going from the top of the head to the first pelvis; it looked a little like a hyena. I’d have made a couple of babies to go with it if I’d had time, but even by itself I imagine it was rather striking, come upon without advance notice.

I was afraid Arlem would think it was in poor taste, but after a couple of seconds he laughed. “That’s great,” he said. “I don’t know anybody else who could do something like that in only an hour.” It wasn’t much of a compliment, and no warmth came with it, but it did make me feel a little bit proud. He went on, “We can go now. Eight of them definitely want to join up and the rest will think about it. And of course they’ll pass the word along. We can radio Reylo Ryl and tell her to send them a language teacher.”

As we walked back to the cruiser, I said, “I’m afraid I wasn’t much help.”

“Yes, you were. I had to make up a few stories to add interest, and I sort of built them around you, and your presence made the stories more credible.”

“Is that why they were staring at me?”

“Yes. You know, we may be able to put together quite a sales pitch, if we practice.” He shrugged and laughed. “Anyway I wish I could see their faces when they find that thing you made. It might make them want to be around humans more.”

We radioed the BLC headquarters, using a scrambler and a directional beam which, we hoped, would keep the Arcturians off our trail. Then we lifted off and turned north for Arlem’s berron, Stoneflower Glade. I played with the squirrels, finding their acceptance of me to be a great comfort after the aloof minds of the Sarbr. Arlem, of course, disapproved.

It was a three-hour flight. In the early afternoon we landed in a grassy dale in the slowly growing shadows of the trees, and got out to stretch our legs. It was cold, but at least the wind was from the east now and didn’t smell of formaldehyde. I was going to bring the squirrels along this time, but Arlem said they’d make a bad impression and discourage potential recruits. So I put out feed and spread some papers in the hold for them, in case we were gone a long time.

“This way,” said Arlem, taking my hand and pulling me after him through the forest. We walked a short distance to a clearing much like the first one we’d visited, except that no fire was lit—a grevious oversight, in my shivering opinion. About ten Sarbr loafed around the clearing playing idle games, talking or sleeping. Again, there was nothing here for my sympathy to latch onto. I began to think there was something basically wrong with all the forest people. Maybe it was their lack of cooperative spirit that made them unfit for the cities. Maybe the city people were right to casually write them off as being dead.

Everyone perked up when they saw us. “Arlem!” someone exclaimed, and we were instantly surrounded by a cluster of chattering, noisy Sarbr. One of them asked something about me, to which Arlem replied with a short sentence, a smile and a shrug, and then a Sarbr-il woman brought out a softball and bat, and they chose up sides, and I found myself in the middle of a softball game. Arlem and I sat down in the dust, waiting for our turn at bat.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Softball,” he explained. “You know the game, don’t you?”

“Well, yes.”

“You’re up to bat right after that girl there. The bases are those pieces of bark. Try to hit the ball into the bushes, so they’ll have a hard time finding it. Anyway the pitcher may walk you; he’s not too good.”

“But what’s a softball game doing in the middle of our mission?”

He looked at me in surprise. “This isn’t our mission. Surely you don’t begrudge me - a little fun with my family?”

When he put it that way, I really couldn’t object. We weren’t so short on time that we couldn’t spare an hour or so for Arlem to be with his family. I said, “Aren’t there any children here?”

At that, he looked annoyed. “No, we won’t allow our children near you humans until we know you better. You’re a strange lot.”

There was a runner on second, and one out, and the girl before me was at bat. She took a stance by the plate and did a few practice swings. The pitcher, a short (for a Sarbr-il), rather stout person, eyed her meanly. His hackles were up. Baring his fangs in a wicked grin, he wound up and let the ball go, at the same time giving a sharp cry to confuse her. It came in fast; she swung, but it was low, and she missed it.

The umpire shouted, and Arlem translated: “Strike one!”

The pitcher wound up, snarling fearsomely at the batter. She snarled back. Just as he let go of the ball, the batter yelled something; it might have thrown his aim off, or his aim might have been perfect, and the ball smacked her on the rear.

There was a pregnant pause. Then, the batter charged toward the pitcher, brandishing the bat over her head. He was smaller than she was, and unarmed, but he was a brave little guy. He stood his ground, fangs glittering. They circled each other cautiously, as the rest of the players watched with no apparent alarm. Suddenly the pitcher made a grab at the bat; he missed and she clonked him on the head. He staggered; she clonked him again and he fell unconscious.

Then the three basemen closed in on her. She clonked Second, but First got the bat away from her and tossed it on the ground, and they went at each other with tooth and nail.

The catcher ran out and picked up the bat and started clonking heads right and left, after which the outfielder came in from the forest to lend a hand, and then the umpire and the other runners joined in, and everybody was fighting except Arlem and me. Humans have an expression, “the fur flew,” to describe a very furious fight. Well, in this fight there really were little chunks of fur floating in the air. And blood splattered. It was bad. They weren’t just playing around.

“Shouldn’t we do something?” I said to Arlem.

He shook his head. “No. Being alive, we can’t afford to get hurt in non-life.” He sighed. “I haven’t been in a good fight in a long time. I think I’ll start one when I get back to the city.”

“You mean you like to fight?” I said. I’d met people like that before, who enjoyed physical conflict, but I never could make any sense out of it. People get hurt in that sort of thing. I don’t like to see bodies misused.

“Sure,” he said. “I like to dig my claws into firm flesh.”

“I bet you don’t like it when somebody else’s claws are digging into your flesh.”

“Either way, it’s a nice change of pace.”

The free-for-all was over as quickly as it had started, mainly because there were only three contestants left standing. The others were crippled and seriously wounded—they took it stoically, uttering no cry—and two looked like they might be dead. I felt sick.

“Come on,” said Arlem, “we have to help carry.”

A few more Sarbr who hadn’t been in the softball game showed up now, and everyone who was able picked up one of the wounded or dead and walked off through the forest with him. I couldn’t have carried a whole Sarbr-il by myself, but about that time the little pitcher regained consciousness, and he raised the shoulders of the batter who had started it all, and I picked up her feet, and we followed the others through the forest. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but Arlem wasn’t anywhere nearby and the pitcher didn’t speak Latin or Arcturian, so I had to keep my questions to myself.

Presently we came to a sort of hill, with grass on top and a wide stone doorframe in the side. We followed the others in. It was a room about twenty feet square, lit with glowglobes on tall slender posts. The surfaces of the room were smooth, warm stone. The temperature in there was quite comfortable, after the cold wind outside. I had almost forgotten how cold I was. We laid the dead and wounded gently on the unfurnished floor, turned around, and walked out. I thought I understood why Berbidron was underpopulated.

As the small company strolled back to the clearing, I found Arlem and said, “Will they be taken care of at all?”

“Of course,” he said, “if they need it.”

“What about the dead ones?”

“They are all dead.”

“Is this part of your religion or something?” I said.

“What?”

“The way the city people call the forest people dead, when really you can see them walking around perfectly all right, and the worst you could honestly say about them is that they’re a little peculiar. It doesn’t make sense unless it’s part of your religion to pretend they’re dead.”

He frowned. “Well, not exactly a religion. It’s more of a philosophy. You might say we’re speaking figuratively when we say the natives are dead. It’s because they’re missing out on so much great stuff in the cities they might as well be dead. It’s also become sort of an in joke.” He smiled as if pleased with himself. “Yeah. There’s a consistent explanation for anything, if you just look hard enough. Always remember that; it’ll help you get along in life.”

Those Sabr who were still on their feet were as cheerful as if nothing had happened. Most of them sat down in the clearing and listened to Arlem’s sales pitch, and four seemed very interested. Then about ten more arrived back from an activity which was not explained to me. They all looked very tired, but they listened attentively as Arlem said his bit again, and then, nodding and murmering agreeable words, they all chose comfortable spots near the clearing and went to sleep.

“How many want to sign up?” I asked Arlem.

“They haven’t decided yet. We’re going to sleep here.”

“Each day the revolution is delayed,” I pointed out, “the planet is brought closer to destruction.” I’d rather have spent the sleeping period traveling, napping and spelling Arlem at the aircar controls, than in that unfriendly forest.

“You can go on without me if you want to,” he said.

“If you think a lot of them will join up, I guess we can wait an extra day.”

We slept together, curled up under a bush for warmth—my warmth; Arlem was quite comfortable in his fur. At least the wind wasn’t so bad down under the bushes. I’d have preferred going back to sleep in the air cruiser but I had a feeling that if I was ever going to understand the Sarbr, I shouldn’t separate myself from them like a holier-than-thou missionary. Eventually, of course, , I learned that they wouldn’t have given a damn no matter where I chose to sleep, and I spent that cold, long time on the ground for nothing. I didn’t sleep at all. It was too cold and anyway, there were always some people who weren’t sleepy, talking and playing noisy games.

By the time the sleeping period, about six hours, was over, it was starting to get dark. Some Sarbr got out about twenty glowglobes and hung them around on the bushes and the branches of the smaller trees, so that the clearing was lit with a ruddy orange glow which, unfortunately (from my point of view) was completely devoid of warmth. Many Sarbr were still asleep, but the ones that weren’t played games, and I took part in some of the less nasty ones. I won twice at chess and lost four times, and then I taught them tic-tac-toe with a stick and a patch of dirt, and almost immediately they started beating me. They made the game bigger, with eighty-one squares, and started having great fun with it. Maybe they were barbaric in some ways, I thought, but they certainly were clever.

Later on in the long twilight I went for a hunt in the forest with Arlem and a few others. Their method was to sniff out an edible animal in the underbrush, and then one would flush it out and everybody else would pounce on it. I got to be the flusher. We got three rabbit-sized marsupials which the Sarbr called calonds, and we almost got a kiebodlin, which is a large, camiverous, and very tasty cousin of the kielin. But it ran me down and got away, because it was the size of a cow and I wasn’t about to argue. One thing: during the hunt there was a sort of chummy espirit de corps which, however, vanished once we got back.

They roasted the meat and there was enough for everybody, because some of the Sarbr weren’t hungry. I ate some, and the warm food made me feel so much better I actually started to feel drowsy, in spite of the wind. I snuggled in among the dead leaves under a bush. Arlem sat among his friends and relations in the orange light of the clearing, exchanging news. Their low voices and the small animal noises from the forest blended to an indistinct mutter.

The next thing I knew, Arlem was shaking me softiy and saying, “Wake up, it’s time to go.” Creamy golden light dazzled my eyes; he was holding a glowglobe. His breath streamed in a milky cloud from his nostrils and mouth, over his shoulder and away. Three times as I shook the sleep from my mind.

I sat up, catching my hair in the twigs and leaves of the bush. An intricate lacing of frost glittered all over the grass and bushes and tree trunks. The forest was quite dark, and there wasn’t even much activity in the clearing.

“Well,” I said, “how many of them joined up?”

“Eight—and some others are interested I already sent their names back to the BLC, and a teacher will be along tomorrow.”

Before we went back to the aircar, Arlem took me through the woods to a ravine where fast water ran. Tall, autumn-browned trees and bushes lined the lips of the ravine, but there were none down inside. By the pale golden light of Arlem’s glowglobe I could see thousands of flowers covering both slopes all the way to the water’s edge. In the yellow light they looked a soft green color, and, like snowflakes, no two seemed to have quite the same shape. All up and down the gully as far as the light would sjiine, flower petals glistened as with dew. The cold air was laden with their delicate fragrance.

“How beautiful,” I said softly. “But how can they bloom so late in the year?”

Arlem smiled. “It’s the water that smells good. The flowers are carved of stone. That’s why this area’s called Stoneflower. I thought you might want to see it.” That was my first experience with Sarbrian art. I was impressed.

When I’d looked long enough, we went back to the aircar, and the squirrels were extremely glad to see me. I played with them for a while, and took a shower, and then we lifted off and headed east toward our next stop.

VI

Four days later, and about two thousand miles farther northeast, we made our fourteenth stop. We hadn’t interested anyone in our mission at the last nine berrons.

Arlem dropped out of the hatch into the lonely little clearing, and helped me down. I looked around at the forest: It was stone gray, like the sky. A powdering of snow lay on the dead brown grass and etched the scaly bark of the trees. There was no undergrowth, only trees and grass and a few rocks, marching up the sloping ground from the little valley where we had landed. The air was painfully cold and completely still, as though it might shatter if we spoke.

Arlem spoke anyway. “Smells like snow,” he grunted, thrusting his hands into the pouch of his jacket. Only two stops ago he’d put on the jacket and a pair of knee-high boots. Even the natives in this region wore clothes. I had on two pairs of long johns.

“What’s the name of this place?” I said.

“Hrazwarin.”

“What does it mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He motioned with his hand. “I think the berron is over that way. Anyway I hear something.”

As we climbed the slope, our boots crunching the snowy grass and making dark tracks, I also heard the distant sound. It might have been shouting, punctuated by a staccato popping noise.

We topped the rise and started down the other side, following the sound as it grew a little louder in the sharp air. Arlem, walking a few yards ahead of me as usual, said, “I guess your word for this place might be ‘Windsigh.’ It’s hard to translate, though. Latin and Sarbrian are as different as … .” He looked back at me with a peculiar expression. “As you and I.”

I said, “Yeah.” Four days had taught me how little I knew about the Sarbr. The one thing I did know was that they weren’t human in any sense of the word.

The sounds became louder as we plodded through the forest. There were passionate voices, two or possibly three, and still that intermittent, resounding clonk.

“Do you suppose it’s a fight?” I said.

He looked back at me with a grin. “No. Tennis.”

I could hardly believe it, but he was proven right when we topped another small hill and suddenly found ourselves looking down on the tennis court. It seemed to be paved with one solid slab of stone, so smooth that the ball never bounced wrong, and the net was woven of leather cords. Two Sarbr women were in the middle of a ferocious game, snarling and cursing at each other. The ball hissed as it shot back and forth under their muscular blows.

“I really don’t think we ought to interrupt,” I said.

We waited on the hilltop until the game was done, and the loser, all smiles, had leaped over the net to congratulate the winner. Then both players, spotting Arlem and me, came up the hill to see who we were.

They were dressed in short red bathrobe-type things and moccasins, which, considering their fur—it was a lot thicker than Arlem’s, and made them look bigger than him—was a great concession to the weather. Arlem introduced us; whatever those human anthropologists had said, there appeared to be no language barriers among the Sarbr. He started on his sales pitch and one of them gestured negatively with her hands, murmered something, and walked away. The other one listened for a minute or two, and then she interrupted with a short sentence, pointed through the forest where her friend had gone, and went off in the opposite direction.

“I gather they’re not interested,” I said.

“No, but the berron is over that way. Come on.”

At the main camp, several Sarbr stopped what they were doing and listened when Arlem explained about the problem with the Arcturians, but soon they drifted back to their games or their naps, until by the time he was through only two remained, and they looked bored.

“It’s no good here,” he told me. “We’re too far away from any city. These people just aren’t interested.”

“If you wait, maybe some more will get back from hunting or something,” I said without much hope. Again I hadn’t found any trace of a group consciousness. I had begun to associate this with the apathy they all seemed to feel toward the welfare of their planet.

“It’s just no good,” said Arlem. “I’m tired of forcing myself on people. Nobody wants to join the BLC. We might aS” well give up.”

“For an insurance salesman, you certainly aren’t very determined,” I said.

He looked at me scornfully. “This is hardly on the level of selling insurance. Let’s just go back to the ship and go home, all right?”

“Well if you insist, there’s not much I can do about it, but I must say that a real patriot ought not to get discouraged so easily, when the safety of his planet is at stake.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Arlem started back toward the aircar, and I followed. I was feeling pretty discouraged myself, but at least I was still willing to try. I’d been thinking of Arlem as a deep believer in the cause we were working for, but evidently his convictions were much weaker than I had supposed. In fact, all the Sarbr seemed to let me down, in one way or another. Reylo Ryl, the great revolutionary, knew less than I did. Arlem was a quitter. The forest people were apathetic—in fact, they were sick. That frightening absence of bonds between them couldn’t be normal. They were dreadfully deficient in sympathy, all of them. But the BLC members had good, strong morale. What made them different?

I stumbled over a rock; my feet were numb. It was starting to snow so I hurried up a little to keep Arlem in sight. Maybe, I thought glumly, I was the one who was sick. Maybe the forest people were perfectly normal, but something was interfering with my sympathetic ability. It could be a touch of the flu. Or maybe something was wrong with my mind. I didn’t know what sort of mental disorder I might have, but I had been feeling sort of uneasy ever since we left the BLC headquarters. The feeling seemed to have something to do with the shortcomings of the forest people. Anyway, I was very tired from it.

Of all the planets to start a revolution on, why did I have to get stuck with this one?

I indulged in a self-pitying sniffle. It was a very juicy sniffle, because my nose had run constantly ever since I landed on Berbidron. I sniffled again.

“Stop that,” said Arlem, without looking back.

“I have a cold,” I said. Then, because it was my expedition and I was in charge, I pointed out, “Even if I didn’t have a cold, I’d sniffle if I felt like it.”

Arlem didn’t reply, but he lengthened his strides so that I had to almost run to keep from falling far behind in the snow. Then I decided I wasn’t going to stand for that any more. I would jolly well go at my own speed, and if he insisted on going so fast, then he’d just have a long wait at the aircar.

I slowed down to a comfortable walk, instantly feeling more in control of things. Arlem, not realizing I had dropped behind, went on until he was out of sight. The snow fell silently.

Fifteen minutes later, I knew I was lost. I’d been trying to follow his tracks, but the snow made them blurry and hard to see, and anyway if it was the right path I ought to have gotten to the aircar by now, even as slow as I was. Evidently the trail Arlem had left was crossed by animal trails, and I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. I climbed a hill to look for familiar landmarks.

It was a fairly big hill. I could see over the wintry tops of most of the trees, except for those big gray ones, which stuck way up into the iron sky like grownups in a nursery. The land was rolling, covered with bare trees and a few rocks, with no outstanding features as far as I could see in the snowy air. I didn’t see the aircar anywhere—but after all, it was down in a little valley. Maybe I could see it if I climbed a tree.

