Carruthers' Last Stand [Novelette], Dan Henderson

Rit Carruthers celebrated his thirty-first birthday as alone as he could make himself - a full kilometer out from the four milky-white domes of Alpha Lunar Hospital. He breathed metallic air from his tanks, felt the tickling at the bridge of his legs that assured him the suit A/C unit was working, and tasted wine left on his upper lip from the party he had given himself an hour before.

The Moon ignored him, and he basked in her ignorance. "This world is hostile to man," he thought. "Not by motive, by nature." The insight made him happy - or it made him what he called happy: maintaining a relative peace with a hostile world. It was away from the alien venom of the Yatz, and away from the mindless stings of the bureaucrat Rushing.

Nothing sounded. Man noises got swallowed up. The only sounds were pseudo-sounds, vibrations carried by the metal of his suit. He saw his footprints in the coarse dust, and was pleased that the Moon would not even take the cosmetic step of closing them over. He smiled, feeling as aged and impersonal as the uncaring dust.

"For my birthday," he mused, "Continental Industries might make me a gift of the hospital. And change the name to Alpha Lunar Home for Lunatics." But CI could be wrong: He wasn't about to go crazy. Not on his salary. He thumbed his nose at Earth - an odd, peculiarly significant gesture due to his massively gloved hand and the mirror of his faceplate.

He turned toward the pearly domes. The name "hospital" was justified by fifteen beds on one floor of one dome. CI had needed a cover in order for the United Nations to grant it a Moon facility. Most of the "hospital" housed corporate secrets. One of them was Rit Carruthers.

"Base to Carruthers."

"Carruthers here."

"Time to come in. Ninety minutes to contact."

"I'll be along."

"You'll be along now!"

"Come and get me," Carruthers said, chuckling. The threat silenced BS (for Base Supervisor, among other things) Rushing. BS had tried sending men after Carruthers before, and had discovered how impossible it was to play tag on the Moon. The entire base staff knew of the escapade - and would love an encore.

"All right, dammit. Twenty minutes. That's it."

"Check."

"Base clear."

"Carruthers, partly cloudy."

He couldn't mute the speaker, but he could obscure it. He switched on a tape of Beethoven's "Ninth."

The music pleased him. He felt giddy, wandering from blinding light into inky shadow, with a full symphony blasting away in his helmet. The sound had all the brilliance and symmetry of R-theory, the first gift from the alien Yatz to man.

"And they think I'm big-headed!" The man on the Moon chuckled to himself. Beethoven had been among the most arrogant men of all time - and he'd had a right to be.

Carruthers suspected that he, too, had that right. How else could one explain Continental Industries' continuous obeisance to him? The monolithic, multigovernmental corporation could as easily crush him, if he were an ordinary man. But he'd demanded, and gotten, this privilege of solitary Moon walks - as well as the custom tape deck for his suit.

"As long as old Rit's the only one who can handle the Yatz, there's nothing they won't do 'for me," he thought.

The "Chorale" began and, somewhere down among the horns and drums, he could hear the Base calling him. He ignored the summons. Carruthers knew exactly how long it would take him to unsuit, put on his warpaint, and hustle down to the R-dome. But he wanted to be back in time to have a cigarette: Already, his stroll had carried him too near the airlock.

It slid open before he could press the exterior call. Meaning someone had been watching for him.

He stepped inside. The door closed. He slouched against one wall of the stainless-steel chamber. He felt the vibration of pumps at his shoulder. As air moved in, he began to hear them. The green light blinked on. He took off his helmet.

He began the graceless routine of getting out of the suit. He could see his face in the opposite wall. Cauliflower ears and a broken nose: A pacifist, Carruthers had learned the virtues of peace the hard way. His hair was close-cropped. The scar of the R-implant showed on his scalp. It was his badge of superiority.

The inside door opened and Carruthers stepped into the anteroom. Rushing and "Emerson" were there. Emerson was Rushing's executive secretary. Carruthers had given her a new name, and it had caught on:

"Knock, knock."

And she had said: "Who's there?"

"Emerson."

"Emerson who?"

"Emerson fine boobs you got there, honey."

She had not spoken to him since. Fine. It was what you expected from the brainless types who became BS secretaries.

"Put this up." Carruthers said, dumping his suit in their direction.

Rushing frowned and Emerson obeyed. Rushing said, "It's been forty minutes. The brass want you for a conference."

"I've nothing to confer."

Rushing looked desperate. "Look, Rit, do it for me. I mean, they can get me."

"Sure, sure. Hustle on down there and tell 'em I'm coming."

Rushing beamed, started to say something, changed his mind, and glided from the room on rubber-soled shoes.

Carruthers watched him go, shook his head at the sight of the retreating back, and reached for his tooled leather boots. Emerson stalked past. Carruthers watched. He wondered if it were possible for a woman to sway with malice.

If so, Emerson had the knack.

Carruthers remembered the first time he had seen Rushing. Boy, had the little bureaucrat hemmed and hawed. It had happened back at the Multiversity.

It had happened like this:

"There's got to be some catch," he'd said, enjoying watching his visitor squirm in the rickety chair generally reserved for students. "Why in God's name would Continental Industries need a primitive anthropologist on the Moon?"

Rushing had colored beet red. "They just do."

The anthropologist had snorted.

"All right then. You know about the transmissions picked up from the aliens?"

"Certainly. And I also know that the signal is more than five hundred years old. Those aliens couldn't be very primitive."

"Well, no, not exactly. But that five hundred years thing - that's just what CI tells the public."

"CI? Continental Industries?"

"Right. They bought research rights to the tapes. They -

"Research rights? Since when has CI been interested in research? Pure research, at that?"

The bureaucrat squirmed a little more. "Well, of course, they, um, they stood to profit from it. You see - you understand this is confidential? - part of the information in those tapes was something called R-theory. It makes mechanically aided telepathy possible, I'm told. Instantaneous communications with the Yatz."

Carruthers took that in. He opened a leather-bound volume of Plutarch's "Lives." It contained a whiskey" bottle and two shot glasses. He glanced at Rushing, who shook his head, and filled only one. He downed it. "So?"

"So it's possible for us to communicate with the Yatz."

"Ah, that word again. Yatz. What's that?"

"The aliens."

Carruthers refilled his glass. "And?"

"The Yatz have proven very hard to deal with. Very hostile, very primitive, in spite of their technological innovations. Two men have already broken down from the, ah, pressures of negotiations. CI thinks you can handle the job."

