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Earthman, Beware! and others
by Poul Anderson
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Science Fiction

Wonder Audiobooks, LLC
www.wonderaudio.com

Copyright ©2009 by Wonder eBooks

First published in 2009, 2009

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

CONTENTS

EARTHMAN, BEWARE!

DUEL ON SYRTIS

STAR BEAST

MORE GREAT VINTAGE SCIENCE FICTION TITLES FROM WONDER eBOOKS

* * * *

EARTHMAN, BEWARE! & OTHERS

by POUL ANDERSON

EARTHMAN, BEWARE!

As he neared the cabin, he grew aware that someone was waiting for him.

He paused for a moment, scowling, and sent his perceptions ahead to analyze that flash of knowledge. Something in his brain thrilled to the presence of metal, and there were subtler overtones of the organic—oil and rubber and plastic ... he dismissed it as an ordinary small helicopter and concentrated on the faint, maddeningly elusive fragments of thought, nervous energy, lifeflows between cells and molecules. There was only one person, and the sketchy outline of his data fitted only a single possibility.

Margaret.

For another instant he stood quietly, and his primary emotion was sadness. He felt annoyance, perhaps a subtle dismay that his hiding place had finally been located, but mostly it was pity that held him. Poor Peggy. Poor kid.

Well—he'd have to have it out. He straightened his slim shoulders and resumed his walk.

The Alaskan forest was quiet around him. A faint evening breeze rustled the dark pines and drifted past his cheeks, a cool lonesome presence in the stillness. Somewhere birds were twittering as they settled toward rest, and the mosquitoes raised a high, thin buzz as they whirled outside the charmed circle of the odorless repellent he had devised. Otherwise, there was only the low scrunch of his footsteps on the ancient floor of needles. After two years of silence, the vibrations of human presence were like a great shout along his, nerves.

When he came out into the little meadow, the sun was going down behind the northern hills. Long aureate rays slanted across the grass, touching the huddled shack with a wizard glow and sending enormous shadows before them. The helicopter was a metallic dazzle against the darkling forest, and he was quite close before his blinded eyes could discern the woman.

She stood in front of the door, waiting, and the sunset turned her hair to ruddy gold. She wore the red sweater and the navy-blue skirt she had worn when they had last been together, and her slim hands were crossed before her. So she had waited for him many times when he came out of the laboratory, quiet as an obedient child. She had never turned her pert vivacity on him, not after noticing how it streamed off his uncomprehending mind like rain off one of the big pines.

He smiled lopsidedly. “Hullo, Peggy,” he said, feeling the blind inadequacy of words. But what could he say to her?

“Joel...” she whispered.

He saw her start and felt the shock along her nerves. His smile grew more crooked, and he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I've been bald as an egg all my life. Out here, alone, I had no reason to use a wig.”

Her wide hazel eyes searched him. He wore backwoodsman's clothes, plaid shirt and stained jeans and heavy shoes, and he carried a fishing rod and tackle box and a string of perch. But he had not changed, at all. The small slender body, the fine-boned ageless features, the luminous dark eyes under the high forehead, they were all the same. Time had laid no finger on him.

Even the very baldness seemed a completion, letting the strong classic arch of his skull stand forth, stripping away another of the layers of ordinariness with which he had covered himself.

He saw that she had grown thin, and it was suddenly too great an effort to smile. “How did you find me, Peggy?” he asked quietly.

From her first word, his mind leaped ahead to the answer, but he let her say it out. “After you'd been gone six months with no word, we—all your friends, insofar as you ever had any—grew worried. We thought maybe something had happened to you in the interior of China. So we started investigating, with the help of the Chinese government, and soon learned you'd never gone there at all. It had just been a red herring, that story about investigating Chinese archeological sites, a blind to gain time while you—disappeared. I just kept on hunting, even after everyone else had given up, and finally Alaska occurred to me. In Nome I picked up rumors of an odd and unfriendly squatter out in the bush. So I came here.”

“Couldn't you just have let me stay vanished?” he asked wearily.

“No.” Her voice was trembling with her lips. “Not till I knew for sure, Joel. Not till I knew you were safe and—and—”

He kissed her, tasting salt on her mouth, catching the faint fragrance of her hair. The broken waves of her thoughts and emotions washed over him, swirling through his brain in a tide of loneliness and desolation.

Suddenly he knew exactly what was going to happen, what he would have to tell her and the responses she would make—almost to the word, he foresaw it, and the futility of it was like a leaden weight on his mind. But he had to go through with it, every wrenching syllable must come out. Humans were that way, groping through a darkness of solitude, calling to each other across abysses and never, never understanding.

“It was sweet of you,” he said awkwardly. “You shouldn't have, Peggy, but it was...” His voice trailed off and his prevision failed. There were no words which were not banal and meaningless.

“I couldn't help it,” she whispered. “You know I love you.”

“Look, Peggy,” he said. “This can't go on. We'll have to have it out now. If I tell you who I am, and why I ran away—” He tried to force cheerfulness. “But never have an emotional scene on an empty stomach. Come on in and I'll fry up these fish.”

“I will,” she said with something of her old spirit. “I'm a better cook than you.”

It would hurt her, but: “I'm afraid you couldn't use my equipment, Peggy.”

He signaled to the door, and it opened for him. As she preceded him inside, he saw that her face and hands were red with mosquito bites. She must have been waiting a long time for him to come home.

“Too bad you came today,” he said desperately. “I'm usually working in here. I just happened to take today off.”

She didn't answer. Her eyes were traveling around the cabin, trying to find the immense order that she knew must underlie its chaos of material.

He had put logs and shingles on the outside to disguise it as an ordinary shack. Within, it might have been his Cambridge laboratory, and she recognized some of the equipment. He had filled a plane with it before leaving. Other things she did not remember, the work of his hands through two lonely years, jungles of wiring and tubing and meters and less understandable apparatus. Only a little of it had the crude, unfinished look of experimental setups. He had been working on some enormous project of his own, and it must be near its end now.

But after that—?

The gray cat which had been his only real companion, even back in Cambridge, rubbed against her legs with a mew that might be recognition. A friendlier welcome than he gave me, she thought bitterly, and then, seeing his grave eyes on her, flushed. It was unjust. She had hunted him out of his self-chosen solitude, and he had been more than decent about it.

Decent—but not human. No unattached human male could have been chased across the world by an attractive woman without feeling more than the quiet regret and pity he showed.

Or did he feel something else? She would never know. No one would ever know all which went on within that beautiful skull. The rest of humanity had too little in common with Joel Weatherfield.

“The rest of humanity?” he asked softly.

She started. That old mind reading trick of his had been enough to alienate most people. You never knew when he would spring it on you, how much of it was guesswork based on a transcendent logic and how much was—was...

He nodded. “I'm partly telepathic,” he said, “and I can fill in the gaps for myself—like Poe's Dupin, only better and easier. There are other things involved too—but never mind that for now. Later.”

He threw the fish into a cabinet and adjusted several dials on its face. “Supper coming up,” he said.

“So now you've invented the robot chef,” she said.

“Saves me work.”

“You could make another million dollars or so if you marketed it.”

“Why? I have more money right now than any reasonable being needs.”

“You'd save people a lot of time, you know.”

He shrugged.

She looked into a smaller room where he must live. It was sparsely furnished, a cot and a desk and some shelves holding his enormous microprinted library. In one corner stood the multitone instrument with which he composed the music that no one had ever liked or understood. But he had always found the music of man shallow and pointless. And the art of man and the literature of man and all the works and lives of man.

“How's Langtree coming with his new encephalograph?” he asked, though he could guess the answer. “You were going to assist him on it, I recall.”

“I don't know.” She wondered if her voice reflected her own weariness. “I've been spending all my time looking, Joel.”

He grimaced with pain and turned to the automatic cook. A door opened in it and it slid out a tray with two dishes. He put them on a table and gestured to chairs. “Fall to, Peggy.”

In spite of herself, the machine fascinated her. “You must have an induction unit to cook that fast,” she murmured, “and I suppose your potatoes and greens are stored right inside it. But the mechanical parts—” She shook her head in baffled wonderment, knowing that a blueprint would have revealed some utterly simple arrangement involving only ingenuity.

Dewed cans of beer came out of another Cabinet. He grinned and lifted his. “Man's greatest achievement. Skoal.”

She hadn't realized she was so hungry. He ate more slowly, watching her, thinking of the incongruity of Dr. Margaret Logan of M.I.T. wolfing fish and beer in a backwoods Alaskan cabin.

Maybe he should have gone to Mars or some outer-planet satellite. But no, that would have involved leaving a much clearer trail for anyone to follow—you couldn't take off in a spaceship as casually as you could dash over to China. If he had to be found out, he would rather that she did it. For later on she'd keep his secret with the stubborn loyalty he had come to know.

She had always been good to have around, ever since he met her when he was helping M.I.T. on their latest cybernetics work. Twenty-four year old Ph.D.'s with brilliant records were rare enough—when they were also good-looking young women, they became unique. Langtree had been quite hopelessly in love with her, of course. But she had taken on a double program of work, helping Weatherfield at his private laboratories in addition to her usual duties—and she planned to end the latter when her contract expired. She'd been more than useful to him, and he had not been blind to her looks, but it was the same admiration that he had for landscapes and thoroughbred cats and open space. And she had been one of the few humans with whom he could talk at all.

Had been. He exhausted her possibilities in a year, as he drained most people in a month. He had known how she would react to any situation, what she would say to any remark of his, he knew her feelings with a sensitive perception beyond her own knowledge. And the loneliness had returned.

But he hadn't anticipated her finding him, he thought wryly. After planning his flight he had not cared—or dared—to follow out all its logical consequences. Well, he was certainly paying for it now, and so was she.

* * * *

He had cleared the table and put out coffee and cigarettes before they began to talk. Darkness veiled the windows, but his fluorotubes came on automatically. She heard the far faint baying of a wolf out in the night, and thought that the forest was less alien to her than this room of machines and the man who sat looking at her with that too brilliant gaze.

He had settled himself in an easy chair and the gray cat had jumped up into his lap and lay purring as his thin fingers stroked its fur. She came over and sat on the stool at his feet, laying one hand on his knee. It was useless to suppress impulses when he knew them before she did.

Joel sighed. “Peggy,” he said slowly, “you're making a hell of a mistake.”

She thought, briefly, how banal his words were, and then remembered that he had always been awkward in speech. It was as if he didn't feel the ordinary human nuances and had to find his way through society by mechanical rote.

He nodded. “That's right,” he said.

“But what's the matter with you?” she protested desperately. “I know they all used to call you ‘cold fish’ and ‘brain-heavy’ and ‘animated vacuum tube,’ but it isn't so. I know you feel more than any of us do, only—only—”

“Only not the same way,” he finished gently.

“Oh, you always were a strange sort,” she said dully. “The boy wonder, weren't you? Obscure farm kid who entered Harvard at thirteen and graduated with every honor they could give at fifteen. Inventor of the ion-jet space drive, the controlled-disintegration ion process, the cure for the common cold, the crystalline-structure determination of geological age, and only Heaven and the patent office know how much else. Nobel prize winner in physics for your relativistic wave mechanics. Pioneer in a whole new branch of mathematical series theory. Brilliant writer on archeology, economics, ecology, and semantics. Founder of whole new schools in painting and poetry. What's your I.Q., Joel?”

“How should I know? Above 200 or so, I.Q. in the ordinary sense becomes meaningless. I was pretty foolish, Peggy. Most of my published work was done at an early age, out of a childish desire for praise and recognition. Afterward, I couldn't just stop—conditions wouldn't allow it. And of course I had to do something with my time.”

“Then at thirty, you pack up and disappear. Why?"

“I'd hoped they'd think I was dead,” he murmured. “I had a beautiful faked crash in the Gobi, but I guess nobody ever found it. Because poor loyal fools like you just didn't believe I could die. It never occurred to you to look for my remains.” His hand passed lightly over her hair, and she sighed and rested her head against his knee. “I should have foreseen that.”

“Why in hell I should have fallen in love with a goof like you, I'll never know,” she said at last. “Most women ran in fright. Even your money couldn't get them close.” She answered her own question with the precision of long thought. “But it was sheer quality, I suppose. After you, everyone else became so trite and insipid.” She raised her eyes to him, and there was sudden terrified understanding in them. “And is that why you never married?” she whispered.

He nodded compassionately. Then, slowly, he added, “Also, I'm not too interested in sex yet. I'm still in early adolescence, you know.”

“No, I don't know.” She didn't move, but he felt her stiffen against him.

“I'm not human,” said Joel Weatherfield quietly.

“A mutant? No, you couldn't be.” He could feel the tensing of her, the sudden rush of wild thought and wordless nerve current, pulse of blood as the endocrines sought balance on a high taut level of danger. It was the old instinctive dread of the dark and the unknown and the hungry presences beyond a dim circle of firelight—she held herself moveless, but she was an animal bristling in panic.

Calmness came, after a while during which he simply sat stroking her hair. She looked up at him again, forcing herself to meet his eyes.

He smiled as well as he could and said, “No, no, Peggy, all this could never happen in one mutation. I was found in a field of grain one summer morning thirty years ago. A ... woman ... who must have been my mother, was lying beside me. They told me later she was of my physical type, and that and the curious iridescent garments she wore made them think she was some circus freak. But she was dead, burned and torn by energies against which she had shielded me with her body. There were only a few crystalline fragments lying around. The people disposed of that and buried her.

“The Weatherfields were an elderly local couple, childless and kindly. I was only a baby, naturally, and they took me in. I grew quite slowly physically, but of course mentally it was another story. They came to be very proud of me in spite of my odd appearance. I soon devised the perfect toupee to cover my hairlessness, and with that and ordinary clothes I've always been able to pass for human. But you may remember I've never let any human see me without shirt and pants on.

“Naturally, I quickly decided where the truth must lie. Somewhere there must be a race, humanoid but well ahead of man in evolution, which can travel between the stars. Somehow my mother and I had been cast away on this desert planet, and in the vastness of the universe any searchers that there may be have never found us.”

He fell back into silence. Presently Margaret whispered, “How—human—are you, Joel?”

“Not very,” he said with a flash of the old candid smile she remembered. How often had she seen him look up from some piece of work which was going particularly well and give her just that look! “Here, I'll show you.”

He whistled, and the cat jumped from his lap. Another whistle, and the animal was across the room pawing at a switch. Several large plates were released, which the cat carried back in its mouth.