There was a tall, maple-like tree growing near the top of the hill. It had a branch low enough for me to reach. I flexed my mittened hands and slapped them together a couple of times to get the numbness out of them, then grabbed hold of the branch and hoisted myself up. The view from there was only level with the top of the hill. I climbed farther. The wind started to move a little bit, and the falling snow slanted through the twig network. From the top of the tree I had a very good view of the forest.

But the forest was all there was to see. A few other hilltops had trees at my eye level, and of course the big gray trees towered above everything even when their roots happened to be down in a valley. Through the gaps where there were no hills or trees I could see for about half a mile: nothing. It was all gray and lonely. The wind made low noises in the treetops. It was very cold.

I slumped on my high perch, and sighed. For a little while I’d felt stronger than usual, a little bit independent. But the nameless exhaustion that had built up during the last four days and nights was taking its toll. I thought how much better I would feel in a warm place, with noise and bright lights and lots of company. Human company.

Then I thought of shouting. I ought to have thought of it before, but the forest was so quiet it hadn’t occurred to me to make a loud noise. Or maybe it would have been too much of an admission of dependence, while I was still feeling rebellious.

I took a deep breath of the icy wind. “Arlem!” I called. It was only a halfhearted shout; the silence had gotten to me and anyway my face was numb. I turned my head the other way and shouted louder: “Arlem!” Then, in case any other Sarbr were near, I added an unspecific: “Help! Help!”

I was just drawing breath for another call when, with a flutter of wings, a small brown bird landed in my treetop, just a couple of yards away on another branch.

“Oh, hi,” I said. I don’t normally speak to birds, but we were the only two people there.

The bird looked at me with one bright eye, and ruffled its feathers convulsively. I thought it must be cold. Maybe it wasn’t a winter bird, but had forgotten to migrate. In that case, it must be as lonely as I was. Poor bird. It looked tired, too. It must have been flying a long time, looking for a warm place. That was exactly how I felt: like a small warm-weather bird that had strayed out over a cold ocean and now hadn’t the strength to fly any farther, with no land in sight. We had a lot in common. I could see a little bit into its mind, and I knew how it felt. I understood about the snow confusing one’s flight, and how it made one’s feathers wet and heavy. I felt the cold needles of wind through my feathers. I was shivering and starving and I couldn’t understand what had happened to all the other birds. Most of all I would have liked to eat about five caterpillars, then perch in a treetop under a warm sun, fluff my feathers until they were dry, and gradually fall asleep.

“Beth, what are you doing up in that tree?”

The sound startled me out of my numb doze. I looked down.

It was one of the tall creatures! With a warning cry to the companions that weren’t there, I fluttered my wings to flee the treetop. Another bird flashed past my eyes, and then I was falling—

just in time, I grabbed the branch. I righted myself, trembling.

“Are you okay?” Arlem called up.

“Uh … I … yes, I’m all’ right. Yes. I guess I’d better climb down from here.” Still unsteady, I reached my numb feet down to another limb, and began lowering myself from branch to branch. It was a slow job. I’ve always been better at getting up into high places than at getting down again, and I was stiff with the cold besides.

Arlem helped me down from the last branch. I regretted not being able to feel any body heat through his jacket and my parka, because I sure could have used it. But his face was full of concern and that was nice to see.

“I got lost,” I said.

“That’s what I thought.” He sounded disapproving. “In more ways than one.”

“Oh, no.” I started shivering: an emotional reaction, I suppose, since I wasn’t any colder now than I had been in the tree. “Actually I had a very educational experience. Did you see that bird that flew away?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I was able to join minds with it. That’s why I acted so funny when you called to me. I’ve never managed such a complete union before, even with a human, much less a bird. I guess my sympathetic ability is growing.” I smiled up at him; it seemed to me that a congratulation was in order.

“You know how dangerous it is,” he said.

I laughed, not too convincingly. “Well, I might have fallen out of the tree. But it was certainly worth it. I’ve devoted my whole life to the development of sympathy.”

“Why?”

“Well, it makes life run more smoothly—for other people, as well as me.”

“So what?”

He would say something like that, I thought, him with his unsharing mind and his apathetic friends. He probably thought he was being terribly clever. “Sympathy is basic,” I said. “You need some of it in order to live at all, and even more in order to get along with other people in a civilized way. Most people don’t go beyond that, but I do because I enjoy it, and I think it improves the quality of my life. Okay?”

He shrugged. “Well, it’s none of my business, I guess. We’d better get back to the aircar. Come on.”

He went down the hill slowly enough for me to keep up, and we climbed the next hill and looked down, and there was the aircar. In my lost wanderings I had passed embarassingly close to it and still missed it, just as we had once again had the truth within our reach, and been blind to it.

VII

We didn’t turn back after all. Arlem said it would be bad for me to go to the city just yet, and of course I was quite willing to continue the expedition.

We spent that night and part of the next day crossing the Sea of Riddlemeree. The water was eerily calm because there were no moons to inspire its currents. Arlem amused me with a Sarbrian legend of how there had once been a huge moon that regularly sent destructive tides that imperiled all the living things along the coasts. An early hero-god of some sort, named Jamryn, was supposed to have stolen the wings of a giant bird and the strength of the grandfather of all ovrets—each of which feats was a story in itself—and flown up into the sky during a solar eclipse and pushed the moon into the sun. After that he was called Jamryn the Moon Killer. The legend also said that Jamryn had promised to produce a smaller moon to take the place of the big one, so there would be light in the forests at night The Sarbr were—and are—still waiting for this second miracle to take place. When Arlem finished the story, I told him the one about Perseus and Andromeda, and he liked that one so I told him Frankenstein. There’s nothing quite like a good monster story.

The next evening, after our sixteenth stop, which had been no more fruitful than the fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth, et cetera, we rose up out of the forest and saw the Window Mountains ahead. They were very young mountains, all raw and craggy, dwarfed and blue with the distance but still impressive.

“Gee,” I said, “I didn’t notice those when we landed here.”

“I know,” said Arlem, who was piloting, as usual. “There was too much dust in the air this afternoon. But the wind’s changed.”

“Dust from what? There’s snow on the ground.” “According to the natives, it’s something to do with Arcturian mines in those mountains. They quarry granite and crush it into powder; don’t ask me why.”

“I know why,” I said, grimly. “Compressed rock dust is what’s used as insulation for the big radiation artillery in warships. They’re starting to build up their fleet already I”

Arlem whistled in astonishment. “Why, those bastards! They really go all out, don’t they?”

“I don’t see why you’re so surprised. What do you think our whole mission has been about?”

“You’ve got a point there. I guess we Sarbr sometimes underestimate human determination—meaning no disparagement, of course.”

“That’s okay.” I didn’t understand Arlem but I liked him, in a rather disinterested way. That was unusual for me. I tended to get all involved with people. I studied his face, which was turned to the mountains with newly awakened interest. I had learned to distinguish him from other Sarbr by subtle facial individualities, as well as the fact that he was often the only one wearing clothes, but I had no idea whether or not his own people considered him to be handsome. By human standards, he certainly wasn’t, but I found him pleasant to look at.

I was about to ask whether his fellow Sarbr thought he was unusual looking, but before I got the words out he said, “I think we had better land near the quarry and have a look around. We might learn something useful. Besides, even though you’re supposed to be a recluse, the Arcturians would think it was strange of you not to drop in and observe the amenities, as long as you’re in the area. Especially after all these days alone with nothing but a native.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic because it might hurt his feelings. I was eager to be with humans again, even Arcturians. At least I could understand them. I got my identity papers out of the glove compartment, to bone up on my fake identity. I said, “you look like you’re glad we’re stopping here.”

“I am,” said Arlem. “Aside from the fun of doing some spying, I like to study Arcturians whenever I can. I admire them tremendously.”

“What!”

He added quickly, “Strictly from outside life, of course, looking in.”

“Remind me to ask you to explain that, when we’ve got more time.” I bent my attention to the papers in my hands.

The quarry was an ugly wound in the loveliest of mountains, and the land around it was cluttered with machines and prefabricated huts and trash. The entire area glittered under harsh spotlights lit against the evening’s descending gloom. No guard ship flew up to challenge our aircar as we glided to a landing on the mountainside a hundred yards from the camp. The operation needed no military protection because it was a thousand miles from the nearest city, and the forest people never came near any Arcturians. As the aircar’s legs jarred against the stone, I felt a momentary surge of admiration for the mountain, because it was so big. Someday, I hoped, I might be able to establish sympathy with a mountain. Someday I might merge with the whole universe, and wouldn’t that be wonderful!

Arlem and I climbed down from the hatch, carrying our identity papers, and were met by half a dozen armed humans from the camp. How close to each other they all were! I drew comfort from the bond between them, and felt better than I had in a week. Five of them wore rough workmen’s clothes, but the sixth had on a sleek, tailored coat of reddish-brown fur, belted and brass-buttoned, under which showed a quaint bad-guy symbol: shiny, spike-toed black boots. He was tall, for a human, and beefy, with a round pink face and thick mustard-colored hair. He had a rather unpleasant expression, but I liked him anyway. I was willing to like anyone who would accept another mind.

Ignoring Arlem, he looked me over quite rudely, and said, “This is a restricted region and you don’t belong here; you’d better have a good explanation.” He was pointing a laser pistol at me.

Tilting my head back in order to look down my nose at him, I said haughtily, “I care nothing for restrictions. I am the Lady Evors Dalant, and I go where I please. You will put your gun away, and tell your lackeys to do likewise, or I shall be obliged to have you all arrested.” Being a noblewoman was easy; it’s fun to act snooty. I enjoyed the feeling of respect it produced in the Arcturians.

The man started to holster his gun, then drew it out again—without pointing it directly at me—and said, “I have to see your papers first, Milady—and his.” He waved the laser toward Arlem. Suddenly Arlem seemed as unimportant to me as he did to these men.

“Very well,” I said, with a cool nod, “after which I must ask to see your papers, Mr.—”

“Craig Duvork at your service, Milady.” With a slight bow he accepted the proferred papers and glanced at them. “These are in order, of course. Men, holster your guns.” He bowed to me again and motioned toward the camp. “Milady, my identification papers are in my office. If you’ll come this way, please Duvork’s office was a small, warm, one-room hu», rather cramped with file cabinets and a big desk, but orderly. I walked in, followed by the quarry boss. Arlem waited outside like a good servant. Like a good spy he was all eyes, taking note of everything that went on in the camp, but I hadn’t much confidence in him. He wasn’t human, after all.

“I said, “Well, Mr. Duvork, your papers also seem to be in order. I commend you on your excellent record.”

“Thank you, Lady Dalant.” He bowed again. “Please sit down—no, here behind the desk; it’s a better chair. May I ask what you’re doing this far out in the boondocks?”

“Camping,” I said. “I love nothing better than solitude, and the opportunity to commune with nature.” “Don’t you get lonely?—if you’ll pardon my asking.” “Not at all. I simply cannot stand any sort of companionship for more than a few minutes at a stretch. When I must converse, I talk to my native servant, but most of the time he’s under strict instructions not to bother me. This is a nice little organization you’ve got here. What is its purpose?”

‘It’s a quarry. We take granite from the mountain and grind it into dust, to be used as radiation insulation.” For some reason, he was expecting me to respond as though what he said was very sexy.

“It sounds dull,” I said with a delicate yawn. I crossed my legs and adjusted my posture, trying as hard as possible to look sexy in my coveralls and parka.

“Oh, no, it’s fascinating work—begging your pardon, Milady, for contradicting.” His eyes slid slyly down from my face. Maybe he thought I wasn’t looking. “We pulverize the rocks with sonic waves. Would you like to see? I could arrange a demonstration—a private one, so you wouldn’t be bothered by too many people. Just you and me.”

I weighed the opportunity. I ought to keep Duvork occupied as long as possible, while Arlem snooped around. But I didn’t think there would be much worth spying on at a quarry, or that Arlem would be likely to understand it even if there was. Besides, I’d been trained for straight guerrilla warfare, not spy stuff.

After an awkward hesitation, I sighed, gave him the sexy smile he wanted, and said, “All right, I would like to see a rock pulverized by sonic waves.”

“No you wouldn’t. That’s obvious enough.”

I raised my eyebrows. “It is?”

He sat on the edge of the desk, leaned toward me and said in a confidential tone, “Lady Dalant, I am a very good judge of people. I don’t know what personal tragedy drove you into seclusion, but you can’t conceal the fact that you are a very lonely woman.”

As I gaped at him, he leaned closer and continued softly, “There’s no reason for a woman so beautiful to be so lonely, is there?” Then he held my head between his hands and kissed me.

That was too much. I don’t like to surprise people, but I do have some pride. I swung my arm out to backhand him, but he caught my wrist neatly as he slid over the desk and plopped into my lap.

“This is outrageous!” I said. Actually it was beginning to be funny, and I had to suppress a giggle.

“Admit that you desire me,” murmured Duvork, with his pink face so close to mine that I could count the hairs in his nostrils. “We’re alike; I’m really of noble lineage, too, although my father never gave me his name. You’re drawn by my inborn aura of aristocracy. Why not give in to that attraction? We’re the only two high-born people within a thousand miles of this place. We belong together!”

I burst out laughing.

He sprang off my lap as though it were an ejection seat, and backed away. “Don’t you laugh at me!”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help it!” The image of his amorous face loomed in my imagination and I laughed harder.

“Stop it!” he bellowed. His face was all red, and his hairy nostrils expanded and went white. I was convulsed in the chair, with tears running down my face, gasping for air, and my sides hurt, but I just couldn’t stop laughing. ‘

Sarbr who don’t understand portions of the preceding narrative should refer to City Life, by Reylo of Ryl. Although not a complete study of human culture, it is the most comprehensive to date and has the added advantage of being firsthand. Reylo the Wanderer comes closer to understanding humans than any other Sarbr-il, with the possible exception of Arlem the Traitor.

On the third day following Beth’s experience at the quarry, Arlem visited the secret headquarters of the Arcturian Protective Guard in Benson.

Darf Sein, sitting in front of that ill-appreciated root, drummed his fingers on his plastic desktop as I came into his office. “Uh, have a seat,” he said nervously.

I sat down, and was relieved to feel the floor come up to meet me halfway. “I suppose you’re mad because I haven’t been reporting in,” I said.

“No, no, uh, that’s all right. I suppose you were, uh, busy—not meaning to pry, of course, but, uh, what have you been doing?”

“Chauffering that New Eden spy all over the planet She had some crazy idea about recruiting the forest people into the BLC. But now I’ve come back for a

new assignment, because she’s dead.”

“Dead! Uh, how?”

I shrugged. “Oh, a two-bit little quarry boss out in the boonies made a pass at her, and she laughed at him, and he shot her. I removed the body right away, because that’s what a real BLC member would have done, and I thought you might want me to salvage my secret identity. As far as the BLC knows, I’m still loyal to the cause.” I twisted my mouth scornfully, which isn’t easy.

“Uh, good,” said Sein. “If it doesn’t, uh, interfere with your plans, then I think you ought to stay in the, uh, movement, and wait for a chance to sabotage it. Did you get anything at all from the New Eden agent? Eh, not meaning to sound pushy or anything.”

“I found out she was going to send for Allied reinforcements when the revolution was ready, but I didn’t get any proof you could confront them with. If she had any other secrets, she didn’t hint about them to me, although I was with her a lot. Her death was rather poorly timed, from the point of view of the Empire.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, she didn’t have time to leak any secrets. But on a personal level, I’m glad she cashed in her chips. She’s nice but she just wasn’t cut out to be a living person.”

“Oh. I see what you mean, uh, yes. Uh, do you happen to know what happened to the quarry man?”

“Oh, I shot him, to keep up the masquerade. Fortunately the quarry workers didn’t catch on to what was happening until I was almost back to the cruiser we’d been using. Even so, they singed my tail.”

“Do you have a tail?” asked Sein, genuinely surprised.

“I was speaking figuratively.”

“Oh. Uh, I’m dreadfully sorry.” He scrunched down in his chair.

“Anyway, the BLC sent me back here to work in the local wall epithet set, and I thought as long as I’m in town, I might as well report. You do want me to continue in the BLC, then?”

“Yes—please, that is, if you don’t mind. Uh, carry on.”

I hung around for a few minutes, waiting for him to pull himself together and say the kind of things a chief spy ought to say. But my continued presence only seemed to demoralize him, so I finally left.

VIII

At this point, once again we tum the narrative over to Beth Goodrich, who lay for days in the presence of the truth and still, with admirable consistency, failed to notice it. (We must admit that even the Sarbr who were involved in the case, displayed no aptitude at the fine art of putting two and two together.)

I woke laughing. Then suddenly I stopped. I wasn’t in that fool Duvork’s office anymore. I was lying on a soft couch in the middle of a round room with a slate-blue wall and a domed, transparent roof. Far above, treetops waved in the wind, with ragged little clouds streaming through their branches. Higher in the pale sky was the small white disk of the sun.

I looked around the room. There were no doors or windows visible. The floor was gray stone, and the only furniture was my couch, a solid slab of stone four feet high, softened by a lot of layers of leather. Covering me, and tucked in snugly under my chin, was a thick gray coverlet woven of animal hair, so I was very warm—and a bit itchy.

For some reason I wasn’t alarmed at waking up in a strange place, although I was thinking very clearly. The last thing I could remember was laughing my head off at Duvork’s angry, silly face. Well, if he had abducted me, which seemed to be the only possible explanation, then I’d better escape as quickly as possible, because he was liable to be showing up soon

and making himself obnoxious.

I tried to sit up. Instantly there was a sharp pain in my chest. With a grunt of surprise, I dropped back onto the couch. Then I tried to sit up again. Again the pain. Lying back, I pushed the coverlet off my chest to see what the matter was. Just under my left breast was an ugly deep sore with blisters around the edges.

“A laser burn!” I whispered, astonished. “How in the galaxy did that get there?” The idea of it frightened me, and I decided I’d better get away from there fast, pain or no pain. With a great effort I pushed myself into a sitting position, wrapped the coverlet around my shivering body, and swung my legs over the edge of the stone couch. I dropped to the warm floor. I landed standing up, and leaned against the leather-draped stone, but the pain was bad and I felt very weak. For a minute I thought I was going to faint. I applied my sympathetic ability to the nerve fibers, and the pain went away.