"Doesn't make sense," Carruthers said. "Why me? I'm just a lowly college-prof type, even if brilliant. They want me to bore the Yatz into cooperation, right, Rushing?"

"No. Not that."

"How much is CI willing to pay?"

"I'm authorized to offer one thousand credits-per-day. Plus benefits. Plus expenses."

Carruthers whistled long and low. A year's pay every month. "For what?"

"You are a professor, but you arc also a primitive anthropologist with much fieldwork to his credit. We know."

"I'm sure you do," Carruthers said. "But you also know about Benton and Marquez, who have done more work. So there's something you're not telling."

The little man took a deep breath. Carruthers could see the pressure building behind the pale eyes. The words damming, until he cracked and a torrent came pouring out: "They told me, Dr. Carruthers, they told me, they needed a strong personality type. No, even more." Rushing glared at Carruthers, a glare that soon was to become familiar.

"They told me, dammit, they told me they needed an arrogant SOB for the job. And I checked. And there was one man with the credentials, one certified SOB, to boot, and you're it."

Carruthers nodded. He drank the last of his whiskey. He smiled "I'm thoroughly charmed. I'll take the job."

Carruthers had learned to love the Moon. But he hated CI.

The dead-eyed, bellied Execs couldn't begin to understand the torture in his brain each time an R-transmission was made - or the personal agony his failures were causing him. Worse, they had insulted him by thinking more money would be a balm for his hurt. Money couldn't cure alienation. "Alien-nation," he thought. Marvelous. In a world gone totally egalitarian, absolutely pedestrian, you couldn't expect appreciation for personal achievement. Ah, well.

He remembered the aftermath of the early R-sessions.

"It's just Moon-lag," Rushing had first proposed. The anthropologist had choked down his nausea and continued to work.

After a while, he'd said, "It's the same one every time."

"You're sure?"

"Yeah. Gestures are idiosyncratic."

"Oh."

And Carruthers had stuck to it, staking his pride and his ambitions on the Yatz. He honed his hate, his misanthropy, and his curses until, at last, he felt he could jeer a shuttle-pilot into a convalescent ward. "God, Rit, you're foul lately." He'd only sworn some more, and gone on.

"Communications with the Yatz are based upon a protocol of insult," he wrote in his first dispatch to the Board of Directors of Continental Industries. "That requirement is a reflection of their pride, their will, and their inability to be humiliated. Only if they believe an Earthman to be their equal will they communicate."

Contact occurred every 12.78 days, an apparently arbitrary figure set by the aliens. Carruthers used the time between contacts to read up on the Yatz, the strange lizardlike race posited in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia. Their curious antagonism, he found refreshing. It was better to have refined hostility, than refinement covering hostility. More esthetic, as well as more honest.

Technical data bored Carruthers, but he was enchanted by the simplicity of the R-theory. Simple to use, that is: Its mechanism was not yet understood.

That fact only increased his awe for the mental capacity of the aliens, and he began to see how mind-to-mind contact might send men careening into madness. He reviewed the clinical records of Silas and Montgomery, the two "communicants" who had preceded him and now were permanently institutionalized.

But the two hadn't had his background, or his will, or his mind: Whatever the Yatz could dish out,. Rit Carruthers was sure he could take. And hand back.

Reviewing films of past contacts, listening to transcripts, studying his own errors in strategy, only deepened his conviction that he was bound to succeed.

Until, one day, to Rushing, he said, "A\ right, you son of a file cabinet with carbon-paper for brains - I'm ready."

The supervisor poured him whiskey.

"I can't go back in there," said Rit the Humble.

"I know. It was bad. Drink this."

The glass emptied, was filled, and emptied again.

"I mean, why should I? You saw what it was wearing around its neck?" he said, feeling the bile in his throat.

"I saw, But it was nothing like what it was saying. And the lizard wasn't even warmed up good."

The anthropologist shuddered. "I know."

"Do you? You've seen the films, sure, but have you thought about them? I'd say it was in second gear, headed for third, when you broke. But that's good - "

"The Yatz didn't sign off, You did," Rushing said. "It's sticking with you. It's a good sign."

"Great sign, fantastic sign. 'Prepare to meet your Maker'. "

"It's a step in the right direction."

"Crap, if that's the right direction ... "Pardon me, but I think I'll go in the other."

Rushing was silent for a moment. He filled Carruthers' glass again. Then he said, "Emerson thought you would quit."

Carruthers frowned. And decided he would stay.

"Now what the hell's the matter? I'd stonewalled it damn good then wham! The screen goes black and he's gone."

"It doesn't respect you. You're losing it."

"Doesn't respect me? Jesus."

"Try yelling. You're awful quiet in there."

"I'm hoarse already."

"Practice."

"Stuff this. Stuff you."

"Sure," said Rushing, with the self-certainty of a true believer.

Carruthers felt nauseated, having this human Jello look up to him. But he practiced.

The Apollo Bar provided the extra luxuries that the rest of Alpha Lunar Hospital lacked. Its interior was as wasteful an expanse as its exterior was frugal. Dim gaslights, not neon, shimmered on the surfaces of real wood tables; corridors spun off from the bar arena to the party rooms, oversized cubicles with deep pile carpet and thickly cushioned chairs; across the room from the multicolored liquor racks a dark shape was lodged against the wall, its keys gleaming yellow in the light of a single golden bulb. A piano. A Steinway concert grand. It provided the only live music on the Moon. Pop stuff came from holos.

CI knows the basics men need to survive, Carruthers thought, each time he entered. And he entered often. But he never followed the winding corridors back to the Lay Ladies. No. He himself was illegitimate, and he was proud of it. He didn't mind that his mother had only known his father as "September" - the month of their affair. It was only that Rit Carruthers - rejecting sex as he rejected Rushing - could not accept easy pleasure. It was a violation of the superior mind.

But Carruthers entered the Apollo often. First, there was the liquor; then, Rushing's wife frowned on drinking and so he was usually spared the banalities of the bureaucrat; and, finally, if he had a friend on the Moon, it was Pinter the Bartender.

Pinter, staff psychologist cum bartender, was a pleasure. He was a jowled man of forty-five, with the huge red hands of a farmer, who blew great clouds of cigar smoke while Carruthers talked.

"I can't make it out. I get to the point where Hun's -

"Hun?"

"That's my alien chum."

"Got it."

"Anyway, Hun's been going on about the whiteness of my belly, and what that reminds him of, so I've just got to come back with what he must smell like, and the lousy yarble-bag sort of sneers at me and fades."