Margaret drew a shaky breath. “I never yet heard of anyone training a cat to run errands.”

“This is a rather special cat,” he replied absently, and leaned forward to show her the plates. “These are X-rays of myself. You know my technique for photographing different layers of tissue? I developed that just to study myself. I also confess to exhuming my mother's bones, but they proved to be simply a female version of my own. However, a variation of the crystalline-structure method did show that she was at least five hundred years old.”

"Five hundred years!"

He nodded. “That's one of several reasons why I'm sure I'm a very young member of my race. Incidentally, her bones showed no sign of age, she corresponded about to a human twenty-five. I don't know whether the natural life span of the race is that great or whether they have artificial means of arresting senility, but I do know that I can expect at least half a millennium of life on Earth. And Earth seems to have a higher gravity than our home world; it's not a very healthy spot for me.”

She was too dazed to do more than nod. His finger traced over the X-ray plates. “The skeletal differences aren't too great, but look here and here—the foot, the spine—the skull bones are especially peculiar—Then the internal organs. You can see for yourself that no human being ever had—”

“A double heart?” she asked dully.

“Sort of. It's a single organ, but with more functions than the human heart. Never mind that, it's the neural structure that's most important. Here are several of the brain, taken at different depths and angles.”

She fought down a gasp. Her work on encephalography had required a good knowledge of the brain's anatomy. No human being carries this in his head.

It wasn't too much bigger than the human. Better organization, she thought; Joel's people would never go insane. There were analogues, a highly convoluted cortex, a medulla, the rest of it. But there were other sections and growths which had no correspondents any human.

“What are they?" she asked.

“I'm not very sure,” he replied slowly, a little distastefully. “This one here is what I might call the telepathy center. It's sensitive to neural currents in other organisms. By comparing human reactions and words with the emanations I can detect, I've picked up a very limited degree of telepathy. I can emit, too, but since no human can detect it I've had little use for that power. Then this seems to be for voluntary control of ordinarily involuntary functions—pain blocs, endocrine regulation, and so on—but I've never learned to use it very effectively and I don't dare experiment much on myself. There are other centers—most of them, I don't even know what they're for.”

His smile was weary. “You've heard of feral children—the occasional human children who're raised by animals? They never learn to speak, or to exercise any of their specifically human abilities, till they're captured and taught by men. In fact, they're hardly human at all.

“I'm a feral child, Peggy.”

She began to cry, deep racking sobs that shook her like a giant's hand. He held her until it passed and she sat again at his knee with the slow tears going down her cheeks. Her voice was a shuddering whisper:

“Oh, my dear, my dear, how lonely you must have been....”

* * * *

Lonely? No human being would ever know how lonely.

It hadn't been too bad at first. As a child, he had been too preoccupied and delighted with his expanding intellectual horizons to care that the other children bored him—and they, in their turn, heartily disliked Joel for his strangeness and the aloofness they called “snooty.” His foster parents had soon learned that normal standards just didn't apply to him, they kept him out of school and bought him the books and equipment he wanted. They'd been able to afford that; at the age of six he had patented, in old Weatherfield's name, improvements on farm machinery that made the family more than well-to-do. He'd always been a “good boy,” as far as he was able. They'd had no cause to regret adopting him, but it had been pathetically like the hen who has hatched ducklings and watches them swim away from her.

The years at Harvard had been sheer heaven, an orgy of learning, of conversations and friendship with the great who came to see an equal in the solemn child. He had had no normal social life then either, but he hadn't missed it, the undergraduates were dull and a little frightening. He'd soon learned how to avoid most publicity—after all, infant geniuses weren't altogether unknown. His only real trouble had been with a psychiatrist who wanted him to be more “normal.” He grinned as he remembered the rather fiendish ways in which he had frightened the man into leaving him entirely alone.

But toward the end, he had found limitations in the life. It seemed utterly pointless to sit through lectures on the obvious and to turn in assignments of problems which had been done a thousand times before. And he was beginning to find the professors a little tedious, more and more he was able to anticipate their answers to his questions and remarks, and those answers were becoming ever more trite.

He had long been aware of what his true nature must be though he had had the sense not to pass the information on. Now the dream began to grow in him To find his people!

What was the use of everything he did, when their children must be playing with the same forces as toys, when his greatest discoveries would be as old in their culture as fire in man's? What pride did he have in his achievements, when none of the witless animals who saw them could say “Well done!” as it should be said? What comradeship could he ever know with blind and stupid creatures who soon became as predictable as his machines: With whom could he think?

He flung himself savagely into work, with the simple goal of making money. It hadn't been hard. In five years he was a multimillionaire, with agents to relieve him of all the worry and responsibility, with freedom to do as he chose. To work for escape.

How weary, flat, stale and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

But not of every world! Somewhere, somewhere out among the grand host of the stars....

The long night wore on.

“Why did you come here?” asked Margaret. Her voice was quiet now, muted with hopelessness.

“I wanted secrecy. And human society was getting to be more than I could stand.”

She winced, then: “Have you found a way to build a faster-than-light spaceship?”

“No. Nothing I've ever discovered indicates any way of getting around Einstein's limitation. There must be a way, but I just can't find it. Not too surprising, really. Our feral child would probably never be able to duplicate ocean-going ships.”

“But how do you ever hope to get out of the Solar System, then?”

“I thought of a robot-manned spaceship going from star to star, with myself in suspended animation.” He spoke of it as casually as a man might describe some scheme for repairing a leaky faucet. “But it was utterly impractical. My people can't live anywhere near, or we'd have had more indication of them than one shipwreck. They may not live in this galaxy at all. I'll save that idea for a last resort.”

“But you and your mother must have been in some kind of ship. Wasn't anything ever found?”

“Just those few glassy fragments I mentioned. It makes me wonder if my people use spaceships at all. Maybe they have some sort of matter transmitter. No, my main hope is some kind of distress signal which will attract help.”

“But if they live so many light-years away—”

“I've discovered a strange sort of—well, you might call it radiation, though it has no relation to the electromagnetic spectrum. Energy fields vibrating a certain way produce detectable effects in a similar setup well removed from the first. It's roughly analogous to the old spark-gap radio transmitters. The important thing is that these effects are transmitted with no measurable time lag or diminution with distance.”

She would have been aflame with wonder in earlier times. Now she simply nodded. “I see. It's a sort of ultrawave. But if there are no time or distance effects, how can it be traced? It'd be completely nondirectional, unless you could beam it.”

“I can't—yet. But I've recorded a pattern of pulses which are to correspond to the arrangement of stars in this part of the galaxy. Each pulse stands for a star, its intensity for the absolute brightness, and its time separation from the other pulses for the distance from the other stars.”

“But that's a one-dimensional representation, and space is three dimensional.”

“I know. It's not as simple as I said. The problem of such representation was an interesting problem in applied topology—took a good week to solve. You might be interested in the mathematics, I've got my notes here somewhere—But anyway, my people, when they detect those pulses, should easily be able to deduce what I'm trying to say. I've put Sol at the head of each series of pulses, so they'll even know what particular star it is that I'm at. Anyway, there can only be one or a few configurations exactly like this in the universe, so I've given them a fix. I've set up an apparatus to broadcast my call automatically. Now I can only wait.”

“How long have you waited?”

He scowled. “A good year now—and no sign. I'm getting worried. Maybe I should try something else.”

“Maybe they don't use your ultrawave at all. It might be obsolete in their culture.”

He nodded. “It could well be. But what else is there?” She was silent.

Presently Joel stirred and sighed. “That's the story, Peggy.”

She nodded, mutely.

“Don't feel sorry for me,” he said. “I'm doing all right. My research here is interesting, I like the country, I'm happier than I've been for a long time.”

“That's not saying much, I'm afraid,” she answered.

“No, but—Look, Peggy, you know what I am now. A monster. More alien to you than an ape. It shouldn't be hard to forget me.”

“Harder than you think, Joel. I love you. I'll always love you.”

“But—Peggy, it's ridiculous. Just suppose that I did come live with you. There could never be children ... but I suppose that doesn't matter too much. We'd have nothing in common, though. Not a thing. We couldn't talk, we couldn't share any of the million little things that make a marriage, we could hardly ever work together. I can't live in human society any more, you'd soon lose all your friends, you'd become as lonely as I. And in the end you'd grow old, your powers would fade and die, and I'd still be approaching my maturity. Peggy, neither of us could stand it.”

“I know.”

“Langtree is a fine man. It'd be easy to love him. You've no right to withhold a heredity as magnificent as yours from your race.”

“You may be right.”

He put a hand under her chin and tilted her face up to his. “I have some powers over the mind,” he said slowly. “With your cooperation, I could adjust your feelings about this.”

She tensed back from him, her eyes wide and frightened. “No—”

“Don't be a fool. It would only be doing now what time will do anyway.” His smile was tired, crooked. “I'm really a remarkably easy person to forget, Peggy.”

His will was too strong. It radiated from him, in the lambent eyes and the delicately carved features that were almost human, it pulsed in great drowsy waves from his telepathic brain and seemed almost to flow through the thin hands. Useless to resist, futile to deny—give up, give up and sleep. She was so tired.

She nodded, finally. Joel smiled the old smile she knew so well. He began to talk.

She never remembered the rest of the night, save as a blur of half awareness, a soft voice that whispered in her head, a face dimly seen through wavering mists. Once, she recalled, there was a machine that clicked and hummed, and little lights flashing and spinning in darkness. Her memory was stirred, roiled like a quiet pool, things she had forgotten through most of her life floated to the surface. It seemed as if her mother was beside her.

In the vague foggy dawn, he let her go. There was a deep unhuman calm in her, she looked at him with something of a sleepwalker's empty stare and her voice was flat. It would pass, she would soon become normal again, but Joel Weatherfield would be a memory with little emotional color, a ghost somewhere in the back of her mind.

A ghost. He felt utterly tired, drained of strength and will. He didn't belong here, he was a shadow that should have been flitting between the stars, the sunlight of Earth erased him.

“Good-by, Peggy,” he said. “Keep my secret. Don't let anyone know where I am. And good luck go with you all your days.”

“Joel—” She paused on the doorstep, a puzzled frown crossing her features. “Joel, if you can think at me that way, can't your people do the same?”

“Of course. What of it?” For the first time, he didn't know what was coming, he had changed her too much for prediction.

“Just that—why should they bother with gadgets like your ultrawave for talking to each other? They should be able to think between the stars.”

He blinked. It had occurred to him, but he had not thought much beyond it, he had been too preoccupied with his work.

“Good-by, Joel.” She turned and walked away through the dripping gray fog. An early sunbeam struck through a chance rift and glanced off her hair. He stood in the doorway until she was gone.

* * * *

He slept through most of the day. Awakening, he began to think over what had been said.

By all that was holy, Peggy was right! He had immersed himself too deeply in the purely technical problems of the ultrawave, and since then in mathematical research which passed the time of waiting, to stand off and consider the basic logic of the situation. But this—it made sense.

He had only the vaguest notion of the inherent powers of his own mind. Physical science had offered too easy an outlet for him. Nor could he, unaided, hope to get far in such studies. A human feral child might have the heredity of a mathematical genius, but unless he was found and taught by his own kind he would never comprehend the elements of arithmetic—or of speech or sociability or any of the activities which set man off from the other animals. There was just too long a heritage of prehuman and early human development for one man, alone, to recapitulate in a lifetime, when his environment held no indication of the particular road his ancestors had taken.

But those idle nerves and brain centers must be for something. He suspected that they were means of direct control over the most basic forces in the universe. Telepathy, telekinesis, precognition—what godlike heritage had been denied him?

At any rate, it did seem that his race had gone beyond the need of physical mechanisms. With complete understanding of the structure of the space-time-energy continuum, with control by direct will of its underlying processes, they would project themselves or their thoughts from star to star, create what they needed by sheer thought—and pay no attention to the gibberings of lesser races.

Fantastic, dizzying prospect! He stood breathless before the great shining vision that opened to his eyes.

He shook himself back to reality. The immediate problem was getting in touch with his race. That meant a study of the telepathic energies he had hitherto almost ignored.

He plunged into a fever of work. Time became meaningless, a succession of days and nights, waning light and drifting snow and the slow return of spring. He had never had much except his work to live for, now it devoured the last of his thoughts. Even during the periods of rest and exercise he forced himself to take, his mind was still at the problem, gnawing at it like a dog with a bone. And slowly, slowly, knowledge grew.

* * * *

Telepathy was not directly related to the brain pulses measured by encephalography. Those were feeble, short-range by-products of neuronic activity. Telepathy, properly controlled, leaped over an intervening space with an arrogant ignoring of time. It was, he decided, another part of what he had labeled the ultrawave spectrum, which was related to gravitation as an effect of the geometry of space-time. But, while gravitational effects were produced by the presence of matter, ultra-wave effects came into being when certain energy fields vibrated. However, they did not appear unless there was a properly tuned receiver somewhere. They seemed somehow “aware” of a listener even before they came into existence. That suggested fascinating speculations about the nature of time, but he turned away from it. His people would know more about it than he could ever find out alone.

But the concept of waves was hardly applicable to something that traveled with an “infinite velocity"—a poor term semantically, but convenient. He could assign an ultrawave a frequency, that of the generating energy fields, but then the wavelength would be infinite. Better to think of it in terms of tensors, and drop all pictorial analogies.

His nervous system did not itself contain the ultra-energies. Those were omnipresent, inherent in the very structure of the cosmos. But his telepathy centers, properly trained, were somehow coupled to that great underlying flow, they could impose the desired vibrations on it. Similarly, he supposed, his other centers could control those forces to create or destroy or move matter, to cross space, to scan the past and future probability-worlds, to....

He couldn't do it himself. He just couldn't find out enough in even his lifetime. Were he literally immortal, he might still never learn what he had to know; his mind had been trained into human thought patterns, and this was something that lay beyond man's power of comprehension.

But all I need is to send one clear call....

He struggled with it. Through the endless winter nights he sat in the cabin and fought to master his brain. How did you send a shout to the stars?

Tell me, feral child, how do you solve a partial differential equation?

Perhaps some of the answer lay in his own mind. The brain has two types of memory, the “permanent” and the “circulating,” and apparently the former kind is never lost. It recedes into the subconscious, but it is still there, and it can be brought out again. As a child, a baby, he would have observed things, remembered sights of apparatus and feelings of vibration, which his more mature mind could now analyze.