A door, hitherto invisible, appeared in the wall and swung inward toward me. In rushed the cold winter wind, and with it came a shaggy gray Sarbr-il—one of the forest people, judging from his lack of attire. A bulging skin flask was slung under his arm, and from his other hand dangled a long, woven bag with some lumpy things in the bottom of it.

When he saw me he dropped the bag and sprang forward with a startled exclamation. I didn’t want him to touch me, but he shook his head and said reassuring things in Sarbrian as he boosted me back up onto the couch and arranged the coverlet over the lower half of my body, probably out of consideration for my vulnerability to the cold rather than for my modesty).

I decided he must be a doctor or a native medicine man, so I allowed him to examine the laser bum and plaster it with some greenish paste from the long bag. The paste stung a bit, but it didn’t seem to do any harm. Then the Sarbr-il lifted my left arm to examine it, and I noticed for the first time that there was a small plastic disk attached to the inside of my forearm.

He took a thin flexible tube out of the bag, fitted one end onto the disk on my arm, unslung the skin flask and plugged the other end of the tube into a similar disk on the flask. After a few seconds the flask began to slowly collapse, like a leaky football, and at the same time a dull ache spread through my arm.

“What’s all this?” I said, but the Sarbr-il smiled and shrugged and said something in Sarbrian. Either he was deceiving me or he really was a forest person, in which case it was unlikely that he was associated with any humans—except me, now—in any way. Therefore, although he seemed to be trying to help me, he might be endangering my life with this transfusion. After all, what did he know about the human body? He could kill me without meaning to.

When the Sarbr-il set the emptying flask on the coverlet beside me and walked out the door, closing it behind him, which brought welcome relief from the draft, I immediately grabbed the connecting tube and tore at it.

“Agh!” Right away I found out that the little disk wasn’t merely stuck on my skin. It was deeply anchored in the flesh.

The Sarbr-il burst into the room to see why I had cried out. He looked at my arm, which was now all sore and red, and made what sounded like a nasty remark. Firmly pressing my left arm and then my right against the leather padding, he pulled the coverlet up around my chin and tucked it in.

I threw off the blanket and gestured angrily at the flask and tube. “Take that stuff away from there! I don’t like it.” In spite of the language barrier, my meaning was clear enough.

Much to my surprise, the Sarbr-il obligingly unhooked the apparatus. The flask was two-thirds empty. He dropped it and the tube into his bag, slung the bag over his shoulder, and walked out of the room.

As soon as the door closed, I regretted my show of temper. Now maybe he was insulted and would go off and leave me all alone in the middle of the forest.

I lay on the stone bed and worried about that for a while.

Gradually I became aware of a warmness that had been in my mind ever since I woke up. I was alone in the room, but somehow I shared a sympathetic bond with many people. There was no mistaking what they expected of me. They expected health, well-being, energy, strength, health, health, health. It was nice to get so many good thoughts. It was even better than get-well cards. It made me feel pretty good. I fell asleep.

When I woke again a female Sarbr-il was bending over me. The woman saw that I was awake and said in Latin, Good afternoon, Beth. My name is Zhan.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said politely. “Would you mind explaining where I am, and how I got here?”

“Certainly. You’re in a healing place. You’re dead now.”

“DeadI” I was thoroughly alarmed, as it flashed through my mind that I might be in some sort of purgatory. But then I remembered the Sarbr had a peculiar use of the word “life”, and I felt better. Whatever Zhan meant by my being dead, it probably wasn’t anything serious. “Well, how did I die? Laser?”

“Yes, Craig Duvork shot you. I don’t know why, but you probably do.”

“I can think of a reason.” I smiled up at the Sarbr-il; there was a lot I didn’t understand, but now that someone friendly was here to explain things, it would all be straightened out and I could get back to work on my recruiting campaign. “How did I get here after Duvork shot me?”

“That young fellow—Arlem—he brought you here in an aircar, and the healers patched you right up. They were afraid they’d make a lot of mistakes because none of them ever fixed a human before, but they found out human metabolism is quite similar to apes—and also to Sarbr. Lucky for you.”

“I should say so. Where is Arlem now?”

“I think he went to Benson. He had life matters to attend to. He left a message, though.” She handed me a folded piece of paper. “I have to go—I expect to come to life shortly, and I have preparations to make.” She struck a model’s pose. “Do you like my outfit?” It was a very fine gray leather playsuit, crusted with tiny beads in colorful, intricate designs.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Did you make it yourself?”

“Of course, and it took a long time, too.” The Sarbr-il went to the door, and paused. “A couple of healers will be in later, to find out some more things about humans. They won’t hurt you so just let them do their tests, all right?”

“All right,” I said.

“I may drop in again before I leave. See you later.”

The door slid shut behind the gray-clad native, and I immediately sat up—it didn’t hurt much, this time—and unfolded the paper. It was in pencil, rather smudgy, and it said,

“Beth—

Sorry I had to go without talking to you, but of course I’m still living and there are things to be taken care of—you know how it is. The healers I’m leaving you with are the best I know of, next to the ones back at my own berron.

You sure picked a dumb time to die, just when the revolution is getting started and there are big adventures to be had. We were hoping to get a lot of new ideas from you. Of course, for all I know Duvork killed you without your permission, which was pretty dirty of him if he did. But after he shot you I shot him, so you’re even.

I’ve been wondering what you’re going to do, now that you’re dead. If you aren’t anxious to get back to New Eden or wherever you’re from, I could become mysteriously missing and we could spend twenty or thirty years together. We could walk around the world, or find an unexplored forest and explore it. There’s one big island in the Southern Hemisphere that’s supposed to have sea monsters under it. You humans seem to be interested in things like that and we could go and take movies of them. Or we could chain you to a rock and wait for a monster to rise out of the sea to eat you, and then I’d jump out from behind the rock and slay it with a trusty sword, like Perseus. Humans used to do that a lot, didn’t they, before they ran out of monsters? Or I could teach you some of the games we Sarbr play. There are a lot of things to do on this planet.

You could come to life again but I hope you don’t. The only thing I didn’t like about you was how you were so wrapped up in living. It isn’t good for you.

If you decided to go back to New Eden or somewhere else, can I go with you? I’ll be back to see you in a few days and you can decide then. In the meantime, don’t change too much. You’re a peculiar person and you’re uglier than anybody I ever saw but you’re very interesting.

Arlem.”

I frowned as I finished the letter and refolded it. I had hoped it would clear up this death business. It had not done so. Anyway Arlem’s proposition was as alarming as it was touching. It was beginning to be obvious that he didn’t take the Arcturian threat seriously at all, and that was bad. Also I sensed dimly that I was in more of a mess than I’d thought at first, and that to go on and finish the recruiting mission which had been so rudely interrupted might prove difficult.

I spent the afternoon improving my health. Although my heart was nearly healed now, I found evidence that it had been badly damaged by the laser, and probably the only thing that had kept it beating was that suggestion I’d set up long ago, deep in my subconscious mind. Anyway it seemed to have received medical attention of some sort, and all that outside sympathy helped, too. But now that I was conscious I could take care of it myself.

Towards evening about six Berbidronian days after I’d been shot, two healers came in to do the tests Zhan had mentioned. Neither of them spoke Latin or Arcturian, but they were gentle and friendly, and even though some of the tests were unpleasant, I didn’t mind too much. I was surprised to see that their tools and techniques, while quite different from those of human doctors, seemed even more advanced.

That was the first time, in the five years (one Berbidronian year being equal to 101 Berbidronian days, or about 210 Earth Standard days) since the first human landing, that any Sarbr-il had had a chance to thoroughly examine a human being. And the ignorance was mutual. Back on New Eden, every now and then one of the big magazines came out with an article speculating on the relationship, if any, between the two species. None of the theories were ever backed up with medical data, because no medical data on the Sarbr were available. Evidently there was a lot less actual contact between the two peoples than outward appearances led one to believe.

The next three days were frustrating. I was full of questions, but none of my attendants spoke Latin or Arcturian, and I was still too weak to go outside and find things out for myself. At least I had plenty of time to organize the impressions I’d gotten since arriving on Berbidron. Somehow, it seemed, the Sarbr were separating city existence and forest existence as if they were two separate worlds. To the city dwellers, the forest world was less than nothing—“dead”. And possibly the forest people felt the same way about the cities. That would explain their lack of interest in the Arcturians, who did not make themselves nearly as obnoxious in the forests of Berbidron as they did elsewhere. And that meant, if I wanted to bring the revolution to the berrons, I’d have to bridge the gap between the two worlds. How?

Another thing that bothered me was my squirrels. I hadn’t seen Elf and Meg since that fateful landing at the quarry, nor had I had any chance to ask what had become of them. I was afraid Arlem might find it easy to neglect them—he’d never liked them. Or he might even drop them in the ocean, or eat them.

But I was pleased with the way my sympathetic ability was growing. It must have been because of the constant influx of love and encouragement that was helping me to get well, and because I was making continual use of my own power to make the laser wound heal more quickly. Anyway I felt that if I had the opportunity to test my power on a receptive life form— which the Sarbr definitely were not!—I might be able to actually exert influence, rather than merely observing and sharing. It was a frightening idea, but I felt up to it.

Zhan came to see me once, but only for a few seconds. “I’m off to Beryl Sands in an hour,” she said happily. “I just popped in to say good-bye. Is there anything you need?”

“Well,” I said, trying to arrange my questions in descending order of importance, “If—”

“Oh, hey, there goes my cousin. I’d better say good-bye to him. It was nice knowing you, Beth. If you’re ever in Beryl Sands, look me up!” With a wave of her hand, she was gone.

The days went slowly, but there were interesting times. The healers brought me a movie projector and showed me how to work it from my bed, and when they threw a cover over the transparent dome of my room, I could watch films on the curved wall (the focus was adjusted to compensate for the curve). I was surprised to see that the projector and films weren’t imitations of human products. Though I was unable to ask about it, I surmised that the Sarbr had developed their own science of photography before they ever heard of the human race. The camera techniques were fascinatingly different, as was the subject matter. Many of the films were long strings of optical illusions. Others were about events, such as epic ovret hunts and complex ceremonies involving hundreds of people. Either these were films of actual events, or the acting was superb, and I was impressed even though I couldn’t understand the conversations. I liked to make up dialogue for the people in the movies, often with very funny results.

One movie in particular interested me. It was about a Sarbr-il who lived (probably, according to the Sarbrian definition, he wasn’t really alive) by himself deep in a forest, and who was evidently a little bit touched in the head. He dug a hole twenty feet deep and a hundred feet in diameter, and paved the sides and bottom with flat stones except for three spots: the center, a spot halfway between the cfenter and the northernmost point, and a similar spot south of the center. In these places he planted three saplings. People from neighboring berrons came and asked him about this unusual setup, but he only smiled, and never spoke a word. Then, evidently after a passage of many years, the saplings were grown into tall pines, and they stood like pillars in their stone-paved holer the northern one, the central one, and the southern one. The same Sarbr-il, or possibly his descendant—anyway they were played by the same actor—still tended the trees and kept the weeds from growing in the cracks between the stones. People came great distances to exclaim at this peculiar landmark and to praise the old fellow on his creation, but he only smiled and never said a word. Then one morning when the people came and looked, it was different. There was still a big tree growing in the center, but the other two were east and west from the center, instead of north and south. Naturally the people thought this was strange. They went down into the hole and had a very close look, but the trees were all rooted solidly, and when they pulled up the stones north and south of the center, they found no sign that any tree had ever grown there. They went to the old tree-planter and questioned him, but he smiled arid said nothing. After that, more people than ever came to see the marvelous hole. But, unless I missed something because of the language barrier, they never did figure out how the trees had moved.

I enjoyed that movie no end. I watched it over and over and laughed every time at the astonished faces of the people who came to see the hole, and at the smug expression of the one who had dug it. When I wasn’t watching the movie I was imagining ways the old rascal could have worked his miracle. But I did wonder why he had done it, and why all the people kept coming to see it.

In the afternoon of my third day after awakening, I was lying on my couch, wondering whether the ground under the hole, tree roots and all, could have been supported by a giant subterranean turntable. But really, I thought, that was awfully farfetched. The answer was probably something simple. Besides, the trees still had their branches oriented the same in relation to the four directions.

Then the door opened and Arlem came in.

“Arlem!” I sat up and pulled the blanket around myself in order to be decent. “Boy, am I glad to see youl”

He came across the room and sat on the end of the bed. “Sorry I couldn’t come sooner,” he said. “Were you bored, with nobody to talk to?”

“Well, yes, but they let me watch a bunch of movies. Where have you been?”

“Benson. I had to keep my life caught up, and everything.”

“You mean, selling insurance?”

“Among other things. But I don’t want to talk about that; it’s a bad subject for you. What movies have you been watching?”

“I don’t know the names of them. The one I like best is about three trees in a hole.”

“Oh, the story of Belim’s Pit. That’s a classic. Did you figure out how he did it?”

“Not yet. Do you know?”

He smiled. “Of course, but I’ll let you figure it out for yourself.”

“Could you give me a hint?”

He shook his head.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “I’ve been thinking—if you Sarbr have movies, do you have three dimension vision? I’d love to see a native Sarbrian 3dv show, not one that copies humans.”

He pulled his legs up onto the bed—he wasn’t dressed, and I noticed that there were some places where clothes had rubbed the fur off—and looked as if he expected to be there a while. “Well, that was a very interesting chapter in Sarbrian history,” he said. “We never got as far as 3d-vision, but years ago we did have a brief encounter with its ancestor, television. Soon after it was invented, word got around that with television, unlike movies, you could see things that were happening far away, at the time they were happening. That sounded like a good thing, so right away every berron got a tv camera and a bunch of screens set up in their main clearing. They went to a lot of trouble—even set up a planetary network, with the smaller berrons hooked into the larger ones, and the largest ones all hooked together, so that everybody in any berron could see, and be seen by, a scattering of berrons from all over Berbidron. Then came the great morning when the whole system was turned on. Everyone, all over the planet, sat in a clearing with their eyes fixed on those screens. Electronic voices babbled all over the planet. The people of Berbidron have never been more united. They didn’t do much-told stories, mostly, and jokes. That was one bad thing; normally a joke takes a couple of years to get all around the planet, but by the end of the first day of the tv tie-in, every joke known to the Sarbrian species was worn out. People had to figure out a whole new set of jokes to pass around, afterwards.”

“Why aren’t there any tv’s anymore?”

“Oh, there are a few, but we don’t take them out and look at them very often. You see, that first tie-in lasted for nine days. Everybody was waiting to witness on-the- spot news on some other part of the planet. So they all just sat there, and slept there, for nine days and eight nights, in front of the television screens. The conversation gradually died down. Once in a while somebody would get up to get something to eat, or to relieve themselves, but mostly they just sat and stared, waiting for something to happen. And so, with all the people watching tv, there was only one berron in which anything was happening.”

“What was happening there?”

“They were having trouble getting their camera set Up.”

“Well, then, how did it end?”

“When those people finally got their camera hooked up to the main network, the central fuse blew. By the time it was repaired, everybody had put away their tv set and gone back about their business. Oh, that reminds me,. I have something for you.” He got down off the bed and went outside. Almost immediately he came back in with Nutmeg perched in one hand and Elf in the other.

“Oh!” I said happily. The squirrels jumped out of his hands onto the coverlet and ran up for me to pet them. They seemed quite healthy and happy. I had misjudged Arlem.

“I thought you ought to be the one to decide what to do with them,” he said. “Do you want to turn them loose here, or sent them back to New Eden or wherever you got them?”

“I’ll keep them, of course! I love them.” While Arlem frowned, I let the squirrels nuzzle my face, and then I tried an experiment. Nutmeg was nosing around in my hair, looking for bugs; she always checked, even though as far as I know she never found any. I joined my mind with hers, and then thought that it would be fun to chase our tail. Nutmeg forgot about my hair. She went down to my lap and started running around in tight circles, chasing her tail. Elf watched in astonishment. I pulled out of her mind when we started to get dizzy, and she staggered around a little bit and sat down, and I laughed.

Arlem said, ‘1 can see Duvork shot you just in time.”

“Hm. Well, speaking of that, isn’t it great how fast I’m healing? Jlere I am practically well already, and yet that laser wound was a pretty bad one.”

“No worse than the average fatal wound.”

I shrugged and made a noncommittal noise.

“What do you plan to do, now that you’re dead? Did you think about my idea?”

“Yes. But you know I have a revolution to supervise before I—”

“Oh, stop itl” His fangs gleamed as he spoke. “The worst thing you could possibly do is come back to life. Now that you’re dead, why don’t you stay that way?”

“I have a responsibility to New Eden—and to Berbidron.”

“You had a responsibility. Now that you’re dead, you have every right to stay dead.” He paced around the bed, looking very earnest. “Oh, Beth, there may be a lot we don’t have in common, but we could have such a good time together! You’re one of the greatest people I’ve ever met. You have—well, I’ve never heard the Latin word for it, but the Sarbrian word translates as ‘corner of the eye’. It’s that thing you have in place of a sense of humor. And besides—you’re so new!”

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Of course I’m nothing special, but according to the old ones I have some potential as an actor, and at any rate I’m a pretty good hunter. We’d eat well.”

“I gather you don’t place much importance on your job as an insurance salesman.”

He flashed his fangs again; an unconscious habit, not meant to frighten me. ‘1 wish you’d forget about that! Yes, I enjoy being an insurance salesman, but I’d enjoy playing with you in the forest much better.”

“Doesn’t the liberation of your planet mean anything to you?”

He was silent for a while. Then he sat down on the bed again. “I guess you’re determined to come back to life again, aren’t you?”

“Yes. After the Arcturians are gotten rid of, then maybe we could spend some time together. Although, frankly, considering that were of different species—” “What do you mean, different species? Once we’re both dead it won’t matter.”

“Well, but if we’re not closely enough related to produce offspring, then I don’t see—”

“Offspring!” He jumped to the floor and walked quickly around in a circle. ‘1 had no idea you were interested in having a child. But if you want one by me, I suppose it’s possible. The healers could probably juggle our chromosomes around enough, after a few years of experimentation. But what do you want a child for?”

“I don’t,” I said. “But if we aren’t closely enough related to produce a child—by natural means—then I don’t think we ought to try mating.”