"That must have been a relief."

"No - a problem. I think these pansy-blue coveralls CI gives us are the trouble. I'm working up my own uniform. You should see it. It's got -

"You sure take all this damn serious."

"Of course I do. With the Yatz, there's still a hope of waking up the human race, still some hope that Homo sap can make the transition into Homo sapiens. We're karmaed out.

"Just think about the genius of the R-process. Anybody who can design that is light-years in front of us."

"Maybe."

"Maybe, my chockra. They are."

"So you say. But my experience is that civilized beings take compassion on the less civilized. They don't carry on like shuttlers on shore leave."

"Thanks, friend."

"I didn't mean - Just get me a drink, okay?"

And Pinter shrugged. "Sure." The request and its answer were their routine. It was a signal that the argument was to stop. Carruthers respected Pinter too much to risk the relationship. If only Pinter hadn't swallowed humanism hook, line, and sinker.

"Still," he thought, "if even Pinter feels that way, I'd better bloody well keep my thoughts to myself. I sure can't afford to let these clowns catch me in uniform."

Alpha Lunar Hospital was laid out in a quad. There was one dome each for Services, Housing, Research (and the hospital, what there was of it), and the R-works. Each of four passageways connected two domes. To get from his room in Housing, Carruthers had to pass through either Services or Research.

Services meant the cafeteria. No way. He moved into the passage toward Research. No one was in sight. If only his luck held ...

He was one-third of the way down a side corridor past the labs when he heard, "Would you look at that?"

He kept walking.

"All dressed up like an Indian - I guess he figures the uniform don't show off enough of his body."

"I thought it didn't cover enough of it."

Carruthers moved faster. Temper, temper.

Almost clear, less than five meters from the interlock to the R-dome, he heard a female giggle. His blood chilled.

"I sure didn't know they made 'em like that anymore, 1 swear I didn't," a sweet Southern voice proclaimed, dripping of honey and sarcasm.

Carruthers' hand flashed to the thong at his waist, catching hold of the tomahawk tied there, as he whirled and let loose the war whoop he had practiced.

He saw eyes bulge as they took in his war paint, his muscles huge and tight against leather, his weapon - and his face. He took one step forward. ,

Heads jerked inside doorways like cuckoos recalled by the striking of the hour.

Carruthers surveyed the suddenly empty hall, his embarrassment transformed into victory. He grinned. "If only the Yatz would fall so easily."

He entered the interlock, passed through the final hall, and came to the doorway. He punched in his ID number; metal parted and he went in.

"That you, Rit?" Rushing said, glancing up. He gagged. "Rit?"

The contact man grunted a response.

"It's brilliant" the bureaucrat said.

"Oh, Christ! I think it will work."

"It better goddam work."

"Right. Don't forget the glasses."

Carruthers nodded. The Yatz projection was always brilliant. But he'd noticed that Hun's pupils were wide in order to see him. "And don't you forget the spotlight."

"I won't."

Carruthers nodded and passed through another pneumatic entrance: Except for the unearthly looking R-works in one corner, the room could have passed for the studio of a Holo talk show.

He seated himself in a black leather swivel chair, turned his back to the camera, pulled a package of cigarettes from his breechcloth, and lit one. With the white cylinder dangling from his lips, he fitted his mirrored flight glasses. His free hand alternately clenched and relaxed on the tomahawk he'd made from pipe and a jagged Moon rock.

"Five minutes. Lobal interconnect functioning."

Power was surging through the station, he knew. Power that would burn through Carruthers' mind, then skip-leap across space. He could feel the sweat running from his eyes, making the nosepiece of the glasses hurtful, while smearing the war paint. He looked at the black mat on the back of his hand, and saw that its hairs were soaked.

The speaker crackled again. "Already?" he wondered.

"This is Inge. Good show and good luck."

"This is Adams, son. Say hello to Custer for me."

Thought Carruthers: "Screw you both with barbed-wire."

Inge was CI's civilian director of the lunar program - although this was the first time Carruthers had heard of him being on the Moon. Adams was director of "security" - all twelve battalions. Both had come to the Moon to view this contact, Carruthers knew. But how had they known to come? Could that peanut-brain Rushing have figured that Carruthers was ready to make a breakthrough? No. Luck. Dumb luck. But it made him nervous.

Silence.

"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, good luck and go!"

Nothing and then the lights went down, the screen flickered on:

"Unsteady two-legged son of a tepid-blooded race - I see you return again to be taught your weakness. Such courage is rare for such a jelly-spined effluvium as yourself. Still, you cower in the darkness! Pathetic weakling, afraid even of his own shadow. Even now you would be carrion rotting in your own waste if -

Carruthers' chair spun, hundreds of candlepower blazed over him, and he was on his feet, screaming into the camera.

The ten-meter-high vision of the Yatz, of Hun, decked out in full battle array, looking like Pancho Villa with a blue reptile's body, loomed in front of him.

A sound started somewhere inside the Earthman's guts, wrenching upward, reverberating along his rib cage, scorching up the trachea, and finally spewing from his lips: words of fury and slime, backed by the full fury of a man who could no longer stomach his own kind, but had turned the anguish elsewhere.

No one but Carruthers could've noticed the brief lapse in the alien's manner or the narrowing of the pupils; none but he had crossed so fully into the Yatz way of thinking. In that moment of exquisite confrontation, with the fire of R-contact burning in his brain, in the middle of chaos and curdled emotion, with sweat streaming from every pore, through eyes bloodshot with strain, Carruthers saw.

He saw, and he knew.

A grimace flickered for one glittering moment on the twisted reptilian face. The force of it ground its way through to the human's bones: It was a new gesture, a gesture of approval, and the contact was on.

Carruthers, in the Apollo, had killed his first whiskey.

"Another one?"

"For sure."

"You look lost, Rit," Pinter said. "You look like a cat that's been chased up a tree after meeting his first dog."

"I feel up a tree," Carruthers said. "But it's like all my life, I thought I was a weird dog, until I got chased up that tree. And there in the branches: cats. It's a frightening and beautiful thing."

"You've met Jesus or what?"

"Yesterday, I got through to Hun. You should've been there. Like a first date. Can you imagine what it's like working shoulder-to-shoulder with a race of Napoleons? A race whose every member was cradle-taught Nietzsche? Beethovens every one."

"Or Hitlers. Just how far away are these friends of yours?"

"You know, for a shrink, you show a streak of xenophobia a klick wide."

"How far?"

