PROLOGUE

THE BLUE ATOM

In the depths of space, where the flaming suns lie scattered like glittering, exploding jewels against the black fabric of infinity, a tiny ship drifts with the tides of time. Now pulled by this sun, now caught by that planetary system, it pursues an aimless, undirected course.

In color it is a delicate shade of blue.

Inside the ship, as if they are waiting for eternity to pass, tiny figures sit quietly.

Chapter One

In the year of 2109 A.D., the space grapevine began to talk of strange things. . . .

Ever since old Samuel Helbron had invented the Helbron Drive, and men had taken to space with the eagerness of kids heading for a swimming hole in the hot summertime, the grapevine had been as full of gossip as an old woman in the spring. It spoke of Mars and Pluto and the void beyond, telling tales of the wonders of the worlds of space. Like the tales told by sailors, many of these stories were false and others were exaggerated. But some of them were true! And some were even understatements of the facts.

In a huge cave deep in the forbidding mountains of Venus, where he owned and operated a mine, all such stories came eventually to Jared Rahmer—known wherever spacemen met as Jarr. Knowing spacemen, he gave them little credence and less heed, unless they concerned the men of the Confederation that he bossed. Jarr Rahmer made his living as a mine operator but his heart and soul were with the men of the Space Confederation known as the Wild Bunch.

Then, in 2109, the grapevine began to talk of really incredible things; it began to tell stories of events even beyond the imagination of spacemen; then Jarr Rahmer listened. The grapevine spoke first of the disappearance of Jack Torrance, his native wife, and their two wonderful kids. It told of the message that Torrance, a jungle trader, managed to get on the air before the silence descended over him.

This story is about Jack Torrance and of what happened to him.

Torrance's ship, inward bound to Torres, the biggest city on Venus, with a cargo of "ivory, apes, and peacocks"— meaning fire opals from the Hannibal Range of Southern Venus, gum incense from the vast central swamp of the planet, and a tank of brilliantly colored tropical fish from the Azure Sea (all of which would bring fine prices from the traders of Torres, and even better prices if taken directly to Earth)—was the first victim of the Blue Atom.

The ship itself was a home-made freighter. It was powered by the Helbron Drive, which would lift anything that would hold together, and would move anything that held together anywhere within the Solar System. It was owned and operated by Torrance. The crew consisted of his native wife and their two children, a boy and a girl aged 14 and 10. Torrance, a grizzled veteran of forty, had spent most of his life in space. He was not afraid of anything that flew, walked, or swam. He could not have fear in him and still be a jungle trader.

Whatever it was that happened, Torrance had some warning of its coming and enough time to get his space radio into operation. This transmitter was tuned to the frequency continuously monitored by one of the spaceship lines operating out of Torres. Probably Torrance did not have enough time to get his weapons into operation. Or he may not have recognized as an enemy what came against him.

His message, as received in the radio room of the Venus Spaceship Line, in Torres, was terse.

"Something is happening in my ship. It looks like a door has opened. I can see a blue glow. Get word of this to Jarr."

Torrance was using voice transmission. The operator in Torres immediately turned on his recording equipment. Thus a permanent record was made of what the jungle trader said.

"Help! I've got to have help!"

A man who did not know the meaning of fear was suddenly calling for help! This alone was enough to start the grapevine talking all over the worlds of space.

After his first call for help, Torrance apparently tried to give his reason for needing aid. Having no words to describe adequately what was taking place, all he could do was yell meaningless sounds about an opening door and a blue light. Did he mean that one of the ports on his ship was open? Or was he talking about something that was happening inside the ship itself, about a door that opened in thin air?

This was a question that was pondered later, by other men, with no satisfactory solution being reached. Then he called his wife's name. "Marta!"

There was no answer.

Then he spoke two other names. "Junior! Sister, stay away from that!" The agony reached still deeper into his voice. He was speaking to his kids.

Probably at this point Torrance had forgotten that the mike was open and that he was still on the air. What he saw happening was enough to make him forget everything except what was taking place before his eyes. If he had been in full control of his faculties, he would have tried to describe what was happening so that the men who would investigate would know what to look for ... or what to avoid.

Torrance called once more to his children. His voice was that of a man gone mad, a scream that tore at the heartstrings.

After that—silence.

His mike was still open and he was still on the air. The recorder at the receiving station was also operating. It caught one other sound, that of someone laughing cruelly.

Torrance certainly was not laughing.

Who, then, had laughed?

In Torres, in the radio room of the Venus Spaceship Line, the operator on duty made frantic efforts to contact Torrance. He received no answer. The radio operator took a bearing on the signal and sent it along with his recording of the message.

"Get word of this to Jarr!" Torrance had indicated.

So the recording came to Jared Rahmer, there in the vast natural cave high in the mountains of Venus where he and a small group of men operated a mine. He listened quietly. Caleb Smith, who was like Jarr Rahmer's shadow all over the worlds of space, listened too.

Jared Rahmer was a big man, better than six feet tall. A poised man, well-muscled, with the calm face of a man who has seen death so often that he has lost all fear of it. He was a natural leader of men.

Jarr was president of the Confederation of Spacemen, a high-sounding title which he never used. Men who knew him, gave him a shorter and more accurate tide—The Boss. He ran the Wild Bunch.

Jarr listened to the replay of the recording of Jack Torrance's last words, then lifted puzzled eyes, to the face of Caleb Smith.

"What do you make of it?" Jarr asked.

Caleb's face was crossed and crisscrossed with wrinkles. He was an old man. No spaceman could remember when he had not been an old man. But the eyes that looked out of his wrinkled face were always bird-bright with alert and eager interest in the world around him.

Caleb always called himself a mechanic. His twisted, gnarled fingers bore evidence of his occupation. But even if his fingers were twisted and gnarled, they seemed to possess a magic skill that went right to the heart of an ailing machine.

He could repair anything from an electric fan to the Helbron Drive, and Helbron Drive mechanics were highly skilled and highly paid craftsmen. Caleb could have gone to the repair shop of any spaceship line and named his own salary, but he preferred to stay on with Jarr Rahmer.

Jared and Caleb were a team. They ranged space like two great dogs: the young dog to command, to explore, and to fight; the old dog to supply wise counsel, to repair any tool that went out of order, or to build a new one. Between them, they ran the Confederation, which brought a semblance of order to the worlds of space. They were the best of friends.

"I do not know enough to even guess." Caleb was slow in answering Jarr's question.

"We'll get more information," Jarr said.

"Well need it," Caleb said. "I know one thing, Jarr."

"What is that?"

"I do not like the way Jack Torrance talked."

"Nor do I." For an instant anger glinted in the gray eyes of Jared Rahmer. "Jack Torrance was a friend of mine," he said. "And his wife was one of the finest women I have ever known."

"I knew them too," Caleb answered. "They were fine people."

"His talk about a door and a blue glow . . ." Jarr muttered. "What do you think happened, Caleb?"

The old mechanic shook his head. "I have learned not to do too much thinking until I have some facts to think about," he answered. "We'll see what happens. It is my guess that somebody has pried up a corner of hell and stuck a chunk under it."

Because they could do nothing else, they waited. The grapevine had strange whispers on it, odd bits of information that seemed to mean nothing. Suddenly it talked again, reporting a mystery weird enough and confusing enough to tangle the wits of the oldest man alive.

The child was sound asleep in its cradle when its mother tiptoed quietly out of the room. Her name was Robinson, and her husband was a technician at the space port in Torres. They had been two years on Venus and had been happy here.

After she had gone from the nursery, the mother thought she heard a cry from the child.

Telling the story later, in the hospital, speaking in broken sentences, her face twisted with anguish, she tried to state what had happened. To her, it was incredible. Adding to this was the fact that the incredible had happened to her child.

"I thought I heard a cry and I went ... I went into the nursery where Jean was sleeping. The blue glow was over everything. I was so surprised that I stopped to look. It was the most beautiful shade of blue I have ever seen. It ... it filled the whole nursery. . .

At this point, she suddenly began to twist and squirm on the hard pad of the hospital examining table, trying to break free of the kindly hands of the two attendants who were restraining her. "Let me go!" she begged. "I have to go see about Jean. She's calling me! Can't you hear her? She wants me, needs me. I'm her mother! Don't you understand? I'm

"Please tell us what happened, Mrs. Robinson," the physician on duty in the receiving room asked.

With great difficulty, she pulled her mind back from some mystery it was exploring and tried to reply to the physician's question. Her voice was that of a person trying to wake from sleep. "Did . . . did something happen?"

"You were telling us about some kind of a blue glow," the doctor reminded her.

"Oh, yes. The blue glow came from the door." Her face was suddenly dreamy.

"Where was the blue glow coming from?" the doctor questioned.

"From the door," Mrs. Robinson answered. "It actually shines at the heart of every atom in all the universe. They dance in this blue glow. . . . the atoms, I mean."

The doctor wished he hadn't tried to change the subject. This talk of a blue glow that was at the heart of all the atoms in the universe made him uncomfortable. "Did it come from any particular spot?" he asked.

"It came through the door and filled the room. Everything in the room danced in it and with it."

"I see," the doctor said. Truthfully, he did not see at all. He was mystified and perplexed. In his years on Venus, he had thought he had seen and heard everything, but he had never heard of a blue glow in which the atoms danced.

"What happened to your child?" he asked.

"She was dancing in the blue glow too. She called to me, 'Mummy! Mummy!' I started toward her."

Mrs. Robinson started to rise from the bed again. This time she did not intend to be stopped. The two attendants had to use all of their strength to restrain her. The physician turned to the nurse. She quickly handed him what he asked for.

Mrs. Robinson insisted. "The blue glow came from this door. Jean danced into the blue glow. The door closed behind her."

"Are you talking about the door into the nursery?" the physician asked. In his mind, he was sure this was what she meant.

"No! Never! This was another land of door, a glass door. The blue glow came from it."

"A glass door that opened in empty air?" the physician persisted.

"Yes. Of course. . . ."

The doctor had had enough. He was now sure the woman was hallucinating. Bending over, he used the instrument the nurse had given him.

The sedative went directly into the blood stream, where it took effect in less than thirty seconds. Sighing, the woman relaxed on the bed. The two attendants gratefully released their holds.

"Take her into one of the emergency rooms," the doctor directed. "I'll look in on her later."

The report he wrote on the matter was most terse. "Mrs. John S. Robinson was brought into the emergency receiving room by a taxi driver who said he had found her running through the streets in her night dress, screaming for her child. Tentative diagnosis: shock resulting from the loss of a child. Treatment: sedation. Nearest relative: husband, John S. Robinson, spaceport. Husband notified."

Jarr and Caleb heard this story, too, and wondered.

The grapevine talked next of old Tel Abruzzi, re-telling the story that he told as he huddled in the farthest, darkest corner of the Crossroads of the Universe Saloon, in the heart of the city of Torres, with the meeting rooms of the Council of the Confederation of Spacemen directly above him. As he squatted there in the back corner of the saloon, his eyes were bleary and he was shaking in every limb. His voice was cracked and broken from the emotional tumult still raging in him as a result of his experience.

He always started his story the same way. "I was just walking down the Street of the Damned and I wasn't more than middling drunk . . ."

The street he was talking about was a twisting, crooked, dirty, smelly alley. This alley was notorious even in this Sodom of Venus. It was a street where you could buy anything except virtue, anything from a shot of rum to space charts stolen from the Sky Queen to the captain's gold watch. There were no morals on the Street of the Damned, no ethics, and no code of conduct; the only rule being that each resident did the best he could as often as he could manage it. There were, of course, a few heretics who violated even this rule.

Midnight was near when Tel Abruzzi made his way down this street. The eternal rain had let up for a while and the clouds had thinned enough so that he got an occasional glimpse of the stars sparkling in the far-off fields of space. One such glimpse was enough to arouse old memories in Tel Abruzzi, of the days when he had known the stars more intimately.

A door suddenly opened in front of him. A glass door. The darkness dimmed. It became blue with the eldritch color that goes along with a lightning flash during a thunderstorm on Earth. It was like the pale, thin blueness that sometimes shows in the Earth sky just before dawn.

It seemed to Tel Abruzzi, as he stopped to stare at this incredible glass door and at this astonishing blueness, that the long night was over at last. Dawn had come. What he was thinking, of course, was that death had finally come for him. To him, this was a relief; he would know finally life's last great adventure.

Then he was a mile in the sky.

Like a toy town seen in the starlight, a city built by intelligent ants, Torres was far below his stupified eyes. The blue glow was all around him.

This was the story he told to his cronies in the Crossroads of the Universe Saloon, shivering and shuddering from the memory, and gulping strong drink in a vain effort to quiet nerves now in a violent uproar.

His listeners were quiet. Certain in their own minds what had happened, they looked knowingly at each other, all except Sam Gerweld, who knew Tel Abruzzi very well. With no real doubt in his voice, Gerweld asked a question. "How'd you get so high in the sky, Tel?"

Abruzzi shuddered before he answered. "I don't know, Sam. I just don't know. The door opened and then closed behind me. It was sort of like going up in a glass elevator. Before I knew it, I was a mile in the sky; I was up among the clouds."

To hear him better, his listeners leaned closer. Gam Bruker, a Venusian who had tried to take on Earth ways, and who thought of himself as being human, looked apprehensively over his shoulder as old memories stirred in the dark depths of his primitive mind.

"Did the blue glow lift you, Tel?" Gerweld continued.

Abruzzi shivered. He was an old man, fading fast, very close to death, but not minding this in the least. "The glass elevator lifted me. The blue glow just went along for the ride."

"Did it hurt?" Gerweld asked.

"It happened so fast I didn't have time to find out if it hurt or not. It scared the wadding out of me, that's for sure. And ... I just remembered . . . there was music." His face softened as this memory came up.

"How could there be music up in the sky, Tel?" Gerweld continued.

"It wasn't exactly music," Abruzzi continued. He frowned at the effort to remember. "There was one deep note and a lot of littie notes playing tag all around it. The big note sounded like an organ playing far off somewhere."

His listeners twisted and lost interest. A glass elevator that whisked its passengers into the sky they could conceivably imagine. Would not the Helbron Drive lift anything that would hold together? Maybe somebody had put the Drive into a glass tank?

However, an organ in the sky was a little too difficult for them to imagine. Most of them were already convinced they were listening to a nightmare that had resulted from drinking too much sapon juice. They might go along with the idea of old Tel doing a little sky walking when he was roaring drunk—most of them had felt the planet grow unsteady beneath their feet under such conditions—but when he said he had heard an organ too, then it was almost certain in their minds that he had been flying on the seven league boots of sapon. Doubt arose in all of them except Sam Gerweld, and oddly, in Gam Bruker. The native listened more closely.

"How'd you get down, Tel?" Gerweld asked.

'The glass elevator brought me down," Abruzzi answered. "It came down slow, like it had a built-in Drive that was just barely biting at space. It set me down on the street again and the door opened and I got the hell out of there as fast as my feet would carry me." Pausing, he looked at his hearers for their reaction. He saw, sadly, that they did not believe him.

"Have another drink, Tel," Gerweld said.

"Don't care if I do," Abruzzi answered. He gulped at the hot liquid the native waiter set in front of him in answer to Gerweld's signal.

"Tell me again about the blue glow," Gerweld asked. His continued interest and belief made Abruzzi feel a little better. The drink helped. He told the story again before he realized that he had lost all of his audience except Gerweld and Gam Bruker. Instead of going away, the native had drawn closer.

"Be telling about it again. Mr. Tel, pleasen?" Gam Bruker pleaded.

"What do you want to hear about it again for, stupid?" Abruzzi asked.

"It makes pictures my head in," the native explained. "Pleasen be telling it again, Mr. Tel."

Pleased, Abruzzi told the story again. When he had finished, Gam Bruker began to talk. "My people be telling stories of much time ago when the Great One lived in the sky. My people be talking of the blue god."

As if he had suddenly remembered something, Gam Bruker hastily looked again toward the front door. Sweat broke out on him.

"Tell us about this blue god, Gam," Gerweld suggested.

Gam Bruker hastily shook his head. He had grown very fearful. "It not be good to tellen too much. The blue god knows everything. But one thing I know, I be scared in my bones."

"So am I," Tel Abruzzi answered, in sudden agreement. "I've been scared ever since I found myself walking in the sky. There's something happening up there that is bad, bad, bad."

"I sure agree with you there, Tel," Gerweld said.

For a time, Abruzzi was silent. Then he spoke with great firmness. "Jarr has to be told about this."

"I agree with you on that too," Gerweld answered.

Gam Bruker nodded hasty assent. Deep in his bones, he was scared almost to death of something that he called the Blue God. Gam Bruker was not a member of the Confederation, but he had heard so many stories of the tall lean man who led the wild ones of space, that he was convinced that Jarr Rahmer was great enough to destroy even the fearsome Blue God of his people.

So the grapevine talked again.

"Send out word that the Council will meet next Tuesday night, in our rooms in Torres," Jarr said to Caleb. "I want everybody there." He mused for a moment, then added a single sentence. "It looks to me as if a screw has come loose somewhere in the Solar System."

"If that is true, 111 bet we discover that the devil has learned how to use a screwdriver," Caleb commented.

"Are you hinting we are going to discover what hell means?" Jarr asked.

"At the very least," Caleb answered.

Chapter Two

They came in over the city of Torres in the dark time, with the eternal rain of Venus splashing at the hull of the little needle-nosed flier. In the pilot's seat was a tall lean man with a calm face and expressionless eyes. Riding in the seat behind him, Caleb looked like some ancient, wise monkey. Across Caleb's lap was what looked like a large suitcase. Jarr was armed with that ingenious adaptation of the Hel-bron Drive that humans had invented soon after Helbron had given them the key to space flight. He carried the bulky weapon in a sling over his shoulder. Caleb was unarmed.

Helbron had not intended to build a weapon when he had invented his famous Drive. His eyes had been on the planets first, then on the stars beyond them. Helbron was a scientist, a humanitarian, a genius. Seeking a pathway to the stars, he was much concerned about the safety of the men who would fly his ships for as long as they were on board. He never gave a thought to what would happen after they landed. In the world in which Helbron lived, men did not hate each other, no one was afraid, and no one coveted his neighbor's property or his friend's wife. In Helbron's concept of the planets, no man-eating tigers had existed, nor had beasts larger than elephants and hungrier than lions. He had been sure that the first men to land on any planet would be welcomed with open arms by the happy inhabitants who lived in an idyllic paradise.

Venus had welcomed humans. The native tribes, lower for the most part than the bushmen of Australia, had thought it was wonderful to have humans come to their world. The natives had never had it so good. They hadn't eaten so well in generations.

The crew of the first ship had been massacred to the last man.

After this had happened a few times, men more practical than Helbron had learned to take weapons with them when they landed. At first, they had used the rifles and revolvers that had already been invented. They would have liked to have taken atomic bombs, but atomic powered hand weapons had never been devised and there was no point in using a radiation bomb on an area where landing later was contemplated. Eventually, practical-minded engineers had learned how to adapt Helbron's Drive in such a way that it could be used as a weapon.

Unfortunately, the Helbron gun was as large as a submachine gun. Big and cumbersome, it was usually carried in a sling over the shoulders.

The gun projected twin beams of invisible frequency about one inch apart. Where the beams struck, they short-circuited, and the Helbron Effect, with which the beams were modulated, came into existence. The weapon itself was silent and the beams themselves were invisible, but where the beams struck, hell itself erupted as the violent churning action of the Helbron Effect came into existence. Since this churning, twisting action started at the atomic level and took effect in any substance, there was no defense against it. The effect on a man struck by the twin beams was simple: a hole appeared in him. He died.

The energy damped out quickly, with the result that the hole was usually small, unless the beams were continuously applied, in which case the hole enlarged rapidly.

Though many people had claimed that it came ahead of its time, the Helbron Drive was an act of pure genius. Its impact on human culture had been staggering. It had literally disrupted Earth's economic and political patterns, throwing both into chaos. It should have been introduced into commerce and politics in a slow orderly manner, but Helbron was no social scientist and he was hardly aware that his invention would have a devastating effect on the economics and politics of his home planet. Helbron had had his eyes on the stars. Unfortunately, in keeping his vision set high, he forgot the planet under his own feet.

The Helbron Effect, as adapted by practical engineers on Earth, meant power for almost no cost. Cheap power, low cost power, has always been the dream of every engineer. Helbron Drive meant that any man could have all the power he wanted simply by buying or building a Helbron generator. There was no fuel to buy and the cost of upkeep was practically nothing. Nations fell over this invention, stocks and bonds that had been valuable were suddenly worthless. Every man who had a Helbron generator was a king. Or thought he was.

The Helbron Drive had made space flight practical. It would power anything from a rowboat to a space liner a mile long, lifting each with equal ease. It drew its power from some subspace of etheric energy which only Helbron clearly understood. After the power was used, it went back to this subspace in a continuous flow inward and outward. Thus the cost of a spaceship was the price of the hull and equipment, plus the Drive. There was no fuel cost. Repairs on the Drive itself were usually nrinimal. Anything would fly.

Before they had fully learned how to walk the surface of their own planet, men had wings to reach the stars.

Men took to space with eager ambition. The dreamers of the race, who had long looked at the stars, suddenly found that the sky was theirs.

Unfortunately, the law and order of Earth did not go with the men who went adventuring. Each man was forced by circumstances to become his own law, and his own keeping of it. The breed of men who went planetward were never, in their hearts, very law-abiding. They were in a vast, seething, silent rebellion against what most men thought of as a society that was a legal octopus that strangled them in petty details and gave them neither freedom nor real protection. Going to space, they were resolved to leave this legal octopus behind them.

On Earth, legislative bodies made laws governing the planets. The inhabitants of the worlds in the sky had no intention of recognizing such nonsense. Nor did the men who went to space. The inhabitants of the planets had their own laws, of which they were usually heartily sick. Spacemen paid little attention to the laws of any world.

This situation, in many instances, had resulted in vast abuse, in injustice, in unfair treatment. Also, colonists had been lured from Earth to the planets to face death in many forms.

To combat this situation of almost complete chaos, the men of space had taken a page out of the Old West in the America of long ago—the vigilantes. Spacemen had formed a system-wide organization known as the Confederation. The Wild Bunch of space—men who had dared to fly the Helbron

Drive anywhere—had taken the first steps toward sane law. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to, because they were forced to recognize the necessity for law and order.

It was this Confederation that Jared Rahmer led. He had not sought leadership but it had been thrust upon him. He had been the major factor in organizing the Confederation. Jarr was also the man who kept it going. He took no pay for the task, all his modest income being derived from the mine which he owned and operated. For him, the work of the Confederation was a labor of love. If greedy men hated him and law breakers plotted his death, this only made his task more interesting. A man needed a little excitement now and then!