He practiced autohypnosis, using a machine he devised to help him, and the memories came back, memories of warmth and light and great pulsing forces. Yes—yes, there was an engine of some sort, he could see it thrumming and flickering before him. It took a while before he could translate the infant's alien impressions into his present sensory evaluations, but when that job was done he had a clear picture of—something.

That helped, just a little. It suggested certain types of hookup, empirical patterns which had not occurred to him before. And now slowly, slowly, he began to make progress.

An ultrawave demands a receiver for its very existence. So he could not flash a thought to any of his people unless one of them happened to be listening on that particular “wave"—its pattern of frequency, modulation, and other physical characteristics. And his untrained mind simply did not send on that “band.” He couldn't do it, he couldn't imagine the wave-form of his race's normal thought. He was faced with a problem similar to that of a man in a foreign country who must invent its language for himself before he can communicate—without even being allowed to listen to it, and knowing only that its phonetic, grammatical, and semantic values are entirely different from those of his native speech.

Insoluble? No, maybe not. His mind lacked the power to send a call out through the stars, lacked the ability to make itself intelligible. But a machine has no such limitations.

He could modify his ultrawave; it already had the power, and he could give it the coherence. For he could insert a random factor in it, a device which would vary the basic wave-form in every conceivable permutation of characteristics, running through millions or billions of tries in a second—and the random wave could be modulated too, his own thoughts could be superimposed. Whenever the machine found resonance with anything that could receive—anything, literally, for millions of lightyears—an ultrawave would be generated and the random element cut off. Joel could stay on that band then, examining it at his leisure.

Sooner or later, one of the bands he hit would be that of his race. And he would know it.

* * * *

The device, when he finished, was crude and ugly, a great ungainly thing of tangled wires and gleaming tubes and swirling cosmic energies. One lead from it connected to a metal band around his own head, imposing his basic ultrawave pattern on the random factor and feeding back whatever was received into his brain. He lay on his bunk, with a control panel beside him, and started the machine working.

Vague mutterings, sliding shadows, strangeness rising out of the roiled depths of his mind.... He grinned thinly, battling down the cold apprehension which rose in his abused nerves, and began experimenting with the machine. He wasn't too sure of all its characteristics himself, and it would take a while too before he had full control of his thought-pattern.

Silence, darkness, and now and then a glimpse, a brief blinding instant when the random gropings struck some basic resonance and a wave sprang into being and talked to his brain. Once he looked through Margaret's eyes, across a table to Langtree's face. There was candlelight, he remembered afterward, and a small string orchestra was playing in the background. Once he saw the ragged outlines of a city men had never built, rising up toward a cloudy sky while a strangely slow and heavy sea lapped against its walls.

Once, too, he did catch a thought flashing between the stars. But it was no thought of his kind, it was a great white blaze like a sun exploding in his head, and cold, cold. He screamed aloud, and for a week afterward dared not resume his experiments.

In the springtime dusk, he found his answer.

The first time, the shock was so great that he lost contact again. He lay shaking, forcing calm on himself, trying to reproduce the exact pattern his own brain, as well as the machine, had been sending. Easy, easy—The baby's mind had been drifting in a mist of dreams, thus....

The baby. For his groping, uncontrollable brain could not resonate with any of the superbly trained adult minds of his people.

But a baby has no spoken language. Its mind slides amorphously from one pattern to another, there are no habits as yet to fix it, and one tongue is as good as any other. By the laws of randomness, Joel had struck the pattern which an infant of his race happened to be giving out at the moment.

He found it again, and the tingling warmth of contact flowed into him, deliciously, marvelously, a river in a dusty desert, a sun warming the chill of the solipsistic loneliness in which humans wandered from their births to the end of their brief meaningless lives. He fitted his mind to the baby's, let the two streams of consciousness flow into one, a river running toward the mighty sea of the race.

The feral child crept out of the forest. Wolves howled at his back, the hairy four-footed brothers of cave and chase and darkness, but he heard them not. He bent over the baby's cradle, the tangled hair falling past his gaunt witless face, and looked with a dim stirring of awe and wonder. The baby spread its hand, a little soft starfish, and his own gnarled fingers stole toward it, trembling at the knowledge that this was a paw like his own.

Now he had only to wait until some adult looked into the child's mind. It shouldn't be long, and meanwhile he rested in the timeless drowsy peace of the very young.

Somewhere in the outer cosmos, perhaps on a planet swinging about a sun no one of Earth would ever see, the baby rested in a cradle of warm, pulsing forces. He did not have a room around him, there was a shadowiness which no human could ever quite comprehend, lit by flashes of the energy that created the stars.

The baby sensed the nearing of something that meant warmth and softness, sweetness in his mouth and murmuring in his mind. He cooed with delight, reaching his hands out into the shaking twilight of the room. His mother's mind ran ahead of her, folding about the little one.

A scream!

Frantically, Joel reached for her mind, flashing and flashing the pattern of location-pulses through the baby's brain into hers. He lost her, his mind fell sickeningly in on itself—no, no, someone else was reaching for him now, analyzing the pattern of the machine and his own wild oscillations and fitting smoothly into them.

A deep, strong voice in his brain, somehow unmistakably male—Joel relaxed, letting the other mind control his, simply emitting his signals.

It would take—them—a little while to analyze the meaning of his call. Joel lay in a half conscious state, aware of one small part of the being's mind maintaining a thread of contact with him while the rest reached out, summoning others across the universe, calling for help and information.

So he had won. Joel thought of Earth, dreamily and somehow wistfully. Odd that in this moment of triumph his mind should dwell on the little things he was leaving behind—an Arizona sunset, a nightingale under the moon, Peggy's flushed face bent over an instrument beside his. Beer and music and windy pines.

But 0 my people! Never more to be lonely.... Decision. A sensation of falling, rushing down a vortex of stars toward Sol—approach!

The being would have to locate him on Earth. Joel tried to picture a map, though the thought-pattern that corresponded in his brain to a particular visualization would not make sense to the other. But in some obscure way, it might help.

Maybe it did. Suddenly the telepathic band snapped, but there was a rush of other impulses, life forces like flame, the nearness of a god. Joel stumbled gasping to his feet and flung open the door.

* * * *

The moon was rising above the dark hills, a hazy light over trees and patches of snow and the wet ground. The air was chill and damp, sharp in his lungs.

The being who stood there, outlined in the radiance of his garments, was taller than Joel, an adult. His grave eyes were too brilliant to meet, it was as if the life within him were incandescent. And when the full force of his mind reached out, flowing over and into Joel, running along every nerve and cell of him....

He cried out with the pain of it and fell to his hands and knees. The intolerable force lightened, faded to a thrumming in his brain that shook every fiber of it. He was being studied, analyzed, no tiniest part of him was hidden from those terrible eyes and from the logic that recreated more of him than he knew himself. His own distorted telepathic language was at once intelligible to the watcher, and he croaked his appeal.

The answer held pity, but it was as remote and inexorable as the thunders on Olympus.

Child, it is too late. Your mother must have been caught in a—?—energy vortex and caused to—?—on Earth, and now you have been raised by the animals.

Think, child. Think of the feral children of this native race. When they were restored to their own kind, did they become human? No, it was too late. The basic personality traits are determined in the first years of childhood, and their specifically human, unused, had atrophied.

It too late, too late. Your mind has become too fixed in rigid and limited patterns. Your body has made a different adjustment from that which is necessary to sense and control forces we use. You even need a machine to speak.

You no longer belong to our race.

Joel lay huddled on the ground, shaking, not thinking or daring to think.

The thunders rolled through his head: We cannot have you interfering with the proper mental training of our children. And since you can never rejoin your kind, but must make the best adaptation you can to the race you live with, the kindest as well as the wisest thing for us to do is to make certain changes. Your memory and that of others, your body, the work you are doing and have done—

There were others filling the night, the gods come to Earth, shining and terrible beings who lifted each fragment of experience he had ever had out of him and made their judgments on it. Darkness closed over him, and he fell endlessly into oblivion.

* * * *

He awoke in his bed, wondering why he should be so tired.

Well, the cosmic-ray research had been a hard and lonely grind. Thank heaven and his lucky stars it was over! He'd take a well-earned vacation at home now. It'd be good to see his friends again—and Peggy.

Dr. Joel Weatherfield, eminent young physicist, rose cheerfully and began making ready to go home.

THE END

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DUEL ON SYRTIS

The night whispered the message. Over the many miles of loneliness it was borne, carried on the wind, rustled by the half-sentient lichens and the dwarfed trees, murmured from one to another of the little creatures that huddled under crags, in caves, by shadowy dunes. In no words, but in a dim pulsing of dread which echoed through Kreega's brain, the warning ran—

They are hunting again.

Kreega shuddered in a sudden blast of wind. The night was enormous around him, above him, from the iron bitterness of the hills to the wheeling, glittering constellations light-years over his head. He reached out with his trembling perceptions, tuning himself to the brush and the wind and the small burrowing things underfoot, letting the night speak to him.

Alone, alone. There was not another Martian for a hundred miles of emptiness. There were only the tiny animals and the shivering brush and the thin, sad blowing of the wind.

The voiceless scream of dying traveled through the brush, from plant to plant, echoed by the fear-pulses of the animals and the ringingly reflecting cliffs. They were curling, shriveling and blackening as the rocket poured the glowing death down on them, and the withering veins and nerves cried to the stars.

Kreega huddled against a tall gaunt crag. His eyes were like yellow moons in the darkness, cold with terror and hate and a slowly gathering resolution. Grimly, he estimated that the death was being sprayed in a circle some ten miles across. And he was trapped in it, and soon the hunter would come after him.

He looked up to the indifferent glitter of stars, and a shudder went along his body. Then he sat down and began to think.

* * * *

It had started a few days before, in the private office of the trader Wisby.

“I came to Mars,” said Riordan, “to get me an owlie.”

Wisby had learned the value of a poker face. He peered across the rim of his glass at the other man, estimating him.

Even in God-forsaken holes like Port Armstrong one had heard of Riordan. Heir to a million-dollar shipping firm which he himself had pyramided into a System-wide monster, he was equally well known as a big game hunter. From the firedrakes of Mercury to the ice crawlers of Pluto, he'd bagged them all. Except, of course, a Martian. That particular game was forbidden now.

He sprawled in his chair, big and strong and ruthless, still a young man. He dwarfed the unkempt room with his size and the hard-held dynamo strength in him, and his cold green gaze dominated the trader.

“It's illegal, you know,” said Wisby. “It's a twenty-year sentence if you're caught at it.”

“Bah! The Martian Commissioner is at Ares, halfway round the planet. If we go at it right, who's ever to know?” Riordan gulped at his drink. “I'm well aware that in another year or so they'll have tightened up enough to make it impossible. This is the last chance for any man to get an owlie. That's why I'm here.”

Wisby hesitated, looking out the window. Port Armstrong was no more than a dusty huddle of domes, interconnected by tunnels, in a red waste of sand stretching to the near horizon. An Earthman in airsuit and transparent helmet was walking down the street and a couple of Martians were lounging against a wall. Otherwise nothing—a silent, deadly monotony brooding under the shrunken sun. Life on Mars was not especially pleasant for a human.

“You're not falling into this owlie-loving that's corrupted all Earth?” demanded Riordan contemptuously.

“Oh, no,” said Wisby. “I keep them in their place around my post. But times are changing. It can't be helped.”

“There was a time when they were slaves,” said Riordan. “Now those old women on Earth want to give ‘em the vote.” He snorted.

“Well, times are changing,” repeated Wisby mildly. “When the first humans landed on Mars a hundred years ago, Earth had just gone through the Hemispheric Wars. The worst wars man had ever known. They damned near wrecked the old ideas of liberty and equality. People were suspicious and tough—they'd had to be, to survive. They weren't able to—to empathize the Martians, or whatever you call it. Not able to think of them as anything but intelligent animals. And Martians made such useful slaves—they need so little food or heat or oxygen, they can even live fifteen minutes or so without breathing at all. And the wild Martians made fine sport—intelligent game, that could get away as often as not, or even manage to kill the hunter.”

“I know,” said Riordan. “That's why I want to hunt one. It's no fun if the game doesn't have a chance.”

“It's different now,” went on Wisby. “Earth has been at peace for a long time. The liberals have gotten the upper hand. Naturally, one of their first reforms was to end Martian slavery.”

Riordan swore. The forced repatriation of Martians working on his spaceships had cost him plenty. “I haven't time for your philosophizing,” he said. “If you can arrange for me to get a Martian, I'll make it worth your while.”

“How much worth it?” asked Wisby.

They haggled for a while before settling on a figure. Riordan had brought guns and a small rocketboat, but Wisby would have to supply radioactive material, a “hawk,” and a rockhound. Then he had to be paid for the risk of legal action, though that was small. The final price came high.

“Now, where do I get my Martian?” inquired Riordan. He gestured at the two in the street. “Catch one of them and release him in the desert?”

It was Wisby's turn to be contemptuous. “One of them? Hah! Town loungers! A city dweller from Earth would give you a better fight.”

The Martians didn't look impressive. They stood only some four feet high on skinny, claw-footed legs, and the arms, ending in bony four-fingered hands, were stringy. The chests were broad and deep, but the waists were ridiculously narrow. They were viviparous, warm-blooded, and suckled their young, but gray feathers covered their hides. The round, hook-beaked heads, huge amber eyes and tufted feather ears, showed the origin of the name “owlie.” They wore only pouched belts and carried sheath knives; even the liberals of Earth weren't ready to allow the natives modern tools and weapons. There were too many old grudges.

“The Martians always were good fighters,” said Riordan. “They wiped out quite a few Earth settlements in the old days.”

“The wild ones,” agreed Wisby. “But not these. They're just stupid laborers, as dependent on our civilization as we are. You want a real old timer, and I know where one's to be found.”

He spread a map on the desk. “See, here in the Hraefnian Hills, about a hundred miles from here. These Martians live a long time, maybe two centuries, and this fellow Kreega has been around since the first Earthmen came. He led a lot of Martian raids in the early days, but since the general amnesty and peace he's lived all alone up there, in one of the old ruined towers. A real old-time warrior who hates Earthmen's guts. He comes here once in a while with furs and minerals to trade, so I know a little about him.” Wisby's eyes gleamed savagely. “You'll be doing us all a favor by shooting the arrogant bastard. He struts around here as if the place belonged to him. And he'll give you a run for your money.”