"Five hundred light-years, say. Out of range of possible face-to-face contact."

"But we can talk to them instantly?"

"Right."

Pinter beetled up his thick brows. "I hate to shake a zealot, but don't you think there's something awful damn strange about that?"

"Like what?"

"Like what are they getting out of this - other than a disciple whose initials are RC."

"Nothing, that I know of. I guess they're interested in primitive races."

"So they come on like, well, like Huns?"

Carruthers considered.

Pinter went on.

"Look, Rit, Beethoven preceded Nietzsche - the Nazis came after him. I respect where you're coming from, but you're wrong. Something's wrong, anyway."

"Come to the point."

"All right. You keep up with this super-race junk, and there's going to be trouble. People don't like it. All I'm saying is play it cool. Stay objective. Keep the hicks happy."

"But, hang it, what if they are a super-race? I owe my allegiance to talent. I believe in higher things, great things, Bigger than Life things."

"And it's made you cynical, bitter."

"So, it's my life. Sometimes, the intelligent man must choose unhappiness."

"What about the hicks?"

"They don't count. For nothing."

"Rit, Rit ... Listen to me. Your little 'tete a tete' would never have happened without the hicks. People like that tech guzzling down the bar there."

""Dammit, get me a drink. Leave me alone."

"Sure, sure."

The bartender brought the drink and then wandered to the end of the bar, where he began talking to the tech. Carruthers watched, jealous and angry. He felt betrayed.

He forced his mind back to the previous evening's contact, hoping to salvage his feeling of euphoria. He failed.

Several things were bubbling through his brain that distracted him and nagged at him. Pinter. Carruthers had played the tolerance game, and it hadn't worked. No one could say where intolerance was justified. And sometimes, it must be.

Other things. The contact. It had been contact, but nothing concrete had happened. Then there was the necklace Hun wore; he had an inkling of what the stones were; but he couldn't accept it, not yet.

Still, the sense of awe returned to him. The ferocious give-and-take had invigorated him and made him aware of the wonders of his own being alive. He saw that the Yatz had no respect for any but themselves. Their social evolution remained an evolution of the fittest. They presumed that life meant having the brains and guts and brawn to survive.

The Yatz were not like Earth's

muddling millions, he thought. They had not sabotaged evolution by pandering to their infirm, or glorifying their weak, or diluting the strong. Carruthers only wished that the distance across the Milky Way was not impassable: Contact between Man and Yatz would be amusing - as long as it lasted.

Carruthers admitted to himself that he did not quite understand the aliens. As Pinter had pointed out, their motivation was not clear. Hard information, given freely at first, now seemed difficult to get.

But the contact man was not worried. No. There was an innate connection between him and Hun, a bond that transcended the R-link, an alikeness which denied mistrust.

In that was the promise of clearing up so many of the apparent contradictions the aliens presented. The solution, present but not yet grasped, would be something light and fanciful, like dancing under the Moon - something loony and significant. It would be as beautiful as the early contacts had been horrible.

But what? He shrugged. He didn't know. He sipped his whiskey and sputtered.

"Almost didn't recognize you with all your clothes on," Rushing said, seating himself at the bar. He took a napkin and fastidiously wiped clean the already spotless surface, before resting his long-boned, narrow arms upon it. "Pinter," he called, "would you bring me a beer?"

Carruthers asked, "You got a note from your wife, Rushing?"

"Don't need one. This is a celebration."

"Of what?"

"Why, of you, Rit. Of you and your ugly friend. Of the contact that will make us all rich."

Carruthers, surprised, suspicious, said, "How's that?"

"Hey, you don't know?" Rushing's look was amused, almost condescending. "You don't know," he said again, the words rolling out of his mouth with obvious pleasure.

"Don't know what?"

"You think all we get from the Yatz comes from the interview, but there's more. When you successfully make contact, secondary channels open up to us."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, yesterday, we got a formula for a new alloy, one that's practically heat impervious - so much so, in fact, we could pass it through the Sun and it'd come out whole. A ship made of that wouldn't heat up enough to require an air conditioner inside."

Carruthers sniffed. "Big deal."

"It is a big deal. Do you have any idea how hot the Sun is? What a revision of molecular theory it takes to accept such a metal? Everything, but everything can change now."

Carruthers shrugged, feeling vaguely annoyed. He didn't know whether it was because of his own ignorance of science, or of his being used for other purposes and not knowing it. Or because Rushing knew more than he did.

"So congratulations," the bureaucrat said. "Our early projections indicate you may have just paid for the entire R-project."

"I want a raise."

"You've got it. Take some time off. The R-team will be working around the clock before the next transmission, just to get the early information sorted."

"It'll take me at least a week before I can go back to the studio," Carruthers said.

"I bet. The doc said the adrenaline you were pumping could kill a man. Heart attack, you know."

"It won't kill me."

"I guess not. You'd choke to death on pride, first."

"You got something important to say? Otherwise, I've got some serious drinking planned."

"I've got something to say."

"Say it."

Pinter arrived with Rushing's brew and put another whiskey in place of Carruthers' empty glass. Then, taking his cue from Rushing's hard stare, he slid back along the bar to where he'd been before, making a great show of turning his back. It was as if he'd hung a huge Do Not Disturb sign above the two.

"We've got to have some more information about the Yatz," Rushing said. "Adams says it's imperative."

"What else have you been telling me? I thought we were getting information."

"That's technical. Theory and stuff. And Adams is upset over the implications: A race that could come up with that metal, that could come up with R-theory - maybe five hundred light-years doesn't mean that much to them. So Adams says we need to be thinking about defense, if only - "

"Defense? Against the Yatz?" And Carruthers threw back his head and laughed. "Tell the Fascist to ask Hun himself."

"It's your job."

"It's my job to maintain contact with Hun, which means it is my job to keep people from screwing up the contact. We start poking around, too quick, and click! No contact. And there go your hopes for any more Supermetals."

"You on their side?"

"I'm on my side."

"You're not indispensable."

"So fire me. You've already made me rich."

Rushing glared at him, then down into his full mug of beer. Silence. It was getting late. Shifts cnanged in the station. Men and women, most wearing the green suits of a tech or the red of research, drifted into the Apollo. With them came the fragrance of grease and rosins.

But most passed toward the action in the back. The 3-11 Bio crew had a party going.

The piano started playing, its notes strangely clear in the general confusion of the bar. The music was classical.

"Ah, Ludwig," said Carruthers.

"What?"

"Ludwig. Ludwig von B. Soc number, 801-463-3827. A good dude. You should get to know him."

