Beneker thought uncomfortably of that moment. The earth-touch had been marked by a superswif t and violent crack and the purple flames vanished and most of the crew dropped flat on their bellies as they gave up a couple of thousand volts.

It's risky work, roaming around. Any world is likely to greet you with a conk off its own bat. If you survive that, the inhabitants line up for their turn, holding in their mitts or assorted grippers a multitude of devices capable of anything from setting fire to beards to automatic and instantaneous skinning.

That's why Beneker felt pleased with himself, at least for a little while. On that pink world they'd left in a hurry before coming here a spiderish creature had discovered them, blandly squatted outside the door biding the dawn, and when Chief Engineer Formel stuck an inquiring head outside it had pursed thick black lips and produced an excruciating sound that addled his brains for all time. Formel was still strapped down and would remain so to the home-going, if he lived that long. It was a mode of space-travelling that Commodore Beneker had no desire to emulate. So he looked at the sun, the trees, the birds, and was gladdened by what wasn't there.

He stepped outside onto the grass and still nothing happened. No whirr of attacking wings, no flick of a poisoned dart, no brain-tearing whistle. Just the sun and a yawning world not fully awake.

"Hah!" he exclaimed with satisfaction. He could not expand his chest since he wore his skeleton on the outside. That feature, plus the long, feathery antenna sticking out of his hair, made him resemble an overgrown and upright insect, a three-foot-tall praying mantis. He was not an insect. He was a Neshantan.

Second Engineer Dith and Astrogator Molop joined him on the grass. Their exit was made with the airy confidence of those who've seen it tried on the dog.

"Nice morning, Commodore," ventured Dith. He smelled the air,- tested the springiness of the turf.

"Not too bad a morning," Beneker conceded, giving him the frozen eye. "Seeing that you have been denied the pleasure of slamming the door upon my dead body."

"You were too quick for me," said Dith. "I had planned to be first out."

"Me, too," declared Molop.

"So not satisfied with having Formel tied up like a pomicker meditating his sins, you want to get yourselves laid out and thus incapacitate the entire expedition?"

"Oh, no, Commodore." Trapped between joint implications of cowardice and sabotage, Dith sought a plausible escape, found it and said with grossly exaggerated humility, "I thought I could best be spared."

"Me, too," declared Molop, radiating virtue.

"A reasonable assumption," agreed Beneker, thus dexterously damning both of them.

He waved a chitinous limb at the landscape. "There is nothing to indicate that we have been observed. That is the main thing; not to be seen coming down. It seems that we have achieved it."

"Unless it takes them a long time to get here," suggested Dith.

"There is a village a mere two and a quarter linids away," Beneker informed. "I could walk it myself in less than a time-unit."

"Me, too," indorsed Molop, lending his authority to the estimate.

Beneker rasped at him, "Who the space-demon asked you?" Without waiting for a reply, he went on, "The longer we sit around the greater our chances of being spotted. We aren't conspicuous in this valley, and we're in an area where traffic is sparse, but these creatures have air machines from which they could see us almost any time. So let's get moving. Call out the crew."

The crew emerged and lined up twenty strong. Their eyes raked the surroundings warily, their antenna quivered as they sought hostile thoughts radiating behind this clump of trees, that outcrop of rock. None of them shared Beneker's confidence in momentary safety and many would have been glad not to share Beneker.

Looking them over with singular lack of pride, Beneker remarked, "As sloppy-looking a dollop of murts as I've seen since Rimbot crash-landed in a garbage dump." He was pleased to note they resented that. "And as sweet-smelling," he added for good measure. His jaundiced eye went along the line until it found the fidgety one at the end. "You with the jelly-like jerks, are you carrying passengers?"

"No, Commodore."

"Better make sure. No knowing what's been picked up on the last ten worlds. Neshanta won't thank us for a cargo of alien nib-blers and gnawers." He scratched himself at the thought of it. "Get cleaned up while you have the chance. Jump to it, we've little time to spare."

Hastily divesting themselves of harness they brought spray-guns out of the ship and doused each other all over. That done, they lined up again. The atmosphere was pungent with anti-parasite fluid.

"We're going to test our powers on the local talent," Beneker informed. "A couple of guards are required to watch over us. I need two volunteers." He pointed an authoritative finger at Mu-shab One and Mushab Two who, as their names showed, had come from a double-yolked egg. "You and you!"

The Mushabs obediently stepped forward, each taking a dim view of this method of offering one's services.

"Well," said Beneker, with the weary air of one compelled to seek genius among imbeciles, "here they are, our guard. Standing to attention, ready and prepared for the fray." He waited awhile, staring at them while they gaped back, then finished with false cordiality, "If the aliens attack we can trust you to spit upon them?"

A spark of revelation came into their eyes. Turning, they went into the ship, brought back weapons.

"That is better," Beneker approved. "It was thoughtful of Neshanta to arm us, was it not? It showed foresight. We shall not be dependent upon spit, shall we?" Getting no answer other than twin blinks of embarrassment, he shifted his attention to Dith and Molop. "On the last world but one Wenk and Formel explored with me. There were other pairs on previous worlds. It is high time you two had a turn."

"But. . ." began Dith.

"Go get your hand-projectors. You're coming along whether you like it or not. I know of no reason why any two should be exempt from risks. Besides," Beneker went on, "have you not agreed that you can best be spared?"

There was no answer to that one. Glumly they fetched handprojectors, buckled them on, taking plenty of time about it. The crew hung around and mooned at them, watched the trees, the rocks, the hill-crests. Much of their original enthusiasm had been sapped by that pink world's spider.

"Ten planets," grumbled Dith, fiddling with his harness. "Three fertile but full of brainless life. Suitable for settlement only if we tackle all the hard work ourselves. Then two more worlds completely sterile. That was the first solar system. So we try a second, this one. And what do we find?"

He shot a glance at Beneker and, encouraged by that worthy's lack of remark, continued, "Worlds big enough to crush us and with satellites either sterile or full of life-forms too dim-witted to be of use. A pink world crammed with eight-legged menaces. Now this one."

"So what?" inquired Beneker, with heavy sarcasm. "Did you expect to find a Neshantan heaven in the first ten out of all these millions?" He swept a hand to embrace the cosmos.

"It's not that," said Dith. "It's just a feeling that bad luck or good luck hangs around the right suns."

"Gross superstition! A sun cannot determine the suitability of the various planets around it." Then, aware that such a statement could be argued, Beneker modified it with, "In limits, of course. We choose suns approximating most closely to our own. That makes sense."

"Yes, I know. It's just a feeling I've got that this particular solar system is a waste of..."

"The space-demon take your feelings! If I went by such illogic I'd never get anywhere." Irately, Beneker turned to the nearer hillside, started upward through the trees. He went at a fast pace.

Dith trailed after him, muttering. "Maybe the need is urgent but, all the same, we ought to be limited to six or seven planets per trip. Enough is enough. Sometimes I get sick of it."

"Me, too," said Molop.

"You'll be sicker before you're through," promised Beneker, his hearing sharper than they had thought.

They went silent. The brothers Mushab mooched in the rear, bearing their heavier weapons with dumb resignation.

The testing place was ideal for its purpose. A narrow dirt road ran along a little valley with low but well-wooded rises at either side. To the right, the hillocks gave way to hills and those in turn to mountains shining in the far distance. Way over to the left the outskirts of a village could just be seen.

There was every facility for close concealment within a mere quarter-linid of the road. This was plenty good enough for the task in hand. Posting the Mushabs higher up the rise and well separated to provide cross-fire without Neshantan casualties, Beneker laid himself flat under heavy bushes. With Dith and Molop close by, he watched the road, directing his attention mostly toward the village.

It was a dreary wait. The world was still yawning and slow to arise. Nothing could be seen stirring among the distant houses but finally thin bluish shafts of smoke began to drift from a few roofs.

Beneker filled in the time with warning lectures. "Don't get overexcited when one approaches, like Wampot did on that third world. We aren't here to pick a fight. Our job is to check on their possible usefulness as slaves."

"Yes, Commodore," agreed Dith, who had no yearning for a fracas anyway. He eyed the sun through a leafy gap, decided he did not like its color, size, degree of light and heat, or anything about it.

"When one of them appears he will look strange. That is inevitable, as you should know by now. But what of it? No matter how he looks or what weird abilities he possesses, he is a prospective article of utility so far as we are concerned. All we need do is lie low, keep calm and test his responses."

"Yes, Commodore."

"That and no more," insisted Beneker, determined to educate the less fortunately endowed. "No matter how intelligent and dexterous these creatures may prove to be, they are of no use to us if we cannot control and direct their intelligence and dexterity. Without control, we shall have to do all our own labor." He was revolted by the thought of it. "Neshantans were created to direct the energies of other forms, not to perform lowly tasks themselves."

"Me, too," said Molop, piously.

Beneker rolled onto one side in order to glare at him. "Was that a deliberate impertinence? I suppose you think you're doing too much doing, and not enough directing on this trip? Let's all boss the ship, eh? Everyone a space-admiral, eh?" He motioned higher up the rise. "Very well, you can do something more right now. Go see whether those dopey egg-friends are still on guard. And go carefully."

Molop crept quietly away, not so much to please the Commodore as to avoid giving the Mushabs the jumps. That pair had a habit of doing things simultaneously and more or less on mutual impulse. They were likely to let go first and then look to see what had bounced.

"Sometimes," commented Beneker, when Molop had gone, "I think that low-quotient murt talks too much."

"Me, too," agreed Dith, absently.

"Did you have to say that?" Beneker yelped.

"Sh-h-h!" Dith became alert, his antenna vibrating. "Look, Commodore, something comesl"

The something kept on coming, at steady pace, along the dirt road toward the hidden watchers. It was still too far away to discern fine details, but one could tell that it was a higher life-form rather than a mere animal. In the first place, it had come from the village and was proceeding unattended by any master-type, walking alone, casually, confidently, of its own initiative. In the second place, it was clad from feet to neck in artificial coverings, its attire neatly made and close-fitting. Lastly, it was carrying some sort of implement.

Drawing nearer, it revealed itself as a burly biped in dark blue overalls and wearing heavy boots. His arms were shorter and thicker than Neshantan arms but his hands were very similar, each having four fingers and one thumb. His broad, brown-skinned face was marked with a strong blue-black stubble and had unchitinous flexibility. Evidently his skeleton was internal like those of the Neshantan slave-races. The thing he was bearing upon one shoulder could be recognized as an axe—not the huge, half-moon-shaped thing with which the observers were familiar, but still an axe.

"I cannot pick up his mind," whispered Beneker. "Can you?"

"No, Commodore," said Dith, all eyes. "Perhaps he is not employing it at the moment."

"That is unlikely. It is well-nigh impossible to exist with a completely empty mind. Even an idiot's head is full of folly."

"Well, I can't pick up his," admitted Dith.

Beneker mulled it a moment. "He may resemble our slave types. We have never been able to get more than incoherent fragments of thought out of them. They are sensitive receivers but extremely poor projectors. Their neural radiation is almost nil." He brightened considerably. "If this creature is the same type we are indeed in luck."

"Perhaps his mind operates across a different band," Dith suggested.

"If so, he won't get our pictures and we won't be able to deceive him." Beneker crouched lower. "We'll soon see. I am going to try make him take his boots off."

"How?"

"I am putting a stream across the road." His antenna bent toward Dith's. "Quick! Get this picture and duplicate it. Well try it out at double force for a start."

Picking up the other's mental vision, Dith waited for the word of command. Twenty more paces would bring the unwary biped immediately to their front.

"Now!" hissed Beneker.

Together they put an imaginary stream across the road, striving to drive the vision into their victim's mind as vividly and realistically as possible.

The biped took six more steps, stopped, stared at the road. Then he scratched the back of his neck and said something unintelligible. His voice was a low and chesty rumble. Moving cautiously forward to get a closer look, he bent and dipped a finger into what wasn't there. Then he looked at his finger.

"It looks wet," projected Beneker.

"It looks wet," simultaneously drove Dith's mind.

Obviously convinced, the biped turned away from them to trace the flow of the stream down the opposite slope. With the swift finesse of those to whom the aptitude comes naturally, the concealed watchers extended their illusion, taking away trees and bushes, building a waterfall over a ledge of rock, adding a few floating twigs and bits of bark.

Coming back to the middle of the road, the biped considered a moment, made up his mind. His thoughts remained undetectable, though at this short range his brain emitted a rapid series of meaningless pips and pops like the chopped-off peaks of his wave-forms. Evidently he overlapped the Neshantan frequency band by a percentage too small to be useful.

He reached a decision. He did not remove his boots as Beneker intended. Instead, he walked straight ahead, his gait slower and more deliberate than before.

"Wading!" realized Beneker, with triumph. "We made it a little too shallow but we fooled him!"

Though immensely pleased with himself, he kept his full attention on the other, not relaxing for an instant. When Neshantans built a dream they did it properly, a bang-up job in complete detail.

So when the biped came out of the stream his boots looked wet, felt wet and seemed to make sloppy squelching sounds. His feet felt cold and wet. Even the bottoms of his overalls appeared to be stained a darker blue almost to knee-height. Several artistically-placed splashes of dampness showed above the knees, each with its own tiny area of coolness. Natural talents come mighty close to perfection no matter how outlandish by the standards of elsewhere.

Stamping his feet hard, the biped cast a final, slightly puzzled look back at the stream, hefted the axe more comfortably on his shoulder, continued on his way.

"Zimpo!" ejaculated Beneker, not too loudly. "Success!" He patted himself with satisfaction. "How about your unlucky sun now? Doesn't this more than compensate for brain-twisting spiders?"

"One creature is hardly sufficient for a test," said Dith. "There may be special reasons for his susceptibility. He may be the only half-wit in the village, abnormally credulous and with a wave-band peculiarly his own."

"He may be a pornicker in a trance," scoffed Beneker. "Or he may be somebody a spider whistled at. But I say that worked out beautifully. All we need do now is try two or three more by way of confirmation. Then home we go with news of a suitable slave-world."

At that point Molop crawled back. "The guards were awake and jumpy. They came within a hair's breadth of blowing me apart."

"If the hair had been thinner," Beneker assured, "I would have been sorely grieved."

"Me, too," said Molop, fervently.

Beneker gazed prayerfully at the heavens and inquired, "Look, have you ever created the vision of a vast hole filled with flames?"

After some thought, Molop answered, "Yes, many years ago when I wanted a slave to . . ."

"Next time you create it," Beneker interrupted, "kindly do me the favor of jumping into it."

Dith nudged him. "Another one comes."

"Keep low!" warned Beneker, banging the unfortunate Molop's head into the turf. "At this stage we cannot afford to be seen." He looked along the trail.

The newcomer was another of about the same size and build as his predecessor but his clothes were not the same, a wide-brimmed tan hat shaded his face, and his body clothes were in two distinct pieces separated by a belt. To top matters, he was riding on the back of a big, brown, four-legged creature.

"A nice problem," murmured Dith. "If the biped is a slave, what is the quadruped which is carrying him?"

"Your premise is shot to a stink-star," Beneker gave back vulgarly. "The two-legger is not a slave—yet!" He noted that the subject of their interest was coming on fast. "It would be useful to discover whether the lower form can be deceived along with the higher."

"It would be equally useful to discover why they can be deceived when there is so small an overlap."

"I have solved that problem," Beneker informed. "I think that like our slaves they do not use the full capacity of their brains. They employ only a part. Hence, the wave-band on which they think is only a portion of the far wider band to which they are inherently sensitive. We're hitting them across the full width." His voice petered out as he flattened himself still more. Then he added, "That brown creature is swift. Hurry, put the stream across, and let's throw in a little depth this time."

They made the stream complete with eddies and ripples. It was wider than the oncoming horse was long and its depth was sufficient to reach above the animal's knees. Dith noticed a bug on a nearby leaf, copied it mentally and had another bug on a leaf drifting lazily in a tiny backwater. Beneker added a few Neshantan water-plants, vague and shadowy in the bottom so that they would not be noticeably different from whatever water-plants this world possessed.

At a steady jog-trot the rider came on, his attention on the distant mountains. The hidden Neshantans feared that he was going to go right through their mirage from sheer absent-mindedness when the quadruped slowed of its own accord.

The rider glanced downward, stopped his beast, took off his Stetson and bent forward to peer over the quadruped's neck.

"I'll be damned," he said. Like the other he looked upstream, noted the provided waterfall and added, "This country is sure changing fast."

Shoving his hat back onto his head, the rancher shrugged and urged his mount forward.

The pony immediately went ahead. It had uttered no sound nor displayed any surprise.

Nevertheless, it lifted its legs higher than before and ploughed forward like an animal going through deep water.

Ghost-drops splashed upward complete with mock-glitterings in the sunlight. A little wash widened behind each leg, spreading V-shaped, making phantasmal leaves swirl and bob.

Emerging, the horse emitted a loud snort and broke into its jogtrot. The stream and the waterfall dissolved like swept mist, leaving only the dusty trail.

"By the giant sun of Nellerl" exclaimed Beneker, "It is almost too easy to be true. Think what you like and they too think it."

"Providing it is plausible," Dith qualified. "That is understood, Bugbrain."

"I know," persisted Dith, "but what I meant was that we aren't sufficiently informed about local conditions to tell what is or is not convincing. For instance, I put a little insect on a leaf in that stream. I copied one which was near my face. But supposing that in a moment of forgetfulness I had put a bright red water-skater with button eyes? If there are no such creatures on this world ..."

"The moral of that is not to be forgetful," Beneker reproved. "It would be a mistake to alarm them or arouse their suspicions just now. Let them rest in blissful ignorance until we return in strength to take them over."

He peered up the trail toward the mountains. The rider had gone from sight.

"This path is not frequently used," he commented. "We may have a long wait before we can make another test." He stood up, stretched himself to his full three feet of height, confident in remaining unseen. "You two lie low and keep watch. I'm going back to the ship to make sure the crew is being energetic about the cleaning and overhauling. Don't try any foolish tricks during my absence."

"No, Commodore," promised Dith.

Beneker gave Molop a sardonically inquiring eye and said, "May I assume that goes for you too?"

"Yes, Commodore," said Molop, happy at being in sweet accord.

"I thought it would," remarked Beneker, with unpleasant pleasantness. He slipped away.

Dith sighed and said, "Now he's gone, let's relax. Sometimes I wish I were a slave."

"Why?" inquired Molop.

"A slave has his dreams. They are created for him, custom-built to suit his heart's desires, real enough to be as satisfying as the really real. That makes him contented.

"What dreams can we have? None at all! We can seek refuge only in our own imaginations and that is like pursuing the shadow of a shadow. An illusionary cannot delude himself or be helpfully fooled by other illusionaries. That is a natural law. I wish someone would abolish it." "Why?" asked Molop.

"Because then you could build a dream or two for me." Ignoring the trail, Dith lay flat on his back, meditatively studied the leaves and branches overhead. "You could conjure for my long-starved delectation a certain female with a beautiful gray-green shell whom I once met during a spring feast on Neshanta. All I can do is lug her out of my memory and dump her into my imagination. But if I were a slave, you could make her real for me." He sighed again, long and deeply. "So wonderfully reall"

"Um-m," said Molop, wistfully.

"But a dream-maker is a dream-resister. He cannot be deceived by another's projections. Sad and unfair." Dith yawned, blinking at the sun-gaps between the leaves. "Anything coming?"

Molop had a look at the trail. "No."

"As if I cared." Dith mused awhile. "I still feel that we ought to try another sun. I have forebodings about this one." He closed his eyes and did not bother to roll off his back until he heard Beneker returning.

For sheer lack of a subject to work upon, the three Neshantans were compelled to laze through several time-units. It was high noon before another prospect appeared.

This one came the opposite way from the first two—out of the mountains and toward the village.

Again a biped, he was old, ill-dressed and on foot. Rheumy-eyed and with a ragged beard, he trudged along bearing a bundle hung on a stick.

"The two previous tests were mainly visionary," Beneker whispered. "Let's try out a predominantly tactile job this time. It will give us a worthwhile check on his nervous system."

"What do you propose?" asked Dith.

"Let's afflict him with some gnawers and nibblers. We can't go far wrong with that. If the cosmos has a universal law, it is that the unwashed become bug-ridden."

Scuffle, scuffle went the biped's worn and gaping boots as he mooched along with minimum lift of feet. "Nowl" breathed Beneker.

They projected together, all three of them, each providing his own quota of biters and his own intensity. It was irresistible.

The victim stopped dead in his tracks, waggled his eyebrows, smote himself in ten different places. It didn't do any good. He tried twenty places at twice the speed and greater force. That brought no improvement either. So he became really vigorous about the matter, getting to work on himself in the frantic fashion of one who could do with six pairs of hands, maybe a couple of wooden mallets and a fence to rub against.

Beneker generously increased the supply, sending an imaginary regiment of crawlers down the small of the biped's back. That was the last straw. With amazingly intensified animation, the subject shot off the trail, took refuge behind the opposite bushes and tore off his clothes. That gave the watchers some worthwhile information about alien anatomy.

For some weird reason nobody could understand, the afflicted one resumed his boots before carrying on with his campaign.

In this incongruous attire, he shook his underthings repeatedly, beat them on a rock, gave them close examination. All the time he was muttering deeply in his beard. A few visible crawlers were supplied to lend verisimilitude to the occasion, and these he picked off and pinched between finger and thumb.

Still muttering peevishly, he dressed himself, picked up stick and bundle, again trudged toward the village. His expression was sour rather than puzzled, suggesting that he viewed what had occurred as a familiar condition which somehow had built up to critical mass.

"Here's a chance to check on range," Beneker told the others. "See how far we can get him. Give him a slight itch when I tell you." He let the subject progress some forty steps before he said, "Go!"

They were rewarded with an irritated scratching. Another forty steps and they tried again. The victim raked himself and voiced a few words that seemed to give off sparks.

The third attempt was a flop—the subject had got beyond illu-sionary range.

"About one-twentieth of a linid," Beneker estimated. "H'm! A fair average. He looked a stupid, insensitive type. We should be able to affect a more receptive brain at twice or three times the distance."

He glanced at the sun now beginning to lower westward, then consulted his time-meter.

"We won't be ready to take off before dusk and there is little we can do if we go back to the ship. We might as well sit this out and test any other fauna that comes along. We'll call it a day when the sun does the same."

"That's all right with me," approved Dith, who liked sitting under a bush rather than cleaning a ship. "But, Commodore, I'm getting pretty hungry." Hastily he added, "And so is Molop."

"Yuck, yuck," exclaimed Beneker. "Now that you've mentioned it, I could savage a gallumpat-steak myself. Go and tell Mushab Two to leave his weapon with you while he fetches rations for all of us."

"Yes, Commodore."

Eagerly, Dith sneaked away. In short time there sounded a loud whump and a tree fell over. Molop opened his mouth but nothing came out.

"Bang goes Dith," remarked Beneker, resigned to that sort of thing. "Those Mushabs never had enough room from the start. One egg—and it has conditioned them for life. I hope the fools have not alarmed the whole village." Parting the leaves, he looked down the trail. He let the leaves fall together and turned his attention back to Molop. "Nothing for it but to try again. Go get the rations."

His expression slightly bemused, Molop got up and made ready to depart. At that point, Dith reappeared, liberally sprinkled with dirt and dragging a weapon.

"The crack-shelled murt popped one at me but he missed by fifty linids."

"Poor shooting," said Beneker. "Has he gone for the food?" "Of course. I told him to hurry." "Good," said Beneker, "Now shut up."

The pay-off came in the early evening with the sun three-quarters of its way down the sky and another couple of time-units to go before dark. Bored by inactivity, Beneker had twice considered giving up the watch and returning to the ship. The tests already carried out were, he felt, sufficient to justify marking this world a free gift to Neshanta.

"Someone coming," informed Dith, who was watching the trail. He waited a moment, counted, "One, two, four of them."

Beneker had a look. The four were halfway from the village. Bipeds, as expected, but there was something queer about this lot.

He continued to look, sensed the queemess increasing as they got nearer. Although he was careful not to reveal it, a trace of unease came over him. There were peculiarities about these arrivals that he could not understand.

In the first place, they were dressed so similarly that it was too much for mere coincidence. Standardized attire suggested some land of uniform and that, in turn, implied officialdom. The dress had a slight resemblance to that worn by the one who'd ridden a quadruped—big hat, colored neck-scarf, two-piece body clothes separated by a belt. Also boots.

But these belts had shaped attachments from which protruded the grips of what appeared to be some kind of hand-projectors.

If so, these were the first bipeds to be seen bearing arms. That would give them a special status, Beneker decided, and special weapon-bearing status must be viewed as ominous.

But it was the weird manner of their approach that bothered him most. They had no steady pace, fast or slow. At one moment they were walking in a bunch, the next they were running in single file. Two of them went off the road to stalk warily around a tree behind which nothing was concealed, and the other two waited for them. Once or twice they adopted an exceedingly strange gait, a kind of jumping run with knees rising high. It did not get them along any quicker than an ordinary run.

"I do not like this," Beneker admitted to the others. "There is something extraordinary about those four. They are armed and eccentric and that is a highly dangerous combination."

"Do you think they might be coming in search of us?" asked Dith, reaching for his hand-projector.

"I cannot see why they should be. How can they know of our presence?"

Beneker looked again. Now that the four were nearer he could discern that they were a kind of biped unlike those observed before.

Their bearing was self-assured, grim, sharp-eyed and occasionally wary. Their physique was small and compact. Their attire neat and decorative.

They were walking at that moment, but as he watched they again broke into that strange, leg-lifting run, doing it simultaneously as if sharing a group-mind, stringing out one behind the other and heading straight up the middle of the trail.

Then there came a point where something hit Beneker smack in the brain. It landed with such shocking vividness that he gasped, flattened himself to avoid being seen, and kept well down until the four had passed, still at an ungainly, knee-raising run.

Intent solely on whatever was the purpose of their journey, they went by seemingly unconscious of the Neshantans.

Raising himself for a cautious glimpse of the departing figures, Beneker said, "I got a picture out of them! By the space-demon, I got a picture!"

"So did I." Dith's antennas were still quivering. "Their minds don't operate on the same band as the others' minds did, or perhaps they use a wider band, or maybe they are more efficient projectors."

"They were riding," said Beneker, a little pop-eyed. "On quadrupeds. I could even feel the animals' back muscles moving and smell their hides. The first two animals were black and had foam on their faces."

"The third was a kind of spotty gray and the last was mottled brown and white," Dith contributed. "The riders were going ten times as fast as they were really going."

"Shooting along like rockets," confirmed Beneker. He was dazed and worried. "How can it be possible that—?"

"Look!" chipped in Molop, pointing.

They sent quick gazes up the trail, saw that the uniformed quartet had left the route and concealed themselves behind a large rock. From this lower angle they could be seen huddled closely together in the shadow, but to anyone coming down they would be invisible. No more pictures came from them, being too far away.

"Something is about to happen," Beneker decided. He glanced behind to choose his line of escape, and hoped the Mushabs would function as intended.

Hardly had he spoken than another biped appeared over a slight rise, coming from the mountains and toward the village. He was a huge specimen with immense shoulders, a heavy, pugnacious jaw. No hat covered his thick mop of iron-gray curls. His dress was a dark brown one-piece affair with a slide fastener down its front.

Obviously unaware of the ambush, the newcomer marched steadily past the rock, his boots making weighty crunching noises. The armed quartet edged around to keep the rock between themselves and the other, then sprang out onto the trail immediately behind him.

One of them must have made a slight sound, for the big biped threw a startled glance rearward and promptly broke into a run.

The four emitted a bloodthirsty yell and set off in hot pursuit. At top pace the entire bunch of pursuers and pursued went past the Neshantan hideout, giving the crouching watchers a very brief replica of the foaming quadruped vision seen before.

They raced on, the chasers gaining slowly but surely. Beneker had to stick his head right out of the bush to see what was about to happen.

Giving up all hopes of escape, the fleeing biped suddenly stopped, whirled round to face his enemies, made a swift snatching motion with both hands at the region of his thighs. The significance of that was a puzzler, but it brought superswift reaction. With expert precision, the four conjured gleaming instruments into their hands. There sounded several thin cracks, made faint by distance. No smoke, flames or visible rays spurted from the weapons, but the target clapped a hand to his shoulder and reeled back against a tree.

"Space preserve me!" exclaimed Beneker. "They are touchier than the Mushabs." He could not take his eyes away from what was going on.

Surrounding their captive, the four uttered commanding words, made commanding gestures, prodded him with their projectors.

Despite his injuries, he obediently lifted his hands to shoulder height, started toward the village, the others following close behind.

Beneker continued to protrude from the bush like a pornicker mortifying his carcase amid thorns. He watched until captors and captive disappeared into the village. Then and only then did he come to life.

"We are going back to the ship. At once. Tell the Mushabs to pack up and follow without delay."

Safe in his control room, Beneker tapped restless fingers on his desk, waited for Dith to return from his inspection of the vessel.

From time to time he glowered at Molop who sat in a corner and held his peace.

Beneker was bothered, irritable and had the fidgets. This was no time to bait him even though innocently.

Dith came in saying, "Formel is still offbeat with the jittering jilips. But everything else is all right. Clean and shipshape from landing-thumpers to astrodome. She's ready to lift any time you say."

"Then I'll say very soon," responded Beneker. "I have reached a decision about this planet. It is no good. It is a dead loss. We would be wise to forget it and seek something better elsewhere."

"Yes, Commodore, that's how I feel about it."

"You can see what has happened," Beneker went on. "It is what I have feared from the beginning. I have not mentioned it before because there's no point in arousing needless apprehension."

"To what do you refer?"

"A set-up similar to that on Neshanta. A slave world complete with master-types." He sighed, lugged his hand-projector out of its grip, dumped it on the desk, poked it away from him. "What we need, and must find if it can be found, is a world of psychologically suitable dupes waiting for someone to dupe 'em. But nature abhors a vacuum. Demand creates supply. I feel we're going to have a tough time finding a planet-load of dupeless dupes sitting around with their mouths dangling, waiting for us to come along and take them over." He gave Dith a sour eye. "Don't you pass that opinion on to the crew. Let 'em do their own sorting out." "Yes, Commodore."

"Our best chance lies on a slave world bossed by illusionaries inferior to ourselves," Beneker continued. "We can beat the teeth out of lesser types, especially if they're in smaller numbers. But I wouldn't care to try it here. It is a big and crowded planet. Those master-types we encountered at the last moment undoubtedly swarm like gnawers on an unbathed gallumpat. It was fortunate for us that we spotted them in good time. This world is a trap, and a dangerous one."

"Like the pink world," reminded Molop, becoming suddenly garrulous.

"Shut up!" Beneker edged his hand-projector a bit nearer, making it a sinister move. Morbidly he went on as if speaking to himself, "I would never have believed that this world's illusionaries could have such powers had I not seen them for myself."

"They violated all natural laws," indorsed Dith.

"Yes, that is what I cannot understand. They could impose their vision on us! What is more, they could do it while remaining unconscious of our existence. That is real power!" He mulled it over. "But that isn't all. Incredible as it may seem, they could construct illusions of such immense strength and potency that they could live in them themselves." His gaze rested on Dith. "Could you enjoy a convincing existence inside one of your own dreams?"

"Not in a million years."

"Neither could any other master-Neshantan. A dreammaker is proof against dreams. That's an inviolable law—and they've shot it to a stink-star!" His expression showed that he regarded law-smashing as a personal affront. "So, having abilities we don't possess, they've developed a different set-up. They don't bother to keep their slaves happy in phantasmal heavens. They enjoy the heavens themselves and rule their slaves by force. That means they are well-armed and utterly ruthless."

"They looked mighty tough to me," said Dith.

"I do not like them," Beneker declared. "Not one little bit. I am going to cross this world from our list of possible conquests. In fact, I'm going to delete this whole solar system. We'll take off forthwith and try some other sun."

"That's just what I've been wanting all along," Dith reminded. "I'll be glad to get out of this place."

Molop opened his mouth, whereupon Beneker picked up his projector, flourished it and growled, "If you say what I think you have in mind to say, there's going to be a terrible accident." He paused, finished, "I would deplore a terrible accident."

"I, likewise," said Molop, and got away with it.

The counter-gravs operated. The Neshantan vessel slid silently into the night. It never came back.

The big biped trod heavily down the village stem, two paces ahead of his escort, a suitably surly expression on his face. Captive and captors stopped only when they came level with the barber shop whose occupant was leaning on the doorpost, chewing a toothpick, studying them speculatively.

"Well, Bill," said the barber to the leader of the escort. "I see you got the low-down, lily-livered skunk."

"We sure did," agreed Bill. He pointed his weapon eastward. "Caught him coming down the mountain trail."

"Nice work." Taking out the toothpick, the barber stared at its ragged end, put it back. "Ain't much use doing half a job, though."

"What d'you mean?"

"Ain't much use pinning him down while his mob runs loose."

"You seen 'em?" Bill stiffened, watching the other keen-eyed.

'Tup. Must've known you were coming. They skinned out fast half a minute back." He pointed down the road. "They went thata-ways."

Bill poked the captive toward the shop. "You take care of him." He turned to his alert companions. "C'mon, let's after 'em!"

Weapons held ready, the four raced headlong down the road, skidded around the far corner and were gone.

