Leigh Brackett (continued 2)

EIGHT

The long arc of deceleration was completed. The starship was cruising now at planetary speed. Aldebaran had grown from a remote point of fire to a giant sun, terrifyingly near at hand. The small companion was visible only as a faint disc above the upper limb, its bluish light drowned out in the flooding ruddy blaze of the larger star.

The Vardda had crowded up into the observation dome, eager for the first glimpse of home. A heavy shield now covered the dome to sunward and in its shadow the returning travellers pressed and chattered. Trehearne stood among them, listening to their excitement and feeling at a loss in it. Their talk was the talk of strangers, full of names and references that were meaningless to him, strident with a joy he could not share. They were coming home, and he was homeless, the loneliest man in the galaxy. Before him loomed the imagined faces of the Vardda Council, passing judgment, and beyond them in the desolate wastes of space the dying world of Thuvis waited.

Shairn tugged at his sleeve. "There!" she cried. "There it is, Michael. Llyrdis!"

He followed her pointing hand, squinting against the tawny glare, and saw a golden planet wheeling toward them, bright and beautiful, with a trio of circling moons. Suddenly the majesty and splendor of this landing out of space swept over him, and drove away his fears. It was an awesome, a godlike thing, to come into a solar system from outside, drenched in the naked blazing of a foreign sun, and see the planets from far off, no bigger than a child's ball, circling the parent star in their slow eternal orbits. He became as excited as the Vardda, but for a different reason. Presently he would stand on the soil of a strange world, in the light of an alien sun, and the winds that blew would come from far peaks nameless to him, and off of unknown oceans. He watched with the others, as tensely as they.

Edri looked at his face, and smiled. "Mirris is on the other side of the sun, but if you'll look hard off there to your right you'll see Suumis, the outer one of our two immediate neighbors."

Suumis appeared against the farther reaches of space like a little red apple, accompanied by a throng of sparkling motes that Trehearne knew must be moons. He stared at it, trying to realize that the little red apple was a world as big as Earth, gave it up, and turned back again to Llyrdis. It had grown. It fairly leaped toward them as the ship swept in upon it, and Trehearne began to make out misty continents and the shadow-forms of oceans, wrapped in a cloud-shot atmosphere that burned a reddish gold in Aldebaran's light. Then it was closer still, it filled the sky, it spread out monstrously and began to fall....

Edri laughed. "Optical illusion. But a striking one, isn't it?"

Trehearne braced his knees and said it was. His heart was in his throat, the rest of his insides had fallen away somewhere, and the ship was plunging at a terrible speed to meet the toppling planet. It touched the atmosphere, and went into it as into a bath of fire. Down it went, rushing, tearing down with a long triumphant scream, and in the lower air the clouds rolled and whipped in golden fury where the dark hull clove them. Trehearne shut his eyes. When he opened them again the ship was sweeping low over an ocean the color of hammered brass, and at length he saw ahead a low shore, and beyond it a rolling plain girdled with tall mountains. On that plain he made out the gleaming vastness of a city that made New York a village.

"There it is," said Edri. "The hub and center of the galaxy."

Trehearne only shook his head. By this time he had no words. He watched the boundaries of the city widen, he watched the towers of its buildings lift and rise until they seemed to bear the sky upon them, and he was silent. Still dropping, but slowly now in a soundless glide, the ship bore to the southward. Here for miles the spaceport ran, the great docks that cradled the giants of the stars. Here was an ordered, ceaseless, swarming chaos of men and machines, seen from Trehearne's position now as a sort of yeasty ferment lapping around and over the apparently endless rows of titanic docks. The sheer size of it was crushing.

The warning bells rang. Trehearne came partly out of his daze and went below with the others to await the landing. Seconds ticked by, and the blood was hammering in his temples, and his muscles twitched with a nervous excitement. Landing. Landing on a strange world, under a strange new sun....

Smoothly, softly, the great keel touched down, home again from the edges of the universe.

Trehearne stood up. The others were already moving, pouring into the corridor, laughing, talking, eager for the opened lock and home. Trehearne would have followed them, but Edri's hand was on him, and Kerrel was in front of him.

"You'll wait," said Kerrel. "Edri, you're responsible for him. See that he doesn't leave the ship."

He went out, and suddenly, for Trehearne, that keen fine edge of wonder was all gone. Shairn came up and gave him a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, Michael. Old Joris is a friend of mine." She went out, too, and Trehearne said to Edri, "Who is Joris?"

"The Coordinator of the Port. In his younger days he flew for Shairn's father." Edri sank down into a chair again. "Might as well take it easy. Kerrel's gone to make his report to Joris in person. This isn't the sort of thing you want too widely broadcast."

"Why Joris? I thought Kerrel worked for the Council."

"He does. But everything that goes in or out of this port has to clear through the Coordinator's office. Sit down, Trehearne, you make me nervous."

"Do you think she'll be able to do anything?"

"I hope so. Damn it, sit down!"

He sat. There were noises in the ship, but they were unfamiliar ones, the impersonal clangings and boomings of freight hatches, machinery, the invading boots and unknown voices of dockside men. The sounds of the port outside came to him muffled and subdued, like the ceaseless roll of thunder a long way off. There was a feeling of cessation. The voyage was over. Out there a new sun was shining, there was air unbreathed by any man of Earth and a whole wide world waiting, a Vardda world, his as much as theirs, but he was barred from it, he was kept under hatches like a criminal, unable even to speak while strangers decided his fate. It scared him, and it angered him, and the more he felt trapped and helpless the more furious he got. His body would not stay still. He sprang up and began to stride the floor, and Edri watched him speculatively.

"Get good and mad," he said. "You can't fight unless you're mad."

"I'll fight."

"You know the line to take. Don't be afraid to let 'em have it."

"I won't."

Time passed. Edri sat and smoked. Trehearne paced, sat down, and paced again. A year went by, and then another, and then a young man, very brisk, very efficient, very self-assured, came in and looked at them.

"You're to come to the Coordinator's office," he said, and stared with frank curiosity at Trehearne. Then he turned to Edri. "He looks all right. Is this story really true?"

"Never mind," said Edri. "Come on, Trehearne."

He followed them, down the long corridor and into the lock chamber, leaving the ship as he had first entered it so long ago, so far away. He stepped out onto the open dock, and the full roaring, thundering impact of the biggest spaceport in the galaxy hit him like an explosion.

Row upon row, and on all sides, the towering docks stretched to the end of his seeing and beyond. Ships lay in most of them, recumbent monsters taking their ease, while men and machines in vast numbers and great complexity waited on their needs. The ringing air was heavy with smells, strange spices and subtle unidentifiable things mingling with the reek of oil and hot metal, cargoes of unimagined riches from unimaginable worlds. Trehearne stood, feeling the tremendous pulse beat through him, hardly aware for the moment that Edri was trying to steer him to a kiosk at the end of the dock, or that the young Vardda was amused at his wide-eyed astonishment.