"I'll look him up," said Rushing.

"You know, BS - I'm ignorant of a lot of things. But of nothing that's important."

Rushing didn't reply, not immediately. Finally he said, "What're you going to do about the Yatz?"

Carruthers thought about it. He hesitated to put a strain on the still virginal relationship. But it would be interesting, if he could manipulate Hun the same way that Hun had manipulated him. "Send me a memo on what Adams wants," he said, "Then, just pay attention to the next broadcast."

"Thanks, Rit. It means a lot -

"Yeah. I know. It means a lot to your career."

Silence. Rushing said nothing. He looked at Carruthers, not glaring, his eyes open, blinking. But he said nothing. Then he got up and left.

Carruthers revolved on his stool. He watched Rushing go. He almost liked Rushing. Bad sign. His attention turned to the piano. A woman's back. A pool of light made a halo on her hair, The "Appassionata," first movement: strange music for a bar: strange and beautiful.

He watched, listened, enjoyed.

When the movement finished, he clapped lightly. The pianist turned to him, radiant, and then she laughed. It was Emerson. His skin began to burn, and he got up, and he headed toward the exit.

"How!" Emerson called out.

He cursed. As he left, he banged a shoulder against the doorjamb. It hurt. The light in the hall was neon. Stepping into it, he felt chilled as if going into a winter's night. He held the thick, dark wood of the Apollo's door open, and hoped for a resumption of the music.

It did not happen. The woman began making the ominous rumbling of wardrums with her instrument. Carruthers shivered and released the door. The shucking sound of its closing cut off the further music, the laughter.

Sleep, dammit.

But he could not sleep. His eyes, scarcely able to stay open, would not close. The ceiling revolved above his sweat-soaked body. He ached.

Sobering up, he thought mechanically. But that didn't seem to matter much: Lately, the line between in- and un-intoxicated had been blurred.

Carruthers felt a loneliness that was new to him. Rushing knew science; Emerson knew music, and what did he know? An image, a suspicion, of Emerson and Rushing together. It sickened him. Always they went to the morons.

But Rushing was no moron.

The Yatz were the only fit company in the world. He laughed at the irony, imaging a Yatz coupling. Imagining himself as a pioneer in miscegenation. He sickened again.

He was lonely. So stupid, so insignificant, so human. He was not worthy of the Yatz. He was always alone, but never like this. He needed to communicate with someone, and the urge could not be held until the next R-contact. Blood roared in his ears with the beat of wardrums.

He thought of Hun, imagining the leathery face hovering above him in the darkness, and something, far beneath his cynicism and his discipline, trembled.

His eyes shut to blank out the alien's face.

Colors drifted across the inside of his eyelids, calming him, lulling him, making him sleep. But sleep only sharpened his understanding, made crystal the mist of hurt and loneliness. What happens to the superior man who can no longer claim superiority? He returns to the herd.

He dreamed of a marionette with a Yatz face, suspended by a long silver cord that ran .up through the black Moon sky to wizened hands. He saw himself, Indian of the maria, seizing the ragdoll figure and shaking it, making a fine line around the top of the skull with his tomahawk, and pulling free a scalp of crepe hair. Spirit gum bled onto his hands.

Laughter surrounded him; laughter needing no air, but coming to him by R-implant; but it was laughter with hard edges and cutting places, human laughter, laughter at his victory.

He slashed angrily at the cord supporting the puppet and it would not cut. He grasped the body and tried to hurl it back into the sky, but it only fell back to dance grotesquely decimeters above the lunar surface.

Wakefulness dawned over the scene, and Carruthers felt the cooler part of him note that his cheeks were wet, that the laughter had been his own.

For the first time, he thought about going crazy.

He found Rushing having coffee with a couple of silver-uniformed executives in the cafeteria. As Carruthers approached, their talk stopped. A thin man with an angular face arose and said, "I've got work to do. I'm sorry, Tim." His hand lightly brushed Rustling's shoulder as he stood. The other exec followed.

"Finally, I've found you," Carruthers said. "I should've known. I've been waiting on that memo."

"Later. I can't talk now."

"Later, hell. I'm doing you the favor."

"Rit, I don't need your favors. You'll have to take responsibility for it yourself."

"Listen, Mr. Paper Shuffler -

"No, you listen," Rushing said, rising to his feet. His eyes stared directly into Carruthers'. Only the features of his face reflected the intensity of his feeling. The soft sparkling of his eyes was now a flashing. His smooth chin was jutting and hard. "I've had it with you, with you and your lizard and your whining. The Yatz aren't the only damn thing in the world. You've paid for yourself. The project is paid for. Everything else is cream. We can take the loss.

"What we can't take is a drunken SOB who is fouling up station procedure with his whims."

The tight lips asked, "You understand?"

Carruthers didn't, couldn't respond. He watched, speechless, as Rushing turned away and began walking. The shock passed. Shaking his head in astonishment, he started after the supervisor.

A powerful hand seized him by the upper arm. Unthinking, he tried to twist free and when he did, cursed: His captor was Pinter.

"Let me go."

"Just wait one minute. Tim's wife has been critically injured in a flitter accident. She was visiting her folks Earthside. Tim can't get down there to see her. He can't, because CI has ordered him to stay here. To watch you. You're too unreliable to be left alone, they say."

"Me? Christ, the whole program rests on me. And if that twit thinks ..."

Pinter only watched Carruthers. And Carruthers felt the observation, and listened to what he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know. If I had known -

"You'd have done the same thing," Pinter said. The grip on Carruthers' arm tightened, then fell off altogether. Pinter walked away.

Reviewing the videotapes took time. But the anthropologist had determined to spend the rest of the days until the R-transmit hidden away among the gray files in the R-dome.

Here was meaning, meaning and some semblance of peace.

He examined film until he thought his eyes would burst. He listened to tapes until the gutteral English of Hun ran together in his ears. The ozone smell of the great computers and the other electrical works seemed the only smell he knew.

He substituted calisthentics for the strolls on the Moon surface. He stopped drinking.

Repeatedly, he called the library - having found he was too stupid even to use the computer-retrieval system. Too much of the information from the secondary tapes was beyond him. He was muddling over the difference between A-type and G-type stars, when there was a knock on the door of the file room.

"Come in," he said, half-afraid, half-hoping it would be Pinter or Rushing.

It was not. At first, he didn't recognize the gangling male with unruly red hair. It was a technician he'd seen often in the Apollo.