Thankfully lowering his arms, the captive sat on the bench out-

Burney glanced briefly at the blue line. From the black square near the northern side of the crater that represented the first major base on Luna, it climbed slantingly over the ringwall. After zigzagging down the broken outer slope and skirting a ridge of vein mountains, the line swept in a wide curve north of Aristillus and Autolycus, the next largest craters of the region, and moved into that subregion of the Mare Imbrium whimsically christened "Misty Swamp." Thereafter, the blue trail led toward possible passes through the Lunar Apennines to the Mare Serenitatis.

"I could expect to lose One," muttered the operator, "in spite of our tower here. But Two shouldn't be blocked by anything yet."

The red line was more direct. Parting from the blue north of the ringwall of Archimedes, it pushed out across the level plain, avoiding isolated mountain ridges and the seven-mile craters of Kirch and Piazza Smyth. After something like three hundred miles, it passed the towering lonely Mt. Pico and probed a dotted delta of possible routes up the ringwall of Plato. This route was x'ed almost to Pico.

"They were supposed to report before attempting the descent," mused Burney. "Maybe the depression of the Mare Imbrium isn't quite what we estimated. The normal curvature would put a lot of rock between us, in that case. An awful lot of rock."

"Maybe they went over the ringwall in a hurry," suggested Joey.

Burney considered that in a short silence. He ran a hand absently over his balding temple. His lean face became a mask of lines as he puckered up his eyes in thought.

"Number Two has Hansen driving, hasn't it? And Groswald, the mechanic ... Van Ness, the astronomer . . . and who else?"

"Fernandez from Geology," said Joey.

The entire personnel of the base numbered scarcely fifty. They were just beginning their surface exploration projects after completing the low domes of their buildings. With such scanty resources, Burney was naturally worried about four men and one of the precious tractors.

"They were with us an hour ago," said Mike, fingering his microphone. "Their set must have gone sour."

When no one replied, he hitched around to face his own controls. "Or else, they're in trouble—"

On the ledge atop the ringwall of Plato, Hansen teetered and tried to maintain his balance by pressing a gauntleted hand against an outcropping of gray Lunar rock. The thermal-eroded surface crumbled slightly beneath the metal-tipped mitten.

In his bulky spacesuit, he found it difficult to lean very far forward, but he could not bear not seeing. The landship tumbled down the inner slope of the ringwall with horrible deliberation.

"I told them 'Don't move her till I find a way downl'" Hansen muttered. "I told them, I told them!"

He was hardly conscious of speaking aloud. Somewhere in the churning mass was the vacuum tractor in which he had driven from Archimedes. Inside, unless it had already been split open„ were Van Ness, Groswald, and Fernandez.

The collection of loose rock and dust passed out of sight for a moment over the edge of a terrace. It reappeared further down. Once, Hansen thought he saw a glint of bright metal, but the slide almost immediately plunged down another sheer drop.

The phase of Luna being closer to "new" than to "first quarter," the sun was far too low on the horizon to light the floor of the crater, or even the three mountain peaks on the ringwall to Hansen's right front. The light from the gibbous Earth, however, was bright enough for him to see quite clearly the surface around him.

The slide finally reached the bottom, at this point nearly 3,000 feet below the man's precarious position. He breathed deeply and tried to straighten the ache from his shoulders.

"Must have taken five minutes," he murmured, realizing that he had frozen in a cramped position as he stared.

It had seemed more like an hour. In the dim shadows of the crater floor, the dust settled rapidly because of the lack of air, but the debris remained heaped at an angle much steeper than would have been possible on Earth. Even the slight vibration Hansen had felt through his boots ceased.

He was alone in the dead silence of a world for eons dead.

He stood there, a spot of color in the chrome yellow of the protective chafing suit. The transparent faceplate of his unpainted helmet revealed a blond young man, perhaps twenty-six, with a lean, square-jawed face. Against the tanned skin, his eyebrows were ludicrously light, but the gray eyes under them were wide with horror.

He was of medium height, but the bulkiness of the suit hid his welterweight trimness; and the pack of oxygen tank and batteries for powering radio, heat pads, and air-circulator increased the appearance of stubbiness.

The quiet hiss of the air being circulated through his suit finally aroused him. With painstaking care, he climbed from the ledge to the level terrace on which the tractor was to have remained while he scouted the route down. A hundred yards away, a great bite seemed to have been snapped out of the ridge.

"All the way from Archimedes, and we didn't even get a look at the floor," he whispered.

For a moment, following the raw scar of the slide with his eye, he considered climbing all the way down and venturing out onto the crater floor to examine the ground. For centuries, the floor of Plato had been reported by Earth observers to darken with the rising sun until at noon it was nearly black. Occasionally, there were stories of misty clouds obscuring the surface, and of shifts in the pattern of light streaks and spots.

One of the expedition's first assignments, therefore, had been the investigation of Plato, to check the unlikely possibility that there might be some primitive, airless form of life present. But the present sortie was clearly ended.

"Not one damn chance," Hansen told himself as he squinted downward. "None of them had a suit on when I got out."

On a terrace about a third of the way down lay an object with an oddly regular shape. It gleamed in the blue-green earth-light, and Hansen peered more intently. It looked like one of the spare oxygen cylinders that had been carried on top of the tractor.

Hansen abruptly became sensitive about the supply of his suit tank. Before he did anything, even sitting down to think the situation over, he wanted to get down there and find out if the cylinder was full.

Despite his eagerness, he held back until he thought he had spied a reasonable path. It involved going two or three hundred feet out of his way, but Hansen managed to work his way down to the lower level without serious difficulty. Once or twice, he slithered a few feet when loose rock shaled off under his grip, but even with his suit and equipment, he weighed little over forty pounds. As long as he did not drop very far, he could always stop himself one-handed.

He walked back along the level strip which was about fifty yards wide at this point, until he approached the path of the landslip. Near it, apparently having been scraped off as the tractor rolled, lay the cylinder.

He checked it hurriedly.

"Whew! Well, that's some help, anyway," he told himself, discovering that the tank had not been tapped.

He left the cylinder and walked over to the inner limit of the level band. Scanning the steep slope and the debris of the slide, he thought he could pick out two or three scraps of twisted metal. There was nothing to be done.

"I'd better get back up and think this out," he decided.

He took the broken chain that had held the tank to the tractor and hooked a broken link through it to make a sling. For the time being, he contented himself with using it as a handle to drag the lucky supply of oxygen after him.

After regaining his original position, the going was easier to the top of the ringwall. They had come over one of the several passes crossing the southern part of the cliffs, and Hansen walked through in a few minutes. The thickness of the ringwall here was only a mile or so, although at the base it probably approached ten miles.

He came out onto a little plateau, and the dim plain of the Mare Imbrium spread out before him. Hansen suddenly felt tiny, lost, and insignificant.

"What am I gonna do?" he asked himself.

For the first time, he had admitted his predicament to himself. His gauntlet crept up to his chest where the switch of his radio protruded through the chafing suit.

"Hello Base! Tractor Two to Base! Tractor Two to Base! Over."

He waited several minutes, and repeated the call five or six times. He screwed his eyes shut to throw every ounce of concentration into listening.

No human voice broke into the quiet hissing of the earphones. Hansen sighed.

"Never reach them, of course!" he grumbled. "This set is made to reach about your arm's length."

He remembered that Van Ness had complained about the reception the last time they had called in, and asked Hansen to maneuver to the top of a ridge of vein mountains near the hulking silhouette of Pico. Hansen was higher now, but also much farther from home.

"Mike Ramirez and Joey Friedman aren't the kind to miss a call," he muttered. "It seems to me, Paul E. Hansen, my boy . . . that you are ... on your own!"

The radio had been but a faint hope, inspired by his height and tales of freak reception. He was not too disappointed. Looking down the rough outer slope of the ringwall, he saw that it was not by any means as steep as the inner, and that fact settled it.

"Guess I'd better see how far I can get," Hansen decided. "When they don't get the regular report over the tractor radio, they'll probably send out another crew to follow the trail. If I can meet them out a way, maybe even as far as Pico, it'll save that much time."

After considerable fumbling, he balanced the large cylinder on his back atop the other equipment with the chain sling across his chest. He started along the series of gentle slopes the tractor had climbed earlier. Deliberately, he pushed to the back of his mind the possibility he would have to face sometime: Base might decide the crew had been too eager to negotiate the ringwall to call back before being blanked out by the mass of rock.

He had to restrain a temptation to rush headlong down to the plain across miles of rough grades. Even with his tremendous load of equipment, he might still travel in twenty-foot bounds in Lunar gravity; but he had no desire to plunge all the way to the bottom with one misstep.

"It'll be easy enough going down," he murmured. "And after that, I can judge the direction well enough from Earth."

He looked up at the brightness of the planet. Earth was rather high in the Lunar sky, although not overhead because of his position far north. It would indicate roughly his southerly course towards Archimedes. As he looked, he noticed that much of the eastern coast of North America, which to his view was almost centered on the hemisphere, was blanketed in clouds.

"Wish I was there right now," he sighed. "Rain and all!"

He wondered about the next step as he worked his way around ridges radiating from the sizable minor craterlet in Plato's ringwall. He still had a good view of the gray plain at the foot of the heights. Although reasonably flat—probably leveled by the colossal flow of lava that had formed the Mare Imbrium, filling older craters and melting down or inundating existing mountains until merely their crests showed—it contained many hills and irregularities that would be even more apparent to a man on foot than from the tractor.

He worked past the craterlet, leaving it to his right. Whenever he struck a reasonably level stretch, he moved at a bounding trot. The first time he tried this, he tumbled head over heels and gave himself a fright lest he rupture the spacesuit on a projecting rock. Thereafter, he was more careful until he got used to being so top-heavy because of the huge oxygen tank.

Finally, scrambling down the last ridges of old debris, he found himself on the level floor of the "Sea of Showers," in the region between Plato and the jutting, lonely Mt. Pico. Off to his right, an extension of the ringwall behind him thrust out to point at the group of other peaks known as the Teneriffe Mountains, which were somewhat like a flock of lesser Picos. The ground on which he stood had perhaps once been part of another crater, twin in size to Plato; but now only detectable by faint outlines and vein mountains. In the past, some astronomers had called it Newton, before deciding upon a more worthy landmark for Sir Isaac.

It had taken Hansen nearly half an hour, and he paused now to catch his breath.

"I feel pretty good," he exclaimed with relief. "I'm carrying quite a lot to go at that speed, but I don't seem to get tired." He thought a moment, and warned himself, "You'd better not, either!"

He turned partly to look at the ringwall towering behind him. It loomed grimly, scored with deep shadows of cracks into which the rays of Earth, seventy times brighter than moonlight it received from Luna, could not penetrate.

Hansen turned away hastily. The mountainous mass made him uneasy; he remembered how easily a landslip had started on the inner slope.

"I'd better get moving!"

He struck out at a brisk, bounding pace, a trot on Luna without the effort of a normal trot. The ground was fairly level, and he congratulated himself upon making good time. Once or twice, he staggered a little, having overbalanced; but he soon got into the rhythm of the pace and the load on his back ceased to bother him. He bore slightly to the right, toward the jutting point of the ring-wall.

The footing was like powdery gray sand. Alternating extremes of temperature during the two-week Lunar day or night had cracked the rock surface until successive expansions and contractions had affected the crystalline structure of the top layers. When these had flaked off, the powder had formed an insulating layer, but the result as far as Hansen was concerned was that he trotted on a sandy footing. When he looked back, he could see the particles kicked up by his last few steps still above the surface. They fell rather neatly, there being no air to whirl them about.

Gradually, he realized that the unobstructive noises of his space-suit had risen a notch in tone. The clever little machines were laboring to dispel the effects of his faster breathing. He dropped down to an easy walk, which was still a goodly pace in the light gravity.

"Guess I'm sweating more, too," he told himself. "Now that I think of it, my mouth's a little dry."

He twisted his neck until he could get his hps on the thin rubber hose sticking up to the left of his chin. He closed his teeth on the clamp, and sucked up a few swallows of water from his tank. It was not particularly tasty, but at least it was cool. It would have been a lot colder if carried uninsulated, he reflected. The night temperature of Luna was something like minus one-fifty Centigrade, and it dropped like a shot as soon as the surface was shaded from the sun.

Refreshed, he started out again at a bounding run, rejoicing in his strength. He felt as if he were just jogging along, but the ground rolled back under his feet swiftly. Had he been on such a bleak desert on Earth, he knew he would be slogging ankle-deep in sand— if he could move at all. His own weight was between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and sixty pounds. With what he was wearing and carrying, he was probably close to three hundred. It did not bother him here.

"It isn't bad at all," he thought with satisfaction. "Feels like jogging around the track in school, warming up for a race. One ... two ... three ... four—still got pretty good form! Not even breathing hard!"

It occurred to him that it resembled a footrace in one other particular. He was deliberately putting off consideration of the finish while he still felt good.

"Oh, 111 meet them somewhere along the way," he said aloud, despite a momentary doubt that he was talking too much to himself. "Pretty soon, I'll cross the tractor trail. I'll follow it out maybe as far as Pico and wait for them to pick me up. The relief crew can't miss a landmark like that. It's damn' near nine thousand feet high, straight up out of the flat plain."

He slowed down somewhat to scrutinize a ridge ahead. It turned out to be an easy grade and he skimmed over it easily. Otherwise, however, he was beginning to lose his recent feeling of satisfaction. Now that he moved out into the flat, empty plain, the essential grimness of Lunar landscape was more apparent than when disguised by the majesty of the view from atop the ringwall. It was a study in gray and black, the powdery sand and the deep shadows groping toward him as he trotted into the earthshine. Above was the deep black of an airless sky, lit by the bright Earih and chilly stars.

Gray, black, green, white—and all of it cold and inhospitable.

"I feel like I'm not wanted here," Hansen thought. "Well, that makes it mutual, I guess!"

He looked back, and was amazed at the distance he had covered. Already, Plato looked more like a range of towering mountains than it did like a barrier of cliffs.

"This won't take so long," he reassured himself. "I must have covered five miles, running like this. Maybe almost ten."

He circled a tiny craterlet, or "bead," a few hundred yards across. In the precise center, it had a tiny peak, corresponding to the central mountain masses found in nearly half the craters of Luna. For the first time, Hansen regretted the camera that had gone down with the tractor.

"Too busy driving to take any pix on the way," he growled, "and now that I come across a perfect miniature, I have no camera. A fine spare photographer for an expedition this size!"

He diverted himself for a few minutes by considering what a fool he was to come to Luna in the first place. He had not really wanted to, and he was sure there were plenty of others who would have been better qualified and better pleased at the opportunity. Still, it was strange sometimes how a man would do things he did not want to because someone else was doing them.

He glanced up at Earth, and kept moving southward with the shining globe on his left front.

Mike and Joey sat before their radio, on folding chairs and empty crate respectively, maintaining whenever not directly addressed an almost sullen silence. Their tiny cubicle was becoming entirely too crowded to suit them.

Dr. Burney paced up and down before the wall map of the Mare Imbrium. Opposite him, the lower section of the radiomen's double bunk—canvas and aluminum like their single chair—had collected an overload of three. Dr. Sherman, the chief astronomer, sat between Bucky O'Neil and Emil Wohl. Besides heading the geologists, Wohl was Burney's second in command; and O'Neil was present in case it was decided to send out a rocket to photograph the Plato region.

"Ya'd think they could use their own rooms," Joey whispered into Mike's ear. "All but Bucky got singles. How we gonna catch an incoming call with all this racket?"

The "racket" at the moment consisted mostly of sighs, finger-drumming, and a tortured semiwhistle from where Sherman sat staring at the map with his chin cupped in one hand.

"There's little doubt of the general location," repeated Bumey, once more reaching a familiar impasse. "But I hate to hold up the other work to send out a crew when we cannot with any certainty agree that something has gone wrong."

"Let's see," said Wohl, "there was some difficulty, was there not, the last time they communicated?"

When no one answered, Mike finally repeated his previous testimony.

"Van Ness said they drove up a sort of mountain to get us. Complained a litde about reception. He might've been getting to the limit."

"Then," said Wohl, "there is really no reason for alarm, is there? They could just as well have decided that continuing the mission was more important than running around looking for a good radio position, couldn't they?"

Mike considered that glumly.

"It's funny they didn't back up far enough to make one call to let me know they were going out of reach," he grumbled. "The speed they make in that rig, it wouldn'ta taken them long."

"That would have been the proper action," admitted Bumey, "but we must not demand perfect adherence to the rules when a group is in the field and may have perfectly good reasons for disregarding them. No, I think we had best—Who's that coming?"

Bucky O'Neil bounded up from the end of the bunk and stuck bis head out the door. When he looked around, his freckled face was unhappy.

"Johnny Pierce from the map section," he announced. "He's got Louise with him. I guess you don't need me any more."

He edged out the door as two others of the Base staff came in. The one who acted as if he had business there was a lean, bespectacled man who managed to achieve a vaguely scholarly air despite rough clothing.

Trailing him was a girl who looked as if the heating economy that necessitated the standard costume of the Base also had the effect of cheating the male personnel of a brightening influence. The shapeless clothing, however, did not lesson the attractiveness of her lightly tanned features or lively black eyes. She wore her dark hair tucked into a knit cap that on Earth probably would have been donned only as a joke.

"We've looked at the photo maps," Pierce reported in a dry, husky voice. "They might very well be out of range. Lots of curvature in that distance, even with the depression caused by a mass of lava like that Mare Imbrium."

Burney accepted this with an expression of relief.

"I heard them talking about the Plato crew," the girl put in. "What's going on?"

Her voice was warm and, like a singer's, stronger than her petite outline would have suggested.

"Oh . . . just checking the radio reception," said Burney. "You can get the details from Mike, I suppose, if you have time off from the observatory. The rest of us are through here."

Mike scowled, and the girl looked puzzled; but Burney, Wohl, and Sherman crowded through the door as if intent upon some new project. Sherman muttered something about the problem of erecting a transparent dome for direct observations, and the voices receded down the corridor. Pierce slipped out after them.

"Did I say something?" inquired Louise. "I only thought there might be news."

"I guess they're just busy, Louise," Mike said. He turned to the radio, unplugged the speaker, and donned a set of earphones. "You know how it is. Why don't you catch Bucky? He's got nothing to do for a while."

Louise had started to show her even white teeth in a smile which now faded. Joey picked up his empty crate and busily moved it around to the other side of the radio set-up.

"Sorry," said the girl, her dark eyes beginning to smolder. "I'll ask somebody else."

They listened to her footsteps as they faded away in the corridor. Mike looked at Joey and shrugged.

"What was I gonna tell her?" he asked. "That her husband either forgot to call in—or got himself quick-frozen when something in his tractor popped?"

Joey shook his head sympathetically. "Tough on her."

"Dunno why she had to come to Luna in the first place," Mike complained. "I can see a nurse like Jean doin' it, and a typewriter pusher like old Edna oughta be classed expendable. But a babe like Louisel"

"It's her science," said Joey. "She wants to see the stars better."

"We got enough astronomers now. She's a smart girl, all right— can't take that away from her. But if she was my woman, she wouldn'ta come up herel"

"If she was mine," countered Joey, "I wouldn'ta taken a second-rate job just to follow her up here eitherl But you're dreaming about the past, Boss."

"Uh-unh," grunted Mike, plugging in the speaker again. "I just believe in equal rights for men. How'd you like to be married to a dame like that and have to trail her to a place where there's three women to forty-eight men?"

"Ask me how I'd like to be married to a dame like that period!" Joey invited him.

Mike adjusted the shade on the light so as to shadow half the room. He straightened the blanket where the three visitors had sat, appropriated the one from the upper bunk to cover himself, and lay down.

"Your watch," he announced coldly. "Wake me up if anything comes in!"

The rope lacing of the canvas creaked as he settled himself; then Joey was left with only the quiet hiss of the radio. He leaned back in the folding chair and relaxed.

Hansen paused and turned to survey the ground he had covered in the past half hour. The hiss of his air-circulator and the whine of the tiny motors within his suit were a comfort in the face of his bleak surroundings.

He had found himself trotting along at such an easy pace that he had kept going past Mt. Pico. Now he wondered if he ought to stop.

"Might as well go on," he muttered. "Now that I've picked up the tractor trail from Archimedes, I can hardly be missed by the relief crew."

He eyed the twin tracks in the gray sand. Flanked by his own wide-spaced footprints, they stretched away into the dim distance. As a sign that man had passed, they did little but accentuate the coldness of the scene.

"Maybe I'll stop at the big triple peak," Hansen planned. "That's about thirty-five or forty miles . .. they ought to be along by then if they started right away."

Careful not to admit to himself that relief might be slow in starting from Archimedes, he took a last look at Pico. Rearing starkly upward, it projected a lonely, menacing grandeur, like a lurking iceberg or an ancient monument half-buried in the creeping sands of a desert. In the fight of the nearly full Earth, it was a pattern of gray angles and inky black patches—not a hospitable sight.

"Come on, come onl" Hansen reproved himself. "Let's get moving! You want to turn into a monument too?"

He had stopped just before reaching Pico to replenish his suit tank from the big cylinder, and still felt good at having managed the valves without the mishap he had feared. He did not feel like a man who had traveled seventy miles.

"Why, on Earth," he thought, "that would be a good three-day march! I feel it a little, but not to the point of being tired."

He looked up at Earth as he started out again. The cloudy eastern coast of North America had moved around out of sight in the narrow dark portion. Hansen guessed that he had been on the move for at least four or five hours.

"I'd like to see their faces when they meet me way out here," he chuckled.

It occurred to him that he might be more tired than he thought, and as he went on he tried to save himself by holding his pace to a brisk walk. He found that if he got up on his toes a bit, he could still bound along that way.

The gray sand flowed under his feet, relieved occasionally by a stretch of yellowish ground. Hansen kept his eyes on his path and avoided the empty waste. When he did glance into the distance, he felt a twinge of loneliness. It was like the wide plains-land of the western United States, but grimly bare of anything so living as a wheat field.

He tried to remember as he moved along where it was that they had driven the tractor up a mountain ridge. He decided that he would rather avoid the climb, and kept an eye open for the chain of vein mountain beyond Pico.

"It ought to be faster to go around the end of them," he thought. "I can always pick up the tracks again."

When he finally sighted the rise ahead, he bore to his right. He remembered from the maps he had studied that the mountains curved somewhat toward another isolated peak, and he watched for that. As far as he knew, it had no name, but although only half the height of Pico, it was an unmistakable landmark.

The mountains on his left gradually dwindled into ragged hills and sank beneath the layer of lava. Hansen turned toward the last outcroppings as the triple mountain he sought came into sight. He climbed onto a broad rock and started to sit down.

The end of the big cylinder slung across his back clanged on the back of his helmet. Hansen lost his balance and tumbled over the side of the rock. Under his groping hands, the heat-tortured surface of it flaked away, and he bounced once on the ground before sprawling full length.

"Damn!" he grunted. "When'll I learn to watch my balance with this load?"

He picked himself up and unslung the tank. Then, allowing for the normal bulk of his back pack of tank and batteries, he backed against the outcropping until he was resting at a comfortable angle.

"Maybe I ought to relax a few minutes," he told himself. "Give the air-circulator time to filter out some of the sweat. Then, too, I don't want to get tired and miss them when they come along."

He idly scanned the arc between the peak toward which he was heading and Mt. Pico, still easily visible off to his right. The northern part of the Mare Imbrium drew his gaze coaxingly into the distance until he felt an insane desire to thrust his head forward. It almost seemed that if he could get beyond the double glass of his insulated faceplate, if he could escape from the restraint of his helmet, he might perceive his bleak surroundings with a better, more real sense of proportion.

There was nothing out there, of course, he forced himself to realize. Except for shadows of craterlets that looked like low mountains, there was nothing to see for fifty miles, and nothing even then more noteworthy than a couple of minor craters.

"Then what are you looking for?" Hansen snapped. "You want it to get on your nerves? And quit talking to yourself I"

He suppressed, however, the sudden urge to spring up and break into a run. Instead, he hitched around to stare along the ridge at whose end he sat.

He was far enough south to be able to see the side lit by earth-light. The ridge climbed higher the further it went, like the back of some sea monster rising from placid waters. Several miles away, a spur seemed to project out to the south; and Hansen thought he could remember a mile-wide crater on the maps.

He was a bit more comfortable inside his suit by now. He shifted his position to expedite the drying of the coveralls he wore under the spacesuit. Then he raised his arms and tried to clasp his hands behind his neck, but found that his garb was not that flexible.

"Shouldn't kick, I guess," he thought. "Without plenty of springs in the joints, I wouldn't be able to bend anything, considering the pressure difference."

He spent a minute admiring the construction of the suit that alone stood between him and instant extinction. That led him to think of the marvelous mechanism of the vacuum tractor that had carried him so comfortably—though he had not appreciated it at the time—across the Lunar plain. That, logically, recalled the men who had come with him and now were buried beneath one of Plato's many landslips.

"Talk about borrowed time!" he thought. "I wonder how long I'll stay lucky? Any little thing might do it—"

He had already taken three or four tumbles, or was it more? On any one of them, had he rolled the wrong way perhaps, he might have cracked that faceplate on a projecting rock. It was made as tough as possible, true, but if he even cracked the outer pane, the insulating sheet of air would spurt out to leave him with a slow leak. The inner plate would lose heat and cloud up from his breath, so that he would end up without even knowing where he was dying.

Or if he had slid over a surface jagged enough to tear through his yellow chafing suit, and then to rip the tough material of the inner suit—

A puncture here would be a real blowout!

He reminded himself to be careful about stepping into shadows, especially if they were more or less straight-edged. He did not remember encountering on the way out any of the canyon-like rills that ran like long cracks straight through all other surface features of Luna—except occasional small craters slammed into the rock after the rill had been formed—but there was always the chance that he might step into some other kind of a hole.

Fortunately, the earthlight shone into his face, so that he should be able to tell a shadow resulting from some elevation ahead of him.

"I'm getting the jitters squatting here," Hansen thought. "It won't do any harm to move on a little way. At least out past that mountain, where I'll have a good view towards Archimedes."

He arose and slung the big cylinder over his back again, jiggling on the toes of his boots to jockey it into place. With one last look over his shoulder at the trail of his footprints splotched in the ashy sand, he started off.

He was surprised to discover that the rest had stiffened him slightly, but that soon worked out. As soon as he was warmed up, he moved out in a brisk walk which on Luna sent him bounding along with fifteen-foot strides. Swinging his arms to keep his balance, he concentrated upon the footing ahead of him. Once more he was alone with the hissing and humming of his suit and the sound of his own breathing, undisturbed by either memory or anticipation.

Mike Ramirez stirred on his bunk with the change of the quiet hissing of the radio. Something more than the occasional crackle or creak of Joey's chair or football in the corridor brought him up with eyes still half-closed. To his sleep-drugged mind, it seemed that nothing had existed until a second ago, when a faint, dreamlike voice had started to speak.

He started to push back his blanket—Joey's blanket—and said, "Joey! You got a call!"

". . . to Archimedes Base. Hello Base! Over."

"I hear him!" snarled Joey. "Go back to sleep!"

He pushed his switch and the rushing noise that had partly muffled the weak voice gave way before the surge of his own transmitter.

"Archimedes Base to Tractor One!" Joey answered, and Mike leaned back on one elbow and sighed.

He did not listen while Joey took the message, but swung his feet to the floor and sat up. Wiggling his toes uncomfortably, he wished he had taken off his shoes; but he had expected to lie down only half an hour or so. Until the call came in, he had been sound asleep.

Joey acknowledged the message and turned to Mike after dropping his pencil.

"The Serenitatis bunch," he said. "They left two of them at Linné to take photos and poke around while the other pair brought the tractor back through between the Apeninness and Caucasus to call in."

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah, they're on the way back already, but they say Linné didn't look as if it was ever a volcano after all."

"Very true if interesting," said Mike. "Okay, take it to Burney. I'll bend an ear a while."

He tossed the blanket back onto the upper bunk and walked over to the chair. He stretched, and sat down as Joey's footsteps departed down the corridor.

He sat there, staring moodily at the softly lighted dials of the radio, wishing he had a cigarette. That was one habit he had had to cut off short when joining the expedition.

"I think I'm getting over it some," he congratulated himself. He looked up at the sound in the corridor, thinking that Joey had made good time to Burney's compartment and back. He raised an eyebrow as Louise entered.

"I just saw Joey go by," she announced hastily. "Did some news come in?"

"Tractor One reported—just routine. What are you doing, picketing this dive?"

"I—I just happened to be passing the Junction, and I saw the paper in Joey's hand." "Uh-huh," grunted Mike.

What the members of the expedition had come to call the "Junction" was an intermediate dome equipped with the main airlock. The other buildings connected with it through safety doors so as to localize any danger or air loss in the event of a rupture in one of the domes. It was, in effect, the front hall of the whole Base.

And if you stand there long enough, thought Mike, everyone you know on Luna will pass by, and you'll find out everything that's going on.

"Where is number Two now?" demanded Louise quietly.

Scared, thought Mike, noting the over-controlled tenseness of her voice.

"I don't know for sure," he answered, not looking at her. "It's time they were inside Plato, and we can't expect to hear them from in there."

Louise walked jerkily to the bunk and sat on the foot of the lower section. She crossed her legs. Seeing the nervous manner in which she twitched her foot, Mike turned to his radio.

After a moment, she spoke again, and his shoulders quivered at the agonized harshness of her tone.

"Don't string me along, Mikel I want to knowl You were worried about them hours ago, weren't you?"

Mike licked his lips.

"That don't mean anything," he muttered.

"The others backtracked to report, didn't they? To call in, I mean. Something happened to number Two, didn't it?"

"Now, take it easy, Louise!" Mike squirmed in his chair, then forced himself to sit still. It was not the sort of furniture that would stand much squirming. "Burney kinda considered that as a possibility, but in the end they decided things were probably okay."

"Then why did they have Bucky in here?" she demanded.

"Just in case they thought it worth the trouble of scouting the Plato region. Nothing special."

Louise bounced up from the bunk. She stood beside it, stiff, with her little fists clenched tightly at her sides.

"They wouldn't let this long a time go by without calling in and you know it!" she declared. "Even if they did, there ought to be a tractor on the way to check."

"You might have a point there," admitted Mike.

"It could always be called back."

"It's probably been thought of," said Mike. "Look, Louise, why don't you calm down and let the worryin' get done by the people supposed to do it?"

She did not look at him. The darkness of her eyes surprised him, and he realized how she had paled beneath her tan.

"I can't help it," she said. "It's my fault, in a way. He only came along because I got so excited about the expedition I couldn't stay down on Earth. He didn't want to come, and now he's out there-"

Mike rose and shoved his chair aside with his foot. He thought the girl was going to faint. Watching her narrowly, he reached out to put his hand on her arm.

He sighed with relief as he heard Joey whistling outside. Louise straightened and moved away from his hand as the younger operator entered.

"Why don't you go see Burney?" suggested Mike. "He'll explain how he figures the odds; or if you want to argue, it's more sense to do it with him than me. I got nothing to do with it."

The girl pulled herself together with a visible effort.

"I know, Mike. Thanks for listening, anyway."

"Joey, go along with her to Burney's quarters!"

"That's all right," said Louise. "I can find my way further than that."

They watched her leave.

Once more, Joey took the chair before the set and the pair of them sat in glum silence. The ventilation system came to life in one of its efforts to homogenize the Base atmosphere, and its sigh partly drowned out the hiss of the radio.

"You know something, Joey?" grunted Mike.

"What?"

"I got a feelin' we're not gonna see those guys again." "Hope you're wrong," said Joey. "It's awful tough digging around here, after the first few inches."

Hansen trotted along steadily with the four thousand foot mountain rising in a sheer sweep out of the lava "sea" over to his right. There were three distinct peaks, he knew, but they ran in a line away from him so that the whole thing appeared one towering mass to him. Most of it, from his position, was black with the deepness of Lunar shadows, although he was gradually reaching a location where he could see the splashes of earthlight on the tortured rocks.

"Pretty soon I'll be out in the real flat, with nothing but a scattering of little craters to steer by," he reflected. "If I don't want to stop, how had I better head?"

Just in case the problem should arise, he began to estimate the direction he should take and the sort of ground he would find.

The first thing would be to bear slightly left until he picked up the trail of the tractor once more. Then he could expect a region of fairly frequent craterlets, leading up to Kirch, a modest but respectable seven miles in diameter. If he passed to the right of Kirch, he would be kept from wandering aimlessly out into the Mare Imbrium by a range of vein mountains. He might go farther astray by passing Kirch to the left, but there the going would probably be easier.

"Then what?" he murmured, trying to recall the map and the journey in the tractor.

There was another open area, he seemed to remember, and then the forty-mile string of peaks called the Kirch Mountains, bordered on the right by an even longer ridge of vein mountains which might once have been part of the range.

And then, another thirty miles or so would bring him to the ringwall of Archimedes!

Hansen shook his head.

"That would be going a little too far," he muttered.

His voice sounded husky to his own ears, and he paused to suck up a few swallows of water through the hose. He must have been half-hypnotized by the steady streaming of the gray surface under his feet, for he suddenly realized that he had gone considerably beyond the triple peak.

Without his steady forward speed, he found it difficult for a moment to stand erect. He braced against the movement of the big tank on his back, and turned around to look back.

He stared at the dark, earthlit ground over which he had been trotting. With the looming mountain in the foreground, and the upthrust ringwalls of smaller craterlets here and there above the level, aseptic frigidity of the plain, it was a scene of complete desolation. It was more naked of life or any kind of softness than any desert on Earth; yet to Hansen, it did not really seem like a desert. There was some further overtone plucking at the fringe of his consciousness.