In endless hordes, men swarmed upon the looming hulls and went busily along the docks, testing, checking, guiding and managing the machines. They were not Vardda men. They were men from the other worlds, who could not fly the stars. A lot of them—and here Trehearne's eyes opened even wider, because even though he had been told, seeing is another thing—were not at all what he would have called human. But in spite of their strangeness, they seemed familiar. They were like any of the cheerful, hard-handed, competent men to be seen around any port of Earth, serving the ships and the planes. The incessant noise was deafening. Gigantic cranes moved ponderously on their tracks, shifting cargoes between strings of carriers and the gaping holds. Small trams weaved in and out of the confusion. At intervals between the docks were lines of shops, where atomic-powered forges shaped new parts, new plates and housings. Here a crew worked on a hull with flaring welders, and there a great bow section was lowered slowly into place with an ear-shattering clang.

Edri's voice reached him, thin and faint. "Big business, Trehearne. The biggest in the galaxy. Impressive, isn't it?"

He urged Trehearne along, toward the kiosk that was still some way ahead. They walked in a railed-off path, and in a moment Trehearne saw coming toward them on the other side of the rail a large and very involved piece of machinery that seemed to be walking slowly the length of the ship's hull, guided by one small human attendant and bearing in its belly another one who sat surrounded by dials and counters and little screens.

"That's an X-ray scanner," Edri told him. "They get first crack at every ship that lands. These ultra-speeds have effects on metals in time. The scanners test the structure of the metals for crystallization, or any abnormal molecular shift. The ships become unsafe after a certain period of service—usually a fairly long one—and they're watched very closely. It's no fun having a hull fall apart on you in the middle of nowhere."

He pushed Trehearne on, into the kiosk. The young Vardda was still amused. Edri said, "There's a lift here. We go down."

Trehearne stepped in, and turned. Just before the door closed smoothly in his face, he caught a glimpse of a tall white pylon in the distance, dominating the whole field, and knew without being told that it housed Port Administration and his immediate destiny. Once more the sense of wonder was stripped away. The lift dropped and his heart dropped with it, swiftly down.

The trip was short. The lift set them in a passageway far underground, and the passageway led to a tube, all very quiet after the roaring of the port. A small monorail car took them in a handful of minutes to the levels underneath the pylon, and then there was another lift, a private one this time, going up. There was a bitter taste in Trehearne's mouth, and the palms of his hands were sweating.

He thought the lift would never stop, but it did, on the highest level. The brisk young man motioned them out, and there was an office, bare and spacious, with window walls that looked on all sides across the spaceport. Trehearne thought fleetingly that it was less like an office than the bridge of a starship, pathetically shackled to the soil.

Shairn was there, and Kerrel, standing far apart and very stiff, their faces set and stubborn. Kerrel did not turn, but Shairn came to Trehearne and took his hand defiantly. Off at one side a second brisk young man presided over some sort of a recording device. There seemed to be a good deal of silence in the place, brought on, perhaps, by the arrival of the lift, for no one was in a silent mood—least of all the man who faced them from the other side of a massive table. Trehearne saw a grizzled, heavy-shouldered giant who was never designed to occupy an office. The walls cramped him, even such walls as these, because they were bounded by horizons. His large scarred hands rested uneasily on the polished wood, impatient of the papers that were stacked there, and his eyes seemed better used to watching stars than men. Those eyes, pale blue as winter ice, sought out Trehearne and did not waver until they had cut from him every bit of knowledge to be had.

"I didn't believe it," Joris said, "but I can see now why you didn't like the idea of killing him. Too much like one of us. But damn it!—Kerrel, you of all people should have remembered the law. No non-Vardda personnel under any circumstances to board any craft designed for interstellar flight. What got into you?"

Before Kerrel could answer, Shairn spoke for him. "A certain squeamishness," she said, "and a doubt. I think he regrets them both, now. You see, Joris, there was a legal doubt. Looking at Trehearne, could you tell he was non-Vardda?"

"But you knew it...."

"Oh no," said Edri pointedly, "we didn't. We didn't know at all until he survived the take-off, and then he couldn't very well be classified as non-Vardda—could he, Joris?"

Joris moved his huge bulk uncomfortably. "A freak," he said. "A mongrel. You didn't do him any kindness to bring him here. Shairn, I get a feeling that you had a hand in this. In fact, knowing you...."

Shairn snapped, "What I do is my own business. And as for Michael, he's as good a Vardda as you are. You haven't answered my question yet. Will you let him stay in my custody until the Council meets?"

"No! And that's final."

"But Joris...."

"You're a trouble-maker, Shairn. You have been since the day you were born. But I'm damned if you'll make trouble for me!"

"And I thought you were my friend. Joris, you ought to remember...."

"I took orders from your father when I flew his ships, but you're not the man he was! And furthermore, I'm not working for you now, I'm working for the government. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly." She added, in a tone of admiration, "Anyway, you haven't forgotten how to roar."

Surprisingly, Joris laughed. "No," he said, "no more than you've learned manners." He glanced from Shairn to the stony-faced Kerrel, who was still standing like a ramrod and saying nothing—Trehearne gathered that he had already said everything he considered necessary—and then back to Edri and the Earthman. "I'll admit this is one hell of a queer mess, and I'm glad I don't have to decide the final outcome. As I see it, my duty now is to keep him in custody like any other undesirable, until the Council takes him off my hands." He looked hard at Shairn. "That's the law, and that's the way it's going to be."

Kerrel spoke at last. "Good. That's what I wanted to be sure of."

Joris glowered at him. "I'm considered fairly reliable in the performance of my office." He nodded to the brisk young man who had brought Trehearne and Edri from the ship. "Make out the usual interim commitment form for suspected persons under the Port Authority Code, Section C...."

Trehearne said, "Just a minute." He stepped forward until he was facing Joris across the table. "You have no authority to imprison me."

Joris stared at him. Then he shook his head irritably as though he thought his ears must be playing him tricks, and stared again. His jowls took on a tinge of red. Trehearne went on. The time had come to let his temper go, and he turned it loose of all restraint.

"Unless he is formally accused of a crime, no Vardda may be detained by anyone against his will. I have committed no crime, and I have not been accused of any."

It took Joris some time to recover his voice. When he did, it fairly rattled the windows. "You are not a Vardda!"

"No? Think a minute. What is the one distinguishing quality of a Vardda that marks him as different from all other men?"

"All right, I'll answer that! By some freak or other you managed to survive the flight. But that doesn't change the fact that you're an Earthman, born and bred, and therefore not a Vardda!"

Trehearne's eyes had acquired a hard glitter. "Then suppose," he said, "that you imprison me—an Earthman who has crossed the galaxy from Sol to Aldebaran, and lived. That'll make quite an uproar, won't it? All the non-Vardda peoples will be much interested. So will the Orthist party. I don't doubt they'll spread the news all over the galaxy—the Vardda have admitted that they're not the only ones who can fly interstellar space!"