As Jarr and Caleb came in over Torres, the little ship throbbed its song of power from the Helbron Drive. This throb was not a hum—a hum would have meant loss of energy through waste vibration and would have thrown Caleb into a fit until he had corrected it—but a higher note which the ear did not quite catch, but which some other center in the human organism detected as being present. It meant freedom, the ability to range the skies over any planet or the wastes of space between them. To Jared Rahmer, life meant freedom, in thought, action, and in imagination.

Lightning walked across the sky and his eyes flicked toward it. The metal covers over the viewport were drawn back and he was flying by sight alone. The lightning came again, closer now, and the blue glow of static electricity appeared momentarily on the hull.

Behind Jarr, Caleb flinched.

"Jumpy?" Jarr questioned.

"Nah!" Caleb answered disdainfully. "Not with you at the controls. But that glow was blue."

"You've accn it a thousand timps when it was that Color,"

Jarr reminded.

"I know I have." Caleb's voice grew grumpy. "But that was before the devil took to wearing blue." His voice went into silence, then came again on a plaintive wail. "Maybe I'm getting old! Maybe I'm no longer fit to ride the thin edge of a razor to nowhere and back again."

"Nonsense!" Jarr said. "You're as good a man as you ever were. And the best mechanic in the Solar System."

"Thanks, Jarr." The old man's tone picked up at this praise. "Maybe it's nerves."

"Nerves never ran away with one of the Wild Bunch," Jarr answered. "You have a reason to be jumpy. There's something happening that I don't like."

"Do you mean right now?" Caleb asked hastily.

"Not to us right now." Jarr answered laughing. "As soon as we find out what the other members of the council have to report."

"Maybe well know why the devil is wearing blue," Caleb commented. "Also we may find out how long he is going to let us stay alive."

"Well be alive long after this particular devil is dead," Jarr answered.

"I hope you're right," Caleb said. "But I've got a wrong feeling in my bones."

"Rheumatism!" Jarr answered, then was silent. Below them, visible through the mist of rain, the lights of Torres glowed like dull pearls lost at the bottom of some murky sea. He started bringing the little flier down.

Control of a ship was no problem to a pilot. The Helbron Drive would take a ship to the right or to the left, straight up or straight down, or even backwards if this was necessary. Only one thing was necessary for the Drive to function-movement. It would not hold a ship still.

The flight pattern of Torres did not give Jarr any concern, for the simple reason that there was no flight pattern. The pilot of a ship powered by Heldron Drive needed to know only two rules for safe operation: first, that the little ships should stay out of the way of the big ships; second, that in no case should he get within fifty yards of another ship while the Drive was operating. The force field generated by the Drive would tear the guts out of anything within this range.

This characteristic of the Drive made it unpopular when used by careless pilots. In itself the Drive was a lethal weapon, and it had been used as such on many occasions, the pilot of the ship skipping just over the heads or the property of his enemies and letting the Drive work its destruction upon them.

The landing area of Torres was large but not well lighted Only the glow from the pylon of the Venus Spaceship Line made a dim light in the rain-spattered darkness. As Jarr landed the little flier, the force of the Drive turned the little pools of water collected on the ground into puffs of steam. He noted that off to the right another private ship was berthed. He flicked a light toward the lone taxicab waiting in the area designated for such purposes, and he and Caleb stepped to the ground as the cab rumbled up to them. The driver's round, grinning face looked out at them.

"Hi, Jarr." There was hardly a man in Torres who did not know Jarr Rahmer and did not call him by his first name. "I thought I recognized your ship."

"Hi, Andy," Jarr answered. "How's it with you?"

"Eating and sleeping, Jarr. Could any man ask more?" The driver had an infectious grin, which faded as another thought came into his mind. "They're waiting for you, Jarr, in the big room over the Universe Saloon." He was referring to the members of the council.

"Good," Jarr answered. "How do you know?"

"I took Big Olaf and Sam Helker there," the driver answered. He hesitated and the thoughtful expression on his face became more serious. "Jarr, there are stories going a-round . . ."

"How are Big Olaf and Sam?" Jarr answered.

"Olaf is the same as ever. Nothing ever bodiers the big ox. But Helker was acting as if he had something on his mind."

"Did Sam say what it was?"

"Sam is as closemouthed as you are," the driver answered. "They're doing their own thinking and they're not talking."

"They always did their own thinking. They're spacemen," Jarr answered. "These stories that are going around—are they bad?"

"They're not good." The driver expertly skidded the cab around a corner on a wet street. "Nobody seems to know quite what to think. Rumors are plentiful but facts are scarce. There's a story going around that Jack Torrance is missing." The driver looked over his shoulder at the passengers in the rear seat of his cab. He was inviting further comment. He did not get what he wanted.

"Sometimes we have facts but they're a little too big for our minds to grasp them all at once," Jarr said. "We have to chew them into smaller bits before our minds can take hold of them."

"I knew you wouldn't talk," the driver grumbled. "But a lot of people are doing a mighty lot of chewing these days and nobody seems to have got his facts chewed down to a size small enough to handle. There are stories going around about something blue—" Again the driver looked over his shoulder to invite his passengers to talk.

"Blue is a nice color," Jarr said. Sitting beside him on the rear seat, Caleb hugged the suitcase tighter.

"This color ain't nice," the driver denied. "The things that have happened to the people who have tangled with it ain't nice either." He snarled out the window at a native slapping across the street in front of the cab. "Get the hell out of my way, you mush-nosed green devil."

The Venusian skipped fast enough to dodge the fender of the cab, then screamed curses in reply.

"Hitting that native wouldn't have been nice either," Jan-commented.

"Him? Huh!" Disdain for all natives was clear in the driver's voice. "I don't mind him. He's a tame one. All he would do would be to scream insults at me. If he had been a wild one fresh in from the jungle, it might have been a different story." He spun the cab around a corner. "There are even stories from Earth about this blue thing." "There are?" Jarr said.

"Don't be so damned innocent," the driver complained. "I know you are in town to turn loose the Wild Bunch on this blue thing. Damned mush-nosed slob-belly!" The last words were spoken to another native who had appeared in the headlight beams as he scurried across the street.

Air hissed as the driver applied brakes in an effort to avoid an accident. The cab skidded sideways and missed the native by inches as it came to a halt. The driver thrust his head out the window to shout obscenities at the native who had almost been his victim. The Venusian made a throwing motion with one arm. The driver ducked, hastily rolled up the window, and slammed the cab into high gear, spinning the wheels as he sought for traction.

"That was a wild one for sure!" he gasped. "I wish somebody would pass a law requiring these mush-nosed greenies to wear signs saying whether they are wild or tame, so I would know which ones are safe to insult."

Jarr reached up and pulled from the upholstery the thin piece of metal which the native had thrown at the driver. It was a needle knife. Designed for stabbing or throwing, it had no edge and no hilt, the latter serving as a launching device and remaining in the thrower's hand. These needle knives were dangerous weapons. The natives could throw them a distance of fifty feet with great accuracy. In a close fight, they stabbed with them.

Examining the needle point, Jarr saw the dark smudge there. "I think you had better mend your manners," he said to the driver.

"I didn't see him in time."

"It wasn't the close shave that he minded, it was the way you insulted him," Jarr said.

"He was lucky I didn't run over him," the driver answered.

"This is his planet. We're guests here. How would you like it if a wild Venusian almost ran you down on Fifth Avenue, in New York, then called you a slob-belly when you didn't jump out of his way fast enough?"

"I guess I wouldn't like it," the driver grumbled. Then, as another thought struck him, he turned wild eyes toward the rear. "Jarr, was that knife poisoned?"

Rahmer exhibited the smudge on the point. "If you had got it in the face, you wouldn't be alive right now."

The driver shuddered.

"Nor would I," Caleb said, in a waspy voice. "And it came closer to me than it did to you. It came closest of all to Jared."

"I didn't mean—"' the driver protested.

"Mend your manners or go order a nice new coffin," Rahmer said. His voice was not harsh or rough but there was a quality in it which the driver heard and respected. Jarr Rahmer affected all men in this way.

The chastened driver cautiously stopped his cab in front of the Crossroads of the Universe Saloon. Jarr paid the fare and he and Caleb stepped out. They entered through the open doorway into the smoke and incense-filled interior.

The place sounded like an alarmed beehive. All the languages spoken in space were heard here, and all the dialects of Venus. All the forms of vice known in the Solar System either existed here or arrangements could be made here to procure them elsewhere. Perhaps as compensation for the lonely, danger-racked hours they spend in flight between the planets, spacemen have always hungered for exotic entertainment. Venusians too hungered to have this sort of frenzied release.

When Jarr and Caleb stepped through the doorway, the buzz of sound in the saloon dropped a notch in volume. The men here who did not know Jarr personally, knew his name and his reputation.

Jarr and Caleb headed straight for the stairs at the rear of the huge room. Everyone present noted the gun slung over Rahmer's shoulder. These men understood and respected weapons, particularly the Helbron gun. The big suitcase that Caleb lugged they hardly noticed. The owner of the saloon, told by an alert waiter that they had arrived, hastily came out of his private quarters. Oozing oil and politeness, he offered Jarr his choice of the delights of the saloon. The owner got a polite nod for his pains and felt he had been honored by being noticed at all.

At the top of the stairs, two men guarded a double door. These were typical spacemen, alert-eyed and ready for anything. Jarr recognized them as crewmen from Olaf's ship. He called each one by his first name and each responded in kind. The nearest quickly opened the double doors.

Jarr Rahmer and Caleb Smith entered a room where seven uneasy men sat around a long table. They rose quickly as he entered, came forward quickly and shook hands. The usual name-calling, the remembering of past shared adventures in the worlds of space, were absent. These were big men, aggressive men. There was not a person present who was not a leader and an able executive. At this moment, an oppressive pall seemed to have settled over them and they looked like a troop of frightened boy scouts.

Caleb took his suitcase to a chair in the back of the room and he sat down. Jarr went to the head of the table.

"Do we have a little trouble somewhere?" he asked quietly.

"A little trouble?" Sam Helker's fist came down on the table. "Somebody, or something, is turning the Solar System upside down." He glared at Jarr as if he was holding Rahmer personally responsible for the situation. "What are you going to do about it?"

"First, I have to find out what it is," Jarr answered. His tone was unruffled though he knew that Helker secretly wanted his job as leader of the Confederation and that the man had made several efforts to discredit him. Helker was a big man who always seemed to be burning with some secret fury. Deep inside him some long-standing frustration smoldered with furious intensity. Upon at least one occasion, Helker was known to have brought emigrants from Earth and to have attempted to establish a colony with himself as king. The effort had failed when the colony had gone down beneath an avalanche of voracious jungle insects. Helker's king-complex now suffered another frustration under Jarr's presidency.

"Don't you know what it is?" Helker demanded. His manner conveyed the impression that if the Confederation had had an able leader, this problem would have been solved.

"All I know is what I have heard," Rahmer answered. "I'm here to listen. Olaf, well start with you."

Chapter Three

A rumble in his voice, which meant that the big man was worried deep inside, Big Olaf retold the story of Jack Torrance.

"Jack Torrance was my good friend!" Olaf finished his account by bringing his fist down on the table with a violence that threatened to split the stout Venusian wood. In this gesure, he stated his whole moral code: loyalty to a friend.

Other men present had the same code and the same feelings; they added their growls. For a time the sound in the room was like that of angry mastiffs growling savagely at some intruder from the night.

Beneath their growls, they were uneasy. They did not know the nature of the intruder. This worried them. A known danger they could meet. The unknown, something that came out of nowhere and went into nowhere, raised their back hair.

At the wave of Jarr's hand, they left off their growling. "What news of Jack's wife and children?" he asked.

"None," Big Olaf answered. "But if they are alive, I will find them. If they are dead, their killer will answer to me!"

This time his fist left a definite mark in the heavy wood of the table top.

"He will answer to all of us," Jarr said. "George, what do you have to report?"

Known as Fat George because he resembled a ball of jelly, the man Jarr addressed told the story of Mrs. Robinson. Fat George did not like what he had to say. When he had finished talking, not a man present liked what he had heard.

"Where is Mrs. Robinson now?" Jarr asked.

"In the restricted ward at Space Hospital."

"She hasn't recovered from the shock?"

"Not yet," Fat George said. "I talked to the head man there. He used a lot of big words which added up to say that he didn't know whether or not she will ever regain her sanity."

"Did you talk to her?" Jarr asked.

Fat George shook his head. "You know how these hospitals are. They wouldn't let me in. I got her husband to go with me and they wouldn't let him in either."

"Where's her husband now?"

"Downstairs, drinking himself blind."

Jarr clicked his tongue in sympathy. "Any news of the missing child?"

"None whatsoever," Fat George answered. "I've had this town scoured from one end to the other. So far as I can find out, the child may have walked straight through that glass door and off of Venus."

A feeling of cold came into the room as Fat George finished talking. Men squirmed in their chairs and tried not to look at each other.

They brought in old Tel Abruzzi to tell his story in person. He told his story in a simple, straightforward manner, and when he had finished, not a man present even thought of asking him how much sapon he had drunk the night he had gone skywalking.

They questioned Tel Abruzzi in minute detail. He could tell them nothing more. He repeated the same words over and over again, stubbornly, as only a spaceman can be stubborn. "A glass door opened. A blue glow came from it. Then I was walking in the sky. And there was Torres down below me like an ant hill lit by candles."

After Abruzzi had been dismissed, there were other reports. Eck Tenner read them in a dry, clipped voice which measured the meaning of each word he spoke. Tenner had once been an astro-navigator on a space liner, but a collision with a meteorite had left him with no legs. The spaceship company had felt that a man without legs was of no use and had fired him. The Wild Bunch, caring more how much heart a man had than whether or not he had legs, had taken him in and had put his mathematical skill to work in the service of the Confederation. Eck Tenner used words as if they were mathematical symbols, each of which had to fit exactly into place before he let it leave his lips. He was secretary of the Wild Bunch.

"I have here a report of R. H. Kitzner, master of the freighter, Star of Mars. He states that as he was leaving Earth's moon outbound for Mars with a cargo of trade goods, his vessel was followed by a round object which emitted a blue glow. His ship was not attacked but he was followed and he was not able to shake off the pursuit. He wishes to know the nature of this blue object."

"He has my sympathy," Olaf muttered.

Jarr was silent. This was the first clear report which indicated that what Caleb called "the blue devil" was operating as far away as Earth's moon. The report made him uneasy. Had something come from outer space into the Solar System? Was Earth threatened also? "What else do you have?" he said to Eck Tenner.

The mathematician pulled another paper from a folder. "This is the report of John Forbes, a jungle trader. He had imported a Quonset hut and had set it up in the Hannibal Range, where he used it to store trade goods. The hut vanished. He wants us to pay for it and he claims that our in-

surance covers such inexplicable thefts."

Glancing around the men seated at the table, Eck Tenner met challenging stares. "Don't glare at me," he said. "That's all there is in the report. Forbes had a hut. Then he didn't have one. He wants us to pay for it. I should like to point out, however, that if we are going to set a precedent of paying for things like this, a special assessment will be necessary and it will have to be a regular levy on all the members."

Now Eck Tenner really faced glares. Special assessments were hated.

"Is this fellow Forbes in his right mind?" Sam Helker demanded.

"What jungle trader ever had a right mind to be in?" Eck Tenner answered.

"But it's not possible for a metal hut to vanish," Helker continued. "Ill bet the goonies tore it down and carried it away for the metal. Or perhaps he sold it and now he's trying to get us to pay for it."

"I know Forbes," Jarr spoke slowly. "He's honest."

"But this thing is meaningless," Helker protested. "Who would want a Quonset hut?"

"Who would want to kidnap a child from its cradle?" Jarr answered.

"But there is absolutely no point—" Helker broke off speaking as another thought crossed his mind. "What did Forbes have in that hut?"

"Only trade goods," Eck Tenner answered. "Nothing of unusual value."

Muttering, Helker subsided. In one way, the vanishing Quonset hut was harder to understand than anything else that had happened. Everyone present knew the region where Forbes had been trading. The Hannibal Range was jungle country. The natives there were hardly above the animal level. Even if they could have stolen a metal hut, it would have had no value to them.

At the head of the table, Jarr saw the unease on the faces of the men seated around him. He glanced over his shoulder at Caleb, but that master mechanic's face was an enigma wrapped in skin the color of old leather. Caleb looked as if he had stopped breathing.

Jarr turned his back to the table. He was the leader here, these men were looking for him to tell them what to do. Thousands of other men, the members of the Confederation, were looking to him for protection—for their lives in many instances. To these men of space, Jarr felt an intense loyalty; they were his people.

Something was happening to them, something that he did not understand, that no one seemed to understand as yet. It almost appeared that Caleb had been right when he had said that the devil had appeared and had taken to wearing blue. Jarr let the information that had been given filter through his mind, seeking a pattern in it, probing for a solution. There was no rhyme or reason in it. The events seemed to be completely without pattern, without purpose, as random as chaos itself. He could not stretch his imagination far enough to conceive of a relationship between the disappearance of Jack Torrance and the report of the master of the freighter outbound from Earth's moon that his ship had been followed by an object which had emitted a blue glow. Where did the child that had vanished fit into the picture? Jarr found himself squirming in his seat. He had never married and he had no children of his own. His feeling was that the kids of the Wild Bunch all belonged to him.

Something was happening that threatened those kids. He did not know what to do about it. He did not know where to start. He could not have felt any more helpless if a glass door had opened and a blue glow had sprung into existence around him.

Jarr started to speak, then stopped as the door opened. He caught the sight of the opening door out of the corner of his eyes. He had the impression that just beyond it destiny was waiting to enter the room. His flesh crawled at the thought.

A guard entered. His manner was apologetic. "Sorry, Jarr, but there's a woman out here who says she simply must see you."

"A woman—" Surprise sounded in Rahmer's voice. Women were not admitted to membership in the Confederation. They often went with their man to space, but it was always the man who led and the woman who followed. "Tell her I can't see her," Jarr said.

The guard was apologetic but determined. His manner conveyed the impression that he had already told her this but that she had insisted on entering. Jarr felt some curiosity. He wondered what kind of a woman would be able to talk her way past his guards.

"She insisted on seeing you, Jarr," the guard said.

"I simply haven't time," Rahmer answered.

The guard was persistent. "She said to tell you that she knows what this blue devil is."

At the words, Rahmer felt a jolt of surprise shoot through him. Around the table, he could see that the other men were surprised, too. Back in his corner, even Caleb had leaned forward. Big Olaf was plainly startled. Helker's face remained bland but the expression was frozen, as if he was suddenly afraid to move. Eck Tenner's face showed more pain than was usual. He seemed to feel that a totally inexplicible and unwanted factor was intruding in the equation he was building—a woman.

"Bring her in," Rahmer said. He was not really hopeful that he would discover anything from a woman but he was willing to listen to anyone.

The guard opened the door. The most beautiful woman that Jared Rahmer had ever seen on Venus, or on any other planet, entered. He got quickly to his feet. Around the table chairs scraped as the other men rose. Only Caleb remained seated but even his eyes showed surprise.

Her hair was as black as midnight. She wore it brushed back from her forehead and caught in a tight knot at the rear. Her skin was tanned a beautiful shade of brown as if she had been much in the sun. Her dark eyes glinted with light and with life. She was dressed in close-fitting slacks and a brown jacket which revealed every curve in her lithe body. She paused for an instant just inside the door while her eyes swept the room. As if she instantly recognized the man she wanted to see, she came directly toward Jarr Rahmer.

"I am Kay McKay," she said. "And you, I am sure, are Tared Rahmer."

Her handclasp was warm and friendly and almost as strong as that of a man. The way she shook hands said she was a good companion and a good friend.

Jarr introduced her to the members of the council. Her warmth melted them all, even Eck Tenner.

"And now, Miss McKay, will you please tell us why you have intruded here," Rahmer said.

As he spoke, the warmth faded from her face and the glow went out of her eyes. Fear replaced it. For an instant her eyes lost all life and became lusterless. Her skin lost part of its brownness. When she started to speak, she had to clear her throat twice, and even then her voice was hardly louder than a whisper.

Watching, Jarr Rahmer knew that this proud and confident woman had suddenly become afraid. He watched her try to find words to express herself.

She was not afraid of the men she was facing. This much was certain. To her, men were friends and companions. The fear came from some other source. Watching her, Jarr felt the single word "blue" whispering through his mind again and again. He suddenly was sure he knew why she was afraid. His skin crawled at the thought.

"I—" she began. Her voice faltered into silence. Jarr watched her take control of herself by an effort of will, he saw her rise above her fear, force it into the background, make it become nothing, and he marveled at what he saw. He had done this same thing many times in his life and he knew how difficult it was. To find a woman who could do it was rare indeed.

"First of all, I should tell you why I came to you," Kay McKay forced words from her lips. "The reason is simple. This is the only organization which possesses the skill, to meet the menace that has come into existence. If I take what I know to United Earth Governments, months will pass before any action will be taken, if it can and will be taken then. We simply do not have months to wait. By the time the United Earth Governments could act, the evil tide that is coming upon us would have grown so strong that nothing could hold it back."

Pausing, she sought for words to say what was pressing so heavily on her mind. "You, and only you, can do the job that has to be done. That you must do it goes without saying. If you fail, or refuse to meet the task, the lights of civilization will go out, not to be rekindled again in our lifetimes—or in many lifetimes to come. There are forces in this Universe which are far more horrible, far more subtle, far more powerful, that are farther-reaching in their effects, than any radiation device yet discovered, then any bomb yet invented, even the Helbron gun. You are the first, and perhaps the only, line of defense against one of these forces."

The room became completely quite as she spoke. Listening, Jarr Rahmer had the impression that the men around the table had stopped breathing. Kay McKay had put into words the secret fear that lay at the hearts of all of them.

"That is why I am here." Her voice came again. "Next, I will tell you what I am and why I know what I am going to tell you. I am an archaeologist and I am employed by the Archaeological Council of United Earth Governments. Perhaps all of you know this, perhaps you do not, but it will do no harm to mention that ever since space flight became practical, regular scientific expeditions have been sent out from Earth to explore the planets. These expeditions have gone into every aspect of existing conditions on the worlds of space ana⁷ into every pnase o£ U£e . . . where Me existed.

The purpose has been to learn everything that could be learned about all the planets and to make this information freely available to all people on Earth."

Though this was not news to them, her hearers were still alert and silent. Many of them had worked with the various scientific expeditions, providing ships and supplies. The free trader, trying to make a living, historically has always preceded organized scientific exploration.