Riordan's massive dark head nodded in satisfaction.

The man had a bird and a rockhound. That was bad. Without them, Kreega could lose himself in the labyrinth of caves and canyons and scrubby thickets—but the hound could follow his scent and the bird could spot him from above.

To make matters worse, the man had landed near Kreega's tower. The weapons were all there—now he was cut off, unarmed and alone save for what feeble help the desert life could give. Unless he could double back to the place somehow—but meanwhile he had to survive.

He sat in a cave, looking down past a tortured wilderness of sand and bush and wind-carved rock, miles in the thin clear air to the glitter of metal where the rocket lay. The man was a tiny speck in the huge barren landscape, a lonely insect crawling under the deep-blue sky. Even by day, the stars glistened in the tenuous atmosphere. Weak pallid sunlight spilled over rocks tawny and ocherous and rust-red, over the low dusty thorn-bushes and the gnarled little trees and the sand that blew faintly between them. Equatorial Mars!

Lonely or not, the man had a gun that could sprang death clear to the horizon, and he had his beasts, and there would be a radio in the rocketboat for calling his fellows. And the glowing death ringed them in, a charmed circle which Kreega could not cross without bringing a worse death on himself than the rifle would give

Or was there a worse death than that—to be shot by a monster and have his stuffed hide carried back as a trophy for fools to gape at? The old iron pride of his race rose in Kreega, hard and bitter and unrelenting. He didn't ask much of life these days—solitude in his tower to think the long thoughts of a Martian and create the small exquisite artworks which he loved; the company of his kind at the Gathering Season, grave ancient ceremony and acrid merriment and the chance to beget and rear sons; an occasional trip to the Earthling settling for the metal goods and the wine which were the only valuable things they had brought to Mars; a vague dream of raising his folk to a place where they could stand as equals before all the universe. No more. And now they would take even this from him!

He rasped a curse on the human and resumed his patient work, chipping a spearhead for what puny help it could give him. The brush rustled dryly in alarm, tiny hidden animals squeaked their terror, the desert shouted to him of the monster that strode toward his cave. But he didn't have to flee right away.

* * * *

Riordan sprayed the heavy-metal isotope in a ten-mile circle around the old tower. He did that by night, just in case patrol craft might be snooping around. But once he had landed, he was safe—he could always claim to be peacefully exploring, hunting leapers or some such thing.

The radioactive had a half-life of about four days, which meant that it would be unsafe to approach for some three weeks—two at the minimum. That was time enough, when the Martian was boxed in so small an area.

There was no danger that he would try to cross it. The owlies had learned what radioactivity meant, back when they fought the humans. And their vision, extending well into the ultra-violet, made it directly visible to them through its fluorescence to say nothing of the wholly unhuman extra senses they had. No, Kreega would try to hide, and perhaps to fight, and eventually he'd be cornered.

Still, there was no use taking chances. Riordan set a timer on the boat's radio. If he didn't come back within two weeks to turn it off, it would emit a signal which Wisby would hear, and he'd be rescued.

He checked his other equipment. He had an airsuit designed for Martian conditions, with a small pump operated by a powerbeam from the boat to compress the atmosphere sufficiently for him to breathe it. The same unit recovered enough water from his breath so that the weight of supplies for several days was, in Martian gravity, not too great for him to bear. He had a .45 rifle built to shoot in Martian air, that was heavy enough for his purposes. And, of course, compass and binoculars and sleeping bag. Pretty light equipment, but he preferred a minimum anyway.

For ultimate emergencies there was the little tank of suspensine. By turning a valve, he could release it into his air system. The gas didn't exactly induce suspended animation, but it paralyzed efferent nerves and slowed the overall metabolism to a point where a man could live for weeks on one lungful of air. It was useful in surgery, and had saved the life of more than one interplanetary explorer whose oxygen system went awry. But Riordan didn't expect to have to use it. He certainly hoped he wouldn't. It would be tedious to lie fully conscious for days waiting for the automatic signal to call Wisby.

He stepped out of the boat and locked it. No danger that the owlie would break in if he should double back; it would take tordenite to crack that hull.

He whistled to his animals. They were native beasts, long ago domesticated by the Martians and later by man. The rockhound was like a gaunt wolf, but huge-breasted and feathered, a tracker as good as any Terrestrial bloodhound. The “hawk” had less resemblance to its counterpart of Earth: it was a bird of prey, but in the tenuous atmosphere it needed a six-foot wingspread to lift its small body. Riordan was pleased with their training.

The hound bayed, a low quavering note which would have been muffled almost to inaudibility by the thin air and the man's plastic helmet had the suit not included microphones and amplifiers. It circled, sniffing, while the hawk rose into the alien sky.

Riordan did not look closely at the tower. It was a crumbling stump atop a rusty hill, unhuman and grotesque. Once, perhaps ten thousand years ago, the Martians had had a civilization of sorts, cities and agriculture and a neolithic technology. But according to their own traditions they had achieved a union or symbiosis with the wild life of the planet and had abandoned such mechanical aids as unnecessary. Riordan snorted.

The hound bayed again. The noise seemed to hang eerily in the still, cold air; to shiver from cliff and crag and die reluctantly under the enormous silence. But it was a bugle call, a haughty challenge to a world grown old—stand aside, make way, here comes the conqueror!

The animal suddenly loped forward. He had a scent. Riordan swung into a long, easy low-gravity stride. His eyes gleamed like green ice. The hunt was begun!

Breath sobbed in Kreega's lungs, hard and quick and raw. His legs felt weak and heavy, and the thudding of his heart seemed to shake his whole body.

Still he ran, while the frightful clamor rose behind him and the padding of feet grew ever nearer. Leaping, twisting, bounding from crag to crag, sliding down shaly ravines and slipping through clumps of trees, Kreega fled.

The hound was behind him and the hawk soaring overhead. In a day and a night they had driven him to this, running like a crazed leaper with death baying at his heels—he had not imagined a human could move so fast or with such endurance.

The desert fought for him; the plants with their queer blind life that no Earthling would ever understand were on his side. Their thorny branches twisted away as he darted through and then came back to rake the flanks of the hound, slow him—but they could not stop his brutal rush. He ripped past their strengthless clutching fingers and yammered on the trail of the Martian.

The human was toiling a good mile behind, but showed no sign of tiring. Still Kreega ran. He had to reach the cliff edge before the hunter saw him through his rifle sights—had to, had to, and the hound was snarling a yard behind now.

Up the long slope he went. The hawk fluttered, striking at him, seeking to lay beak and talons in his head. He batted at the creature with his spear and dodged around a tree. The tree snaked out a branch from which the hound rebounded, yelling till the rocks rang.

The Martian burst onto the edge of the cliff. It fell sheer to the canyon floor, five hundred feet of iron-streaked rock tumbling into windy depths. Beyond, the lowering sun glared in his eyes. He paused only an instant, etched black against the sky, a perfect shot if the human should come into view, and then he sprang over the edge.

He had hoped the rockhound would go shooting past, but the animal braked itself barely in time. Kreega went down the cliff face, clawing into every tiny crevice, shuddering as the age-worn rock crumbled under his fingers. The hawk swept close, hacking at him and screaming for its master. He couldn't fight it, not with every finger and toe needed to hang against shattering death, but

He slid along the face of the precipice into a gray-green clump of vines, and his nerves thrilled forth the appeal of the ancient symbiosis. The hawk swooped again and he lay unmoving, rigid as if dead, until it cried in shrill triumph and settled on his shoulder to pluck out his eyes.

Then the vines stirred. They weren't strong, but their thorns sank into the flesh and it couldn't pull loose. Kreega toiled on down into the canyon while the vines pulled the hawk apart.

Riordan loomed hugely against the darkening sky. He fired, once, twice, the bullets humming wickedly close, but as shadows swept up from the depths the Martian was covered.

The man turned up his speech amplifier and his voice rolled and boomed monstrously through the gathering night, thunder such as dry Mars had not heard for millennia: “Score one for you! But it isn't enough! I'll find you!”

The sun slipped below the horizon and night came down like a falling curtain. Through the darkness Kreega heard the man laughing. The old rocks trembled with his laughter.

Riordan was tired with the long chase and the niggling insufficiency of his oxygen supply. He wanted a smoke and hot food, and neither was to be had. Oh, well, he'd appreciate the luxuries of life all the more when he got home—with the Martian's skin.

He grinned as he made camp. The little fellow was a worthwhile quarry, that was for damn sure. He'd held out for two days now, in a little ten-mile circle of ground, and he'd even killed the hawk. But Riordan was close enough to him now so that the hound could follow his spoor, for Mars had no watercourses to break a trail. So it didn't matter.

He lay watching the splendid night of stars. It would get cold before long, unmercifully cold, but his sleeping bag was a good-enough insulator to keep him warm with the help of solar energy stored during the day by its Gergen cells. Mars was dark at night, its moons of little help—Phobos a hurtling speck, Deimos merely a bright star. Dark and cold and empty. The rockhound had burrowed into the loose sand nearby, but it would raise the alarm if the Martian should come sneaking near the camp. Not that that was likely—he'd have to find shelter somewhere too, if he didn't want to freeze.

The bushes and the trees and the little furtive animals whispered a word he could not hear, chattered and gossiped on the wind about the Martian who kept himself warm with work. But he didn't understand that language which was no language.

Drowsily, Riordan thought of past hunts. The big game of Earth, lion and tiger and elephant and buffalo and sheep on the high sun-blazing peaks of the Rockies. Rain forests of Venus and the coughing roar of a many-legged swamp monster crashing through the trees to the place where he stood waiting. Primitive throb of drums in a hot wet night, chant of beaters dancing around a fire—scramble along the hellplains of Mercury with a swollen sun licking against his puny insulating suit—the grandeur and desolation of Neptune's liquid-gas swamps and the huge blind thing that screamed and blundered after him

But this was the loneliest and strangest and perhaps most dangerous hunt of all, and on that account the best. He had no malice toward the Martian; he respected the little being's courage as he respected the bravery of the other animals he had fought. Whatever trophy he brought home from this chase would be well earned.

The fact that his success would have to be treated discreetly didn't matter. He hunted less for the glory of it—though he had to admit he didn't mind the publicity—than for love. His ancestors had fought under one name or another—Viking, Crusader, mercenary, rebel, patriot, whatever was fashionable at the moment. Struggle was in his blood, and in these degenerate days there was little to struggle against save what he hunted.

Well—tomorrow—he drifted off to sleep.

* * * *

He woke in the short gray dawn, made a quick breakfast, and whistled his hound to heel. His nostrils dilated with excitement, a high keen drunkenness that sang wonderfully within him. Today—maybe today!

They had to take a roundabout way down into the canyon and the hound cast about for an hour before he picked up the scent. Then the deep-voiced cry rose again and they were off—more slowly now, for it was a cruel stony trail.

The sun climbed high as they worked along the ancient river-bed. Its pale chill light washed needle-sharp crags and fantastically painted cliffs, shale and sand and the wreck of geological ages. The low harsh brush crunched under the man's feet, writhing and crackling its impotent protest. Otherwise it was still, a deep and taut and somehow waiting stillness.

The hound shattered the quiet with an eager yelp and plunged forward. Hot scent! Riordan dashed after him, trampling through dense bush, panting and swearing and grinning with excitement.

Suddenly the brush opened underfoot. With a howl of dismay, the hound slid down the sloping wall of the pit it had covered. Riordan flung himself forward with tigerish swiftness, flat down on his belly with one hand barely catching the animal's tail. The shock almost pulled him into the hole too. He wrapped one arm around a bush that clawed at his helmet and pulled the hound back.

Shaking, he peered into the trap. It had been well made—about twenty feet deep, with walls as straight and narrow as the sand would allow, and skillfully covered with brush. Planted in the bottom were three wicked-looking flint spears. Had he been a shade less quick in his reactions, he would have lost the hound and perhaps himself.

He skinned his teeth in a wolf-grin and looked around. The owlie must have worked all night on it. Then he couldn't be far away—and he'd be very tired

As if to answer his thoughts, a boulder crashed down from the nearer cliff wall. It was a monster, but a falling object on Mars has less than half the acceleration it does on Earth. Riordan scrambled aside as it boomed onto the place where he had been lying.

“Come on!” he yelled, and plunged toward the cliff.

For an instant a gray form loomed over the edge, hurled a spear at him. Riordan snapped a shot at it, and it vanished. The spear glanced off the tough fabric of his suit and he scrambled up a narrow ledge to the top of the precipice.

The Martian was nowhere in sight, but a faint red trail led into the rugged hill country. Winged him, by God! The hound was slower in negotiating the shale-covered trail; his own feet were bleeding when he came up. Riordan cursed him and they set out again.

They followed the trail for a mile or two and then it ended. Riordan looked around the wilderness of trees and needles which blocked view in any direction. Obviously the owlie had backtracked and climbed up one of those rocks, from which he could take a flying leap to some other point. But which one?

Sweat which he couldn't wipe off ran down the man's face and body. He itched intolerably, and his lungs were raw from gasping at his dole of air. But still he laughed in gusty delight. What a chase! What a chase!

Kreega lay in the shadow of a tall rock and shuddered with weariness. Beyond the shade, the sunlight danced in what to him was a blinding, intolerable dazzle, hot and cruel and life-hungry, hard and bright as the metal of the conquerors.

It had been a mistake to spend priceless hours when he might have been resting working on that trap. It hadn't worked, and he might have known that it wouldn't. And now he was hungry, and thirst was like a wild beast in his mouth and throat, and still they followed him.

They weren't far behind now. All this day they had been dogging him; he had never been more than half an hour ahead. No rest, no rest, a devil's hunt through a tormented wilderness of stone and sand, and now he could only wait for the battle with an iron burden of exhaustion laid on him.

The wound in his side burned. It wasn't deep, but it had cost him blood and pain and the few minutes of catnapping he might have snatched.

For a moment, the warrior Kreega was gone and a lonely, frightened infant sobbed in the desert silence. Why can't they let me alone?

A low, dusty-green bush rustled. A sandrunner piped in one of the ravines. They were getting close.

Wearily, Kreega scrambled up on top of the rock and crouched low. He had backtracked to it; they should by rights go past him toward his tower.