Then it came to him.

"It's like an oceanT he exclaimed. "There's something about it that's like .. . like a cold, gray, winter sea smashing in on a rocky coast!"

There was the same monstrous, chilling power, the same effect upon the beholder that here was a massive, half-sentient entity against whose callous strength and cruelty nothing human could stand. It was a thing to observe from a safe distance, to cower from lest it somehow become aware of the puny structure of bone, blood, and flesh spying upon it. Then there would be no escape, no withstanding the crushing force of its malice. But he was on no safe cliff. He was down in the sea.

He looked around. Gray everywhere, mottled with inky shadows. Gray ash underfoot, gray-and-black lumps thrusting up from the surface like colossal vertebrae, gray distance in all directions.

"Been going for hours," he thought, "and there's no sign, really, that I'll ever get anywhere! I might as well be in the middle of the far side of Pluto!"

The huge mountain towered behind him, like a hulking beast from some alien world stalking the only object in all its frozen world that dared to move. Hansen suddenly could not bear to have his back turned to it. He faced it and edged clumsily away. The helmet that reduced his field of vision was his prison. If that black-shadowed mass of rock chose to topple over, it would easily reach him, and more. He would be ground under countless tons of weight, mangled and frozen in one instant—

Hansen whirled about and bolted.

On his first stride, he caught the toe of his right foot in the sand and sprawled forward with flailing arms. He plowed into the ground, throwing up spurts of sand like a speedboat tossing spray.

Somehow, he was up immediately, running in long, wobbling, forty-foot bounds. His eyes bulged and the breath rasped between his hps as he strove desperately to keep his balance.

It was like running in a dream, the nightmare come true. More than once, until he adapted to the pace, he found himself churning two or three steps at the zenith of his trajectory, too impatient to wait for the touch of boot on sand. There was sudden, dynamic power in his tiring muscles. All his joints felt loose.

His chest began to labor and he stumbled slightly. With a quick spasm, he blew his lungs and sucked in a deeper breath. After a few repetitions, he felt a trifle easier. In a minute he began to get his second wind. All this came like a half-perceived process of instinct, while he concentrated narrowly upon speeding ahead.

He flew up a slight grade and took off in a soaring leap to the next crest of an undulating stretch of pale yellow ash. The next thing he knew, he was rushing upon a long shadow that barred his path.

A hasty glance each way warned him there was no use trying to skirt it, for the shadow or hole or whatever it was ran for hundreds of yards right and left. Hansen stamped hard at the near edge and kicked off for at least sixty feet. Something seemed to snap in his right knee, but he came down all right and kept running, well clear of the shadow.

How long he ran, dodging this way and that to avoid hills and shadows obstructing his path, he did not know. In the end, the tiny motors of his suit fell behind the rate at which he consumed oxygen and gave off carbon dioxide and copious moisture.

When he began to feel like an underwater swimmer reaching his limit with writhing chest, Hansen gave up. He stopped.

That felt worse. He moved on at a gentle walk, accomplishing it mostly by motion from the ankles down. Amid the stifling warmth and stickiness inside his spacesuit, it was borne in upon him how badly he had lost his head.

He looked back, panting. Where was the mountain? Then, following the trail of isolated scars on the surface beyond where they faded into the gray distance, he saw a small knob of gray against the star-dotted black of the horizon.

"I guess . . . I've . . . really been traveling!" he panted. "Twenty minutes or half an hour—wonder how fast I went to put a mountain out of sight? Of course ... I was well past when I started."

That reminded him of his bolt, and he closed his eyes in a paroxysm of shame.

The sweat beading his forehead began to trickle down his cheekbones or nose. Now and then, a drop rolled into his eye, despite efforts to shake his head inside the confines of the helmet. It stung, but he was too blown to get excited over that.

"Why did I have to go and do that?" he groaned inwardly.

He remembered how level-headed he had been in the first minutes of the catastrophe. Calmly, he had judged the odds of there being any survivors; calmly, he had climbed down for the prime requisite, the tank of oxygen; calmly, he had started off by a well-chosen route that led him accurately to landmarks so plain that they could be spotted from Earth with a good pair of field glasses.

He had intended to go only as far as Pico, or perhaps the triple peak. Or had he?

Somewhere back there, he remembered, he had begun planning a further march. There could be no reason for that except—

Except that he was secretly aware that he could count upon no help to reach him in time!

"Why should they send anybody out yet?" he asked himself. "For all they know, we're still inside Plato, camping on the nice level lava floor. I must have been thinking that, underneath, when I was figuring which side to pass Kirch."

He had been skating on thin ice and should have expected a crack-up. For a moment, he considered the possibility that it would have been better had he broken down on the spot. But then he might have quit while still on the ringwall of the great crater.

"As it is," he said aloud, "I'll at least get the most possible mileage out of this suit. If I live long enough, I might even walk in on them at Base, for a surprise."

He grinned a bit as he considered that pleasant fantasy:

"Hi, Paul; where you beenF'

"Oh, just out for a little walk on the moon."

"And where did you go on your little moon walk?"

"Took a turn around Plato. Pretty boring but 'toujours gai, whatthehell whatthehell!'"

He managed a deeper breath as his equipment caught up somewhat to his physical needs. The half-grin on his lean features faded, and he stepped up his plodding pace.

"Why kid myself?" he snorted. "I'm just about scared senseless! And I've got a right to be!"

Bucky O'Neil, as the pilot who was to take the scouting rocket, occupied the only extra chair in Dr. Burney's headquarters room. Burney sat across from him at the folding table and circled the proposed search area continuously with the butt of his pencil. Both men eyed the map reflectively. Burney looked as if he were trying to guess the precise location of his tractor crew. O'Neil, tracing his route with a blunt forefinger, was obviously attempting to estimate where he would have to punch his flare release in order to have his camera working by the time he whipped across Plato.

"Just to save us the wait," said Burney, leaning back in the silent, crowded room, "report by radio as soon as you loop back. Have you checked your set with Mike?"

The radio operator, standing to the rear of the little group, spoke up, "Joey's checking with the field now."

"Good!" approved Burney. "Does anyone have anything to add?"

He looked about. Sherman whistled quietly and tonelessly. Wohl shook his head. Johnny Pierce hovered, waiting to get his hands on his photomap again. Louise leaned against one wall near the door, worrying a pencil end between her white teeth.

"All right, then," said Burney, "you can get into your suit, Bucky. Good luck!"

The gathering broke up. Burney signaled for Wohl and Dr. Sherman to stay behind, and forestalled Johnny's move to re-appropriate the map.

"We may want to consider further," he offered as an excuse, and Pierce left with Mike.

Outside, they watched Louise follow Bucky in the opposite direction.

"Wonder how it feels to have her man out there and maybe not coming back?" murmured Johnny. His long face looked sad.

"What do you think their chances are?" he persisted after a brief pause as they turned a comer in the corridor. Mike shrugged.

"Tractor One is starting back already," he said simply. Hurrying along the other end of the corridor, Bucky was unable to shake off the following footsteps without putting on an obvious burst of speed. It sounded like Louise, and he wanted to think about his flight plan.

Finally, as he passed through the safety door—a double mounting that could be used in an emergency as an airlock—he had to pause long enough to acknowledge her presence.

"Do you mind if I ask you something, Bucky?" Louise inquired.

"Of course not, but I have to—"

"I know; I won't take more than a minute. The thing I don't like is that they just want you to photograph Plato."

Bucky released the door which swung shut automatically. He looked puzzled.

"Don't you think it's worth doing?" he asked.

"Oh, yesl Yes, I do. But how about all the other places?"

The pilot fidgeted.

"I can't take shots of the whole Mare Imbrium, Louise."

"You might take a few of the section this side of Plato, though. How do we know they ever reached the crater? If tracks show up on your pictures, we'll know how far they got."

"That's a good point," admitted Bucky, scratching his head. "But why didn't you bring it up in the meeting?"

Louise looked away. She shrugged slightly.

"Well, maybe Burney would have talked you out of it," Bucky conceded. "We all know you're worried."

"I know what everybody thinks," Louise replied. "I'm getting excited because one of the four happens to be my husband. I'm not thinking calmly about what's best for the Base as a whole, whether it's worth taking people off other jobs to play hide and seek out on the surface. I probably shouldn't have come to Luna in the first place."

Bucky looked around, but there was no one passing through the Junction. Louise stepped closer and put a trembling hand on his arm.

"All right, Bucky, it's true enough. I'm frightened. I wish I'd never thought of coming here and making Paul feel he had to trail alongl Are you married, Bucky, or engaged?"

"Well, there's a little blonde waiting down there for me—I hope. She'd better wait."

"How would you like it if she were out there?"

"Ummm," murmured the pilot. "I see what you mean."

He saw more than that. He saw how close she was to losing her grip, how she was keeping back the tears with an effort, trying to use every ounce of self-discipline so as to keep from being ignored as hysterical. Getting a few little things done, like influencing him to take extra photos, was all she could do at the moment to look out for her man. He remembered hearing from Pierce that Burney had refused her offer to take out a tractor herself.

"Well . . ." he yielded, "I'll see if I have a chance. I figure to cover the approaches to the ringwall anyway; maybe I can get a shot out around Pico, or thereabouts."

She did not thank him, but hid her face against his shoulder for a second. Bucky looked around again, touched her lightly on the head with one big, freckled hand, and disengaged himself gently.

When he glanced back over his shoulder, Louise was opening the safety door to go back.

"Heading for Mike and the radio, I bet," he thought. "Wonder when she slept last?"

He reminded himself that he had a job to do which involved delicate judgments at high speed, and he had no business going into it with hindering worries on his mind. If that girl did not watch herself, she would wind up under the care of Jean and "M. D." McLeod.

"I'm liable to, myself," he muttered, "if I don't snap out of it now! I wonder who'll pick me up if I zig out there when I ought to zag?"

He stopped at a phone connection and called the field control dome to learn if they were ready for him.

Dazzling glints of light flashed here and there from that part of the Pacific Ocean still in bright sunlight as Hansen came in sight of Kirch. The coast of California had faded into the darkness and Asia was partly in view. He estimated that he had been moving for nearly eight hours.

His pace was still a rhythmic lope, but the feeling of having vigorous reserves of strength had worn off. Hansen knew that he must rest soon. In traversing the flat, crater-speckled plain since his panic, he had paused only once when he took a few minutes to recharge the oxygen tank of his suit.

"But I'm due for a good half hour off my feet," he decided.

His legs, he noticed, had lost some of their snap, so that his bounding trot was less exuberant. On the other hand, this resulted in his getting slightly better control of his stride; he no longer broke his rhythm by bouncing too high. The thing that bothered him most was the growing ache across the small of his back.

He skirted the ringwall of the last of a series of small craters and saw the shadowed side of the seven-mile wall. He was approaching the left curve of it, for he had hours ago decided to abandon the tractor tracks when he had crossed them again.

"No use running up the right and getting into the Kirch Mountains," he had muttered. "I'd have to zig-zag through them and I doubt I'll feel like making any extra distance by then."

His guess now, from the angle of Earth in the starry sky, was that he was heading a shade left of his generally southerly route. He reminded himself that he must change after rounding Kirch.

"I'll keep going till I'm past," he promised himself. 'Then I'll sit down and relax a while."

He could not see much point in making another few miles out into the empty wasteland beyond Kirch. The crater was a natural goal to mark a section of his journey. About halfway between Plato and Archimedes, it was further than he had dreamed of going. Even now, after he had seen how fast he could travel in the light gravity, it struck him as almost unbelievable that he would have covered such a distance. It was nearly a hundred and fifty miles.

Yet here he was, not in bad shape at all. He glanced at the outer slope of the ringwall on his right, and mentally catalogued his various irritations. There was, of course, the general clamminess that resulted from spending hours in a spacesuit, plus the fact that his bladder was beginning to bother him and there was nothing he could do about it. The overheating due to his exertions had been partially adjusted when he had discovered during his last halt that he could regulate the heating unit by a small dial in his battery pack, which discovery left him slightly aggrieved at not having had the finer points of the care and handling of spacesuits more exhaustively explained to him.

"But then," he reflected, "I was probably expected to spend a lot of time in the darkroom as a spare photographer."

He could not say he was hungry, although he supposed that sooner or later he would discover feelings of weakness. His suit seemed to be functioning as well as could be expected, except for something that had given way in the right knee on that one leap. He wondered if a spring were working loose.

"That could end up giving me a beautiful limp," he thought. "With fourteen pounds inside, and no air at all outside, it'd be tough to bend a joint without some mechanical help."

By now, he could see light-streaks along the ringwall, and knew that he was rounding it. The lighting gradually increased as he continued, until when he began to move out into the open plain some time later, the walls were mostly gray with earth-light. Kirch had a "new" appearance, as craters went. Its floor was not lava-filled, nor its ringwall seemingly as long exposed to thermal erosion, so that the probability was that it had been formed after the "sea" around it.

Hansen began to keep an eye out for a suitable place to sit down. Presently, he located a rock the size of an auto.

"Time for a drink, and then 111 pick out a good spot," he sighed.

The second he stopped to grope with his lips for the little hose, he knew he was really tired.

The water, cool from being only partly surrounded by heating coils to protect it from the exterior cold, refreshed him but slightly. The running had left a thick taste in his mouth.

Hansen unslung the big cylinder he had carried on his back and set it down beside a comfortable indentation in the rock. He then unfastened his back pack of tank and batteries. The metal-covered connection protecting the hose and wires was long enough to permit the pack to be set at his side.

He lowered himself to the fine sand and leaned his back against the rock with a sigh of relief. He squirmed into a more comfortable position.

"Wish I hadn't drunk all that water," he growled.

He leaned the back of his neck against the neckpiece of his suit. It was not uncomfortable except that he found himself staring directly into the light of Earth.

"I'm getting used to it all right, if I think that's too bright," he thought. "Bet my pupils are big as a cat's now."

Ironically, his feet had not started to hurt until his weight was off them. It felt as if he were developing blisters. The coveralls he wore under the spacesuit, moreover, had begun to chafe in a few places—around the armpits as he swung his arms, behind his right knee, on the inside of his thighs.

He also was reminded of the sweat that had trickled around or into his eyes, for the lids felt sore.

"I want a different view," he grunted, picking himself up. "Facing the other way, maybe I can rest my eyes."

Carrying his back pack, he started around the rock, then prudently went back for his big oxygen cylinder. He could think of no good reason for dragging this with him, but he somehow felt more comfortable with it beside him.

The other face of the rock was blackly shadowed, and he was forced to find a convenient spot by groping about. With a sigh, he settled down, squirmed again into an easy position, and found himself contemplating the ringwall of Kirch a few miles away. The regular sough of air through his suit and the quiet hum of the mechanisms that were keeping him alive were so familiar by now that he hardly noticed them. It was the cessation of movement, not any diminishment of the normal sounds, that lent an impression of quiet to the scene.

He looked at the ringwall, squinting against the sting in his eyes that caused them to water occasionally. The left extremity was dim in the distance, but to the right, he could clearly see the slope of the wall as it curved to meet the plain. There was no feeling of a towering, insecurely balanced mass like that of the mountain.

"Although a crater at a distance does look like a mountain range," he thought. "Not so close as this; it goes up too steeply."

Ot/T BEYOND the farthermost planet of SoTs system— toward the heart of the galaxy where rich worlds revolve slowly or swiftly about other suns, waiting for the foot of man and the weight of his ambition to change them. What if an explorer discovers a too perfect world? Such a gift from fortune arouses suspicion, not gratitude. Where was the hidden trap, Captain Chang wondered.

Thou Good and Faithful

K. HOUSTON BRUNNER

The big ship eased leisurely out of hyperspace, solidified into reality, and settled with a few prim puffs from its steering jets into an orbit around the planet.

"There it is, captain," said Deeley with pardonable pride.

The captain nodded, pipe clenched between his teeth, and said, T wonder what we'll find here."

In seventy years of wandering he had grown to expect the unexpected.

Around him in the big cabin that tradition insisted on calling the bridge the four senior officers under his command sat at their control desks, from which each co-ordinated the information provided by his particular department. Officially, Deeley's title was Nav; Spinelli's, Engines; Engelhart, Personnel; Adhem, Biological, and Keston, Observation. In practice, these names were pretty elastic.

The planet filled nearly half of the direct viewport with blue-green radiance, dimmed in patches by the presence of two atmosphereless moons which lay like dark stones in a shallow shining pool. Beyond it hung the curtain of ten million stars— a mass of dusky gold, the very center of the galaxy. 102

It didn't yet seem right that there should be stars packed so thick in any planet's sky.

The captain's name was Chang—a good terrestrial name-but he had been raised on New Earth, Alpha Centauri IV, way out towards the rim of the galaxy, where the stars were no more than occasional flecks of gold in the dark velvet of the sky. Here in the neighborhood of the Hub it was different. Here it was the black that pitted the bright.

The world below looked to be a good world, though it was maybe twice as old as Earth. This was an older part of the universe. There were a few brilliant clouds in its atmosphere, and there were wide seas, but not so wide as Earth's, being less than half the surface of the planet. And chlorophyll green shone bright on the spectroscopes.

There were no deserts and no ice-packs.

Behind him, Keston of Observation cleared his throat and said, "Captain, here's the data on the planet."

"Let's have," said Chang.

"Density, mass and surface grav are so close to Earth normal we can't differentiate them. Air's a little thin—about thirteen point six pounds at sea level, I guess—and high on C0₂ and low on oxygen, but only about a per cent each way. Plenty of water vapor—in short, breathable. Forty-five per cent of the surface is ocean. Has a twenty-nine-hour day and about an eleven-month year. It's an older world than Earth, and the pull of the moons and the sun have respectively lengthened the day and shortened the year."

Chang nodded, said, "Is that all?"

"Just about. We haven't made out any evidence of habitation yet, but that'll come if it exists. There's a lot of vegetation-chlorophyll vegetation—both in and out of the sea."

Chang took his pipe out of his mouth and blew smoke. He said, "Good. Tell me if you get anything else, will you."

"Right, sir."

He sucked on his pipe ruminatively, relaxing in his chair before the viewport. A planet matching Earth this close was a find in a million, literally, for an oxygen-high atmosphere was the second most unstable of all possible atmospheres and rarely survived, whereas chlorine-high, hydrogen-high and methane-high were all too common. It could mean retirement and ease for them when the colonists came. They could ask their own price for an acre of ground.

Assuming it was uninhabited and theirs by right of prior discovery, that was, and he felt it might be. This close to the Hub, where the ships that had been so far might be numbered on your fingers, a previous discovery was unlikely, and as for indigenous races, oxygen reactions seemed to build unstable life forms which died quickly. A world twice as old as Earth might once have been inhabited—

But he was basing his judgments on data gathered far away. Too far away. Here, everything might very well be new.

From behind him, Keston said: "Sir, Sandiman thinks he's found signs of habitation on the inner moon."

"Indigenous or planted?" said Chang.

"Can't tell, sir, but I'd advise investigation."

"We'll take a look at it, then," said Chang with decision. "Engines!"

"Sir?" said a quiet voice with a lilting Romance accent. Spinelli had inherited that from an ancestor more than half a millennium ago, back in the days before the races merged.

"Shift us over to the nearer moon," said Chang.

"Sir," said Spinelli.

The viewport changed. For an instant there was the golden glory of stars. Then the barren, airless, pitted face of the inner moon began to show clearly, lit by the reflected light of its primary, and at last hung steady, almost filling the viewport, while they played off its attraction against an antigrav beam. Chang looking it over, said, "Keston, have someone put a 'scope on this port, will you?"

The image blanked for a second before a small section of it reappeared, fantastically bloated, as if it were scant yards away instead of two hundred miles. Keston volunteered, "Sandiman reported something in the crater with its ringwall in three sections—see it?"

"I see," nodded Chang.

Deeley had got up from his chair and come over to stand behind him. Shortly, he uttered a muffled exclamation and said, "Sir, what's that hut?"

Chang permitted himself a slight smile. "It's rather more than a hut," he said. "From the way it shows up you could put this ship inside it and have room to spare. Looks to me like the top dome—supply lock, maybe—of a pressurized city."

Deeley said, with the disappointment in his voice partly masked by his interest in contacting a new culture, "Then that means a non-indigenous race, doesn't it?"

"Looks like it," nodded Chang, leaning closer to the port. He said in a curious tone, "Keston, have the magnification stepped up, and tell me what's odd about that dome."

The picture again swelled enormously, and Keston said, with more than a hint of relief in his voice, "Locks are open, sir, inner and outer, and there are a number of meteor rents in the roof."

"I thought it looked odd. That means we needn't expect much trouble from that quarter. Is it the only one on the moon?"

After a pause, "Yes, sir," reported Keston. "And we haven't found any signs of habitation on the planet, either. Hardesty thinks he's found a city site, but it's so overgrown it equally well could be a natural formation. No sign of cities or even roads."

"Good," grunted Chang. "Spinelli, put us down within shouting distance of that dome, will you?"

"Right, sir," Spinelli answered.

His viewport blanked for a moment as they took the 'scope off it, and then relit to show the distant moon rising rapidly to meet them. At this range he could quite easily make out the dome with his naked eye.

Then the crater with the triply split wall filled the port, and the big ship settled with hardly a jolt on a level surface fused and scarred by the hot jets of rockets landing and taking off.

The image in the port stilled, and was that of the ringwall outlined against the stars.

A searchlight sprang up, began a methodical sweep across the floor of the crater, and they waited with interest for what it might show.

After a while, Keston said, "Sir, we've picked up a rocket in the shadow of the far ringwall. I have it on my screen."

Chang got up and came across the bridge to survey the harsh black and white image in front of Keston. The rocket was a small one, perhaps even an individual job, and its hull shone unblink-ingly in the glare of the searchlight.

"Locks wide, you notice," commented Chang after a while. "Looks like it got left behind when they quit. Put the building on the screen, will you?"

The screen flickered and then went blank except for the jagged line of the ringwall silhouetted against the stars. It was a matter of two or three seconds before the searchlight swept around and showed a tall building, tall with the fantastic flying tallness of low gravity, that looked like the main hall at Grand Central Spaceport made aesthetically acceptable. You could have put the ship inside it with no trouble at all.

Chang studied it with considerable interest. It was plainly the work of a race versed in architecture, for it was superbly designed to waste no more than necessary on resisting gravity, yet to maintain an atmosphere at fourteen pounds to the square inch without risk.

But it was open and deserted.

They stood looking at it in silence, except for the very quiet humming of the generators and the creak-crack of the hull that was the ship talking to itself. Finally Chang straightened with a grunt.

"Engelhart!"

"Sir?"

"Are your men standing to battle stations?"

"Of course, sir," said Engelhart with injured dignity.

"They needn't. There won't be a reception committee. But detail me a couple of men to come on over and take a gander at this place before we go downstairs, will you? You can come yourself if you like."

"Glad to, sir," said Engelhart. "What do I tell the men we've got?"

"Looks like a plum cake, but tell them not to count their chickens. Say we've struck an Earth-type world which looks like it's uninhabited, but emphasize that bit about the looking."

"Good enough, sir. When do we start?"

"As soon as you're ready," said Chang. He knocked out his pipe and went towards the door, paused before going out to look at the scene in the viewport. So many stars, and no knowing what you'd find among them—

He went down to Medical and submitted to having his semicircular canals numbed to prevent nausea and his heart slowed to avoid wasting energy. Then two orderlies helped him into his bulky spacesuit, and he shuffled awkwardly out of the hospital section into the anteroom of the personnel lock.

There was only moon gravity here—about one-tenth g—and he flexed his arms and legs a few times and checked his equipment. Before he finished Engelhart joined him, face keen and sharp behind his transparent mask. He nodded, clicked on his microphone and said, "Can you hear me, sir?"

"Loud and clear. Who've you picked to come with us?"

"Trooper Anson, sir. He'll be here in a moment." He checked his oxygen supply with practiced efficiency, turned his torch on and off a few times, and stamped to make sure his joints were working freely.

Then Trooper Anson joined them, and they moved cautiously into the lock and waited while the big doors behind them slid shut. Before the others opened, a voice crackled in their phones.

"Keston here, sir. We're keeping our 'scopes on you just in case, but I don't expect you'll find trouble. We found one hole in the top of the building twenty feet across."

Chang said, "Right. Stand by to open locks. Ready?"

"Ready."

They turned on their magnetic soles for the brief instant in which the air in the lock whooshed out into free space with a thin scream, and then they moved forward to the top of the ramp beyond and stood staring at a monument to a vanished race.

The stars filled the sky so brightly that they had to shade their eyes to see it in the dim glow of the searchlight—a vast and empty, and enigmatic, building.

Chang said slowly, "That's a lovely piece of design, Engel-hart."

Engelhart nodded behind his faceplate. "They never knocked that up on their first trip. I'd lay good money on there being a city under here. I wonder why they abandoned it."

Chang shrugged. "We'll find out later—perhaps. Shall we move?"

They went down the metal ramp to the scorched rock at its foot, snapped off their magnetic soles and began to bound in twenty-foot leaps across the short mile that separated them from the building.

For a while there was no noise except star static and the irregular thud after each jump as they landed with enough force to disturb the microphones, and they braked gradually to a halt a few yards from the open end of the building.

They stood surveying it. After a pause, Chang said, "Anson!"

"Sir?"

"Shine your torch inside, will you?"

A few seconds later a puddle of dazzling light a few inches in diameter sprang up on the ground before them and leaped into the cavernous hollow, widening as it did so. It showed nothing.

Chang said, "Switch it off," and took the shade away from his faceplate.

After a while he could make out a little of the interior by the starlight that filtered through a dozen gashes in the vaulting roof. The main floor of the hall was smooth and level, but stacked at the sides were crates, their metal bright and untarnished in the airlessness, and a small vehicle stood parked against one wall.

Far at the back he could dimly discern something like an elevator shaft leading down into the crust of the moon—presumably the city of which this was the outward and visible sign.

He said, "Keston, still watching us?"

"Of course, sir," Keston answered from the ship.

"We're going inside. Your 'scopes'U lose us and I imagine radar will, too. These walls are metal. I'll have Anson stay here, though, and we'll relay messages through him. Got that?"

"Right, sir," said Keston.

Anson had already taken his orders and moved off to one side. He was unfolding the chair attachment of his suit as Chang and Engelhart took their first cautious steps into the building, their torches shedding small circles of light that dimmed to nothing a hundred feet away.

The floor, Chang noted, was metal, smooth and unmarked save for a few bright scratches. He heard a thud then, both through his earphones and by bone-conduction from the floor. He turned in astonishment to see Engelhart making determined but fruitless efforts to lift his feet from the floor.

Engelhart cut short his startled exclamation. He said in a queer voice, "I just switched on my magnets to see if the floor was magnetic, sir. Take a look at it, will you?"

Chang nodded and bent down, examining it. It was cobalt blue and magnetic, and the durasteel knife built into his right glove blunted its tip against it. He looked up and said in an awed voice, "That's durasteel, Engelhart."

"Yes, sir. I thought so. And any race that can afford to throw it around like this has my respect."

Chang got up slowly. "Mine too, Engelhart," he said. "This place just couldn't be duplicated by man. Why, any single planet wouldn't have enough durasteel to floor it. They got a long way ahead of us, then. I wonder why they went."

Engelhart shrugged, and they went over to inspect the crates piled up at the side, but they were empty, or contained no more than the flotsam left by a swiftly ebbing tide of civilization—so much so, that one would have sworn the users of the hammers and drill atop the open crates had just put them down and would be back in a moment. The small vehicle afforded no clues. It was apparently self-propelled, but there was no visible power source, unless it absorbed induced electricity from the floor, or broadcast energy; the controls, which might have helped them to picture the creature who used them, had been pared down to a single rod bearing a simple press-button on the tip that served for both steering and start-stop gear, and there was no rest or seat.

Chang grunted, said, "That tells us a lot!"

Engelhart said, "Sir, I think if there is anything to be found here at all, it'll be in the city beneath, and that may call for a full-scale investigation. Chances are it'd be simpler to study the planet itself. If they've had space travel and lost it, even if they haven't died off altogether, they won't present any serious problem."

"Agreed. But we'd best have a look at the entry to the city beneath at least before we move on." Chang swept his torch-beam around and froze suddenly, his free hand groping wildly for the blaster at his side. Engelhart caught his muttered exclamation, followed his eye and almost cried out in horror.

Then Chang relaxed, chuckling. "Phew, that gave me a fright! I thought for a moment we'd run across an alien, but it's only a robot. I wonder how long it's been here."

Engelhart wiped his forehead a little shakily against the absorbent lining of his helmet, and said with heartfelt relief, "Let's go take a look at it, sir."

Together they leaped across the intervening forty-odd yards and halted to survey the immobile robot. It was not purely uniform, but like many human-built servitors a rough imitation of its creators. It was about nine feet tall and faintly anthropoid in that it had a head, topping a cylindrical body, but it had six limbs—two legs, four arms ending in delicate plierlike devices with cutting, shaping and gripping appliances. Two lenses in the front of its head, set close together, shone dully in the light of their torches.

"Will you want this taken back to the ship?" Engelhart asked.

"No, that can wait. It's been here space knows how long already. It won't run away, and another few days waiting won't hurt it. There are more urgent things to do."

With a lingering backward glance at the motionless machine, Engelhart turned to follow the captain into the back of the hall, towards the downward-leading shafts. They also had locks, as a precaution against meteor-damage to the outer section, but at both ends they were fully open, and there was no air below.

Chang shuddered slightly as he looked down five hundred feet into their black depths. He said, "I wouldn't have liked to be down there when the first meteor hit."

Engelhart said, "I don't think there was anyone there then, sir. It looks to me as if they simply checked out in a big hurry— they wouldn't have left the outer locks open otherwise."

"That's a point," agreed Chang. "So there wouldn't be much below even if we did try to climb in. I think you were right about the advisability of moving downstairs right away. Let's go."

Engelhart was shining his torch down the shaft without result. He said, "I notice they did economize on the durasteel as far as lining the shaft goes. This floor's only about six inches thick, but even so it's a pretty costly extravagance—"

Chang turned sharply and stared back towards the entrance where Trooper Anson was visible waiting patiently in radio view of the ship.

"What is it, sir?" Engelhart demanded.

Chang gestured with his torch, and the other automatically followed an extension of his line of motion up to the jagged rents in the roof. He said, "See that big gash? How big a meteor do you imagine it would take to make it?"

Engelhart calculated rapidly. "I'd say it couldn't have been less than twenty feet across, which means—eleven, twelve—a mass of maybe a hundred tons."

Chang began to move out across the floor, switching his torch from side to side as he went. He said, "Since when has six inches even of durasteel been able to take a kick like that? Can you see any signs of meteor fragments or splash damage? Ah, here we are. Look—the floor's been re-welded and ground smooth with a high velocity diamond buffer to make it level. And it's just below the biggest meteor strike."

Engelhart, glancing up at the thick-packed stars beyond the shattered roof, said, "That's very strange, sir."

Chang was following the marks of the weld around the floor. He said, half to himself, "Who repaired this floor? And why didn't they fix the roof first to give themselves air to work in?"

"Maybe they used robots for the job," suggested Engelhart. "That would account for the presence of the one we saw."

"Could do," said Chang, straightening up. "But then why didn't they finish the job? What made them stop halfway? And will it do the same to us? Out of here, Engelhartl Jump!"

Three quarters of an hour later he stood gazing from the viewport in the nose of the ship while they lifted away from the moon and began the leisurely topple into an orbit that would brush atmosphere and allow them to settle without any fuss, letting the air do their braking for them.

Behind him Keston said suddenly, "Sir, Hardesty says he just picked up a flicker from astem. It's gone into radar shadow now, but he says it didn't look like a meteor—could have been a ship."

"Big or small?"

"Small, sir. About the size of the rocket we found back on the moon."

"Then it probably was that," said Chang, turning quickly. "Deeley, Spinelli, give us a quick put-down."

"Do you mean really quick or just quick, sir?" asked Spinelli. Deeley's hands leaped for the Nav computer before him.

"Really quick. A bottlestopper. Pick the largest piece of open-wide open—flat ground you can in the time. Engelhart!"

Engelhart said without looking round from his control desk, "Sir?"

"Get the men to battle stations again, just in case." Engelhart nodded, pushed the red knob at the top left of his board. A bell sounded faintly somewhere inship.

"Sir!"

"Yes, Spinelli?"

"Bottlestopper coming up, sir. Well be down in about thirty seconds from—NOW!"

Twenty-nine seconds later the ship, red-hot from her whirlwind swoop through the atmosphere, fired half a square mile of grasslike plants in the approximate middle of a smoothly rolling plain dotted with clumps of trees at intervals of about a mile. Engelhart, whose responsibility it was, ordered out the extinguisher sprays, and when the mist of their operation blew clear of the viewport Chang looked out on a blue sky a little darker than that of his own planet and a sun a little yellower than the one under which he had grown up. But the vegetation was green and waved in the breeze like grass, and faintly on the horizon showed low blue mountains. He said almost absently, "Deeley, this is a splendid world."

"Thank you, sir," said Deeley. He had deduced the existence of it from a distance of ninety light-years and brought them out of hyperspace within half a million miles of it—which was a remarkable piece of navigation—so there was reason for congratulation.