"Though you may be familiar with what I am telling you, there is one investigation about which you probably know nothing, simply because it has carried a top-secret classification since its inception."

Her listeners stirred at this. Had the grapevine missed something?

"The reason I reveal this information to you is because I must. We are face to face with a crisis so big that if it is not met now, total destruction will be our eternal fate.

"I came to you because you are free men grouped together in what is in effect the oldest organization known to the human race, the guild. You can act swiftly, within days, or even within hours."

"Then get quickly to the point," Jarr said. Iron was in his voice. Around the table the listening men were very quiet. They knew from experience that when this tone was in Jarr Rahmer's voice, he was through with talking and was ready for action.

"Ill do that," Kay McKay said. "But before I can come to the point, I must give you some history."

"Then please do that," Jarr said. "But make it as brief as possible."

"I will have to tell you about the Great Race," Kay McKay said.

Interest quickened as she spoke. Big Olaf leaned forward in his chair. Helker's dark eyes were suddenly bright with an inner glow that might mean anything.

"The work I have been doing has been a special project set up by UaJted Earth Governments to trace doivn the history of the Great Race. We have covered the planets with instruments that not only probe beneath the surface but which also give us indications on underground structures. This is a big project. It has been in progress for years and has involved many people. Part of the work has been submarine exploration of the Japanese Deep in the Pacific Ocean of Earth. We found there the ruins of the Japanese cities that went down when most of the islands of Nippon went into the sea, but we also found something else, traces of construction so ancient that the time span is almost inconceivable. We got some of our first hints from the depths of the Pacific Ocean and the possibility exists that the home of the Great Race was originally Earth. Discovering space flight, they spread from Earth to the other planets. No, we are not the first people to master space! Another race did this before us. We have photographs of every planet from the air, using special cameras, lenses, and filters. We were looking for evidence of constructions so vast that the present races regard them as ranges of hills. We have found such works! Some of the most revealing data came from Mars.

"Everywhere, on all the planets, we have found some evidence pointing to the existence of what we call the Great Race. This people antedated humans by millions of years and they reached a height in scientific achievement far beyond anything that we have as yet reached.

"The evidence we have pieced together" indicates that the Great Race, contrary to all that we know that is best for social growth, was a total monarchy." Kay paused and a note of repugnance crept into her voice. "This meant that the will of the emperor was the supreme law of the land. Even his slightest whim was law."

The note of repugnance grew stronger in her voice. The men around the table were reacting in the same way. To their way of thinking, every man was his own law. The idea of having to obey the whim of another stirred deep wells of rebellion within them. True, they took orders from Jarr Rahmer, but he was one of them, and they took his orders

willingly, knowing they were for the good of all.

"I do not need to tell you that in an absolute monarchy, every man was the slave of the ruler and every woman was his chattel to do with as he wished."

Jarr was aware that Caleb had risen and had moved behind him. He leaned backward.

"Something is wrong here, Jarr," Caleb whispered in Jarr's ear.

"What is it?"

"I do not know yet, but I do not like it."

"Are your instruments functioning?"

"Certainly!" A touch of acid appeared in Caleb's whisper as if he resented the idea that any instrument, or any machine, would dare to fail to function perfectly around him. "Keep your eyes open, Jarr." The old man's voice was tense as he turned back to his seat by the wall.

Kay McKay continued speaking. "Absolute monarchy can exist in one way, and in only one way. It must be supported by absolute power. This power must be held in the hands of the monarch, and in his hands only."

Around the table heads nodded in agreement. They could see why this had to be true.

"In the case of the Great Race there existed a mechanism ... a machine. I use these words because I do not know any others to describe what must be a very complex grouping of subatomic energies and particles which involve a manipulation of space itself. This machine could be used to bring to death or destruction any man, any woman, any child, or any piece of property anywhere on any of the planets. It was the secret of the ruler of the Great Race. It gave him absolute power and made absolute monarchy possible. There is a political maxim which says, 'Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.' This is what happened to the Great Race." She hesitated, feeling for words, not wanting to say what she had to say next, but knowing it had to be said.

When she spoke again, her voice had grown weaker.

'"This machine not only existed in the past, it exists now. The very nature of its construction made it almost immune to time, and probably completely immune to destruction. It is in existence in the Solar System at this instant. It has been tested and retested. The strange things that are concerning you gentlemen here tonight came from the testing of this machine."

A growl came from Big Olaf. "Somebody has stolen a child, and driven its mother mad, just to test a machine?" Big Olaf sounded incredulous. Anger was deep in his voice.

"Yes," Kay McKay answered. "And it will be used to reestablish the absolute monarchy of the ruler of the Great Race, unless you gentlemen can prevent it. You, and you alone!"

Listening, Jarr Rahmer was aware that Kay McKay's voice was growing fainter and fainter. Looking at her more closely, he saw her body distorted by rising heat waves. He came to his feet. With a single movement, he swept the Helbron gun from its sling over his shoulder.

Behind him, he heard Caleb suddenly shout a warning.

Around the table, men were rising. Alarm turning to fear was on their faces.

Kay McKay had stopped speaking. A vague smile had appeared on her face. She glanced around the room as if she did not understand what was happening but she seemed puzzled rather than alarmed.

Jarr Rahmer moved quickly toward her.

A glass door opened between them.

Jarr stopped moving.

A blue glow flicked into existence around Kay McKay's body. It outlined her figure with a ghosdy radiance. For an instant she seemed to be standing in a glass door with a blue light playing over her.

Then she was gone . . . gone into a blue glow.

This happened so rapidly that the eye followed it with difficulty. During another instant, the air in the room seemed to crackle as if it was under great tension. Jarr Rahmer had the impression that streamers of static electricity were about to explode in the room. He felt the hair standing erect on his head. He had the dazed impression that he had suddenly lost most of his weight. He saw the heavy table rise an inch into the air, then settle back. Big Olaf staggered backward against the wall. Eck Tenner, trying to get to his feet on his artificial legs, was making swimming motions with his hands as if he was trying to push his way through heavy water. Helker was weaving backward. His hands were up as if he was trying to ward off some blow. Fat George was shaking all over. The others were in attitudes of distress.

Not a man spoke. Not a sound was in the room except the crackle of static electricity. Then the whole room resounded with a note like that of a giant violin string being plucked with powerful fingers.

Instantly, the room lighted with a blue radiance, a glow that came from nowhere. Springing into existence, it lit the whole room with its eldritch glow. It seemed to bring into full relief every object in the place.

It did something else too. It reached the human consciousness, producing there an incredible effect. Jarr Rahmer had the utterly bewildering impression that he was seeing the whole Solar System from near its center, seeing it all at once, in one single unified experience. What he saw seemed to him in this moment to be real. He was near the sun and he was looking simultaneously in all directions at the whole System. Near him, the great sun flared with a brilliance that was intolerable. Outward from it the planets spun in a sea of glass—space. That flick of light over there was Venus, the planet where he was supposed to be—but where he did not seem to be during this mad moment. Beyond it was Earth, the planet of the green mountains, home to the human race. Out farther the great planets moved in stately circles. Beyond them, lost in the infinitudes of that same sea of glass, the great suns of the void sparkled.

All this he saw while the blue glow held.

With this sight came the cold of space itself, the vast bitter biting sting of the deep freeze of the abyss, the cold that comes when motion almost ceases, the cold that exists where the asteroids go.

The icy cold swept through Jared Rahmer. He felt it bite into his bones. He took a step backward and flung one hand in front of his eyes. With his other hand, he clutched die Helbron gun, knowing as he did this that it was a useless weapon.

As he lifted his hand, he seemed to disturb a balance very diinly held. The vision of the Solar System vanished. The cold of space disappeared.

But the blue glow remained.

Men crouched backward against the walls of the room like frightened animals cowering against the walls of their cage before the whip of the trainer.

A voice laughed.

The laughter mocked at them, jeered at them, made fun of them. It said they were nothing . . . less than nothing. It said their greatest efforts could not avail against the laugher. It said they were the size of ants and that it was a giant that could stride on seven-league boots from planet to planet. It said they were slaves, and that if they doubted this, they would soon find proof in the iron collar around then-necks.

Hearing this laughter, Jarr Rahmer hated it with all his heart, hated it as he had never hated anything in his life before. This laughter represented to him all that was evil in the whole Solar System.

The laughter went into silence.

The blue glow vanished.

The table settled back firmly on its legs.

The sane, familiar world returned.

Chapter Four

Jarr Rammer wiped sweat from his face. The Helbron gun he kept clutched in his left hand, hoping that by some good fortune he would find a target for it, but knowing surely he would not. He was not going to be lucky enough to solve this problem with anything as simple as a gun.

"Gentlemen, will you please take your places at the table?" His words were put in the form of a request, but they were actually a command. He stood at the head of the table, waiting to be obeyed. The men of the council were slow to respond.

"Gentlemen!" Rahmer repeated.

Helker looked toward Rahmer, then toward the door.

"If anyone wants to run, no one will stop you. But you will never come back to this council," Rahmer said.

"Arrah!" Big Olaf's voice was a heavy grunt of sound. "By thunder, that thing took me in its teeth and shook me so much it made the bones rattle in my soul. However, it seems likely I can still sit down. In fact, If I don't sit, I have a hunch I may fall." He moved to the table and took his seat there. The others followed.

"Now if you will bear with me for a moment—" Rahmer turned to Caleb, beckoning him to come forward.

The old mechanic had not moved but his eyes had grown bright with inward lights. He watched Rahmer, waiting for orders. At the wave of Jarr's hand, he grabbed his suitcase and set it on the table in front of his leader.

"The phone, please. Get me the operating room of Venus Spaceship Line." Communication with Earth was surest via code rather than voice.

Caleb opened one side of the suitcase. Revealed therein was a compact transmitter and receiver. Making the contact, Caleb handed the combination mike and earphones to his boss.

"Venus Spaceship? I want to dictate a message to Earth. No, I am not drunk. I want you to put it on space radio immediately, ahead of everything else you've got on hand, including company business. Who the hell do I think I am? My name is Jared Rahmer." He waited for a few seconds while the operator at the other end hastily mended his manners and got his typewriter ready to take dictation. "Are you ready? Good. To: Calvin Ernest, President, United Earth Governments. Request full data including complete personal history on Kay McKay, archaeologist employed by Archaeological Division of United States Governments. Also require full data on secret project on which she was working. This is of utmost importance. Repeat UTMOST IMPORTANCE. Please answer immediately via space radio. Give top priority to reply. Signed: Jared Rahmer. No, operator, I do not know his address. Just 'Earth' will reach him. No, don't send this collect. Charge it to me personally. Oh, you're a member of the Confederation too? Good boy."

Handing the headset back to Caleb, Jarr swept the table with his eyes. "I know you have questions, gentlemen. I will try to answer them as best I can as soon as I can. However, for the next few minutes, please be patient. All right, Caleb, what did you get?"

Caleb was already opening the other side of the big suitcase. Revealed therein were instruments. The men a-round the table leaned forward to stare. They knew Caleb. Anything that he had done with an instrument or a machine would be interesting.

Rahmer was watching Caleb's face. He wasn't likeing what he was seeing there. The old mechanic's face was more sensitive than any instrument he could devise, if only you knew how to read what it was saying. Caleb's face was gaunt now, a sure sign of failure.

"Jarr, the main band of energy, the heart of this damned devil in blue, was so high in frequency that my instruments could not detect it."

"Then you got nothing?"

"Of course I got something!" Caleb's voice conveyed the impression that no instrument which he had made would ever dare to fail to function. "I got a lot but it was all lower harmonics of the main band. I caught the flickering of the blue light and the room turning cold. I got nothing on the opening of the glass door. The frequency on this was out of this world."

"Then you agree with what the woman said, that this thing is a mechanism of some kind?"

"I heard what she said," Caleb answered. "But did she know what she was talking about or was she guessing? I do not know whether this thing is a mechanism under the control of somebody somewhere, or whether it has life of its own."

Tension that had lightened momentarily began to creep back. It showed on the faces of the men and was revealed in the stiff, straight way they sat around the table, the intent manner in which they followed the conversation.

"Then you think it may be alive?" Rahmer felt his voice falter as he asked this question. He did not want to face the possibility of a life form so incredibly alien that it was incomprehensible to the human mind but he knew this possibility had to be faced. In the infinite depths of space, who knew what life forms existed and might wander into the Solar System?

"I said I didn't know," Caleb answered. "The young lady who made the speech to us seemed to think it wasn't alive but who can define life? I know of no instrument that will tell us whether or not a thing is alive or dead. A chunk of rock looks dead. It doesn't move, it doesn't talk, it doesn't breathe, or reproduce itself. However, all through the rock there is atomic movement. Life may exist at the atomic level. It's a strange kind of life, but just because it's strange doesn't mean it isn't real. This blue devil may be alive but in a way that we cannot understand." Hundreds of wrinkles showed on Caleb's face as he talked. He shook his head and shook it again and again as ideas came to him and were discarded.

In the shaking of Caleb's head, Rahmer read complete frustration. "How did it get here, into this room?"

Caleb shook his head at the question and frowned at his own answer. "My guess is that the thing got to us through hyperspace, which it uses with as much ease as we use ordinary space, that it actually works through, and possibly belongs to, other space."

Rahmer felt his own face grow grimmer. He knew something of the vast amount of theoretical and mathematical research that had been done on what was called other space. Whether there was one, a hundred, or an infinity of other spaces, no one knew. The mathematical proof of their existence was beyond dispute but this was the first time anyone had ever seen any real evidence that something could move through them.

"My guess is that what looks like the opening and the closing of a glass door is actually the beginning and the ending of a movement through other space," Caleb continued.

"If that is true, then this situation is really tough," Rahmer spoke. "It will be difficult enough to find—and fight —an enemy that has the whole Solar System as a hiding place. If it has other space as well, finding it will be like looking for a needle that never existed in a haystack that never was." He found he was involuntarily imitating the shaking of Caleb's head.

"So you have got nothing for your effort to trap the Blue Atom?" Helker questioned.

"Very little," Caleb admitted.

"I want to point out several things," Helker continued. "From our very midst, a person was kidnaped. We were powerless to prevent it. What I want to know is what is being done to prevent this from happening again to one of us?"

"At the present moment, I don't know enough to make adequate plans," Rahmer stated. "I should like to point out, however, that as the appearance of Miss McKay was unforeseen, her kidnaping was likewise unexpected."

"I don't think that's true," Helker answered. "I think you expected it to happen. If you hadn't expected it to happen—to her or to one of us—you would not have gone to the trouble to make those instruments and bring them here."

"Sometimes I wonder why I don't throttle you, Sam,"

Rahmer answered. "I don't usually let people call me a liar. As I told you before, I suspected something might happen, but I didn't know what it would be."

"How do you explain the fact that she was kidnaped when she was just on the verge of giving us important information?" Helker continued.

"I can't explain it. Can you?"

"No. That is . . . uh!" Helker's voice suddenly failed. "That is, unless—"

"Unless the Blue Atom knows exactiy what is happening at all times?" Is that what you are trying to say, Sam?" Rahmer asked.

"Yes. No! Hell, no!" Helker was suddenly on his feet and his gaze was darting wildly around the room as if he was trying to look in all directions at once. "Jarr, that can't be true! If it is true, it could mean we are being watched right now, by something we can't see?" Again his eyes searched the room.

"What do you think I've been worrying about all along?" Rahmer asked quietly.

The tension in the room was almost as thick as the field from the Helbron Drive. It was felt as a kind of magnetic flux and flow that pulled and jerked at the nerve endings. Eck Tenner was staring thoughtfully at his nails as if he was finding them objects of supreme interest. Fat George was shaking. Big Olaf was clasping and unclasping his huge fist.

"Can that possibly be true, Jarr?" Fat George spoke. Superstitious to the core, in many ways Fat George had the heart of a chicken. But when once he made up his mind to fight, no man was braver.

"It can."

"Then all of us may be sitting in the lion's mouth right now without knowing it?"

"Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. I don't know." Rahmer answered "But this brings up a point I have in mind. I want a vote on this, from each person present. Do I have full control of the Confederation, with full authority to use its resources in men, money, and materials in any way I see fit to fight this menace that has come upon us?"

There was not a dissenting vote. This was, in effect, a declaration of war. Every man present knew it. They went along with it without hesitation.

"Thank you, gentlemen," Rahmer said, when the vote was finished. "As of right now, we're on a war footing. Each of you will hold himself, such ships as he may possess, and such men as may be loyal to him, ready to go anywhere in the Solar System at any moment. Each one of you hereby swears that he will support this Confederation with all that he possesses, including his life, if need arises."

The oath was simple. As Rahmer looked at each man in turn, the individual nodded. This was all that was needed. When it was finished, Rahmer spoke again. "Now, I, Jared Rahmer, in the presence of all of you, do swear the same oath. In addition, I swear that I will lead you to the best of my ability, until you may relieve me of the responsibility, or until death takes me."

"The best clue we have is Miss McKay," Rahmer said, after a moment. "She knows more than anybody else about this . . . thing."

"How are we going to find her, Jarr?" Big Olaf spoke.

"We're going to find how she got to Torres," Rahmer answered. "She must have come in a ship. Caleb and I are going on a little exploring expedition."

The Helbron gun projected over Rahmer's shoulder as he and Caleb passed through the Crossroads of the Universe Saloon. At the sight of them the sound of the place dropped in volume. There was not a person present who was not very curious to know what had happened in the meeting rooms upstairs.

Outside the saloon was the dark, rain-splashed night. Scented with a dozen different odors, it seemed to contain all the mystery of Venus in it. In the distance, lightning flickered across the sky like the forked tongue of a night-walking dragon breathing fire into the darkness.

"Taxi, sir? Taxi? Oh, it's you, Jarr. If you're looking for a cab, use my hack." As Rahmer hesitated, the driver grinned at him. "Honest, Jarr, I'm doing my best to mend my manners. From now on out, I'm not even going to splash one of the local citizens."

"Okay," Rahmer answered, laughing. He opened the door and let Caleb precede him into the back seat. Power throbbed as the cab pulled away from the curb. Ahead of it, a shadow moved against the wall. Caught in the headlight beams was a native. His arm made a sweeping downward gesture.

The dart passed within inches of the driver's head.

Hearing it thud into the seat behind him, Rahmer knew that it had missed him by less than that. The Helbron gun came out of its carrier over his shoulder. The driver jerked his cab back toward the curb. Rahmer shoved the power control of the weapon to its lowest notch. He pointed the blunt end of it past the shoulder of the driver, who caught a glimpse of it and hastily ducked. The cab hit the curb and jolted to a halt.

The Helbron gun made a very soft phut-phut. No light flared from it, there was no visible radiation of any kind, but the shadow trying to flee down the street threw up its hands and collapsed.

"I hope I didn't kill him," Rahmer said. He leaped from the cab and ran forward. Caleb and the driver followed. Rahmer bent over and inspected the native.

"He's only stunned," he said. "Here, you take this. Shove it forward to full power." Passing the Helbron gun to Caleb, he leaned over and picked up the native. "I want a place where I can talk to him," he said to the driver.

"I've got a room near here. You can take him there. But you won't be able to understand the kind of noises he makes."

"Ill solve that problem later. Take me to your place. I don't want anybody else to know about this if I can help it."

The taxi driver led them to a small room that opened off an alley. The place was small but it was dry and it had a bed in it. Rahmer laid the native down. From a pouch at his belt, Jarr removed a small pot of black, gummy paste. He set this to one side. From the belt itself, he removed four more knives.

"Plenty of ammunition," Caleb commented.

"They always have plenty," the taxi driver grunted. "There ought to be a law against allowing wild ones to run loose in Torres. After all, this is a city."

"It's still their city," Rahmer said. "Caleb, will you go back to the saloon and find the tame Venusian who thinks he is almost human. Gam—"

"I know him," Caleb said. He handed the Helbron gun to Rahmer and departed.

"I want some strong cords or wire," Rahmer said. The taxi driver found them and Jarr tied the hands and the feet of the native. Before this was finished the Venusian was coming back to consciousness. Rahmer watched the hands strain at the wire that bound them. The native was not yet fully conscious but he was already trying to reach one of the knives that had been in his belt.

"It's no go," Rahmer said. His voice brought the native back to consciousness. The eyes that looked at the human were wild. There was an animal expression in them.

Entering the room with Caleb, Gam Bruker was thrilled and flattered. Humans had sent for him, humans wanted to talk to him, at last he was on his way to being accepted as human. And not just any human wanted to talk to him, but Jarr was the one! Gam Bruker's bow was so low that his head almost touched the floor. When Rahmer shook hands with him, his happiness was complete. Shaking hands was the way humans greeted each other. When he saw the native on the bed and realized what was required of him, Gam Bruker's face lost much of its happy shine.

"Bad one, Jharen. Maybe I had better go."

"Maybe you had better stay," Rahmer said. "Tell him we are not going to kill him, that all we want to do is talk to him."

Swearing, Gam Bruker turned to his task. Rahmer made little effort to follow the flow of talk between the two Venusians. The Veiled Planet had hundreds of dialects and even Gam Bruker seemed to have difficulty in understanding the grunted gutturals and the hissed sibilants of a wild , native from the jungle. For a time, so sharp were the hisses, that it seemed to Rahmer that two snakes were talking to each other.

"Tell him I want to know why he tried to kill the taxi driver," Rahmer directed. He saw that Gam Bruker was sweating profusely now and that the hot eyes of the native were loaded with hate.

"Be sorry sayin' this, Jharen," Gam Bruker said, pointing to the driver. "Not him he tryin' killen."

"Eh?" Rahmer's voice was a single grunted syllable of sound in the hot room.

"You," Gam Bruker said. "Being you he try killen."

"That's what I was afraid of!" Caleb said.

"You and me both," Rahmer answered. "Ask him if he was trying to kill me with the first dart he threw!"

"Already asken him," Gam Bruker answered. "He said he try two times."

"Somebody hired a killer to get you," Caleb said. "This is not the first time it has happened."

"It had to be somebody who knew I was coming to town," Rahmer said. "I don't like this."

"I don't like it, either. If you were out of the way, the Confederation would fall to pieces. If this happened, that blue devil could do as he pleased."

Rahmer tried to shove his embarrassment down deep inside of him. "Some day I'm going to make you walk the plank out beyond Pluto," he grumbled. "I'm not paying you to be a yes-man or to flatter me. What I want to know is why somebody wants me killed. After what we saw the Blue Atom do, we can guess that it doesn't need to hire natives to throw poisoned knives."

"The blue devil didn't hire this wild one. Somebody else did that."

"Now who—" "Ask the native."