He could see it from here, a low yellow ruin worn by the winds of millennia. There had only been time to dart in, snatch a bow and a few arrows and an axe. Pitiful weapons—the arrows could not penetrate the Earthman's suit when there was only a Martian's thin grasp to draw the bow, and even with a steel head the axe was a small and feeble thing. But it was all he had, he and his few little allies of a desert which fought only to keep its solitude.

Repatriated slaves had told him of the Earthlings’ power. Their roaring machines filled the silence of their own deserts, gouged the quiet face of their own moon, shook the planets with a senseless fury of meaningless energy. They were the conquerors, and it never occurred to them that an ancient peace and stillness could be worth preserving.

Well—he fitted an arrow to the string and crouched in the silent, flimmering sunlight, waiting.

The hound came first, yelping and howling. Kreega drew the bow as far as he could. But the human had to come near first—

There he came, running and bounding over the rocks, rifle in hand and restless eyes shining with taut green light, closing in for the death. Kreega swung softly around. The beast was beyond the rock now, the Earthman almost below it.

The bow twanged. With a savage thrill, Kreega saw the arrow go through the hound, saw the creature leap in the air and then roll over and over, howling and biting at the thing in its beast.

Like a gray thunderbolt, the Martian launched himself off the rock, down at the human. If his axe could shatter that helmet—

He struck the man and they went down together. Wildly, the Martian hewed. The axe glanced off the plastic—he hadn't had room for a swing. Riordan roared and lashed out with a fist. Retching, Kreega rolled backward.

Riordan snapped a shot at him. Kreega turned and fled. The man got to one knee, sighting carefully on the gray form that streaked up the nearest slope.

A little sandsnake darted up the man's leg and about his wrist. Its small strength was just enough to pull the gun aside. The bullet screamed past Kreega's ear as he vanished into a cleft.

He felt the thin death-agony of the snake as the man pulled it loose and crushed it underfoot. Somewhat later, he heard a dull boom echoing between the hills. The man had gotten explosives from his boat and blown up the tower.

He had lost axe and bow. Now he was utterly weaponless, without even a place to retire for a last stand. And the hunter would not give up. Even without his animals, he would follow, more slowly but as relentlessly as before.

Kreega collapsed on a shelf of rock. Dry sobbing racked his thin body, and the sunset wind cried with him.

Presently he looked up, across a red and yellow immensity to the low sun. Long shadows were creeping over the land, peace and stillness for a brief moment before the iron cold of night closed down. Somewhere the soft trill of a sandrunner echoed between low wind-worn cliffs, and the brush began to speak, whispering back and forth in its ancient wordless tongue.

The desert, the planet and its wind and sand under the high cold stars, the clean open land of silence and loneliness and a destiny which was not man's, spoke to him. The enormous oneness of life on Mars, drawn together against the cruel environment, stirred in his blood. As the sun went down and the stars blossomed forth in awesome frosty glory, Kreega began to think again.

He did not hate his persecutor, but the grimness of Mars was in him. He fought the war of all which was old and primitive and lost in its own dreams against the alien and the desecrator. It was as ancient and pitiless as life, that war, and each battle won or lost meant something even if no one ever heard of it.

You do not fight alone, whispered the desert. You fight for all Mars, and we are with you.

Something moved in the darkness, a tiny warm form running across his hand, a little feathered mouse-like thing that burrowed under the sand and lived its small fugitive life and was glad in its own way of living. But it was a part of a world, and Mars has no pity in its voice.

Still, a tenderness was within Kreega's heart, and he whispered gently in the language that was not a language, You will do this for us? You will do it, little brother?

* * * *

Riordan was too tired to sleep well. He had lain awake for a long time, thinking, and that is not good for a man alone in the Martian hills.

So now the rockhound was dead too. It didn't matter, the owlie wouldn't escape. But somehow the incident brought home to him the immensity and the age and the loneliness of the desert.

It whispered to him. The brush rustled and something wailed in darkness and the wind blew with a wild mournful sound over faintly starlit cliffs, and it was as if they all somehow had voice, as if the whole world muttered and threatened him in the night. Dimly, he wondered if man would ever subdue Mars, if the human race had not finally run across something bigger than itself.

But that was nonsense. Mars was old and worn-out and barren, dreaming itself into slow death. The tramp of human feet, shouts of men and roar of sky-storming rockets, were waking it, but to a new destiny, to man's. When Ares lifted its hard spires above the hills of Syrtis, where then were the ancient gods of Mars?

It was cold, and the cold deepened as the night wore on. The stars were fire and ice, glittering diamonds in the deep crystal dark. Now and then he could hear a faint snapping borne through the earth as rock or tree split open. The wind laid itself to rest, sound froze to death, there was only the hard clear starlight falling through space to shatter on the ground.

Once something stirred. He woke from a restless sleep and saw a small thing skittering toward him. He groped for the rifle beside his sleeping bag, then laughed harshly. It was only a sandmouse. But it proved that the Martian had no chance of sneaking up on him while he rested.

He didn't laugh again. The sound had echoed too hollowly in his helmet.

With the clear bitter dawn he was up. He wanted to get the hunt over with. He was dirty and unshaven inside the unit, sick of iron rations pushed through the airlock, stiff and sore with exertion. Lacking the hound, which he'd had to shoot, tracking would be slow, but he didn't want to go back to Port Armstrong for another. No, hell take that Martian, he'd have the devil's skin soon!

Breakfast and a little moving made him feel better. He looked with a practiced eye for the Martian's trail. There was sand and brush over everything, even the rocks had a thin coating of their own erosion. The owlie couldn't cover his tracks perfectly—if he tried, it would slow him too much. Riordan fell into a steady jog.

Noon found him on higher ground, rough hills with gaunt needles of rock reaching yards into the sky. He kept going, confident of his own ability to wear down the quarry. He'd run deer to earth back home, day after day until the animal's heart broke and it waited quivering for him to come.

The trail looked clear and fresh now. He tensed with the knowledge that the Martian couldn't be far away.

Too clear! Could this be bait for another trap? He hefted the rifle and proceeded more warily. But no, there wouldn't have been time

He mounted a high ridge and looked over the grim, fantastic landscape. Near the horizon he saw a blackened strip, the border of his radioactive barrier. The Martian couldn't go further, and if he doubled back Riordan would have an excellent chance of spotting him.

He turned up his speaker and let his voice roar into the stillness: “Come out, owlie! I'm going to get you, you might as well come out now and be done with it!”

The echoes took it up, flying back and forth between the naked crags, trembling and shivering under the brassy arch of sky. Come out, come out, come out—

The Martian seemed to appear from thin air, a gray ghost rising out of the jumbled stones and standing poised not twenty feet away. For an instant, the shock of it was too much; Riordan gaped in disbelief. Kreega waited, quivering ever so faintly as if he were a mirage.

Then the man shouted and lifted his rifle. Still the Martian stood there as if carved in gray stone, and with a shock of disappointment Riordan thought that he had, after all, decided to give himself to an inevitable death.

Well, it had been a good hunt. “So long,” whispered Riordan, and squeezed the trigger.

Since the sandmouse had crawled into the barrel, the gun exploded.

Riordan heard the roar and saw the barrel peel open like a rotten banana. He wasn't hurt, but as he staggered back from the shock Kreega lunged at him.

The Martian was four feet tall, and skinny and weaponless, but he hit the Earthling like a small tornado. His legs wrapped around the man's waist and his hands got to work on the airhose.

Riordan went down under the impact. He snarled, tigerishly, and fastened his hands on the Martian's narrow throat. Kreega snapped futilely at him with his beak. They rolled over in a cloud of dust. The brush began to chatter excitedly.

Riordan tried to break Kreega's neck—the Martian twisted away, bored in again.

With a shock of terror, the man heard the hiss of escaping air as Kreega's beak and fingers finally worried the airhose loose. An automatic valve clamped shut, but there was no connection with the pump now—

Riordan cursed, and got his hands about the Martian's throat again. Then he simply lay there, squeezing, and not all Kreega's writhing and twistings could break that grip.

Riordan smiled sleepily and held his hands in place. After five minutes or so Kreega was still. Riordan kept right on throttling him for another five minutes, just to make sure. Then he let go and fumbled at his back, trying to reach the pump.

The air in his suit was hot and foul. He couldn't quite reach around to connect the hose to the pump

Poor design, he thought vaguely. But then, these airsuits weren't meant for battle armor.

He looked at the slight, silent form of the Martian. A faint breeze ruffled the gray feathers. What a fighter the little guy had been! He'd be the pride of the trophy room, back on Earth.

Let's see now—He runrolled his sleeping bag and spread it carefully out. He'd never make it to the rocket with what air he had, so it was necessary to let the suspensine into his suit. But he'd have to get inside the bag, lest the nights freeze his blood solid.

He crawled in, fastening the flaps carefully, and opened the valve on the suspensine tank. Lucky he had it—but then, a good hunter thinks of everything. He'd get awfully bored, lying here till Wisby caught the signal in ten days or so and came to find him, but he'd last. It would be an experience to remember. In this dry air, the Martian's skin would keep perfectly well.

He felt the paralysis creep up on him, the waning of heartbeat and lung action. His senses and mind were still alive, and he grew aware that complete relaxation has its unpleasant aspects. Oh, well—he'd won. He'd killed the wiliest game with his own hands.

Presently Kreega sat up. He felt himself gingerly. There seemed to be a rib broken—well, that could be fixed. He was still alive. He'd been choked for a good ten minutes, but a Martian can last fifteen without air.

He opened the sleeping bag and got Riordan's keys. Then he limped slowly back to the rocket. A day or two of experimentation taught him how to fly it. He'd go to his kinsmen near Syrtis. Now that they had an Earthly machine, and Earthly weapons to copy—

But there was other business first. He didn't hate Riordan, but Mars is a hard world. He went back and dragged the Earthling into a cave and hid him beyond all possibility of human search parties finding him.

For a while he looked into the man's eyes. Horror stared dumbly back at him. He spoke slowly, in halting English: “For those you killed, and for being a stranger on a world that does not want you, and against the day when Mars is free, I leave you.”

Before departing, he got several oxygen tanks from the boat and hooked them into the man's air supply. That was quite a bit of air for one in suspended animation. Enough to keep him alive for a thousand years.

THE END

[Back to Table of Contents]

STAR BEAST

The rebirth technician thought he had heard everything in the course of some three centuries. But he was astonished now.

“My dear fellow—” he said. “Did you say a tiger—”

“That's right,” said Harol. “You can do it, can't you?”

“Well—I suppose so. I'd have to study the problem first, of course. Nobody has ever wanted a rebirth that far from human. But offhand I'd say it was possible.” The technician's eyes lit with a gleam which had not been there for many decades. “It would at least be—interesting!”

“I think you already have a record of a tiger,” said Harol.

“Oh, we must have. We have records of every animal still extant when the technique was invented, and I'm sure there must still have been a few tigers around then. But it's a problem of modification. A human mind just can't exist in a nervous system that different. We'd have to change the record enough—larger brain with more convolutions, of course, and so on.... Even then it'd be far from perfect, but your basic mentality should be stable for a year or two, barring accidents. That's all the time you'd want anyway, isn't it?”

“I so,” said Harol.

“Rebirth in animal forms is getting fashionable these days,” admitted the technician. “But so far they've only wanted animals with easily modified systems. Anthropoid apes, now—you don't even have to change a chimpanzee's brain at all for it to hold a stable human mentality for years. Elephants are good too. But—a tiger—” He shook his head. “I suppose it can be done, after a fashion. But why not a gorilla?”

“I want a carnivore,” said Harol.

“Your psychiatrist, I suppose—” hinted the technician.

Harol nodded curtly. The technician sighed and gave up the hope of juicy confessions. A worker at Rebirth Station heard a lot of strange stories, but this fellow wasn't giving. Oh, well, the mere fact of his demand would furnish gossip for days.

“When can it be ready?” asked Harol.

The technician scratched his head thoughtfully. “It'll take a while,” he said. “We have to get the record scanned, you know, and work out a basic neural pattern that'll hold the human mind. It's more than a simple memory-superimposition. The genes control an organism all through its lifespan, dictating, within the limits of environment, even the time and speed of aging. You can't have an animal with an ontogeny entirely opposed to its basic phylogeny—it wouldn't be viable. So we'll have to modify the very molecules of the cells, as well as the gross anatomy of the nervous system.”

“In short,” smiled Harol, “this intelligent tiger will breed true.”

“If it found a similar tigress,” answered the technician. “Not a real one—there aren't any left, and besides, the heredity would be too different. But maybe you want female body for someone?”

“No, only want a body for myself,” Briefly, Harol thought of Avi and tried to imagine her incarnated in the supple, deadly grace of the huge cat. But no, she wasn't the type. And solitude was part of the therapy anyway.

“Once we have the modified record, of course, there's nothing to superimposing your memory patterns on it,” said the technician. “That'll be just usual process, like any human rebirth. But to make up that record—well, I can put the special scanning and computing units over at Research on the problem. Nobody's working there. Say a week. Will that do?”

“Fine,” said Harol. “I'll be back in a week.”

He turned with a brief good-by and went down the long slideway toward the nearest transmitter. It was almost deserted now save for the unhuman forms of mobile robots gliding on their errands. The faint, deep hum of activity which filled Rebirth Station was almost entirely that of machines, of electronic flows whispering through vacuum, the silent cerebration of artificial intellects so far surpassing those of their human creators that men could no longer follow their thoughts. A human brain simply couldn't operate with that many simultaneous factors.

The machines were the latter-day oracles. And the life-giving gods. We're parasites on our machines, thought Harol. We're little fleas hopping around on the giants we created, once. There are no real human scientists any more. How can there be, when the electronic brains and the great machines which are their bodies can do it all so much quicker and better—can do things we would never even have dreamed of, things of which man's highest geniuses have only the faintest glimmer of an understanding? That has paralyzed us, that and the rebirth immortality. Now there's nothing left but a life of idleness and a round of pleasure—and how much fun is anything after centuries?

It was no wonder that animal rebirth was all the rage. It offered some prospect of novelty—for a while.

He passed a mirror and paused to look at himself. There was nothing unusual about him; he had the tall body and handsome features that were uniform today. There was a little gray at his temples and he was getting a bit bald on top, though this body was only thirty-five. But then it always had aged early. In the old days he'd hardly have reached a hundred.

I am—let me see—four hundred and sixty-three years old. At least, my memory is—and what am I, the essential I, but a memory track?