He sighed and sat on the bed again. “Of course not. I don’t care much for sex anyway. I had no intention of mating with you.” Shaking his head and frowning, he added, “You humans really have sex on the brain. I guess it’s not just a life matter, huh?”

“I suppose not,” I said uncertainly. “Now, would you mind filling me in on what I’ve missed concerning the revolution? What about the forest people we recruited? Are they turning into good revolutionaries?”

“Sure. A couple of them are working with me already —I’m in the underground in Benson now. But never mind about that; if you insist on coming back to life, we’d better figure out who you’re going to be.”

“What do you mean, who?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean, who?”

We stared at each other. I said, “I have a feeling we’ve got our wires crossed somehow. Is there some reason why you and I can’t just go on with our recruiting campaign, when I’m well?”

“There certainly is. I’m not above bending the laws a little but that’s out of the question. Dead people just don’t pop up out of their graves. If you want to live again, you’ll have to do it as somebody else.”

“I don’t understand this,” I said.

He shrugged. “Well, since your efforts are a guerrilla leader mean so much to you, we might be able to set you up in life as a woman who takes the place of the deceased secret agent from New Eden. Probably you’ll have to be an Arcturian, because Beth Goodrich was the only Allied human on Berbidron, and she’s dead. I don’t know of any Arcturian revolutionaries, so you’d have to be against the revolution in the beginning, but I could convert you. In fact, maybe you could bring some of your important Arcturian friends over to our side, too. It wouldn’t hurt.”

I wondered if the Sarbrian conceptions of life and death, and this new oddity of having to take on a different identity the second time around, might be part of their religion, in which case it couldn’t be expected to make any sense. Anyway, if I studied specific examples of the Arcturians’ activities I might have better luck in relating the problem to the world of the forest people. And Arlem’s idea of helping to switch other Arcturians to our side might be a smart move. I began to see myself as a femme fatale in a slinky black dress, running my fingers through the hair of an Arcturian official and urging him in a husky voice—accented—to take off his coat and make himself comfortable. In the coat pocket was a top secret document….

“Well,” said Arlem, “do you want to be an Arcturian, or shall we work something else out?”

‘I’ll be an Arcturian.” I practiced a cryptic smile.

He looked at me carefully. “Maybe I shouldn’t trust you after you come to life.”

I laughed mysteriously. “You would be wise never to make assumptions about me,” I said in Arcturian. “Just kiss me, you fool!”

With a bemused look, he lifted my hand and kissed my fingertips. “You are as beautiful and dangerous as a cobra,” he murmured. “I dare not continue to see you, and yet I cannot resist you, Natasha.”

Natasha smiled in her unfathomable way.

IX

Thus ended Beth Goodrich. Parmod’n the Observer supplied us with the information that four days later, the starship Donavi out of Arcturus Ceta IV made orbit around Berbidron. A planet-to-orbit ferry came up to meet her. The crew of the ferry was Sarbrian, although the captain was human. The ferry took on the Donovi’s passengers and as much as it could hold of the starship’s cargo, which was tools and heavy machinery. Then the ferry ship descended again to Desker Spaceport, and the task of unloading began.

The first officer, Parmod’n, stood at the bottom of the ladder from the hatch, checking off names of the passengers as they came down. The human captain stood beside him.

“Roddak, Jino,” said Parmod’n, checking off a name on his list as the passenger displayed his ID. card. “Roelnor, Dins, Roen, Natasha.”

“I don’t remember seeing her get on,” said the captain.

The first officer glanced at the plain, dark woman in the brown cape that concealed her form completely. “I saw her. You probably did, too, but if I’m any judge of human women, I’d say you aren’t to blame for not remembering.” They both laughed.

The woman flashed them a dark look, and hissed, then put her ID. card away somewhere under her cape, and moved on. “Rupshar, Munn K.” droned Parmod’n. “Ryber, Jino. Rybertag ..

It was easy to get used to being Natasha Roen, even after a lifetime of being Beth Goodrich. I’d never had a very strong grip on my identity anyway. I learned to answer to the name quickly, and I fitted well into Arcturian society with the help of my slowly growing power of sympathy. My papers identified me as a lady of good breeding, less high than the Lady Evors Dalant but still enviably well placed in the social heirarchy. Natasha Roen was the daughter of a wealthy interplanetary merchant, deceased, of Arcturian lineage but bom in space. Having seen a lot of different planets, I’d been exposed to other things besides all that Arcturian propaganda, which made it more believable that I might defect. I didn’t like that because it would give the Arcturians a reason to suspect me, but Arlem had insisted on it. My money came from investments the Sarbr had arranged for me—I haven’t the faintest idea how, but a very respectable Arcturian bank sent me a large check every month—and I had enough for a plush suite in the best hotel in Benson, good food, lovely clothes— I easily learned to like the Arcturian styles—and all sorts of extravagant extras, like a superdeluxe aircar, a jet pack, and a Procyon ruby pendant. I was even learning to tell apart different years of the same kinds of wine.

Arlem had provided me with some letters of introduction, presumably forged, into Berbidron’s little pocket of Arcturian high society. Most of the aristocracy was quite agreeable to my need to circulate and meet everybody, because there was a shortage of eligible ladies —human—on Berbidron. Never having rubbed shoulders with important people before, particularly Arcturians, I was worried at first that I might not do the right things the right way, but they just shrugged off my little blunders as odd habits I’d picked up in my travels to the lesser—Allied—planets. Anyway I adapted quickly.

In the first week of my existence as Natasha Roen, I shuttled back and forth among all four cities, attending half a dozen .teas, two birthday parties, a picnic, and a “cosy little get-together” of about fifteen people (I never counted heads, but I’m sure it was an odd number, with more men than women).

That was a memorable party. It was held in one of Benson’s hundreds of splendiferous mansions, a lovely ivy-covered bam of a place, four stories high, with big white pillars along the front. The landscaped yard had marble statues and fountains that were pretty, though the place was a little too cluttered with them. The only thing about the estate that wasn’t charming was the fact that it was on the edge of town, so that only a few snowy fields separated it from the forest.

I landed my aircar on the roof and was let in by a Sarbr-il butler wearing, of all things, a tuxedo—with tails! I still wasn’t used to seeing Sarbr in human clothes, and for that matter I wasn’t used to seeing tuxedos on anybody. I felt sure it must rub his fur all wrong.

Never having had much experience with servants, I couldn’t say positively, but I had a feeling he was probably the finest butler of all time. He escorted me down a gorgeous marble stairway; he’d suggested the elevator, but I like steps better, when I can get them. I admired the butler-looking way he walked, as if he had starched pants and a board down the back of his coat. His expression was like a tobacco-store Indian—which I’ve never seen, but I can imagine it. Also his hands were combed and manicured—the claws, I noticed, were not trimmed off. I did wonder why he smelled of after-shave, because I still couldn’t imagine where a Sarbr-il would shave.

Most houses have their main floor on the top, to be near the aircar entrance, but this one was old-fashioned, so we had to go all the way down to the bottom floor. This was fine with me because I was really enjoying the marble staircase and the butler. Also I appreciated the extra time I had to fuss over my appearance. The cocktail dress was tailor-made for me by a native in Beryl Sands—not Zhan; I couldn’t find her either of the times I was there—and I had thought it was very pretty when I paid for it, but now I worried that it might be too dressy, or it might clash with the room decor. My hair was piled on top of my head, to make me feel older and more like a spy-about-town, and that worried me too because I really look prettier with it down on my shoulders, and anyway what if everybody else had theirs down? And I had on calf-high lace booties, which were all the rage for evening wear—for both sexes—but what if everybody else had on spike-toed boots, a sign of patriotism?

I was so nervous I almost forgot to check on the butler’s political affiliations. This was important, because Arlem hadn’t contacted me in all the time since I’d become Natasha Roen, about two Earth standard weeks. I was beginning to think I’d better do the contacting myself, or it might not get done. The trouble was, I hadn’t the faintest idea how to locate the Berbidronian Liberation Committee. I couldn’t come right out and ask anybody, because many Sarbr weren’t sympathetic to the revolution and might turn me in.

As we came around the last bend in the stairway I saw a big double door of polished wood down ahead of us. I knew I’d better make my move while I had the chance.

“Wait a minute,” I said, with a little pull at the butler s elbow. “I think my bootie’s loose.”

I sat down on a step to fiddle with the lacy straps. He said, “Allow me, Modom,” and started to help, but I said I’d do it myself. Actually, of course, the bootie was all right, but I undid it anyway and shifted the straps around.

“Nice day,” I said casually.

“Yes, Modom.” He sat stiffly on the third step down, in order not to tower over me.

“Have you worked here very long?”

“Since the house was built, Modom. That’s four years now. Berbidronian years.”

“Who did you work for originally?” We both knew I should have said whom.

“I doubt if you would be acquainted with her, Modom. She was a Sarbr-il: the Lady Reylo Ryl.”

What luck! “Did you like herr?”

“Begging your pardon, Modom, I do not pass judgement on my employers.”

“I’m sorry.” I fiddled with my bootie for a minute. Then I remarked, “I wonder what ever happened to the Lady Ryl.”

“She disappeared shortly after the Arcturians—shortly after the government shifted into the hands of the Arcturians.”

“Oh.” I had a feeling he might be a revolutionary, but then again he might not. “Well, I’m ready to go in now.” I stood up.

He said tactfully, “Modom intends to meet the hostess with her bootie unfastened?”

After I fixed my bootie, we went on down and he opened the big wooden doors and announced in a voice that carried without being unduly loud, “Miss Natasha Roen.”

That surprised me, because I had merely flashed my invitation and hadn’t told him my name, but I didn’t stop to wonder about it. Everybody looked up as I came into the room. I noted that most of the ladies had their hair up and two had on booties, and I felt much better.

The hostess, Lady Carem, came forward to meet me. “Nat, you look lovely,” she said, all smiles. All the Arcturians called me Nat. I didn’t like it. It was a cute nickname, but it didn’t fit my spy image.

“So do you,” I said. Actually the only thing I really noticed about her appearance was that her makeup was cracked where the wrinkles were. Also her hairdo was shaped exactly like a heap of horse manure, but fortunately she was blonde. I remember vaguely that her dress was a pretty color but rather snug. The only reason she was on Berbidron was to take advantage of the favorable male-female ratio. In order to avoid further hypocrisy, I looked around and said, “This is a beautiful room.” It was.

“Oh, that,” she said disparagingly, leading me over to meet the other guests.

As I said before, I wasn’t sure of the exact number, but among them were a Lord Admiral in the Protective Guard, a lieutenant who worked at the spaceport, a colonel from the Arcturian Interplanetary Police (he was a liason officer or something), a civilian industrialist, and one other guy who looked like he might be somebody. Lady Carem didn’t mention his occupation, which was significant.

After I was introduced all around, and had forgotten everybody’s names, Lady Carem switched the conversation back to what they’d been talking about, a swimming party which had happened the previous summer. That wasn’t very nice of Lady Carem but I appreciated the opportunity to shut up and just look around the room. It was worth looking at.

It was a big double living room, about sixty feet long, with two marble pillars carved to resemble trees, suggesting a division in the middle. Each half had high walls, and a great domed ceiling on top of that, which added to the impression of spaciousness. I like high ceilings. I supposed Reylo Ryl or any other Sarbr-il would like them, too, on account of being used to the forests with those tall, tall trees. A chandelier hung from the center of each dome. They were gorgeous things like gigantic diamond necklaces, with hundreds of miniature glowglobes the size and color of pearls. The walls, which were some sort of shiny gray tile, featured narrow, full-length mirrors alternating with paintings that were long horizontally. The end walls were masked by heavy cream-colored draperies embroidered all over with a tiny flower design. Around the edges of the rugs ran about a foot of cream-colored wood, shiny enough to reflect the paintings on the walls. The rugs were very thick and more or less rusty brown, although they had a design that looked like hieroglyphics (later I found out that they said, “God bless our home” in Sarbrian). The furniture was mostly shades of gold or red, very plushy and comfortable, with carved wooden legs. It was on a slightly larger scale than what humans need, so that we all looked like Goldilocks in Papa Bears chair. I could picture Reylo Ryl being quite at home here.

There were three things that seemed out of place. One was the 3dv stage in front of the curtain at the far end of the room, and one was a framed photograph on the wall. It showed a Sarbr-il standing in a stream, wearing high rubber boots and a jacket, and even wearing a hat with fishing lures on the band. In one hand he held a mechanical fishing pole, and from the other hand hung a long, mean-looking fish, and the Sarbr-il had a triumphant grin on his face.

The third thing that didn’t seem right was an abstract statue in front of the other creamy curtain. It was made of polished gray wood.

A lull came in the conversation. Evidently they’d exhausted their recollections of that swimming party. I said, “Lady Carem, that statue in front of the curtain is very interesting. What’s it made of?”

She smiled brightly. “It’s from a branch of one of those big gray trees.”

I almost gagged. “Really? I didn’t know any of them had been cut down.”

“They haven’t. The branch was struck by lightning or something and it just fell off. A friend of mine found it when he was on an ovret safari, and he brought back that piece for me. I sent it back home to have it carved. Actually, that’s the only contribution I’ve made to this room, so far. The rest was this way when I moved in; it’s all native stuff. I’m going to redecorate soon, in modem style.”

She pressed a button on the arm of her sofa. “Jamryn is being so slow with the drinks!” Then she said to the industrialist, who wasn’t married, “Really, Jino, you ought to come over some time just to admire my wine cellar. The natives who used to live here stocked it with just everything imaginable, and I’ve added to it, selectively. It’s an absolute treasure trove.”

Jino murmered something polite.

Lady Carem went on, “This house is full of curiosities, actually. Look at this.” She went over to the draperies behind the statue, and pulled them open. Everyone gasped.

It was a window looking out on a great city in the evening. I could see the lights of the aircars moving, and signs blinking far away in the business district, and as we watched, a cloud scudded across the sky from left to right. There were mountains in the distance. That city certainly wasn’t little old Benson.

“That cloud crosses the sky every day at this time,” said Lady Carem, with a smile. “Earlier in the day there’s a traffic jam and about four accidents, and tonight there will be a fire. Also, spaceships land periodically in the background, and an occasional pedestrian wanders by in the near foreground. One will get mugged in the wee hours of the morning. It’s a tape, of course, synchronized exactly with the Berbidronian day. It was here when I moved in, and I haven’t had it taken out yet, because it’s a conversation piece. Besides, all that’s back behind that wall is the forest.” She shivered delicately. “No point in putting a real window there.”

The young lieutenant, who wore his uniform as if it were gold leaf, remarked, “Speaking of the forest, I wish they’d get rid of that big gray tree that grows right in the middle of the spaceport. One of these days somebody’s going to crash into it. Besides, it’s an eyesore.”

“Uh, amen,” said the one whose occupation I didn’t know.

I seized this opportunity to say, “Do you work at the spaceport?”

He shook his head and reached for a drink from the tray which Jamryn, the butler, had just brought in. Everyone else took a glass of something except me. I have a very low capacity when I’m drinking in a group, and I thought the great spy ought to stay sober. Jamryn left again. It was peculiar, how different the Sarbr-il looked to me when I was sitting among humans. I noticed his face less, and his tallness and furriness more. Was I really a spy for those creatures?”

Well, since I had come this far, I might as well get on with it, for the sake of the people of New Eden, if not for the Sarbr. There were important people here. This wasn’t a good situation for recruiting any of them, but I might be able to get them to drop a secret or two. The Lord Admiral, for instance. He’d had a few drinks before I came and he was currently working on a pretty heady brandy. I edged into his mind, which wasn’t a very pleasant place, and got him into a confiding mood, hoping that what came out would be relevant to the revolution. In that mood, when a silence came in the conversation, I almost blurted out my own secret, just as a joke, but fortunately the Lord Admiral beat me to it.

He said, “Might as well let that tree at the spaceport live a while longer. It’ll go in eight years, along with everything else.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the wife of the AIP man. “I’m sure those rumors about the destruction of the planet are exaggerated. There may be some readjustment of the ecology if—”

“Readjustment!” said the Lord Admiral. “Elimination, Mrs. Riekl You can take my word for it. If this was a populated planet it’d be different, of course, but the Council of Lords—”

“Tebert,” said his mousy wife, “are you sure you ought—”

“I know what I’m doing,” the Lord Admiral assured her. “These people can all be trusted.”

“It’s a bunch of bull anyway,” said Jino, the industrialist. “I’ve got a hand in what’s going on on this planet, too, you know. Sure the refineries are cutting comers, and that means pollution, but not enough to come anywhere near the destruction of all life on Berbidron—not for a hundred yearsl”

This was news to me; I was all ears. There was a round of indignant insistence that the Arcturian Empire was not going to destroy any planet, but the Lord Admiral gulped down half his drink and then astounded us all with, “It’s not going to be the refineries or the factories that do it. It’s going to be nerve gas.”

“Nerve gas!” cried five or six people, all at once.

The Lord Admiral nodded smugly. “This is to go no further, you understand. If the natives found out, they might riot.”

We all promised not to tell. It was fun, being in on a big secret like this.

“Why nerve gas?” asked Colonel Riek.

“It’s a special formula, for the conquest of the Allied Planets and the Colonies, naturally,” said the Admiral. “It’s a derivative of the dart poison, septrinide, from Hecate Thirty. Any chemist could tell you the formula, but no government has ever produced it on a large scale because the only way of doing it that isn’t prohibitively expensive involves taking large amounts of carton dioxide out of the atmosphere. Very large amounts. So large, in fact, that in a few years there won’t be enough C0_2 to sustain plant life on a planet. And of course, when the plants die… He shrugged. “Needless to say, we wouldn’t want to do this on Arcturus Ceta IV. That’s the real reason we took Berbidron. The abundance of natural resources is just a fringe benefit.”

Lady Carem shivered delicately. “Well, I certainly don’t want to be here when the air gets bad!”

At that, we all laughed, sort of, and the Lord Admiral assured us that we would all be evacuated long before there was any danger.

“But what about the Sarbr?” asked Mrs. Riek.

The Lord Admiral set his drink on a coffee table with a click. “They aren’t human, you know. It’s not as if they were human.”

Colonel Riek told his wife soothingly, “Asphyxiation doesn’t hurt much, I hear.”