Rahmer turned back to Gam Bruker, who did his best to get the wanted information. He pleaded, he cajoled, he threatened, and he blustered. Sweat poured out of him as he worked. Finally he threw up his hands and turned to Rahmer. "He just not knowen, Jharen. His headman sent him. Not knowen who paid his headman. He say this was just a job he had to do. He not mad. Just job."

"See what I told you," the taxi driver spoke. "There oughta be a law."

"It's not immoral for him to try to kill me," Rahmer said. "He doesn't know any better. But it would be immoral for me to kill him. I know better. Gam—"

"Yesn, Jharen."

"You stay here with him until we get back." A wave of his hand indicated the native on the bed. "Don't let him get away. Ill want to talk to him later and see if I can find out who his headman is. Maybe bis heaman can tell us who is trying to get me killed."

"Hokay, Jharen. But not liken talken to headman."

Leaving the gesticulating Gam Bruker behind them, they exited. Outside was the night with its eternal rain. "Will your hack still run?"

"Sure thing. I didn't hit that curb enough to do any damage. Where do you want to go?"

"A woman came to the meeting tonight."

"A woman at the meeting of the Confederation!"

"Yes. I don't suppose you brought her."

"Nope."

"She probably came in a ship to Torres and the ship is probably still around here somewhere."

"I got you. Jump in. If we meet any more knife-throwers, I'm going to run over them first and ask questions afterwards."

"You just drive the cab," Rahmer instructed.

True to the driver's faith, the cab rolled on. "There's a lot of landing fields around this place, Jarr," the driver commented.

"We'll check 'em all, if we have to."

"Wouldn't it be faster if we just called the space lines and see if anybody like this dame has come in on one of their fields?"

"Faster, maybe, but the news would get around that way."

An hour later they were approaching a small flier resting in a dark corner of one of the smaller landing fields. The ship was completely dark. The driver swept the cab's lights across it and read the number on its nose. "That number tells me a lot of nothing. Ill go bang on the port. If I get shot for waking somebody up, you go to bat for me."

He stopped his cab and got out. They could hear him splashing around in the water on the field but they didn't hear him try to rouse the occupants. He was back at the cab very quickly and his voice was down to a whisper.

"I don't know if it's this dame's ship or not, Jarr, but somebody has either been here ahead of us, or is inside now."

"How do you know?"

"The outer door has been cut into with a torch and forced." Rahmer and Caleb were instantly out of the cab. "If there's somebody inside, he saw my lights, and he's waiting for you."

"In that case, well go right on in." Rahmer slipped the Helbron gun from its back holster. A flashlight in the hand of the nervous driver revealed where a cutting torch had worked on the stout steel of the hull, neatly cutting out the lock on the port. The inner door was partly open. No sound came from inside the ship. Rahmer stod there in the darkness, listening to the swish of the rain blowing across the hull. An odor came from inside, a subtle yet pervasive perfume. As the fragrance of the perfume reached him, Rahmer found that a mental picture of Kay MeKay as she had stood in the council room rose before his inner vision. He recognized her perfume and knew that this was her ship.

"Take the flashlight from the driver before he drops it and shine it inside," Rahmer said to Caleb.

"Sure, Jarr. But be ready to blast. And have that popgun on full power."

"I've already got it there."

The light flicked on. Just beyond the inner door of the lock was a shambles. Moving forward, Rahmer saw that clothes had been jerked from a wall locker. The flier was a private ship, luxuriously fitted. It had been ransacked from end to end.

"Somebody beat us here," Rahmer said.

"Yeah," Caleb answered. "This is not just an ordinary space tub, this is a yacht that cost somebody a pile of money."

"I noticed that."

"The thing I've got on my mind is how a woman employed by Earth Governments could have afforded a ship like this. They don't pay much, even to top people."

"I know."

"Do you think maybe we've got the wrong ship?" "No. Her perfume was in the air."

"Perfume? Yeah, now that you mention it, I smelled it too. She was here all right. She came to Torres in this ship. But why—?"

"Somebody else is looking for her and wants to know more about her," Rahmer said.

"Or maybe somebody doesn't want us to find out anything about her," Caleb commented. "Maybe they stripped the ship to keep us from discovering anything she might have left there. Maybe she had notes on the Great Race; maybe she knew more about the blue devil than she told us; maybe—"

"We can think of a million maybes," Rahmer said. "There's nothing here for us. Come on."

In the back seat of the cab, Jarr and Caleb were silent as they rode back into the city of Torres. Lightning flickered in the sky, each was aware of it but the impulse to jump at the sight of a flash of light was passing. Behind the wheel, the driver was restless.

"Take me back to your room, driver. I want to talk to the native we left there."

"Sure." The driver twisted the wheel of the cab. "Do you think he knows something?"

"Right at this moment, I don't know what I think, except that you would be a mighty smart cab driver if you buttoned up that big hp of yours."

"Sure, Jarr."

The driver led the way to his room. He opened the door, looked inside, then jerked his head over his shoulder.

"There's a kind of funny blue light in here," he said. "It's just fading. Nothing I guess." He walked on in.

Jarr and Caleb took their time about entering. Gam Bruker was gone. The bed where they had left the killer was empty. He was gone too. A tang of ozone was in the air. A faint blue mist was still visible in the room. While they watched, it faded away. Space itself seemed to creak as it settled itself back on its foundations.

"Now what the hell happened to them?" the cab driver asked.

Rahmer and Caleb backed quietly out of the room. "By how many minutes did it miss us?" Rahmer questioned. "Maybe a minute, maybe thirty seconds," Caleb answered, shuddering.

Chapter Five

The place stank. The rank odor of native beer, unwashed bodies, and an eternal musty dampness, which gave the impression that crawling things were spawning in it, was in the air. There was a side door which led to an alley, a back door which led to an adjoining building; then on and on into the rat warrens of Torres where the crawling things actually did spawn; and finally another side door which led to a passage which in turn led down a short flight of steps and into the main room of a native saloon. A man, or a Venusian, who wished to flee from this place could lose himself within seconds within the dives of the city, where he could never be found. A human hiding here might not live long; if a native didn't get him, the crawling things would.

"I think we're being watched," Jarr Rahmer said. "I think our regular meeting rooms are bugged by something from other space. For all I know, this place may be bugged too, but it seemed safer. That's why I had you come here."

The time was near noon of the next day. Jarr and Caleb had slept in a native hotel. Coming here, they had summoned the others. "I think this thing from other space knows what we're doing as soon as we do it—maybe before we do it."

It seemed to Rahmer that the walls of this back room were made of lead. He knew, of course, that they were actually made of stone two feet thick and that two spacemen stood guard at each door, but he still felt uneasy. His inner being was disturbed. It was sending up little warning prickles of coldness to his skin, telling him that all was not well.

Big Olaf started to say something, then changed his mind. Eck Tenner also looked as if he was about to speak but did not quite dare open his mouth. Helker was quiet, perhaps too quiet. Fat George was sweating. Rahmer waited for someone to speak. When no one did, Jared continued. "I think the factor that saved Caleb and me last night was motion. We kept moving. This thing that watches from other space couldn't quite follow as fast as we could jump. It. lost us."

The men in the stinking back room were thinking, except Caleb, who sat at one side and fiddled with the instruments in his suitcase. Rahmer kept on talking.

"When we leave here, I think our best insurance is to keep moving. But don't follow a straight course; that way you're predictable. Keep random. When you're on the ground, don't stay long m the same spot."

"I don't like running," Big Olaf muttered. "Also, what good will it do? If something is watching us from other space, it can catch us no matter where we go."

"Yes," Rahmer agreed. "It can and it will. But it seems to lose us when we move erratically."

"I don't like being watched without knowing it," Fat George said. A shiver passed through his body, shaking it like a bowl of jelly.

"I don't like it either," Rahmer answered. "According to Caleb, the Blue Atom probably works through other space. If it is an entity, a being in its own right, then it is watching us. But it is not a perfect entity, or a perfect instrument; and when we move quickly, we do get out of its focus."

"I think this may go farther than just watching us," Helker said. "Have any of you had a feeling that something was poking around inside your brain? I mean . . ." He shook his head. "Hell, I don't know what I mean, except I don't like it."

"I've had that feeling," Olaf said. "Now and then something seems to pry up the top of my skull and take a peek inside."

"You see, you've got it, tool" Helker said. For an instant, he seemed pleased to know that someone else was sharing his experience, then his satisfaction vanished as he grasped the meaning back of that experience.

"Stop it!" Rahmer said sharply. "We have no evidence which would indicate mind reading. If we start thinking we have, well start misinterpreting a lot of little skin twitches that we normally don't even notice, and which have no real meaning . . ." His voice faltered into silence. He shook his head.

"I don't blame you for shaking your head. You don't believe what you're saying and none of us do either. You've got to admit the possibility that this damned thing that used other space can read our minds too, simply because thinking sets up waves that enter other space," said Eck Tenner.

"You didn't figure all that out with a slide rule, Eck,"

Rahmer answered. "But I've got to admit you're right. We've got to admit the possibility of damned good mind guessing if not mind reading. First of all, Kay McKay was kidnaped, just at the right moment to keep her from telling too much. We watched this happen. Therefore something else must have been watching too. It does not follow that this something else read her mind; it might have been able to understand her language, but it knew enough or guessed enough to know to act when the time was ready. Also, it snatched away a native killer before I could question him fully. Add these facts together, and if you don't come up with the suspicion that our minds are being read, you at least will conclude it is pretty certain we are being watched.

"On the other hand, we must not overestimate the powers of this thing," he continued. "Whatever it is, it must have its limits."

"Do you know those limits?" Eck Tenner questioned doubtfully.

"I do not. We will have to uncover them." "I'd like to stay alive while we do it," Eck Tenner continued.

"You can say that for me too," Big Olaf spoke.

"Make me three," Fat George added. ,

"If I may make a suggestion," Jarr continued, "we need a detector which will reveal to us that this blue devil is near." Caleb spoke. "My instruments were faulty last night. However, they gave me some information, enough to enable me to build a better detector. To do it," Caleb paused, "I'll have to have my own workshop and my own men. This means a return to headquarters."

"I'll fly him back right now," Fat George said promptly.

"What are you doing about this McKay woman?" Helker asked.

"Hunting for her," Rahmer answered vigorously. "Orders have already gone out, giving her description, to find her. Eventually they will reach every spaceman in the system. They'll be looking for her. *

"If she is in the System, they'll find her," Rahmer said, A note of pride sounded in his voice. He knew his spacemen. They would do a thorough job.

"Do you mean to imply that she may not be in the System?" Sam Helker asked.

"You saw her leave," Rahmer answered. "Where do you think she is?"

"That's the question I want answered," Big Olaf rumbled.

Rahmer spread his hands in an empty gesture. "You know as much as I know. Other space took her. Where does other space go? No man knows. Perhaps the search of the spacemen is useless." His shrug conveyed the feeling of helplessness. He turned toward the door as a knock sounded there. "Come in."

A spaceman holding an envelope entered. "A messenger from the spaceship line was looking for you with this, Jarr."

As he tore it open, Rahmer knew that this had come in answer to his query about Kay McKay. Now perhaps they would have something to go on, some fact to indicate the direction their search should take, some clue as to what had actually happened. Scanning the words rapidly, he let his mind soak up their meanings. The words lifted his spirits tremendously. At the same time, for some reason that he could not quite comprehend, they depressed him. The space-gram said that Kay McKay came of an excellent family and that, having inherited a fortune, she was wealthy in her own right. Reading this, Rahmer understood why the ship that he and Caleb had found the night before had been a luxury vessel. It was her private flier! She had been born with a golden spoon in her mouth and with entree to the best and most exclusive circles on Earth. She had turned her back on it to go to school! The spacegram did not give the name of the university from which she had been graduated but it said she had finished at the head of her class summa cum laude, that her major had been in archaeology and her minor in languages, ancient and modern, Earth tongues and the languages of space. She also had a Ph.D. degree, which she had not mentioned when she had come to the meeting rooms of the Confederation.

"She's all right," Rahmer said, looking up from the space-gram. His intuitive hunch as to her Tightness when he had first met her had been correct. This pleased him. The knowledge of who and what she was depressed him. She came of the best that Earth had produced. He was a wild man and the leader of even wilder men. The gulf between them was as deep as space itself. "Her special training included field trips to all the major planets," he said, looking up again. There was more to the spacegram. At this moment, though, his mind was so full of thoughts of the woman herself that he did not finish reading it.

"What's the rest of it, Jarr?" Big Olaf questioned.

Rahmer took his mind off of its stored pictures of Kay McKay and put his eyes back on the job of reading. He spoke the words aloud, "Impossible To Give You Data On Project To Which Dr. McKay Was Assigned."

"That sonofagun!" Rahmer muttered. "Just because the damned project has a top-secret classification, he doesn't want to talk about it or even admit it exists. He ought to know me better than to try to hold out on me. No! There's more to it."

Files Stolen. Can Confirm Existence And Classification Of Project But Can Give Nothing More. No One In Archaeological Division Knows Contents Of Missing Files. Theft Not Discovered Until After Your Inquiry Arrived. Am Starting Investigation Here. Request You Advise Me Immediately Of Dr. McKay's Whereabouts. Am Contacting Her Project Director on Mars for Further Information.

Calvin Ernst.

Rahmer let the sheets slide through his fingers. "He wants me to tell him where she is," he said.

"What's this about the files being stolen?" Helker asked. "The man says they've been stolen."

"But why would anybody—? Rahmer, this is simply incredible. Files stolen on Earth to keep you—"

"From finding out their contents," Eck Tenner said.

"I said we're being watched," Rahmer said. "I said our only safety is to keep moving—erratically . . . which reminds me, I've got a feeling we've been here long enough. Gendemen, keep in touch with message center at headquarters." He rose from his chair and went out the side door that led to the corridor that led in turn to the saloon in front. Fat George was right behind him. It was a sober group of men who filed out of the room.

Rahmer was at the top of the stone steps leading down into the main room of the saloon when he heard Caleb yell behind him. "Watch it, Jan!"

At the same instant, he felt something touch him. As he felt it, he realized it had been touching him for some seconds but that he had not been aware of it. What it was, he did not know, but it seemed to touch, and to caress every molecule in his body at the same instant. Its touch was feather-light yet at the same time it had the stickiness of warm glue.

He tried to jerk away from it. And failed.

Behind him, he heard Sam Helker scream. "It's here againl"

Feet pounded toward the rear exit.

Rahmer turned his head. His foot missed the top step of the stairs. He fell headlong. This probably saved his life. As he fell, the feather-light yet glue-sticky grip on every molecule of his body was jerked loose. He felt it let go of him. Grabbing at the railing on the stairs, he missed his hold, and felt his shoulder strike the side wall. At the same time, the Helbron gun slung over his shoulder bumped from its sheath. He heard it hit the stairs.

Something very close to panic came up in Jarr Rahmer then. He knew the Blue Atom had touched him. This in itself was enough to bring up fear, but the possibility that the Helbron gun might be discharged was even worse. The twin beams from that deadly weapon could blast holes in the solid stone walls.

Rahmer rolled his body so that he was sliding down the steps on his back. At the same time, he grabbed the Helbron gun and lifted it above him, holding it above his body. He was still holding it there as he slid to a stop on the floor of the saloon.

He heard the crash of breaking wood as the Venusians in the place went out the front door. They did not know what was happening but they did not wait around to find out. They had seen a human being with a Helbron gun in his hands. They did not know whether or not the human was dead. This was inconsequential, to their way of thinking. What mattered was that they get out, fast.

Rahmer waited for the sounds to subside. When they had gone into silence, he patted the stock of the Helbron gun very gently. Hell was breaking loose at the head of the stone steps. He sat up and watched the glass door open there. He knew that if he had remained at the head of the stairs, it would have opened for him. But he was not there. He had fallen, accidentally, and the glass door was no longer in focus on him. It was in focus on Fat George.

Fat George was shaking, he was sweating, he was yelling, he was fighting. But he was going.

Rahmer brought up the Helbron gun, then held its fire. The weapon was useless here. The best he could do with it would be to kill Fat George.

Rahmer saw the glass door close around Fat George. The whole saloon was lit an eldritch blue glow. When the glow died down, the glass door and Fat George were both gone.

The worried face of Caleb Smith appeared in the opening where Fat George had been. Seeing Rahmer sitting on the floor below, some of the worry vanished from Caleb's face. He came quickly down the steps.

"Are you all right, Jarr?"

"Ill do."

"Warmish here, isn't it?" "Sort of," Rahmer answered. "Let's go outside."

"That's the best idea I ever heard," Rahmer said. As they went out the front door, Jarr looked over his shoulder. Nothing showed on the stairs. In the far corner of the room, a Venusian who had apparentiy been knocked from his feet by the mad flight of the others was scuttling on all fours for a hole in the wall. Most of the tables were overturned, glasses and bottles were on the floor. The place was as silent as the grave.

Outside was the same silence. Rain swept down from the sky. Neither a human nor a Venusian was in sight. Caleb took a long breath and started brealfcing again.

"Thanks," Rahmer said.

"For what?"

"For yelling. If you hadn't yelled, I wouldn't have turned to look and I wouldn't have lost my footing and I— I wouldn't be here."

"None of us may be here long," Caleb answered.

"We're heading home. I want you to get to work on that detector you were talking about. We need it."

Down the street a car moved. It was a taxicab. They hailed

it.

Jarr knew stories would be told and retold about what the tellers imagined had happened in the back room of this fierce little saloon. Probably tales would go abroad that the leaders of the spacemen had fought among themselves and that Fat George had been killed and his body taken away. Those who knew the leaders of the spacemen would know that this was not true, but the grapevine would talk just the same, filling the length and breadth of the Solar System with its speculations. There would be more rumors about the blue devil.

"Circle the block," he said to the driver.

In the block behind the saloon, Big Olaf was standing in the middle of the street. Bareheaded, he did not mind the rain pouring over him. He had a club—a leg wrenched from a table—in one hand. He lifted this menacingly as they came toward him. The wild light of battle was in his eyes.

Rahmer struck his head out of the cab door. "It's okay, Olaf. Get in."

"Oh, it's you, Jarr." A little of the light of battle died out of the big man's eyes as he recognized his chief. Clutching the club, he squeezed his bulk into the back seat of the cab. "Blast off!" he said. His voice was like a foghorn. He looked his chief over. "I thought it got you, Jarr."

"Fat George was the victim," Rahmer answered. The cab picked up speed and shot ahead on the wet street.

"It could have got all of us at the same time." Olaf's voice sounded like a ioghorn that had choked down with water. "What are your orders, Jarr?"

"Head for space, keep moving, random course," Rahmer answered. "Pass the word on to Helker and Eck Tenner. Report in to headquarters message center every four hours."

"I'll do that." A plaintive rumble of protest sounded in the giant's voice. "Jarr, can't I stick around with you? I'm a good man in a fight where all I have to do is lower my head and bull my way through, but this thing calls for more than that."

"It calls for you to keep moving," Rahmer said.

The last they saw of the unhappy Viking, he was standing on the sidewalk clutching his table leg. Natives were walking carefully around him.

At the landing area, Jarr Rahmer and Caleb Smith both inspected their flier very carefully from the outside before they entered it. Inside, they checked with equal care.

"No visitors so far as I can see," Rahmer grunted. Caleb agreed with him and he settled himself in the pilot's seat. Under his touch, the little ship shot skyward as fast as the Drive could take it. Rahmer kicked the ship straight through the cloud bank of Venus and out into space, where the sky was black and the suns were blazing torches in the void, then looked over his shoulder at Caleb.

"I don't think we're being followed," the old mechanic answered. "But just the same, while I can't see anything, I've got an uneasy feeling that something is just behind me, ready to peek over my shoulder or pry up the top of my head and inspect the rust on my brain."

Rahmer kicked the controls right, held this course for fifteen minutes, then kicked the nose of the ship up for the same length of time, then turned left for five minutes, then right for ten minutes, then down in a long dive toward the planet below them.

"Taking a dose of the same medicine you gave Olaf!" Caleb grunted. "How do you know it won't be waiting for us when we get home?"

"I don't know it won't," Rahmer answered. "But if anything follows us, it is going to have to take a mighty crooked course." He lifted the nose up again and aimed the ship at the sun.

Hours later, he brought the little flier down through the cloud banks. High mountains loomed eventually in the mists around them. Rahmer nosed the flier through these mountains until he found the overhanging cliff that marked the entrance to the mine—and to the headquarters—of the spaceman. He brought the ship in under the overhang. Beyond was the vast darkness of a huge cave marked by the occasional flare of lights. Other fliers rested there and men could be seen going about their work of milling and separating ore. Off to the right was a workshop: Caleb's den.

"It looks normal," Rahmer commented. "For a change, the boys are working instead of loafing." As he brought the ship down, a tall thin youth emerged from the doorway of a small building on the left and came running toward them. This was Mike Cordon, who was in charge of the space message center here. Mike was redheaded and freckled, with an eternal grin on his face.

"Boss, I'm sure glad you're back," Mike greeted them.

"Has the message center been busy?"

"I've got all my boys at work and I've got every recorder going just trying to hold even. Big Olaf, Eck Tenner, and Sam Helker have all called. The way they're playing tag all over space, you'd think they were tanked up on sapon. What the hell did you do in Torres? Throw a whopper?" At Rahmer's grin, Mike went on talking. "And that's not all." He fixed his boss with an accusing eye. "You put a message on space radio to find a woman. You gave a description of her. You said for every spaceman to look for her." The accusation in Conlon's eyes grew stronger.

"Has anybody found her" Rahmer said quickly.

"No, but they've found every other woman in the System," Cordon answered.

Rahmer grinned ruefully. He knew spacemen. Women held an incredible fascination for them. "I didn't tell 'em to start chasing girls. I told them to find Kay McKay. Has anything else happened, Mike?"

"I should say it has."

"Have you seen any blue lights?" Caleb spoke before Conlon could answer. "No."

"Any impression of anybody looking over your shoulder?"

"No." The puzzled expression on the youth's face gave way to a knowing grin. "Say, you did spend your time getting tanked up on sapon after all!"

"No, but I almost wish we had," Caleb said, sighing. "If I only knew I was drunk, I could face this thing a lot easier."

"But there has been something, Mike?" Rahmer questioned, watching the expression on Conlon's face.

"There sure has! I don't get it at all but you've got half the spacemen in the System looking for a woman when—" He turned and glanced toward the door from which he had just emerged, then waved his hand.

Kay McKay came out of the door of the message center and walked toward them.

"Hell on wheels!" Caleb whispered. "What's the devil done to us now?"

Rahmer didn't walk toward her. He ran.

"Kay. My dear—" He stopped in confusion as he saw the expression on her face. "Pardon me. I mean Dr. McKay. I mean—" Looking at her, he knew he did not know what he meant.