"You the joker who's been driving Basil crazy?"

Basil was the librarian. "I am. But what - ?"

"Then you need my help. You work with the Yatz, don't you?" He extended his hand. "Rit, isn't it? Rit Carruthers? I'm Will Abernathy. Mind if I sit?" He eased himself slantwise into a chair across from Carruthers.

"I'm sorry. I'm very busy. I - "

The intruder waved away the protest. "With my help, you'll save enough time to spend a few minutes. I've got clearance, too, so don't worry. See, I was in the library and Basil, the old carp, was just a-carryin' on every time you called. It got me interested, so I checked, found out who was calling, and came on down - after I got the CI paper mill to approve it. Okay?"

Carruthers nodded dumbly. He disliked nice people. The hail-fellow-well-met, he hated. But...

Abernathy said, "I've sure been wanting to meet you. I've heard loads about your work and you - you let the CI big shots know exactly how big they are, don't you!"

Carruthers smiled, slightly. Maybe this Abernathy could be of some help. "Well, thanks and all, but I can manage."

"No. You need help. You want Basil running over here to bean you with the Unabridged? No, no. No need to be embarrassed, though. Like my grandad used to say, 'Don't waste a coon dog on no rabbit'."

He reached across the table and took the folder Carruthers held. He glanced through it. "This stuffs tricky. So give me something to brag about. Let me help."

He shut up - finally - and began reading.

Carruthers studied him. Funny guy. He decided to risk it. "I'm trying to understand what the facts about G-type stars mean. I understand the facts, I just don't understand how they fit."

"Why do you need to know?"

"The Yatz have one."

"So do we."

"Really? That's odd. I thought 'G' had something to do with temperature."

"For sure. They heat up between forty-five thousand and six thousand degrees Kelvin."

"But the mean surface temperature on their planet is supposed to be about eighty degrees Centigrade."

"No problem at all," Abernathy said. "I bet their year's a lot shorter than ours."

Carruthers shook his head. "It's not. In fact, the twelve-plus days between contacts are roughly one of their weeks, and there are sixty-three of them in one of their years."

Abernathy blinked. "Son of a river rat. You sure?"

"Yes. It's here ... somewhere." Carruthers began shuffling through the papers on the desk in front of him, while Abernathy began working on his watch-calculator.

The technician took sheets from Carruthers, thumbed through them and occasionally fed figures into his machine. He frowned, repeated the process. He whistled. "That's just weird. Where's the stuff you've got on their atmosphere?"

"It's only hypotheses."

"Hmmmmm." Abernathy studied the papers. "Well, you'd have to figure their air's butter-thick, with enough carbon dioxide to produce one hell of a greenhouse effect. Or else their sun is the unlikeliest candidate for a G-type star I know of ..." His pen made a staccato noise as it tapped against the face of his watch. "No. Impossible." He glanced at Carruthers. "You figure it took them as long to get civilized as it took us, and you figure they've got a big A-type star."

"I don't follow you."

"What I'm saying is, they're damn lucky their sun hasn't gone pffft. It must be overdue to nova."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning if the magnitude's what I think it is, meaning their planet's an ace candidate for a molten graveyard. Those figures can't be right."

"Or ..." Carruthers said, softly.

"Huh?"

"Or somebody's lying."

"Them? But why?"

Carruthers shrugged. "I don't know. There're some things that just won't get straight. Maybe if we could figure out about where this star's supposed to be ..."

Carruthers found out a lot of things that he didn't know, some of them important. Abernathy helped not so much by clearing up problems, as by showing where the real problems were.

"Thanks, Will."

"My pleasure. It's not often I get to play expert with my hobby."

"Your hobby?"

"Shoot, yeah. I'm in transport, remember?"

"Oh, yeah."

Abernathy's departure left Carruthers with a feeling of reinforced ignorance. He stared thoughtfully at the wall. Then he reached for the report on the Yatz's alloy.

It seemed the logical place to go.

After all, as Abernathy said, there was at least one report of a nova the Chinese had seen from the direction of Cassiopeia. It had been some five hundred years before. If R-transmission was indeed instantaneous ...

Two days before contact, hurrying down the hallway through Research, Carruthers met Rushing coming out of the interchange.

"Tim," he said. "I hope your wife's better."

The little man seemed not to hear. He made a move to pass on by. Then he said, "She may live. Might. Her life, hers, worth so many more than - " And he looked at Carruthers. Then he went on down the hall.

And Carruthers knew what Rushing had wanted to say, and he could understand, and he himself felt like he must be worth less than this woman he had never seen.

But he could not change his past.

He turned his conscious mind to his latest findings on the Yatz, and he hoped that his guilt would submerge into his subconscious and drown there.

He had found what he was looking for in the films, and it disturbed him. Too damn consistent, he thought as he watched the Hun on the holos. Almost too consistent to be acquired.

But that was impossible, he told himself: The gestures were neither social nor automatic; there was no other explanation than idiosyncratic.

He. sighed to himself and kept working. At midnight on the eve of contact, he switched off the viewer, lit a cigarette and settled back into his chair. He felt good. He was on the brink of understanding the enigma that the aliens presented. It had to be one of two things, and one was impossible. The other was only unacceptable. Tomorrow would decide.

That thought pleased him. Hun can controlled the Earthman's actions to this point, and CI had harnessed the rest with its rules. "That's all past," he told himself. "Tomorrow, I'm in control. I'll make the rules."

He realized his own error in measuring his own worth against that of the Yatz; but he saw, too, that the past could not be changed. Only success could free him.

Only freedom could give him success.

Carruthers caught his breath at the sight of the grotesque image, then smiled. He had applied the war paint so perfectly that he loathed the reflection of himself which appeared on the shiny metal of the door to the R-dome studio.

At his back was Rushing, who had not looked up as Carruthers entered. Pinter was here. Surprising. Again, Rushing had anticipated what the contact-man was up to. He knew this time that sanity was at stake.

But when Carruthers asked Pinter to have him a drink ready when he came out, the bartender turned away without answering him at-all.

The mirror image split suddenly as the door parted and the Indian passed through it.

He'd been winning and he had known he was winning. He saw Hun had realized it too. That was when it happened, a puffing sort of explosion that went off in his brain. It had come from the R-implant.

Then silence. Blackness, too, and numbness. There had' been void as long as Carruthers was able to remember. But sight, hearing and touch were drifting back to him in the guise of a nightmare, a dream state to which he had forfeited his mind.