Unlike most of the people in the building, he wore clothes, a light tunic and cloak. He was a little sensitive about the flabbiness of his body. He really should keep himself in better shape. But what was the point of it, really, when his twenty-year-old record was so superb a specimen?

He reached the transmitter booth and hesitated a moment, wondering where to go. He could go home—have to get his affairs in order before undertaking the tiger phase—or he could drop in on Avi or— His mind wandered away until he came to himself with an angry start. After four and a half centuries, it was getting hard to coordinate all his memories; he was becoming increasingly absent-minded. Have to get the psychostaff at Rebirth to go over his record, one of these generations, and eliminate some of that useless clutter from his snyapses.

He decided to visit Avi. As he spoke her name to the transmitter and waited for it to hunt through the electronic files at Central for her current residence, the thought came that in all his lifetime he had only twice seen Rebirth Station from the outside. The place was immense, a featureless pile rearing skyward above the almost empty European forests—as impressive a sight, in its way, as Tycho Crater or the rings of Saturn. But when the transmitter sent you directly from booth to booth, inside the buildings, you rarely had occasion to look at their exteriors.

For a moment he toyed with the thought of having himself transmitted to some nearby house just to see the Station. But—oh, well, any time in the next few millennia. The Station would last forever, and so would he.

The transmitter field was generated. At the speed of light, Harol flashed around the world to Avi's dwelling.

* * * *

The occasion was ceremonial enough for Ramacan to put on his best clothes, a red cloak over his tunic and the many jeweled ornaments prescribed for formal wear. Then he sat down by his transmitter and waited.

The booth stood just inside the colonnaded verandah. From his seat, Ramacan could look through the open doors to the great slopes and peaks of the Caucasus, green now with returning summer save where the everlasting snows flashed under a bright sky. He had lived here for many centuries, contrary to the restlessness of most Earthlings. But he liked the place. It had a quiet immensity; it never changed. Most humans these days sought variety, a feverish quest for the new and untasted, old minds in young bodies trying to recapture a lost freshness. Ramacan was—they called him stodgy, probably. Stable or steady might be closer to the truth. Which made him ideal for his work. Most of what government remained on Earth was left to him.

Felgi was late. Ramacan didn't worry about it; he was never in a hurry himself. But when the Procyonite did arrive, the manner of it brought an amazed oath even from the Earthling.

He didn't come through the transmitter. He came in a boat from his ship, a lean metal shark drifting out of the sky and sighing to the lawn. Ramacan noticed the flat turrets and the ominous muzzles of guns projecting from them. Anachronism—Sol hadn't seen a warship for more centuries than he could remember. But—

Felgi came out of the airlock. He was followed by a squad of armed guards, who grounded their blasters and stood to stiff attention. The Procyonite captain walked alone up to the house.

Ramacan had met him before, but he studied the man with a new attention. Like most in his fleet, Felgi was a little undersized by Earthly standards, and the rigidity of his face and posture were almost shocking. His severe, form-fitting black uniform differed little from those of his subordinates except for insignia of his rank. His features were gaunt, dark with the protective pigmentation necessary under the terrible blaze of Procyon, and there was something in his eyes which Ramacan had never seen before.

The Procyonites looked human enough. But Ramacan wondered if there was any truth to those rumors which had been flying about Earth since their arrival, that mutation and selection during their long and cruel stay had changed the colonists into something that could never have been at home.

Certainly their social setup and their basic psychology seemed to be—foreign.

Felgi came up the short escalator to the verandah and bowed stiffly. The psychographs had taught him modern Terrestrial, but his voice still held an echo of the harsh colonial tongue and his phrasing was strange: “Greeting to you, Commander.”

Ramacan returned the bow, but his was the elaborate sweeping gesture of Earth. “Be welcome, Gen—ah—General Felgi.” Then, informally: “Please come in.”

“Thank you.” The other man walked into the house.

“Your companions—?”

“My men will remain outside.” Felgi sat down without being invited, a serious breach of etiquette—but after all, the mores of his home were different.

“As you wish.” Ramacan dialed for drinks on the room creator.

“No,” said Felgi.

“Pardon me?”

“We don't drink at Procyon. I thought you knew that.”

“Pardon me. I had forgotten.” Regretfully, Ramacan let the wine and glasses return to the matter bank and sat down.

Felgi sat with steely erectness, making the efforts of the seat to mold itself to his contours futile. Slowly, Ramacan recognized the emotion that crackled and smoldered behind the dark lean visage.

Anger.

“I trust you are finding your stay on Earth pleasant,” he said into the silence.

“Let us not make meaningless words,” snapped Felgi. “I am here on business.”

“As you wish.” Ramacan tried to relax, but he couldn't; his nerves and muscles were suddenly tight.

“As far as I can gather,” said Felgi, “you head the government of Sol.”

“I suppose you could say that. I have the title of Coordinator. But there isn't much to coordinate these days. Our social system practically runs itself.”

“Insofar as you have one. But actually you are completely disorganized. Every individual seems to be sufficient to himself.”

“Naturally. When everyone owns a matter creator which can supply all his ordinary needs, there is bound to be economic and thus a large degree of social independence. We have public services, of course—Rebirth Station, Power Station, Transmitter Central, and a few others. But there aren't many.”

“I cannot see why you aren't overwhelmed by crime.” The last word was necessarily Procyonian, and Ramacan raised his eyebrows puzzledly. “Anti-social behavior,” explained Felgi irritably. “Theft, murder, destruction.”

“What possible need has anyone to steal?” asked Ramacan, surprised. “And the present degree of independence virtually eliminates social friction. Actual psychoses have been removed from the neural components of the rebirth records long ago.”

“At any rate, I assume you speak for Sol.”

“How can I speak for almost a billion different people? I have little authority, you know. So little is needed. However, I'll do all I can if you'll only tell me—”

“The decadence of Sol is incredible,” snapped Felgi.

“You may be right.” Ramacan's tone was mild, but he bristled under the urbane surface. “I've sometimes thought so myself. However, what has that to do with the present subject of discussion—whatever it may be?”

“You left us in exile,” said Felgi, and now the wrath and hate were edging his voice, glittering out of his eyes. “For nine hundred years, Earth lived in luxury while the humans on Procyon fought and suffered and died in the worst kind of hell.”

“What reason was there for us to go to Procyon?” asked Ramacan. “After the first few ships had established a colony there—well, we had a whole galaxy before us. When no colonial ships came from your star, I suppose it was assumed the people there had died off. Somebody should perhaps have gone there to check up, but it took twenty years to get there and it was an inhospitable and unrewarding system and there was so many other stars. Then the matter creator came along and Sol no longer had a government to look after such things. Space travel became an individual business, and no individual was interested in Procyon.” He shrugged. “I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry!" Felgi spat the words out. “For nine hundred years our ancestors fought the bitterness of their planets, starved and died in misery, sank back almost to barbarism and had to slug their way every step back upwards, waged the cruelest war of history with the Czernigi—unending centuries of war until one race or the other should be exterminated. We died of old age, generation after generation of us—we wrung our needs out of planets never meant for humans—my ship spent twenty years getting back here, twenty years of short human lives—and you're sorry!”

He sprang up and paced the floor, his bitter voice lashing out. “You've had the stars, you've had immortality, you've had everything which can be made of matter. And we spent twenty years cramped up in metal walls to get here—wondering if perhaps Sol hadn't fallen on evil times and needed our help!”

“What would you have us do now?” demanded Ramacan. “All Earth has made you welcome—”

“We're a novelty!”

“—all Earth is ready to offer you all it can. What more do you want of us?”

For a moment the rage was still in Felgi's strange eyes. Then it faded, blinked out as if he had drawn a curtain across them, and he stood still and spoke with sudden quietness. “True. I—I should apologize, I suppose. The nervous strain—”

“Don't mention it,” said Ramacan. But inwardly he wondered. Just how far could he trust the Procyonites? All those hard centuries of war and intrigue—and then they weren't really human any more, not the way Earth's dwellers were human—but what else could he do? “It's quite all right. I understand.”

“Thank you.” Felgi sat down again. “May I ask what you offer?”

“Duplicate matter creators, of course. And robots duplicated, to administer the more complex Rebirth techniques. Certain of the processes involved are beyond the understanding of the human mind.”

“I'm not sure it would be a good thing for us,” said Felgi. “Sol has gotten stagnant. There doesn't seem to have been any significant change in the last half millennium. Why, our spaceship drives are better than yours.”

“What do you expect?” shrugged Ramacan. “What possible incentive have we for change? Progress, to use an archaic term, is a means to an end, and we have reached its goal.”

“I still don't know—” Felgi rubbed his chin. “I'm not even sure how your duplicators work.”

“I can't tell you much about them. But the greatest technical mind on Earth can't tell you everything. As I told you before, the whole thing is just too immense for real knowledge. Only the electronic brains can handle so much at once.”

“Maybe you could give me a short résumé of it, and tell me just what your setup is. I'm especially interested in the actual means by which it's put to use.”

“Well, let me see.” Ramacan searched his memory. “The ultrawave was discovered—oh, it must be a good seven or eight hundred years ago now. It carries energy, but it's not electromagnetic. The theory of it, as far as any human can follow it, ties in with wave mechanics.

“The first great application came with the discovery that ultrawaves transmit over distances of many astronomical units, unhindered by intervening matter, and with no energy loss. The theory of that has been interpreted as meaning that the wave is, well, I suppose you could say it's ‘aware’ of the receiver and only goes to it. There must be a receiver as well as a transmitter to generate the wave. Naturally, that led to a perfectly efficient power transmitter. Today all the Solar System gets its energy from the Sun—transmitted by the Power Station on the day side of Mercury. Everything from interplanetary spaceships to televisors and clocks runs from that power source.”

“Sounds dangerous to me,” said Felgi. “Suppose the station fails?”

“It won't,” said Ramacan confidently. “The Station has its own robots, no human technicians at all. Everything is recorded. If any one part goes wrong, it is automatically dissolved into the nearest matter bank and recreated. There are other safeguards too. The Station has never given trouble since it was first built.”

“I see—” Felgi's tone was thoughtful.

“Soon thereafter,” said Ramacan, “it was found that the ultrawave could also transmit matter. Circuits could be built which would scan any body atom by atom, dissolve it to energy, and transmit this energy on the ultrawave along with the scanning signal. At the receiver, of course, the process is reversed. I'm grossly oversimplifying, naturally. It's not a mere signal which is involved, but a fantastic complex of signals such as only the ultrawave could carry. However, you get the general idea. Just about all transportation today is by this technique. Vehicles for air or space exist only for very special purposes and for pleasure trips.”

“You have some kind of controlling center for this too, don't you?”

“Yes. Transmitter Station, on Earth, is in Brazil. It holds all the records of such things as addresses, and it coordinates the millions of units all over the planet. It's a huge, complicated affair, of course, but perfectly efficient. Since distance no longer means anything, it's most practical to centralize the public-service units.

“Well, from transmission it was but a step to recording the signal and reproducing it out of a bank of any other matter. So—the duplicator. The matter creator. You can imagine what that did to Sol's economy! Today everybody owns one, and if he doesn't have a record of what he wants he can have one duplicated and transmitted from Creator Station's great ‘library'. Anything whatsoever in the way of material goods is his for the turning of a dial and the flicking of a switch.

“And this, in turn, soon led to the Rebirth technique. It's but an extension of all that has gone before. Your body is recorded at its prime of life, say around twenty years of age. Then you live for as much longer as you care to, say to thirty-five or forty or whenever you begin to get a little old. Then your neural pattern is recorded alone by special scanning units. Memory, as you surely know, is a matter of neural synapses and altered protein molecules, not too difficult to scan and record. This added pattern is superimposed electronically on the record of your twenty-year-old body. Then your own body is used as the matter bank for materializing the pattern in the altered record and—virtually instantaneously—your young body is created—but with all the memories of the old! You're—Immortal!”

“In a way,” said Felgi. “But it still doesn't seem right to me. The ego, the soul, whatever you want to call it—it seems as if you lose that. You create simply a perfect copy.”

“When the copy is so perfect it cannot be told from the original,” said Ramacan, “then what is the difference? The ego is essentially a matter of continuity. You, your essential self, are a constantly changing pattern of synapses bearing only a temporary relationship to the molecules that happen to carry the pattern at the moment. It is the design, not the structural material, that is important. And it is the design that we preserve.”

“Do you?” asked Felgi. “I seemed to notice a strong likeness among Earthlings.”

“Well, since the records can be altered there was no reason for us to carry around crippled or diseased or deformed bodies,” said Ramacan. “Records could be made of perfect specimens and all ego-patterns wiped from them; then someone else's neural pattern could be superimposed. Rebirth—in a new body! Naturally, everyone would want to match the prevailing beauty standard, and so a certain uniformity has appeared. A different body would of course lead in time to a different personality, man being a psychosomatic unit. But the continuity which is the essential attribute of the ego would still be there.”

“Ummm—I see. May I ask how old you are?”

“About seven hundred and fifty. I was middle-aged when Rebirth was established, but I had myself put into a young body.”

Felgi's eyes went from Ramacan's smooth, youthful face to his own hands, with the knobby joints and prominent veins of his sixty years. Briefly, the fingers tightened, but his voice remained soft. “Don't you have trouble keeping your memories straight?”

“Yes, but every so often I have some of the useless and repetitious ones taken out of the record, and that helps. The robots know exactly what part of the pattern corresponds to a given memory and can erase it. After, say, another thousand years, I'll probably have big gaps. But they won't be important.”

“How about the apparent acceleration of time with age?”

“That was bad after the first couple of centuries, but then it seemed to flatten out, the nervous system adapted to it. I must say, though,” admitted Ramacan, “that it as well as lack of incentive is probably responsible for our present static society and general unproductiveness. There's a terrible tendency to procrastination, and a day seems too short a time to get anything done.”

“The end of progress, then—of science, or art, of striving, of all which has made man human.”

“Not so. We still have our arts and handicrafts and—hobbies, I suppose you could call them. Maybe we don't do so much any more, but—why should we?”

“I'm surprised at finding so much of Earth gone back to wilderness. I should think you'd be badly overcrowded.”

“Not so. The creator and the transmitter make it possible for men to live far apart, in physical distance, and still be in as close touch as necessary. Communities are obsolete. As for the population problem, there isn't any. After a few children, not many people want more. It's sort of, well, unfashionable anyway.”

“That's right,” said Felgi quietly, “I've hardly seen a child on Earth.”