Shairn said, "That's it, Michael! Go it!" Edri had drawn back a little. His eyes were sober and intent. Kerrel spoke, and his voice was sharp. "You've had bad advice, Trehearne. That kind of talk won't help you."

Joris motioned him to silence. To Trehearne he said, "What do you know about the Orthist party?"

"Enough to know that they could make a great deal of trouble. Either I'm Vardda or I'm not. And if I'm not, I could be the start of a whole new movement. The first non-Vardda to fly the stars, the first crack in the monopoly."

Joris shook his head. "You can be put away so quickly and quietly that no one will ever hear of you."

"Good," said Trehearne. "Put me away. Put away all the officers of the ship. Put away all the passengers. Put away all the crew. That's a lot of people to keep quiet."

Shairn broke in triumphantly. "Yes, Joris! How are you going to silence me?"

"And," said Edri, "me."

Joris looked from one to the other and back again, his brows drawn angrily together. But he said nothing. Kerrel leaned over the table.

"Joris," he said, "do you understand? The man is trying to blackmail you with an open threat of treason."

"Yes," said Trehearne, "I am." His voice was suddenly very quiet, and he spoke straight to Joris. "When I made that flight and lived I won my right to the freedom of the stars. I won my right to fly deep space, and I will use any weapons I can get my hands on against any man who tries to keep me from it."

Then, for quite a long while, no one spoke.

"By God," said Joris slowly, "I take it back. There can't be any mongrel blood in you. Only a Vardda could have that kind of insolence." He got up and came round the table. "You, Shairn. In spite of your political views, you'll back him up in this?"

"I will. And it's probably the only real accomplishment the Orthists will ever make."

"And you, Edri?"

"All the way."

Kerrel swore. It was the first time Trehearne had ever heard him do it, and it was aimed directly at Shairn. "For God's sake, watch what you're saying! Joris, she doesn't mean it, and she won't do it. I know her feelings on the subject too well for that."

Shairn said, "Try me."

Joris had become very thoughtful. "You know," he said to Kerrel, "whether she does or not, there's a great deal of truth in what the Earthman says. Far too much, I'm afraid, to be overlooked."

"Bluff," said Kerrel. "Look here, Joris, if you turn this man loose, I'll have to report...."

"Oh, report and be damned! The law says I have to shut him up, and shut him up I will, and there my duty ends. And I don't need you to tell me my business." He went to the recorder, took out the spool, dropped it on the floor and crushed it under his boot. "Now clear out, all of you. Dismissed. And I'd advise you all to keep your mouths shut. Especially you," he said to the two very young men. "You have enough work to keep you busy. Go and do it. You stay here, Trehearne."

Trehearne stayed, and there was a bitter thought in him that he had failed. The faces of the others, as they left, were full of doubt. Presently he was alone with Joris in the sweep of golden light from the windows. From the eastern quadrant of the port Trehearne saw a great ship rise and clear away for distant suns.

Joris walked the floor, and said nothing. The silence was heavy, an oppressive thing. It was not touched by the sounds of the port, so far below. They were outside it, and the face of Joris was a heavy, sombre mask. Trehearne looked out at the alien sky, where the clouds burned like little nebulae, and then down again at the ships. From this vantage he could see the sector where the planetary craft came in, the slow freighters from the non-Vardda worlds of Aldebaran, and it came to him suddenly how the poor bastards that flew them must feel, watching the starships come and go and knowing they could never follow. Beyond the port the towers of the city rose, and Trehearne wondered if he would ever see it.

Joris stopped his pacing and said, "Come here."

Trehearne obeyed. The pale eyes, harsh and keen as an old eagle's, probed into him, weighing, judging. Trehearne stood and waited. He said nothing. There was nothing more to say.

"Vardda blood," Joris muttered to himself. "Unmistakable. And he wants to fly the stars." He asked abruptly, "Were you a foundling?"

"No," said Trehearne. And then he added slowly, "But I might just as well have been."

Joris turned away, his brows drawn and brooding, his head and shoulders massive against the background of burning sky. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-three, in Earth years."

Still with his back to Trehearne, Joris spoke. "I think I see a way. Whether it will work or not, I don't know. The Council convenes again in five days, at which time I'll be required to make my report on you, and I'll do what I can. Meanwhile, you'll have to go where I tell you and stay there without any fuss. Is that clear?"

"Yes." The pulse of hope had begun to beat again.

"Good. And Trehearne—"

"Yes?"

"If things turn out all right, you will fly the stars!"

It was a threat as much as a promise.

Thirty minutes later, after a journey under guard in a sublevel tubecar that left him in complete ignorance of his whereabouts, Trehearne was conducted into a square neat cubicle, comfortable in all respects but none the less a prison cell. The magnetic lock clicked behind him and he was alone.

There were no windows. He did not even know whether he was above or below ground. There was neither day nor night nor time. He paced the narrow floor and ate the unfamiliar food delivered to him automatically through a slot in the wall, and tried to sleep. He smoked the last of his hoarded cigarettes and thought of Earth and the distances between the suns. He hoped and hope became gradually a grim despair.

No one came. Shairn had forgotten him. Edri's friendship had turned feeble at the last. The trap that Joris had set for him became more obvious with each passing hour. He hated them all. He raged and waited and remembered the old man's words—You can be put away so quickly and quietly that no one will ever hear of you.

This was his landing on Llyrdis, the fruit of his journey across the star-shot universe. This was the end of his dream.

He ceased to rage.

There came a time when he awoke sharply from uneasy sleep to hear the low click of the lock and a soft slurred step on the floor, coming toward him. He sprang up, and saw that it was Shairn. She cried out, "Michael!" and her words came to him with a sound of unreality, like the voices heard through fever.

"It's all over, Michael—and you're free!"

NINE

An hour had gone by and he still could not quite believe it. He had left the cell behind him and the five eternal days of waiting. He stood on a terrace high above the city. It was night, and the burning moons were brilliant in the sky. The wind from the sea had the clean sting of wine, but it was not like the sea winds he remembered, it was new and strange, intensely thrilling. Around him the tall slim towers rose upward toward the moons, and far below the shining web of streets was a pattern of sensual beauty, many-colored, sounding, alive.

Shairn said softly, "Look at it, Michael. It's all yours."

He looked. His hands were tight on the terrace rail, and there was a fulness in him that made it hard to breathe.

"I had something to do with it, Michael. Aren't you going to thank me?"

He turned. She had put on a flowing thing of white, cunningly draped and spangled over with a diamond frost, and there were strange jewels caught in the dark masses of her hair. He started to speak and then forgot the words, when sounds from inside the apartment—it was Edri's—announced the arrival of Joris.

"Come now and hear how the miracle was done."

From the terrace they passed through sliding doors of glass, open now to the warm breeze, into a low, broad, spacious room of the utmost simplicity and comfort. A millionaire's room, Trehearne would have said, and yet Edri was a poor man by Vardda standards, owning no ships and working for those who did. The window walls looked out over the city, a mighty panorama of light and color that was without garishness, and inside there was quiet and homeliness, made personal by the small things Edri had brought home from his voyages. Robots of various sorts did all the cleaning automatically when he was away, and there was no kitchen. Meals arrived by pressure tube, fresh, hot, and to order, from a service center. Remembering his own bachelor quarters on Earth, Trehearne was overcome with envy.