He thought he saw himself stripped naked and on the surface of the Moon. Stars shone steadily, piercingly. The vacuum on his skin caused it to shake as a horse's does to frighten flies.

But death did not come as he expected, only death-agony. He tried to scream with the no-air in his lungs. New constellations formed above him, one with the face of Hun.

Then the face became real, grew a body, appeared. The Yatz laughed.

Carruthers could imagine Hun broadcasting to another race. He noticed the lizard had added two stones to the horrific necklace he wore.

But not two stones, he knew.

What's the custom? he thought wildly. They cut off... ears? Blackness and silence rushed back over him, protecting him, but still he sweated. He groped his way back to vision, forcing himself to see and think of the neckpiece. Stones, but not quite. And there are two new ones. He thought, Two. His gut twisted on itself, seeking to plunge him back into hiding. Two of them. Two of mine. Curious, bean-shaped things. Bronzed. Something very like testicles. Something very like mine.

He tried to scream and was successful. Because he could do it, the leftovers of Carruthers knew him not to be dead. He shaped the sound into a war-whoop.

He began to run after the phantom Hun, and the Moon's surface cut into his bare feet like glass. He heard laughter and breathed it for air. This chase, he knew, was a parody of one earlier, when Rushing had dispatched men after him.

That had been different, he thought.

That had been sane.

Carruthers continued his sidereal pursuit, a naked man plunging after a armored lizard that took thirty-meter evasive leaps. But the Earthman felt his bronzed arms stretching out in front of him, his fingers elongate and white, growing talons. They missed, grabbed hold, and tore at the alien flesh. But not the leather he'd expected - cloth. Cloth and balsa and strings.

The thing dissembled slowly, pieces falling dreamily in the light gravity. The anthropologist shook his head mournfully over the shattered figure and said, "Dammit, gestures are supposed to be idiosyncratic!"

One act only remained: He reached for the cord suspending the puppet's remains, wrapped them around his hands and heaved downward. The wirelike cord cut into his flesh and blood boiled from the cut. A curtain rose across the pinpricked sky; and a machine cowered, blew a fuse.

Loneliness rushed over him as it was done.

"It was the unacceptable," he said sadly.

Hun asked, "Are you sure?"

The loneliness was gone.

"You understand what kind of man-less man you are?" Hun asked.

"A man," Carruthers said.

"And what comes before acceptance?"

"Revulsion."

"Before love?"

"Hate."

"And before righteousness?"

"Righteous indignation."

"Very, very good. You may live", Hun said.

Words tumbled around him; they clambered noisily in the thick fresh air. He breathed deeply of the air's cool reasonableness. The air was good.

"I've got it," he said pleasantly, thinking of the impossible. "Now what am I going to do with it?"

His friend said, "You should lie until you understand the truth."

Carruthers giggled to himself and told the world, "I hurt."

He could feel the blood pooled beneath him.

But not blood, he thought. Sweat.

Cold floor and sweat beneath him.

He smelled himself. He made a good honest smell - the rich, sharp stink of fear.

Carruthers opened his eyes and saw a curious half-moon above him. One of the Moon's eyes was swollen as if it had been hit. It looked purple.

"Hun?" he asked. He brought his hands up and looked at them. They were unmarred. He took his hands down and saw the moon was Rushing. He watched as the mouth made the words, "You all right?"

"How's your wife, Tim?" he asked.

Someone said, "He's gone crazy."

"I need a drink."

"He sounds normal to me."

Immediately a glass pressed against his lips and a force (a hand?) lifted his head. A familiar bitterness touched his tongue. The liquor tasted of salt.

"What's your name?"

"Rit. Rit like the dye. Rit."

A smile creased the face above Carruthers. But the crease deepened and the purple of the eye spread swiftly across the skin, while the nose swelled and turned to chitin.

Words again.

"Some memory, anyhow ... shock, but not ... God, did he hit me! ... something, something ... got balls ... wasted ... rotting in waste ... carrion rotting in your own waste if -

Carruthers screamed.

Hun said, "It's to be expected. Reality is always a shock."

"What happened?" Carruthers asked, a long week later.

"You've been out for a while. Feel okay?

"K-O'd. You mean, nuts?"

"Well, yes," Rushing said. He looked the same as when he'd told him CI wanted an SOB.

"Your wife's okay," Carruthers said. He said it as fact.

"Why, yes. She's fine."

"Good," Carruthers said. "I take it I'm under wraps?"

"Just for a little while. You're classified."

"As what?"

"As a human being, right now. If you're ready to talk, it'll end that much quicker."

"Fine."

"Just a minute. I'll be right back."

Rushing left and Carruthers began smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes. On the third one, he gagged. He stubbed it out. No need for that, now.

Footsteps came down the hall. Booted steps. A voice ordered guards into position.

Inge, Adams, and Rushing came into the room.

Pleasantries exchanged.

Finally, "You're going to think I'm nuts," he said and grinned. "But then you thought I'd be, anyway, didn't you?"

None of the three reacted. Carruthers decided maybe they didn't know. Okay. He said, "How come none of our bright boys could tell this deal was a fraud?"

He told them the lie that would prepare them for the truth: He told them the unacceptable, not the impossible.

He said the Yatz broadcast, which was nothing more than a computer-designed projection of a statistically normal Yatz individual, was likely being beamed from a dead planet. "Remember that protocol of insult I told you about? Well, I overlooked another explanation than the one I gave. Actually, two. The insults were rules to a game, designed to limit response. See, a computer can't play against unlimited variables. But with specific limitations, a computer can come up with a quite realistic response."

Three blank faces stared at him. He knew that Hun's advice about the lie had been the truth.

"I had to operate within a narrow category of insults." A little light showed in Inge's eyes.

"Exactly," Carruthers said. "The computer could play only one game. It could have been chess - I would still have had to learn chess before I could play the game. Then I would think my opponent was human."

It seemed to sink in. "The giveaway was consistency. Hun's gestures were too ordered to be spontaneous."

It took, over a week's time, eighteen packages of Marlboros (you don't quit all at once), two fifths of Jack Daniels, a good-sized tantrum from Adams (who, Carruthers thought, was more upset by the fact the Yatz couldn't be warred against than anything else) the services of Will Abernathy, a LOGAN 1600 computer, and as many questions as answers from the anthropologist before they believed him.

"You mean it's all fake? All of it? The alloys, the R-transmitter?" Inge asked. He looked terrified.

Carruthers laughed aloud. He knew what Inge must be thinking: How was he going to explain to the Board of Directors that he blew a billion credits on a puppet show?