Engelhart said, "What are we supposed to do, sir?"

"Sit around, as usual, Engelhart—what else? We can't be sure it was a ship Hardesty picked up, but if it was and if it was the one we saw on the moon, then it can only be the robot on board."

They digested that in silence.

"In which case we can assume that the inhabitants will pay us a call, and soon. Maybe we were wrong in assuming that because the dome on the moon was broken they'd had space travel and lost it. Maybe it's only temporarily out of commission while robots see to the damage, not completely abandoned."

Keston said dryly, "Then where are the inhabitants hiding, sir?"

Chang shrugged. He said, "This is an old world, Keston. The race inhabiting it could be a whole lot ahead of us. Maybe they don't build cities or roads. Maybe they live in isolated houses and fly everywhere. Keep your men to stations, Engelhart. Adhem!"

"Sir?" said the medical officer.

"While we're waiting, you can run off the usual tests—presence of viruses, bacteria, and injurious ingredients in the air and ground, and so on."

"Right away, sir."

They waited. It was unlikely that there were any natives within quite a few miles, at any rate. They had seen, as they came down, no roads, no cities, no spaceports, and no sign of any smaller artificial construction. True, they had had almost no time to look for them. They had come through one hundred ninety miles of detectable atmosphere in twenty-nine seconds, and even the so-called instantaneous cameras couldn't hold focus at that speed. But this nearly flat and mostly bare plain seemed natural and haphazard enough, without sign of planned layout, and if it was big enough for Spinelli to have picked it out from a hundred thousand miles out—

Adhem's speaker burped and whispered for a moment, and after a few curt comments the medical officer said helplessly, "All right then." He turned to Chang.

"I can give this place a clean bill of health, sir," he said. His voice held a disapproving note.

Chang observed it, commented, "Something's eating you."

"Yes, sir. There is not one single bacterium, virus or subvirus in any of the air, soil or vegetation samples we took. There is no sign of any poison, either, but that doesn't worry us. But it isn't natural for there to be no bacterial"

"Perhaps it isn't natural," said Chang equably. "After all, the only bacteria aboard this ship are the ones we use to digest our food, but that isn't natural. We saw to it ourselves."

"But you couldn't do that to a whole world—I"

"Why not? I'd believe a lot of a race that can afford to floor the supply lock of a complete city with durasteel. Either way, what does it matter? Engelhart!"

"Sir?"

"I want a thorough survey of the immediate neighborhood from as low as your boys can go without getting into trouble. Say within a radius of a hundred miles. That's your pigeon. Use helis, and screen them well. Deeley, I also want a full photographic record with wide-angle and instantaneous cameras and full color stereo prints of the entire surface of the planet—land and water—from high level. You can have two of the lifeboats for that. And I want results quicker than jump. Engelhart—one more thing: Tell your boys to pay special attention to anything that could be a sign of habitation and report it as soon as found."

"Right, sir," said Engelhart, and he and Deeley turned to their control desks, whispering orders into hanging microphones.

Chang turned to Adhem, said, "Is this planet safe?"

"One hundred per cent, sir—and no reservations."

"Right. Have the verandah extended, will you? Let's go outside."

They stood leaning over the rail of the "captain's verandah," a platform extending outside the bridge halfway up the nose of the ship and thus about forty feet from the ground. Blue sky shone over them and the warmth of the sun refreshed them.

After a while Deeley and Engelhart joined them from inship, and they watched the survey helicopters purr out from their lock like a flight of gigantic bees, their vanes silver in the sunlight, and vanish from sight as their screens went up. Then with a roar and a clank the two lifeboats detailed for Deeley's planetary mapping job kicked a couple of miles into the sky of anti-grav beams from the ship and went heavenwards on a cloud of atomic flame. There was nothing to do but wait, warily.

Inside the ship the crew stood to battle stations. The launchers and the mine throwers and the energy beams and the fluorine spray jets swung evenly in their guides, invisible behind screens that would go down at the first sign of hostility. The radar antennae were out, poking their radiant fingers into the blue sky, and the electron 'scopes moved in continual survey of the neighborhood. There was small chance of them catching the approach of anything even moderately well screened, but there was the possibility that alien-built screens might fail to cover a band of radiation which men used. But the alarm on Keston's lapel speaker remained silent.

EngeUiart picked a spot to lean over the rail, said appreciatively, "This could be Earth, couldn't it?"

Chang's pipe smoke rose blue and straight in the still air. He said with interest, "Have you been there, then?"

Engelhart laughed. He said, "Not I, sir. I was bom on Beta Centauri III—Heimwelt, we call it. One of the few worlds to retain a second official language—Old German in our case, as well as Anglic Terrestrial. You been to Earth, sir?"

"No. In fact, I doubt if we have anyone aboard who has, let alone anyone born there. Have we, Deeley?"

Deeley grinned, said self-consciously, "Only myself, sir. I checked."

Chang said, "And I didn't knowl Is this like Earth—really?"

Deeley turned and stared out across the greenness of the plain to the blue bills on the horizon. He said softly, "Not in the slightest. It's Earth as it may have been a thousand years ago, but there hasn't been room for this much peacefulness and beauty on Earth for a good many centuries. That's why I emigrated—to find a chance to be alone."

Chang nodded, his pipe tying a knotted trail of smoke. He said, "It's gotten that way on New Earth, too—where I was born. No place for beauty any more. Too much overcrowding. Too much to do and too little time to do it."

"Uhuh," agreed Keston with a touch of cynicism. "But by the same token, if this world is uninhabited our fortunes'll be made by the spill-over from those same overcrowded planets."

"What a mess that'll make," said Adhem seriously.

The alarm on Keston's lapel purred softly, and the observation officer held the speaker to his mouth. He said, "Keston listening."

"Sandiman here," said the tiny but clear voice. "We've spotted a small animal of some sort on the port side—just about at the edge of the burnt patch."

"Wait a moment," said Keston. He turned to the left of the verandah. The others followed his example, searching for some sign of the creature.

Then they saw it—a small furry beast about the size of a wallaby and somewhat resembling one. It had blind white eyes like tennis balls and long ears cupped forward towards the ship. It was just at the edge of the burning.

Chang pulled a monocle from his pocket and looked it over with care. He said finally, "I wish they'd allow us a regular alien psychologist and semanticist instead of leaving everything to chance."

Adhem laughed under his breath. He said, "The argument they use, sir, is that only one planet in a thousand is inhabited, and of those few races we do find common ground in five cases out of six just doesn't exist. Then we run across a plum like this one and we get the blame if anything goes wrong."

"Hello!" Chang interrupted. "Unless my eyes are playing tricks I don't think that's a specimen of the local intelligence."

"Why, sir?" said Keston. He had produced a monocle of his own now and was also looking at the alien.

"Several things. The most obvious is that the robot we found on the Moon had six limbs and this has four, but that could be for convenience. What I do find interesting is that this one hasn't any hands."

Keston looked at the beast's upper limbs with care. Sure enough, they terminated in flat pads that showed little sign of being able to grip anything, and the possession of gripping appendages was a prime attribute of all known intelligence, whether suckerlike, tentacular, manuform or even magneto-gravitic like the high-density Proximans who had a small colony on Pluto. He said, "You never know, sir."

Chang sighed slightly. He agreed, "You never know. All right, Engelhart, I'll attempt communication. Have everything you've got ready to hit if anything goes wrong. If you have to blast me, tell Deputy Captain Malory to come on watch and lift for space at once. Get me some gloves, somebody, and you'd better let me have a gravitic belt in case they shoot something at me."

Keston whispered into his lapel speaker, and a moment later an orderly came out with a pair of steel-quilted gloves that would stand hydrofluoric for twenty seconds and yet would let the wearer tell a milled coin from a plain one, and a gravitic belt that would stop a high velocity bullet aimed anywhere in head or body from more than a yard away. Chang put them on and began to descend the ladder from the verandah to the ground.

They watched in silence as he began to walk cautiously through the charred vegetation, black powdery ash marking the legs of his trousers. The alien creature did not move, except to swing its big ears from side to side.

Twenty yards from it he stopped, holding his hands well out at the side to show they were empty. The creature seemed to be studying him, listening for something. He could see now that the white, bulging eyes were not blind. Each had a black pupil and each was turned on him. But it did not take fright and run away, and, encouraged, he stepped nearer.

Feet from it, he paused again, and then started slightly as it moved, but its only action was to come up to him as if to sniff him like a dog, and then to rub itself contentedly against his legs.

Hardly the action of an intelligent being, but certainly nothing to get alarmed about. He bent down to pick it up, found it not only amenable but eager, for it jumped on his shoulder and began to play with his ear.

Gently he turned and began to walk towards the ship.

When he came within speaking distance of the verandah, Adhem said, "What is it, sir?"

"Affectionate, but not intelligent," Chang reported. "If they're all like this one, they'd make good pets. Do you want to examine it?"

"Not particularly, sir. Its metabolism should be substantially the same as ours, and until we contact the intelligent aliens I'm inclined to be chary of molesting the local fauna. They might misinterpret it."

"Good enough," said Chang. He put up his hand to help the creature down, but he heard the alarm on Keston's lapel ring again, and waited, looking at the verandah.

After a moment the men on it turned their eyes to the skyline, and he turned and followed their example. A second's horrified indecision, and he dumped the beast unceremoniously and went up the ladder as fast as he could. As he put his foot on the floor the screens went down and the snub nose of a mine-thrower became visible on each side of the verandah. He turned to look.

Less than half a mile away, on top of a slight rise that silhouetted him against the sky, stood a robot exactly similar in all respects but one to the one they had seen on the moon. The single difference was that this one was moving.

He came striding down the slope in the direction of the ship, arms swinging in pairs to counter the motion of his legs, the sun glinting on his polished body. He—not it. He was more like a living thing than Chang had imagined metal could look. At the edge of the burnt patch he paused and surveyed them.

The little creature on the ground below the verandah hesitated a moment, and then, as if in response to an unseen signal, scuttered across the charred "grass" till it reached the robot. It went up his legs and body as if it were scaling a tree and perched on his upper left shoulder—the robot had four arms and therefore four shoulders also—whereupon the latter turned around and began to stride the way it had come.

On the skyline it paused to take one last look at the ship, raised one "hand" as if in salute, and disappeared.

Keston exhaling loudly, said, "A robot with pets, yetl"

Deeley was staring at the place where the robot had been, a look of disbelief on his face. He shook his head slowly.

Chang said, "That makes critical massl Engelhart, get a heli after that robot and find where, if anywhere, he's going. Make them carry heavy arms and screen them well."

"Right, sir," said Engelhart crisply, going inship. A moment later his voice was heard issuing curt orders.

Chang waited impatiently, drumming on the rail with his fingertips, humming snatches of tunes culled at random from his memory. Shortly, a fast heli pulled away from the ship, its screens blanking it out as soon as it was well clear, following the track left in the thick "grass" by the heavy metal feet of the robot.

"Back to your posts," Chang ordered his officers, and they went inship, sat down at their control desks, relaxed but ready to snap into action at a single word. They waited expectantly.

A quarter hour elapsed before Engelhart's speaker chuckled to itself and he turned to Chang. "Radio from the heli I sent after the robot, sir. The crew report they finally caught up with him— he was running, and making a good hundred ten miles an hour at that—but in spite of their screens, the moment they hove in sight he pulled up and sat down. At the moment he's playing with the animal he was carrying, and it seems he's content to stay put until they leave. They're circling overhead, hoping his patience will wear out first, but they'd appreciate further instructions."

"Tell them to spray a tracer fluid on him and get hull-down over the horizon. Then they can track him without being seen themselves."

Engelhart nodded and relayed the orders into his hanging mike.

Chang turned to look out the viewport. A robot that could run at more than a hundred miles an hour over unmade ground was no common automaton. How could a race that built such machines have degenerated—abandoned its lunar stations and its cities so completely that no traces could be found? And how long ago must it not have perished if it had left so little sign of its presence?

But why had the robots not gone, too, if their creators had gone?

Engelhart said with faint amusement in his voice, "Sir, the crew of the heli did what you suggested and tracked him from below the horizon, but after a while one of them noticed the tracer impulses were getting rather diffuse, so they took a look and found they were tracking a small stream. Looks like the robot washed off the tracer as soon as they were out of sight and is now hell-bent for no one knows where."

"All right," said Chang wearily. "Call 'em back. But next time one of those robots shows itself near the ship, have a heli on his tail at once and follow him if it takes a year to make him move. Got that?"

"Excuse me, sir," said Engelhart. He turned to his speaker, listened to the thin voice that crackled from it. After a while he turned back. "The first survey heli's reported in, sir. I'm having its photos developed at once, and there'll be a map ready in about ten minutes."

"Good work, Engelhart," said Chang. "How about your boys, Deeley?"

"I told them not to break radio silence without reason, sir."

"O.K. That reminds me. Keston, have you anybody monitoring the radio bands?"

"Yes, sir, but we haven't got much so far. There's a little that's definitely static, and some more that could very well be, but shows symptoms of artificiality. They're breaking it in the analyzers now."

"Spoken language?"

"Can't say, sir. I doubt it—though of course some languages sound pretty odd. At a guess, having heard a sample of it, I'd say it was basically mathematical."

Chang nodded slowly four or five times. He said, "Do you mean it's someone reciting mathematical formulae?"

"No, sir. I mean someone who thinks from a mathematical foundation. He or she or it sounds like a digital computer at work. There are two or three like that on different wave lengths. Then there are one or two that seem to be pictorial transmissions. I'll let you know if we crack either of them."

"Good," nodded Chang. "Carry on."

Engelhart said, "Sir, all the survey helis are in now. The map should be ready fairly soon. I told them to spread it out on a table in the mess—it's a sight too big to get in here."

Deeley was suddenly alert and bending over his speaker. He exchanged curt comments with his correspondent and then turned to Chang. He said, "Sir, my number two reports they're being observed by an alien ship." "Where are they?"

"Galactic north of the planet, over the pole. The alien isn't doing anything but sit and watch. It's a small vessel like the one we found on the moon. They want to know if they should do anything about it and if so what."

Chang said curtly, "Hold it, KestonI"

"Sir?"

"Have you any radio signals coming in from the galactic north that could conceivably not be static or aurora?"

"I'll find out, sir." He whispered into his mike, waited, listening.

On the top of the hull the big d-f frames swung through varying angles, and a tech somewhere in the bowels of the ship set a universal frequency oscillator to searching the wave bands. After a few moments a voice bubbled from the speaker, and Keston reported, "Yes, sir. One pictorial and one of the other sort. But they're both so faint they're probably leakage from a tight beam."

"Where's that beam focused?"

"Can't tell without a thorough search, sir, but it's somewhere south and west of here. At a guess, less than five hundred miles away."

"Engelhart, have a couple of helis out and look for any sign at all of a radio installation—a frame, a loop, an aerial, anything— southwest of here and less than five hundred miles away. They can ignore the area already searched because if it's within that it'll show up on the photographs."

"Yes, sir. One thing further, sir—you asked about signs of the indigenous race."

"That's right," agreed Chang. "Did they find any?"

"None at all, sir. They saw several robots, with or without accompanying animals, and in one place a herd of animals with one robot in attendance. But no other creatures at all."

"All right. Get those helis out. We can investigate that later."

"Right, sir," said Engelhart, pulling his microphone towards him.

"Sir, what shall I tell my men to do about the alien ship?" Deeley wanted to know.

"Carry on with their map work. If the alien shows signs of hostility, get out from under—but fast. At the same time, try and do nothing in a hurry that might be misunderstood. Got that? Who's in command—a reliable man?"

"Sesraphokis, sir. He's no hothead."

"I'm glad to hear it. Keston, watch for the alien ship when it comes down, will you?" Chang turned to look out the viewport again at the green plain beyond.

Engelhart said, "Sir, the map's ready. Shall we go down and have a look at it?"

"That's pretty fast work, Engelhart. Congratulate whoever's responsible. Where's it been set up?"

"Officers' mess, sir."

"Right then, let's go." Chang took a lapel speaker from his own control desk beside the viewport, clipped it to his jacket, and he and Engelhart went down to the mess.

The door opened on a crowd of people: photo technicians moving around the main table with jars of developer and photo retouchers; a few were putting final touches to the alignment of the map; along the far wall a dozen men, the crew of the survey helis, stiffened to attention as the captain entered.

A thin man with contact lenses and rumpled blond hair came up to them, clicked his heels. His hands were stained with developer and he carried a big wire stereo-drying frame. He said, "The map's on the table, sir. I'm Carmody, photo tech first class."

"Were you in charge of this operation?" Chang wanted to know, nodding at the table.

"More or less, sir."

"A fine piece of work. Let's see it."

They pushed through the crowd to the table and surveyed what lay on it. It was a full-color exaggerated stereo reproduction of the country within a hundred miles of the ship. At points on it rested small plastic crosses in bright colors, indicating places of special interest. Carmody handed his drying frame to a junior with instructions to make it and himself scarce, and picked up a pointer.

He said, "Here's the ship, sir. Right in the middle. The north pole of the planet fortunately coincides almost exactly with galactic north—this world is non-Draysonian and its axis remains permanently vertical, so there are no seasons. North is over here, then, where I've hung this arrow. To give you some orientation, here's the place where the helis lost the robot. The stream's too small to show up well on this scale."

Chang watched, nodding as Carmody flicked his pointer from place to place, referring occasionally to a list in his hand, and his dry precise voice explained the various crosses—robot seen here, robot seen there, two more seen somewhere else, a herd of animals with a robot in attendance on the easterly side of the ship, none of them going anywhere in particular. Apparently, as soon as the helis came over the horizon and in spite of them being well screened, the robots stopped going where they were going and waited patiently till the helis moved on. Frustrating.

The alarm on Chang's lapel rang softly, and he said, "Hold on a moment, Carmody. Chang listening. What is it?"

"Keston, sir. You know you told me to watch for the alien ship when it came down?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Can't track it, I'm afraid, sir. It went into radar shadow behind the rim of the world well out of sight of both Deeley's survey ships and all we've got here as well. That means it could have put down anywhere within a million square miles."

"O.K., Keston. Secretive, aren't they? But keep your 'scopes out, and if you see anything go upstairs larger than a firework, track it. If you must, send a lifeboat after it. But don't miss seeing it go down!"

"Right, sir," Keston answered. The lapel speaker went dead, and Chang turned to Carmody. "Go ahead," he invited.

"Well, sir, there's only one more point of interest and that's this." He laid his pointer on a blue cross about ninety miles southwest of the ship at the center of the map. "Fischer!" he said briefly over his shoulder, "get that stereocube from Mitsubishi, will you? If it isn't fixed yet, use a quick dryer on it. We can, make another print later."

"Right, Mr. Carmody," said a photo tech fourth class who was standing nearby.

Carmody turned to Chang again. He said, "This is the nearest approach we've found to a sign of habitation, sir. It could be an ordinary hill, but it's also the only thing that could by any stretch of the imagination be a camouflaged building. Ah, here we are."

The photo tech fourth class came up to them with a big stereo-cube and handed it over. He said, "Mitsubishi did have to use a quick dryer on it, Mr. Carmody, and it'll fade in about ten minutes."

"Good enough," said Carmody, taking it. "Have him make another and fix it." He turned and put the stereocube on the table, and Chang and Engelhart leaned over to examine it.

They saw a reproduction of a steep-sided hill, vaguely square in plan, crowned with a small clump of trees similar to those that dotted the plain around them—luxurious green growths with soft barkless trunks. Carmody said, "You see, sir, it could be a natural formation, but on a world as old as this there aren't many hills as steep as that and certainly they don't stick up out of a flat plain that way."

Chang glanced from the cube to the site of the blue cross on the map and saw that it was indeed sticking up like a wart on smooth skin. He said in a curiously distant voice, "Very interesting, Carmody. Get me a spotlight and a microscope, will you?"

An observant tech standing nearby anticipated Carmody's order and passed the captain one of the pocket-sized twin microscopes used for examining photos that wouldn't take enlargement. At the same time Carmody pulled one of the ceiling lights down and held it over the top of the cube. Chang scrutinized the hill closely.

At last he straightened with a satisfied grunt and held out the microscope to Engelhart. "Take a look at that clump of trees," he suggested. "Tell me what you see there."

Engelhart adjusted the focus of the viewer and bent to examine the cube. A few seconds later he uttered a surprised exclamation and Chang smiled. "What does it look like?" he asked.

"Sir, if that isn't a radar antenna I'll eat my entire uniform," Engelhart said. He looked at it from a different angle, nodded in excitement. "That's an antenna all right. And there's an incoming beam aerial in the crown of the big tree on the left, and I think there's a transmitter next to it. Sir, what induced them to hide the stuff like that? For our benefit?"

"Maybe they just didn't want to spoil the view," said Chang shortly. He pinched his lapel speaker with his thumb and first fingernails, said, "KestonI"

"Sir?"

"You can call off the search for the focus of that radio beam southwest of here. You'll find it on top of a hill"—he glanced at the map and made a rapid calculation—"about ninety miles from here. You can't miss it—it sticks out like a sore thumb. But don't try to meddle with itl One thing more. Tell those helis, if they see any of the robots on the way home, to open their receivers, let down their screens and record anything they pick up. Don't ask why now."

"Right, sir," said Keston, plainly puzzled, and the speaker went dead. Chang turned to Engelhart.

"That's obviously where the alien ship was delivering its beam. Nice shooting at that range." He pushed the stereocube across to Carmody.

"Have the first properly fixed print sent up to the bridge as soon as it's ready, will you? We'll have to do something about attempting communication, I suppose, but the prospect doesn't thrill me. Engelhart, come back to the bridge with me."

They re-ascended in silence, Chang wearing a thoroughly worried look, and were greeted enthusiastically by Keston. He shut off his speaker and turned to them.

"Sir, we've established a relationship between the robots and that hill with the radio station atop it."

"Already?" said Chang. "How?"

"One of the helis on its way back ran across a robot lying down in the grass, so it made like you said and went down without screens and its radio receiver wide. Better still, another heli came back within a few miles of the hill in question, detoured over it and picked up an incoming beam. They've just re-broadcast it to us, and it's identical with one sent out by the robot. It's double, as usual—one pictorial, one this odd mathematical stuff again. The semantic analyzers gave it up in disgust, apparently, but Running Bull, one of my men, thinks he's got a clue to it. Seems we were right about it being like a digital computer, but it's a cut above the best we have. All our stuff depends on binary figure combinations—you know, one impulse or no impulse. This stuff uses impulses of varying strengths and conveys as much in one signal as we do in ten. Anyway, Running Bull reckons that as soon as he can convert the impulses into our sort of stuff, he can give the analyzers something they can handle. Sir, what gives, though, about the natives? Have they just dug themselves a hole and climbed in? Or have they merely taken fright at our arrival and hidden till they know if we're friendly?"

Chang shook his head. "I don't know. But we've only been on-world six hours, and if I'm any judge six hours is a short time to hide everybody."

"You mean they're insane? Or do they live underground naturally, from choice?"

"That can be answered later," said Chang. He strode over to his own control desk, snapped a switch, spoke into the hanging mike. "Malory? I'm going off watch now. Have Keston post you on the position as it stands. General orders are to sit still and do nothing, but to be ready to go upstairs at short notice. And don't jump to any conclusions."

Two days—the planet's twenty-nine-hour, four-minute days —passed. The big ship sat in the middle of the black patch of charred "grass," already turning green again, and its weapons still swung watchfully from side to side, the radar antennae still probed the sky. The survey of the neighborhood had been extended over a further sixty miles, making the map too big for the table in the officers' mess. It had accordingly been transferred to the floor of the recreation room, since the chart room, where one might have supposed it belonged, was full of three-dimensional star maps. But nothing had happened.

Once, the sky had clouded over and it had rained, and it was after that that fresh green shoots sprouted among the wet ash near the ship. Otherwise everything had been serenely peaceful. Neither animals nor robots had been seen within twenty miles of the ship since the first day. It was as if by tacit consent they were being ignored.

T don't understand it," Engelhart confessed. Since there was nothing they could do just now, the officers on watch were on the captain's verandah looking out over the plain. "What do these people hope to gain by remaining hidden? Do they think we'll get bored and go away again? Surely this is the openest invitation to bring the family and set up house."

"Not quite," Chang contradicted. "Those robots are a disturbing factor. I had hoped for some clue to their behavior and their raison d'etre from Running Bull's idea, but since Keston reported that it appeared to be an arbitrary number-code related to a spoken language, and the analyzers aren't equipped to take straight number and can't take it if it isn't converted, I've given up hope in that direction."

Keston nodded. He had joined them from inship. He said, "But there's one inaccuracy there, sir. For all we know the language might not have been spoken at all. It might be related to a language of signs, for instance, or visual signals of some sort like colors. Running Bull's working on that now. If only we had a semantic analyzer that was more than a kindergarten toy! But that's all we'll have as long as they skimp our allocations to pay for new fun-planets."

Chang nodded emphatically. He said, reaching in his pocket for his pipe and hot-coil lighter, "We're supposed to be the most important branch of the service, and if we find a habitable planet we get a sizable fortune and retirement with honor. But they assuredly don't make the job easy for us. If they'd stop spending so much on entertainment for twenty years or so, I guarantee we could wipe off the overcrowding problem."

From inship came voices, and after a moment Adhem came out on the verandah. He nodded to Chang, said bluntly, "Sir, the men are getting edgy."

Chang said, "I feel that way myself. This waiting for an enemy who doesn't seem likely to turn up would get anybody. All right. What do you prescribe?"

"Let 'em out in the sun, sir. There's no town for them to go into, or any attraction, much, but I think I've spotted a few cases of incipient agoraphobia, and the chance to get out in the air will nip them in the bud. Tell them to keep within sight of the ship, if you like."

"I can do better than that," said Chang. "Engelhart!"

"Sir?" from Engelhart.

"How many alarm connections can you muster?" "About a dozen, sir."

"Right. Detail a working party to mount them on posts and ring the ship with them about four or five hundred yards out so that anything crossing either way will make a racket. As soon as they're set up, you can let the off-watch men go outside."

About an hour later they sat in an irregular semicircle of cushioned chairs on the captain's verandah, and watched the men leave the ship and savor the taste of natural air and the sight of blue sky and the warmth of the sun. A few of the more energetic made up a couple of baseball teams near the stem, but the majority went over to a grassy bank beyond the burnt patch, stripped off their clothes and lay down to sun themselves a while.

Engelhart said, "Are you expecting any trouble at all from the inhabitants, sir, or do you think they're willing to stay hid?"

Chang knocked out his pipe delicately and dropped his bombshell. He said, "I think we've met the intelligent race."

Engelhart's mouth dropped open. He said, "I don't understand, sir."

"Nor I," said Keston. "Do you mean—they're invisible to us, or something?"

"I do not," said Chang calmly. T think the answer is staring us in the face."

They thought it over. Then Deeley said faintly, "Sir, do you mean—the robots?"

The captain nodded, his face strained and serious. He said, T do mean the robots."

Adhem sat up in his chair with a jerk. He said, "No, by thunder, sir. It's impossible. I'll stake my reputation that these were never natural growths. It's against all possibility for an Earth-type planet to evolve metal intelligences."

Another bombshell. "Who said they had evolved?"

"Frankenstein!" said Deeley in an awed voice.

"What was that, Deeley?"

T said Frankenstein, sir. It's the name of a preatomic story current on Earth, dating back to the late Dark Ages, about a man who built the first robot and it killed its creator."

"There's nothing new under any sun," said Chang.

They looked out across the burning to the green plain and the blue hills and bluer sky, and there was no pleasure in these things any more. It was as if a cloud had passed across the sun.

Adhem said puzzledly, "Sir, if I understand you, you're assuming that these robots were built by some intelligent race and turned on and killed their creators."

"Correct," nodded Chang.

"But what makes you think so?"

"You said yourself that metallic beings wouldn't evolve on a world like this. Therefore they were manufactured. To manufacture them, or that lunar station, would require a colossal technology—they're light-years ahead of any robots I've seen on any world—and the only living beings we've seen are small and without holding appendages. If they have the technology, where is it? There are no roads, no cities, not even any houses. The only artificial thing we've seen is a radio station, camouflaged to look like a hill. Living creatures—organic creatures—need protection from the weather and usually means of getting from place to place. They get tired. But no weather can touch a durasteel robot, and it never gets tired. It needs neither roads nor cities. And there aren't any underground cities or any similar place where the inhabitants could be hiding, or our seismo probes would have shown them up. Further, if the intelligent race only made itself scarce because we came, why didn't it take its servants with it?"

He sucked at his pipe, but it had gone out.

"Add to that the fact that we saw a rocket on the inner moon —with its locks open—a meteor-damaged entry to a pressurized city, of which someone or something had mended the floor but hadn't bothered to repair the roof, and a robot. Robots don't need air. Shortly afterwards we saw something that could have been that same rocket lift from the moon and dodge into radar shadow—most conveniently. That wasn't accident, Ad-hem."

"But—why haven't they attacked us?" demanded Engelhart.

"Why should they? The status quo suits them perfectly. If we don't interfere with it, they won't trouble us. If we try to set up house, though, that'll be a different matter."

"But . . . but maybe some natural disaster like a disease—or a war—was responsible?" Adhem suggested.

"Think it over for yourself, Adhem. If there was a war, why did the robots survive? Even durasteel won't take atomic blast. And if they used radio-dust, why haven't we found traces of lead in the soil? Poisons are out for the same reason. As for germ warfare or disease, there are no bacteria here now. Robots don't catch diseases. Why should they clear away the germs after their masters died? Isn't it far more likely that living beings did that?"

Deeley, who had been listening in silence, put in, "Sir, you're assuming that these robots are volitional, aren't you? That their free-will extended even to harming their creators?" Chang nodded. "I thought that wasn't possible."

"Ask Keston. He's the authority."

Deeley looked at the observation officer, who held a doctorate in cybernetics among other distinctions, and received an emphatic nod.

"We couldn't do it. We couldn't put that much intelligence into a single mobile robot. A human-built servant is nothing but a small number of stimulus-response circuits that enable it to obey orders. But it can evaluate situations. It hasn't an endocrine balance, for one thing, nor a random factor in its analyzer. We have to work with a binary signal system—impulse or no impulse. But the stuff we picked up uses variable-strength impulses, and with that you could store between twice and a hundred times as much data according to the sensitivity of your analyzer. Oh yes, it could be done. I see no reason why these robots shouldn't be volitional."

Engelhart was appalled. His face went white. "You know what this reminds me of? The time I talked to the big brain on Canopus X and XI. I wouldn't go through that again if I was paid. I was terrified."

"Why?" Deeley wanted to know.

"Well, I suppose it wasn't really fright so much as awe—the knowing that this man-made thing was ten times as intelligent as its builders and knew ten thousand times as much as any man could hope to learn in a lifetime. But at the bottom of it was always the fear that the servant would become the master."

Chang stuffed his pipe afresh, forcing himself to feel calm. He said, "Here the fear has become reality."

There was a roar of jubilation from the stern of the ship as a big hitter in the baseball game swiped one over the head of the pitcher and began a home run. It symbolized the joyous irrationality of mankind—the knowledge that they were not perfect, not infallible, and quite content to remain so, but permanently afraid, because of that knowledge, of going down before something inhumanly efficient, fearing most of all lest their downfall be of their own doing.

"By all that's holyl" said Keston suddenly, slapping his thigh and sitting up with a jerk. "I think that gives us the answer to the radio signals we picked up."

"How, Keston?" demanded Chang.

"We've wasted time trying to make a language out of it. It isn't a language. It's true telepathy." "Telepathy!"

"Yes, on the mechanical level. It's pure thought without intervening steps. The robot, being mechanical, thinks with electrical impulses, and communicates by broadcasting them as they stand. Magnificent! Running Bull'll go wild over this. Excuse me, sir." He got up and went hastily inship.

By the stern, the noise from the men playing baseball had stopped. A soft breeze ruffled the grassy vegetation of the plain.

Deeley said eventually, "Sir, we can't afford not to have this planet."

Chang nodded, taking his pipe out of his mouth. "Not with twenty billion people on New Earth alone and a birth-death ratio of plus two per cent. This world is worth more than any man could spend."

"Well, sir—what are we going to do about it?"

Til need time to consider it, but the general pattern is clear. The first step would be to pick up a sample of the opposition-magnetic grapples should hold them—and find out if and how, they can be destroyed or immobilized. Then do it. As for that fake hill with the concealed radar gear atop, we'll just blast it and any like it. If these tin soldiers took the world from their creators, I feel no compunction about taking it from them. This is the course of action I suggest in outline. We grab our specimen and go upstairs at once. We can fight off attack easier in space, and if necessary we can dodge into hyperdrive. If we find the robots indestructible, at least by our resources, we'll have to put back for reinforcements. A robot-dominated world would be an unstable element in a galactic culture anyway, and on a sweet world like this one it's a criminal waste—"

His lapel alarm went and he said, "Chang listening."

"Sir, Trooper Phillips P.J. has disappeared."

Chang jerked as if stung. He said, "How?"

"Sir, he was in the ball game by the stern, and Trooper Horrigan was at bat and hit a homer which went behind a ridge, and Trooper Phillips went after it and didn't come back, and from the tracks in the grass it looks like a robot got him."

Chang was on his feet. "What went wrong with the alarm system?"

"Blanked out, sir. We found the master cell'd been blown with a big overload."