The one with the mysterious occupation piped up, “Uh, they’re a spooky lot anyway, and they can’t ever be really, uh, civilized. I’m relieved to hear they’ll, uh, be exterminated. The, er, galaxy will be the better for it.” “I still think they deserve more humane treatment than this,” argued Mrs. Riek. I agreed with her, but didn’t say so.

Jino backed her up, in a way. “Right you are. I intend to instigate a policy of wholesale euthanasia before the air gets bad enough to strangle them. I’ll take the matter all the way to the Council of Lords if I have to. How many are with me?”

Poor Mrs. -Riek! Everyone said they were, except her. She argued feebly for a while, but we all poo-poohed her objections until in the end she was made to feel like a silly sentimentalist with an old-fashioned fondness for animals. Jino did say he’d try to get the Imperial Zoo interested in a couple of pairs of Sarbr, in order to keep the species from being extinguished.

Well, I thought, so much for my spy mission. How had I ever gotten mixed up with a stupid thing like that in the first place? After all, it wasn’t as if the Sarbr were people. When people decide to do something, other species get out of the way or take the consequences. It was peculiar that the New Eden Alliance didn’t see it that way. Well, the New Eden Alliance was composed mostly of people who weren’t terribly bright, like Mrs. Riek.

Lady Carem rang for more drinks.

As Jamryn passed around the alcohol the conversation turned to other topics, for which I was thankful. The idea of nerve gas made me sick to my stomach.

“Have some brandy, darling,” said Lady Carem, handing me a glass and smiling. “You’ve been abstaining, and that’s not sociable.”

Due to previous experiences with the Lady C, I suspected that she wanted to get me drunk. We were the only two unattached women in the room, which in her eyes made us competitors. But I don’t think she knew I knew it.

Smiling, I accepted the glass, though I didn’t intend to drink it. She said, “You really ought to have brought your squirrels, Nat. They’re so amusing.”

“Squirrels?” said Terpa Dale. “Well, Nat, you and I have something in common then. I have a hamster.”

“Let’s not talk about animals,” said Colonel Riek. “I believe my wife is tired of that subject.”

There was a silence while everybody tried to think of something other than animals.

The Admiral’s lady came up with, “Has anybody seen any good movies lately?”

The conversation meandered on, once even touching on the Black Mountains Mural, which we all believed was a natural formation. The industrialist suggested, and we all agreed, that it would be much easier to appreciate its beauty without a bunch of natives crawling all over it, which was one advantage of the nerve gas affair. The Lord Admiral made a pass at me when his wife was out ot the room, and Terpa Dale asked me for a date. The party showed no signs of breaking up—the Arcturian elite on Berbidron didn’t have much else to do—and I seemed to be coming down with the flu. Anyway something was wrong with my digestion and I had a headache. I finally just got up and said my good-byes and walked out, much to Lady Carem’s relief. Probably she said nasty things about me after I left, but it was no matter. I really didn’t feel good.

Jamryn walked me up the steps. He was looking less like a dumb animal than he had when he’d brought the drinks in. Maybe all those Arcturians inhibited his normal personality.

“You don’t look well, Modom,” he said. “Would you like something to settle your stomach?”

“No, I’ll be all right. It was nice of you to offer.” I was a little surprised that he had offered. One wouldn’t expect a Sarbr to understand such little courtesies.

Actually, even if they weren’t quite on the level of humans, the Sarbr were really very quaint and charming. It was a shame to destroy them all. In fact, the Arcturians weren’t being very decent about this. And besides that the nerve gas was going to be used against the New Eden Alliance. That was my nation. Maybe, I thought, I had better be the spy after all.

“This is a beautiful house,” I remarked.

“Yes, Modom.”

“Lady Ryl certainly had good taste.”

“Yes, Modom.”

“I don’t suppose she’d have cared much for the Arcturians.”

“I wouldn’t know, Modom.”

“Well, I don’t care much for them, anyway.” If word of this got back to Lady Carem, it was a faux pas of the worst order, but it was certainly worth the risk to get in touch with the BLC. I felt awfully glad about being a spy against the Arcturians. They were the bad guys.

Jamryn didn’t reply. I had a feeling he might be a loyal Arcturian subject, after all.

I said, “Anyway, I don’t like what the Council of Lords is planning to do to this planet.”

I wasn’t going to say any more unless he gave an encouraging sign, so we climbed the stairs in stony silence for a flight and a half. Finally, with unbutlerish curiosity, he said, “May I ask what the Council of Lords is planning to do with this planet, Modom?” He sounded so human as he said itl In fact, the Sarbr were probably really almost as intelligent as humans, although they were less advanced.

I said, “Oh, I couldn’t tell that to just anyone. But I

hope to meet someone soon whom I can talk to.”

VVe came to the roof, and I had said all I could. But the fresh air did wonders for my indigestion.

X

It had been two weeks and one day since I slipped through customs and took up residence at the Empire Hotel. The date, I believe, was the Eighteenth of Winter. The Sarbr waiters at the restaurant in my hotel were starting to say Spring was just around the corner, but it certainly didn’t look it. It was a stinging cold afternoon, and the wind picked up flakes of dry snow from the ground and threw them like little frozen needles. I huddled inside my long brown cape as I walked down a sidewalk in Benson. It was a nice residential area—only a few winding lanes, comprising the only middle-class neighborhood in town. The houses, like on New Eden, were brightly colored plastic molded into towers and archways and pretty designs, each with at least one aircar port. Pines were the only trees, being one of the few Earth types that could stand the cold winters. The Sarbr had insisted on transplanted Earth trees when the city was built, preferring not to dig up their own forests. None of these trees had any cones, Berbidronian soil evidently having rendered them sterile, but there were pine needles in the snow, and the scent of pine mingled with the strange bitter odor of the north wind as the trees tossed their heads and whispered. That was the only sound, except for a distant buzz of aircars in the business district. On such a bright, snowy morning, there ought to have been children playing, particularly Sarbr children who wouldn’t mind the cold, but there was no sound of children. None lived in this town. The rich Arcturians sent their children to rich schools on Arcturus Ceta IV, and the poor Arcturians weren’t allowed to bring their families. And of course the Sarbr children were hidden away in the forests. Even before, when Berbidron was under the protection of the Allies, it had been no place to bring one’s children. I thought it very sad that the city of Benson had never seen children.

I plodded down the heated sidewalk that meandered artistically through the neighborhood. I was on my way to an appointment, in response to a note I’d found under my pillow two nights before. It was on cheap paper, all smudged and blotched with blue ink, and it read: “Natasha Roen—

If you meant what you said about not liking what the Arcturians are doing to this planet, and if you still want to explain the matter to an understanding listener, come to 533E Sun Alley at 18 a.m. Thursday and ask for Tiger. Come alone and make sure you aren’t followed. Bum this note.”

I had burned the note and flushed the ashes down the toilet, and it was 17:43 a.m. Thursday, and I was on my way to Sun Alley. As far as I knew, I wasn’t being tailed. I hoped Tiger would turn out to be Arlem.

The middle-class neighborhood did not degenerate. It stopped short, and so did I. Behind me, the well-kept, heated sidewalk, which blended from one delicate pastel shade to another as it stretched back away from me, wandered through a park like place, landscaped and tree-studded. The pretty plastic houses nestled into the scene at comfortably spacious intervals. Ahead, the sidewalk was cement gray, unheated, dirty, cracked, with big pieces missing in some places. The stoops of the houses were flush with the walk on both sides, and the houses, which were all hooked together, towered up six or eight stories. They were all right angles and cracked windows, built of iron and dark bricks. I think they learned even closer together at the top than they did at the bottom; anyway, hardly any light got down to the sidewalk. The buildings were dirty. There was grime everywhere, though it was a mystery where it came from, because the air of Benson wasn’t polluted yet, and the rest of the city wasn’t dirty at all. A broken street sign dangled from a post next to me. Through the scribbled obscenities on it I could read the words, “Sun Alley”. The whole place looked like a movie set.

I took a step and entered Sun Alley.

Instantly, a hostile atmosphere assaulted my sympathetic sense. I couldn’t see any faces at the dark windows, but there were faces there, watching. I pulled my cape more closely around me and walked slowly down the shadowy alley, looking for 533.

There is an old human saying: “Anyone who walks down a dark alley is just asking for it.” It has always been my theory that any halfway intelligent mugger, knowing that everybody knows this, isn’t going to waste his time in any dark alley. But the trouble with muggers is that they aren’t even halfway intelligent. I hadn’t gone twenty feet down that alley when one jumped out at me from a doorway. At least, I think he was a mugger. I was a little nervous. When I saw this big guy coming at me with his fangs bared, I just gave him a karate chop in the neck and a kick in the groin, and he fell down and sort of curled up on the sidewalk.

I looked down at him and said, “Are you hurt?”

He seemed to be having trouble talking, but he managed to whisper, “I’ll sue.” Slowly he started to get up.

I hurried on down the alley, keeping an eye on the dark doorways.

The sidewalk turned a sharp corner and then another, so that the mugger was lost to view. Coming around the second comer, I had to stop in order to avoid running into a Sarbr-il woman carrying a big bag on her back. The woman was wearing a loose blouse, but nothing else, and as I stared at her she dipped her filthy hand into the bag and pulled out a handful of greasy dirt. She smeared it on the bottom step of the nearest stoop, and sprinkled some of the sidewalk all around. “Mind your cape,” she told me. “This stuff is the devil to wash out.”

“What in the galaxy are you doing?”

The Sarbr-il looked down at me in surprise. “Spreading dirt, as you can plainly—oh, I see. Just pay no attention to me. I’m not alive.”

“Oh.” I accepted the fact that Sarbr who were “not alive” did strange things sometimes. “Well, can you tell me which building is 533?” There were no numbers on the buildings here.

“You can’t ask me that,” said the woman, tossing a handful of grime in the air and watching the wind spread down the alley. She dug around in her sack and drew forth two wads of unidentifiable, but undelectable, trash, and arranged them on the stoop she’d been dirtying.

That was too much for me. “You’re insane!” I said.

The Sarbr-il beamed toothily at me. “That’s good! I ought to have thought of it before, but the problem never arose. From now on I’ll be insane. And in that case, I can show you the address you want.” She waved her hand at the dingy view. “Just pick a building, any building. I’ll tell you if it’s the right one.”

Helplessly, I closed my eyes and pointed at random.

“That’s the one,” she said.

I opened my eyes. I was pointing at the scroungiest doorway I had ever seen. Some gilt lettering on the grimy glass door said, “Ye Olde Opium Denne”.

I said, “Are you sure that’s 533?”

The woman nodded her furry head. She went over and passed her hand across the lettering, obscuring it in a streak of dirt. “Now no one will ever be able to find it again. You’ll be the last to go in.”

A little bell tinkled as I entered, and a greasy-loolang, shabbily dressed Sarbr-il came over to the counter. Something was missing in his appearance. I suppose it was the fact that, being furry all over, he couldn’t create that classic unshaven look.

“What can I do for you, Miss?” he said.

“I’m looking for 533E,” I told him.

“Oh, that’s the fifth floor. You’ll have to take the escalator. This way, please.”

He led me through the den. It was very warm and smoky, and in the dim light I could see ragged forms huddled on chairs and sofas and on the floor, sucking away at their pipes. The place had a lot of atmosphere. We came to a double helix escalator winding up through the next floor. It wasn’t moving. I had to walk up. Some of the steps had holes in them.

As I passed through the second floor, which was wintry cold after the den, I saw a narrow hallway. Outside each doorway was a heap of garbage, frozen solid. The third and fourth floors were the same. On the fourth floor, I saw a rat run across the hall. It was so shaggy its fur dragged on the floor.

On the fifth floor, the stairway opened onto a bare little hallway lit by one pink glowglobe imbedded in the ceiling. On the third door was a gilt inscription: 553E. I knocked.

There were sounds of things being moved and drawers opening and closing, and then, “Who’s there?” said a voice.

“I’m looking for Tiger,” I said.

The door opened. A Sarbr-il man who was not Arlem said, “Come in, Miss Roen.”

The room was small, clean, and almost unfurnished, with one dinky window opposite the door, and another room to the right, connected by a doorless doorframe with a blanket hanging across it. It was very cold, possibly even colder than outside, and filled with the smell of garbage from the hall, combined with the odors of ink and paint. On the one plastic card table sat a mimeograph machine, very old, and there were stacks of blank paper and smudgy pamphlets on the floor, along with a few big squeeze tubes of paint. In one corner, on top of a heap of crude posters, snored Arlem.

“Arlem!” I ran across the room and threw my arms around him.

He woke with a grunt, blinked at me, and said softly, “You don’t know me, remember?”

So I said loudly, “Who are you?”

“That’s not important,” said the other Sarbr-il, sitting on the edge of the table. He was dressed in a very old, frayed ovret-leather playsuit, which by striking contrast reminded me of Jamryn. I found out later that his name was Denell. “We represent the Berbidronian Liberation Committee. Miss Roen, what is it you know about the Arcturians that you’d like to tell us?”

So I sat down on the only chair and told them about the nerve gas. They were surprised, but not as shocked as I had expected. They seemed almost to relish the horrible tidings.

“Well, we’ll see what we can do about that,” said Denell.

Arlem said, “What do you think of our setup here? The furnace doesn’t work, but the airconditioner does. I’ve never been through a really cold spell in this place, but I understand they open the window to get warm.”

“Why not open the window right now?”

He looked surprised. “Oh, that’s right, you would be uncomfortable.” He crossed the room and tugged the window open. “At night everything freezes, and that’s a bother. We can melt our drinking water in our mouths, but we don’t like to do that with the mimeograph ink. Dilutes it.”

“Then why don’t you work during the day, when it’s warmer?”

“It would be inconsiderate. The machine’s noisy and all our neighbors sleep days. They go out and lurk in the park at night.”

He sat down on the floor. “There’s coffee perking in the other room. You can have some as soon as it’s ready.

Denell looked at me, seemingly auspicious. “How come you’re defecting? Haven’t you ever been a patriotic Arcturian?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, come on. Every Arcturian baby takes in official propaganda with his mother’s milk. You were raised in an Arcturian family; you went to Arcturian schools. Maybe something happened to turn you against your people and maybe it didn’t, but you had to start out as a patriot.”

“My father was an interplanetary merchant,” I said, shaking my head. “I spent most of my life in space, or in foreign ports. I sampled freedom.” I wondered why Arlem hadn’t told him the truth, but since he hadn’t, I thought it would be wisest to stick to my Arcturian identity.

Denell looked at Arlem. “Have you checked her credentials?”

“The part about her father being a merchant, and her traveling all around, is true as far as our agents can find out. As for what she says she got out of it—well, I can’t read minds, but I think she’s for real.”

I tilted my head, to flash a sidelong glance at Denell —I was getting good at that sort of thing. “It’s a pity you don’t trust me. I have told you the truth, as far as it goes.”

“As far as it goes?” Denell’s tongue flickered over his lips, and both Sarbr gazed at me intently.

“I have no love for the Arcturian Empire,” I said by way of explanation. “I will help you as long as helping you serves my own purposes. But—they are my own purposes. My own private purposes.”

“Ah,” said the underground leader with a slow smile. “Perhaps we will get along better than one would think. We are much alike.”

Arlem said softly, “Denell, who knows the whisper of the wind in the grass from the hiss of a snake? You’ve made mistakes before—more than you know.”

The three of us smiled mysteriously at one another.

XI

That evening, I went to the theater with Lieutenant Terpa Dale; I’d had an invitation from the Lord Admiral, but it seemed unwise to start a scandal, at least until I had a few more powerful friends. The play, which was written and put on by Sarbr, was a soapy drama that featured subtleties within intrigues within intricate complications of the plot. It seemed to be a satire of a gothic murder mystery romance on a luxurious 150 year-old space station that was believed to be haunted. Social significance was injected by the sudden entrance of a peaceful, honorable, intelligent, handsome, almost Christ-like space pirate. The Sarbr in the audience made knowing ah’s at the appropriate times, but most of the humans had a hard time following it at” all. Throughout the first act, I had to work at not laughing at the incredible complexities. In the second act I had no such problem. Terpa Dale kept me so busy fielding passes that I lost track of the plot.

Finally I said, “Look, Terpa, do you want to watch the show, or do you want to leave?” I hoped that would shut him up.

“Let’s leave,” he said, in a voice full of suggestive undertones.

We left. Dale had borrowed a luxury cruiser and a driver from the officers’ motor pool. In the sub-cabin we sat close together on synthetic satin cushions.

He said, “You know, I had a feeling you and I ought to get together, when you made such a funny face at that euthanasia idea of Uncle Jino’s. Did you have second thoughts about it for the same reason I did?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What was your reason?”

“Well, the way I see it, if euthanasia is the wisest move, the High Council will do it without any pressure from down below, and if it isn’t wisest, then we’d be wasting our time on a foolish cause. You know, it’s kind of presumptuous to try and tell the High Council what to do.”

“Absolutely,” I said. We both agreed that it was pretty unlikely that the High Council might make a mistake.

“After all,” said Terpa, “they’d never have gotten so high if they didn’t know what they were doing, would they?”

“Come to think of it, I guess they wouldn’t.”

“One thing that I never could figure out, though—the rulers of the other empires, like the Allied planets for instance. They must be pretty smart, too, or they wouldn’t be where they are. So how is it that they don’t always agree with our own High Council?”

I couldn’t figure it out, either. “Maybe they really do agree. Maybe the fighting and everything is really what’s best all around.”

“Maybe so. Well, after I get a few promotions, I guess I’ll be in the know.”

I was sympathizing with him pretty closely. I had forgotten all about being the great spy. He stood in awe of all heads of state everywhere, and so did I. We both knew he was destined to climb in the system, due to his tremendous ability, with a little help from his rich family.

We watched the lights of Benson flash by through the transparent bottom of the craft. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?” said Terpa, leaning close to mumble in my ear.

It was. I thought I had always liked neon signs in the twilight.

“But not half as pretty as you,” he added.

“That’s nice of—” I was interrupted as he kissed me. There’s nothing like kissing someone you are in rapport with. I actually saw into his thoughts. I had a clear look at what was passing through his mind at that moment. Then suddenly the sympathetic bond was gone and would not come back. I was kissing a stranger. I pulled away as if reluctantly, but secretly I was angry at his impudence.