Joris came toward him, holding out a huge hard hand. Trehearne shook it, and Joris said, "What were you thinking, those five days in the cell?"

Trehearne shook his head. "I won't tell you, since none of it was true."

Joris laughed. Edri said, "We haven't told him anything. We left that for you." He found glasses and poured wine. Joris settled heavily into a chair, full of an honest pride in his own cleverness, beaming with it. Shairn curled up near him on a wide couch and sipped her wine. "Go on," she said. "We're waiting."

"It took a lot of juggling," Joris said, "and more than a little downright forgery, but it worked. You see, Trehearne, a full record of all voyages is kept at Port Administration. I went back between thirty and forty years and managed to supply you with a pretty good background." He leaned forward. "You get this into your head, and keep it there. You were born on Earth thirty-four years ago of Vardda parents then engaged in trading activities on that planet. Your mother died in childbirth and your father was forced to abandon you, since even a Vardda infant cannot endure interstellar flight. The people who brought you up, and whom you had assumed to be your parents, merely fostered you." He paused, searching through his trouser pockets until he found a slip of paper, which he handed to Trehearne. "Here are the names of your real parents. Memorize them. Your father has since been killed in a wreck off Orion Nebula and you have no brothers or sisters. Incidentally, you have no inheritance either, since according to law your father's estate was divided upon his death. From now on, this is your only history. Don't forget it. And don't talk about any of it more than you're forced to."

Trehearne stared at the paper and the two names that were written there. "I didn't think it could be done—But what did Kerrel say about this? He surely didn't believe the story."

"He couldn't prove it wasn't so. And I produced such convincing records that the evidence was overwhelming." He laughed. "Matter of fact, I cut the ground right out from under him."

"He didn't like it," Shairn said. "But there was nothing he could do, and there never will be anything he can do. Joris and I managed to persuade the Council not to have you appear for questioning, Michael—on the very good grounds that the less said about it the better. The hearing was closed, with the news-services barred out. Joris' records, and your Vardda characteristics were sufficiently convincing. They passed their resolution in less than thirty minutes, and then followed it by another to tighten the laws against Vardda children being born on any world but Llyrdis!"

Trehearne put the piece of paper in his pocket. "There's a lot of things I want to say, but—" He broke off, and Edri shoved a glass in his hand. "Don't try," he said. "Just tell us honestly that we're wonderful, and we'll be satisfied. Incidentally, don't ever make me out a liar. I reported the most interesting statements from you concerning your unhappy childhood as a foundling."

Trehearne grinned. He looked from one to the other, and finally his gaze centered on Joris. "There's one thing I don't understand. Why did you do this for me?"

"Don't ever question a man's reasons, as long as they're good, Trehearne. And now you're a Vardda, stamped and sealed, you've got another problem ahead of you. You have to make a living. Do you still want to fly the stars?" He saw the look on Trehearne's face, and smiled. "I need a supercargo on my ship Saarga, outbound in two weeks for trade in the Hercules Cluster. Officers and crew fly on shares and it's a rich voyage. Even a supercargo should do well."

Edri said, "I ought to warn you, Trehearne. The Hercules run is one of the toughest in the galaxy."

"That's why it pays so well," said Joris. "Well?"

Before Trehearne could answer, Shairn laid her hand lazily on his shoulder and said, "Nonsense, Joris. He doesn't have to take on anything like that. I can find a better opening in my fleet and he won't starve until I do."

Trehearne's face tightened. He said quietly, "I seem to have heard, Shairn, that you're quite well off."

"Oh, quite! Thirty ships to Joris' two. My father was smart, and I was lucky enough to be his only heir. Oh, the devil with it—who wants to talk business! Come on, Michael, we'll show you the city."

"In a minute." Joris was looking at him with an odd expression, and Trehearne's mouth tightened another notch. He said, "When shall I report aboard the Saarga?"

Edri leaned over Shairn's shoulder and whispered, "I think you've got our Michael angry."

Joris looked at Shairn and roared. "Missed your guess, didn't you?" He got up. "All right, Trehearne, I'll let you know. And now let's see what we can do in the way of a celebration!"

They went. But for the next hour or so Shairn was inclined to be sulky, and was all the more so because Trehearne seemed to have forgotten her existence.

Resplendent in black and silver supplied for him out of Edri's wardrobe, free, accepted, and with a future ahead, Trehearne walked the streets of the city, drunk with color and sound and movement, dazed with the incredible size and the utter strangeness of the greatest metropolis in the galaxy. It surged magnificently, crowded, thriving, beautiful, drenched in the wealth and inventiveness of a thousand far-flung cultures, Mecca for all the peoples of Aldebaran's seven inhabited planets. And its beauty was honest. There were no dark and evil places hidden behind the splendid buildings, no slums, no poverty, no ugliness. The Vardda had travelled widely, and seen much, and they had learned from others. From a vantage point given to no other people in history, they had studied and compared the inceptions, growths, and collapses of more empires, races, and cultures than a man could count in a year, and the work still went on under the direction of their best minds, correlating and compiling, examining causes and evolving from the mass of evidence ways and means to keep the Vardda empire healthy. They had managed well for a thousand years, and Trehearne felt a tremendous admiration for them, laboring as they did under the extra handicap of an essentially inbred society. Their government was elective, and they kept it clean. Their laws were relatively few and simple, and they were obeyed. They oppressed nobody, and saw to it that their non-Vardda neighbors benefited heavily from the Vardda trade.

"It's not at all," Edri had told him once, "that we're so much more bloody noble than anybody else. Matter of fact, we're probably unrivalled in our basic selfishness. It's good business, you see. Keep everybody as happy as possible, deal as fairly as you can, make 'em all rich, and you don't have trouble, which is bad for trade. The non-Vardda races may not love us, but they're not inclined to try getting along without us. As for domestic politics and administration, it's simple self-preservation to keep them sound. We're not Utopians, to use one of your favorite Earthly terms, we just try to make sense."

Looking at the city, Trehearne thought they had done a remarkably good job. Actually, few of the Vardda were urbanites. Llyrdis was essentially a world of estates and small communities. The Vardda sociologists had not been blind to that final corrosive stage of civilization that Spengler called Megalopolis. The city was not a place in which great mobs of people spent their lives. It was a clearing house, a warehouse, an office, a factory, devoted entirely to business. The population was chiefly non-Vardda, and they only stayed there during their employment. Their homes were on their own worlds. They inhabited the city without being trapped in it.