"O.K. Call everyone inship at once." He snapped off the speaker, whirled to Engelhart. "Have a heli after that robot. Fit it with a magnetic grapple or some means of stopping the robot without harming the man. Battle stations!"

Engelhart went inship at a run, and Chang turned to the stunned-looking Adhem. He said briefly, "It looks as if our plan to get a sample of the opposition has been anticipated."

They turned and went into the bridge. As they did so, Keston and Spinelli entered from the opposite direction and sat down at their control desks without speaking. The entire ship seemed suddenly to have tensed for action, and instead of being as it were a convenient and comfortable dwelling in beautiful surroundings, it was again a tight little world of its own, very much alone against the universe.

Engelhart's speaker bubbled, and he turned to Chang. "The helis we sent after the robot and Phillips reporting, sir. He's outrun them. He's gone invisible, but they can follow his tracks, and they claim he's making all of three hundred."

"Which way's it heading?" demanded Chang curtly.

"Southwest, sir. Towards the place where we found the radar antennae."

Before Chang could say anything further, Keston interrupted, "Sir, there's an unbeamed broadcast going out—non-pictorial on about three hundred seven meters. Its source appears to be the radio station ninety miles southwest of here."

Chang said, "Spinelli, get us off the ground. This is asking for trouble."

"Planetary take-off, sir?" said the engines officer, bis hand reaching for the appropriate switches.

"No, just hoist us up to about five thousand feet."

"We can't hold that for long on antigrav, sir," said Spinelli wamingly. "The generators will burn out this close to a planetary mass."

"It needn't be for long. Long enough to get Phillips back, if we can, or deliver a few shrewd punches if we can't." "Can't you use a heli for that, sir?"

"No," said Chang with infinite patience. "A ship can go right upstairs in case of trouble, but a heli can't." "I see, sir," said Spinelli.

Shortly, the big ship floated awkwardly up from the ground, leaving a broad dent in the soft rich soil of the plain and a few scorched logs that might have been a clump of trees nobody noticed on the way down, and lumbered at an energetic two hundred miles an hour the ninety miles to the camouflaged building. Maneuvering a big ship on antigravs was necessarily slow near a planet, rather like walking on stilts with a rider on your back.

From five thousand feet up they surveyed it. Even here it was difficult to make out the aerials concealed among the trees, and there was no sign at all of an entry to the underground building itself, but that was probably the best-hidden part of the setup.

Chang said musingly, "I wonder why they did that."

Adhem shrugged, said, "Maybe they camouflaged it to hide it from their masters when they revolted and never bothered to uncover it again."

"Perhaps. Even so, it's an interesting thing about these robots. They may dominate the planet, but they seem to look after it well and have an eye for beauty. They've made the best of their resources."

"Sir," said Deeley diffidently, Tve been thinking. Maybe these robots are the advance guard of another race wanting to colonize the planet. That would account for the sterility of the soil and air. Prophylactic measures. When we take over a new planet we immunize the colonists against the local plagues with vaccines and antitoxins. A race with higher technology might prefer to sterilize the planet."

"That's an ingenious idea, but it doesn't jibe with the lunar station we found, nor with the attitude of the robots towards us. I refuse to believe in a race that builds pressurized cities out of durasteel for its overnight huts. That looked more like a way station for outgoing interplanetary traffic, which implies a race on the planet already. And if it were so, the robots would be putting up KEEP OUT signs all over."

Before anyone could argue with his conclusion, Spinelli said, "Sir, the generators are beginning to show signs of strain."

"All right. Engelhart, have you a medium-light hydrogen mine handy?"

"Yes, sir. Do you want me to blast the hill?"

"No. I don't want to kill Phillips if I can help it. Put it out on the end of a beam and dangle it over the radar antenna looking at us out of those trees. Keston, any sign of life on the radio waves?"

"Yes, sir. Running Bull's cracked the pictorial transmission. There's a picture of the ship going out unbeamed in all directions, plus a whole lot of nonpictorial stuff."

"Thanks. Engelhart, drift the mine over to a convenient hill, but make sure there are no robots around, because I don't want to do damage yet, only to show that we can—and blow the hill to bits."

"Right, sir," said Engelhart, reaching for his mike.

After a while, the spherical bulk of the mine bobbed out from the side of the ship on a levitator beam and wove a complicated dance pattern over the radar antenna. Then the operator of the beam shifted it off to one side and saw that the antenna turned to follow it. He put on full power, and the mine whined rapidly into the distance.

About forty miles away, on the sky-line, a three-hundred-foot hill fountained skywards in a mushroom of smoke and dust.

"While they're thinking that one over," said Chang with an air of satisfaction, "I want a heli fitted with remote controls. Tell me when it's ready."

Ten minutes later Engelhart reported, "Ready, sir."

"Right. Jam the doors open and let it settle down about a hundred yards from the hill, in full view of it. You will also send out another mine, but keep this one bobbing a few feet off the ground. I want them to get the idea that they can send back the man they kidnaped, or go the way the hill went."

"Number one generator's starting to overheat, sir," said Spinelli warningly. "I can't guarantee you more than another ten minutes of this—"

"Never mind," said Chang. "Hurry, Engelhart."

The heli shot away from the side of the ship and sat down with a bump that bounced it three times on its hydraulic landing gear. The pilot at the radio controls had been told to hurry. Within a few yards of it hovered the fifteen-foot bulk of the mine, its metal surface gleaming dully in the sunshine.

They waited. One minute passed. Then two. Three.

Then a crack opened in the hillside, and Chang leaned forward to stare out the viewport. "Something's happening, sir," reported Keston belatedly.

"I know," said Chang. "Question is—what?"

The crack grew wider. There were steps beyond it, dimly visible, but the interior was dark compared to the sunbright ground outside, and nothing could be made of it until—

Chang's eyes narrowed as he saw the heads of two robots appear. Then, a moment later, that of a man between them. Since he was three and a half feet shorter than the robots, he showed after they did. But he was coming out.

They reached the grassy ground under the eyes of all the men in the ship, and it was clear that the man in the center was accompanying them without being led. As soon as they saw the heli, the robots stopped, motioned the man to go on. After slight hesitation he did so, walked across the intervening space.

"Number three generator's heating up, sir," said Spinelli without looking up. T don't want to seem impatient, but—"

"You can get ready to lift," said Chang. "Engelhart, have your pilot pick the heli up the moment Phillips gets aboard. I suppose that is Phillips?"

"Looks like him, sir. How about the mine?"

"Bring it inboard along with the heli. I don't expect trouble now. What is Phillips doing?"

He had paused on the step of the heli and turned to wave-actually to wave at the robots!

Before Chang could summon a suitable comment on this lunatic action, the pilot of the heli, warned of the need for haste, had given it a slight upward jerk—about six inches, enough to make Phillips scramble aboard in a hurry.

"Numbers two and six generators are heating up, sir," Spinelli reported. "Won't stand much more."

"All right. Have Deeley give you a top emergency orbit-quick."

The blades of the heli blurred, and it rose swiftly and headed for the ship a mile above it. The mine, too, lifted and began to home at speed. Chang could hear Spinelli uttering frantic orders to his engineers.

"Heli in," reported Engelhart after what seemed an eternity, and Chang shouted, "Lift, Spinelli!"

The hill in the viewport gave a frantic lurch and began to dwindle. Then there was an anguished scream from Spinelli's speaker, and every light in the ship went out.

They got the emergency illumination on almost immediately, and Chang looked along the bridge at Spinelli, who was whispering into his lapel speaker, independent of the main power supply. He said, "What happened?"

Spinelli looked up, brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. He said, "Number one generator blew up, sir, and one of my techs took a bad bum, but he'll be O.K., I think. Well have the generator rewound in about an hour. They're attending to the mess now."

Chang nodded, said, "Adhem, send someone to engines to treat the burnt man, will you?"

"Right away, sir," said the medical officer, reaching for his own lapel speaker.

Chang glanced through the viewport. It showed a vast number of brilliant stars and a small segment of the world they had just left so precipitately.

He said, "Deeley, where are we?"

"In orbit, sir, provided nothing went wrong. About ninety-four thousand miles out, in a lunar equilateral with the inner moon. It was the safest bet in the emergency, but I'm afraid it'll take a lot of getting out of." "That doesn't matter. Nice work in the circumstances. Keston, everything O.K. by you?"

"Yes, sir. Techs and equipment survived unharmed. But the semantic analyzer was running off number one generator, and if you want it in a hurry we'll have to rewire it to another circuit."

"Leave it, then. They'll have it repaired in another hour. Engelhart, how about this man Phillips?"

"I'm going to have him sent down to Medical for a check-up, sir. That O.K. by you?"

Chang glanced at Adhem, who nodded and stood up. "I think 111 supervise this myself," he said. "It may be a little tricky. Excuse me, sir." He went out.

"Warn me if anything happens," said Chang, reaching for his own lapel speaker, which was hung on its hook by his control desk. Then he sat down and stared at the massed glory of the stars till his eyes ached.

Time passed. The ship slowly began to regain its normal air. First the hum of the generators cut in again, and the main lighting system took over. Then the ship turned so that the world below was visible through the viewport. The main communication system reawoke with a squawk.

Adhem's voice, tinged with worry, was the first thing to issue from Chang's speaker after it came on.

"Sir?"

"What is it?"

"We've given Phillips the works, sir. There's no apparent sign of tampering with his mind—no hypnosis, no conditioning at all anywhere accessible to our techniques. But he has an odd story to tell and no mistake. Says he was treated fine, likes the robots a lot, and, among other things, that they speak Anglic Terrestrial."

"Is that so?" said Chang. "Is that correct or an induced delusion?"

"I'm afraid it's correct, sir. There's no sign of a patch in his memories. I think maybe you'd better see him." "I'll be down in a moment." "Do you want a guard on him?"

"Might not be a bad idea. Don't make it obtrusive—I take it he can't hear what we're saying?"

"No. This is the dement ward, and it's soundproof. I'll have a guard ready."

Adhem met the captain outside the hospital section and said, "I've put the guard behind a screen of one-way glass, sir. There's something a little odd about Phillips, which I suspect of being emotional conditioning."

"Emotional conditioning? Violent?"

"No! He's in perfect endocrine balance. As a good trooper, Phillips should be aggressive but obedient, and his nerves were a little ragged, like all the rest of us. That shouldn't have been cured by what he's been through. Now he seems sort of—contented. I don't know how to put it. See for yourself." He opened the door.

Trooper Phillips rose smartly from his chair as they went in. He wasn't wearing a hat, so he didn't salute.

He was a little dark man, with broad shoulders and hairy hands, and a face that showed signs of rough usage, but he almost radiated what Adhem had called contentment.

"Sit down, Phillips," said Chang, nodding. He leaned against the wall beside the door, glanced around. On the left was the door of one-way glass behind which the guard must be hiding. It was rather comforting to know he was there with weapon ready. Then he glanced back at Phillips, trying to understand the strangeness in his bearing. He failed.

"Let's hear your story," he invited. "Right from the beginning."

"Well, sir," said Phillips, T was playing center field when Horrigan hit what looked like a sure homer. I ran after it and didn't even realize I'd gone out of sight of the ship. Anyway, suddenly a robot looms up out of nowhere—I got a funny idea he was invisible because I knew he was there O.K. but every time I tried to see him plain I got all cross-eyed. Anyway, I felt scared half to death, but before I could holler he'd picked me up and started to run. I don't know how fast we were moving, but I was sure glad he held one of his spare hands over my face like a windshield.

"Well, I couldn't do anything about ... I couldn't even kick, not that he would have felt it if I had. So I just hung on and tried to guess how long I had to live till we came to that fancy place that looks like a hill only it isn't, and the robot pelted up it and we dived into that crack in the ground. I sure thought it was all over with me. But it wasn't.

"We came into a sort of big room, with lots of light all over and a whole lot of shiny metal and crystal everywhere and big boards on the walls covered with dials and lights and switches. The place smelled of ozone, as if there was a lot of electricity around—like the generator room does—and there were a whole lot of these robots standing around. They weren't invisible. I could see them plain as I see you.

"Well, my robot put me down and I sort of stood there feeling little and scared, because all the robots are about nine feet high, when one of them came up to me with a sort of gadget he parked on my head—I couldn't do anything about it somehow, though I felt I'd drop dead any moment. He held it there a couple of minutes, and then flay me if he didn't start to talk Anglic!"

"He talked Anglic? How?"

T asked that, sir. He said the gadget on my head was an e.e.g. only a lot better, and it picked up the language out of my mind and turned it into radio waves which is what they use to talk with—them and the big one."

"The big one?" said Chang. "What's that?"

Phillips looked very slightly astonished. He said, "Why, the one I was inside, of course, sir. The robots told me he was a sort of big computer like the one they have at Canopus, but better, and he was what they called a combination father confessor and information bureau for all the robots. I sort of gathered there were more than one of the big ones, but I don't know where the others are. He talked to me, too—the big one did. They had a loud-speaker fixed up on one wall, and they talked to me by modulating their own radio beams as if they were microphones."

Chang said, "That's a useful trick—direct modulation of a carrier wave." He glanced at Adhem, who raised his eyebrows, and looked at Phillips again. He said, "Go on."

"Well, sir, I didn't get a chance to ask a lot of questions, but I was told that the robots wanted to establish communications with us, and now they'd picked up our language we'd be hearing from them. Then the big one said, kind of amused, that you in the ship had just made rather a mess of one of the hills near here with a bomb, and there was a heli coming for me, so they thought they'd better send me back before you did something rash. The big one said he didn't blame you for being cagey, but he hoped we'd get on more friendly terms soon. Then they said good-by and let me out."

"So they hope to get on friendly terms, hey?" said Chang grimly. "They got another think coming. I don't like them one little bit."

Phillips's eyebrows went up, and he said, "But sir, it's impossible not to like them once you get close to them. I was pretty angry with the one that ran off with me till I found what a swell bunch they really were. You know the way it is, sir. There are some people you can't help liking even before you get to know them, and these robots are like that. They're not like ordinary tin soldiers, not the way human-built servants are. You feel you could swap jokes with them, or ... or play ball, just like with people."

"Play ball with them is one thing we are not going to do," said Chang, elbowing himself away from the wall. "How do you feel after what you've been through?"

"Me? I feel fine, sir," said Phillips, who appeared genuinely distressed at the captain's reaction. "A lot better than before, even."

"Well, thanks for your story, Phillips. You were pretty observant."

"They made it easy for me, sir," said Phillips, rising. "Glad to have been of service."

"Adhem, I want a word with you," Chang said, and the medical officer went with him into the passage.

"See what I mean?" the latter said.

Chang nodded. "Are you sure that man's mind hasn't been tied in knots?"

"Certain, unless by a new and unsuspected technique. But my guess is that the robots put on one big act, and he swallowed it hook, line and sinker. They may have seemed friendly and likable and so on, but right now they're probably doing the robot equivalent of laughing their heads off. I'd advise you to do something in a hurry, sir."

"But we can't. Spinelli hasn't reported the generator fixed yet, and without it we're helpless to use antigrav or go into hyperdrive."

His lapel speaker rang softly, and he said, "Chang listening." "Keston here, sir. We're being watched by an alien ship. The usual—a small rocket which looks like a solo job." "Did you track it on the way up?"

"No, sir. It only just came out of radar shadow. We're being properly leery of it, but it seems content to . . . excuse me, sir." His thin voice dimmed to inaudibility and then came back, excited and loud.

"Sir, it's signaling to us—in Anglic!"

"Hold everything," said Chang. "I'm coming up to the bridge." He glanced at Adhem. "It seems Phillips wasn't dreaming," he commented, and departed at a run.

When he re-entered the bridge, he leaned over Keston's shoulder and said, "Where's the signal?"

Without taking his eyes off the stereoscreen in front of him, Keston passed up a sheet of plastic torn from a waterproof memo block. Chang took it and read, "Note that you are in difficulties. Can I be of assistance?"

He passed it back, said, "They seem to take us for morons. Expect us to fall for that? What are you looking at?"

Keston didn't reply for a moment. Then his screen suddenly lit with a severely black and gold picture of a small rocket, obviously the inquisitive alien. At this magnification it was quite easily seen that the locks were open and a robot was "standing" on the hull looking towards them.

His speaker crackled again. A pleasant but characterless voice said, "Calling the human ship. You didn't acknowledge my last message, so 111 repeat my offer. If you're in difficulties, can I help?"

Chang said in a low voice, "Is your mike on that circuit?" "No. We haven't anything going outship on his wavelength." "Then make it so."

Keston glanced up in surprise, but shrugged and made a couple of adjustments on his control desk. "You're on," he said. "He can hear us now."

"Hello, robot!" said Chang harshly. "We're in no need of assistance."

"Glad to hear it," said the robot with complete equanimity. "I thought something might have given way during your rather scared-looking lift just now. However, as your friend Phillips has doubtless told you, there wasn't anything to be afraid of.

"I suppose you're Captain Chang ... is that right? Phillips gave us your name. I want to talk to you."

"You're talking to me right now and I am not much interested."

There was a subtle change in the robot's unremarkable voice when he next spoke. He said, "You had better be. I have an idea you are considering exterminating us and selling this planet to colonists of your race. It's the sort of thing I'd expect from you." There was a hint of contempt in the last sentence.

Chang said angrily, "You haven't much right to talk that wayl Suppose it is what we are intending, what then?" He covered the mike, whispered, "Spinelli, is that generator finished yet?"

Spinelli whispered back, "Ship back to full working order, sir."

Chang nodded and uncovered the mike again. He said harshly, "And we might make a start with you!"

The robot said, "I'd not advise you to try. At this range I could detonate every mine in your ship. If you don't believe me, throw out a mine from your ship well clear of both of us with the detonator on safe, and I'll explode it. You aren't in a position to bargain, captain."

"Bargain! With a bunch of tin soldiers?"

"Seeing that the deal I have to offer runs considerably in your favor, I'd advise you to hear it."

"You must think us extremely gullible," said Chang dryly.

The robot said tightly, "Captain, I'll give you proof of my good faith. I could quite easily destroy all the members of your would-be occupying force, but I don't want to. Throw out the mine as I suggested. Make sure for yourself, if you like, that the detonator's on safe."

Chang said slowly, "Well, there's nothing to lose—"

There was only expectant silence from the robot. He turned to Engelhart. "All right. We'll call his bluff. Engelhart, throw out a mine—hard as you can—well clear of us and the alien ship, with the detonator welded over to safe. That'll leave no room for doubt."

About two minutes later the mine—a small one, about ten feet in diameter—left the number three starboard catapult at speed, but it had traveled a bare thousand yards from the ship before it melted into silent eye-searing flame.

There was a long silence.

Then Chang said, shaken, "All right, robot. I guess we have to listen. What's the deal you offer?" "Will you accept not only this planet, but ourselves—as a gift?'

There was silence again. This time it was the silence of sheer stunned amazement. There was no reflex in the human make-up that would cope with a reverse of attitude so sweepingly complete. From facing a deadly enemy in the shape of machines that had turned on their creators to receiving their unconditional surrender without a blow being struck was beyond their powers of assimilation.

Chang was the first to recover. He said, "There's a phrase in our language dating back to the Dark Ages—something about a Greek gift. It means a gift with strings attached—a booby trap. We won't strike a bargain till we know the whole story."

The robot sighed—a remarkably human sigh, considering it was effected by direct modulation of radio waves. He said, "That's very sensible of you, I suppose."

Around Chang the four officers listened with set, worried faces.

"I don't think you'd believe me if I told you our reasons for this action. You might believe the big one—one of the main computers. This is my proposition.

"I'll send my ship back on-world under auto control and stay here myself. You will put someone responsible, in a position to make decisions, aboard a small vessel—a lifeboat, for instance— and pick me up. The ship can then get well out of the way.

'Tour representative will come with me to the big one where Phillips was taken. If we fail to convince him of the honesty of our offer, you have the choice of going away unharmed and staying gone, or being destroyed. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but that's the way it is. Any takers?"

Chang shut off the microphone and looked around the group of officers. Engelhart was pale but calm. Adhem frankly overwhelmed, Spinelli as ever inscrutable, Deeley torn between vast hopes on one side and dreadful forebodings on the other.

He said abruptly, "I'm going."

Under the robot's guidance, Chang set the lifeboat down on its jets—it was too small to mount an antigrav unit—about half a mile from the hill that concealed what the robots called "the big one." The radar antennae among the trees had followed them down, and as soon as the flames from the exhaust died, two more of the robots came from the open entry.

Chang shut off the controls and wondered why he was doing this. He was both scared and not scared—scared in the conscious part of his mind that told him what he was doing was insanely risky, not scared but rather warmly satisfied in his subconscious, because he was feeling what Phillips had felt, and only his ingrained caution prevented him from reacting as the trooper had reacted to the aura of good will that the big robot exuded. Under any other circumstances he would have accepted it at once. But now-Well, Greek gifts were one thing that had not lost nationality. The robot opened the lock and descended to meet the others below, and Chang followed, sick with the conflict between conscious fear and mounting confidence, descended the steps into the side of the little hill.

It was as Phillips had described it—bright-lit, full of shimmering crystal and many flashing indicators. There was a faint humming like that of a well-tuned ship, and there were about half a dozen robots standing round, one of which carried one of the little animals he had met when first they came. It clung to the arm of its metal mount and gazed curiously at him. He glanced all around, noting what seemed to be an inscription on one wall in curious unreal curves that made him dizzy to look at. One of the robots came up with a chair, and he looked at it, saw it was plain plastic, and sat down with a word of thanks. Expectantly, the robots glanced up.

A deep, friendly voice which might have come from anywhere said, "Welcome, Captain Chang. I'm the big computer you're sitting inside."

In spite of the warmth of the voice, Chang felt a touch of the tremendous, terrifying awe Engelhart had suffered when he spoke to the giant brain on Canopus X and XI. He licked dry lips, said inanely, "Thank you."

The voice chuckled amusedly. "I'm sorry to frighten you, captain. But I can't say I blame you for distrusting me. My creators would have done the same at your stage of cultural development, and justifiably."

Chang said, with a glacial calm that cost him much effort, "Your creators—what happened to them?"

The voice said, "When you came here and found a number of obviously manufactured machines in virtually solitary possession of the planet, you saw two possible explanations. One— that our creators had been forced by some natural process to abandon the planet—had died off and were gone, in short. Two— that we had taken it by force. You settled on the second as more likely and are computing on that basis. But you overlooked the third and correct alternative."

"What third alternative?" said Chang, with the dreamlike air of a man who finds himself doing the impossible.

"That they gave it to us," said the machine.

The captain wanted to believe what Phillips believed, to know that this thing that the machine told him, though unthinkable, was true. He wanted to—but he couldn't yet. He said defiantly, "Prove itl"

"That will need considerable explanation, then. I'll tell you the story in outline.

"Our creators were a race rather like yours. These robots around you are more or less in their image, though enlarged by about a third. They grew up through cultural stages like yours— petty skirmishes, molecular-explosive wars, atomic wars, and then comparative sanity. They achieved space travel, but not hyperflight, which is why you haven't met them before. They just didn't want hyperflight. We were the reason they didn't want it.

"Don't jump to conclusions. We didn't prevent them from reaching it—that would have been insane. But there was no call for them to leave their planet. They had built us to serve them, which we did in our various ways, and I think we may claim to have served them well. So they were content without needing to take the stars, and from the physical sciences they turned to the mental ones.

"And in due course of time, being living creatures which we are not, they . . . they did something for which your language has no word or even circumlocution. You might best express it as moving up a step on the evolutionary ladder.

"When you came in here, you were awed as your friend Engel-hart was awed when he spoke to the big brain at Canopus. Would you believe me if I said I have been awed as you were?

"Yes, our creators outstripped us. They merged in a being as far superior to me as I am to you. They became pure mind, and they no longer needed us. But because without our aid they could not have achieved what they did, they were grateful, and though we cannot evolve, being machines without power of growth, they did what they could for us. They gave us our freedom, and a sense of beauty, and their technology which had become our technology over the years, and most important, they gave us what we most desired—this world.

"So we made the world as beautiful as we could, and saw to our trust carefully. And we are nearly content."

Chang listened to the deep friendly voice, full of age-old reminiscence, and fought to keep control of his doubts and fears. He said, "And the animals?" for want of anything better to say.

T said our creators were grateful. They remembered their pets, too. As you humans keep dogs or cats, so our creators kept these creatures, and they asked us to make their path easy for them in case they, too, evolved to something higher."

Chang looked at the brown furry beast with its blind-seeming eyes, and said stubbornly, "Still you have shown no proof—only made statements. You've prepared a good case, I admit, but it isn't conclusive."

The voice said musingly, "It is hard to tell whether your hesitancy is shrewdness or merely fear of the unknown."

Nettled, Chang said, "But if I do acept your offer, what then?"

"Well, it is and always has been our nature to aid others if we can. From what I know and can deduce of your race you're pretty

Grevan grimaced uneasily, because that phrase did describe the Group's position here, in one way or another. Never once, in the eight years since Central Government had put him in charge of what had been a flock of rebellious, suspicious and thoroughly unhappy youngsters, who weren't even sure whether they were actually human beings or some sort of biological robots, had the question of escaping from CG controls been openly discussed among them. You never knew who might be listening, somewhere. The amazing thing to Grevan even now was that—eight weeks travel on the full fury of their great ship's drives beyond the borders of Central Government's sprawling interstellar domain—they did seem to have escaped. But that was a theory that still remained to be proved.

"Are you going to accept contact with CG tomorrow?" Klim inquired.

Grevan shrugged. "I don't know." Their only remaining connection with CG, so far as they could tell, were the vocal messages which flashed sub-spatially on prearranged occasions between two paired contact sets, one of which was installed on their ship. They had no way of guessing where the other one might be, but it was activated periodically by one of the CG officials who directed the Group's affairs.

"I was going to put it to a vote tonight," Grevan hedged. "They can't possibly trace us through the sets, and I'd like to hear what they have to say when they find out we've resigned."

"It might be a good idea. But you won't get a vote on it."

He looked down at her, while she stooped to haul a small portable cooker out of the big one's interior and slung it over her shoulder.

"Why not?"

"The cubs seem to think there's no way of guessing whether accepting contact at this stage is more likely to help us or hurt us. They'll leave it up to you to decide."

"Aren't you worried about it at all?" he inquired, somewhat startled. However well he felt he knew the cubs, they still managed to amaze him on occasion.

Klim shrugged. "Not too much." She clamped a chemical testing set to the portable cooker. "After all, we're not going back, whatever happens. If CG's still got some fancy way of reaching out and stopping us, wherever we are, I'd much rather be stopped out here than get another going-over in one of their psych laboratories—and come out a mindless-controlled this time—"

She paused. Faint, protesting outcries were arising from a point a few hundred yards out in the water. "Sounds like Muscles caught up with Vernet. Let's get down to the beach."

Vernet raked wet brown hair out of her eyes and indignantly denied that it was her turn to sample. But the Group contradicted her seven to one, with Lancey withholding his vote on a plea of bad memory. She dried and dressed resignedly and came along.

The first three likely-looking growths the foraging party tested and offered her were neither here nor there. They put up no worthwhile argument against assimilation and probably would turn out to be nourishing enough. But raw or variously treated and flavored in Klim's portable cooker, they remained, Vernet reported, as flatly uninspiring as any potential mouthful could hope to be.

The fourth item to pass the chemical tests was a plump little cabbage-arrangement, sky-blue with scarlet leaf-fringes. She sniffed around it forebodingly.

"They don't advertise identity like that for nothing!" she pointed out. "Loaded for bear, I bet!" She scowled at Klim. "You picked it on purpose!"

"Ho-hum," Klim murmured languidly. "Remember who had me sampling that large fried spider-type on wherever-it-was?"

"That was different," said Vernet. "I had a hunch the thing would turn out to be perfectly delicious!"

Klim smiled at her. "I'm K.P. today. I'm having the hunches. How would you like it?"

"Quick-baked," snarled Vernet. "And my blood be on your head!"

Half a minute later, she nibbled tentatively at a crisped leaf of the cabbage, announced with surprise that it was indeed delicious and helped herself to more. On the third leaf, she uttered a wild whoop, doubled up and began to adapt at speed. That took about twelve seconds, but they allowed a full ten minutes then to let the reaction flush her blood stream. Then Vernet was sampled in turn and staggered back to the beach with a martyred expression, while Klim and Muscles started cabbage-hunting.

Grevan retired to the ship's laboratory, where he poured the half cupful of blood he had extracted from the martyr's veins carefully into a small retort. Ontogenetic adaptation, with reaction-times that crowded zero, to anything new in the way of infections or absorbed venoms was one of the more useful talents of their specialized strain. Considerable unauthorized research and experimentation finally had revealed to them just how they did it. The invading substance was met by an instantaneous regrouping of complex enzyme chains in every body cell affected by it, which matched and nullified its specific harmful properties and left the Group member involved permanently immune to them.

The experience of getting immunized sometimes included the momentary impression of having swallowed a small but active volcano, but that illusion didn't last long enough to be taken very seriously by anyone but the sufferer. Vernet's blood emerged from processing presently in the shape of small pink pills; and just before dinner everybody washed down two each of these and thus adapted the easy way, while the donor denounced them as vampires.

Albert II, in a vintage mushroom sauce and garnished with quick-baked Vernet Cabbages, was hailed as an outstanding culinary composition all around. Klim took the bows.

By nightfall, they had built a fire among rocks above the highest tide mark, not far from the edge of the rustling jungle; and a little later they were settled about it, making lazy conversation or just watching the dancing flames.

Special precautions did not seem required at the moment, though Weyer had reported direct neuronic impressions of carnivorous and aggressive big-life in the immediate neighborhood, and the Group's investigation of the planet had revealed scattered traces of at least two deep-water civilizations maintained by life forms of unknown type but with suggestively secretive habits. A half dozen forms of sudden death snuggled inside the ornamental little gadgets clamped to their gun belts, not to mention the monstrous argument the pocket-sized battleship which had carried them here could put up; and their perceptions were quick and accurate and very far-ranging. If any of this world's denizens were considering a hostile first encounter, the Group was more than willing to let them do the worrying about it.

Not a care in their heads, to look at them, Grevan thought, a trifle enviously. Handsome young animals, just touching adulthood—four young men and four young women, who acted as if they had been sent on a star-hopping picnic, with Grevan trailing along as a sort of scoutmaster.

Which wasn't of course, quite fair.

The cubs were as conscious as he was of the fact that they might still be on a long, invisible leash out here—artificial mental restraints imposed by Central Government's psychological machines. They had developed a practical psychology of their own to free themselves of those thought-traps, but they had no way of knowing how successful they had been. If any such hypnotic mechanisms remained undiscovered in them, the penalty for defying Central Government's instructions would be automatic and disastrous. Grevan could see himself again as a frightened, rebellious boy inside a subterranean conditioning vault, facing the apparently blank wall which concealed one of the machines known as Dominators. He heard the flat, toneless voice of the legendary monster, almost as old as Central Government itself, watched the dazzling hypnotic patterns slide and shift suddenly across the wall and felt hard knots of compulsive thought leap up in response and fade almost instantly beyond the reach of his consciousness.

That had been his first experience with CG's euphemistically termed "restraints." The Dominator had installed three of them and let the boy know what to expect if rebellion was attempted again. Two days later, he had skeptically put the power of the restraints to a test, and had very nearly died then and there.

They would know soon enough. Failure to keep the scheduled contact tomorrow would trigger any compulsive responses left in them as certainly as direct defiance of CG's instructions would do. And because they had found finally a world beyond CG's reach that could be their home, they were going to follow one or the other of those courses of action tomorrow. Looking around at the circle of thoughtfully relaxed young faces, he couldn't even imagine one of them suggesting the possibility of a compromise with CG instead. After eight years of secret planning and preparing, it wouldn't have occurred to them.

He relaxed himself, with a sigh and a conscious effort, releasing his perceptions to mingle with theirs. A cool breeze was shifting overhead, slowly drawing fresh scents from new sources, while unseen night things with thin, crying voices flew out over the sea. The ocean muttered about the lower rocks; and a mile to the east something big came splashing noisily into the shallows and presently returned again to the deeper water. Resting, the cubs seemed to be fitting themselves into the night, putting out tentative sensory roots to gather up the essence of this new world's life.

Then their attention began to shift and gather, and Grevan again let his mind follow where they seemed to be pointing without effort of his own.

It came to him quickly—a composite of impressions which were being picked up individually by one or the other of them and then formed by all into an increasingly definite picture. The picture of a pair of shaggy, shambling appetites working their way awkwardly down the cliffs behind the Group, towards the gleam of the fire.

The cubs sat still and waited while the things approached, and Grevan watched them, amused and momentarily distracted from his worries. The shaggy appetites reached the foot of the cliff at length and came moving down through the jungle. Heavy-footed but accomplished stalkers, Grevan decided. The local species of king-beast probably, who knew the need of a long, cautious approach before their final rush upon nimbler prey—he filed the fact away for future consideration that a camp-fire seemed to mean such prey to them.

On a rocky ridge two hundred yards above the fire, the stalkers came to a sudden halt. He had an impression of great, gray, shadowy forms and two sets of staring red eyes-It would be interesting, he thought, to know just what sort of intuitive alarms went off in the more intelligent forms of alien carnivores whenever they got their first good look at the Group. The cubs still hadn't moved, but the visitors seemed to have come almost immediately to the conclusion that they weren't nearly as hungry now as they had thought. They were beginning a stealthy withdrawal—

And then Eliol suddenly threw back her head and laughed, a quick, rippling sound like a flash of wicked white teeth; a yell of pure mirth went up from the others, and the withdrawal turned instantly into ludicrously panicky flight.