He tried twice more to put his arms around me, then slumped down in his cushions and stared sullenly out the big viewport. I said gently, “Terpa, sometimes you infuriate me, but you are a fascinating man. What makes the strange conflict in you between stem self-discipline and wild sensuality? Is your work such a strain?”

“No, I was just born that way, I guess. I mean, some people are naturally just kind of—well, let’s say stable, while—”

“You mean dull,” I said.

“If you want to put it that way. While other people—” “Like you.”

“You said it, not me. Other people are more high-strung. I think we get more out of life this way.”

“Certainly,” I said, “but isn’t it a handicap in your work? I mean to be so imaginative, so sensitive, so different—most people haven’t got that, and they fear the few who have. I should think they might hold back from giving you as much responsibility as you could handle.”

“They do!” said Terpa, sitting up straight to look down at me earnestly. “I don’t have nearly as much authority as I deserve—or as high a salary either. In fact, they were damned slow about giving me what little responsibility I do have.”

“And what is that?”

“Oh, I already told you I’m the assistant to the chief traffic coordinator at the spaceport. We approve the flight plans of all the ships in the system, and tell them when they can land and take off. I could be much more useful if they’d tell me what was in the ships—then I could arrange the schedules according to the priorities of the cargo.”

“How foolish of them to deny you that responsibility!” I was in a daring and defiant mood, and I think it was beginning to rub off on him.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “Sometimes I think if only I could sneak a look at the cargo reports, I’d make such a magnificent schedule that the ships would come in and out like clockwork, there would be neither a lot of rushing nor any long waits at the unloading docks, and the customs officials would have a steady stream of business instead of a series of unmanageable lumps. The Port Director himself would probably give me a citation or something. I’d be promoted over my boss. He doesn’t belong above me anyway. He’s from Ceta III Outpost.” “Then why don’t you do it? You owe it to your career.” “That’s true.” He thought for a while. “It wouldn’t be a wrong thing to do. I will do it.”

“You sound afraid. You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

“Of course not!”

‘1 think you are. You won’t really sneak a look at those cargo reports.”

“I will! You can watch me do it, if you don’t believe me.

“It’s a deal.”

The following week, an important shipment of septrinide arrived on Berbidron. With all my connections, I was able to reconstruct the sequence of events pretty accurately. Ferry ships relayed the entire cargo to Desker Spaceport. It was heaped in a great mountain of aluminum boxes on an unloading dock. Within the next half hour, all the Sarbr at the spaceport found some reason to vacate the area of the dock, and all the humans were drawn away by phone calls and other pretexts. Due to this happy coincidence, not one was hurt when the bombs went off. Naturally there were a great many questions asked afterwards. Interplanetary Police interrogation squads, using lie detectors and brain regulators as well as good old-fashioned torture, discovered no one, human or otherwise, who knew anything about the bombing. Each of the hundred and some people who had managed to be absent at the crucial moment had been so by means of a legitimate coincidence. The Interplanetary Police made a few halfhearted purges, but nothing much came of them.

During the night of Winter Twenty-fifth, Arlem the Traitor paid his last visit to Darf Sein, head of the Berbidronian Division of the Arcturian Protective Guard. Arlem relates:

Sein was angry. “I must say it was, uh, damned inconsiderate of you to, uh, allow the BLC to get away with that bombing,” he pouted. “It set the, uh, military-industrial schedule back two standard months, and cost the Empire a lot of, uh, money. Whatever were you, uh, thinking of?”

I stood before his desk. I’d have felt more natural sitting down, but the Chief of Intelligence, when he was mad, had been known to turn off the chair mechanism without mentioning it to the agent he was mad at. Agents who had incurred his displeasure preferred at such times to stand, even though it created the illusion of respect.

I said, “They didn’t let me in on what they were planning until it was too late to warn you.” Actually I had planted the bombs myself, because I like to see big explosions. They’re so colorful.

“Well,” said my boss, unwilling to give up his pout, “Uh, what about all those people who wouldn’t break under interrogation, though? We didn’t know the, uh, BLC was big enough to give them all, uh, anti-squeal conditioning. You might have told us about that.”

“The BLC didn’t condition anybody,” I said.

“Then, damnit, how did they know about the bombing and yet not admit it to our, uh, questioners?”

I thought for a minute. “Okay,” I said. “Here’s the explanation. The Sarbr have a sort of religious cult about which we’re all very, very serious. From birth to death we’re bound to keep the rituals secret from all nonbelievers—in other words, all humans. One of the BLC members revealed the bomb plot as part of a group confession, and that’s how all those people found out about it. They could take measures to protect themselves and their human friends, but they can never reveal what they know or how they know it, because they would involve disclosing some of the secrets of our religion. This code of secrecy is so deeply ingrained in every Sarbr-il that no amount of coercion or dope could wring a single forbidden word out of us. The physiological effects of this code of secrecy make a lie for this purpose not a lie at all, in terms of drugs and lie detector measurements.”

“Uh, if it’s that much of a secret, then why did you just tell me?”

“Oh—well, I’m an agnostic,” I said glibly. “See, there’s always a logical explanation. Life is consistent.”

He stared at me, and made a couple of futile attempts at arguing the point, but I was steadfastly logical and he finally gave up and changed the subject. “Well, uh, would you mind telling me how the BLC found out about that shipment of septrinide?”

“Not at all,” I said. “They were told by an Arcturian traitor, Natasha Roen. She found out by seducing a traffic coordinator.”

“So Roen’s a traitor, eh?” He leaned back in his chair and twiddled his thumbs, looking thoughtful. “Well, does she know any other, uh, state secrets?”

“-Not that I know of. No BLC secrets, either, because they don’t completely trust her yet. You might as well kill her.”

“I think I will, after a, er,” he blushed, “a cursory interrogation. Uh, now, about the BLC—do you know the location of their, um, headquarters?”

“No. They move around all the time. Some people could say where they’ll be at a given time, but I’m not that high up in the organization.”

“Well, er, the Protective Guard is anxious to, uh, wipe them out. There’s a special division of our fastest ships being readied for, uh, that purpose. If you could, uh, radio the BLC’s current location in code as soon as you find it out, we, uh, would greatly appreciate it. Being constantly, er, poised to answer your signal, uh, this force will come upon the BLC before, uh, they have a chance to, er, vanish in the wilderness.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll try and find out where they’re hiding. Is that all?”

“Uh, yes, I think so. No offense.”

I went to the door, then paused. “After Natasha’s dead, can I have the body? I have some unfinished business with her.” I figured that if her death went through the normal channels, she’d probably be shipped back to New Eden.

“Why, you pervert!” said Sein, with a halfhearted smile. “Uh, yes, you can have the body, why not? After all, she’s a traitor.”

“Let me know when you’re about to kill her, then, and I’ll be around with an aircar. I want the body while it’s still warm.”

Darf Sein swallowed hard. “If that’s all you have to say, you may, uh, leave now.”

I smiled, nodded, and departed, kissing his secretary on the way out, as usual. On the whole, I thought I’d done a remarkably good job of maintaining consistency.

XII

“Tiger! Tiger!” I pounded on the door. The pink neon light made my hands look bloody.

There was a mutter of voices inside, and footsteps. The door opened a crack, letting out a blast of cold air that pierced my aching lungs like fire.

The surprised face at the door was Arlem’s. “Help!” I gasped.

Drawing me into the room, he closed the door. I threw my arms around his neck and waited to catch my breath. He smelled of ink. His overalls were as grimy as everything else in Sun Alley, but he was good and solid to lean against, and the soft thick fur of his shoulders warmed my hands. “What’s all this about?” he said.

The three other Sarbr in the room, sitting on the floor surrounded by freshly inked posters, looked at me suspiciously. I could sense their alarm, but I also felt their togetherness in the face of any emergency, and it was comforting.

“You’d better sit down,” said Arlem, urging me toward the one chair. “I’ll get you some cof—”

“No!” Still fighting for air, I capsulized my problem: “They’re after me! They followed me here. We’ve got to get away.”

What a commotion there was then! Everybody scrambled around, gathering up all signs of habitation from the two rooms, and wiping away fingerprints. Too exhausted to help, I sank into the chair and watched them with a rather stupid expression. Somebody set a pot of plastic flowers in the window, “to warn the others”. I stared at the frivolous things bobbing on their stalks, in front of the dirty pane and the black sky, for about fifteen seconds. It looked horrible in the garish yellow light from the ceiling globe. I began to shiver.

“Come on!” Thrusting a box of papers into my arms,one of the Sarbr dragged me from my chair and shoved me toward the door. We all dashed down the pink, sour-smelling hallway, up two flights of steps to the roof. It was good to be in a dreadful hurry with friends. I didn’t ask where we were going.

The acrid north wind burned my overtaxed lungs as we loaded everything and ourselves into the aircar on the roof. The hatch was pulled shut with a hollow clang. We clambered up through the hold into the cabin. Denell took the controls, and Arlem was copilot. The other three of us sat on some blankets on the floor behind them. The car came to life, grumbled at the cold, and then rose quickly through the dark air so that our backs bent and our seats pinched the blankets against the plastic floor. And then we slid back against the wall as the car leaped forward.

The cabin was dark except for the instrument panel. We three sat crosslegged on our blankets, watching Denell’s hands on the steering stick. The light made a halo at the edges of his fur. The wind moaned monotonously outside, but the cabin was starting to warm up a little from our body heat. We were all very excited. For some reason I had a craving for popcorn.

“Who’s after us, anyway?” said the Sarbr-il next to me. “The police, or the Protective Guard?”

I said, “Maybe both. I was in my hotel room, reading, when two P.G. men barged in. They told me I was under arrest for treason, but I conked them both with a microfilm case. I guess they weren’t expecting much fight from a girl—bunch of male chauvinistsl Anyway I got away.” A fresh thought hit me. “Elf and Megl Denell—turn back!”

“Can’t!” he said.

“But I left them behind!” I started to get up, but my friends pulled me back down.

“Then what happened?” said one of them.

“Oh—you people were the only ones I could trust, so I came to you. I tried to take a devious route, but I guess it didn’t work, because just before I got to Sun

Alley I heard sirens coming after me. It was pretty scary to be running from them in the dark. And I kept slipping in the snow.” I shook my head. “But I don’t know what they’ll do to Meg and Elf !”

I was really upset about my squirrels, partly because I was attached to them and partly because I feared that if they died I might also die. Having lost them, I was distressed to the point of copelessness. “Oh,” I said anxiously. I had a silly desire to keep saying “oh” over and over again. But none of the others cared about them, and I soon fell into the group’s intentness on the problem at hand.

Arlem, glancing at the rear monitor screen, snapped out, “We’re being followed! Five cars, in formation.” Denell pressed the acceleration lever. We were thrown back against the wall again, as the hum of the wind slid up the scale to a falsetto screech. Then he looked back at us, and shouted above the wind, “We’re armed, aren’t we?”

The lanky Sarbr-il on my left nodded. “We have a laser cannon and ten handguns down in the hold.”

“We can’t turn and fight,” said Arlem to the leader. “Not against five cars.” His voice was all but drowned out, though we in the back strained to hear.

“But what else is there to do?” Denell said. “We can’t lead them to Lady Ryl.”

“With the whole BLC behind us, we could beat five cars.”

“But they’d radio for help before we could silence them. Then the enemy would know the location of our headquarters.”

“So?- All we have to do is move again. Lord knows they move camp often enough anyway. I don’t even know the current location.”

“But suppose the Arcturians have a stronger force waiting to take to the air when we’re out of sensor range? Then we might not be able to cover up our tracks fast enough. They might have let Natasha get away in the hopes she’d lead them to Reylo.”

“No,” I put in, “I beaned them fair and square.”

“Are you sure they didn’t trick you?”

“Of course. I saw into their minds. They were good agents, and they didn’t mean for me to get away.”

“Well, then,” said Denell thoughtfully, “I guess it’s no trap, and so there’s no sense in the five of us throwing our lives away. We’ll make for headquarters.” He moved the control stick, and the aircar veered westward.

As we sped through the evening, the enemy slowly gained on us. They were less than a minute behind us when Denell threw on the retro jets. We stopped quickly and dropped down toward a small clearing. There would have been room for two of them, but we hogged the space so that only one other could land.

“All right, everybody out!” said Denell. “Each grab a weapon and hide in the bushes!”

I pulled the hatch open and my two friends clambered down Into the hold, followed by Denell and then me. Arlem remained sitting in his acceleration seat. I poked my head up again. “Aren’t you coming?” I said.

He started. I could see his face dimly reflected in the windshield above the lightened instruments; some fleeting expression made me almost suspicious. Then he turned and came quickly through the hatch after me. “I was going to signal Reylo, but I guess there’s no time,” he said.

“You take the cannon; you’re strongest,” Denell told him. He handed me a pistol. “Let’s go.”

We dropped through the outer hatch onto the snow, and dove into the bushes just as the first of the pursuing aircars shot into view overhead and wheeled in a big circle above the clearing, its airjets roaring hotly.

The others came close behind, but they did not land or fire their weapons. I crouched behind a bush at the edge of the litde clearing, clutching the shaped handle of my pistol and shivering in the cold bitter wind. Only a few feet of starlit snow separated me and the others from the rim of the ship, which was as black as its shadow from this angle. But in the control cabin on top, the instruments still winked their colored lights against the windshield, and the engines were running, although the jets were disconnected. Hopefully, the heat from the aircar would screen our own body heat, so that the Arcturians’ infrared screens wouldn’t tell them we were waiting in ambush. Anyway they had no way of knowing there were more of us than just me.

The aircars circled the clearing cautiously. We had left the inner and outer hatches open in our haste, and now the sound of Arcturian voices on our radio came clearly to where I hid. They wanted me to give myself up.

Two or three minutes passed, during which I got tired of crouching and sat down on the snow. They were telling all sorts of lies to get me to surrender, but of course I didn’t. I hardly listened. I couldn’t see my companions in the dark, but we were in strong sympathetic contact. Feelings on our side ran high, as we waited for a chance to start shooting. ‘

One aircar landed. Its lower hatch dropped open and a man jumped to the ground. We might have been wiser to hold our fire until more of them exposed themselves, but the blood lust was too much. Four thin beams shot through the dark air to converge on the man; my gun was not the last. He screamed for an instant, and fell in a heap on the ground. Then the bitter wind was laden with the smell of burned meat.

“Shift your positions!” yelled Denell, from somewhere to my right. I jumped up and ran a little distance from the clearing, moved parallel to the edge of it and looked back through the patchy shadows of the forest.

From the four ships that were still airborne came laser beams to focus on our grounded aircar. It began to glow dull red while we, running and dodging among the bare trees near the clearing, fired up at them. Arlem’s cannon melted half the airjets of the grounded enemy ship. Our own ship suddenly collapsed like a bubble of lava. The dry bushes near it caught fire, and lit the clearing redly. One of the Sarbr-il got fire on his fur and burned to death, screaming.

I ventured close to the fire, to confuse the infrared scanners, and took careful aim at a gunport in one of the circling ships. I fired, holding the beam steady on the moving target. Five seconds later there was a hole in the ship’s hull and someone inside it was screaming. But I knew other guns must be seeking me out by now, so I cut the beam and dodged away—just in time. Five beams blanketed the spot where I had been standing. I slipped in the melting slush and fell to the mushy ground between a burning bush and the trunk of a big gray tree. The tree bark oozed pungent sap; a reaction to the heat, maybe. I remember how the thick droplets glowed brown in the firelight. The sounds of yelling and the clear hums of many lasers were around me.

I didn’t feel good. I wasn’t afraid, not with the courage of the running, yelling Sarbr all around me—in fact I viewed the fight with a sort of fierce relish—but I just had an upset stomach. Maybe it was because I’d never seen anyone bum to death before.

Pushing myself up to my hands and knees, I vomited bitter acid in the slush. It looked horrible in the light from the twisting, crackling bush beside me. The smell of it blended with the acrid smoke and the natural formaldehyde quality of the wind, bringing tears to my eyes.

An Arcturian soldier fell out of one of the circling ships. Two pieces of him hit the ground. As I reached for my laser where I’d dropped it when I fell, I heard a chorus of bloodthirsty cries. A tall Sarbr-il, bristling with rage, leaped over me to charge into the clearing. There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred or more, rushing through the forest from all directions. The raw force of their fighting spirit dragged me to my feet, laser in hand.

Their rifles brought down the remaining aircars in flames. After that the fight went our way. We lost a dozen men or so; it was a rough battle. Both sides shot at me, since most of the Sarbr didn’t know me. Once a Sarbr-il who looked like Arlem fired a laser cannon at me. But I knew if it was him he was merely caught up in the ecstasy of burning, and not responsible. Anyway I dodged behind a tree and only got a few minor burns.

We destroyed every Arcturian—twenty in all—which was the first real victory of the BLC. When the last enemy perished into a heap of screaming mutilated flesh, we all gave a great cheer and danced around the bodies. A couple Sarbr still wanted to shoot me, but Denell explained who I was. I found a stone and used it to chip a little notch in the plastic handle of my pistol. I’d gotten one without any help.

Still happy, but a little more sober, we picked up our dead and wounded and started quickly through the snow towards camp.

Arlem fell in step beside me, balancing the cannon on his shoulder.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Oh, I’m fine.” He sounded displeased. “You look pretty healthy, too.”

“Yes, thank you. We’ll be moving camp now, won’t we?”

He nodded. “We have to spread out and move fast, before more Arkies get here with infrared sensors.”

At camp, the wounded lay among the trees, and eight medics were administering first aid. I noticed that their methods didn’t seem nearly as advanced as in the hospital I’d been in. Some other Sarbr carried the dead bodies away. I saw the remains of the one who had burned to death. He reminded me of my upset stomach.

Morale continued to be excellent.

The tents of the camp were folded up within a quarter of an hour, the last traces of the campfires were obliterated, the wounded were transferred to litters and the BLC headed north.

XIII

As we walked, Reylo Ryl dropped back from the head of the line to talk to me. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Miss Roen,” she said. “You’re the only Arcturian I know of who I wouldn’t mind offering sanctuary to.”