The expression in her eyes said she did not know him, that she had never seen him before.

"I am looking for a Mr. Jared Rahmer," she spoke slowly, in a strange accent. "Can you tell me where I can find him? The youth here seems confused." She nodded toward Mike Conlon.

"Watch it, Jarr." Caleb's tight whisper came. "This woman is not herself. Unless I miss my guess, the devil that took her away has thrown a monkey wrench into her thinking machinery.

Rahmer caught the words of surprise and concern before they could pass his lips. He made his face immobile. Bowing slighdy, he said, "I am Jared Rahmer."

A faint flicker of recognition came into her eyes as he spoke, then was instandy gone.

"And who are you?" Rahmer continued.

"Uldreth," Kay McKay said. The pride of vast achievement was in her voice as she answered. "The last scientist of the Great Race."

Chapter Six

Fob a split second, Jarr Rahmer hesitated. Without quite knowing how he knew it, he knew he had to accept this situation at the face value Kay McKay put on it. She thought he was a stranger. He had to act like one. She thought she was someone by the name of Uldreth, who was the last scientist of the Great Race. He had to accept this idea as being true. Nor could he, by the slightest change of expression on his face or in his voice, indicate that he thought otherwise. His bow to her was very deep and was as indicative of vast respect as the bow he always gave visiting Venusian witch doctors.

"It is a privilege to meet so distinguished a person. How can I serve Your Highness?"

She watched him as if she was wondering what sort of double talk he was using. "I want to talk to you," she said.

"I am honored," Rahmer answered.

Her eyes went from Caleb Smith to Mike Conlon. Neither were very reassuring sights. "Alone," she added. "What I have to explain is very difficult to put into words. It is best that we talk privately." Her voice was tight and clipped, and she spoke with a strange accent that had a singsong intonation.

Rahmer bowed again. "I will enjoy talking to you." He turned to Caleb Smith and Mike Conlon. "Will you excuse us, please?" His tone was courtly and polite. Since neither of them had ever heard him say please before, the word made them owl-eyed with surprise. They said they would excuse him. Rahmer offered his arm to Kay McKay. She took it. He looked over his shoulder at the two astonished spacemen. "Caleb, I suggest you get busy on your project—but fasti Mike, will you please see to it that we are served lunch in my office?"

"Sure thing, Jarr," Mike said, gulping. Caleb was off on the run toward his own workshop.

Equipped with a big desk and with chairs that had been made here at the mine, his office was a huge place. Sitting at the outer edge of the cliff, one entire wall was of clear plastic. Beyond this big window, dropping away into the far distance, was rain-streaked jungle. A fan pushed cool air continuously into the big room. Kay gasped in pleasure and surprise at the sight from the window.

"Will you excuse me for a minute?" he asked. "I have to give instructions to the men."

"Of course. Ill sit right here at the window. But don't be gone very long. I have much that I must talk to you about. And so little time." Anxiety showed on her face, then was quelled by some force that seemed to be working in her.

Outside, Rahmer said to Mike Cordon. "How did she get here?"

"I don't know. One of the boys found her just outside the cave and brought her in." "You didn't see a ship?"

"No. But one could have sneaked in and let her off."

"I'd like to believe she came in a ship." Rahmer chewed his own thoughts for a moment and found them unpalatable. "But I don't believe it. Has she shown any unusual interest in anything since she arrived?"

"Yeah, in my transmitters." A hurt look appeared in Conlon's eyes. "She wanted to know about them but as soon as I explained them to her, she lost interest. She acted as if they were about on a par with a bunch of string telephones strung across a couple of back yards. I can reach Pluto with those transmitters and there isn't a ship in space I can't work, but she practically made fun of them. Who does she think she is?"

"Let's don't go into that," Rahmer said. "I want you to get every ship fully stocked with food and water and ready to hop. Don't do anything out of the usual but alert every man here and tell them to be ready to go aboard at a moment's notice."

"Is this place that hot?"

"Not yet." Rahmer turned and walked back into his office. Kay was still sitting at the window. "And now, if you will tell me why you want to talk to me, I am ready to listen."

"I need help!" Her voice was a singsong of toneless sound but her words were very clear. The urgency in it was unmistakable.

"How can I help you?"

"You must come, with ships and fighting men, at once." "Come where?"

"To Rondskol! Where else? That is where I am." Rahmer kept his face under control. It would not do to admit that he had never heard of Rondskol.

"Johrud . . . Johrud is the danger!" Her voice had dropped to a whisper and she seemed to be talking from a vast distance. "Johrud is awake. I cannot control him." "Who is Johrud?"

"The last ruler of the Great Race." Surprise showed on her face. "Don't you humans know anything of the real history of the System? Are you as stupid as the drowlers who howl in the outer gardens?"

"You must pardon our ignorance," Rahmer said quietly. He had the impression that he was walking a knife edge over a vast gulf and that the slightest wrong word might disturb, perhaps break forever, the tremendous subtleties existing here. "For instance, so far as we know, the last member of the Great Race perished long, long ago. Yet you tell me that you are a scientist of this people and that their last ruler has awakened."

The surprise deepened on her face. It showed now in her violet eyes. A control slipped somewhere. For an instant, her eyes said she was suddenly Kay McKay and that she remembered who she really was. Then that identity was gone and she was again something else. "We did not perish. We rested, for a while."

"I don't understand your meaning."

"You will, in time." Her smile was enigmatical.

Rahmer tried to maintain his composure. The feeling of the knife edge across the gulf of chaos was stronger now. This was Kay McKay. He had seen the Blue Atom take her in Torres. Now she was here, but she was no longer Kay McKay. Instead somebody named Uldreth seemed to be speaking through her, and she thought she was this Uldreth! What had been done to her after she was taken from Torres? How had she gotten here. Rahmer felt like a pawn in a chess game. In this game that he was playing, there was no board and no rules. There were only men and one woman moving as pawns. The vast fabric of space itself was the board. If he said the wrong thing, if he asked the wrong question, he could not guess what might happen.

"I once knew a Kay McKay," Rahmer said. The words came out almost unbidden. The instant he spoke, he knew they were the wrong words. When he spoke her name, she remembered who she really was.

Fear, deep and as fathomless as space, exploded in the violet eyes. Behind it came screams as she leaped to her feet. Rahmer caught her in his arms. As he held her, Bill Nex, an old spaceman, came pottering through the door with a tray of food. Nex took one look at his boss holding a woman in his arms and started to grin.

"Set the tray on the desk, you damned idiot and help me with her. And stop grinning. It's not what you think."

"Yes sir, Jarr."

Kay McKay was in a state. The fear lasted for only a moment. As it left, anger replaced it. "Take your hands off of me, Mr. Rahmer!"

"Easy, Kay, easy," Rahmer begged her. What did she think he was?

"I'll help you, boss," Nex volunteered.

"If you touch me, 111 kick your teeth out!" Kay McKay told Bill Nex. "Being pawed by one drunken spaceman is enough. When two try it, somebody is going to end up with a broken head."

"Yes, ma'am," Nex said, hastily backing away.

Rahmer released her. As soon as she was sure she was free, the anger left and the fear came back. "Where—where am I? How did I get here? Oh, Jared, I'm so frightened." Suddenly she was in his arms again, by her own choice this time.

"A minute ago I was a drunken spaceman," Rahmer told her.

"I'm sorry, Jared. It's that I'm frightened, distraught. Forgive me."

"Don't you really know where you are?" "No. A minute ago I was talking to you in Torres. You were with a group of spacemen. Now . . . I'm here." "Don't you remember what happened?" "I ... I really don't." Perplexity, and fear as a deep dark

shadow, showed in the violet eyes. "I seem to remember something, but it's like a bad dream, and when I try to recall it, it slips away from me." She became aware that she was in his arms. Anger glinted in her eyes again. "Weill"

"You did it yourself. I didn't grab you and I'm not pawing you." Rahmer's reward was her laughter, one of the most welcome sounds he had ever heard.

"Thanks you, Mr. Rahmer, for protecting me. I am quite myself again." She slid out of his arms. Bill Nex looked disappointed and Rahmer furiously told him to serve lunch. He knew the tales that Nex would tell and how the spacemen would elaborate on them.

"I'm so glad you thought of food. I'm actually famished."

"Well eat and talk at the same time." Rahmer knew he had an additional problem on his hands, one he had not sought and which he did not begin to understand—a woman. Did anybody in all space understand one of them? So far as he could tell, this woman was again Kay McKay. The sound of her own name had brought back the knowledge of her own true identity. He was afraid that some other word might make her think she was the last scientist of the Great Race again. He was also afraid it might not. He desperately wished he had available the services of an expert psychologist, but not having one, he knew he had to do the best he could himself.

She ate like a starving woman. "Now tell me how I got here?"

"I hoped you could answer that question." Her face showed surprise and some doubt. "Don't you know?"

He shook his head. As he told her what he knew, she stared at him in growing perplexity. "But I don't remember telling you I was somebody named Uldreth. I never heard of Johrud or of Rondskol. I don't know whether those words are the names of planets, men, mountains, or whatever. I had a dream. I remember that much." While Rahmer held his breath, she seemed to search inside herself for some hidden memory, for some lost experience. Her face went blank, then came to life, then became almost haggard. "I almost had the dream but it got away."

"Someone named Uldreth wants help against somebody named Johrud, who has awakened in a place called Rond-skol." Rahmer supplied clues to her lost dream-memory. He was scared to do this, but more scared not to. Something in her lost identity was important.

"I'm sorry. I just don't remember."

"Then well tackle this from another direction. I had the impression just before you were kidnaped in Torres that you were going to tell us something important. Do you remember what this was?"

"I certainly do. I was going to tell you that our researches had uncovered information which led us to suspect that the Great Race still exists, that it can cause trouble, and to ask help in locating this trouble spot and in sighting the danger that would arise from it."

"You don't know its source?"

"Sorry. I thought perhaps the spacemen might know. That was one reason I came to you in Torres."

Rahmer drummed on the desk top with his fingers. He felt baffled. No matter how he turned, he was blocked. All the time that he sat here talking, the possibility existed that he was being hunted. "I want you to answer some questions without thinking, just by saying the first word that pops into your mind."

"An association test. I am tired, but 111 do it."

"Who kidnaped you in Torres?"

"Johrud."

"Did he use the Blue Atom to do it?" "Yes."

"Who brought you back here?" "Uldreth."

"Did he use the Blue Atom to bring you back?" "Yes." She passed a hand across her face. "If you will excuse me, I'm awfully tired. Even answering these questions seems to take an awful lot out of me. And, as I answer them, I'm getting afraid again." As he watched, helpless, her eyes glazed, and she dropped her head down on the desk like a very small and very tired child.

Rahmer, in a panic, yelled for Mike Cordon and for everyone else who was available. Bill Nex, who had been married once, and who claimed great knowledge of women as a result, solved the problem. "She's only fainted. Shell be all right when she gets a litde rest. Just put her to bed."

As Rahmer laid her on his bed, she stirred restlessly. "Her . . . her strength is almost gone. Be careful! There is, also, danger—much danger." Again her voice had the singsong quality. Asking questions, Rahmer got no answer. There had been a momentary contact with Uldreth, but it had been broken.

He went out of the room with his head in a whirl. Finding Bill Nex, he put him on guard outside her door, then hunted up Mike Cordon.

"Big Olaf is over on the Earth side of Venus. Helker is moving in toward the sun. Eck Tenner is well out and is going farther. The boys are really jumping."

"They had better jump, if they want to stay alive."

Mike shoved a bunch of papers at Rahmer. "These are the reports on Kay McKay. They haven't found her yet but they've sure got a lot of fine leads . . . and some fine vis-aphone numbers. Shall I call 'em off?"

"Let 'em hunt."

"But she's here, Jarr."

"Nobody knows that but us . . . and somebody named Uldreth. How are you getting along with stocking the ships?" "The boys are jumping."

"Keep 'em at it." In his mind's eye, Rahmer could see three ships well out from Venus, each following an erratic random pattern. Kay was also a part of the bigger pattern that was unfolding. Somewhere, unseen as yet, were Johrud and Uldreth, two enigmas in a maze. Hovering over it all was something called the Blue Atom.

"Boss, she dropped this here in her chair." Mike Conlon handed a small object to Rahmer. Made of some metal which he did not recognize, it had a slight blue tinge. It impressed him as being incredibly old. On its surface, jewels glittered in an irregular pattern.

"She was wearing it around her neck when I first saw it. The chain must have broke and she lost it."

"These jewels! Mike, this is a map of the Solar System." Rahmer pointed out the pattern of the jewels.

"So it is. But why would anybody want a map of that?"

"I wish I knew. Where's Caleb?"

"In his smoke hole. I tried to borrow some of his lab men to help stock the ships but he ran me off. What's he so jetted-up about, Jarr?"

"He's got something on his mind."

Caleb's smoke-hole was actually his own private lab, where he was an absolute king. A sign on the door said KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS YOU! Rahmer knocked gently. Caleb's irritated voice advised him to get lost. He opened the door and dodged the heavy chunk of metal that came hurtling at him.

"Oh, it's you, Jarr. I thought it was Mike trying to steal my men again. Come in but walk softly. This damned thing is so sensitive that a fly breathing on it will throw it off its frequency." The old mechanic took another look at his boss. "On second thought, don't come in. Go to bed and get some sleep."

"I can't," Rahmer answered. "Somebody else is sleeping in my bed." When Caleb looked startled, Jarr told him what had happened.

"It's close on our tail, Jarr. If I don't get this detector finished . . ."

"Are you making any progress?"

"We always make progress. Beat it."

As Caleb shoved him out of the laboratory, Rahmer got a glimpse of the men in the smokehole. They hadn't even looked up from their tasks when he entered. "You're a slave driver," he muttered.

"If I don't drive, well all be driven," Caleb answered. "You get some sleep." Caleb closed the door, then opened it again. "But stay out of my bedl" he added.

It seemed to Rahmer that his head had barely touched the pillow of Mike Cordon's bed when he awakened. A glance at his watch told him that twelve hours had passed. Rahmer shot out of his bunk as if he had a built-in Helbron Drive unit. Bill Nex was dozing in a chair outside of the room Kay was occupying. He grinned knowingly at his boss. "Relax, Jarr, relax. I haven't heard a sound out of her."

"Not a sound? Maybe she's not here! Maybe it's got her." Something close to panic came up Rahmer at this thought. He cursed himself for sleeping when he should have been alert. Jerking open the door of his room, he saw that Kay McKay was sound asleep in his bed. Blushing and feeling like a small boy caught peeking, he hastily closed the door and snarled at Bill Nex to get that grin off his face. Breakfast and a shave gave him his courage back. He went to the message center and asked about Big Olaf, Eck Tenner, and Helker.

"They're still in space," Ed Ramsey, on duty while Mike Conlon slept, told him.

"Have they been bothered?"

"Only by nerves." Ramsey was tall and slender. "I just got a message from Pluto. Somebody out there has found Kay McKay. He wants to know what to do with her."

"Tell him to treat her tenderly. If you tell that bunch of space wolves where she actually is, 111 shoot you. Where's Caleb?"

"He just sent out for more coffee so I suppose he's still in his den," Ramsey answered in an injured tone.

Rahmer had to knock twice before he was admitted. He entered a smoke and coffee aroma filled room that had five men in it, all in advanced stages of exhaustion.

"You're just in time, Jarr," Caleb told him.

"From the way you and your bunch look, I'm just in time for five funerals."

Caleb nodded gravely. "It could be. We've got the detector built."

"Does it work?"

"Too well."

"Eh?"

"Something is hunting for us, Jarr. We caught it just as soon as we got the detector finished. There it is again." Caleb nodded toward a screen.

About a foot square, the surface of the screen was as black as midnight. Looking at it, Rahmer had the impression that just behind the blackness were thousands of tiny points that were ready to turn into light.

Caleb turned off the lights and the room became dark. A man sighed and sat down on the floor. Another, sitting in a chair, lit a cigarette. The glow of the lighter gave Rahmer a glimpse of the man's face. It was grim with sweat and overgrown with beard. The others were about the same. Their loyalty to Caleb had kept them working to the edge of exhaustion, then on beyond. Or were they actually loyal to the Confederation, and to all it stood for in bringing law and order to the worlds of space? On the screen, lights swirled in a circling movement, drawing his attention away from the men.

The lights became a soft glow which formed a circle. The focus was well off the center of the screen. As the glow appeared, Rahmer was aware that every man in the dark room stopped breathing. Presently the glow faded. He heard men start breathing again.

"That's the closest it has come yet." Caleb's voice was a tired whisper in a dark room.

"How long has this been going on?"

A radiant dial showed in the darkness as Caleb looked at his wrist watch. "Twenty-one minutes."

"What do you think it is?"

"A probe beam smelling for us. We're under hundreds of feet of crystallized rock here. My guess is that the crystals in the rock are distorting the probe."

"Do you think it can act with full power here?"

"I would bet it can. It wouldn't be smelling around if it didn't have teeth to bite with after finding its victim. Once it gets us into focus, full power will ride in on that probe beam. Then—" Caleb shrugged tiredly. "Why, then, I suppose somebody will laugh at us. Have you got anything more out of Dr. McKay?"

"She's still asleep."

"Better get ready to wake her up. Also, Mike told me you had ordered our ships provisioned." "Yeah."

"Running won't solve this problem."

"I know. But it may give us a chance to fight another day. I don't like being hunted. I'd much rather be the hunter. But I will run if I have to, until there comes a time to turn."

"It would help if you induce Dr. McKay to contact Uldreth again, or to become Uldreth, whichever way it works."

"I don't think she has much choice in the matter. Maybe none. My guess is that Uldreth sent her here, via the Blue Atom, then controlled her, using the same mechanism. Once the control is broken, it is doubtful if she can re-establish it."

"This Blue Atom must come close to being the ultimate machine." Caleb's voice picked up deep interest. A machine, any machine, would hold his attention. "If it is a machine. Maybe it controls things like Uldreth and Johrud. Did you ever think of that possibility?"

"I'd rather not think about it," Rahmer said.

"So had I," Caleb said sighing. "But when the devil drives—Come in."

Bill Nex cautiously opened the door. "Jarr, your gal is awake and wants to talk to you."

"I'm on my way," Rahmer said.

As he went out of the smoke-filled laboratory, he saw that the screen was beginning to come to life again. The hunter was still on the jobl

Chapter Seven

She was firn^hing a cup of steaming coffee when he entered. Her hair was combed and caught in a black knot at the back of her head, and she had done what she could to repair the damage to her complexion—all this before she had called him. Her face was wan, but most of the lines were gone from it. Her eyes glowed as Rahmer entered the room.

"Thanks for the bed," she said.

"Quite all right."

"I'm not taking you away from something important?"

"Yes. But you may be more important. Have you remembered anything more about—"

"No. Was I supposed to? I've been sleeping, you know."

"Sometimes when we wake up from sleep, we find that things have come back to us."

"I'm sorry to say that nothing has come back to me except a ravenous appetite. Oh, thank you." The last was addressed to Bill Nex who entered with a tray of food. "You're a nice man. Every time I see you, you're bringing me something good to eat."

Nex's grin indicated he wished he was thirty years younger.

As she ate, Kay McKay studied Rahmer. "You have much on your mind, Jared. Care to talk about it?" "When you finish, 111 show you what it is." "What do you want of me?"

"I could tell you, but I hardly dare. I don't know enough about the functioning of the mind to take chances. If I had the services of an expert psychologist, perhaps he could help. But I'm not a psychologist, and the best I can do is to hope you will be able to remember something that you know, but have forgotten."

"And if I can't remember?"

"Then you just can't remember," Rahmer said. He did not add that the lights would go out in the Solar System for a thousand years.

Jim Troker, one of the tired engineers from Caleb's lab, limped into the room. "The boss wants you," he said to Rahmer. "And the lady too."

"Will you come, please?" Rahmer said.

"Of course."

On the way to Caleb's lab, Rahmer stopped in the message center. Mike Cordon was back on duty. "Pick ten men for my flier and put them in it. Move it right up to the door of Caleb's smoke hole. Keep it ready right there. Put everybody else in the other ships and get them out of here. For my ship, pick the roughest, toughest miners we've got. Move."

"Yes, sir. But what about my message center?" "Move a transmitter into my flier. On the beam, Mike." "Yes, sir. Do you mean we may all be getting out of here?"

"At a moment's notice," Rahmer answered. He saw that Kay McKay's eyes were on him asking questions which he did not choose to answer. "Youll go in my flier, of course," he added.

"The Blue Atom?" she asked.

He nodded. "Caleb has a detector for it. It's coming."

Her face strengthened with resolution. "I'm sorry I got you into this, but I had no choice."

"We were already in it before you came," Rahmer said. "It had taken our people. When it did that, war was declared." His voice was wry and toneless. "So far, it's won all the victories. The biggest problem is that we don't know what it is or where it's located."

"Is that where I come in?"

"That's where you would come in if you could remember where it took you." "Ill do my best."

In the smoke-hole, the silence was deeper than before.

Entering the room, Rahmer had the impression that these exhausted engineers were Stone Age men skulking in the back of some cave to escape from huge cats and giant lions that roamed the night outside.

They were watching the screen. It was lighted again. More dots were appearing on it and they were coming to focus nearer the center. Rahmer watched the dots of light wink against the blackness of the screen.

Outside a Helbron Drive growled as a ship lifted and moved outward under the overhang of the high cliff. Caleb looked at Rahmer, asking a question with his eyes. "I'm sending everybody out but us, and I'm having Mike bring my flier up to the door of your lab, so we can board it in a hurry."

"Good boy."

The men moved aside while Caleb pointed out the screen to Kay McKay and explained how it worked. "What can you do to help?" he said at last. The light from the screen revealed Kay's face. It was twisted and wretched. "There's something," she whispered.

"What is it?"

"I—I don't know."

Caleb sighed and turned away from her. Around the big lab, men sort of sagged downward. Rahmer caught a glimpse of Jim Troker sitting cross-legged on the floor. Outside another growl was coming into existence. It moved closer, shifted, then went into silence. The door of the lab opened and Mike Conlon looked in. "It's here at the door, Jarr, in case you want it."

"Thank you. See to it that the others get out."

"I'm doing that."

"Stick close yourself. If we leave, it will be in a hurry." "Right." Mike closed the door as sofdy as he had opened

it.

Rahmer turned his attention back to Kay. She was standing very close to him. The expression on her face was woebegone. "I was told something, or given something, or—" She looked as if she was about to burst into tears.

"Take it easy," Rahmer said. "It will come to you."

Outside another growl came into existence. Rahmer listened to the beat of Helbron's Wings against the fabric of space. Here in this cave the Drive was noisy.