"No, not that," he said. "The facts had to be genuine - they were the bait. We got the best of their technology because we were willing to listen to 'em bitch. The cybernetics, the R-theory, the alloys, all of it was the best they could produce before their planet was destroyed by nova or supernova."

"That's absurd," Adams said. "If they're all gone, where do the signals come from?"

"I've been told that the heat resistant alloy is hard to produce. I guess they produced enough to shield their R-facility."

He added, "And only that survives." The whole truth would be better. But it would take years of preparation before it would be understood.

Adams seemed satisfied, but Inge's face had clouded over. Carruthers tensed, preparing himself for the question to come.

"But why bother? Why'd they do it?"

As a warning, he wanted to say. Carruthers shrugged his shoulders for Inge's benefit. He noticed that his finger was already yellow with nicotine; Hun would be critical. A hole had been burned in one of the sheets.

"I can only guess," he said finally. "Suppose the Yatz were extremely vainglorious."

Yes. Let's suppose that.

"Suppose they were so proud of their achievements that they couldn't stand to see them ended."

He paused again: Yes I can understand that.

"Maybe they thought by giving gifts - but at a price in honor - they'd earn the respect they could never enjoy."

He looked squarely at Inge. "But we may never know. The lode seems mined out. It looks like the Yatz episode is closed."

And, inside himself, Carruthers heard this: "Such a skillful liar! I am pleased. You will make an excellent diplomat."

"Thanks, friend. Now bug out and let me finish."

Adams looked uncomfortable. Inge looked embarrassed. Only Rushing had the guts to ask. "What happened to you?"

Carruthers laughed. "I caught on and the computer knew. I imagine it tried to give me a prefrontal lobotomy with the R-implant. Something along that line probably happened to Sylas and Montgomery." He thought, Only they chose it.

"Did you know it would happen?"

"I knew there was a risk. Maybe the only way to win in this world is to go off your rocker. Maybe not."

Silence filled the room, broken finally by the silken rustling of Inge's pants as he stood up. "CI thanks you for your work, Carruthers. There'll be a bonus."

"Glad to do it. Next time you need a patient for this classy little hospital of yours give me a ring."

Adams looked grieved. "I don't know," he said. "These corporate governments aren't much on rewarding bravery. I sure think you deserve a medal." He stood up and walked to the patient's bedside. "But, boy, I'd sure like to shake your hand."

He did, and Carruthers said, "Thanks, General. But I've already got my medal." He tapped the left side of his brow, where the R-shaped scar showed.

The man left.

Rushing looked nervous.

"Well, good buddy, what happens now?"

The supervisor smiled, as if it hurt. "I've got my job to do."

"So do it."

"You are to take the next shuttle back out to Earth and your employment with CI, as well as salary, end upon touchdown. Your duties, official and self-imposed, terminate at this moment. You are reminded that paragraph VI of your contract binds you to silence for one year, with Cl holding an option to buy your silence for an acceptable sum the next five years. If you violate this trust, all monies will be forfeited by you and criminal prosecution will ensure."

Carruthers whistled. "And you learned all that for me?"

Rushing shuffled a bit. "For myself, I just want to say I accept your apology. You've done a good job."

"Tim . . ." Carruthers said.

"You've got it wrong. We did a good job."

And the bureaucrat beamed.

Already drinking, but somehow blocked from getting drunk, Carruthers arrived at the Apollo Lounge soon after it opened. It was 11 AM GST. The bar was empty, except for someone in a corner, a darker shadow among the shadows. He paid no attention.

He seated himself. Pinter brought the regular.

"You're going to make a day of it. I can tell."

"I already have, Pinter. I already have." He took a speculative drink of the whiskey. "You ever wake up and realize you've made an error, only this time it was a big one, like maybe with your whole life?"

The bartender chuckled. "Every Monday."

Carruthers smiled. He brushed a smear into the condensation of the shot glass; green light played through the amber liquid. He realized he didn't want so much to drink, as to talk. He'd come to the Apollo to apologize to Pinter.

"Say, what were you doing in the R-dome at the last contact?"

"Vulture instinct. I know when my patients are ready to crack. The funny thing is, they drugged me out of remembering any of it. Top secret, they said. I'm dying to remember that it was I saw," Printer said.

Carruthers laughed. "Put it this way: You remember telling me I looked like a cat that's been treed by a dog?"

The aproned man nodded.

"Well, if you'd been watching, you'd have seen me climb back out of the tree as a dog."

Pinter scowled. "Thanks. That tells me a lot."

"Sorry. Top secret, you know." And not only by our side. "What I really wanted to say was, Thanks for being there. I'm sorry I've been such a pain."

The bartender toweled out a couple of tall glasses and racked them. He smiled, but not as if he were responding to Carruthers' statement. "Mondays are rough, all right," he said. "Beginnings and all of that. But you can't avoid the gut feeling that the pain will go away, that there's work to be done, work that you've got to do. Good work, but risky."

Carruthers stared at him, curious. Just how much did Pinter know? How much had he guessed?

"Rit, you look happy." "I am friend, I am."

Behind him, the piano began to play. Beethoven. Pinter looked at the anthropologist and winked. He walked away. Carruthers turned around.

Inside him, this voice: "It's okay. We have time. Do what you have to do. Love is a good training. Love is a diplomacy all its own."

And Carruthers grinned, outwardly. The R-implant warmed him, did not burn. Helped, did not hurt.

He turned on the barstool and watched the haloed, brunette pianist. He watched her play, then got up, needing to follow the strains of Beethoven to their source.

It was a celebration of being alive, he thought. He no longer could make himself alone. He breathed air laced with her perfume, felt the good tickling he had ignored for years, and tasted his lips nervously.

The walk across the room took a terribly long time. Carruthers felt awkward, as if needing to plan each step before he made it. He stopped once, thinking to go back for his drink. But then he went on, not stopping until he felt the warmth of the musician's shoulder against his palm.

The impassioned arrogance of the old composer poured from her fingers. Her nails shone like stars in the dimness. The cords of muscle in her back danced under his own hand.

Carruthers understood something in that moment, that Beethoven's arrogance came in his creation. Not in his snarls and not in hatred and not in bluff, but in the doing of beauty.

It was as the Yatz taught.

The music ended. Emerson looked up.

"How!" Carruthers said, lamely.

Emerson smiled. It was a smile echoed five-hundred light-years away, on the face of an armored reptile who, alone, kept the R-works going. He, too, had been lonely.

But not any more.