“Oh,” I said, bewildered. “Thank you.”

“You’ll have a hard time traveling fast in that slinky dress, though. We happen to have the backpack of another human who was with us briefly—rest her soul— and she was about your size. You can step behind a bush and change into a pair of her coveralls, if you like.”

“Oh, thank you,” I said again.

She called to another Sarbr-il, who tossed me my old knapsack. I looked inside; nothing was missing. In fact, there were even the clothes I’d been wearing the day Craig Duvork shot me. The laser holes were neatly mended. I put on my coveralls and parka, and felt much better. Also my good old Polarian boots were a lot better for walking than the sexy spy shoes I’d been wearing.

They seemed to know all the paths through the underbrush. Traveling at the top loping speed of the Sarbr, spread thinly through the forest to avoid showing a concentration of heat on an infrared scanner, we went about twelve miles per hour. Of course I couldn’t keep up, so they took turns carrying me piggy back. Once we heard aircars to the south, but none came close enough to be seen—or to see us. At about midnight we stopped and rested for two hours. Ten more of the wounded died, and were carried away—along with two who looked like they weren’t far from death.

I asked Arlem what had swelled the ranks of the BLC from its original size of about thirty to its present number, which was almost one hundred.

“Some of them are ones you and I recruited,” he said, “and the rest are ex-spaceport workers, and their friends and relations. You know, when the spaceport was bombed they were all interrogated, and the Arcturians have unpleasant methods of interrogation. So the spaceport guys all quit and joined the BLC.”

“Well, we can certainly use them,” I said.

Arlem grunted. “I wish you’d forget about the damned BLC, and the city and everything!”

“I can’t,” I said.

We moved on again in a few hours, traveling swiftly and silently through the dark forest. Four more of the wounded died, and were carried away. The carriers

caught up with us an hour and a half later.

Towards dawn the forest seemed to grow thinner, and the trees were smaller and scrawnier. There was no underbrush here, but only course grass, and weeds growing four or five feet tall—not too tall for the Sarbr. Soon we saw ahead of us the end of the great forest.

At the last line of trees, the party stopped to look ahead. There was half a mile or so of tall grass, sloping down away from us in a long lawn. At the bottom of the slope ran a loud river from east to west, glittering in the starlight. Bushes grew low on both banks, but on the opposite bank, beyond the bushes, rose a long, stony slope with its top jagged against the sky.

“What’s that land?” I said to the Sarbr-il woman on whose back I rode.

“That ridge is Rastin-arrorhin, the barrier of the poison water.”

“And what’s on the other side?”

“A dead land. All the water there is bad, because the soil is full of poisonous minerals.”

“Are we going there?”

“I guess so. I don’t know what we’re going to eat and drink, though. We aren’t carrying supplies, and the land is too wide to cross without food and water. At the widest place, I understand it’s about four-hundred fifty miles across.”

“At least the Arcturians wouldn’t think of looking for us there.”

“That’s true,” the Sarbr-il admitted. “I sure hope we don’t go very far beyond the arrorhin, though.”

Reylo Ryl started down the slope toward the river, and the other Sarbr followed her—but not without dubious murmurings. They pushed through the bushes at the river’s edge and started wading. Many of them filled canteens with the last good water for hundreds of miles, but Reylo Ryl did not.

“She knows something we don’t,” said Ebin, my carrier.

The swift water was waist-deep to the long-legged Sarbr, yet they had to bend all their power to the task of pressing forward to the other side. I wouldn’t have had a chance without Ebin. As we gained the north bank, it occurred to me that I was now more at their mercy than ever—there was no getting back to civilization without the aid of the Sarbr.

We paused, dripping and tired, on the north bank of the river, and then plodded up the long, grassless incline of Rastin-arrorhin. Ebin put me down and let me walk. It felt good to stretch my legs. The way was steep and rocky, but at least there were no thorns or scratchy twigs.

I look up suddenly and saw Arlem walking beside me. “Do you know where we’re going?” I said, but he shook his head.

Ahead, the first walkers reached the top of the ridge. They stood silhouetted against the sky, striking in their stillness. More people joined them, chatting, and these also fell still. Soon the ridge was lined with tall, frozen shapes. Arlem and I hurried up the slope to see what was transfixing everybody. It was peculiar that there was no unity in them now; each one stopped dead by his own decision, as though they were forest people.

At my first sight of the land beyond Rastin-arrorhin, I also stopped. Pale starlight lay across the hills like a silver veil on the face of death. The tortured corpse of an ancient land spread north as far as the clear air would carry light, and the north wind sobbed as it swept a bitter flavor across numberless weather-tom mounds of stone. But the wind was not as cold as that dark, aching landscape.

To me it looked like a burial ground for the strangest, quietest, and oldest of all the dead things in the universe, but out of the comer of my eye I saw that Arlem’s face was full of sorrow, or some other emotion.

“Gruesome, isn’t it?” I whispered. There was no reason to whisper, except that everyone else was silent.

The stars gleamed crystal on the tears in his eyes as he glanced at me. “This land has waited a million years for life to come back. Speak no unkind words of it.”

After everyone had come to the top of the ridge and had a chance to see this sepulchral vastness without a footprint on it, we came down the rocky incline to where a poisonous little stream ran parallel to the river we had left behind. This water we dared not touch. They jumped across, and Arlem carried me. Then Reylo Ryl set out across the bare hills and dead stream gulches, and the rest of us plodded behind in a long line. Some Sarbr struck up conversations and a few even tried to sing, but these attempts died away quickly, and we proceeded in silence.

Half a mile from Rastin-arrorhin we descended into a dry riverbed and followed it westward. It narrowed and the banks rose around us until we trod a path no more than a foot wide, with stone walls rising almost vertically, so that the broader-shouldered of the Sarbr had to go sideways in some places. Then suddenly a light glared at the head of the line. Reylo Ryl, holding up an orange neon glowglobe, followed the river’s path down through a great slit in the stone. One by one, we came behind her, and more people brought out glowglobes. We threaded downward through a narrow passage, then upward, then around a bend, and then—

“Ooh,” cried the first Sarbr behind the lady herself. “Aahh,” exclaimed the next ones. That was enough to bring the rest of us crowding forward to see what it was all about.

It was just like any other indescribably magnificent cavern. Our entrance was a ledge at almost roof level, with stalactites hanging from the arched ceiling above us, glittering with many-colored impurities. Way down on the floor—at least eighty feet below—there were stalagmites and other interesting formations, mostly varieties of crystals. The tinkling splash of a hidden waterfall echoed around and around the cavern, but it was almost drowned out by the oohing and aahing of ninety-one Sarbr, and me.

Reylo allowed us to rubberneck for five minutes or so, and then she showed us a path down to the floor of the cavern. No recipient of a surprise birthday party was ever more astonished than the Sarbr when they reached the bottom and found evidence of habitationl There was a smooth, straight walk winding through the rough terrain of the floor. In single file, with Lady Ryl, who, unlike the rest of us, had not been surprised, in the lead, we filed down the path, past crystal shapes and huge stalagmites, curious rock formations, fossils, and delicate, colorful mineral deposits. The path wound on and on through that immense cavern for nearly two miles. By that time I was getting tired of looking at scenic wonders, and even the Sarbr were noticeably less enthusiastic.

We came to an exit from the cavern, almost directly under the entrance high up in the wall. This passageway was ten feet high and ten feet wide, and was obviously not a natural formation. The leader of the Sarbr entered it without hesitation, and we followed. It was a short tunnel. After turning one corner we came abruptly into a big room. Here the circular floor, some hundred-fifty feet in diameter, was tiled with blue-gray stones, and the wall, thirty feet high, was of the same featureless slate I had seen in my hospital room. The domed ceiling also was blue, with skylights that penetrated many feet of stone to let in the pale glow of the stars. The chatter of the waterfall filled the room, and there were big shapes in the darkness against the far wall, where the light of our glowglobes did not reach.

“Who could have created this place?” I said.

Lady Ryl turned to me and smiled. “An ancient civilization, long since disappeared. This underground complex—there are more rooms—was evidently their refuge in time of danger, like the medieval castles on Earth. Its existence was forgotten for many thousands of years, but my tribe used to wander near Rastdn-arrorhin when I was young, and I came poking around one day and discovered it. I always had a feeling it would come in handy sooner or later. Now it will be our headquarters.” She touched a mark on the wall by the door, and the skylights grated shut. Then the lights came on: glowglobes, stuck around the top edge of the wall at regular intervals, and one gigantic beacon on a tall pillar

in the center of the room.

The Sarbr-il uttered noises of wonderment.

“They must have been a terrific civilization,” said someone.

“Yeah,” said another, “I wonder what ever happened to them.”

“I suppose we’ll never know,” said Reylo Ry!.

I said, “If they were this advanced, they must have left books or microfilms or something.”

Lady Ryl looked at me thoughtfully. “Yes, that’s possible. We might explore around a bit in a few days, after we’re all settled, and see if we can find any clues.”

“Sort of an archeological expedition,” said Arlem enthusiastically.

The lady nodded. “Yes. I hadn’t thought of it before, really. Beth, you’re a very bright child. But, first things first. We must set up headquarters and tend to our wounded.” She pointed to the stacks of boxes on the other side of the room. “Those contain supplies. I had them brought months ago, in anticipation of having to come here. That waterfall is in a little chamber just off the main room. It’s the only good water in the land. At least, it used to be good. You never know when, after thousands of years, the poisons from the surface might finally leak down through the stone and get into the water supply.”

“Let Beth taste it first,” said Arlem.

‘1 wouldn’t want to deprive you of that honor,” I retorted. I hoped he was joking, but I was far from sure of it.

Reylo Ryl took the first sip, and the water was sweet and good. We explored a few more rooms, opened up the supplies, and sent out a couple of scouts to see if the pursuit had cooled off, or if the Arcturians were still looking for us. They were, but they didn’t find us.

After we settled into our underground hideout, I got into the habit of taking long walks alone through the big cavern, partly to keep warm, because the inside temperature was, of course, adjusted to the preference of the Sarbr, and partly to get away from my furry friends and their everlasting games. It seemed to me that they ought to find something revolutionary to do.

But the morale was good.

XIV

On the third day after we came to the cave, I went on a particularly long walk. I’d been thinking about my future, and I was worried. The transmitter I’d had, with which I’d been going to call the New Eden Alliance when the time came, had been taken from me in the hospital, and nobody seemed to know anything about it. There would be no help from home, now. I would probably never see my planet again, unless the Sarbr got their rears in gear and threw off the Arcturian yoke. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry to do that. Even those who had joined the BLC to spite the Arcturians because the Arcturians had tortured them were not much enthused about the revolution. And the planet’s atmosphere was due to be ruined in less than ten years.

I was still more disturbed by the ambiguity of my own status among the Sarbr. They seemed to like me well enough, and let me into their games, but some of them, like Arlem, occasionally suggested that I get myself killed. Also, everyone except Arlem insisted on calling me Natasha and refused to acknowledge that I’d ever been Beth Goodrich—even the ones I’d met before I switched identities. Once when I had mentioned meeting Reylo Ryl before, some of the Sarbr went so far as to intimate that I was a prevaricating namedropper. And certainly, by refusing to remember who I really was, they also could not admit I was a trained revolutionary. To them I was an Arcturian merchant’s daughter, and had no authority over what the BLC ought to do. This was frustrating.

I missed my squirrels. My sympathy was growing, but the Sarbr were still quite strange to me and I found that I couldn’t go very deeply into their minds. The squirrels would have helped me to grow faster.

Perking up from my reverie, I saw that I was at the base of the path leading up to the cave’s entrance. It seemed to me that the wind and sky might help make my mind clear, so I started to climb. As I emerged among the gray stones of the surface, the cold, acrid wind careened down the gully to blast against my face and bite through the inadequate protection of my parka. Leaning into the wind, and squinting against it, I trotted down the gully to a place where one bank sloped gently enough for me to scramble up.

Taking note of the way I had come, so I wouldn’t get lost in the big land, I climbed a small hill and stood at the crest to get my first look around by daylight. It was a little warmer, and the colors were beautiful, though subdued. There were no greens or warm browns: no life colors. But the rocks were various shades of pale blue and gray, with some so light they were almost white. The bottoms of many of the dry gullies had a lavender tinge, scattered with tiny golden sparkles. Looking from my vantage point far out over the irregular landscape, I caught the moving gleam of three or four little creeks—poison water, according to the Sarbr. All around me, the bitter wind gusted over the hills and through the gullies and around the weather-carved boulders, playing a random tune. Sometimes it sounded like a voice, so that I wondered if an ancient prophet of those long-dead builders of the underground rooms had ever stood on one of these hills and listened to the advice of the wind. Then I smiled. If they had followed the wind’s advice, it was no wonder that the civilization had disappeared, because that ageless wind was clearly not sympathetic to the interests of mortals.

The glittering sparks in the lavender gullies interested me, so I came down the hill and circled another hill to jump down into a shallow gully for a closer look. The ground was littered with purple rocks—crystals they were, most of them grossly imperfect, but a few had facets smooth enough to reflect the sun, and these were the golden glitters I’d seen from a distance. I bent down to pick one up—but then my eye was caught by an almost perfect crystal of gleaming royal purple, just a few yards away, where the gully made a sharp turn. Eagerly I went to pick up this specimen. As I reached for it, the section of the gully around the bend came into view. I stopped short.

Kneeling with his back turned to me was a Sarbr-il, bent in concentration over the dials of a small piece of electronic equipment. I moved silently to the other side of the gully to get a better look. It was a radio transceiver of Arcturian make. The Sarbr-il was a traitor!

I knew I was no match for a Sarbr-il in hand-to-hand combat, karate notwithstanding. I sneaked back around the bend in the gully, climbed the slope as quietly as possible, and then ran like hell for the cavern. At the foot of the path that came down the wall of the great cavern, I ignored the two-mile scenic route and clambered across a few yards of jagged stalagmites to the entrance into the skylighted room, and thus reached help in something under five minutes from the time I’d seen the traitor, instead of the twenty minutes it might otherwise have taken. As I burst into the room, tired and out of breath, all the Sarbr looked up in surprise from the things they were doing.

“What’s the matter?” someone asked.

As soon as I got my breath back, I said, “There’s a traitor out there sending a message to the Arcturians!”

Reylo Ryl jumped to her feet. “Take us to him, quickly!” She motioned for several big burly Sarbr to follow; I looked around for Arlem but didn’t see him in the big room.

We ran back through the cavern into the late afternoon sun, over a couple of hills and down into the gully. We came to the place where the transmitter was, and the traitor was still bent over it, speaking in Arcturian. Hearing our footsteps, he dropped the microphone and turned toward us.

It was Arlem.

I thought I was going to pass out as he rose slowly to his feet, holding his arms up, a prisoner. His face was wary, and so unfamiliar. He knew he was in big trouble,

but he didn’t look ashamed. The transmitter sputtered with staticky Arcturian voices.

“Frisk him,” said Reylo Ryl.

Two Sarbr went forward, with their lasers trained on his chest. They found a laser pistol and a small knife on him. These they tossed on the ground. One of them bent down and switched off the radio.

“D you deny that you were signaling the Arcturians?” said Lady Ryl.

He said nothing. He just looked sullen.

The rebel leader looked sad. “Oh, why did it have to be you?” she said. “You were such a good boy. You had the love of all your friends and the respect of everyone who knew you. What misguided impulse turned you away from us, and brought this awful fate upon you?” He said, “They offered me a lot of money.”

Then Reylo’s voice was cold: colder than the wind, which I could hardly feel. She said, “Shoot him.”

Arlem!

“Wait a minute,” he said, and he looked at me. “You’ll come to the healing place and visit me, won’t you? I don’t want to lose track of you.”

I grunted incredulously. Those weren’t toy lasers they were about to shoot at him.

“After I’m dead,” he insisted, trying for some more definite response from me. “You can take a day off from the revolution, to come and see me, and we can plan that trip to the Southern Hemisphere.”

“Of course she will,” said Reylo. “Are you ready to get on with it now?”

He nodded and dropped his hands to his sides and closed his eyes. The Sarbr lifted their guns.

I finally found my tongue. “Would somebody please explain all this to me?”

Arlem opened his eyes. Reylo said, “I thought you understood. He’s a traitor, and we’re shooting him.”

“I know, but will he really be dead afterwards?” Then I winced at my words, which weren’t exactly tactful in Arlem’s presence.

“Yes, I’ll be dead,” said Arlem. “I’m no cheater.”

“Dead like the forest people?”

“Yes,” said Arlem. “These are awfully strange questions you’re asking.’

Like the forest people, I thought, with a lifting of the weight in my chest. “But the forest people aren’t really dead,” I pointed out optimistically. Everyone looked at me without comprehension. By way of evidence, I added, “They talk a lot.” It wasn’t the brightest thing to say, but my brain wasn’t hitting on all cylinders.

After a long, awkward silence, Lady Ryl said, “Beth, tell me your definitions of fife and death.”

Here was the thing that had been all wrong ever since I’d arrived on Berbidron. Whatever it was, it was going to come out now. I cleared my throat. “Well, life is when you eat and sleep and all those things—you know, when you’re busy doing things, and your body has stuff going on inside it. Death is when everything stops and your mind … trails off, and your body rots. It must be very boring, I think.”

The lady nodded slowly. “And if you were dead— that is, outside life—then how would you define life? A non-life explanation.”

“If I were dead I wouldn’t be able to define anything. I wouldn’t exist.” All this I already knew, but what worried me was their definition.

“In other words,” said Lady Ryl, “that definition remains the same, no matter which condition you’re in at the time?”

“Yes,” I said. “What about your definition?”

She spoke to the others in Sarbrian, and asked Arlem a question. He shrugged and replied briefly. Then, taking a deep breath, she said to me, “Beth, when the first humans landed here and we began to hear about your culture and customs, your wars and political intrigues, and your economic systems, we thought you were jok-_ » mg.