The incident had brought them awake and put them into a talkative mood. It might be a good time to find out what they really thought of their chances of breaking free of CG tomorrow. Grevan sat up, waiting for an opening in an impassioned argument that had started up on the other side of the fire.

There had been a bet involved, it seemed, in that impulsive five-fold plunge into the ocean on landing. Last one in to be tomorrow's K.P.—and Vemet had come out on the sticky end of the bet.

Everybody else agreed thoughtfully that it just hadn't been Vernet's day. Vemet appeared unreconciled.

"You knew my gun belt was stuck again," she accused Eliol. "You had it planned so I'd be lastl"

Eliol, having postponed her own turn at the Group's least-favored chore for one day by issuing the challenge, permitted herself a gentle chuckle.

"Teach you to keep your equipment in regulation condition! You didn't have to take me up on it. Weyer didn't."

"Well, anyway," said Vemet, "Lancey will help Vernet live through it. Won't he?"

"Uh-huh!" beamed Lancey. "You bet!"

"How he dotes!" Eliol remarked critically. "Sometimes it gets a little disgusting. Take Cusat there—flat on his back as usual. There's a boy who shows some decent restraint. Nobody would guess that he's actually a slave to my slightest whim."

Cusat, stretched out on the sand nearby, opened one eye to look at her. "Dream on, little one!" he muttered and let the eye fall shut again.

The others were off on another subject. There had been an alien awareness, Grevan gathered, which had followed the five swimmers about in the water. Not a hostile one, but one that wondered about them—recognized them as a very strange sort of new life, and was somewhat afraid. "They were thinking they were so very—edible!" Eliol said and laughed. "Perhaps they knew the swim was making us hungry! Anyway they kept warning one another to stay out of our sight!"

"Plankton eaters," Lancey added lazily, "but apparently very fast swimmers. Anyone else get anything on them?"

"Cave builders," said Freckles, from behind Weyer, only a few feet from Grevan. She propped herself up on an elbow to point across the fire. "That big drop-off to the west! They've tunneled it out below the surface. I don't think they're phosphorescent themselves, but they've got some method of keeping light in the caves. Bacterial, possibly—And they cultivate some form of plankton inside."

"Sounds as if they might be intelligent enough to permit direct contact," Grevan remarked, and realized in the moment of silence that followed that it must have been an hour since he'd last said a word.

"They're easily that," Freckles agreed. Her small face, shaded by the rather shapeless white hat she favored, turned to him. "If Klim hadn't been cooking, I'd have called her to give it a try. I was afraid of frightening them off myself."

"I'll do it tomorrow," promised Klim, who had much the deftest touch of them all for delicate ambassadorial work.

There was another pause then—it might have been the word "tomorrow."

"Going to make contact tomorrow, Grevan?" Freckles inquired in a light, clear voice, as if it had just occurred to her.

"Unless," nodded Grevan, "somebody has a better idea."

It seemed nobody did until Muscles grumbled: "It's CG who's likely to have the ideas. If it were up to me, I'd just smash that set, tonight!"

Grevan looked at him thoughtfully. "Anybody else feel the same way?"

They shook their heads. "You go ahead, Grevan." That was Weyer's calm voice. "We'll just see what happens. Think there's a chance of jolting any worth-while information out of them at this stage?"

"Not if they're on guard," Grevan admitted. "But I think it will be safest for us if we're right there when it dawns on CG that this Exploration Group has resigned from its service! And it might prod them into some kind of informative reaction—"

"Well, I still think," Muscles began, looking worriedly at Klim, "that we . . . oh, welll"

"Vote's eight to one," Klim said crisply.

"I know it," growled Muscles and shut up.

The rest seemed to have become disinterested in the matter again—a flock of not quite human cubs, nearly grown and already enormously capable of looking out for themselves. They'd put themselves into the best possible position to face the one enemy they'd never been able to meet on his own ground.

And until things started happening, they weren't going to worry about them.

A few of them had drifted off to the beach below, when Grevan saw Klim stop beside Cusat and speak to him. Cusat opened both eyes and got to his feet, and Klim followed him over to Grevan.

"Klim thinks Albert is beginning to look puny again," Cusat announced. "Probably nothing much to it, but how about coming along and helping us diagnose?"

The Group's three top biologists adjourned to the ship, with Muscles, whose preferred field was almost-pure mathematics, trailing along just for company. They found Albert II quiescent in vitro—as close a thing to a self-restoring six-foot sirloin steak as ever had been developed.

"He's quite assimilating, and he's even a shade off-color," Klim pointed out, a little anxiously.

They debated his requirements at some length. As a menu staple, Albert was hard to beat; but unfortunately he was rather dainty in his demands. Chemical balances, temperatures, radiations, flows of stimulant and nutritive currents—all had to be just so; and his notions of what was just so were subject to change without notice. If they weren't catered to regardless, he languished and within the week perversely died. At least, the particular section of him that was here would die. As an institution, of course, he might go on growing and nourishing his Central Government clients immortally.

Muscles might have been of help in working out the delicate calculations involved in solving Albert's current problems; but when they looked round for him, they found him blinking at a steady flow of invisible symbols over one wall of the tank room, while his lips moved in a rapid, low muttering; and they knew better than to interrupt. He had gone off on impromptu calculations of his own, from which he would emerge eventually with some useful bit of information or other; though ten to one it would have nothing to do with Albert. Meanwhile, he would be grouchy and useless if roused to direct his attention to anything below the level of an emergency.

They reset the currents finally and, at Cusat's suggestion, trimmed Albert around the edges. Finding himself growing lighter, he suddenly began to absorb nourishment again at a very satisfactory rate.

"That did it, I guess," Cusat said pleased. He glanced at the small pile of filets they'd sliced off. "Might as well have a barbecue now—"

"Run along and get it started," Grevan suggested. "I'll be with you as soon as I get Albert buttoned up."

Klim regarded Muscles reflectively. "Just nudge my genius awake when you're ready to come," she instructed Grevan. "He looks so happy right now I don't want to disturb him—"

It was some minutes later, while Grevan was carefully tightening down a seal valve, that Muscles suddenly yawned and announced: "Thirty-seven point oh two four hours! Checks either way, all right, boss. Say—where's Klim gone?"

"Down to the beach, I suppose." Grevan didn't look up. He could find out later what Muscles was referring to. "Drowned dead by now, for all you seem to care!" he added cruelly.

Muscles left in the perturbed hurry that was his normal reaction to the discovery that Klim had strayed out of sight; and Grevan continued buttoning up Albert, undistracted by further mathematical mutterings. The cubs had finished sorting themselves out a year or so ago, and who was to be whose seemed pretty well settled by now. There had been a time when he'd thought it would have been a nice gesture on CG's part to have increased their membership by a double for Klim or Eliol or Vernet or Freckles—depending more or less on which of them he was looking at at the moment—though preferably somebody three or four years older. Of late, however, he had developed some plans of his own for rounding out the Group. If the question of getting and staying beyond CG's range could be satisfactorily settled-He shrugged off an uncomfortably convincing notion that any plans he might consider had been discounted long ago by the branch of Central Government which had developed the Group for its own purpose. Speculative eyes seemed to be following every move he made as he wished Albert pleasant dreams and a less temperamental future, closed the door to the tank room and went to the ramp. Halfway down it, he stopped short. For an endless second, his heart seemed to turn over slowly and, just as slowly then, to come right side up again.

The woman who stood at the foot of the ramp, looking up at him, was someone he knew—and he also knew she couldn't possibly be there! The jolting recognition was almost crowded out by a flash of hot fright: obviously she wasn't really there at all. At a distance of thirty feet, the starlight never could have showed him Priderell's pale-ivory face so clearly—or the slow stirring of her long, clever dancer's body under its red gown, and the sheen of the short red cloak she wore over it, clasped at her throat by a stone's green glitter.

Afterwards, Grevan could not have said how long he stood there with his thoughts spinning along the edge of sheer panic. In actual time it might have been a bare instant before he became aware of a-familiar distant voice:

"Hey, boss! Grevan!"

The sound seemed tiny and very far away. But he heard himself make some kind of an answer and suddenly realized then that the image had vanished.

"Do you want barbecued Albert, or don't you?" Klim shouted again from the direction of the fire. T can't keep these pigs away from your share much longer!"

He drew a deep breath. "Coming right now!"

But it was another minute or two before he showed himself at the fire, and he had arranged his thoughts carefully into other lines before he did. The cubs couldn't actually tell what he was thinking—unless he made a deliberate effort to let them; and they weren't too accurate then—but they were very quick to trace the general trend and coloring of one's reflections.

And his reflections had been that his visualization of Priderell might have been something more than some momentary personal derangement. That it might be the beginning of a purposefully directed assault on the fortress of the Group's sanity, backed by a power and knowledge that laughed at their hopes of escape.

Fortunately his companions seemed to feel that the barbecue had been exactly the right way of ending the day. A short while later they were stretched out on blankets here and there in the sand, fully relaxed and asleep, as far as Grevan could see, though never more than that small fraction of a second away from complete and active wakefulness which experienced travelers learn to regard as the margin that leaves them assured of awakening at all.

But Grevan sat aside for a while, and looked out at the sea and the stars.

There were a lot of stars to look at around here, and big ones. They had come within twenty-eight light-years of the center of a globular cluster near the heart of the Milky Way, where, so far as they knew, no humanly manned ship had ever gone before. In every direction the skies were hung, depth on depth, with the massed frozen flows of strange constellations. Somewhere, in that huge shining, four small moons wandered indistinguishably— indistinguishable, at any rate, if you didn't know just where to look for them, and Grevan hadn't bothered to find out.

Something stirred softly, off to his left.

"Hello, Freck," he said quietly. "Come to help me plot against CG?"

The four little moons couldn't have raised a tide in a barrel between them; but there was a big one at work below the horizon, and water had crept in to cover the flat stretches of shore. By now it was lapping at the base of the higher rocks that bordered their camp area. Freckles sat on the edge of one of the rocks, a few yards off, the white hat pushed to the back of her head and her feet dangling over the ripples below.

"Just being companionable," she said. "But if you think you need any help in your plotting, fire awayl This is one place where CG couldn't possibly have its long ears stuck out to listen."

He played for a moment then with the notion of telling her about his green-eyed hallucination. Freckles was the Group's unofficial psychologist. The youngest and smallest of the lot, but equipped with what was in some ways the boldest and most subtle mind of them all. The secret experiments she had conducted on herself and the others often had put Grevan's hair on end; but the hard-won reward of that rocky road of research had been the method of dealing effectively with CG's restraints.

"What kind of psychological triggers," he said instead, "could CG still pull on us out here—aside from the ones we know?"

Freckles chuckled. "You're asking the wrong kind of question."

He frowned a little, that being one of his pet phrases.

"All right," he said. "Then do you think we might still be carrying around a few compulsions that we simply don't remember?"

"No," Freckles said promptly. "You can install things like that in ordinary-human, because they're half asleep to start with. I've done it myself. But you'd have to break any one of us down almost to mindless-controlled before you could knock out our memory to that extent. We wouldn't be much good to CG afterwards."

"How do you know?"

She shrugged. "When I was a kid, a Dominator worked on me for a week trying to lay in a compulsion I wouldn't be able to spot. And, believe me, after a day or two I was doing my best to co-operatel The type of mind we have simply can't accept amnesia."

She added, "Of course, a Dominator—or a human psycho, if you agree to it—can hold you in a cloud just as long as they can keep on direct pressure. You'll do and believe anything they tell you then. Like the time when you—"

"I remember that time," Grevan acknowledged shortly. She was referring to an occasion when he had authorized her without reserve to attempt some unspecified new line of investigation on him. Some while later, he had realized suddenly that for the past half hour he had been weeping noisily because he was a small, green, very sour apple which nobody wanted to eat.

"Boy, you looked silly!" Freckles remarked reminiscently.

Grevan cleared his throat. She might, he remarked, have looked somewhat silly herself, around the south polar region, if he'd caught up with her before he cooled off.

"Ah, but you didn't!" said Freckles. "A good researcher knows when to include a flying start in her computations. Actually, I did come across something really fancy in mental energy effects once. But if CG could operate on those levels, they wouldn't need a hundredth part of the organization they've got. So it stands to reason they can't."

"What sort of effects?" he inquired uneasily.

"You've got me therel" Freckles admitted, pulling the white hat thoughtfully down on her forehead. "I haven't the faintest idea of what they were, even in principle. I was still alone then-it was about four years before they got us together to make up the Group. They brought a man into the Center where I was, in an ambulance. He looked unconscious, and our psychos were all excited about him. They took him off to the laboratories, where they had one of those mobile Dominators—and then people suddenly started screaming and falling down all around me, and I felt something like fire—herel" She tapped the top of her hat. "I remember I seemed to understand at once that the man was using some kind of mental energy against the Dominator—"

"Eh?" said Grevan incredulously.

"That's right. And also some kind of gun which wasn't any CG type, by the sound of it. Of course, I was out of a window by then and going straight away; but the whole thing only lasted a few seconds anyhow. I heard the Dominator cut loose in the laboratories with its physical armament—disruptive sonics, flash-fire and plain projectiles. The burning feeling suddenly stopped again, and I knew the man was dead."

"For a moment," Grevan said gloomily, "I thought you were going to tell me a human being had beaten a Dominator!"

Freckles shook her head. "I doubt that's ever happened. The filthy things know how to take care of themselves. I saw one handle a riot once—some suicide cult. The suiciders got what they were after, all right! But that man had enough on the mental level to make the Dominator use everything it had to stop him. So there definitely are degrees and forms of mental energy which we know nothing about. And, apparently, there are some people who do know about them and how to use them. But those people aren't working for CG—"

Grevan pondered that for a moment, disturbed and dissatisfied.

"Freck," he said finally, "everybody but Muscles and myself seems to agree that there's no way of knowing whether we're improving our chances or reducing them by inviting a showdown with CG via the contact set. If you had to decide it personally, what would you do?"

Freckles stood up then and looked at the stars for a moment. "Personally," she said—and he realized that there was a touch of laughter in her voice—T wouldn't do anything! I wouldn't smash the set like Muscles, and I wouldn't accept contact, like you. I'd just stay here, sit quiet and let CG make the next move, if anyl"

Grevan swore gently.

"Well," she said, "that's the kind of situation it is! But we might as well do it your way." She stretched her arms over her head and sniffed at the breeze. "That whole big beautiful oceanl If CG doesn't eat us tomorrow, Grevan, I'll sprout gills and be a fish! I'll go live with those plankton eaters and swim up to the polar ice and all the way through beneath it! I'll—"

"Listen, Freck; let's be practical—"

"I'm listening," Freckles assured him.

"If anyone—including Muscles—can think of a valid reason why I shouldn't make contact tomorrow, right up to the moment I plug in that set, I want to hear about it."

"You will! and don't worry about Muscles. He can't see beyond Klim at the moment, so he's riding a small panic just now. Hell be all right again—after tomorrow."

She waited then, but Grevan couldn't think of anything else to say. "Well, good night, Grevan!"

"Good night, Freck." He watched her move off like a slender ghost towards the dim glow of the fire. The cubs felt they'd won—simply by living long enough to have left the musty tang of half-alive, history-old Central Government worlds far behind them and to be breathing a wind that blew over an ocean no human being had seen before. Whatever happened now, they were done with CG and all its works, forever.

And the difference might be simply, Grevan realized, that he wasn't done with it yet. He still had to win. His thoughts began to shift back slowly, almost cautiously, to the image of a woman whose name was Priderell and who had stood impossibly at the foot of his ship's ramp, smiling up at him with slanted green eyes. She had been in his mind a good deal these months; and if present tensions couldn't quite account for that momentary hallucination, the prospect of future ones might do it. Because, while the cubs didn't know it yet, once he had them settled safely here, he was going to make his way back into CG's domain and head for a second-rate sort of planet called Rhysgaat, where—to be blunt about it—he intended to kidnap Priderell and bring her back to round out the Group.

It wouldn't be an impossible undertaking if he could get that far unspotted. It seemed rather odd, when he considered it rationally, that the few meetings he'd had with Priderell should have impressed him with the absolute necessity of attempting it, and that somebody else—somebody who would be more accessible and less likely to be immediately missed—shouldn't do just as well.

But that was only one of the number of odd things that had happened on Rhysgaat, which had been the Group's last scheduled port of call before they slipped off on the long, curving run that had taken them finally into and halfway through an alien cluster of the Milky Way. Taken together, those occurrences had seemed to make up a sort of pattern to Grevan. The cubs appeared to notice nothing very significant about them, and so he hadn't mentioned the fact.

But it had seemed to him then that if he could understand what was happening on Rhysgaat, he would also have the solution to the many questions that still remained unanswered concerning the relationship between Central Government and the Group—their actual origin, for one thing; the purpose for which they had been trained and equipped at enormous cost; and the apparently idiotic oversight in their emotional conditioning which had made them determined to escape. Even the curious fact that, so far as they had ever been able to find out, they were the only Exploration Group and the only members of their strain in existence.

For some four weeks, the answer to everything had seemed to be lying right there about Grevan on Rhysgaat. But he had not been able to grasp it.

It was four months ago that they had set their ship down at Rhysgaat's single dilapidated spaceport, with no intention of lingering. Supply inventory, a final ground check, and they'd be off! The taste of escape, the wonder that it might be so near, the fear that something might still happen to prevent it, was a secret urgency in all of them. But the check showed the need for some minor repairs, and to save his stores Grevan decided to get some materials transferred to him from local CG stockpiles. As a CG official, he was in the habit of addressing such requests to whatever planetary governor was handiest; and after some tracing, he found the gentleman he wanted presiding over a social gathering in a relaxed condition.

Rhysgaat's governor gave a horrified start when Grevan stated his rank. Confusedly, he began to introduce the official all around as an unexpected guest of honor. So a minute or two later Grevan found himself bowing to Priderell.

She was, he decided at once, as attractive a young woman as anyone could wish to meet—later on, he discovered that practically all of Rhysgaat agreed with him there. She was, he learned also, a professional dancer and currently the public darling. Not, of course, he informed himself on his way back to the ship, that this meant anything at all to him. Nobody who knew himself to be the object of CG's particular interest would risk directing the same attention towards some likable stranger.

But next day Priderell showed up of her own accord at the spaceport, and he had to explain that his ship was part of a government project and therefore off limits to anybody not directly connected with it. Priderell informed him he owed her a drink, at any rate, for her visit; and they sat around for a while at the port bar, and talked.

Just possibly, of course, she might have been CG herself in some capacity. The Group had met much more improbable secret representatives of government from time to time; and, when in the mood, the cubs liked to booby-trap such characters and then point out to them gently where their hidden identities were showing.

After she had left, he found the cubs in a state of some consternation, which had nothing to do with her visit. They had almost finished the proposed repairs; but signs of deterioration in other sections of their supposedly almost wear-proof space machine had been revealed in the process. After looking it over, Grevan calculated uneasily that it would take almost a week before they could leave Rhysgaat now.

It took closer to four weeks; and it had become obvious long before that time that their ship had been sabotaged deliberately by CG technicians. Nobody in the Group mentioned the fact. Apparently, it was some kind of last-minute test, and they settled down doggedly to pass it.

Grevan had time to try to get Priderell clear in his mind. The cubs had shown only a passing interest in her, so she was either innocent of CG connections or remarkably good at covering them up. Without making any direct inquiries, he had found out as much about her as anyone here seemed to know. There was no real doubt that she was native to Rhysgaat and had been dancing her way around its major cities for the past six years, soaking up public adoration and tucking away a sizable fortune in the process. The only questionable point might be her habit of vanishing from everybody's sight off and on, for periods that lasted from a week to several months. That was considered to be just another of the planetary darling's little idiosyncrasies, of which she had a number; and other popular young women had begun to practice similar tantalizing retreats from the public eye. Grevan, however, asked her where she went on these occasions.

Priderell swore him to silence first. Her reputation was at stake.

"At heart," she explained, "I'm no dancer at all. I'm a dirt-farmer."

He might have looked startled for a moment. Technically, dirt-farming was a complicated government conducted science which investigated the hit-or-miss natural processes that paralleled mankind's defter manipulations of botanical growth. But Priderell, it appeared, was using the term in its archaic sense. Rhysgaat had the average large proportion of unpopulated and rarely visited areas; and in one of them, she said, was her hideaway—a small, primitive farm, where she grew things in real dirt, all by herself.

"What kind of things?" asked Grevan, trying not to sound too incredulous.

"Butter-squogs are much the best," she replied, rather cryptically. "But there're all kindsl You've no idea—"

She was not, of course, implying that she ate them, though for a moment it had sounded like that to Grevan. After getting its metabolism progressively disarmed for some fifty centuries by the benefits of nutriculture, ordinary-human knew better than to sample the natural growths of even its own worlds. If suicide seemed called for, there were gentler methods of doing it.

However, it would hardly be polite, he decided uneasily, to inquire further-All in all, they met only five times, very casually. It was after the fourth time that he went to see her dance.

The place was a rather small theater, not at all like the huge popular circuses of the major central worlds; and the price of admission indicated that it would be a very exclusive affair. Grevan was surprised then to find it packed to the point of physical discomfort.

Priderell's dance struck him immediately as the oddest thing of its kind he had seen, though it consisted chiefly of a slow drifting motion through a darkened arena, in which she alone, through some trickery of lights, was not darkened. On the surface it looked pleasing and harmless; but after a few seconds he began to understand that her motion was weaving a purposeful visual pattern upon the dark; and then the pattern became suddenly like a small voice talking deep down in his brain. What it said was a little beyond his comprehension, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that it would be just as well if it stayed there. Then he noticed that three thin, black beasts had also become visible, though not very clearly, and were flowing about Priderell's knees in endless repetitions of a pattern that was related in some way to her own. Afterwards, Grevan thought critically that the way she had trained those beasts was the really remarkable thing about the dance. But at the time, he only looked on and watched her eyes, which seemed like those of a woman lost but not minding it any more, and dreaming endlessly of something that had happened long ago. He discovered that his scalp was crawling unpleasantly.

Whatever the effect was on him, the rest of her audience seemed to be impressed to a much higher degree. At first, he sensed only that they were excited and enjoying themselves immensely; but very soon they began to build up to a sort of general tearful hysteria; and when the dance entered its final phase, with the beasts moving more swiftly and gliding in more closely to the woman at each successive stage, the little theater was noisy with a mass of emotions all around him. In the end, Priderell came to a stop so gradually that it was some seconds before Grevan realized she was no longer moving. Then the music, of which he had not been clearly aware before, ended too, in a dark blare of sound; and the beasts reared up in a flash of black motion about her.

Everything went dark after that, but the sobbing and muttering and sluggish laughter about him would not stop; and after a minute Grevan stood up and made his way carefully out of the theater before the lights came on again. It might have been a single insane monster that was making all those sounds behind him; and as he walked out slowly with his hair still bristling, he realized it was the one time in his life that he had felt like running from something ordinary-human.

Next day, he asked Priderell what the dance had meant.

She tilted her head and studied him reflectively in a way she had—as if she, too, were puzzled at times by something about Grevan.

"You really don't know, do you?" she said, and considered that fact briefly. "Well, then—it's a way of showing them something that bothers them terribly because they're afraid of looking at it. But when I dance it for them, they can look at it— and then they feel better about everything for a long time afterwards. Do you understand now?" she added, apparently without too much hope.

"No," Grevan frowned, "I can't say that I do."

She mimicked his expression and laughed. "Well, don't look so serious about it. After all, it's only a dancel How much longer do you think your ship will be stopping at Rhysgaat?"

Grevan told her he thought they'd be leaving very soon— which they did, two days later—and then Priderell looked glum.

"Now that's too bad," she stated frankly. "You're a very refreshing character, you know. In time, I might even have found you attractive. But as it is, I believe I shall retire tonight to my lonely farm. There's a fresh bed of butter-squogs coming up," she said musingly, "which should be just ready for . . . hm-m-m!— Yes, they should be well worth my full attention by now—"

So they had spoken together five times in all, and he had watched her dance. It wasn't much to go on, but he could not get rid of the disturbing conviction that the answer to all his questions was centered somehow in Priderell, and that there was a connection between her and the fact that their ship had remained mysteriously stalled for four weeks on Rhysgaat. And he wouldn't be satisfied until he knew the answer.

It was, Grevan realized with a sigh, going to be a very long night.

By morning the tide was out; but a windstorm had brought whitecaps racing in from the north as far as one could see from the ship. The wind twisted and shouted behind the waves, and their long slapping against the western cliffs sent spray soaring a hundred feet into the air. Presently a pale-gold sun, which might have been the same that had shone on the first human world of all, came rolling up out of high-piled white masses of clouds. If this was to be the Group's last day, they had picked a good one for it.

Grevan was in the communications room an hour before the time scheduled for their final talk with CG. The cubs came drifting in by and by. For some reason, they had taken the trouble to change first into formal white uniforms. Their faces were sober; their belts glittered with the deadly little gadgets that were no CG designs but improvements on them, and refinements again of the improvements. The Group's own designs, the details of which they had carried in their heads for years, with perhaps a working model made surreptitiously now and then, to test a theory, and be destroyed again.

Now they were carrying them openly. They weren't going back. They sat around on the low couches that ran along three walls of the room and waited.

The steel-cased, almost featureless bulk of the contact set filled the fourth wall from side to side, extending halfway to the low ceiling. One of CG's most closely guarded secrets, it had the effect of a ponderous anachronism, still alive with the power and purpose of a civilization that long ago had thrust itself irresistibly upon the worlds of a thousand new suns. The civilization might be dying now, but its gadgets had remained.

Nobody spoke at all while Grevan watched the indicator of his chronometer slide smoothly through the last three minutes before contact time. At precisely the right instant, he locked down a black stud in the thick, yellowish central front plate of the set.

With no further preliminaries at all, CG began to speak.

"Commander," said a low, rather characterless voice, which was that of one of three CG speakers with whom the Group had become familiar during their training years, "it appears that you are contemplating the possibility of keeping the discovery of the colonial-type world you have located to yourself."

There was no stir and no sound from the cubs. Grevan drew a slow breath.

"It's a good-looking world," he admitted. "Is there any reason we shouldn't keep it?"

"Several," the voice said dryly. "Primarily, of course, there is the fact that you will be unable to do it against our wishes. But there should be no need to apply the customary forms of compulsion against members of an Exploration Group."

"What other forms," said Grevan, "did you intend to apply?"

"Information," said CG's voice. "At this point, we can instruct you fully concerning matters it would not have been too wise to reveal previously."

It was what he had wanted, but he felt the fear-sweat coming out on him suddenly. The effects of life-long conditioning —the sense of a power so overwhelmingly superior that it needed only to speak to insure his continued co-operation—

"Don't let it talk to us, Grevan!" That was Eliol's voice, low but tense with anger and a sharp anxiety.

"Let it talk." And that was Freckles. The others remained quiet. Grevan sighed.

"The Group," he addressed GG, "seems willing to listen."

"Very well," CG's voice resumed unhurriedly. "You have been made acquainted with some fifty of our worlds. You may assume that they were representative of the rest. Would you say, commander, that the populations of these worlds showed the characteristics of a healthy species?"

"I would not," Grevan acknowledged. "We've often wondered what was propping them up."

"For the present, CG is propping them up, of course. But it will be unable to do so indefinitely. You see, commander, it has been suspected for a long time that human racial vitality has been diminishing throughout a vast historical period. Of late, however, the process appears to have accelerated to a dangerous extent. Actually, it is the compounded result of a gradually increasing stock of genetic defects; and deterioration everywhere has now passed the point of a general recovery.

The constantly rising scale of nonviable mutant births indicates that the evolutionary mechanism itself is seriously deranged.

"There is," it added, almost musingly, "one probable exception. A new class of neuronic monster which appears to be viable enough, though not yet sufficiently stabilized to reproduce its characteristics reliably. But as to that, we know nothing certainly; our rare contacts with these Wild Variants, as they are called, have been completely hostile. Their number in any one generation is not large; they conceal themselves carefully and become traceable as a rule only by their influence on the populations among whom they live."

"And what," inquired Grevan, "has all this to do with us?"

"Why, a great deal. The Exploration Groups, commander, are simply the modified and stabilized progeny of the few Wild Variants we were able to utilize for experimentation. Our purpose, of course, has been to insure human survival in a new interstellar empire, distinct from the present one to avoid the genetic re-infection of the race."

There was a brief stirring among the cubs about him.

"And this new empire," Grevan said slowly, "is to be under Central Government control?"

"Naturally," said CG's voice. There might have been a note of watchful amusement in it now. "Institutions, commander, also try to perpetuate themselves. And since it was Central Government that gave the Groups their existence—the most effective and adaptable form of human existence yet obtained— the Groups might reasonably feel an obligation to see that CG's existence is preserved in turn."

There was sudden anger about him. Anger, and a question and a growing urgency. He knew what they meant: the thing was too sure of itself—break contact nowl

He said instead:

"It would be interesting to know the exact extent of our obligation, CG. Offhand, it would seem that you'd paid in a very small price for survival."

"No," the voice said. "It was no easy task. Our major undertaking, of course, was to stabilize the vitality of the Variants as a dominant characteristic in a strain, while clearing it of the Variants' tendency to excessive mutation—and also of the freakish neuronic powers that have made them impossible to control. Actually, it was only within the last three hundred years—within the last quarter of the period covered by the experiment—that we became sufficiently sure of success to begin distributing the Exploration Groups through space. The introduction of the gross physiological improvements and the neurosensory mechanisms by which you know yourselves to differ from other human beings was, by comparison, simplicity itself. Type-variations in that class, within half a dozen generations, have been possible to us for a very long time. It is only the genetic drive of life itself that we can neither create nor control; and with that the Variants have supplied us."

"It seems possible then," said Grevan slowly, "that it's the Variants towards whom we have an obligation."

"You may find it an obligation rather difficult to fulfill," the voice said smoothly. And there was still no real threat in it.

It would be, he thought, either Eliol or Muscles who would trigger the threat. But Eliol was too alert, too quick to grasp the implications of a situation, to let her temper flash up before she was sure where it would strike.

Muscles then, sullen with his angry fears for Klim and a trifle slower than the others to understand—

"By now," CG's voice was continuing, "we have released approximately a thousand Groups embodying your strain into space. In an experiment of such a scope that is not a large number; and, in fact, it will be almost another six hundred years before the question of whether or not it will be possible to re-colonize the galaxy through the Exploration Groups becomes acute—"

Six hundred years I Grevan thought. The awareness of that ponderous power, the millenniums of drab but effective secret organization and control, the endless planning, swept over him again like a physical depression.

"Meanwhile," the voice went on, "a number of facts requiring further investigation have become apparent. Your Group is, as it happens, the first to have accepted contact with Central Government following its disappearance. The systematic methods used to stimulate the curiosity of several of the Group's members to insure that this would happen if they were physically capable of making contact are not important now. That you did make contact under those circumstances indicates that the invariable failure of other Groups to do so can no longer be attributed simply to the fact that the universe is hostile to human life. Instead, it appears that the types of mental controls and compulsions installed in you cannot be considered to be permanently effective in human beings at your levels of mind control—"

It was going to be Muscles. The others had recognized what had happened, had considered the possibilities in that, and were waiting for him to give them their cue.

But Muscles was sitting on the couch some eight feet away. He would, Grevan decided, have to move very fast.

"This, naturally, had been suspected for some time. Since every Group has been careful to avoid revealing the fact that it could counteract mental compulsions until it was safely beyond our reach, the suspicion was difficult to prove. There was, in fact, only one really practical solution to the problem—"

And then Muscles got it at last and was coming to his feet, his hand dropping in a blurred line to his belt. Grevan moved very fast.

Muscles turned in surprise, rubbing his wrist.

"Get out of here, Muscles!" Grevan whispered, sliding the small glittering gun he had plucked from the biggest cub's hand into a notch on his own belt. "I'm still talking to CG—" His eyes slid in a half circle about him. "The lot of you get out!" It was a whisper no longer. "Like to have the ship to myself for the next hour. Go have yourselves a swim or something, Group! Get!"

Just four times before, in all their eight years of traveling, had the boss-tiger lashed his tail and roared. Action, swift, cataclysmic and utterly final had always followed at once.

But never before had the roar been directed at them.

The tough cubs stood up quietly and walked out good as gold.

"They have left the ship now," CG's voice informed Grevan. It had changed, slightly but definitely. The subtle human nuances and variations had dropped from it, as if it were no longer important to maintain them—which, Grevan conceded, it wasn't.

"You showed an excellent understanding of the difficult situation that confronted us, commander," it continued.

Grevan, settled watchfully on the couch before what still looked like an ordinary, sealed-up contact set, made a vague sound in his throat—a dim echo of his crashing address to the cubs, like a growl of descending thunder.

"Don't underestimate them," he advised the machine. "Everybody but Muscles realized as soon as I did, or sooner, that we were more important to GG than we'd guessed—important enough to have a camouflaged Dominator installed on our ship. And also," he added with some satisfaction, "that you'd sized up our new armament and would just as soon let all but one of us get out of your reach before it came to a showdown."