As for Trehearne, it seemed to him that night that he could spend a lifetime there and never tire of it. The little ships that tramped the narrow planetary roads set down beside the scornful giants of the star-trails and poured into the metropolis a never-ending tide of visitors, come to touch the fringes of a glory they could never grasp themselves, to revel in alien pleasures and barter for the gems and spices and the spider-woven silks of worlds that they would never see. Most of them were human or nearly so, their skins a variety of tints, their costumes outlandish or sober according to their native custom. Some were not human at all, except in intelligence and pride of bearing.

"See those black-skinned, hawk-nosed chaps with the bronze wings?" Edri's hand guided Trehearne's wondering gaze. "They're from Suumis. And the three silvery ones over there with the bright crests and the crimson robes. They're the dominant race on the second world sunward, and proud as Lucifer for all they've got scales instead of skin. That little bluish fellow is a merchant-prince from Zaard, the outermost planet. See his diamond caste-mark?"

Trehearne saw. He mazed his brain with seeing, with hearing and feeling—the pulse and rush of the city, the kaleidoscopic multitudes, the companies of lordly Vardda like peacocks in their jewels and brilliant tunics, the babel of outworld tongues, the drifting sound of music, strange and sweet. From place to place the four of them drifted, in no hurry, wandering as the mood took them, drinking the dark wine of Antares, the pungent snow-white brew of Fomalhaut, endless wines of many colors from the worlds of many stars. Shairn forgot to sulk. To Trehearne she seemed to float in moonlight and laughter, bewitching and unattainable as a creature seen in dreams. The wine mounted to his head. The excitement, the strangeness, the wild joy of release put a kind of fever in him, and his surroundings lost reality, whirling ever faster and in brighter colors round him, visions painted on a blowing mist. Faces, human, half-human, unhuman, beautiful, grotesque, ludicrous. Carnival masks, reeling, dancing. Vardda women lovely as sin, dressed in a thousand fashions from a thousand worlds, smiling with red mouths. Music throbbing, beating, wailing, unknown melodies plucked from unknown strings, passionate, soft, mingling with the smell of wine and perfume and the sharp sea-wind. Dancing girls with emerald skins, outlandish beasts that capered with an eerie cleverness, a spinning whirl of pleasure-palaces, terraces, gardens, parks and squares, nameless trees blowing under the triple moons, Shairn's laughing face, Joris flushed and jovial, a grey-polled ox on holiday, Edri....

There was something wrong with Edri. Perhaps the wine had given Trehearne a sharper insight, or perhaps it was only that the outside stimuli had grown so bewildering that he fled from them at last, unconsciously, by turning to the familiar as personified by his friends. At any rate, he emerged a little from his daze and realized that while he and Shairn and Joris had been growing gayer Edri had grown steadily more solemn and withdrawn. Sobriety was not habitual with him, but Trehearne had never seen him really drunk. He was drunk now, and he was continuing to drink as though there was not enough wine on Llyrdis to fill him, sitting silently, his eyes fixed on some inner distance, a brooding look on his ugly face. Trehearne spoke to him, and he answered, but it was only a mechanical reflex, a sound without meaning.

They were in a place of trees and crystal columns, with bowers drowned in bloom and the open sky above. Trehearne looked at the others. They were happy, without a care in the world. Then he saw Edri's face again, bleak and sad and seeing nothing, and he frowned. He was fond of Edri. It came over him in a rush how fond he was of him. He leaned forward and said, "What is it, Edri? What's wrong?"

"He's sober," Joris said. "He needs more wine." He reached over and poured a ruby liquid into Edri's glass. Abruptly Edri shook his head and pushed the goblet away. He was looking now at something behind Trehearne. "No," he said. "I'm going home."

"There's no hurry, Edri. Stay a while." It was Kerrel's voice. Startled, Trehearne turned his head and saw him standing there, as though he had been standing for a long time. Now he came forward and sat down with them. Trehearne could not tell what he was thinking. He did not like a man whose thoughts he could not even guess at.

"Congratulations," Kerrel said. "I don't believe a word of it, of course, but that history of Trehearne was a fine piece of strategy."

Joris laughed. "The Council believed it. Furthermore, I believe it, Shairn believes it—even Trehearne believes it, don't you, Trehearne?"

"Of course."

"Well, it's done now," Kerrel said, as though it had ceased to matter.

Shairn picked up one of the musky flowers and tossed it into Kerrel's lap. "Have you forgotten me?" she asked him, with a curious edged sweetness. "I know you. You're a bad loser, and it's no use pretending you're not. Besides, I've seen you this way before. Just what are you meditating in your little mind?"

"Nothing at all, but the usual broad speculations on life. Curious what twists and turns it has. Take today. One man escapes banishment and another, a respected member of our community, incurs it."

"Who?" said Joris, peering sharply at Kerrel as through a fog.

"Arrin."

There was a small silence. Then Shairn said, "But I met him once. He's nice. You can't send him to Thuvis."

"I'm afraid there's no doubt about it. He's one of the Orthist leaders—you didn't know that, did you?" His question was addressed to no one in particular. "We've suspected him for some time, and today he was caught. Odd thing, though. They couldn't find any of his papers." He turned casually to Edri. "Arrin's a friend of yours, isn't he?"

"I know him."

"Oh, come now! You've known him for years."

Edri said nastily, "I've known you for a long time too. Don't cat-and-mouse with me, Kerrel. If you have something to say, say it."

Kerrel shrugged. "I was only thinking that a man can have too many unfortunate friendships."

"Does that include me?" said Trehearne, getting up.

"Oh, the hell with him," said Edri. He lurched to his feet, giving Kerrel one smouldering look, but it was Trehearne he spoke to. "He's a tireless and worthy investigator, a good cop as you would say on Earth. But he enjoys his work too much. I'm leaving."

He walked away, staggering a bit but holding himself rigidly erect. Trehearne watched the solitary figure moving down an avenue of trees, splashed with shadows and golden light. He hesitated, and then followed.

Edri stopped when he felt Trehearne's hand touch him. He looked at him in a curious way, almost as though he had never seen him before. And now that he was here, Trehearne did not know what to say. Rather awkwardly, he asked, "Can I do anything?"

"No. Thanks."

"I'm sorry about your friend."

"Why should you be? He's an Orthist, a traitor. He deserves to be sent to Thuvis."

Remembering the desolate picture he had seen of that world at the end of the galaxy, and his own so narrow escape from it, Trehearne shivered. "I don't care. It doesn't seem right to send anybody to rot forever in that boneyard. Besides, I can't see that the Orthists are so bad."

Edri reached out and took hold of Trehearne's shoulders. "Hate them," he said earnestly. "Hate them with everything you've got."

He turned away, and Trehearne said with a certain exasperation, "Hate 'em or not, I don't see why they're such a danger."

"There was a message, Trehearne. Long after Orthis disappeared, one of the life-skiffs of his ship was picked up in space. There was nothing in it but a message, painted in big letters on the walls. It was addressed to his enemies, and it said, 'You have not destroyed me. The peoples of the Galaxy will yet be given the freedom of the stars.' You understand? There was still hope, from the Orthist point of view."