Caleb pointed to the screen. Dots were swirling strongly there now, at the center. Rahmer watched them. As gendy and as sofdy as the sunrise, a blue glow came into the room. So gende was it, so insidious was its coming, that no one present realized what was happening. Little by litde, there was more light. The eyes saw the light and adjusted themselves to it but the mind did not recognize the significance of this new fact. Rahmer noticed that he was seeing a little better, but his attention was so closely concentrated on the screen, that he did not grasp the importance of the improved vision.

The light grew stronger, then dimmed, the way an electric bulb does when someone turns on a piece of power equipment and pulls a sudden heavy load out of the line.

Jim Troker was no longer sitting on the floor.

"Jim went to get a drink of water," Rahmer thought. His eyes had detected that a man was missing and his mind was trying to explain this fact in a reasonable manner by making him believe that Troker had gone to get a drink. This was reasonable. Rahmer believed it, for a minute or two. Then Burr Worley, standing against the wall, pointed down to where Troker had been sitting.

"Jim's gone," Worley said.

At this point, Rahmer realized that the light in the lab was blue.

"You go too, Burr," he said. "Into my ship outside the door. All of you. Move."

Burr Worley moved toward the door at a lope. The other engineers, finally realizing what had happened, stirred into action by Worley's movement, suddenly moved too. There was a momentary pile-up at the door, then they burst it outward. Caleb Smith and Kay McKay looked at Rahmer.

"Do you mean that for us too, Jarr?" Caleb asked. "If you want it," Rahmer answered. "The devil is here in the lab."

"I know." On the screen, the dots had died down now and had moved a littie off center.

"You two go," Rahmer said suddenly. The dots were crawling back toward the center of the screen.

Caleb reached toward the work bench and picked up a tube of steel. "Do you mean for us to go while you stay?"

"Yes. Put down the pipe, Caleb. I'm stronger than you and my reflexes are faster. You won't be able to hit me with it."

"Nor

"You are to take command of my flier," Rahmer said. He watched the dots of light. Kay McKay stood like a wooden image, listening and watching. Her face was a mask. It had long since lost all capacity for expression.

"I would tell you if I could remember," she said.

"Somewhere deep inside, you know. You'll remember when the pressure gets strong enough."

"She's a woman, Jared." Caleb's voice had protest in it.

"I know and I'm sorry. Go! Both of you!" His voice rose to a shout.

They moved slowly toward the door. As this happened, the lights came into focus at the center of the screen. At the same time, Rahmer felt the feather-light touch on every molecule of his being. He saw that the light in the room was blue again. All over his skin were tiny prickling sensations. Looking at the two people moving toward the door, he had the impression that he was seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope. They looked very far away and very small, like dolls moving against the backdrop of infinity.

One of the dolls suddenly turned and looked at him. The doll flung itself at him. He felt the doll grab his shoulders. "Jaredl I remember! Where is it, Jared? Where is it?" "Where is what?"

"The necklace! I had it. It's the key. Quick, Tared."

The necklace! Mike Conlon had given it to him. "It's—it's in my pocket."

Rahmer tried to get it for her, knew that he could not. His arms would not work. A heavy paralysis was settling over him. He had the impression that he could feel the planet rotating beneath his feet. He knew that Kay McKay pulled the necklace out of his pocket, but he could not see what she did with it. She did something, turning it in her hands, and pressing upon one of the jewels. He felt the feather touch in his body begin to lessen. Something that had gripped every molecule in his body began to let go, re-luctandy. Abrupdy his vision shifted from the wrong end of the telescope. Suddenly he could see too well. Caleb had turned and was pulling at him, trying to get him away from this place of horror. Kay McKay was direcdy in front of him. Over her shoulder he could see the dots of light on the screen. They were fading.

The blue in the room was also fading.

Rahmer suddenly collapsed. He fell as every muscle in his body seemed to let go at the same time. The floor was solid. It felt good. He looked up at Kay McKay. She was laughing hysterically. She thrust the necklace toward him.

"Uldreth gave it to me, for protection. It cancels the effect of the Blue Atom."

"Good girl!" Rahmer said. "I knew you would remember when you had to do it to save somebody's life."

He got slowly to his feet. Caleb Smith was gibbering around him. Caleb had a grin on his face that went from ear to ear. He ignored Caleb.

"Before you forget again, where is Rondskol?" he said to Kay McKay.

"At the core of the planet we call Mercury," she answered.

He turned toward the door of the lab. "Then that's where we're going," he said. Catching Caleb in his left arm and Kay in his right, he propelled them out the door.

With Mike Conlon at the controls, the little flier growled like an angry lion as it shot out of the mouth of the cave.

Chapter Eight

Mercury is a hot planet. The atomic furnace of the sun blasting so near it in the sky accounts for this.

No one knew whether or not life in any form, including simple vegetation, had ever existed here, but it seemed improbable. Spacemen avoided the place, colonists knew there was nothing for them on Mercury, and even the free traders had never been able to find anything here worth carrying away. There was almost no atmosphere. Travel on the surface was space suit work, which spacemen hated. Having no air, there had never been any rain. Hence erosion had never softened the contours of the rugged mountain ranges that had been piled up when this world was in the making. The alternate heating of the sunward side and the freezing of the spaceward side had taken the place of erosion, cracking the mountains down to dust; and this, because of its metallic content, was being continually lifted into cone-shaped clouds, not by wind action, but by the furious magnetic vortices which the field of the sun induced here.

Rahmer, at the controls of the flier, studied the terrain below him. "If you are right, what we want is at the core of this world. Yet I don't see a way to get below the surface." He spoke to Kay McKay.

"I can't prove it but I'm positive I'm right. The rulers of the Great Bace picked this place from which to rule the System because it was isolated. The native population could never revolt against them because there was no native population. They excavated the core of the planet to build a pleasure city, going inward not only for protection but because of the desirable effects of the low gravity. I'm positive the Blue Atom works from the core of the planet itself, straight through the crust, but before they had the Blue Atom, they had spaceships. Afterwards too, for that matter.

The ships had to have a way to reach the core and return."

She was pale, her face was almost distraught. After its one flicker of life, her memory had shut down again. Rahmer knew she was trying to recall what Uldreth had told her, an effort that was almost hopeless, he suspected. This information was buried in the deep wells of her subconscious. She had told them only enough to bring them here. The rest was up to them!

Glancing over his shoulder, Rahmer saw that Caleb had his nose buried deep in the now hooded detector. They had made a trip back to the mine for this instrument. Behind Caleb, men lounged in as much ease as they could manage. Each had a Helbron gun strapped over his shoulder. They were Caleb's engineers, plus the workers from the mine that Mike Conlon had selected for this ship.

Rahmer sent the little ship closer to the surface of Mercury. Above him, in an erratic pattern, were five other ships that he could not see. But they could hear Mike Conlon, and they would come down if they were told to do so. They were Rah-mer's reserve strength.

"Jarr, that valley below us is hot." Lifting his head from the hood of his detector, Caleb was pointing downward.

A great gash, the result of some ancient upheaval, was below the ship. Rahmer turned the flier into it, then exclaimed at what he saw. On the walls of a huge cliff were dim hieroglyphics. Carved deep into the rock, each marking had been lined with metal. Much of the stone had crumbled away but flakes of metal remained to mark the outlines of the symbols.

"The written language of the Great Race!" Kay exclaimed. "I've seen fragments of it on Mars."

"Over to the left is something," Mike Conlon said, pointing.

"It's a tunnel. I caught a glimpse of it," Rahmer answered.

"The ships of the Great Race came this way long ago," Caleb said. "The radioactivity comes from particles thrown out by their exhausts."

"What does the writing say?" Rahmer asked Kay.

"There's not enough left to be interpreted. But it proves the Great Race was here. And that tunnel—"

"I know. It's partly blocked. But—" Rahmer brought the little ship down over the slide in front of the tunnel. The Drive stirred up great clouds of dust, then, digging into toes into the rock, made dust out of that.

The men in the ship stared dubiously at the hole that was revealed. "What will the Drive do to the walls of that tunnel?" Caleb muttered.

"We'll find out," Rahmer answered. "Mike, tell the ships outside what we've found and that we're going in. Tell them to be ready to dig us out if the walls of the tunnel go down on us."

Very, very cautiously, he put the nose of the little flier into the dark hole. Their lights revealed that the tunnel had been lined with metal. Protected here, it had lasted longer than the metal in the hieroglyphics on the cliff outside. The Drive did not touch the metal.

"Can't you imagine the ships of the Great Race feeling their way into this place with cargoes from the planets, gems, precious metals, slaves, hostages for a whole world?" Kay whispered.

Following a course that was old before the human race had come into existence, the little flier slipped quietly along the dark tunnel. "Picking up anything, Caleb?" Rahmer asked.

"Not a thing," the answer came. "They either don't know we're here or they're lying low."

The tunnel twisted like a corkscrew boring its way toward the core of a planet, then abruptly came to an end. In the distance was a glow of light. Dim on the horizon, it outlined what had once been a city. Directly below them, hardly visible in the half-light, was what looked like a vast jungle of matted growth.

Small darting shadows seemed to move through the mottled gray growth below them.

"Something down there has sighted us," Rahmer said

"They look like scared apes. There must be thousands of them. Watch 'em run."

Scuttling figures moved away from the path of the ship.

"Check for air," Rahmer said. At this order, one of Caleb's men moved. Rahmer heard a hiss as a valve opened, admitting the atmosphere of this tremendous cavern at the core of a planet. He heard Ed Nitko give a fast guess on the oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases present in the air here. "Nothing really dangerous. The oxygen is a little low but we can breathe it," Nitko finished.

Rahmer scarcely heard the chemist's report. He, and everyone else in the ship, was watching the light city that was emerging ahead of them. It was enough to take the breath away. High domes connected by a tracery of sky-walks, vaulting towers that reached toward heaven, it was a city of glass, metal, and as fight and delicate as a spider's web.

The light held the eyes. It seemed to come from the metal itself. Probably once it had been as bright as the midday sun on Earth, but it had died away as millennia had rolled past until now it was only a soft glow that spread a sheen of silver over everything. This glow lay over the whole city, producing a softness that took away all harsh lines and gave the impression of early morning with all the world waiting on tiptoe for the sunrise.

"They had real artists," Kay McKay whispered.

"And real architects," Caleb Smith added.

Here at the core of Mercury, the lost city of the Great Race was a dream of beauty. Yet it was a haunted dream. The city was deserted. Broad avenues circled a vast structure at the heart of the place. Other broad streets gave entry to the center. It was hard to discern that these were actually streets, so overgrown were they with vegetation. The motded gray growth of the tank had crept into the city itself, covering everything. It had even crept up the walls of the tallest towers.

As the ship slowly circled the city, nothing was to be seen below. Even the ape-like creatures of the dark areas were not visible here.

"Where do we go?" Rahmer asked.

"That city within the city is the palace," Kay answered. "What we are looking for is somewhere within the maze of buildings there, but I don't know where."

Obviously once surrounded by a moat and a wall, which the vegetation had overrun, she was pointing at a circular core that lay at the heart of the city. In this heartland, the architects, the city planners, and the artists had gone wild in expressing themselves, creating a maze of parks where flowers had bloomed and lagoons were sparkling rills where water had once run. Flowers bloomed there still, wild growths that had lost their identity and were only patches of yellow, purple, and red. The single building at the center of this parkland was enormous. Other buildings had been added to it until the whole area within the wall was a vast maze.

Rahmer set the ship down outside the wall, near a crumbling opening that had once been the gate through which a broad street led into the palace area.

"Landing party. Mike, you stay here. Keep five men with you. Caleb, bring your detector. I want everybody armed and I want everybody to keep his eyes open. Open the lock."

Rahmer went out first, dropping down from the ship to a pad of soft vegetation. The air was soft, the gravity light so that he seemed to float down from the lock of the flier. The first thing he noticed was the smells of this place, a mixture of strange odors that perplexed his nose. He caught the fragrance of flowers adding a perfume to the soft, motionless air. Under the aroma of the flowers was a rank, foetid tang that threatened to send his stomach into revolt, the heavy unpleasantness of something rotten and rotting still.

In the distance, a howl sounded. One of the apes we saw, he thought.

Aside from the howl, a vast silence hung over the city. The voices of the humans behind Rahmer sounded hushed.

At first, no one wanted to move. They wanted to look. On foot, they could appreciate the vastness of the construction here. A race had labored in this place for uncounted years, building a pleasure dome more elaborate than anything out of Kubla Khan. The engineering feat of hollowing out the core of a planet had been titanic, almost beyond the grasp of the human brain.

"The ruler was considered to be the owner of everything, and I mean everything, in the whole System," Kay whispered. "Anything he wanted was brought here for his enjoyment."

Rahmer grumbled an answer deep in his throat. He foresaw problems here that would take some solving. What would happen if this place were thrown open to the free traders? How could anyone keep them out if they once got wind of this? The grapevine would talk of a tremendous treasure trove at the heart of Mercury. The free traders would hear of it. He moved forward, through the gap in the wall, and turned left, taking a path around the nearest building. He wondered if the fight gravity was doing tricks to his thinking and feeling. On his right, as he moved around the building, great doors came into view. Once they had opened on a vast courtyard. One hung askew on its hinges now. The other had fallen. Back of them was the bulk of the interior of the building, a vast dark, silent chamber where bats flew.

Whatever secrets the Great Race had ' wrested from Nature would be here still!

Rahmer moved forward, past the opening into the huge building. This would have to wait for later exploration, if there was a later exploration. Ever since they had landed, he had had the uneasy feeling that they were being watched. He glanced backward at Caleb and asked a question. The old mechanic grunted in reply. Rahmer turned a corner, then another. He found himself in another vast courtyard. This one, he thought, had been the yard of the women in the long gone days when the Great Race had used this city. It was more ornate, the wall carvings were softer, the fountains from which water had once spurted were more delicate. In spite of their obvious artistic merit, there was about the carvings a licentiousness that Rahmer found appalling, a studied, obvious depravity that was hideous in what it implied.

EEEEeeeeeYOWeeeeee! 1!

The scream, coming from behind Rahmer, lifted the hair straight up on his head. He whirled, the Helbron gun ready. An animal that looked like a huge ungainly ape jumped across the opening between two buildings and was gone before he could be certain what it was. The men stood ready. Only Caleb was unperturbed. He kept his eyes on his detector. There were worse things here than animals, things that came out of nothing and went back into it.

"Those apes we saw," Rahmer spoke. "I wonder if they are actually apes."

"They may be the degenerate descendents of the slaves who were brought here," Kay said. "Perhaps of the artists who carved the obscenities on these walls, the women who looked at them day after day as they lolled here. People can go back to the jungle. Behind us, Jared!"

An animal that looked like a cross between a human and a gorilla was running toward them. It had a club in its powerful hands. There was no mistaking its intention. As it charged them, it howled, a sound that was picked up and echoed by others lurking near.

The twin beams from the Helbron gun hit its legs and sizzled there. The howl became a scream of pain. This creature knew nothing of a weapon that could strike from a distance. Going down, it lay twisting and squirming, then with jaws wide open and powerful teeth bared, it began to crawl toward them. Helbron beams from a dozen guns knocked the life out of it.

"You said something about the drowlers that howl in the outer gardens," Rahmer said to Kay. "Is that a drowler?"

"I don't remember talking about them," she answered.

"Uldreth was talking through you when you—" Rahmer's statement was drowned in a chorus of howls that welled up. Over the walls of the courtyard, through the gate which the humans had used in entering this place, poured a horde of the men-beasts. Each one howled and each one carried a club, a piece of metal torn from a building, or a heavy stone.

"Form a circle!" Rahmer shouted. The soft iUumination that lay over this ancient city was brightened by bursts of flame where the Helbron beams met flesh. The courtyard of the women surged with a violent cacophony of sound, the howls of the creatures of the cavern. They came in hundreds. The Helbron guns cut them down by tens and twenties. They were packed so closely together that it was impossible to miss.

The air was suddenly foul with the stench of burning flesh. Around the circle of humans bodies began to pile up. And still the creatures came over the wall and through the gate, a surging tide of hate. A thrown club arched upward and came down. A human went down. Kay McKay resolutely pulled the stricken man to the center of the circle. His comrades filled the gap he had left.

The pile of bodies around the circle of humans grew as high as a man's shoulder. The creatures were fighting their way to the top of their fallen comrades. In the distance the howls continued.

"There must be millions of them!" a man muttered.

"And not one of them with enough sense to be scared!" another man said.

"I was worried about the Blue Atom. I expected Caleb's detector to warn us of its coming and your neutralizer to stop its action." Rahmer nodded toward the metal disk with its jewels which again hung from the chain that circled Kay's neck. He looked toward the howling mass that surrounded them. "If anybody had told me that this would happen, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have sworn that Helbron guns would stop anything in the System. These creatures don't seem to know the meaning of death."

"We'll fight our way back into the building behind this courtyard," Jarr ordered.

The humans went over the tops of the bodies piled around them. The Helbron guns cleared a way in front of them as they moved toward a dark opening where once a door had hung.

Pressing forward around them were the howling creatures of this interior world.

Inside the budding was revealed a vast hall. Rahmer took one look at it and knew that it had once been a harem, and a huge one. The furnishings were gone but the walls remained. The obscenity on display there revealed the purpose to which this huge room had once been put. Here harem girls had once paraded by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands, in a place where the air had probably been scented, where soft music had played in the background. In contrast to the rest of the city, where the metal gave off light, in this huge room the illumination was dim. It was a place of shadows. Around the walls were openings where once doors had hung. Now they were arched dark openings leading on into more darkness that existed in the maze of buildings beyond.

Outside the creatures howled in rage as they saw their prey escaping. They charged into the doorway and died there. Slowly the stench of charred flesh rose higher into the air. And still the creatures camel

Though no one mentioned it, each one knew that this vast harem could easdy be a death trap.

"We came here expecting to find super-science," Caleb grunted. "Instead, we have found super-savagery!"

"The super-science is here," Rahmer answered. "We just haven't found it yet. More important, it hasn't found us."

Caleb's face grew grimmer. "We need Mike and the ship."

"How are we going to get word to him? We're out of his sight."

"Hell hear the howling and know that something is wrong." He broke off as a shadow passed over the entrance. "The ship! Mike has come looking for us."

A cheer went up, then died down. The ship moved past the opening, circled once, then moved away into the distance. When last they saw the flier, it was gathering speed. Men looked at each other, then at Rahmer.

"Hell come back," Caleb said quickly. "He just didn't see us in here when he passed over."

"He looked to me like he was getting to hell out of here," a miner said. "Not that I blame him, but—"

An hour later, those who remained were backed into a niche in the inner wall of the building. Two miners were gone. Wild apes had leaped over the bodies of their dead companions and had dragged them away before the creatures could be destroyed. One of Caleb's engineers had been instantly killed by a thrown club.

"You're worn out!" Jarr said as he glanced quickly at Kay.

"Yes. But that's all right. As my strength fails, something happens inside me, where my memories are. They come to the surface easier."

"I don't understand this."

"As the strength fails in the conscious mind, the subconscious comes to the surface. By this, I know that Uldreth is trying to reach me. He's here, in the core of this city somewhere, and he's trying to tell me something. I get little insights, but nothing clear."

"Do you trust this Uldreth?" Rahmer asked dubiously.

"He is a truly great scientist, perhaps the greatest who ever lived in the Solar System. Unlike Johrud, he has a regard for moral values. It was Johrud who took me from Torres and brought me here. Later, with Johrud's knowledge, Uldreth sent me to you. I told him about you and he hoped to be able to communicate with you through me. This hope failed when he lost contact. The whole story is not yet clear. Uldreth invented the Blue Atom and laid it at the feet of his emperor. He is able to use it when Johrud is otherwise occupied."

"Are there only two of them?"

"I think that is all, now, though the possibility exists that there will be many more, later. For this reason, we must secure control of the Blue Atom. Johrud, using that hellish device, is more dangerous than a whole fleet of spaceships. He is completely amoral and will stop at nothing to gain his ends."

"Why doesn't Uldreth destroy him when he has control of the Blue Atom?"

"The answer lies in Uldreth's feeling of loyalty to his emperor. He hates Johrud but Johrud is still his king. He would take all of Johrud's power away from him, if he could, but he would not kill him. Nor, when it comes to a showdown, would he oppose his ruler's wishes. Uldreth's loyalty is hard to understand but it is still real.

"I can't tell, other than that he is here somewhere, where Uldreth is. It may be that he is only thinking about me very strongly and I am picking up his thoughts. When he sent me back to you, we were in resonance. Some of this resonance remains. I don't think he knows we are here, nor, in all probability, does Johrud know it."

"How could he miss all of this howling?"

"Very easily. They know about the drowlers but they regard them as beasts. I think the drowlers go . . . well, sort of stir-crazy ever so often and fight among themselves. Even if Uldreth or Johrud heard the howling, they would only think the drowlers had gone crazy again and were fighting among themselves."

EEEEYOWI Kay flinched away as a drowler leaped the bodies of its comrades and lunged at her. Rahmer burned it down and shoved the still quivering body away with his foot. He knew they were trapped here and that the battle was hopeless.

From outside came another sound, the growl of the Helbron Drive.

"A ship!" a miner shouted. Another growl sounded.

"Ships!" Rahmer spoke. "Mike had to go outside to get into radio contact with the others. He brought them back with him."

Outside, the howling of the drowlers suddenly changed. A new note appeared in it for the first time—fear. The response of the drowlers was pure reaction—flight. Those inside rushed out, to meet ships diving in just over their heads with the Drive on at full power.

Not without reason did spacemen respect the Drive in the immediate vicinity of a ship. Moving to the door of the courtyard, Rahmer saw the surrounding walls go down in choking dust. He saw drowler bodies thrown high into the air and literally torn to shreds of hide, flesh, bone, and blood as the peculiar twisting action of the Drive hit them. A ship dived over the courtyard, then another, then a ship settled down just outside the cloud of dust where the wall had been. Out of it spewed Sam Helker, followed by his men. They came running through the boiling dust. Then Big Olaf's ship came down, then that owned by Eck Tenner, then the ships from the mine. Each one discharged its quota of fighting men.

His own men coming to him was one of the finest sights Jarr Rahmer had ever seen!

Chapter Nine

They stood in the courtyard of the women, these men from space, awe and bewilderment in their eyes. They stared constantly at the vast city around them, then came back to the bloody mass on the ground.

"I've seen messes," Big Olaf rumbled. "But I never saw anything that smelled worse than this. What kind of devil's spawn are these, Jarr?"