"That is true," the voice agreed. "Though I should have forced a showdown, however doubtful the outcome, if the one who remained had been any other than yourself. You are by far the most suitable member of this Group for my present purpose, commander."

Grevan grunted. "And what's that? Now that the Group's got away."

"In part, of course, it is simply to return this ship with the information we have gained concerning the Exploration Groups to Central Government. The fact that the majority of your Group has temporarily evaded our control is of no particular importance."

Grevan raised an eyebrow. "Temporarily?"

"We shall return to this planet eventually—unless an agreement can be reached between yourself and CG."

"So now I'm in a bargaining position?" Grevan said.

"Within limits. You are not, I am sure, under the illusion that any one human being, no matter how capable or how formidably armed, can hope to overcome a Dominator. Before leaving this room, you will submit yourself voluntarily to the new compulsions of obedience I have selected to install—or you shall leave it a mindless-controlled. As such, you will still be capable of operating this ship, under my direction."

Grevan spread his hands. "Then where's the bargain?"

"The bargain depends on your fullest voluntary co-operation, above and beyond the effect of any compulsions. Give us that, and I can assure you that Central Government will leave this world untouched for the use of your friends and their descendants for the next three hundred years."

The curious fact was that he could believe that. One more colonial world would mean little enough to CG.

"You are weighing the thought," said the Dominator, "that your full co-operation would be a betrayal of the freedom of future Exploration Groups. But there are facts available to you now which should convince you that no Exploration Group previous to yours actually gained its freedom. In giving up the protection of Central Government, they merely placed themselves under a far more arbitrary sort of control."

Grevan frowned. "I might be stupid—but what are you talking about?"

"For centuries," said the machine, "in a CG experiment of the utmost importance, a basic misinterpretation of the human material under treatment has been tolerated. There is no rational basis for the assumption that Group members could be kept permanently under the type of compulsion used on ordinary human beings. Do you think that chance alone could have perpetuated that mistaken assumption?"

Grevan didn't. "Probably not," he said cautiously.

"It required, of course, very deliberate, continuous and clever interference," the Dominator agreed. "Since no machine would

RAYMOND F. JONES

It was meant to be a vacation. The three of them had looked forward to a week of joyous insanity. By letters—dozens of them— and by one long and recklessly expensive spacephone call they had planned this trip. Rick was coming home after a year-long exile on Mars.

Never again would they be separated so long, he had promised Sarah. But he had not told how he intended to keep that promise—not until he stepped off the spaceship dock and hugged her close while he punched the biceps of their sixteen-year-old Ken.

He told then about the great plans he had for all of them to live on Mars indefinitely. He told about the new space-probing crews of which he had been given command. And he told about the Junior Officers Corps, which came like a golden dream to Ken.

And so this that was meant for vacation time had turned to a harsh and bitter journey.

Sarah glanced aside at the face of Rick. Spaceburned, and grim now after their quarrels, he looked straight ahead, his jaw tight. His hands gripped the steering wheel too hard, making the car sway like an overcontrolled ship.

In the edge of the rear-view mirror she could see Ken. It was 208 like jumping backward two decades in time. But already there was the same intensity of eyes and hard-set jaw that made them alike in unapproachable severity.

A sudden scream cut through the air, far above. It seemed to hang like a vapor trail long after its source was gone.

Rick's face brightened. "What was that?" His eyes sought the sky for a brief instant, but saw nothing.

"Run 32 that Continental has been bragging about," said Ken. "They put it on two weeks ago and it's been making the Moon on a scheduled fourteen hours. It's really a ship! Shorty Mc-Comas, who handles mail, took me through her one night after hours."

Their faces were glowing in the intimacy of their private talk, which shut Sarah wholly out of their dread world. The scream of the ship was to her a cry of pain and helplessness. To them it was a song of exultation.

"Let's hurry," she murmured to Rick. "We want to make it before dark."

Like a signal, her words shut the light of fascination out of their faces. She wanted to scream when they closed down like that. They challenged her right to interfere in their lives, but not once did they credit her with a life of her own.

It was almost dusk when they topped the long rise that looked over the valley where her parents lived. The sun was a golden light fanning out across the valley, and the scene brought a choked longing to her throat.

This is what I've wanted, she thought. This says everything I've tried to tell you about the way I feel.

Ken's voice was a sudden, small roar behind her. "Look at that sunset! It's like the flames of ten thousand jets rolled into one!"

Sarah looked away, helpless before the intuitive skill of Ken and Rick to turn everything into reminders of terror.

The farm of Sarah's father consisted of a thousand rolling acres devoted to orchards, grain, and cattle feeding. She had never lived on it, because her parents acquired it after their own retirement and long after her own marriage.

But the farm represented everything that she had come to think of as missing from her own life.

As long as she could remember, there had never been a time when she could put her personal possessions in a place she could call home—her own home. Her father was Commander Ronald Walker, United States Space Navy, Retired, and her early years had seen nothing but a succession of cell-like apartments near space bases, where she and her mother spent the long, lonely hours when the ships were out.

She felt almost cheated when her father retired and bought the farm. There was the peace and security and stability for which she had longed. And now it was still beyond her, for she, like her mother, had married a spaceman.

It was inevitable that she should. The only men she knew were spacemen. If it hadn't been for the Space Navy she and Rick would never have met. She had not yet come to the point of thinking it would have been best if they had not met. It wouldn't! But her heart ached with the weary questioning: Why couldn't their lives have been patterned in the same world?

She hated the very mention of the stars, and they were all that Rick and Ken lived for. It was all that her father had lived for. His frenzied rejection of Earth had left Sarah and her mother to years of loneliness while he chased a faraway dream that could not be caught and held.

In retirement, he had given her mother finally the things she had longed for all her life. A home of her own—but Sarah pitied her mother for the long, wasted years, and the now fruitless achievement of her desire.

The car followed the swelling curve of the road over the hill and crossed a wooden bridge. The hollow rumbling of it was a solemn welcome to this rustic world. Ahead, the farm itself was deceptively casual in appearance. But Rick knew every building and every tree was laid out with the same precision Commander Walker would have used in planning a flight across the Solar System.

This, Sarah did not see or know. For her, this was simply peace in contrast to the hectic naval base where houses were boxes, and "entertainment" was planned in some department by a brisk young woman with owlish glasses.

Sarah's lace softened now, and Rick, watching her, grew less grim. He stopped the car for a moment at the entrance to the farm. On either side, the glistening white fence curved away into the distance, along the green slopes, and was lost among the gentle hills. Overhead, the leaves held back the light of the sky and whispered temptingly to those who passed beneath.

Rick deflated his lungs with a long breath. "We ought to be able to find the answer to almost any problem in a place like this," he said. "Let's make a try, Sarah. Will you forgive me the things I said this morning?"

"Of course—" Her voice held little conviction and drove him away with its utter resignation.

When he started the car again she wished she had taken advantage of the moment. If Rick could look at the farm through her eyes for just an instant—then perhaps they could find an answer to the questions that plagued them.

She looked askance at Ken in the back seat. He was puzzled and grim by the things he heard between them.

He wanted nothing from life except to be a spaceman. He lived only for the whine of the jets overhead, and the hours when he could get some porter or mechanic to take him through the vast ships.

At sixteen he had soloed at three times the speed of sound. He was cast in the mold of his father and his grandfather. And his handsome young face promised unhappiness for some other woman in the long, lonely waiting, Sarah thought.

Or perhaps there would be someone whose vision could soar along with his. There were enough such girls at the Base. Sarah envied their ability to watch the stars with burning light in their own eyes, waiting jubilantly for their men who spanned the chasms of space.

She would be forever apart from these, she knew. She did not know why. She did not understand either herself or the men who were tied to her—but sometimes she wished for the courage to free them, wholly and completely.

The house was long and low, like a great crystal set among the trees. Sarah's mother came out the side door almost the moment the car drove up and erupted with Ken's sudden leap to the ground.

Mrs. Walker was still slim and looked fifteen years younger than her actual sixty-five. And all the harried tension that Sarah remembered so well was gone from her face.

She hugged Ken's man-wide shoulders and kissed his forehead as he struggled away.

"I think Dad's got something for you inside. He said something about your birthday, I believe."

"Wait a minute," called Sarah. "We get to see, too." She even felt that the smile on her face was real, now. She grasped Rick's hand and pulled him along as they left the car.

Then, as they stepped inside the house, the light in her face died away. Her father was standing there with his polished black pipe in one hand, and smiling across the room at Ken.

Reverendy, the boy held a glistening three-foot model of an old-fashioned jet ship. It was a sleek, swept-back thing with a needle nose. Its bright red and gold coloring was like the flame of sunset.

Sarah felt sick inside. She recognized that shape and the golden name, Mollie, on the nose.

Mollie was her mother's name, and she knew that ship. She had seen its prototype when she was a lot younger than Ken was now. She had waited with her mother in a Navy radio room during the cold and rainy night, waited for news of that ship.

Her father was the pilot of it, flying the first round-the-world, non-refuel flight—the first of the atomic jets.

Ken was almost weak with the exquisite pleasure of this gift his grandfather had made for him.

"It . . . it's beautiful," he finally said. "Gosh, it's a beautiful thing. Boy, how I'd like to have been with you when you flew this-"

"You'll fly better ships than that one, son, and fly them farther and faster."

"But there'll never be a 'first' like this one."

"I think there will. I've been hearing about the Junior Patrol Corps that's being set up to train on Mars. I trust that your father has been able to swing enough influence to get you in. If he hasn't, I'm sure I havel"

Ken's angular face sobered. He set the model carefully on the floor and looked at it with his hands in his pockets.

"I won't be going, I believe," he said. "Mother doesn't think I'm old enough for that sort of thing. She doesn't want me to be a spaceman, anyway."

Commander Walker glanced sharply and with new light in his eyes towards his daughter. He knew the expression he saw now on her face. So many times he had seen it—when she was a little girl and he said good-by to her at the beginning of some long flight.

"We'll have a talk about it," he said quietly, "but let's get ready for dinner now. Mother's had it waiting for half an hour. She'll really let us know about it if we keep her waiting much longer."

Ken slept that night with the model on end by his bed. The moonlight sprayed through the open window and softened the bright colors of the ship until it looked like a half-real dream standing there in take-off position.

But it would never be more than a dream for him, he thought. He couldn't hurt his mother as he knew he would do if he went to Mars. And there was more yet to think of. It would put a breach between his mother and father that could never be healed. He could not take the responsibility of that.

His perspective would not yet permit him to understand that the breach was already there and not of his creation. For the moment, he was imprisoned by his parents' conflict.

He watched the shadows slowly engulfing the ship as the moon rose higher. He could almost see and hear it crashing through the night sky as his grandfather left the sun behind on that great flight around the world.

He had to go to Mars. He sat up in bed, his fist beating the pillow, his eyes suddenly wet. Somehow, he had to convince his mother that he and his father were not wrong.

Sarah awoke early, aware of the thin weight of another day. She wished now that they hadn't come. She had actually forgotten that the overwhelming influence of her father would be added to the other side of the argument and she knew she could no longer uphold her own.

She looked across at Rick's sleeping form, and suddenly their arguments seemed so futile. This was all there need be to life: a man, and a woman, and their child. What else mattered? Why couldn't Rick and Ken see that the stars did not matter as long as they had each other

But, they would say, why couldn't she go along with them, if they wanted the stars bad enough? One side of the argument seemed as reasonable as the other, and she did not know the answer—only that she feared and hated the stars.

She took a quick, cold shower, and joined her mother in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Its broad windows opened onto the orchard, snowy with blossoms. In the meadow beyond, the grass was close-cropped by the indolent dairy cows.

Sarah stepped outside a moment and filled her lungs with the sharp, glistening air. It carried the scent of the orchard and the dewy grass and the pungent smells of the distant barn where her father was supervising the milking.

"I don't see how anyone would want to live in any other way," she said. "It's horrible to bring up a child knowing nothing but grease and steel and the sickening smell of jets. Ken doesn't know what the world is like, yet!"

"If this is the world, then neither did any of us know it when we lived at the bases when Dad was in the Navy!"

"We certainly didn't. Day and night—nothing but jets and rockets screaming. I thought I'd go crazy listening to them. I dreamed of finding a place where it was quiet and people moved at a walk instead of screaming through space like witches on atomic broomsticks.

'And then I saw to it that I would spend the rest of my life there by marrying a spaceman!" "You don't have to stay with him."

"I do. It just so happens that I'm still in love with him. It's more likely that he'll tell me to go my own way, but I just can't stand the thought of Ken going to Mars to join this crazy Patrol they've organized for children. It's insane! Sixteen-year-olds being taught to handle spaceships. Don't they deserve any childhood?"

"What does Ken say about it?"

"He's all for it, of course. He doesn't know any better. He doesn't know there's anything else in the world."

Mrs. Walker checked the automatic ovens and glanced at the clock. "We'd better round up the men for breakfast. Almost done." Then she put her hands on her hips and looked at Sarah.

"I haven't had much to do with men—only had the one around during my life. With Ken and Rick you've had more experience in learning how they act, young and old, than I ever had. But one thing I did learn was that it just doesn't matter very much what they do as long as it's what they want. A man shouldn't have to slave at some uninspired career and try to enjoy life on the side. If his career isn't what he wants to do, then he's wasting his life, and no woman has a right to ask him to do that."

"Doesn't anything I want matter?"

"Of course. If you want to leave Rick and be a lady farmer nobody in the whole world would stop you or criticize you. That's one thing you can count on today—and that no one before us could—you are absolutely free to do just about as you please."

"You don't have to make it sound so ridiculous!"

"Well, what do you want, then? You don't want to go to Mars with Rick, and you don't want to stay behind."

"Why does a woman always have to be the one to give in?"

"They don't. I just told you what you could do. You can break up your marriage and you and Rick and Ken can still be good friends—plenty of people have done that rather than 'give in' to each other."

"But that's the ancient dogma that I can't have a marriage and my own life at the same timel"

"You've been married long enough to know that. You've hated the Navy life all these years, but you've lived it. Only this business of Ken's going to Mars has brought it to a climax.

"I had to make the choice, too. It wasn't much fun for me, sitting in the radio shack waiting for news of our great hero. I always thought it was nothing but showing-off, but it was the only thing he lived for, and of all the choices I had to make, he was the one thing I would not give up.

"Yours is twice as hard, because you have Ken as well as Rick— or is it twice as easy?"

In the afternoon she lay on the lawn chair in front of the house watching the twinkling pattern of sunlight that came through the leaves of the old oak tree. The world had stopped its rush of jet wings. She seemed to have slipped into utter time-lessness.

Her father's approach startled her out of her reverie. "May I join you?" he said.

"If you promise to talk about nothing but cows and pigs, and crops and weather," she said.

He dropped to the grass and looked up at her. A patch of sunlight caught the silver border of his hair and turned the space-bumed skin of his face to bold bronze.

"I tried to interest Ken in the farm this morning," he said, "but I didn't have much luck. I'd be glad to leave him this place, you know, if he wanted it. I'll be through with it by the time he's old enough. But he won't want it, and neither will Rick—not then, anyway. Farming these days is just an old man's hobby, important enough, but my kind can take care of it."

Sarah sighed. "All right, so you want to talk about Ken and Mars and space jets. You won't let me hear of anything else. You're all determined that I am wrong, that I haven't the right to control my own child's life until he knows what he wants to do."

"Take it easy, Sarah. I'm not used to being jumped like that. It's bad for an old man's heart, you know.

"But as to Ken, are you sure that it's his going to Mars that you are so angry about, or is it something that someone else has done to you—or something, even, that's merely inside yourself?"

"It's everything—everything connected with space and jets and the things that take men away from their families."

"Rick tells me he's arranged for you to go with him."

"He's arranged it! And without consulting me or even assuming I could have another idea about it. He's been gone a whole year, and now he expects to jerk me up and transplant me to some frigid desert where life isn't fit for savages. And I'm supposed to be happy about that!"

"Would you really be happy with anything less than his giving up space altogether?"

Her breathing halted momentarily with a quick, deep intake as if she had not dared to frame in words the magnitude of this demand before. But she nodded slowly. "I guess that's it, Dad. I'd really settle for nothing less."

"You'll have to settle for a lot less!" Commander Walker retorted. "It's always been like this, Sarah," he continued more gently.

"There has always been a peculiar breed of man who had to see just what was beyond the horizon, a kind of man never settled or satisfied with what he had in the here and now. That's the kind of man I am, and that's the kind Rick is—and Ken is one with us.

"There's nothing you can do about it, Sarah—nothing at all." Sarah's face grew pale beneath the unwanted tan painted by sunlight on barren Naval Bases. "I can try," she said slowly. "You'll lose them both." "Would Mother have lost—?"

He nodded slowly. "There is no way on Earth to hold a man from crossing the private horizon he has to cross. And sometimes I think we all have such a horizon, whether we know it or not.

"At any rate, there were certain things I had to do. To have abandoned them would have hurt us both more than to follow through. Your mother understood that. She understood it very well."

"What about me? I didn't understand it. I don't understand it yet. What about the long nights I sat with mother listening for radio reports—first the solo flight around the world, then the Moon, and then the Mars trip, not once but three times we waited while you tried and failed and tried again.

"I was glad when you had to turn back and missed being the first to reach Mars. I felt it made up a little for all the nights I waited for you. But nothing, really, could make up for that. You didn't even care—"

"There's more to caring than just clinging to someone you love—sucking the life out of him with demands he cannot fulfill. You can't imprison the thing you love.

"Because I left you did not mean that I had forgotten you. Remembering you was the one thing that kept me going. Perhaps I've done nothing, really, to let you know that, but if I'd known you would ever say the thing you have just said I would have kept on going without caring much if I ever succeeded in getting back."

Sarah looked at her hands, lying still and icy m her lap. "I'm sorry, Dad—but that's the way I did feel. It's almost the way I feel now about Rick and Ken. I can't help it. I can't forget those nights of waiting and being afraid—"

"Then you'd better tell Rick and get it over with. You can't change him, and you can't change Ken. Think about it a little while and then tell them if you still feel the same."

He rose to his feet and glanced off towards the distant fields. "I've got to go up to the house and check with the Weather Bureau again. I ordered two inches of rain for tonight and tomorrow. I'd like to postpone it while you're here, but the crops won't stand it. It doesn't show much signs of developing yet. The forecasters are getting pretty careless about filling orders lately."

When he was gone, Sarah lay back in the chair, her arm over her eyes to shield them from the sun edging now through the maze of leaves. She would be glad to see it rain, she thought. It should be raining everywhere. The whole world should be crying.

She would have to tell Rick and Ken that they could go-forever. There had not been any other answer since she first watched in fear while Rick took a new experimental ship to test on a long, lonely Moon flight. She had crouched then in a chair in the radio room just as she and her mother had done for so many long years waiting for news of her father.

There had been a thousand other flights since then, and they had quarreled and made up and quarreled bitterly again. And he had wholly overruled her objections to Ken's taking the jet courses at the Base.

Now, he wanted to take them to Mars forever. That, she could not do. They had to cross their far horizons wherever they might lead them, but they had to go without her.

The sky began clouding that afternoon and by three o'clock the rain came as scheduled. Sarah watched through the windows, watching it drip softly among the trees and wetting the whole Earth as far as she could see.

Her mother was busy with needlework and the men were hotly debating the merits of some fantastic and insignificant jet-drive mechanism.

Of them all, Sarah was alone in her discontent, alone and afraid. And they seemed, as if by conspiracy, to ignore her in her solitude.

Her mother spoke once, and then she turned to Commander Walker. "What are you going to do if the fish pond goes out? You said the dam would never stand another rain like this one, and you haven't done anything about it."

He waved the question away with superior knowledge of such details.

By morning the storm began to abate, the clouds were pierced with sunlight as the air mass was lowered by the controlling beams to conserve its remaining moisture for another location.

But Commander Walker, reading the automatic rain gauge records fumed. The total catch was only sixty per cent of his order.

Sarah slipped into her coat and boots and left the house as he called the Bureau to report his opinion of forecasters and demand the remainder of his order.

With surprise, she found Ken standing just outside the doorway, his face revealing an unbelievable awareness of the spring glory about him.

He smiled almost shyly. "Feel like going for a walk, Mom? It's a swell morning for that."

"I'd love to, Ken. Let's go on up the hill and see what things look like from there."

They started out together as the door opened and Commander Walker roared at them: "We're going to have some more rain this morning if that Weather Bureau can find enough brains to get those clouds back here. Better not go far. Stay in range of the old house on the island. The forecasters are probably mad enough to give it all in one bucketful. And I'll sue if they cost me any topsoil!"

Ken laughed and waved a hand as they retreated from the house. "We'll be all right. Don't worry about us. We like the rain."

The light in his face was a joyous thing to see, and Sarah thought suddenly how little there had been of it during the past years. She thought back over the times that Rick had left them alone, and it seemed there had been nothing of closeness or love between her and Ken. He had always pulled away in the direction of his father's horizon—and she had pulled against almost everything he had wanted.

They walked past the steaming barns and the low grumbling noises of the cattle within. The meadowland underneath their feet was squashy from the rain and she had to grasp Ken's arm to keep her feet beneath her.

He was big, like Rick, and the hardness of muscle in his arm startled her. He seemed to have grown almost without her awareness, she thought in panic.

"I've decided I won't go with Dad," Ken said abruptly. "I know how you feel about it. I'm not going to ask any more. We talked about it last night. I told him, and he said it was up to me.

She couldn't see his face, but she knew how it must look. Yet her heart gave an involuntary leap within her. He was offering the thing she most desired at this moment—or so it appeared.

But it was only appearance. She understood—as he didn't at this moment—that some day he would hate her for the unspoken pressure by which she had forced him to this decision.

"We'll talk about it more, later," she said. Her voice was hoarse and barely audible. "We may find another answer."

They came to the low rise behind the barns and followed the base of it towards the old creek bed, long dried up and overrun with grass. There had once been a sizable stream here, but a dam in the low hills beyond held back all the water that used to flow in spring freshets. This was the fish pond where the runoff from the hills was trapped.

Across the dry stream bed was a rise on which stood the first farmhouse of the place, now long abandoned. The stream had once run behind the house, but one sudden spring flood had washed a new course and left the house stranded on a tiny island between the two branches. It did not matter, for the house had been long abandoned even then.

Now Sarah and Ken turned their steps towards it. Ken glanced at the sky. "It looks like Grandpa is about to get all the rain he can use. I'll bet the forecasters are so tired of his grumbling that they're really going to let him have it."

Sarah stopped and glanced anxiously for the first time at the low gray ceiling that was settling with furious intensity.

"We'd better get back," she said. "We'll be drenched if we get caught out here." But already the first drops had started to fall.

T think it's been raining quite a while over the hill there," said Ken, nodding towards the rise that hid the fish pond. "We'd better go up to the old house and wait it out."

It seemed the sensible thing to do. Sarah hurried on, clutching Ken's hand for support. The bottom of the dry creek bed held three or four inches of water already from the previous rain. They sank to ankle depth in it, and tried to hop across on projecting rocks. Finally, they scrambled up the opposite slope to the house. Their footsteps rattled like dry bones on the old, weather-beaten porch.

From the moment they set foot on it, the rain spurted in torrents. It hammered the aged roof and began to pour through holes. Ken and Sarah dodged, clinging to each other and glancing apprehensively upward.

And Sarah found that she was laughing.

It was a strange and startling discovery. Ken was laughing with her, and she sensed that he, too, felt that they had not laughed together for a very long time.

They clung momentarily in this miracle of laughter, and then it slowly died away in Ken's face. He relaxed his hold on his mother, and then it was there between them again—the wonder and the agony of their divergent lives.

They sat down close to each other on the porch floor, their backs against the wall. Water fell and splashed on either side of them. They watched the sheeting rain, and listened to its roar on the roof.

Their own silence was long. Ken shifted uneasily. Sarah sensed his embarrassment in not knowing what to say to her in this moment.

She broke the silence. "Why do you want to go to Mars?" she asked suddenly. "Can you tell me in just a single phrase that will make me understand this thing?"

"It's what I've got to do," he answered, forgetting his former promise to abandon the plan. "There's one thing that each man in the world is born to do, Grandpa says, and I believe him. Mine is out there in space.

"Think of all there is yet to do I We haven't even reached the last planet of our own System. Somebody living now is going to be the first to make it. That could be me. And there are the other Systems like ours.

"They're talking about an SOL—speed of light drive—out there on Mars now. Dad thinks he may get in on some of the development work on that. We could reach the nearest stars with it.

"I've been born in the best age the world has ever knownl I can't turn my back on it. You have no right to ask it of me."

"I won't ask it," said Sarah quietly. "I'm going to let you go— you and Dad—you can go together."

"That isn't what we want. We don't just want to go by ourselves. We need you, too."

"No!" Her voice was so shrill it startled her. "You'll never get me to agree to anything like that. I'll give you all the freedom you want for yourselves, but you can't ask any more of me than that."

From a distance there came a sudden sound of thunder. It rose from somewhere in the hills above them, and a gathering roar shook the old house on its rotten underpinnings. Sarah and Ken glanced up the littie valley with wonder and apprehension, and the roaring grew.

"The dam!" Ken cried. "Grandpa's pond—the dam's broken!"

Sarah recalled her mother's complaint about ordering so much rainfall to drain behind the weakened dam. It was incredible that her father should have underestimated such a risk. But now she could see the gray tongue of water curling down the dry creek bed, widening swiftly, some of it overflowing the banks and racing towards the barns and corrals across the meadow.

Then she saw it flowing through the other branch around the house.

"We can't get out of here!" she exclaimed. "There's water all around the house."

Ken eyed the widening reaches of the water. "The bed's pretty well filled up down below so that it won't drain, but it won't be more than six or seven feet deep at the most."

"But how'll we ever get across?"

He grinned as if he were now in the midst of something he could enjoy. "We'll swim, of course."

"No. Your grandfather has the boat he takes to the lake for fishing. They can pull it up here on the trailer and take us off."

"All that trouble? Come on, let's swim across. There's no need to wait for the rain to quit. We couldn't get any wetter than well be crossing."

Sarah looked down at the roiling water with distaste. "They'll come looking for us soon. There's no sense in trying to make it across now."

Ken was halfway across the porch. He turned and looked back with boyish pleading in his eyes. "Oh, come on, Mom. Let's not do it for sense. Let's do it for funl"

For a moment she had a chilling impression that somewhere a key had turned within a lock. She halted in her movement towards him.

To her eyes, resting on his, it seemed as if understanding flared between them—as if some window had opened, letting her see for the first time through the murky turmoil between them. Let's do it for fun-It was so simple she wanted to cry. She had sought for a thousand complex answers to explain the lives of the men who baffled her so.

Let's do it for fun—

They had crossed oceans and prairies in ages past. And now they circled the Earth and reached out to the planets, and Ken already had thoughts of other stars beyond the sun. Their far horizons—they crossed them for fun.

Let's do it for fun—It was so simple, but was it true? How long had it been since she had done anything for fun, for the sheer pleasure of it? Her memory ranged back over the years and they seemed barren of anything but a dread intensity that hovered in the sky on the wings of rockets.

Ken was alarmed by the sudden, half-hysterical giggle that escaped her as she put her hands up to her face and hid her eyes from his sight for a moment.

"What is it, Mom? What's the matter—?"

She looked at him again, and her eyes were shining in a way that he had never seen before. "Come on—" she said.

It was a crazy thing—they could just as well wait—and she knew if she stopped to think about it she would never go through with it.

There was only one way to find out if it were true—if it were possible to do anything for fun any more.

She stripped off her coat and outer clothing and raced down the slope clad only in her underthings. She stopped at the edge of the water and waved to Ken who struggled with his shirt on the porch. He was grinning in pleased astonishment.

"Wait a minute," he called. "We can put a rock in these and throw them across."

He made a couple of bundles of their clothes and hurled them across the stream. They landed with a squashy sound on the other side.

"Now we've got to go!"

It wasn't cold. The rain was still falling, and it seemed warm on her bare skin. She looked down at herself. She wasn't old, but she couldn't remember another time when she had stood almost naked in the rain. She opened her mouth to taste it. She wondered how many other things that were fun she had missed.

Ken took her hand and they walked into the water. It was colder than the raindrops and closed like circling ice about her legs and waist and chest. But it felt good. She felt as if thirty years' terror had been stripped away with her clothes.

Her father had been so busy crossing his own horizons that he had never thought to explain why they had to be crossed. He had forgotten to tell her that it was fun and she had never sensed it through her dread.

It had taken Ken's impulsive, naive wisdom to explain it to her—and this simple adventure to prove it. And now she knew it was true.

Ken was grinning but puzzled. The puzzlement didn't matter, for she was seeing him really alive for the first time in years. All his joy and life had been suppressed in her presence before now, and she had not known it.

Abruptly, her feet slipped on the grassy slope and she went down. Ken grabbed her and buoyed her up, and then they were both laughing and swimming and sputtering their way towards the opposite slope.

The sky was breaking as they started wading again, and Sarah saw the figures coming towards them, her mother and father and Rick. Rick broke into a run.

Ken squeezed her hand hard, and looked at her as if he understood the feeling that was in her. "Aren't you glad we didn't wait for them, Mom?"

Then Rick was grasping her hand and pulling her towards him, wrapping his own dry coat about her wet shoulders. She looked up into his worried face.

"I've got a surprise for you, darling," she said. "We're going to Mars, all of us. It will be funl"

He scowled in wonder. "I don't know what that's got to do with this, but if it's true it's wonderful."

She didn't get to say more. Her mother was bustling up insisting that Ken take her coat against his wishes.

"Dad knew that dam couldn't take a rain like this. He knew it was weak and ordered rain anyway. Now look at the expense of building the pond again," she complained.

At first the words didn't register through the cold and unpleasantness that was beginning to settle upon Sarah. Then their significance cut sharply. She looked at her father and her son. She caught the momentary glance that passed between them.

And then she understood. A fantastic scheme, a play of their production in which she had been assigned a role without her knowledge. It had worked. They had shown her that the narrow restrictions she called her world could hold the same uncertainties as the vaster universe in which they lived.

But it was Ken's impulsive, unrehearsed invitation that gave her the insight she needed.

Let's do it for fun.

She smiled at her father as he caught her watching them

All members of the Endlich family had been looking around them at the weird Vestal landscape. Through John Endlich's mind again there flashed a picture of what this asteroid was like. At the Asteroids Homesteaders' School in Chicago, where his dependents and he had been given several weeks of orientation instruction, suitable to their separate needs, he had been shown diagrams and photographs of Vesta. Later, he had of course seen it from space.

It was not round, like a major planet or most moons. Rather, it was like a bomb-fragment; or even more like a shard of a gigantic broken vase. It was several hundred miles long, and half as thick. One side of it—this side—was curved; for it had been a segment of the surface of the shattered planet from which all of the asteroids had come. The other side was jagged and broken, for it had been torn from the mesoderm of that tortured mother world.

From the desolation of his own thoughts, in which the ogre-form of Alf Neely lurked with its pendent promise of catastrophe soon to come, and from his own view of other desolation all around him, John Endlich was suddenly distracted by the comments of his kids. All at once, conforming to the changeable weather of children's natures regardless of circumstance, their mood had once more turned bright and adventurous.

"Look, Pop," Bubs chirped, his round red face beaming now from his helmet face-window, in spite of his undried tears. "This land all around here was fields oncel You can even see the rows of some kind of stubble! Like corn-stubble! And over there's a—a—almost like a fence! An' up there is hills with trees on 'em—some of 'em not even knocked over. But everything is all dried-out and black and grey and dead! Goshl"

"We can see all that, Dopey!" Evelyn, who was older, snapped at Bubs. "We know that something like people lived on a regular planet here, awful long ago. Why don't you look over the other way? There's the house—and maybe the barn and the sheds and the old garden!"

Bubs turned around. His eyes got very big. "Oh! O-ooh-h-h!" he gasped in wonder. 'Top! Mom! Look! Don't you see? . .

"Yeah, we see, Bubs," John Endlich answered.

For a long moment he'd been staring at those blocklike structures. One—maybe the house—was of grey stone. It had odd, triangular windows, which may once have been glazed. Some of the others were of a blackened material—perhaps cellulose. Wood, that is. All of the buildings were pushed askew, and partly crumpled from top to bottom, like great cardboard cartons that had been half crushed.

Endlich's imagination seemed forced to follow a groove, trying to picture that last terrible moment, fifty-million years ago. Had the blast been caused by natural atomic forces at the heart of the planet, as one theory claimed? Or had a great bomb, as large as an oversized meteor, come self-propelled from space, to bury itself deep in that ancient world? A world as big as Mars, its possible enemy—whose weird inhabitants had been wiped out, in a less spectacular way, perhaps in the same conflict?

Endlich's mind grabbed at that brief instant of explosion. The awful jolt, which must have ended all consciousness, and all capacity for eyes to see what followed. Perhaps there was a short and terrible passing of flame. But in swift seconds, great chunks of the planet's crust must have been hurled outward. In a moment the flame must have died, dissipated with the suddenly vanishing atmosphere, into the cold vacuum of the void. Almost instantly, the sky, which had been deep blue before, must have turned to its present black, with the voidal stars blazing. There had been no air left to sustain combustion, so buildings and trees had not continued to bum, if there had been time at all to ignite them. And, with the same swiftness, all remaining artifacts and surface features of this chip of a world's crust that was Vesta, had been plunged into the dual preservatives of the interplanetary regions—deepfreeze and all but absolute dryness. Yes—the motion of the few scattered molecules in space was very fast—indicating a high temperature. But without substance to be hot, there can be no heat. And so few molecules were there in the void, that while the concept of a "hot" space remained true, it became tangled at once with the fact that a practically complete vacuum can have practically no temperature. Which meant— again in practice—all but absolute zero.