He went on, a drunken man, not talking to Trehearne now but to himself, to the wind and the casual moons and a world that had turned bitter around him. "Arrin worked. All his life he worked, like a lot of men before him. He searched the records, the closed files that nobody is allowed to look at, and then they caught him. He never found what he was looking for, but he might have. A little more time, and he might have!" He looked up into the sky, the empty sky that stretched away to the rim of the universe. "Somewhere out there Orthis sits in his ship and waits—waits to be found again. But where? That's it, the question no one has answered in a thousand years. Where?"

He turned aside and was abruptly, violently sick. Trehearne waited. After Edri muttered, "It's curious, the things a man will say when he's drunk."

"I don't know," Trehearne said. "I didn't hear anything."

"Don't ever hear anything, for your sake as well as mine." He managed a smile. "Thanks. I'm all right now. I'm going on home."

He walked away slowly, and Trehearne went back to the others. He had sobered up a bit himself, and some of the magic had gone out of the evening. He was worried about Edri.

Shairn looked up at him, heavy-eyed. "You were gone so long, Michael."

"Holding Edri's head." Kerrel was still there. A sour mood seemed to have come over everyone. Joris sat with his head hanging forward. His eyes were open, staring moodily into the spilled wine, but he was obviously on the verge of passing out. Shairn had torn to bits the pale flowers in her lap, scattering them on the grass. No one was talking. Kerrel had not touched the wine. He was looking at Shairn, just sitting still and looking at her. Trehearne said to him, "You haven't given up, have you?"

"No."

"He only thinks he hasn't," Shairn said angrily. She rose and stood in front of Kerrel. "What is it you just can't bear to give up—me, or my thirty ships?"

Kerrel got up. He lifted his hand and slapped her hard across the cheek. There was a second when no one moved, when Shairn's eyes blazed wider and wider, and then Trehearne thrust her aside and moved in. Kerrel was stony sober and his reflexes were fast. The next thing Trehearne saw, through a ringing haze, was Kerrel walking away, leaving small sharp scars in the turf where his heels had cut in.

"No," said Shairn. "Not this time, Michael. Let him go."

His head hurt. The wine was turning on him, and he felt ashamed. He wanted to kill Kerrel, and he couldn't.

Shairn said uneasily, "I'm not mad. That's funny, Michael. I'm not mad at all, I'm scared."

"Why?"

"Him." She nodded after the dark figure receding among the trees.

"He'd never hurt you."

"Not directly. It's you I'm thinking of. He won't let you go. He was warning me. He can't let you go, and it isn't only because of me, or his pride. I've left him before, but this is different. You're different. He knows we lied to the Council."

"What can he do?"

"You saw him go after Edri. I don't know, Michael, but be careful. Don't give him even the hint of a chance at you." She shook her head. "I've changed my mind. I'm glad you're going voyaging. And meanwhile, you'd better not see much of Edri."

"You love me, Shairn?"

"I should think I'd done enough to prove it!"

"Don't get your back up. I was only wondering. Would you really have gone to the Orthists to help me?"

She laughed. "It was a safe threat to make. I knew Joris would never call it."

As though the sound of his name had decided him, Joris fell quietly sideways and began to snore. Trehearne bent over him, and he thought he saw in the moonlight a curious thing. He thought he saw tears on the old man's cheeks. He decided he must be very drunk indeed.

Shairn touched his arm. "Come, Michael."

"Where?"

"The home of my family, the Silver Tower. There's so little time to be happy in, before you go."

Two weeks later, dressed in the black and scarlet of the Vardda spacemen, Trehearne left Llyrdis behind him for the starship Saarga, outbound for Hercules.

TEN

The Saarga was not like the ship that had brought Trehearne from Earth. She was older and shabbier and clumsier, a great lumbering beldame of a ship, with enormous capacity for cargo and no space at all for passengers. Officers and crew were cramped into quarters functionally reduced to the absolute minimum, and there were no such luxuries as lounges and observation domes. But to Trehearne she was a thing of beauty, of miracle and wonder. Every dent and scar on her unlovely bulk-heads recorded a voyage to a nameless sun. The crammed and odorous vaults of her belly were storehouses of exotic riches. She was outbound for Hercules, and he was part of her. He was no longer merely a hungry onlooker. He belonged. He worshipped her.

He saw her first lying hugely in the dock, her scored and pitted hull-plates giving back a dull glint from the sun. He looked up at her, and then around him at the tremendous clamor of the port, and then he strode down along the walkway feeling ten feet high and happy as a kid at a carnival. He reported aboard, was duly checked in and assigned to quarters in a very small cabin with four very narrow bunks, where he good-naturedly allowed himself to be elbowed into the least desirable upper. His cabin-mates were all younger than he, but they were veterans, and he was forced to admit that this was his first professional voyage.

"Trehearne," said the dark-haired youngster in Lower Two, turning the name over on his tongue and frowning. "Funny sort of name—I've heard it somewhere."

The copper-haired youngster—the youngest—in Upper One, said, "I know. My uncle was talking about him. He's the fellow they found on Earth. Aren't you, Trehearne?"

"Yes."

The dark-haired youngster whistled. "Were you in luck! It was a million-to-one chance you'd ever even meet another Vardda. What's it like on Earth? I've never been there."

"It's all right," Trehearne said, "for Earthmen."

The first of the warning bells rang for take-off. They settled themselves in the padded bunks, and the long, lean, cheerful-looking man in Lower One, whose youth was already overlaid with many kinds of experience, glanced up at Trehearne and said, "You're not used to this, are you?"

"No." Trehearne's belly had contracted suddenly into a hard knot, and his skin was cold with a clammy sweat. The agonies of that first take-off returned to him full force. He knew this one would not be as bad. Once the adjustment was made, you were all right. Everybody said so. It didn't make any difference. He was scared.

The man in Lower One said quietly, "Just take it easy. By the way, my name is Yann. Radar crew."

"Hello."

The second warning sounded. Trehearne's teeth shut together with a snap and his jaw muscles stood out in ridges.

Red-head in Upper One said, "I'm Perri. Low man in the generator room."

Trehearne grunted.

The voice of Lower Two, directly beneath him, said, "If you fall through, I'll catch you. I'm Astrogation-Computer Technician, Second Class. A big mouth-filling title, but all I do is punch keys. They call me Rohan."

Trehearne said painfully, "On Earth there was a Cardinal...."

Third warning. Silence. A drawing-in, a throb, a quiver, and then a leap....

"Trehearne? Trehearne, are you still there?"

"Yes—" Crushed, weighted, stupefied, but it isn't so bad, it isn't nearly so bad, not much worse than pulling out of a dive. And she's going up, oh God she's going up!

The air-shriek died. The soundlessness of space was wrapped around the hull outside, and within there was the soft and mighty beating of that pulse that Trehearne remembered, going faster, going higher. A sigh escaped him, and his body relaxed. He smiled. He was where he wanted to be.