Eck Tenner, supported at each elbow by two brawny men, looked mosdy at the city. In it, he found something that intrigued his slide-rule mind no end. "It's marvelous. Wonderful! Mass rising on mass, yet all of it fitting together as if each part belonged exacdy where it is placed. And all of this here all the time, unknown to us." His eyes came to Rahmer and his mind took another tack. "There must be wealth here, Jarr. This place has never been looted. I was thinking—"

"There will be no looting."

"I was thinking that our treasury could stand new credits," Eck Tenner continued, unperturbed.

"Have you found this Blue Atom yet?" Sam Helker questioned.

"We just got here, Sam, when all hell broke loose. But I think Kay can help us find it now."

Knots bulged at the corners of Rahmer's jaws. "Kay? Have you got her here?"

"Yes."

"You didn't tell me!" Helker's voice was suddenly hard. "No. I didn't tell anybody."

"But you've got men looking for her all over the System."

"Yes. I thought it was better that way. If I called off the hunt, somebody would be certain to guess that she had been found."

Helker shifted the Helbron gun in his hands. His own men were ranged around him. "I don't like this, Rahmer. How did you get her? Did you find her here?"

"No, Sam. She came to headquarters."

"How would she get to headquarters?"

"Sam, I'll tell you the whole story later. Right now I want to get Kay and my men back to my ship. They've been through a rather trying time." The spacemen had surrounded him at the door of the courtyard of the women. Rahmer turned to find Kay and help her to his ship. He knew she was near exhaustion. Not seeing her in the press of men, he pushed his way through them and re-entered the building.

His heart dropped when he realized she was not here. Perhaps she had fainted in the niche where they had made their last stand! He swore at himself for being so careless as to leave her there, but when the ships had arrived, he had

gone to meet them, thinking she would follow. She was not in the niche.

"Kayl" Rahmer's shout set the echoes ringing in this vast harem hall. He strained his ears for an answer. When the talk of the spacemen crowding through the door became an interfering babble, he screamed at them to be silent. Hearing the tone of his voice, they obeyed prompdy. He called her name again, was waiting for an answer when Caleb came up. "She was right here just a moment ago. When I went out to the ships, she disappeared. Find her for me, Caleb." For an instant, Jarr Rahmer felt utterly helpless and completely alone. Pathos as deep as space was in his voice, coming from a longing he had never known before.

"Do you think it was . . . well . . ." Caleb's voice had sympathy in it.

"She was protected against that." Rahmer was horrified.

"Maybe she sort of stepped around the comer," Caleb suggested.

"It's more than that. Start hunting for her, Caleb. Have everybody help you." The last was flung across Rahmer's shoulder as he moved across this room of the women. Inside him was turmoil and a kind of deep longing that struck at the core of his being. He had never known a woman could be so important to a man. Caleb called to him, then called again, in a sharper voice. He ignored the old mechanic. On the far side of the cavern, in the dust which thé drowlers had not disturbed, he found footprints which led into a dark opening. He shouted for Caleb to pick men and follow him. The footprints passed into a covered passage where the dust was deep and the fight was very dim. The impressions in the dust were evenly spaced and they indicated that Kay had walked as if she knew exactly where she was going. Had she remembered at last?

Ahead, he caught a glimpse of a brighter light, an opening into another large room. A heavy voice was speaking.

"Ne de vonerl Ne de vonerl" The speaker was shouting as if outraged.

Kay's voice answered. "Ne otra thotal. No tumul tho sed-sun vo etro."

Ahead of Rahmer a door was ajar. It had not rusted away as had the others. He shoved it aside and stepped into a room that was bigger by far than the room of the women. Unlike the harem enclosure, which had been all soft dimness, this room blazed with light. In the center was a tall metal pillar surmounted by a huge ball of some land of crystal. At the base of the pillar were control mechanisms, though what was controlled was not clear. Rahmer's attention was taken up by two people in the room. One was Kay McKay. So far as he could tell at a glance, she was all right. The other was at least seven feet tall. Big in proportion, his whole manner was that of one born to command. This giant glanced at Rahmer and lunged toward the control chair. Kay McKay pointed at him. "This is Johrud. This is the enemy we seek." Rahmer lifted the Helbron gun.

Johrud saw the gun, guessed that it was a weapon. A glance at the face of the man behind it told him that it would be used instantly. He halted his movement toward the control chair.

"Tell him to stand clear," Rahmer said to Kay McKay.

She repeated his meaning in the same language she had been using. A torrent of expostulation came from Johrud.

"He says this place is sacred to him," Kay translated. "What he means is that it is taboo to anyone else. He wants to know who you are and by what right you enter his sacred presence."

"Tell him this is my right," Rahmer answered. He patted the Helbron gun. "Tell him "if he doesn't move away from that control panel, he is another dead drowler." Under the pressure of the gun, Johrud obeyed. He didn't like it, but he understood he had no choice.

"Watch him, Jared!" Kay's voice was sharp. "He is not to be trusted for an instant. Also, here in this place he has control of powers that we do not know exist. Don't let him get control of that." She nodded upward. Rahmer followed the line of her gaze. Now for the first time he saw clearly the object on top of the metal pillar. It was a globe of crystal about five feet in diameter. In color it was a fight blue. Pain shot through his eyes as he looked at it.

He knew intuitively that this was the Blue Atom. As he glanced at it, his gaze was caught and held. He seemed to see below the surface and into the Blue Atom, and beyond it into a blue infinity. His eyes tried to focus on the depths of that infinity. Finding nothing to serve as a focal point, they kept trying. The rising tension in the eye muscles grew to sudden sharp pain. He cried out and clapped his hands over his eyes to relieve this torture, then jerked them down and brought the Helbron gun to bear on Johrud, who had seized this opportunity to start again toward the control chair in the complex of apparatus at the base of the pedestal. Seeing the weapon cover him, Johrud came to an abrupt halt.

"The eyes are twisted if you look direcdy at it," Kay exclaimed.

"So I noticed," Rahmer answered. He suddenly felt dizzy and weak.

"I should have warned you but I didn't have time. I don't know what it does to the eyes but I know it is the greatest discovery ever made. It's a translation into reality of the unifying principle so long sought by human scientists. Through it, the forces that act in the whole System are brought into unity so that no one of them acts against another but all act in harmony."

Rahmer moved to the comer of a long bench standing beside the wall, got his back into this corner, and waited for the dizziness to pass. The bench was covered with what looked like a large number of very small dolls, toy houses, and toy ships, a play place for a child. Rahmer had no attention to give to these. He was watching Johrud and waiting for the dizziness to pass. "How'd you happen to come here?" he asked Kay.

"I had a feeling that if I came in this direction I would find what we are seeking," Kay answered. "Just as I got here, Johrud was starting to sit down in the control chair. I think he had gotten some inkling that we have arrived in Rondskol and was getting ready to use the Blue Atom to investigate. I startled him so much he jumped out of the chair."

"You could have stopped it with your necklace."

"I could have protected myself and a few others. But he could have taken the ships and all the men in them. He could have left those of us who were out of the ships at the mercy of the drowlersl" A shudder passed through her slender body.

Rahmer felt the dizziness pass. He straightened himself and glanced at the toys on the shelf. One house was a model of a Quonset hut. He was wondering how this happened to be here at the core of Mercury, when men came running through the same door by which he had entered. He had to act promptly to keep them from killing Johrud. He waved them back and away, forced Johrud at gun point to stand with his back to the wall, then formed the spacemen in a semicircle around the ruler.

"If he tries to get away, kill him."

The ruler looked down from his superior height at the men who had captured him as if they were inferior creatures.

"He looks at us as if we were dogs," Big Olaf grunted.

"Worse than that." Caleb added. "He thinks we're lower than those drowlers outside."

"I can take that superior look off of his face—" Big Olaf glanced at Rahmer, then subsided. Rahmer did not look as if he wanted Johrud killed. Big Olaf muttered to himself. Surely they were not going to save something like this for seed!

Johrud broke into a torrent of language, then ended by pointing to the door by which the humans had entered.

"He says for us to leave at once," Kay translated. "He says this place is reserved for his own sacred presence, and that if we do not leave, we will all be destroyed when his forces arrive."

"What does he think he is?" Rahmer questioned.

"A god," Kay answered. "In his mind, he is not just a ruler, but the supreme ruler. As that, he is a god before whom all creation must bow."

"He forgot to let us in on this," Big Olaf grunted.

"I want to know how he can be alive when his empire is done," Rahmer said.

"He says he was betrayed and taken captive by a person he trusted and that this happened long ago," Kay translated.

"But that doesn't explain how he happens to be alive."

"He says he will not explain this to you, that you are unfit to know such a great secret." Kay hesitated, then spoke slowly. "He says that in spite of the fact that you have broken the law by entering his sacred presence unbidden, he will make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, if you will agree to serve him."

"Tell him to go to hell," Rahmer said.

"Just a minute, Jarr," Sam Helker interrupted. "We ought to think about what he's saying."

"I've already thought about it all I need to."

"Don't go too fast," Helker urged. He licked thick lips.

"I have enough wealth to suit me," Rahmer said.

"But you can't say the same for the rest of us," Helker continued. "Remember he had control of the whole Solar System while he was top man. He's probably got stuff that could be converted into credits stacked so high he can't see over the top of it. Why let him keep it when the rest of us could use it?"

"I didn't say I was going to let him keep it," Rahmer answered.

"What I mean is, Eck said the treasury could stand some credits. And we've all been to a lot of extra expense in coming here—"

"Ask him how the Blue Atom works," Rahmer said, ignoring Helker.

"He says he will not reveal this secret either," Kay answered, after talking at length with the tall ruler. "My guess is he doesn't know. As I told you, he didn't discover the unifying principle which made the Blue Atom possible. He doesn't actually know much science, probably only enough to start and stop the effect."

"Tell him he will either answer my questions or I will kill him," Rahmer said. He was bluffing and he knew it. Any enemy in battie, he could kill, but a defenseless enemy he could not harm. To make his bluff look good, he lifted the Helbron gun. Kay glanced sharply at him, then translated what he had said.

Johrud drew himself up so that he seemed to be eight feet tall as he answered. "He says that if you kill mm, you will get nothing. He says you need him, and that he needs you, to re-establish his kingdom as it existed in the old days."

"Tell him his kingdom is dead and that it will stay dead," Rahmer answered. "Ask him about Uldreth."

"He says Uldreth betrayed him once. He does not know where Uldreth is."

Rahmer was silent as he decided what to do. He knew he would not trust anything he could get out of Johrud. But they had him and they had the Blue Atom. This was enough! "Take him to your ship," he said to Big Olaf. "I guess I don't need to tell you to guard him carefully."

"I should say you don't," Big Olaf grunted.

"We ought to treat him with great care," Helker suggested. "After all, the scientists would pay plenty for a chance to talk to him."

"Money is not what we're after and nobody is going to pay for talking to him. No amount of money would do us any good as long as anybody else controlled that." He jerked his head up toward the globe resting on its pedestal.

"You don't mean to say you're going to destroy it just as soon as you've got your hands on it!" Helker was appalled.

"What would you do with it, if you had it?"

"I'd use it," Helker answered promptly.

"That's what I thought," Rahmer answered. "That is what most people would do. However, this wouldn't work. It would put too much power into the hands of one man and we would end up again with absolute monarchy in the Solar System. Take him away, Olaf. I don't want him here, where his power is located. He knows too much that he hasn't told and we know too little."

He lifted his voice. "1 want this place searched. Form small parries and go through it. Caleb, I would like it if you would explore the controls on the Blue Atom."

"How'd you know that was what I wanted to do anyhow?" Caleb asked.

'T guessed it," Rahmer answered, grinning. "But take care. That thing might explode."

"Think I'm a darned fool?" the old mechanic grunted.

Rahmer drew Kay to one side. "I have an uneasy feeling that we have taken the tiger by the tail."

"So do I," she answered. "There is so much that I don't understand; for instance, these." She pointed to the panels of clear plastic that lined the walls of the vast room. Rahmer walked along them. Behind the plastic were what looked like dolls, but which he suspected were not that.

"Did he employ doll makers to construct dolls of everyone he knew?"

"I don't think these are quite dolls," Kay answered. "I think—"

Rahmer, engrossed in the next panel, hardly heard what she had said. It contained quarts of what looked to be red sand. The next one contained even greater quantities of what looked to be clear sand. Each grain sparkled in the clear light of this big room. Kay pointed toward the red sand piled so carelessly behind the plastic panel. "I think these are actually rubies. And what looks like clear sand in the next panel are really diamonds. I think each one is a perfect jewel in itself."

"What did you say?" Rahmer said.

She talked quickly, the words coming from her hps in litde bursts of sound. Looking at her, Rahmer had the impression she was remembering again, things that Uldreth had told her or had impressed on her mind in some way. "Each jewel is worth a fortune. Johrud looted the planets, for wealth, for women, and for hostages. He brought them all here, reduced them in size, and put them behind these panels."

"Non—" Rahmer caught the words before it passed his hps.

"I know you think this is only sand and that these are only dolls. But I tell you that these are real jewels and that these dolls are real people, and that they can be brought back to full size. After they were brought here, they were reduced. In the case of people, this reduction slowed their life processes to a crawl, and even slower than that. This was done with the Blue Atom and is another of the powers that reside in it. It can be used to make objects small, then make them large again. While they are small, their life processes slow down, too, down, down to almost nothing. The heart beat of a human being at his normal size is about seventy-two per minute. The hearts of the people from Earth we see as dolls behind these panels are beating perhaps once a year. One breath may take four or five years. In this way, they will live almost forever. This is the secret Johrud refused to reveal. This was the way he handled his enemies. This was what Uldreth did to him, then to himself. Not so long ago, Johrud awakened and came back to his normal size. Uldreth awakened at the same time."

She paused and seemed to run out of breath. Her eyes were wide and she looked at Rahmer as if she was seeing him but was also seeing something else too. He called to Caleb and had him come over and listen to what she had to say. The lines in the old mechanic's face deepened as he listened. When Rahmer asked him if this was possible, Caleb took his time before he answered.

"Who is to say what's possible and what is not possible? I would have said that the Blue Atom was not possible, until it happened. Everybody said that Helbron was crazy until he came up with the Drive. Then a lot of 'em wished he had been as crazy as they had thought he was. We can't think about the things that can be true here as we would think about ordinary things. We can't even guess at the laws in operation here. All we _tcan do is remember two things: first, that we are dealing with super-science, with knowledge so vast that it is utterly beyond us; second, that matter, which seems solid to us, is actually mosdy empty space. If you took the space out of a human being, he would shrink to almost nothing. A single atom consists of an electron circling a nucleus. The distance between the electron and its nucleus, comparatively speaking, is as great as the distance between one of the planets and the sun. An atom is mostly space. So is a human being. But I don't want to think too much about it, Jarr. There is such a thing as straining the mind to the breaking point."

"I know what you mean," Rahmer said. "I felt my own mind twist and strain as Kay was talking. It made me wish I was back on Venus, digging rock and shooting guzzo horses when they came up out of the swamps."

"Come and look at these," Kay said. She led the wall to the shelf. Around the room men were moving, search parties going out. Off in the distance, drowlers were howling. They sounded like wolves skulking in the darkness, not yet daring to attack, but getting up their nerve. Rahmer looked at the objects on the bench.

"That's a model of a Quonset hut. There was a man by the name of John Forbes, a jungle trader in the Hannibal Range, who claimed he had lost a Quonset hut and wanted us to pay for it, under the terms of our insurance. Oh, Lord!" His eyes had gone to another tiny figure on the bench. "Fat George!" There was no mistaking the rounded, jelly-like figure he had seen vanish in the saloon in Torres. "There's Jack Torrance and his native wife. There are their two kids. And there's a child! There was a woman by the name of Robinson who had lost her mind because her child had been kidnaped in its cradle!" Horror as deep as space rose in

Rahmer's voice. Anger was right behind it. "That dirty—I" He looked around the room. Big Olaf and Johrud were already gone. Perhaps it was just as well. "I want Uldreth," he said.

"I think he is coming. He has been sleeping and has only recendy awakened. There!" She pointed across the big room. Four spacemen were prodding a second giant ahead of them.

Kay moved quickly toward them. The giant smiled at the sight of her, bowed, then broke into a torrent of language. She pointed toward Rahmer. The giant moved toward the big spaceman with a step that suddenly seemed to have new life in it.

Like Johrud, Uldreth was tall. Utterly unlike Johrud, there was a humility about him, a kind of deep patience, and a depth of understanding that set him off completely from his ruler. Rahmer's first impression of him was that here was a person he would like as a friend. There was none of the proud, imperious, go-to-hell expression on Uldreth's face. Instead it was a face that had known suffering and had gained strength from it. He bowed to Rahmer. The big spaceman shifted the Helbron gun in his hands and nodded his head in reply.

"Do you understand all of this?" Rahmer's arm swept in a circle that included the whole room.

Kay translated the question. Anguish appeared on Uldreth's face as he answered. "He says he understands it. He says, God help him, he invented it."

Rahmer's gesture toward the dolls on the bench was a savage thing.

"Uldreth says that Johrud did that and all the others in the panels!"

"Ask him how it happens that he and Johrud are still alive when all the rest of their people are gone."

"He says that when he invented the Blue Atom, he gave it to his ruler, that his plan was to use it to provide fast communication between the planets, to knit the empire together into an organic whole, to make it into a unity. He says Johrud betrayed him and used it for his own purposes. When he saw what was happening, he used it to overcome Johrud, after which he sent all members of the Great Race from this city and made it a place of taboo for them. He says he made Johrud into one of the littie dolls, then used the Blue Atom to do the same thing to himself, and that he set up automatic controls so that if Johrud ever awakened, he would be awakened too, and both brought back to full size. He says what I have already told you, that the dolls live almost forever, that they will wait thus, through eternity, for someone to awaken them."

"I see." It was a kind of suspended animation, only in this case it was a slowed animation. Jarr understood it all, dimly, in a general way, though not the specific processes. "Did Johrud bring you here? Ask him." To Jarr Rahmer, this point was important.

"Yes. He says that he discovered as soon as he awakened that Johrud was already using the Blue Atom, testing it, finding out what had happened and was happening in the Solar System, and that when Johrud made contact with the other humans, he knew something had to be done. After Johrud brought me here, he sent me back—"

"What other humans?" Rahmer demanded.

"I don't know," Kay answered. "There was a contact."

"Ask him!" The big spaceman's voice had become a shout.

"He says he does not know what humans, that he never saw them. He says that I am the only human he ever met, and that when I told him about you, he sent me back to you, without Johrud's knowledge, to ask for help."

"I knew there were humans mixed up in this somewhere. The theft of the files on Earth could not have been an accident, nor was your kidnaping, nor were the attempts on my life. There was a Judas somewhere, working with Johrud! Ask him again, what humans? If the traitor belongs to the Confederation, I'll dump him into deep space if I never do anything else." Anger was in Rahmer, violent and heavy.

He made no effort to suppress it. In a way, it was a cleansing thing since it brought to the surface suspicions that had been in the back of his mind ever since Kay had been kidnaped in Torres.

"He still says he does not know," Kay answered, after questioning the tall Great Race scientist. "He says it makes no difference anyhow, since you hold both the Blue Atom and Johrud. I told him that you have taken Johrud captive."

"What does he think about that?"

"He thinks it is sad, but necessary."

A shout across the room pulled Rahmer's attention in that direction. Big Olaf, shaking drowlers from him the way a lion might shake off wild dogs that had dared to attack it, came stirmbling into the room. His head was bloody and one arm hung limp.

"Sam came and said that you said for me to take Johrud into his ship," Olaf shouted. "He and his men got the jump on me. They've put Johrud into Sam's ship and they're burning the air on their way out of here. Also, Johrud has got sometJiing, a box of some kind, I don't know what."

"Then Helker was the human Johrud contacted; he was our Judas! Damn him!" All the savage anger came up again in Rahmer. He paced the floor like a caged Hon, cursing Helker. Yet he knew that this betrayal had been inevitable. Sooner or later someone would do what Johrud had done so long before—grab for everything in sight. He turned back to Big Olaf and studied the giant for a moment. Olaf was not badly hurt and the light of batde was in his eyes. "Are you able to fly?"

"HelL yes," Olaf grunted.

"I want you and Eck to get into your ships and capture Helker. All I want you to bring back is his hide."

The light of battle glinted more strongly in Olaf's eyes. "Well do that, Jarr."

Eck Tenner was not so eager. His slide-rule brain was still working. "We've got the source of Johrud's power here. All Helker has is Johrud. Can Johrud build another Blue

Atom and use it against us?"

"Uldreth says that Johrud cannot build another Blue Atom," Kay answered, after she had questioned the Great Race scientist. "He has not the knowledge."

"Then we're sitting in the driver's seat," Eck Tenner said. As if his mathematical mind had caught a glimpse of victory, triumph sounded in his voice. "Johrud is not worth a damn to Helker, not even to trade to us."

"I wish I was as sure of that as you are but I know there are more jokers in this deck than we have found yet. You and Olaf go get them. Ill feel safer when they're dead."

"Yes, Jarr."

Rahmer watched Big Olaf and Eck Tenner moved slowly across the room toward the exit. Drowlers were howling closer now. Eck Tenner had called most of his crew to him. They had enough weapons to protect them from the creatures lurking outside.

"There's something else," Kay said. "Uldreth says—"

Howling, drowlers charged through the door. In the enclosed space, their howls made a hideous cacophony of blaring sound. With Big Olaf in the lead and Eck Tenner following, with guns blasting, the humans moved through the drowlers. The creatures, however, had found other doors and were charging through them too. The spacemen became very busy. Rahmer was aware that behind him Kay was shouting unintelligible words in the language of the Great Race but he had no time to listen, no time to do anything except use the weapon in his hands. The air was already beginning to stink again with the rank, stomach-twisting odor of burned flesh.

"Ask Uldreth how to stop these things," Rahmer yelled over his shoulder.

"He says to use the Blue Atom on them," Kay answered.

"With him at the controls?"

"Of course. No one else knows how to use it."

"I think you can trust him."

"I don't trust anybody with that much power, not even me. If I put him into the control chair of the Blue Atom, he may help his ruler. Watch it, Olaf!" He screamed the last words across the whole big room just in time to warn the big Viking to look to one side and blast a drowler leaping at him. Olaf looked back, shook his head, and grinned, then looked upward. The grin vanished. He pointed with his Helbron gun at the crystal sphere on its orb. Looking upward, Bahmer saw that the Blue Atom was glowing. Misty blue illumination was coming from it. The whole planet seemed to start to vibrate as a note like that of a gigantic harp flooded through the room.

The howl of the drowlers changed instantly. They were not afraid of death, but here was something that they did fear. Leaving off their attack on the humans, they all tried to escape at the same time.