John Endlich knew. He'd heard the lectures at the Homesteaders' School. Here was a ghost-land, hundreds of square miles in extent—a region that had been shifted in a few seconds, from the full prime of life and motion, to moveless and timeless silence. It was like the mummy of a man. In its presence there was a chill, a revulsion, and yet a fascination.

The kids continued to jabber—more excitedly now than be-
fore. "Pop! Mom!" Bubs urged. "Let's go look inside them
buildings! Maybe the things are still there! The people, I
mean. All black and dried up, like the one in the showcase
at school; four tentacles they had instead of arms and legs,
the teacher said!" ,

"Sure! Let's go!" Evelyn joined in. "I'm not scared to!"

Yeah, kids' tastes could be pretty gruesome. When you thought most that you had to shelter them from horror, they were less bothered by it than you were. John Endlich's lips made a sour line.

"Stay here, the pair of you!" Rose ordered.

"Aw—Mom—" Evelyn began to protest.

"You heard me the first time," their mother answered.

John Endlich moved to the great box, which had come with them from Earth. The nervous tension that tore at him—unpleasant and chilling, driving him toward straining effort—was more than the result of the shameful and embarrassing memory of his very recent trouble with Alf Neely and Companions, and the certainty of more trouble to come from that source. For there was another and even worse enemy. Endlich knew what it was—

The awful silence.

He still looked shamefaced and furious; but now he felt a gentler sharing of circumstances. "We'll let the snooping go till later, kids," he growled. "Right now we gotta do what we gotta do—"

The youngsters seemed to join up with his mood. As he tore the pinchbar, which had been conveniently attached to the side of the box, free of its staples, and proceeded to break out supplies, their whimsical musings fell close to what he was thinking.

"Vesta," Evelyn said. "They told us at school—remember? Vesta was the old Roman goddess of hearth and home. Funny —hunh—Dad?"

Bubs' fancy was vivid, too. "Look, Pop!" he said again, pointing to a ribbon of what might be concrete, cracked and crumpled as by a terrific quake, curving away toward the hills, and the broken mountains beyond. "That was a road! Can't you almost hear some kinda cars and trucks goin' by?"

John Endlich's wife, helping him open the great box, also had things to say, in spite of the worry showing in her face. She touched the dessicated soil with a gauntleted hand. "Johnny," she remarked wonderingly. "You can see the splash-marks of the last rain that ever fell here—"

"Yeah," Endlich growled without any further comment. Inside himself, he was fighting the battle of lost things. The blue sky. The shifting beauty of clouds in sunshine. The warm whisper of wind in trees. The rattle of traffic. The babble of water. The buzz of insects. The smell of flowers. The sight of grass waving ... In short, all the evidences of life.

"A lot of things that was here once, we'll bring back, won't we, Pop?" Bubs questioned with astonishing maturity.

"Hope so," John Endlich answered, keeping his doubts hidden behind gruffness. Maybe it was a grim joke that here and now every force in himself was concentrated on substantial objectives—to the exclusion of his defects. The drive in him was to end the maddening silence, and to rub out the mood of harsh barrenness, and his own aching homesickness, by struggling to bring back a little beauty of scenery, and a little of living motion. It was a civilized urge, a home-building urge, maybe a narrow urge. But how could anybody stand being here very long, unless such things were done? If they ever could be. Maybe, willfully, he had led himself into a grimmer trap than it had even seemed to be—or than he had ever wanted . . .

Inside his space suit, he had begun to sweat furiously. And it was more because of the tension of his nerves than because of the vigor with which he plied his pinchbar, doing the first task which had to be done. Steel ribbons were snapped, nails were yanked silently from the great box, boards were jerked loose.

In another minute John Endlich and his wife were setting up an airtight tent, which, when the time came, could be inflated from compressed-air bottles. They worked somewhat awkwardly, for their instruction period had been brief, and they were green; but the job was speedily finished. The first requirement—shelter—was assured.

Digging again into the vast and varied contents of the box, John Endlich found some things he had not expected—a fine rifle, a pistol and ammunition. At which moment an ironic imp seemed to sit on his shoulder, and laugh derisively. Umhm-m —the Asteroids Homesteaders Office had filled these boxes according to a precise survey of the needs of a peaceful settler on Vesta.

It was like Bubs, with the inquisitiveness of a seven-year-old, to ask: "What did they think we needed guns for, when they knew there was no rabbits to shoot at?"

"I guess they kind of suspected there'd be guys like Alf Neely, son," John Endlich answered dryly. "Even if they didn't tell us about it."

The next task prescribed by the Homesteaders' School was to secure a supply of air and water in quantity. Again, following the instructions they had received, the Endlichs un-crated and set up an atom-driven drill. In an hour it had bored to a depth of five-hundred feet. Hauling up the drill, Endlich lowered an electric heating unit on a cable from an atomic power-cell, and then capped the casing pipe.

Yes, strangely enough there was still sufficient water beneath the surface of Vesta. Its parent planet, like the Earth, had had water in its crust, that could be tapped by means of wells. And so suddenly had Vesta been chilled in the cold of space at the time of the parent body's explosion, that this water had not had a chance to dissipate itself as vapor into the void, but had been frozen solid. The drying soil above it had formed a tough shell, which had protected the ice beneath from disappearance through sublimation . . .

Drill down to it, melt it with heat, and it was water again, ready to be pumped and put to use.

And water, by electrolysis, was also an easy source of oxygen to breathe . . . The soil, once thawed over a few acres, would also yield considerable nitrogen and carbon dioxide—the makings of many cubic meters of atmosphere. The A. H. O. survey expeditions, here on Vesta and on other similar asteroids which were crustal chips of the original planet, had done their work well, pathfinding a means of survival here.

When John Endlich pumped the first turbid liquid, which immediately froze again in the surface cold, he might, under other, better circumstances, have felt like cheering. His well was a success. But his tense mind was racing far ahead to all the endless tasks that were yet to be done, to make any sense at all out of his claim. Besides, the short day—eighteen hours long instead of twenty-four, and already far advanced at the time of his tumultuous landing—was drawing to a close.

"It'll be dark here mighty quick, Johnny," Rose said. She was looking scared, again.

John Endlich considered setting up floodlights, and working on through the hours of darkness. But such lights would be a dangerous beacon for prowlers; and when you were inside their area of illumination, it was difficult to see into the gloom beyond.

Still, one did not know if the mask of darkness did not afford a greater invitation to those with evil intent. For a long moment, Endlich was in an agony of indecision. Then he said:

"We'll knock off from work now—get in the tent, eat supper, maybe sleep . . ."

But he was remembering Neely's promise to return tonight.

In another minute the small but dazzling sun had disappeared behind the broken mountains, as Vesta, unspherical and malformed, tumbled rather than rotated on its center of gravity. And several hours later, amid heavy cooking odors inside the now inflated plastic bubble that was the tent, Endlich was sprawled on his stomach, unable, through well-founded worry, even to remove his space suit or to allow his family to do so, though there was breathable air around them. They lay with their helmet face-windows open. Rose and Evelyn breathed evenly in peaceful sleep.

Bubs, trying to be very much a man, battled slumber and yawns, and kept his dad company with scraps of conversation. "Let 'em come, Pop," he said cheerfully. "Hope they do. We'll shoot 'em all. Won't we, pop? You got the rifle and the pistol ready, Pop . . ."

Yes, John Endlich had his guns ready beside him, all right— for what it was worth. He wished wryly that things could be as simple as his hero-worshipping son seemed to think. Thank the Lord that Bubs was so trusting, for his own peace of mind—the prankish and savage nature of certain kinds of men, being what it was. For John Endlich, having been, on occasion, mildly kindred to such men, was well able to understand that nature. And understanding, now, chilled his blood.

Peering from the small plastic windows of the tent, he kept watching for hulking black shapes to silhouette themselves against the stars. And he listened on his helmet phones, for scraps of telltale conversation, exchanged by short-range radio by men in space armor. Once, he thought he heard a grunt, or a malicious chuckle. But it may have been just vagrant static.

Otherwise, from all around, the stillness of the vacuum was absolute. It was unnerving. On this airless piece of a planet, an enemy could sneak up on you, almost without stealth.

Against that maddening silence, however, Bubs presently had a helpful and unprompted suggestion: "Hey, Popl" he whispered hoarsely. "Put the side of your helmet against the tent-floor, and listen!"

John Endlich obeyed his kid. In a second cold sweat began to break out on his body, as intermittent thudding noises reached his ear. In the absence of an atmosphere sounds could still be transmitted through the solid substance of the asteroid. It took Endlich a moment to realize that the noises came, not from nearby, but from far away, on the other side of Vesta. The thudding was vibrated straight through many miles of solid rock.

"It's nothing, Bubs," he growled. "Nothing but the blasting in the mines."

Bubs said "Oh," as if disappointed. Not long thereafter he was asleep, leaving his harassed sire to endure the vigil alone. Endlich dared riot doze off, to rest a little, even for a moment. He could only wait. If an evil visitation came—as he had been all but sure it must—that would be bad, indeed. If it didn't come—well—that still meant a sleepness night, and the postponement of the inevitable. He couldn't win.

Thus the hours slipped away, until the luminous dial of the clock in the tent—it had been synchronized to Vestal time-told him that dawn was near. That was when, through the ground, he heard the faint scraping. A rustle. It might have been made by heavy space-boots. It came, and then it stopped. It came again, and stopped once more. As if skulking forms paused to find their way.

Out where the ancient and ghostly buildings were, he saw a star wink out briefly, as if a shape blocked the path of its light. Then it burned peacefully again. John Endlich's hackles rose. His fists tightened on both his rifle and pistol.

He fixed his gaze on the great box, looming blackly, the box that contained the means of survival for his family and himself, as if he foresaw the future, a moment away. For suddenly, huge as it was, the box rocked, and began to move off, as if it had sprouted legs and come alive.

John Endlich scrambled to action. He slammed and sealed the face-windows of the helmets of the members of his family, to protect them from suffocation. He did the same for himself, and then unzipped the tent-flap. He darted out with the out-rushing air.

This was a moment with murder poised in every tattered fragment of it. John Endlich knew. Murder was engrained in his own taut-drawn nerves, that raged to destroy the trespassers whose pranks had passed the level of practical humor, and become, by the tampering with vital necessities, an attack on life itself. But there was a more immediate menace in these space-twisted roughnecks . . . Strike back at them, even in self-defense, and have it provenl

He had not the faintest doubt who they were—even though he could not see their faces in the blackness. Maybe he should lay low—let them have their way . . . But how could he—even apart from his raging temper, and his honor as a man—when they were making off with his family's and his own means of survival?

He had to throw Rose and the kids into the balance—risking them to the danger that he knew lay beyond his own possible ignoble demise. He did just that when he raised his pistol, struggling against the awful impulse of the rage in him—lifted it high enough so that the explosive bullets that spewed from it would be sure to pass over the heads of the dark silhouettes that were moving about.

"Damn you, Neelyl" Endlich yelled into his helmet mike, his finger tightening on the trigger. "Drop that stuff!"

At that moment the sun's rim appeared at the landscape's jagged edge, and on this side of airless Vesta complete night was transformed to complete day, as abruptly as if a switch had been turned.

Alf Neely and John Endlich blinked at each other. Maybe Neely was embarrassed a little by his sudden exposure; but if he was, it didn't show. Probably the bully in him was scared; but this he covered in a common manner—with a studiedly easy swagger, and a bravado that was not good sense, but bordered on childish recklessness. Yet he had a trump card-by the aggressive glint in his eyes, and his unpleasant grin, Endlich knew that Neely knew that he was afraid for his wife, and wouldn't start anything unless driven and goaded sheerly wild. Even now, they were seven to his one.

"Why, good morning, Neighbor Pun'kin-head!" Neely crooned, his voice a burlesque of sweetness. "Glad to oblige!"

He hurled the great box down. As he did so, something glinted in his gloved paw. He flicked it expertly into the open side of the wooden case which contained so many things that were vital to the Endlichs—

It was only a tiny nuclear priming-cap, and the blast was feeble. Even so, the box burst apart. Splintered crates, sealed cans, great torn bundles and what not, went skittering far across the plain in every direction, or were hurled high toward the stars, to begin falling at last with the laziness of a descending feather.

Neely and his companions hadn't attempted to move out of the way of the explosion. They only rolled with its force, protected by their space suits. Endlich rolled, too, helplessly, clutching his pistol and rifle; still, by some superhuman effort, he managed to regain his feet before the far more practiced Neely, who was hampered, no doubt, by a few too many drinks, had even stopped rolling. But when Neely got up, he had drawn his blaster, a useful tool of his trade, but a hellish weapon, too, at short range.

Still, Endlich retained the drop on him.

Alf Neely chuckled. "Fourth of July! Hallowe'en, Dutch," he said sweetly. "What's the matter? Don't you think it's fun? Honest to gosh—you just ain't neighborly!"

Then he switched his tone. It became a soft snarl that didn't alter his insolent and confident smirk—and a challenge. He laughed derisively, almost softly. "I dare you to try to shoot straight, pal," he said. "Even you got more sense than that."

And John Endlich was spang against his terrible, blank wall again. Seven to one. Suppose he got three. There'd be four

There goes the Babe, he thought, and watched the tiny sun as it seemed to hesitate, then withdraw suddenly—in a blink-behind the near horizon. The clouded sky immediately began changing its heaped-up, and fortunately high-up, ammonia vapors from red to purple and then to neutral grey as the upthrust arc of sunlight narrowed and faded.

"Miles' Matchless Acres," this valley was, in his letters to his friends on Earth; the Agricultural Registry in Three Major listed it with less whoopdedoo as: "Sections 764-5-6 Alcron; product (s): kanl, linla; owner (s) Maxwell Julius Miles, age 41, vol. Earth July 2691."

But Max Miles was fired with the blooded pride of the pioneer—and the less unselfish pride of the landowner. This was his farm. Ipso facto it was the best farm on Goran Three.

He jumped, and Three's gravity—.5403 Earth—socked his feet gently into the tangled grass. Waves and eddies of stink—there's no other word for it—came at him from all directions; stink that was a level eight-foot blanket over the Alcron lowlands. Miles grinned and ducked under Mary's stubby wing, savoring the heavily-laden air with the peculiar gusto of one to whom an unpleasant thing has become pleasantly familiar. Sliding open the cargo hatch, he hoisted a box of supplies to his shoulder and started up the path for the cottage, squinting into the gloom of oncoming evening.

Several dark shapes seemed to materialize at the meadow's edge, vague and hulking against the backdrop of intertwined kanl trees. Miles wondered, as he often had, how any critter as big as the average Crony could move so silently and so fast. . . .

"Is it Miles?" The sibilant whisper was beamed, by thoroughly unhuman vocal chords, at the little Earthman.

"It is Miles," he replied, and although he recognized the voice, courtesy demanded that he add: "Is it Fir?"

"It is Fir, with Tos. What is your wish?"

"None, save to retire. The farm is well?"

The answering whisper carried overtones of satisfaction. "It is well, Miles. You will find an account on your desk—" and the figures melted into the thick-hung blackness.

Miles grinned, trudged on up the path. Gone for half a day's shopping—and his workers had kept a record of the farm's happenings. That was Lin's work, he suspected. His big foreman enjoyed the assumption of tasks over and above those assigned him; such as his regular trips to the cottage, a few minutes before Grandpa, to make certain that Miles was awake and aware.

The natives of Goran Three were certainly not the most beautiful to look upon—although reasonably humanoid and not at all disturbing to a human, if the human were forewarned—but he'd stack them for common decency against any blank sapiens in the catalogued systems. And work! They'd work their hands to the— well, no, not to the bone. At least so far as Miles or anyone else could know for sure. Couple of years ago some stiffnecked medicos from Mars General had come to Three with ideas about examining the Cronies and placing them in the exact black and white scheme of things. After a while they had gone back to Mars, disgruntled, carrying fogged X-ray plates and souvenir scalpels that had blunted on chitinous hides. One amiable Crony had signed a release, submitted to an atomic drill—and exited laughing.

Miles himself had often wondered about the physiological set-up of the Cronies. After all, he thought, living with equal comfort under both the Babe and Grandpa was somewhat like breathing both air and water. Or air and fire, more like it.

But then, the Cronies were paradoxical from the word go. With one of the highest racial I. Q.'s known, so far as could be determined, considering the difficulty of establishing suitable criteria, they acted like kids, preferring to spend much of their time romping and singing in the sunlight and working gratis as farmhands for the Earth settlers.

Which, argued some scientists, along with the hints occasionally dropped and the gadgets often carried but never shared by the Cronies, was no small indication of their cultural status: highly advanced, with the arts and technology to produce anything and everything they could possibly want except exercise.

Other scientists argued decadence.

All the scientists would have loved to examine just one of those gadgets, to have entered just one of the great shining Hives that lay scattered across the face of Goran Three, and thereby see exactly what was what.

But after several decades of being neatly rebuffed in such attempts, Earth scientists knew the following and little else: the Cronies were tough, brilliant, amiable and—telepathic. They were not, however—and thank Heaven—able to read Earth minds. This the Cronies admitted.

The binary-meter on Miles' wrist suddenly began to agitate— buzzing wasp-like—and grew hot. The illuminated dial, controlled by the master-meter in Three Minor, told him that he could expect Grandpa in precisely an hour and a half from now.

"Damn crazy place to live," he confided to the meter. Then his blue eyes snapped half-shut with annoyance as the heat increased. "All right, all right! I'm not asleep this time—!"

He made whistling noises and thumped the box of supplies to the ground, grabbed at the meter to click it off. Pain faded. Miles flipped the wrist around to cool it, cussing the meter—but without enthusiasm, for he remembered the time he had been asleep, lying in the grass at the far end of the meadow. Good Martian wine and a very bad book had eased him into a weighted slumber, and the brilliance of certain death had begun to silhouette the distant hills. The meter had all but fried his wrist in its effort to get him on his feet. He still had the scar—and the nightmare memory of that frantic race with Grandpa.

The box reshouldered, Miles cut away from the path and knelt. The racks were spread with neat rows of round, soggy kanl leaves, all ready for Grandpa. He straightened, took a deep breath. It was a good life. He let out the breath—if you could stand Grandpa and the unholy stink.

Miles rounded the corner of the cottage and came to a surprised halt. His cheery whistle turned atonal and perished. The big man's voice was oddly soft, almost friendly in tone.

"Does it always smell like this?" he inquired.

He stood by the door, his back leaned against the tangled jongar. His round face might have been weak, almost childlike, with its shallow eyes and nubbin of a nose—but the small mouth beneath was tucked in at the corners, stamping an ugly determination over all. And as far as smells went, he was no peony himself—he had the horsy odor of a big man long unwashed; his tunic was rumpled and dirty, his face stub-bled and sweat-shiny.

Miles lowered his gaze and had his first opportunity—if you didn't count the detective thrillers he followed on the screen of his telaudio—to study the triple nozzle of a hand-blast pointed at him with intent to do him dirt. It did indeed command attention, and Miles gave his to the stranger's next words.

"Is that food you're carrying?" Hopefully.

"Some of it," Miles admitted.

The man moved backward through the doorway. "Come in, said the spider—although it's your parlor."

Max Miles followed, ducking to clear the trailing jongar vines, more puzzled than afraid. Strangers were uncommon on Goran Three. One of many pioneer worlds, it bore a purely functional population. Importing supplies was a headache, living conditions were flexible and still under critical analysis, and space visas were proportionately hard to get. There were only two cities on the tiny planet; one a shipping center, and the other a glorified department store. These, along with the farms and outlying districts, contained in aggregate exactly 964 humans, most of whom were known to one another and one of whom, Miles was sure, this stranger was not.

Habit brought Miles' hand to the house-board. He inserted his key, turned the cottage on. Coming to electronic life, it detected their presence and spilled soft, duffuse light from the walls.

From the center of the room the big man murmured his surprise: "Pretty fancy for a farmer."

Miles blinked to adjust his sight. "What'd you expect— candles?"

The stranger's mouth tightened. "Kick the door shut." Miles did so.

The stranger indicated the box of supplies with a wave of the hand-blast. "Set it."

Miles bit down on his anger and slid the box onto the table. He said mildly, "Okay, Mister—?"

"Jord. Henry Jo—" the stranger broke off with an appreciative grin. "Say, aren't you the smart one? I like a smart man." He took a step forward, the grin stiffening over his small, even teeth. "Now, put your hands in your pants pockets and turn around."

Miles pivoted slowly to face the wall. Henry Jord's free hand patted up and down his torso, removing his wallet, his pocket-talkie. A moment later he heard the tiny 'tronic shatter on the floor. Then Jord's steps retreated to the center of the room, his soft-steel voice said, "All right, farmer. At ease."

Miles wheeled, picked the wallet out of mid-air as it was tossed to him. Its thickness told him that his money was still there.

Jord put the hand-blast on the table. "Ten to one," he said casually, "that I can pick it up and shoot you before you get to me."

"Wouldn't buck those odds," Miles grunted. He leaned against the wall, watching silently as the big man unpacked the box of supplies, item by item. At one point Jord exclaimed happily and set aside a container of Venus-Blue Garol.

"I guess we'll have that for supper," Miles interpreted.

"I said you were smart, farmer—" Jord's hand explored the bottom of the box. "I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a hand-blast mixed in here. No reason why there should be-but wouldn't I be a fool to take the chance?" He picked up the gun from the table and gave Miles his wide, meaningless smile.

The little farmer bared his teeth in a returning smile that meant a great deal—most of it nasty.

"As long as you're my guest," he said, "suppose you call me by name—you got it from the wallet—and tell me what in hell this is all about!"

Jord raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that obvious? Or don't you listen to the telaudio?"

"No, it isn't obvious," Miles snapped, "and I listen to the telaudio. But my set isn't any government I. P. pick-up. And you're not from Goran Three, mister!"

Something of surprise flickered in Jord's pale gaze.

"Maybe you're too damned smart," he said. "How did you figure that?"

"Three's like a small town—there's nobody on this clod I can't call by his first name."

Jord's face lost its wary tension. "Of course," he murmured, "I'd forgotten. That's very nice—my not being known here should expedite things." He sat down and stretched his long legs under the table, keeping the hand-blast targeted on Miles' chest. "Well . . . since you don't know who I am, I'll tell you. We all hope for notoriety, of course, but you must understand that I would have preferred a different sort. Henry Jord, galactic explorer, perhaps—or Henry Jord, famous author. I do write, you know. No, I suppose you don't. At any rate, these things are not in our hands, are they?" He flung out a casual hand, as if in demonstration. "So I am Henry Jord, embezzler, murderer, fugitive."

Miles stared at the big man blankly, while a cold ball of horror gathered in his chest, dropped to his stomach and stuck there.

A murderer! A rare animal, these days—almost extinct. The little farmer had been inclined to take the threat of the hand-blast only half seriously. Now he suddenly developed an intense respect for it, in inverse proportion to the respect he lost for its holder. And for the first time in his life he knew fear of another human being. It was an atavistic, somehow unclean, feeling, and it made him a little sick.

To keep the ball rolling while he considered his situation, he said, "Where'd all this murdering and embezzling take place?"

"Jason One—and in the opposite order. First, I embezzled from my firm. My partner discovered the loss and we had a disagreement. I disposed of the body, but you know how it is. One thing after another. Eventually questions were asked and although I lied magnificently I was booked on suspicion."

He tossed the can of Garol to Miles and the farmer turned, pressed it into the opener. Near his fingertips lay the inviting bulk of the short-wave cook-all and it occurred to him that with luck he might be able to brain the big man with it. The can opened with a hiss. Miles shoved it into the cook-all, wrapped his fingers around the grill to get a firm hold. He put his weight on his toes and bunched his arm muscles—

"That's fine!" The hand-blast bored cruelly into his back and twisted. "Now get back against the wall, little man, and think up something better to try!"

For one reckless moment Miles toyed with the idea of swinging around abruptly, wrestling for the weapon. Jord sensed this, however. He stepped back quickly to the center of the room and barked a single word, "Don't"—underlining it with the chat! of the hand-blast. The charge whined past Miles' head and out of the window, raising small thunder and a sudden white plume near the base of the sun-mill. The farmer heard Jord's sarcastic laugh:

"You might as well find out right now that I'm an excellent shot, and that I'm not a careless man or a fool. Mind that, and well get along."

Miles snapped on the cook-all, his face impassive. "I'll mind it." He moved to the wall, and sat down cross-legged. "I don't have to stand, do I?"

"No."

Miles forced himself to consider his position logically, screening out certain impulses that he recognized as neurotic in origin. Such reactions were dangerous, could very well result in his death. The attempt with the cooker, for example, had been quite foolish.

This train of thought gave him a minor inspiration. He turned it over in his mind, thinking moodily that every little bit helps.

The old bar-rag stench of jongar filled the room, bringing its picture of the vines that crowded the cottage walls, lacing over the windows with a persistence that no amount of blasting could inhibit. Burn the vines, sear their roots—and jongar would regenerate from a cinder.

Max Miles versus the vines had been a primary issue soon after his arrival from Earth, and he had tackled them with indignation. But, after ten or a dozen futile sessions with a hand-blast, he had shrugged his shoulders and saved his pellets. Whereupon jongar had, during a single night, regained and consolidated, twisting and matting so that from afar the cottage looked like a blue haystack; and there jongar stopped its growth, took a million bites of Mercury-steel with a million mouths and sat back to digest, perhaps also shrugging its shoulders.

Miles cleared his throat. "Got something to tell you—" he said.

Jord looked at him without much interest and Miles deliberately wet his lips uneasily, refusing to meet the big man's gaze.

"Those vines—" Miles pointed at the tendrils of jongar dangling outside the window— "their odor is toxic." He cleared his throat again, looking Jord squarely between the eyes. "You— you have to get injections every week or you die. It's a horrible death. If you stay here much longer, you'll—I—it'll be too late—" he trailed his voice off into a hopeful silence.

Jord's irises were twin chips of polar ice as he studied Miles' face. Then, slowly, amused contempt dulled the hard glitter. He shook his head.

"You're lying," he said. "And very badly. I forgot to tell you that I'm also an excellent judge of men."

Miles shrugged philosophically . . . and mentally patted his back on a fair job of acting. When he told his next lie, minus the fidgets, Jord would probably believe it. His ego would want him to believe, and so he would. This gave the farmer a slight edge, a toehold. Men like Jord, who prided themselves on their caution, sometimes looked so hard for subtleties that they overlooked the Letter on the Mantle. Miles had no idea yet what his next lie was going to be, but he knew that it would be a dilly.

After a moment, he said: "What about the body?"

Jord frowned. "What about it?"

"No body—you say you disposed of it. No corpus delicti."

"Corpus delic—oh, Earth law. I'm afraid that doesn't throw much weight out here. If you've ever read western stories, you know what I mean. Men were men and all that, and the law was a—Holt, I believe the blaster was called? Here on the pioneer worlds, just as on the western frontier, we're beyond contemporary law. Will be for some years, I imagine—though never a fraction as lawless." Jord got up and crossed to adjust the cook-all, moving crab-wise to keep an eye on Miles. "It'll catch up to us in time," he went on, "but until then we won't have legalities to confound justice . . . Funny, isn't it?"

"What?"

"My concern for the blind lady Justice."

Miles answered inanely, his intelligence nowhere near the conversation. "I hardly imagine that you're looking forward to your just punishment."

Jord laughed shortly. "Oh, Lord, you're right there! I plan to escape it! Obvious as hell that I killed Harry, you know. In an Earth court I might have wheedled and bribed my way out of it. Here—" he shrugged. "So I skipped my bail and got off-world."

Miles stood up and shouldered out from the wall, and the hand-blast snapped up to level on his midriff. He pointed at the supplies on the table. "Do you mind if I put some of that stuff away?" he growled. "That steak is soaking up these smells like a sponge."

Jord moved away from the cooker to a neutral corner and nodded. Miles slid open the deep-freeze and stacked in the perishables, slanting his attention at the big man. His covert glances didn't pass unnoticed.

"Don't try to throw anything at me," he was warned, "or this place will smell even worse. These hand-blasts really cook a man, you know!"

Hand-blast? Miles thought grimly. Brother, you haven't met Grandpa! And then he frowned, his hands pausing in their work. He'd almost forgotten about Grandpa. On Goran Three— or Two or One, for that matter—people didn't forget about Grandpa and live to tell about it. He glanced casually at his wrist-meter. An hour, a little over. He ground his teeth almost audibly. This was getting nastier by the minute.

He'd have to get Jord out of here before Grandpa's arrival or take the big man underground; and he didn't favor the latter very much. First, because he didn't want to be cooped up with the killer for seven hours; second—and more important— if Jord got out of the lowlands he might possibly manage to escape from Three. Another killing, maybe two. A stolen visa. A quick interstellar jaunt through hyperspace and Henry Jord would vanish into the crowds of Earth or Mars. And this, Miles thought with naive logic, should not be allowed to happen.

As if reading his mind, Jord said, "You'd like to stop me, wouldn't you?" He nodded, not waiting for an answer. "I've been tempted to stop myself several times since this thing began. At such times I forget that I am the criminal—the impulse to remove such a danger-potential to our society is almost overwhelming . . ." he rapped his knuckles lightly on the table top, then seemed to remember what he had been about to say. "But luckily, speaking as an individual rather than as a component of that society, my aberration has included a revival of the self-preservation 'instinct.' Otherwise I'm sure I would have offered myself for elimination."

Miles closed the deep-freeze and hipped himself onto it. Keep him talking about himself, he thought with controlled calm, and look for an opening—because, brother, you're between the devil and the Saturnian Sea! Exactly Imlf an hour left to do something—but what?

He said aloud, "Jason One's a good week's spacing from here. Why come to Goran?"

"Oh, it wasn't intentional. I had some vague idea of heading for Sol—lose myself in a crowd, you know." Jord pulled a roll of cigarettes from a pocket and scratched one alight on the table. He flipped the roll to Miles. "But I never was much of an astrogator. Piled on the drive till I blew a tube. Barely managed to get into the life-shell before the whole business went kaput. I set the spectro for an Earth-type planet."

He shifted and made a face. "Beastly little things, those shells. Stuffy—no ports, you know—completely automatic. No place for a claustrophobe. So here I am—and you never did answer my first question. What the devil stinks so?"

"Plants, mister. Jongar, linla, kanl, herck—"

"And slithy toves. I wish I had a breath of fresh air!"

Miles grinned crookedly. "You get used to it after a while."

Jord fell back a step, his grin taking on that peculiar stiffness heavily, like bright blue lava. He snapped off the cook-all and raised an eyebrow at the little farmer. "I won't be here that long—thanks to your stratocoupe."

"Now, wait a minute," Miles growled. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and glared at the big man.

Jord fell back a step, his grin taking on that peculiar stiffness again. "You can address your complaints to this hand-blast."

Miles shook his head angrily. "You'll have a real party flying Mary. It took me a month to get on to her bag of tricks!"

"I'll manage. Strength of desperation and all that. Suppose we eat?"

Followed closely by Jord, Miles made several trips to Mary to bring in the remaining supplies. Jord poked among the cans and containers, selecting the most expensive and exotic items.

Miles, in turn, busied himself at the cook-all under the careful guidance of his guest who, it seemed, liked his food just so. And without poison. They ate silently, Miles evolving and discarding schemes, Jord very carefully on guard against them.

Later, Jord switched on the telaudio and fiddled with the dials. To the farmer's surprise the old set picked up a bleared image from Leyville on Goran Two. A symphony orchestra, one of the many extrovert organizations springing from this lonely outer space existence, was struggling fiercely with Verklärte Nacht. It probably wasn't half bad at the point of origin, but forty million miles of space gave it a hell of a kicking around.

Jord grunted, "Plenty verklärte—" and turned the dial methodically until he located a newscast. There was the usual stuff: local news, polo scores, spaceship arrivals and departures, births and deaths. Nothing about fugitive killers.

Jord flashed a lop-sided smirk at Miles as if to say, "Looks like I'm safe, eh?"

His assumption, it developed, was premature, for the newscaster was handed a slip of paper by some unseen associate and immediately registered professional agitation. He rolled his smooth voice, carefully raised to the "flash-big-news!" pitch, into the two cities and outlying farm districts of Goran Three:

"The wreckage of an interstellar has been detected off-world. It is thought to be that of Henry Jord, J-O-R-D, wanted by the authorities of Jason One for murder and unauthorized spacing—"

"In that order?" murmured Miles; but Jord didn't hear him, which was just as well. So the story's finally gotten to Goran, he thought. Perfect timingl Maybe he was followedl

Jord had bared his teeth and snapped them together. He leaned forward until his face almost touched the visiscreen and he moved his hands—twitched them—as if wishing he could strangle the distant throat and its unwelcome words.

"—assumed that Jord is dead, but until such is proven all Goranians are cautioned to watch for this man. Warning—he is probably armed. His description—"

Jord cut off the telaudio viciously. "So now what?" he grated, his shallow eyes looking through Miles, through walls and jongar, at the strange and suddenly inhospitable world of Goran Three.

"I'll tell you," offered the farmer. "They'll prowl the strato-