The long haul out to Hercules was uneventful, and the others found it dull. But for Trehearne, every minute of it was charged with magic. He was called up once before the skipper, who looked hard at him and said, "Joris told me to see that you worked. There's more to being a starman than lounging around in your bunk, and you'll be wanting to take examinations for some kind of a rating sooner or later. Here, study these. And in your spare time, learn all you can about the ship."

"These" proved to be texts on the Vardda Trade Laws, manuals on the rules and regulations governing relations with other races, and a history in many microvolumes of the trans-galactic expansion of the Vardda race in its thousand years of existence. He knew that Joris must have supplied the books and he was glad to get them. The trade codes, like laws anywhere, were pretty dull stuff and interesting only because of the fantastically broad field they dealt with. The manuals were better, because they were full of references to alien and frequently non-human races, with fascinating glimpses, into the damndest customs and psychologies Trehearne had ever heard of. But the history held him spellbound.

It began with a foreword on what the Vardda had been like in the millenniums before Orthis, when they were simply the people of Llyrdis. It seemed to Trehearne that they were not too different from the people of Earth. They had had their ages of barbarism and change and growth, and their homogeneity had not been achieved without pain. However, they had achieved it, and at an earlier period in their world-culture than that in which his native planet now was. He thought perhaps the task had been easier for the Llyrdians because there were fewer geographic barriers to the free mingling of peoples in their nomadic phase. The oceans were land-locked and the mountain ranges were broken by traversable passes. No primitive tribe had grown to statehood in even partial isolation, and the cultural streams had flowed strongly in all directions, losing their narrow intensity and broadening out into what eventually became one universal lake. It made for dulness in the world picture, perhaps, because of a sameness in dress and language and custom, but it was steady, and it led to a conception of the individual as a world-citizen instead of a nationalist, which cut down rapidly on wars. Scientific progress seemed to have gone on with only normal hitches, without any Dark Ages to set it back, and at a time when the people of Earth were sunk in their blackest pit of ignorance since the Stone Age, Llyrdis had atomic power, an established commerce with her neighbor planets, and was building and launching the first starship, which brought the history to its initial chapter, and Orthis.

"It is difficult for us now to realize what that first epic flight of man between the suns was like...."

Not as it was now, swift and easy, far outrunning the velocity of light. Science had the techniques even then to build and power the fast ships, but they were useless. Man could not survive the ultra-speeds. They had to go as they went between the planets, slowly. Four generations lived and died within the close confines of that first feeble forerunner of the Vardda fleets, men and women dedicated in themselves and their children to the conquest of the greatest barrier humanity had ever crossed. And they crossed it. Slowly, painfully, exposed to all the dangers of unknown radiations and unexplored, uncharted wilderness in its most ultimate sense, exposed to the most terrible loneliness and isolation that living beings had ever endured, they toiled their way to a landing on the world of another star and then—and this, to Trehearne, seemed the most incredible bravery of all—they took off again for Llyrdis, which to this intermediate generation was only a name and a tradition, and which they knew they would never live to see. Orthis was born during this return voyage, twenty-two years out from the planet he was taught to regard as home, though he had no knowledge of planets, nor of any life except that of the ship that moved apparently forever through the night of deep space. His ears must have been attuned only to that outer silence, his sight to the darkness and the far-off stars. To wind and rain, to sunlight and warm grass, to beasts and birds and the faces of many people, he was a stranger.

And a stranger he remained. "He could not endure to be planet-bound, after living all his life in space. He built his laboratory ship and worked in it, cruising where he wished and almost alone, for another fifteen years. Then, when he was thirty-seven, he announced his discovery—the birth of Galactic Man, the inception of the Vardda.

"Orthis refused to give to anyone the whole secret of his mutational process, believing that it was too dangerous in inexpert hands. He himself constructed the apparatus and used it, sowing with his own hands the seed of the Vardda race that would flower in the next generation. And at that time, he was revered by the people of Llyrdis almost as a demigod. But within the next year the troubles arose that almost split the Llyrdian State, and brought Orthis eventually into disgrace. He had given his discovery first to his own people, and now...."

Trehearne read with the most intense interest, trying to pry between the stiff factual lines for whatever force it was that made men like Edri fly in the face of their own best interests. Orthis had no intention of limiting the Vardda race to his own world. He would share his mutational process with the other planets of Aldebaran, and eventually with the star-worlds the original expedition had visited, and which were highly civilized. He wished them all to share in the great new future of star-travel—they and all races that might be discovered in the galaxy with sufficiently high culture-levels to be worthy of it. But when this became known to the embryo Starmen it started a most violent reaction. All sorts of objections were raised, ranging from the selfish but, to Trehearne, quite sensible argument that the Llyrdians had the best right to the mutation, having taken all the chances and done all the work, and therefore they should keep it, at least for a while, to the solemn threat of war on a galactic scale. "Remember," said the President of the Council, "how we helped the more backward worlds of our own solar system to achieve interplanetary flight, and how they repaid us. Remember the wars we have already fought! Let us take thought before we scatter this great power broadcast among the stars."

They took thought, and in spite of the impassioned arguments of Orthis and his followers they would not be hurried into a decision. The situation became so tense that Orthis' laboratory ship was sealed and impounded, and Orthis himself placed under virtual arrest. The battle in the Council Hall dragged on for years, and from the accounts it seemed to Trehearne that those fathers of the Vardda-to-be had not acted entirely from a selfish desire to hang on to a good thing. They were faced with a tremendous problem for which there was no precedent, nothing to go on but their own thoughts and feelings. Some of the Council members—the Llyrdian Congressmen—were obviously motivated by sheer hard-headed self-interest. But there were others who tried honestly to be just, and justice to their own people came first. They were afraid to share the mutation, and the control of it, with anyone. They were afraid to throw open all the unknown doors of space onto Aldebaran. The Orthists were defeated.

Then came the end, the dramatic fireworks. The Orthist party arranged an escape for their leader. They helped him get his ship away. They saw him off into the dark void beyond the sky, and they thought that after all he would be victorious. But by this time the new Vardda race had begun to flourish, and some of them were old enough, just barely, to fly. They went out after Orthis, believing intensely in their own right, as he believed in his. Orthis himself was undoubtedly able to endure ultra-speeds, for it was a long and bitter chase. The new young Vardda partially disabled his ship, but even so he managed to elude them. There was no ultra-wave radar or radio in those days, and after all, the old man had cut his teeth on the stars. They lost him, and that was the end, of Orthis and his ship—all except the message in the drifting life-skiff that was picked up more than a century later. And Trehearne thought, "Whether he was right or not, Orthis was the hell and all of a man!"

He could understand why Orthis had hung on stubbornly all these centuries. Certainly a more noble dream had never been dreamed. For himself, though, he was rather glad it was only a dream. He liked being a Vardda. He liked things the way they were. It had worked pretty well for everybody, and looking back, he could think of an awful lot of people he would have hated to see entrusted with the power to get at their neighbors on other stars. Orthis, that solitary, space-born man, had seen only the ideal, the abstraction. The Council had extrapolated a reality.