Arlem said, “We never grow old and die. We thought you didn’t, either. I’m afraid the misunderstanding was my fault. You see, with so much time on our hands, aur primary motive in, uh, life, is to avoid boredom as much as possible. We have all sorts of games that we play, some of which are quite complicated and require a lot of pretending. When you humans showed up, I was one of the first ones on the scene, and I assumed that the weird things you do must be a game, because it’s just the sort of thing I’d think up. So I went around getting all my friends interested in this new game, which the humans called life.’ We built cities, and copied what we read in or saw on 3dv. We had a great time pretending to have a huge population and crime rate and so on. We thought you were just pretending, too. When the Arcturians moved in, that was just another phase in the interplanetary politics game, so we made the proper countermove, the formation of the BLC. I became a spy, since in my opinion any complication is an improvement. But I haven’t really betrayed my people.”

Reylo said, “Of course, we expected you humans to drop the game and be your real selves eventually, but it’s been less than six years since you got here, which is no time at all to us. We thought this life’ business was just an imaginative way of introducing yourselves, of making a good first impression. It was amusing, and that means a lot to us.”

One of the others’ said, “Are there really billions of people on your planet, then?”

I nodded. I don’t think I could have spoken. It was so much to take in, all at once.

“So many children!” said Arlem. “How old are you, Beth?”

“Twenty-four. How old are you?”

“Fifty thousand and something. I forget exactly. Reylo is about forty million years old.”

“Oh,” I said.

He added helpfully, “She’s from the planet Ryl, near the center of the galaxy. We inhabit thousands of planets, although Berbidron was the first.”

“If you’ve explored so far,” I said, “why was it we who discovered you, instead of vice versa?”

“We avoid that area of the galaxy where your planets are,” said Arlem. “There’s an old legend—” he stopped, and glanced sharply at Reylo. They both frowned.

Then with a muttered explanation she vanished, followed almost instantly by the other Sarbr, except Arlem.

I wasn’t too startled by the vanishing. One expects strange powers from people millions of years old. “Don’t you go too, please,” I said to Arlem.

“I haven’t got the talent; I’m not old enough yet. We’ll have to walk.”

We started back towards the cavern. In spite of all the alarming things, I felt pretty relieved. Arlem wasn’t a traitor, and these people weren’t backwoods lunatics after all and could probably cancel the Arcturian threat with a snap of their fingers. Of course, there were a few matters yet to be cleared up. “What’s going to happen to me now?” I said.

“It depends. We have to find out if you’re the people in the legend.”

“What legend?”

“I was just getting to that. The legend goes back about nine hundred million years. I wasn’t bom yet, of course, but there are people who remember. Life on this planet was much the same as it is now. We’ve kept it this way because, to our minds, it’s nice and basic—you know? When our sun gets old, I imagine we’ll replace it, or move the planet.” He looked over at the setting sun. “Poor old friend. Anyway, a billion years ago there were a lot more living species than there are now. The creatures out of our evolutionary past hadn’t died out. We had great primitive sea creatures, and giant fems as tall as trees, dinosaurs, and other extinct species you’ve probably read about. Also the Sarbr were there, living alongside our pre-sapient ancestors. We were developing the rudiments of a technology, being about as advanced as you humans are now, though it took us a lot longer than it’s taken you, since we had other ways of getting what we wanted. We had developed mental science, in the area of controlling our bodies, to the point where we were immune to all diseases, and almost invulnerable to all injury. But we couldn’t extend this health to things outside our own bodies, and we can’t even today; it’s much too dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” I said. “How?”

“It requires a great exertion of sympathy,” said Arlem. “Sympathy is the basic destructive force. Anyway, we could cure ourselves of anything, but we couldn’t cure other life forms, and even our own children. They’re highly vulnerable until their minds develop, which happens at the age of about five hundred.

“Well, a mutant virus developed that we had no cure for. It must have struck first at about the evolutionary level of the sponges and primitive seaweeds. It allowed the creatures to live for a short time—the exact span was different for different species—and then they withered and died. We couldn’t find any cure for the virus, so we destroyed all the infected specimens we found, hoping there would be enough healthy ones left for the species to survive. But it turned out they were all infected, or became so before we could halt the spread of the disease. Then we tried to prevent it from spreading to other species—which our scientists predicted it would do—by gathering every infected organism we could find, loading them on a spaceship, and taking them away to a lifeless planet that we adjusted to be able to support these simple life forms. We chose a planet out near the edge of the galaxy, far removed from the directions we expected to take in our future explorations.”

“Earth,” I guessed.

He shrugged, as we went down out of the pink evening light into the gloom of the cavern. I got out my glowglobe.

“It might be Earth,” he said. “That’s what Reylo is checking right now. Anyway we transplanted the infected species there, rather than destroying them, because it seemed a shame to make them completely extinct. Of course, at their normal rate of reproduction— things on Berbidron don’t have to multiply at the fantastic rate they do on the human planets—at their normal rate, they wouldn’t have survived more than a couple of diminishing generations. So we seeded their new planet with proteins designed to make them reproduce faster. We had gotten rid of all the affected organisms on this planet, and thought we had the problem solved, when a number of other life forms, both plants and animals, which were slightly higher on the evolutionary scale than the first ones, suddenly showed signs of the disease. Of course, not every life form at that level was affected; some evolutionary strains appeared to be immune, and today you can still see living specimens of them on this planet. At any rate, we transplanted the sick ones to the young planet, and they too became extinct on Berbidron. But the whole thing kept happening over and over again, each time a little higher on the evolutionary scale. We began to be afraid that the virus might eventually infect our children. We searched for a cure, but none could be found except what we were already doing, eliminating the infected species. That wasn’t working too well because, when one species became infected, latent forms of the virus were passed on to the next higher up, to incubate during about ten generations—that’s a long time on Berbidron —and then suddenly appear. We couldn’t anticipate which species would be affected at the next higher level, and we didn’t want to needlessly extinguish anything that wasn’t going to be affected so you can see that we were in something of a quandary. If we let the disease spread much higher, it would endanger our children. We were already making plans to evacuate them, if necessary. The last load we shipped off to that other planet contained a bunch of apelike creatures… .” He looked at me, and I blushed. “Anyway, we were about to take the drastic measure of destroying all life at the evolutionary level just above the current position of the disease, in the hope that it couldn’t bridge the gap to attack higher life forms. That was dangerous for us, too, though not as dangerous as trying to cure everything. But then, the disease underwent another mutation. It no longer confined itself to certain species. It attacked all life. The whole planet was in immediate danger.”

“What did you do?” I said. We’d reached the floor of the cavern, and were taking the long way around.

“Well, it was spreading from a definite focal point, so we just started killing off all life forms in the area-like starting a backfire. That was only about four million years ago. My Aunt Agnor was in on it.”

“Did it work?”

“Nobody knows for sure. The day after we started the process, every trace of that disease, both the mutated and unmutated forms, disappeared from the planet. By that time, we had very sophisticated devices for detecting it, but it simply wasn’t there. We stayed alert for it for a few hundred thousand years, but finally we just put it out of our minds like a bad dream, along with that unfortunate planet. We’re very good at forgetting things. You have to be, when you live forever.”

“Do you think that planet is the Earth?” I said.

“Well, it sounds like it. If it is, Berbidron is probably infected again. Fortunately there haven’t been any humans around the children—since we’ve known you for less than a thousand years, we haven’t been taking any chances—but still it could spread through the wildlife in the forests, and reach the children that way.” He shrugged and said nothing for a while. Then he looked at me wonderingly. “Twenty-four years old! Our youngest at present is a hundred thirty. But that’s Berbidronian years, of course.”

“Do you have any children?” I said.

“Me? No. Whenever somebody dies—really dies, that is, which isn’t often, because there’s only one thing that can kill a mature Sarbr—then they hunt up a couple of volunteers to replenish the population. Everybody wants to try it; it’s something different. My tum hasn’t come yet, but it will eventually, I guess. Too bad you’ve got that disease. I’d have enjoyed having a real child for a friend.”

I didn’t care much for being thought of as a child. I’d just gotten to the age where humans grudgingly admitted I was an adult. If he tried to cootchy-coo my chin, I was prepared to hit him.

When we got to the big room, there were a lot of people there whom I hadn’t seen before, and also one of the healers from when I had that laser bum, and Jamryn, minus the tuxedo. Suddenly I remembered the legend about the moon killer, and wondered if it was the same Jamryn.

“There’s my Aunt Agnor,” said Arlem, pointing. “She’s nearly a billion years old.”

She didn’t look it.

The Sarbr were looking over my medical record, according to Arlem, and comparing it with data on the disease which had disappeared from their planet four million years previously. They looked pretty grim.

When they saw me, one of them came over with a little eggshaped thing in his hand. He waved it at me and it bleeped. Everyone exchanged significant looks. “You’ve got it, said Arlem.

That made me feel bad, even though it was only old age and I’d always known I had it.

“Well,” I said, “what are we going to do about it? Anything?”

Reylo said, “We can’t cure you.”

“Is it all right if I just go back to New Eden?”

“That’s a good idea,” said Reylo. “No offense.”

“What about the Arcturians, though? I doubt if they’ll leave willingly.”

“We’ll give them a fair chance.” She turned to Arlem. “That’s your job. Use that radio thing they gave you. Convince them of the futility of trying to remain on this planet.”

Arlem had left the transmitter in the gully, so he had to go back outside again. I went with him, because he was more or less my only friend.

Two big warships and about thirty aircars, in precise formation, came like a flock of geese in the dark violet sky. The sun flashed redly on them as it drowned in the frozen black waves of the hills. I trembled in the cold wind.

The radio crackled and beeped, then a voice said in Arcturian, “N-73, we are not receiving your homing signal. Where are you? Report in. Repeat, Agent N-73”

Arlem stared at the radio for several seconds before he remembered that he was N-73. “Strange to think of its not being a game,” he murmured, as he picked up the microphone. Then he spoke to the Arcturians. “This is Arlem the Traitor, known to you as N-73. There is nothing for you to attack. The BLC no longer exists. We have quit the game of living. The old ones have decided no humans should remain on the planet. If you value your lives, leave at once. Go back—” he stopped. Two of the aircars had broken formation, and they came swiftly toward the gully where Arlem and I stood. Their laser cannons were about to fire.

They’d be killed if I didn’t act fast. I concentrated all my mind on the mind of one of the pilots, trying to tell him to go back. He wavered, but wouldn’t turn.

The two ships stopped in midair. Their hatches opened and their crews, five from each ship, floated out and down, shouting with fright, until they landed softly on the crest of a hill close to us. My pilot was quieter than the rest because of the battle going on in his mind. I kept trying to make him surrender but he wouldn’t, the fool. He was sweating and shivering and wondering what was going on, and he looked at Arlem and me with a totally bewildered face, but I couldn’t make him surrender.

Then I felt an agony of change deep within him, and he shriveled and crumbled and the wind caught up his essence and we flew, spreading through the air, down to touch the people and the stones and the streams in their busy existences, flowing down through bedrock, merging with ore veins and then down into the molten core, spreading, and I was a tiny germ becoming one with all the planet in its patient, ponderous dance around the sun. And the sun radiated. Its entire existence was to radiate, to warm the little planets (and me, a speck of chemicals) in passing, to reach out toward the sister stars, and we reached out across a cold black space into the hearts of other suns, all radiating, and they shared a common purpose: the whirling galactic march through the empty regions. The galaxy and its neighbors moved as a group, as one. And the cluster of galaxies had a dim sense of being part of a larger whole. And I, so far stretched beyond that particle drifting in infinity, took that final step, and my awareness reached across the last great gap to the ends of the universe, reaching for total wholeness, total unity, total uniformity—

The tiny original particle thought wryly, “How ignominious, to be smallified to death!”

Then I faltered, like an overinflated toy balloon with a leaky mouthpiece. There was a wild descent as the galaxies and stars flashed past and away into globes and spots and points of light, and the planet flowed out of me, and the stones….

I was lying on cold stones. Something huge and gray flashed past my line of sight. There was a meaty thunk! and then pain in my chest. A voice from somewhere way up high was saying, . . Beth GoodrichI You’re Beth Goodrich!”

When his big foot hit my ribs again it really hurt and I shouted back, “All right! I’m here!”

My eyes focused up on Arlem’s homely, furry face with its concerned expression, and beyond it three early stars that were not part of me, and had nothing to do with me. I sat up shakily, and from the pain I judged that my ribs, where Arlem had kicked me, might be broken or at least cracked. I felt the automatic healing processes starting to work—what a wonderful thing a living body is!

“You see,” said Arlem, squatting down to my level, “why sympathy is the one thing that can kill us. You shouldn’t allow yourself any more of it than what the strength of your sense of identity can handle.”

I enjoyed the sound of his voice. I savored the bitterness of the wind in my nose and mouth. The cold that cut through my coveralls was almost ecstasy. I felt the texture of the air on my face and the gritty rocks under my hands and the fuzziness inside the toes of my socks. It was good to be in a specific body. I laughed to think I’d ever imagined anything could be better.

The last light from the west gave gentle shape to the ten dark purple crystals that were almost silhouettes against the sky, on the high rim of the gully. I counted the crystals twice, appreciating the ten-ness of them, each separate from the others, all separate from me. Ten little purple crystals.

Ten Arcturian warriors.

They’d been standing right there, and now—“Did you do that?” I said to Arlem, pointing.

“No. The old ones in the cavern.”

“What are the purple crystals?”

“Poison. The old ones formed it inside the bodies of the men, and it dissolved them.”

I looked at the floor of the gully, over which were scattered hundreds of purple crystals. And there were more gullies like it, covering four hundred miles. “What happened to this land, then?”

“It was the focus of the mutated form of the disease. Now there’s so much poison nothing will grow here. That’s why we built Rastin-arrorhin; it goes all around this land, to keep the poison from spreading.”

The full force of the airships moved to attack us now, but as before there was no bloodshed. In three minutes the airships were empty, and one hundred eighty-five crystals of poison lay scattered on the face of the land. Then the unmanned ships moved into a new formation—the Arcturian death symbol. They flew away swiftly in the direction from which they had come.

‘They’re a warning,” said Arlem. “Maybe no more killing will be necessary.” He bent down and switched off the transceiver, which spluttered with static.

The date was Spring Eighth, and I was leaving. Rather than have me spread more germs all over the forest, the Sarbr had brought my little space cruiser to Benson Spaceport. The big gray tree was in no danger from me, since my disease was the unmutated form, to which it was immune.

Spring had definitely come to Berbidron. Since its seasons were determined by its position in its elliptical orbit, rather than the tilt of its axis, flowers were blooming all over the planet at the same time. It smelled heavenly. There had been a lot of rain, but the sky was clear for my departure. Even the wind seemed to have relented; it had a definite suggestion of warmth, which it tried to cover up by blustering loudly. I was sorry to be going.

I had spent the last four days carousing around town with my Sarbr friends—after all the purple crystal were cleared away, that is. We’d drunk about half the wine in Benson, and dined every day on ovret, which really was as good as it was cracked up to be, although I still wouldn’t have cared to meet a live one in a dark alley, or anywhere else. Also I had contributed testimony to the History of Berbidron, the only human ever to have that honor. Everyone wanted to give me a present, and I accepted as many as would fit in the Adamant. They were terrific things: ornaments and mementoes from the local mansions, a Sarbrian movie projector with my favorite film, gorgeous clothes, a stone sculpture by Liom himself, a pretty rock from the cavern. I think the Sarbr were trying to make up for not being able to cure me of my disease.

The game of life, minus humans, still went on in the cities. The entire population of Benson was at the spaceport to see me off, with a brass band and a 3dv crew. I stood on the field with a squirrel on each shoulder, smiling at them all and doing a lousy job of not crying. Some of them were crying, and not only the ones who were alive. Everybody shook my hand, while the mayor and the governor made speeches. I sniffled and tried to think of something appropriate to say.

Elf let me know that he had to go the bathroom. I’d been trying to sympathize less, but I just couldn’t shut my mind against my own squirrels. I told him he’d jolly well better wait until he was in his box on the ship.

“I’ll miss you,” said Arlem, standing beside me at the bottom of the ladder to the hatch. “I wish we could have gone on that trip.”

I hugged him and he kissed me, in a strictly Platonic way. I was really crying.

Now Nutmeg had to go too. They hadn’t had much exercise in weeks. The Sarbr-il hotel manager who had kept them for me hadn’t let them run around free, and of course four days ago the pines had all been poisoned, so there was no place for them to play. And they’d be shut up in that ship for another two weeks.

I said, “Would hurt anything if I let Nutmeg and Elf run on that big tree for a minute?”

“I think it would be all right,” said Arlem.

We walked over and I let Elf and Meg jump off onto the massive gray trunk. “It’s kind of too bad there aren’t any squirrels native to Berbidron,” I said.

Arlem said, “Aunt Agnor told me there were, once, but the disease took them.”

The squirrels didn’t share my uneasy feeling about the big gray tree. They chased each other all around and up and down, digging their little claws into the bark, and twitching their saucy tails.

“You know,” I said, “that tree doesn’t look so unfriendly, with squirrels on it. I can almost—”

I could sympathize with itl

When I regained consciousness, lying in a big four-poster bed in Reylo’s mansion, Arlem was sitting nearby, reading. He looked up from the book and said, “You’re going to live forever.”

“Yes, the tree told me.”

“But why?”

“I was too closely tied to the squirrels. It had to save me in order to save them. They waited millions of years

for the squirrels to come back.”

“The trees?”

I nodded. “They saved this planet once—the trees— when they realized they had to. But they’d already let the squirrels die, not realizing until it was too late how much they loved them. Trees need a long time to figure things out. But they are immensely powerful, because they know who they are.”

“Do you, yet?”

“No.” I smiled at an alarm clock on the table by the bed. ‘1 have lots of time to find out, though.”

The clock had stopped.

Thus ended the brief homecoming of the humans. Beth the tree-friend went to study with the other children—where she was frequently visited by Arlem— until her 455th year—which was, fittingly, the year of the burial of the dead land and the start of a new age—when the Old Ones judged her to be mature enough to live in the world. At that time she and Arlem the Traitor set out immediately for the Isle of Dragons in the Southern Hemisphere. By then, of course, she was physically as well as mentally quite different from her original state, and she is still developing. We are all most curious to see what a fully-grown human will be like.

The squirrels have multiplied astonishingly, until the forests are as alive with them as in the old times. As for the trees themselves—efforts to persuade them to communicate have thus far been unsuccessful.