The glass door opened. It trembled with a jerky motion, moved toward focus, missed, moved again. Men scattered from it like suddenly frightened bugs.

Eck Tenner tried to run. On his metal legs, he could not run very fast, and he could not dodge at all. He looked over his shoulder and saw the glass door immediately above him. He twisted, fell, and the glass door came to focus on him. Closing around him, it held him like a bug in a glass jar.

Wild jeering laughter hooted in the room. It was the same laughter they had heard in the meeting room in Torres! Now it was recognizable. Johrud's laughter! As it died into sdence, another voice came, shouting at them in English.

"Lay down your guns and stand against the wall. I'm in my ship outside Mercury and I've got Johrud. He can control the Blue Atom. You are seeing what is happening to Eck Tenner. The same thing will happen to all of you if you have not laid down your guns by the time we bring the glass door back."

Helker's voice.

The glass door vanished. Held like a bug in a glass jar, Eck Tenner vanished too.

All over the big room stunned men looked at Rahmer. They were free of the drowlers but this counted for nothing in the greater menace that had come upon them.

"Uldreth says that Johrud has a remote control device for the Blue Atom," Kay screamed at Rahmer from behind him. "I've been trying to tell you—"

"That black box that Big Olaf said he had!" Rahmer was aware that Big Olaf and his men were gone. Soon they would be outside Mercury. But not soon enough. The glass door would be upon the men in the cavern long before Olaf's ship could reach the outer world. There was only one way to stop this. Rahmer lifted the Helbron gun and brought it to bear on the Blue Atom. There in that blue sphere was the crux of the whole situation!

For a split second, the big spaceman's finger hesitated on the trigger. He wondered what would happen when the hellish energies of the Helbron gun were released into the crystal sphere. Anything could happen. The result could be bigger than an H bomb. It could blast Mercury into dust, throw the planet from its orbit, which would shift the orbit of every other planet in the System. This would be a cataclysm beyond the mind of man. Did he dare take this chance to save a handful of wild spacemen?

On the other hand, he knew that Helker and Johrud would use the Blue Atom to enslave the system. Would the billions of life forms swarming through the' planets prefer slavery or death?

Deep in his heart, Rahmer knew there was really no choice. The handful of spacemen, including himself, did not matter. But freedom did! After all, Mercury might not explode! As Kay and Uldreth shouted at him, he pressed the trigger of the gun. Hellish energies spewing forth smashed at the crystal orb.

Nothing happened.

Rahmer took the gun from his shoulder and looked at it to make certain it was working properly. While Kay screamed at him, he raised it and fired again. Again, nothing. Behind him now, he heard was Kay was saying.

"Uldreth says the Blue Atom is ultimate force itself, that nothing in the Universe can destroy it, that until entropy has reached its maximum in the heat death, and the very atoms of which the planets are constructed have ceased their eternal motion, it will remain in existence. Then, and only then, when all the Solar System is dust, will it go into dust also."

Rahmer took the gun from his shoulder. The drotolers had ceased their howling. Men stood in silence, waiting for they knew not what. Now as never before they were realizing they were little men. Helbron's gun had released the energies of subspace but the Blue Atom rested on the foundation of some deeper energy still, on some infinite, eternal, ultimate force. Rahmer let the useless weapon slide down into his hands.

"Then there is no way to stop Johrud and Helker," he said.

Chapter Ten

Despair gripped him; it gripped every man in the cavern. He thought of the ships outside, knew there was no time to reach them, and no place to go if they did reach them. There was no place to hide in all space. Rahmer knew that Uldreth was talking very fast and that Kay was trying to translate. He did not care what the Great Race scientist was saying. It did not matter. Then Uldreth ran toward the controls of the Blue Atom and Rahmer threw up his Helbron gun.

"But he is going to disconnect the remote control that Johrud is using!" Kay cried out in sharp protest at his action.

Something like hope leaped into Rahmer's mind. "Is there a way to do that?"

"He says there is and he ought to know. He built it."

"But—" In Rahmer's mind was doubt. Uldreth might still be loyal to Johrud. "Caleb! Watch him closely. Kay! Tell him if he makes a false move, it will be his last one." With the memory of Johrud's laugh in his ears and of Helker's orders, Rahmer did not feel inclined to trust anybody. Caleb moved quickly. He and Uldreth stood conferring beside the controls.

"I think he's all right, Jarr," Caleb said.

"He had better be."

Uldreth jerked the back from the control panel of the Blue Atom. His long fingers went inside. He pointed to Caleb to go around to the other side. Caleb moved. The Blue Atom glowed. The glass door opened. While Rahmer raged and started to use the Helbron gun, the glass door closed around Uldreth. As it had held Eck Tenner, it held Uldreth, like a bug in a glass jar.

Laughter roared through the room. Not until then did Rahmer realize that Johrud, on Helker's ship, had used the Blue Atom, instead of Uldreth. Again Helker's voice shouted orders for the spacemen to lay down their guns.

The glass door closed. Uldreth was gone. The blue glow faded from the crystal orb on its pedestal. Not a man present but knew that within seconds, minutes at the most, it would light again.

"That's that!" a spaceman said. He laid down his gun and moved to put his back to the wall. Another followed him, then another and another.

"You dogs, would you quit now?" Rahmer's voice lashed them but even as he spoke, he knew he had no heart for the words. They were not failing him as much as he was failing them. Human, afraid, they were face to face with unimaginable forces.

"Jarr, we don't want to quit!"

"Jarr, if there is still anything we can do—"

"Just tell us what, Jarr. But—"

Rahmer said nothing. He saw how it was. Only Kay McKay and Caleb Smith stood beside him in the center of the vast room. All the others were standing with their backs against the wall.

"Why don't you go join them?" he said.

Kay's lips were red where she had bitten them. Caleb's face had new wrinkles in it. Both shook their heads.

"You don't have to die here. Helker always needs mechanics, particularly good ones. He always needs—" Hahmer could not force his voice farther than this.

"I know history. I know what happens to women when somebody gets too much power."

He caught her roughly in one arm. "Knowing you has been good. Just knowing you . . ." His voice had become a harsh croak, but in it, somehow, even in this moment, there was an undertone of happiness, as if death, in coming for him, had at the last moment held off long enough to give him something that all men seek and few ever find: a woman fit to stand beside him.

He heard Caleb move and thought that the old mechanic had gone to the wall to surrender. He chose not to look at that. He held Kay tight and she was willing to be held so, but now there was nothing to say. They had passed the point where words might have meaning. Dimly he was aware that the Blue Atom had begun to glow again. Its dim blue radiance was spreading over the room, a forerunner to the opening of the glass door. He sensed it feeling for a focus but made no effort to avoid that focus. The stunned spacemen stood against the wall. He took no notice of them either.

The blue glow faded, died as does a bulb that has been turned out in which the filament glows for a few seconds after the current is gone. The glass door flashed out of focus. A burst of the happiest profanity he had ever heard struck Jarr Rahmer's ears. He turned to see Caleb straighten up beside the control panel. The old mechanic had in his hands something that looked like a switch torn out by its roots.

"The control switch on the remote control box. If Uldreth could build it, I could find it."

It seemed to Jarr Rahmer that he had never heard a happier sound than that of Caleb Smith swearing. Then Caleb was talking. "The controls still work, Jarr. All I did was jerk out the remote control. Handling Helker and Johrud is your job. Olaf may never catch 'em. If he does, they may out-gun him. But there's one thing they can't outrun or outgun —the Blue Atom."

Rahmer threw himself into the control chair. He knew if he hesitated he might never have the courage to take over the control of that device of awesome power. He knew, also, that he did not know how it worked.

"You don't know how the Helbron Drive works either but you fly ships powered with it," Caleb answered. He pointed a gnarled finger at a red button. "This starts it. The green one guides it. The white one stops it. Youll have to experiment until you get it under control. But, watch yourself! My guess is that this thing can tear the hell out of the mind of the man who is using it. Let your head rest on the pads at the back of the chair and push the red button."

Rahmer let his head slide back into the position Caleb had indicated. For the first time, he became aware of the twin mirrors that set on each side of the pad on which his head rested. Infinity seemed to be caught within them. The same eye-twisting pull that was in the Blue Atom was in them. Knowing that they concentrated some force upon the brain itself, Rahmer pulled his gaze away from them and pushed the red button. The Blue Atom glowed.

Mercury reeled on its axis. At least this was one of the impressions that Rahmer had, but only one. There was a second, more nerve-shattering than the first, of exceedingly fast movement. Humans are accustomed to a stable platform under their feet. As the Blue Atom glowed Rahmer felt the instability of the platform under him. Mercury was spinning madly on its axis. There was a second motion of the planet around the sun and a third motion which was that of the sun and all the planets making what seemed to him to be a mad plunge through space. He became aware of all of these motions at once.

The second effect was a coldness, a surging wave of it, that penetrated to the marrow of his bones. To him at this moment it seemed to be the cold of the lost infinities where even the vast suns did not go.

The third effect was even worse than the first two. His mind seemed to split into two parts, to become dual entities. One part of his mind was in his body, crouched in the control chair. The other part was at the core of the Blue Atom on the pedestal above him. For one mad second, he did not know which he really was, the part in his body or the part at the core of the Blue Atom, then a steadying impulse rose, giving him balance, so that he seemed to be able to be in two places at once. This balance was precariously held, he well knew. If it toppled one way, madness waited him. If it toppled the other way, there was destruction. Yet it was not all madness, not all destruction, the part of him that was at the core of the Blue Atom felt a kind of heady joy at being there, at the core of things, at their inward heart from which the pulse of life itself poured outward.

From this core, he could see in all directions at once, and see perfectly, in some incredible way that was not subject to the limitations of optics or of distance. He could see all the planets and the sun and this vast cavern at the heart of Mercury at the same time, via some medium which he could not name but which he knew existed and which gave a blue color to the sea in which the planets swam. Seeing this, he knew what the Blue Atom really was.

It was the Solar System. The whole of it, the all of it!

The blue sphere on top of its pedestal here on Mercury was a model, a focusing device like the lens of a telescope that saw in all directions. It was the Little Blue Atom. The Big Blue Atom was the whole system. Beyond that, he saw that the Solar System itself was only an atom in a space-time configuration so enormously vast that the mind reeled as it tried to grasp its meaning, reeled and hastily turned backward, seeking something small enough to grasp and understand. There in the beyond, infinity dwelt in a continuation of the blue haze. This blueness was the Vast Infinity. Out of it the worlds were made.

Rahmer's vision shuddered away from the Vast Infinity. He was not ready for it yet. No man was. The Solar System was big enough for men, as yet. Perhaps it was too big for them!

"How . . . how do I concentrate this thing, Caleb?"

Both Caleb and Kay had sensed what was happening to him. They stood close beside him, trying to help, but knowing no way.

"The green buttons guide it, Jared. You'll have to experiment."

Rahmer pressed the first green button. His vision shifted. He was looking at the surface of Mars from less than one hundred feet. The scene was as clear as it would have been if he had been in a ship. He knew now how Johrud had watched them. Through the Blue Atom, anything could be watched.

Cold sand, with a dothar plodding slowly across it, lay below Rahmer's eyes. The dothar is an ungainly beast. It looks like a cross between a camel, a giraffe, and a rhino. On the deserts of Mars, it has few natural enemies. It has, however, an evil temper, a capacity for tremendous rage and for violent panic. Rahmer decided he would learn how to use the controls by practicing on the dothar. He found the button which controlled the opening of the glass door and opened it. The dothar sensed the opening of the door, stopped its patient plodding, and looked around for the enemy it suspected was near, ready to charge. The glass door come over it before it knew the source of danger. Throwing up its tail, it started to run. The glass door closed over it.

Rahmer was experimenting, he wanted to know how to concentrate the Blue Atom, how to bring it into focus, and how to release the object he had captured. When he saw the dothar was fairly trapped, he decided to set it down again on the sands of its native planet. He took his finger off the control.

A wild bellow of rage tore his ear drums. Splayed feet pounded on the stone floor as the dothar, released from the glass cage, raced in a circle around the room trying to find a way to escape from this trap which had suddenly closed over it. Men scattered before it like dust before a jet blast. A spaceman beamed it down.

"How did it get here so quickly?" Rahmer muttered. This was what amazed him at the moment, the practically instantaneous speed of the transit. For the space of a heartbeat, he was reluctant to use the Blue Atom again. Then, remembering he had flown the first ship he had ever owned into the side of a mountain, and thus learned how to fly ships, he turned his attention back to the controls.

Inside his ship, Sam Helker was already king of the Solar System, in his imagination. All his life he had been hungry, not for something to eat, but for something to make him feel important. Now he had it—the Blue Atom. The thought was like sapon in his veins. It was a narcotic and an aphrodisiac combined into one. He could have hundreds of ships, thousands of women, and when he landed on a planet, all the inhabitants would be rubbing their noses in the dirt as he descended from his ship. As for his own conscience, it had long ago retreated through some escape hatch which he had slammed shut.

Of course, to be king, he would have to eliminate Johrud and Jarr Rahmer. And the leaders of the Confederation. Helker had no illusions about Johrud, nor did the Great Race ruler have any about the human. Two of a kind, they understood each other perfecdy. Each needed the other, at this moment. Each would use the other until the time came to destroy him. As Johrud used the remote control device, he was careful to keep his back against a bulkhead of the ship. The ruler was not letting anybody get behind him. Eck Tenner appeared in the ship and was taken captive, then the Blue Atom brought back Uldreth. Helker, gloating at the thought of the weapon he had, saw Johrud start to send the Blue Atom into operation again.

Blue fire flashed from the control box under Johrud's fingers. Screaming with pain and surprise, the ruler leaped back from it. A livid burned streak appeared on his arm.

"Then we don't have the Blue Atom any longer?"

"No."

"Then Rahmer will be after us!"

As his fears spoke to him, he caught a glimpse of a small ship shooting up from Mercury. The pursuit had already started! "Take her out into space! Full speed!" he yelled.

The ship trembled as the full power of the Helbron Drive lifted her forward in a tremendous surge of speed. Then something happened. It seemed to Sam Helker that a great hand reached out across space, laid hold of the vessel and slowed its flight. Against the power of this great hand, the Helbron Drive struggled futilely.

Then the glass door opened and Helker knew what was happening. He even caught a fleeting glimpse of the rocky interior of Mercury as the ship with all of its occupants passed through it. Seen from this viewpoint, the stone heart of the planet was as clear as glass and apparendy no denser than a somewhat heavy gas.

"Just stand still, Sam," Rahmer said. "And tell your boys to stand still, too."

Helker and his men had their backs to the wall and their hands in the air. Johrud and Uldreth were there too. Kay had cried out when the spaceman had forced Uldreth to join the others, but after looking at Rahmer's face she had been silent.

Rahmer's face was not pleasant to look at. Under his black beard, deep lines were visible. There was about it a grim bleakness that made it look as cold as the rocks of Earth's moon. This came in part from what had happened to him, and in part from what he had to do now. Handling the Blue Atom had left deep marks on his psyche. If he lived to be a million years old, he would never forget the sight of the whole Solar System seen at one glance.

Sweat was popping out all over Sam Helker. "Jarr, you've got no right to treat me this way. You're not the law." Helker knew what was going to happen to him but he was still fighting like the cornered rat that he was.

"This is space, Sam," Rahmer answered.

"You've got to take me back to Earth. I demand a fair trial. This is a kangaroo court, and you know it."

"All the space rats want to go back to Earth for a fair trial, Sam. You know the code of spacemen: you answer in space for crimes committed there."

"But I haven't done anything wrong. Johrud kidnaped me. He made me take him away in my ship."

"He also had you kidnaped in Torres, Sam?"

Fear blotched Helker's face. "Do you know about that?"

"Yes." Rahmer turned to Kay McKay. "This will be very difficult for a woman. You do not have to remain here?"

"What are you going to do with them?"

"Execute them," he said bluntly.

Her face went gray. "You are going to do it personally?"

"If a man pulls a trigger at my orders, am I not doing it? Yes, I will execute them personally. I will not ask a man under me to do what I will not."

"But they've had no trial—"

"This is space, Kay. There is no law here, except what we bring. There are no courts here, except those of the spacemen. There is not a man here who will not gladly pull the trigger of the gun that destroys Helker and Johrud. They are guilty and we both know it."

"I know, Jared." Her face was still pale but her voice was resolute. "I just didn't want you to have to do it. And—and there's Uldreth."

"Yes, there's Uldreth." Rahmer nodded slowly. "And he points up the real problem, which is not Helker and Johrud, but is this." He nodded upward toward the Blue Atom on its pedestal.

"I don't quite understand you," Kay said. "It's the greatest invention ever made."

"That's what's wrong with it," Rahmer answered. "If we don't destroy it, other would-be kings will try to grab it because of the power it will give them. And we can't destroy it. Also, the wealth behind these plastic panels is to be considered. Every rat in space will be here sooner or later, thinking that in this place he can find the means to grow into a wolf. If we give it to United Earth Governments, they will have to face die same problem. We have won a victory, but the spoils are too big for us, too big for the human race. As the inventor of the Blue Atom, Uldreth is also too big for us."

"Maybe we could keep all of this a secret!"

Rahmer's laugh was grim. "We've got men. They will talk. The grapevine will report what they say. Within a month, every bartender in the System will know there is treasure at the core of Mercury."

"We could seal all the entrances to this place."

"Spacemen would unseal 'em. If we blasted the tunnels shut all the way to the core, somebody would try to dig new ones."

"You could move your headquarters here and maintain a guard."

"And never know from one day to the next which one of my men would be plotting to cut my throat. Besides, I don't trust myself with that much power. If it was around where I could lay hands on it, I might get ideas that I could be a king."

"You wouldn't. I know you wouldn't," Kay protested.

"Even if I didn't, there would come a time when somebody would take my place. Then somebody would take his place. Somewhere along the line a man would appear who wanted to be a king. Remember your own axiom: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

"But Uldreth is all right. He saved my life. He sent me back to your headquarters on Venus. Is that unimportant to you?"

"It is very important to me," Rahmer answered. "Uldreth is trying to catch your eye," Kay said. "Ill talk to him."

The last scientist of the Great Race moved slowly forward from his position. His steps were slow and a haunted look was on his face. Kay talked to him at length, then turned to Rahmer.

"He seems to understand the problem you are facing," she said. "He says he faced it long ago and failed to solve it because he did not have the coinage to destroy his own invention. He wants me to tell you that while the Blue Atom itself cannot be destroyed, its controls can, and that he thinks there is no one else alive who can make it work once its controls are gone." Her voice caught, then came on strong again. "He suggests, therefore, that after you have destroyed the controls, you kill him, too."

"He said that?" Rahmer said.

"Yes. He is not human, but he is fit to be called a man. And—" A sudden glow was in her eyes. "I have an idea." "Let me hear it," Rahmer said.

He listened quiedy while she spoke, then nodded, then went to the control chair of the Blue Atom.

Eventually that nervous instrument, that faithful reporter of news and rumor, the space grapevine, talked again, telling fantastic tales. It told how John Forbes, a jungle trader in the Hannibal Range of Venus, had found that a lost Quonset hut had been miraculously restored to him. It also reported that Fat George was around his usual haunts in Torres again, but that a great change had taken place in him. All the lard had been boiled out of him and he was as skinny as a snake. When questioned on how this had happened, George kept completely silent. It also said that Eck Tenner, after being mysteriously absent for some time, was back on the job again, his slide-rule mind as sharp as ever. It said that Big Olaf was also back in town, with one arm in a sling, swearing at doctors.

The grapevine talked of these things, relishing them, wondering what they meant. It told how, in the mental ward of the hospital in Torres, a miracle had taken place when a lost child had been restored to a patient there, a Mrs. Robinson, and how she, now sane, and her child had been discharged from the hospital. It reported the worry of the doctors in this hospital, not because a patient had recovered, but how her child could have been smuggled into a locked ward in the hospital without anyone knowing it. The doctors had disregarded the wdd story other patients told, of a blue light suddenly coming into the ward, and that the child had come out of the blue light. This could not happen, the doctors knew. They had fired a hospital attendant for smuggling the child into the ward. This attendant, outraged at the injustice he claimed had been done him, had gone to the Confederation with his story, and a job had been found for him.

The grapevine also said that the treasury of the Confederation suddenly had so many credits in it that not even Eck Tenner with his biggest slide rule could figure out how long it would be before spacemen had to pay dues again, but that it might be a thousand years!

The grapevine also told of a great number of scientists going to Mercury to study vast new discoveries made there about a race that all spacemen knew had once existed. It told of a blue crystal sitting on top of a pedestal that the scientists found there and of the inability of the scientists to understand what this crystal was or how it operated. Obviously controls had once existed but these were now missing, perhaps removed by vandals in some past age. It said that the scientists were having a great deal of trouble understanding and explaining the race that all spaceman knew about, the Great Race.

The grapevine was not just an instrument that reported what was happening in space, it also asked questions, and waited patiently for answers. It had many questions to ask. It wanted to know what had happened to Sam Helker and his men and ships. It was obvious that Helker was gone from the System, but what had happened to him was not at all clear. Then, out of nowhere, answers began to appear, rumors that made the grapevine very nervous.

The rumors told of a tiny ship, not a foot in length-just a toy, really—that had been flung, as if by a gigantic hand, far out into the vast void of space. It said the little ship existed there. Now caught in the gravity of this sun, now pulled toward some other system, the toy ship floated in the void. In it, the grapevine said, were two tall men, Johrud and Uldreth, the last ruler and the last scientist of the mysterious Great Race, the former gone to his just doom, the latter sharing that doom with him out of loyalty. In this toy ship, so the grapevine said, was the missing Sam Helker and his crew.

The grapevine said this tiny ship and its occupants floats forever in the vast void of space, out where the large suns dare not go, out where no man knows his way, where no ship ventures, and that it will float there until the Last Days come, not dead, not alive, but waiting for the tides of time and fate to bring it home upon some congenial shore.

The grapevine whispered that the hurling of this tiny ship and its occupants out into the void was the last act of the Blue Atom, and that after this was done, the controls of the Blue Atom were completely removed and utterly destroyed by an old man, the best mechanic in the Solar System, who wept as he worked; wept because he was destroying what was as near scientific and mechanical and electronic perfection as could ever exist. He loved machines, this old mechanic, but this one he had to destroy because it was more perfect than the genius who had created it or the race that had found it at the core of Mercury.

The grapevine said that this old mechanic, who wept as he worked, was driven or assisted—this point was not clear —to or in his task by a tall, grim, bleak-faced giant of a man, who stayed on the job to the bitter end, until all that was left of the Blue Atom was a giant blue crystal