“And of course there's a slow drift out to the stars as people seek novelty. You can send your recording in a robot ship, and a journey of centuries becomes nothing. I suppose that's another reason for the tranquility of Earth. The more restless and adventurous elements have moved away.”

“Have you any communication with them?”

“None. Not when spaceships can only go at half the speed of light. Once in a while curious wanderers will drop in on us, but it's very rare. They seem to be developing some strange cultures out in the galaxy.”

“Don't you do any work on Earth?”

“Oh, some public services must be maintained—psychiatry, human technicians to oversee various stations, and so on. And then there are any number of personal-service enterprises—entertainment, especially, and the creation of intricate handicrafts for the creators to duplicate. But there are enough people willing to work a few hours a month or week, if only to fill in their time or to get the credit-balance which will enable them to purchase such services for themselves if they desire.

“It's a perfectly stable culture, General Felgi. It's perhaps the only really stable society in all human history.”

“I wonder—haven't you any precautions at all? Any military forces, any defenses against invaders—anything?”

“Why in the cosmos should we fear that?” exclaimed Ramacan. “Who would come invading over light-years—at half the speed of light? Or if they did, why?"

“Plunder—”

Ramacan laughed. “We could duplicate anything they asked for and give it to them.”

“Could you, now?” Suddenly Felgi stood up. “Could you?”

Ramacan rose too, with his nerves and muscles tightening again. There was a hard triumph in the Procyonite's face, vindictive, threatening.

Felgi signaled to his men through the door. They trotted up on the double, and their blasters were raised and something hard and ugly was in their eyes.

“Coordinator Ramacan,” said Felgi, “you are under arrest.”

“What—what—” The Earthling felt as if someone had struck him a physical blow. He clutched for support. Vaguely he heard the iron tones:

“You've confirmed what I thought. Earth is, unprepared, helplessly dependent on a few undefended key spots. And captain a warship of space filled with soldiers.

“We're taking over!”

* * * *

Avi's current house lay in North America, on the middle Atlantic seaboard. Like most private homes these days, it was small and low-ceilinged, with adjustable interior walls and furnishings for easy variegation. She loved flowers, and great brilliant gardens bloomed around her dwelling, down toward the sea and landward to the edge of the immense forest which had returned with the end of agriculture.

They walked between the shrubs and trees and blossoms, she and Harol. Her unbound hair was long and bright in the sea breeze, her eighteen-year-old form was slim and graceful as a young deer's. Suddenly he hated the thought of leaving her.

“I'll miss you, Harol,” she said.

He smiled lopsidedly. “You'll get over that,” he said. “There are others. I suppose you'll be looking up some of those spacemen they say arrived from Procyon a few days ago.”

“Of course,” she said innocently. “I'm surprised you don't stay around and try for some of the women they had along. It would be a change.”

“Not much of a change,” he answered. “Frankly, I'm at a loss to understand the modern passion for variety. One person seems very much the same as another in that regard.”

“It's a matter of companionship,” she said. “After not too many years of living with someone, you get to know him too well. You can tell exactly what he's going to do, what he'll say to you, what he'll have for dinner and what sort of show he'll want to go to in the evening. These colonists will be—new! They'll have other ways from ours, they'll be able to tell of a new, different planetary system, they'll—” She broke off. “But now so many women will be after the strangers, I doubt if I'll have a chance.”

“But if it's conversation you want—oh, well.” Harol shrugged. “Anyway, I understand the Procyonites still have family relationships. They'll be quite jealous of their women. And I need this change.”

“A carnivore—!” Avi laughed, and Harol thought again what music it was. “You have an original mind, at least.” Suddenly she was earnest. She held both his hands and looked close into his eyes. “That's always been what I liked about you, Harol. You've always been a thinker and adventurer, you've never let yourself grow mentally lazy like most of us. After we've been apart for a few years, you're always new again, you've gotten out of your rut and done something strange, you've learned something different, you've grown young again. We've always come back to each other, dear, and I've always been glad of it.”

“And I,” he said quietly. “Though I've regretted the separations too.” He smiled, a wry smile with a tinge of sorrow behind it. “We could have been very happy in the old days, Avi. We would have been married and together for life.”

“A few years, and then age and feebleness and death.” She shuddered. “Death! Nothingness! Not even the world can exist when one is dead. Not when you've no brain left to know about it. Just—nothing. As if you had never been! Haven't you ever been afraid of the thought?”

“No,” he said, and kissed her.

“That's another way you're different,” she murmured. “I wonder why you never went out to the stars, Harol. All your children did.”

“I asked you to go with me, once.”

“Not I. I like it here. Life is fun, Harol. I don't seem to get bored as easily as most people. But that isn't answering my question.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, and then clamped his mouth shut.

He stood looking at her, wondering if he was the last man on Earth who loved a woman, wondering how she really felt about him. Perhaps, in her way, she loved him—they always came back to each other. But not in the way he cared for her, not so that being apart was a gnawing pain and reunion was—No matter.

“I'll still be around,” he said. “I'll be wandering through the woods here; I'll have the Rebirth men transmit me back to your house and then I'll be in the neighborhood.”

“My pet tiger,” she smiled. “Come around to see me once in a while, Harol. Come with me to some of the parties.”

A nice spectacular ornament— “No, thanks. But you can scratch my head and feed me big bloody steaks, and I'll arch my back and purr.”

They walked hand in hand toward the beach. “What made you decide to be a tiger?” she asked.

“My psychiatrist recommended an animal rebirth,” he replied. “I'm getting terribly neurotic, Avi. I can't sit still five minutes and I get gloomy spells where nothing seems worthwhile any more, life is a dreary farce and—well, it seems to be becoming a rather common disorder these days. Essentially it's boredom. When you have everything without working for it, life can become horribly flat. When you've lived for centuries, tried it all hundreds of times—no change, no real excitement, nothing to call forth all that's in you—Anyway, the doctor suggested I go to the stars. When I refused that, he suggested I change to animal for a while. But I didn't want to be like everyone else. Not an ape or an elephant.”

“Same old contrary Harol,” she murmured, and kissed him. He responded with unexpected violence.

“A year or two of wild life, in a new and unhuman body, will make all the difference,” he said after a while. They lay on the sand, feeling the sunlight wash over them, hearing the lullaby of waves and smelling the clean, harsh tang of sea and salt and many windy kilometers. High overhead a gull circled, white against the blue.

“Won't you change?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. I won't even be able to remember a lot of things I now know. I doubt if even the most intelligent tiger could understand vector analysis. But that won't matter, I'll get it back when they restore my human form. When I feel the personality change has gone as far as is safe, I'll come here and you can send me back to Rebirth. The important thing is the therapy—a change of viewpoint, a new and challenging environment— Avi!” He sat up, on one elbow and looked down at her. “Avi, why don't you come along? Why don't we both become tigers?”

“And have lots of little tigers?” she smiled drowsily. “No, thanks, Harol. Maybe some day, but not now. I'm really not an adventurous person at all.” She stretched, and snuggled back against the warm white dune. “I like it the way it is.”

And there are those starmen— Sunfire, what's the matter with me? Next thing you know I'll commit an inurbanity against one of her lovers. I need that therapy, all right.

“And then you'll come back and tell me about it,” said Avi.

“Maybe not,” he teased her. “Maybe I'll find a beautiful tigress somewhere and become so enamored of her I'll never want to change back to human.”

“There won't be any tigresses unless you persuade someone else to go along,” she answered. “But will you like a human body after having had such a lovely striped skin? Will we poor hairless people still look good to you?”

“Darling,” he smiled, “to me you'll always look good enough to eat.”

Presently they went back into the house. The sea gull still dipped and soared, high in the sky.

* * * *

The forest was great and green and mysterious, with sunlight dappling the shadows and a riot of ferns and flowers under the huge old trees. There were brooks tinkling their darkling way between cool, mossy banks, fish leaping like silver streaks in the bright shallows, lonely pools where quiet hung like a mantle, open meadows of wind-rippled grass, space and solitude and an unending pulse of life.

Tiger eyes saw less than human; the world seemed dim and flat and colorless until he got used to it. After that he had increasing difficulty remembering what color and perspective were like. And his other senses came alive, he realized what a captive within his own skull he had been—looking out at a world of which he had never been so real a part as now.

He heard sounds and tones no man had ever perceived, the faint hum and chirr of insects, the rustling of leaves in a light, warm breeze, the vague whisper of an owl's wings, the scurrying of small, frightened creatures through the long grass—it all blended into a rich symphony, the heartbeat and breath of the forest. And his nostrils quivered to the infinite variety of smells, the heady fragrance of crushed grass, the pungency of fungus and decay, the sharp, wild odor of fur, the hot drunkenness of newly spilled blood. And he felt with every hair, his whiskers quivered to the smallest stirrings, he gloried in the deep, strong play of his muscles—he had come alive, he thought; a man was half dead compared to the vitality that throbbed in the tiger.

At night, at night—there was no darkness for him now. Moonlight was a white, cold blaze through which he stole on feathery feet; the blackest gloom was light to him—shadows, wan patches of luminescence, a shifting, sliding fantasy of gray like an old and suddenly remembered dream.

He laired in a cave he found, and his new body had no discomfort from the damp earth. At night he would stalk out, a huge, dim ghost with only the amber gleam of his eyes for light, and the forest would speak to him with sound and scent and feeling, the taste of game on the wind. He was master then, all the woods shivered and huddled away from him. He was death in black and gold.

Once an ancient poem ran through the human part of his mind, he let the words roll like ominous thunder in his brain and tried to speak them aloud. The forest shivered with the tiger's coughing roar.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dared frame thy fearful symmetry?

And the arrogant feline soul snarled response: I did! Later he tried to recall the poem, but he couldn't. At first he was not very successful, too much of his human awkwardness clung to him. He snarled his rage and bafflement when rabbits skittered aside, when a deer scented him lurking and bolted. He went to Avi's house and she fed him big chunks of raw meat and laughed and scratched him under the chin. She was delighted with her pet.

Avi, he thought, and remembered that he loved her. But that was with his human body. To the tiger, she had no esthetic or sexual value. But he liked to let her stroke him, he purred like a mighty engine and rubbed against her slim legs. She was still very dear to him, and when he became human again—

But the tiger's instincts fought their way back; the heritage of a million years was not to be denied no matter how much the technicians had tried to alter him. They had accomplished little more than to increase his intelligence, and the tiger nerves and glands were still there.

The night came when he saw a flock of rabbits dancing in the moonlight and pounced on them. One huge, steely-taloned paw swooped down, he felt the ripping flesh and snapping bone and then he was gulping the sweet, hot blood and peeling the meat from the frail ribs. He went wild, he roared and raged all night, shouting his exultance to the pale frosty moon. At dawn he slunk back to his cave, wearied, his human mind a little ashamed of it all. But the next night he was hunting again.

His first deer! He lay patiently on a branch overhanging a trail; only his nervous tail moved while the slow hours dragged by, and he waited. And when the doe passed underneath he was on her like a tawny lightning bolt. A great slapping paw, jaws like shears, a brief, terrible struggle, and she lay dead at his feet. He gorged himself, he ate till he could hardly crawl back to the cave, and then he slept like a drunken man until hunger woke him and he went back to the carcass. A pack of wild dogs were devouring it, he rushed on them and killed one and scattered the rest. Thereafter he continued his feast until only bones were left.

The forest was full of game; it was an easy life for a tiger. But not too easy. He never knew whether he would go back with full or empty belly, and that was part of the pleasure.

They had not removed all the tiger memories; fragments remained to puzzle him; sometimes he woke up whimpering with a dim wonder as to where he was and what had happened. He seemed to remember misty jungle dawns, a broad brown river shining under the sun, another cave and another striped form beside him. As time went on he grew confused, he thought vaguely that he must once have hunted sambar and seen the white rhinoceros go by like a moving mountain in the twilight. It was growing harder to keep things straight.

That was, of course, only to be expected. His feline brain could not possibly hold all the memories and concepts of the human, and with the passage of weeks and months he lost the earlier clarity of recollection. He still identified himself with a certain sound, “Harol,” and he remembered other forms and scenes—but more and more dimly, as if they were the fading shards of a dream. And he kept firmly in mind that he had to go back to Avi and let her send—take?—him somewhere else before he forgot who he was.

Well, there was time for that, thought the human component. He wouldn't lose that memory all at once, he'd know well in advance that the superimposed human personality was disintegrating in its strange house and that he ought to get back. Meanwhile he grew more and deeply into the forest life, his horizons narrowed until it seemed the whole of existence.

Now and then he wandered down to the sea and Avi's home, to get a meal and be made much of. But the visits grew more and more infrequent, the open country made him nervous and he couldn't stay indoors after dark.

Tiger, tiger

And summer wore on.

* * * *

He woke to a raw wet chill in the cave, rain outside and a mordant wind blowing through dripping dark trees. He shivered and growled, unsheathing his claws, but this was not an enemy he could destroy. The day and the night dragged by in misery.

Tigers had been adaptable beasts in the old days, he recalled; they had ranged as far north as Siberia. But his original had been from the tropics. Hell! he cursed, and the thunderous roar rattled through the woods.

But then came crisp, clear days with a wild wind hallooing through a high, pale sky, dead leaves whirling on the gusts and laughing in their thin, dry way. Geese honked in the heavens, southward bound, and the bellowing of stags filled the nights. There was a drunkenness in the air; the tiger rolled in the grass and purred like muted thunder and yowled at the huge orange moon as it rose. His fur thickened, he didn't feel the chill except as a keen tingling in his blood. All his senses were sharpened now, he lived with a knife-edged alertness and learned how to go through the fallen leaves like another shadow.

Indian summer, long lazy days like a resurrected springtime, enormous stars, the crisp smell of rotting vegetation, and his human mind remembered that the leaves were like gold and bronze and flame. He fished in the brooks, scooping up his prey with one hooked sweep; he ranged the woods and roared on the high ridges under the moon.

Then the rains returned, gray and cold and sodden, the world drowned in a wet woe. At night there was frost, numbing his feet and glittering in the starlight, and through the chill silence he could hear the distant beat of the sea. It grew harder to stalk game, he was often hungry. By now he didn't mind that too much, but his reason worried about winter. Maybe he'd better get back.

One night the first snow fell, and in the morning the world was white and still. He plowed through it, growling his anger, and wondered about moving south. But cats aren't given to long journeys. He remembered vaguely that Avi could give him food and shelter.

Avi— For a moment, when he tried to think of her, he thought of a golden, dark-striped body and a harsh feline smell filling the cave above the old wide river. He shook his massive head, angry with himself and the world, and tried to call up her image. The face was dim in his mind, but the scent came back to him, and the low, lovely music of her laughter. He would go to Avi.

He went through the bare forest with the haughty gait of its king, and presently he stood on the beach. The sea was gray and cold and enormous, roaring white-maned on the shore; flying spin-drift stung his eyes. He padded along the strand until he saw her house.

It was oddly silent. He went in through the garden. The door stood open, but there was only desertion inside.

Maybe she was away. He curled up on the floor and went to sleep.

He woke much later, hunger gnawing in his guts, and still no one had come. He recalled that she had been wont to go south for the winter. But she wouldn't have forgotten him, she'd have been back from time to time—But the house had little scent of her, she had been away for a long while. And it was disordered. Had she left hastily?

He went over to the creator. He couldn't remember how it worked, but he did recall the process of dialing and switching. He pulled the lever at random with a paw. Nothing happened.

Nothing! The creator was inert.

He roared his disappointment. Slow, puzzled fear came to him. This wasn't as it should be.

But he was hungry. He'd have to try to get his own food, then, and come back later in hopes of finding Avi. He went back into the woods.

Presently he smelled life under the snow. Bear. Previously, he and the bears had been in a state of watchful neutrality. But this one was asleep, unwary, and his belly cried for food. He tore the shelter apart with a few powerful motions and flung himself on the animal.

It is dangerous to wake a hibernating bear. This one came to with a start, his heavy paw lashed out and the tiger sprang back with blood streaming down his muzzle.

Madness came, a berserk rage that sent him leaping forward. The bear snarled and braced himself. They closed, and suddenly the tiger was fighting for his very life.

He never remembered that battle save as a red whirl of shock and fury, tumbling in the snow and spilling blood to steam in the cold air. Strike, bite, rip, thundering blows against his ribs and skull, the taste of blood hot in his mouth and the insanity of death shrieking and gibbering in his head!

In the end, he staggered bloodily and collapsed on the bear's ripped corpse. For a long time he lay there, and the wild dogs hovered near, waiting for him to die.

After a while he stirred weakly and ate of the bear's flesh. But he couldn't leave. His body was one vast pain, his feet wobbled under him, one paw had been crushed by the great jaws. He lay by the dead bear under the tumbled shelter, and snow fell slowly on them.

The battle and the agony and the nearness of death brought his old instincts to the fore. All tiger, he licked his tattered form and gulped hunks of rotting meat as the days went by and waited for a measure of health to return.

In the end, he limped back toward his cave. Dreamlike memories nagged him; there had been a house and someone who was good but—but—

He was cold and lame and hungry. Winter had come.

* * * *

“We have no further use for you,” said Felgi, “but in view of the help you've been, you'll be allowed to live—at least till we get back to Procyon and the Council decides your case. Also, you probably have more valuable information about the Solar System than our other prisoners. They're mostly women.”

Ramacan looked at the hard, exultant face and answered dully, “If I'd known what you were planning, I'd never have helped.”

“Oh, yes, you would have,” snorted Felgi. “I saw your reactions when we showed you some of our means of persuasion. You Earthlings are all alike. You've been hiding from death so long that the backbone has all gone out of you. That alone makes you unfit to hold your planet.”

“You have the plans of the duplicators and the transmitters and power-beams—all our technology. I helped you get them from the Stations. What more do you want?”

“Earth.”

“But why? With the creators and transmitters, you can make your planets like all the old dreams of paradise. Earth is more congenial, yes, but what does environment matter to you now?”

“Earth is still the true home of man,” said Felgi. There was a fanaticism in his eyes such as Ramacan had never seen even in nightmare. “It should belong to the best race of man. Also—well, our culture couldn't stand that technology. Procyonite civilization grew up in adversity, it's been nothing but struggle and hardship, it's become part of our nature now. With the Czemigi destroyed, we must find another enemy.”

Oh, yes, thought Ramacan. It's happened before, in Earth's bloody old past. Nations that knew nothing but war and suffering, became molded by them, glorified the harsh virtues that had enabled them to survive. A militaristic state can't afford peace and leisure and prosperity; its people might begin to think for themselves. So the government looks for conquest outside the borders—Needful or not, there must be war to maintain the control the military.

How human are the Procyonites now? What's twisted them in the centuries of their terrible evolution? They're no longer men, they're fighting robots, beasts of prey, they have to have blood.

“You saw us shell the Stations from space,” said Felgi. “Rebirth, Creator, Transmitter—they're radioactive craters now. Not a machine is running on Earth, not a tube is alight—nothing! And with the creators on which their lives depended inert, Earthlings will go back to utter savagery.”

“Now what?” asked Ramacan wearily.

“We're standing off Mercury, refueling,” said Felgi. “Then it's back to Procyon. We'll use our creator to record most of the crew, they can take turns being briefly recreated during the voyage to maintain the ship and correct the course. We'll be little older when we get home.

“Then, of course, the Council will send out a fleet with recorded crews. They'll take over Sol, eliminate the surviving population, and recolonize Earth. After that—” The mad fires blazed high in his eyes. “The stars! A galactic empire, ultimately.”

“Just so you can have war,” said Ramacan tonelessly. “Just so you can keep your people stupid slaves.”

“That's enough,” snapped Felgi. “A decadent culture can't be expected to understand our motives.”

Ramacan stood thinking. There would still be humans around when the Procyonites came back. There would be forty years to prepare. Men in spaceships, here and there throughout the System, would come home, would see the ruin of Earth and know who must be guilty. With creators, they could rebuild quickly, they could arm themselves, duplicate vengeance-hungry men by the millions.

Unless Solarian man was so far gone in decay that he was only capable of blind panic. But Ramacan didn't think so. Earth had slipped, but not that far.

Felgi seemed to read his mind. There was cruel satisfaction in his tones: “Earth will have no chance to re-arm. We're using the power from Mercury Station to run our own large duplicator, turning rock into osmium fuel for our engines. But when we're finished, we'll blow up the Station too. Spaceships will drift powerless, the colonists on the planets will die as their environmental regulators stop functioning, no wheel will turn in all the Solar System. That, I should think, will be the final touch!”

Indeed, indeed. Without power, without tools, without food or shelter, the final collapse would come. Nothing but a few starveling savages would be left when the Procyonites returned. Ramacan felt an emptiness within himself.

Life had become madness and nightmare. The end....

“You'll stay here till we get around to recording you,” said Felgi. He turned on his heel and walked out.

Ramacan slumped back into a seat. His desperate eyes traveled around and around the bare little cabin that was his prison, around and around like the crazy whirl of his thoughts. He looked at the guard who stood in the doorway, leaning on his blaster, contemptuously bored with the captive. If—if—0 almighty gods, if that was to inherit green Earth!

What to do, what to do? There must be some answer, some way, no problem was altogether without solution. Or was it? What guarantee did he have of cosmic justice? He buried his face in his hands.

I was a coward, he thought. I was afraid of pain. So I rationalized, I told myself they probably didn't want much, I used my influence to help them get duplicators and plans. And the others were cowards too, they yielded, they were cravenly eager to help the conquerors—and this is our pay!

What to do, what to do? If somehow the ship were lost, if it never came back—The Procyonites would wonder. They'd send another ship or two—no more—to investigate. And in forty years Sol could be ready to meet those ships—ready to carry the war to an unprepared enemy—if in the meantime they'd had a chance to rebuild, if Mercury Power Station were spared

But the ship would blow the Station out of existence, and the ship would return with news of Sol's ruin, and the invaders would come swarming in—would go ravening out through an unsuspecting galaxy like a spreading plague—

How to stop the ship—now?

Ramacan grew aware of the thudding of his heart; it seemed to shake his whole body with its violence. And his hands were cold and clumsy, his mouth was parched, he was afraid.

He got up and walked over toward the guard. The Procyonite hefted his blaster, but there was no alertness in him, he had no fear of an unarmed member of the conquered race.

He'll shoot me down, thought Ramacan. The death I've been running from all my life is on me now. But it's been a long life and a good one, and better to finish it now than drag out a few miserable years as their despised prisoner, and—and—I hate their guts!

“What do you want?” asked the Procyonite.

“I feel sick,” said Ramacan. His voice was almost a whisper in the dryness of his throat. “Let me out.”

“Get back.”

“It'll be messy. Let me go to the lavatory.”

He stumbled, nearly falling. “Go ahead,” said the guard curtly. “I'll be along, remember.”

Ramacan swayed on his feet as he approached the man. His shaking hands closed on the blaster barrel and yanked the weapon loose. Before the guard could yell, Ramacan drove the butt into his face. A remote corner of his mind was shocked at the savagery that welled up in him when the bones crunched.

The guard toppled. Ramacan eased him to the floor, slugged him again to make sure he would lie quiet, and stripped him of his long outer coat, his boots, and helmet. His hands were really trembling now; he could hardly get the simple garments on.

If he was caught—well, it only made a few minutes’ difference. But he was still afraid. Fear screamed inside him.

He forced himself to walk with nightmare slowness down the long corridor. Once he passed another man, but there was no discovery. When he had rounded the corner, he was violently sick.

He went down a ladder to the engine room. Thank the gods he'd been interested enough to inquire about the layout of the ship when they first arrived! The door stood open and he went in.

A couple of engineers were watching the giant creator at work. It pulsed and hummed and throbbed with power, energy from the sun and from dissolving atoms of rocks—atoms recreated as the osmium that would power the ship's engines on the long voyage back. Tons of fuel spilling down into the bins.

Ramacan closed the soundproof door and shot the engineers.

Then he went over to the creator and reset the controls. It began to manufacture plutonium.

He smiled then, with an immense relief, an incredulous realization that he had won. He sat down and cried with sheer joy.

The ship would not get back. Mercury Station would endure. And on that basis, a few determined men in the Solar System could rebuild. There would be horror on Earth, howling chaos, most of its population would plunge into savagery and death. But enough would live, and remain civilized, and get ready for revenge.

Maybe it was for the best, he thought. Maybe Earth really had gone into a twilight of purposeless ease. True it was that there had been none of the old striving and hoping and gallantry which had made man what he was. No art, no science, no adventure—a smug self-satisfaction, an unreal immortality in a synthetic paradise. Maybe this shock and challenge was what Earth needed, to show the starward way again.

As for him, he had had many centuries of life, and he realized now what a deep inward weariness there had been in him. Death, he thought, death is the longest voyage of all. Without death there is no evolution, no real meaning to life, the ultimate adventure has been snatched away.

There had been a girl once, he remembered, and she had died before the rebirth machines became available. Odd—after all these centuries he could still remember how her hair had rippled in the wind, one day on a high summery hill. He wondered if he would see her.

He never felt the explosion as the plutonium reached critical mass.

* * * *

Avi's feet were bleeding. Her shoes had finally given out, and rocks and twigs tore at her feet. The snow was dappled with blood.

Weariness clawed at her, she couldn't keep going—but she had to, she had to, she was afraid to stop in the wilderness.

She had never been alone in her life. There had always been the televisors and the transmitters, no place on Earth had been more than an instant away. But the world had expanded into immensity, the machines were dead, there was only cold and gloom and empty white distances. The world of warmth and music and laughter and casual enjoyment was as remote and unreal as a dream.

Was it a dream? Had she always stumbled sick and hungry through a nightmare world of leafless trees and drifting snow and wind that sheathed her in cold through the thin rags of her garments? Or was this the dream, a sudden madness of horror and death?

Death—no, no, no, she couldn't die, she was one of the immortals, she mustn't die!

The wind blew and blew.

Night was falling, winter night. A wild dog bayed, somewhere out in the gloom. She tried to scream, but her throat was raw with shrieking; only a dry croak would come out.

Help me, help me, help me.

Maybe she should have stayed with the man. He had devised traps, had caught an occasional rabbit or squirrel and flung her the leavings. But he looked at her so strangely when several days had gone by without a catch. He would have killed her and eaten her; she had to flee.

Run, run, run— She couldn't run, the forest reached on forever, she was caught in cold and night, hunger and death.

What had happened, what had happened, what had become of the world? What would become of her?

She had liked to pretend she was one of the ancient goddesses, creating what she willed out of nothingness, served by a huge and eternal world whose one purpose was to serve her. Where was that world now?

Hunger twisted in her like a knife. She tripped over a snow-buried log and lay there, trying feebly to rise.

We were too soft, too complacent, she thought dimly.

We lost all our powers, we were just little parasites on our machines. Now we're unfit—

No! I won't have it! I was a goddess once—

Spoiled brat, jeered the demon in her mind. Baby crying for its mother. You should be old enough to look after yourself—after all these centuries. You shouldn't be in circles waiting for a help that will never come, you should be helping yourself, making a shelter, finding nuts and roots, building a trap. But you can't. All the self-reliance has withered out you.

No—help, help, help

Something moved in the gloom. She choked a scream. Yellow eyes glowed like twin fires, and the immense form stepped noiselessly forth.

For an instant she gibbered in a madness of fear, and then sudden realization came and left her gaping with unbelief—then instant eager acceptance.

There could only be one tiger in this forest.

“Harol,” she whispered, and climbed to her feet. “Harol.”

It was all right. The nightmare was over. Harol would look after her. He would hunt for her, protect her, bring her back to the world of machines that must still exist. “Harol,” she cried. “Harol, my dear—”

The tiger stood motionless; only his twitching tail had life. Briefly, irrelevantly, remembered sounds trickled through his mind: "Your basic mentality should be stable for a year or two, barring accidents.... “ But the noise was meaningless, it slipped through his brain into oblivion.

He was hungry. The crippled paw hadn't healed well, he couldn't catch game.

Hunger, the most elemental need of all, grinding within him, filling his tiger brain and tiger body until nothing else was left.

He stood looking at the thing that didn't run away. He had killed another a while back—he licked his mouth at the thought.

From somewhere long ago he remembered that the thing had once been—he had been—he couldn't re-member

He stalked forward.

“Harol,” said Avi. There was fear rising horribly in her voice.

The tiger stopped. He knew that voice. He remembered—he remembered—

He had known her once. There was something about her that held him back.

But he was hungry. And his instincts were clamoring in him.

But if only he could remember, before it was too late—Time stretched into a horrible eternity while they stood facing each other—the lady and the tiger.

THE END

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