He did not discuss the question with anybody. That night in the pleasure-garden had impressed upon him the fact that the whole subject was unhealthy, and especially for him. The thought of Kerrel arose sometimes like a dark shadow in his mind, and linked with it was a gnawing anxiety about Edri, whom he had not seen before he left—not for any reasons of caution, which he would have been ashamed of, but because Edri had gone away somewhere and was not to be reached. He had sent Trehearne a brief message wishing him luck, and that was all.

About Shairn he thought as little as possible. He didn't want to know what she was doing. He preferred to remember the two weeks he had spent at the Silver Tower as ending against a blank wall.

He read on in the thundering saga of Vardda exploration, opening the starways. He studied his laws and codes. And he studied the ship. His bunkmates were more than willing to show off their knowledge to a greenhorn, particularly one older than themselves. Perri explained to him the inner workings of the purring metal giants that drove the ships—adaptations of the cosmotron for use as a generator, with centrifuges keyed to ultra-speeds that created the fifth-order rays. Rohan let him punch keys on the computers that did astral mathematics—he was not much interested in those—and Yann taught him how to read the radar screens that functioned not by slow electro-magnetic waves but by rays akin to those that powered the ship, moving far faster than light. He listened in Communications to Vardda ships talking across the galaxy in thin ghostly converse by those same super-swift rays. The Skipper unbent briefly and allowed him—and this was like realizing an impossible dream—to hold the controls of the Saarga in his hands.

Yann did a good bit of tolerant jeering. "You're just starting out, and it's still fun. Wait till you're as old in the game as I am." He was twenty-eight. "I've made nine voyages into the Cluster, and I'm tired of it. All I want is my own ship, which I will let somebody else fly while I sit comfortably on Llyrdis and catch up on my wine and women."

"Have you any chance of getting one?" asked Trehearne.

"This trip will do it."

Rohan let out a loud laugh. "Hark at him! Don't let him kid you, Trehearne. We do well, but not that well."

Yann said seriously, "I mean it."

"Would you mind telling me how?"

"I saved my money," Yann told him virtuously. Then he grinned. "Besides, you're forgetting that I spent almost a year on the ground, filling in for some damned Vardda factor that died. I didn't waste my time." He turned to Trehearne. "Wait until we hit that system. I'll show you things you never saw before. Real barbarism. Good people, though. I got along with 'em fine."

"I guess," said Trehearne, "that there are all kinds of worlds in the Cluster."

"Just wait," said Rohan sourly. "You'll have a bellyful before you're through. There are beautiful ones, and picturesque ones, and very quaint ones, all right, and some are even civilized. But there's a hell of a lot that are just plain godawful. You must have guessed that there's a reason for the high pay on this run."

The great Cluster of Hercules grew from a patch of hazy brilliance lost in the blaze and crash and thunder of the universe, to a monstrous star-swarm, blinding even through a darkened port—a swirling hive of suns, white, red, yellow, peacock blue and vivid green, booming across the eternal void with the rush and roar of a cosmic avalanche toward some unknown destination, guided by the evil blinking eyes of the Cepheid variables. The Saarga plunged in at last among the edges of the swarm, and Trehearne discovered at least one reason why Edri had warned him about the Hercules run.

"All the globular clusters are bad," Yann told him cheerfully. "Omega Centauri—there's another one to break a starman's heart. A strong ship, a strong captain, and no imagination—that's what it takes for a voyage like this."

Trehearne was introduced to gravity tides and for the first time in his life he knew what real fear was. The generators throbbed incessantly. The Saarga groaned and shrieked in all her iron bones, moving in erratic bursts of speed and sudden brakings, pitching and swerving as she felt her way in through shoals of suns, fighting the complex, ever-shifting gravitational fields. Trehearne got the feeling that he was trapped inside a giant football being battered back and forth between the stars.

Yann grinned. "It gets worse as you go farther in."

It did. Trehearne thought it was impossible for any ship to live in those mighty cross-currents of gravitation as the suns thickened like swarming bees. Forty times a day he was convinced that his end had come, and his only comfort was that the Hercules Cluster was a more noble place to die in than any he had seen on Earth. He wore out his emotional potential until he had no more to give and merely suffered the noises and the violent pitchings as the Saarga rolled doggedly on her way. He had an idea that they must be deep into the heart of the cluster, and was somewhat daunted to learn, when the ship made her first landing, that they were still only on the fringe. He was too far gone to care much. All he wanted then was solid ground under his feet.

He emerged from the airlock into the light of a waning star, inexpressibly dim and sad, and looked out over a shadowy plain that glimmered even at midday with the distant glories of other suns, burning unconcerned. The plain was barren, scoured to the underlying rock by the winds that blew across it, dry and withering and cold. But there was a town there, very neat and gay with colors. It made Trehearne think of too-bright cosmetics on the face of a corpse. The Saarga discharged food and ores and many small luxuries, receiving payment in gems of royal purple mined out of the grey rock by little men with sorrowful eyes. The place began to get on Trehearne's nerves. His duties kept him by the ship, checking bills of lading, but he watched the people who came out from the town. They were healthy, well-fed, well-dressed. But their bodies were stunted, and even the children's faces held a sadness that seemed as much a part of them as their skin, seeping into them from the dying sunlight and the dying soil. He saw the way they looked at the great ship and the men who flew in her, and how they glanced then at the hot flaming suns that were beyond their reach. They did not talk much. They only stood and looked. But once a group of children crept close to him and a small boy asked, in the lingua franca of the trade worlds, "What is it like to fly the stars?"

The Saarga did not stay there long, and Trehearne was glad. "Christ!" he said to Yann. "Those poor kids would break your heart. Couldn't they be moved or something? They're just dying slowly with their world."

Yann shook his head. "It's been tried, but it doesn't work. At planetary velocities, even a relatively short hop between stars takes years, and most people just can't take it psychologically. They crack up in all directions, or else they sort of wither and die. Besides, I suppose there's a sort of interstellar ecology. Old worlds die, and new ones are born, and if you started upsetting the normal balance you'd have every livable planet overrun with more population than it could support."

Thinking of the children, Trehearne said, "Ecology, hell. They're human beings."

Young Perri shrugged. "We all take our chances. You'll get used to it. Anybody know where we touch next?"

"It's on the board," Yann said. "A lovely place. Trehearne will like it. There aren't any people there at all."

Trehearne's education into the rights, privileges, and duties of a Vardda were only beginning. The Saarga slowed again close to a cumulid variable of the most evil aspect and picked up a planet that turned out to be a worthy child of its parent. "Here's where we earn our money," Yann said. "Radiation suits, Trehearne. Full kit. Only the Old Man is exempt from this."

"What do we do?" Trehearne wanted to know.

"We pick fungus," Rohan told him not joyfully. "It makes a particularly fine antibiotic when it's been treated, but meanwhile don't get it on you. It's poisonous as hell. And be sure your oxygen lines are clear. The air is full of methane."

"He doesn't care," said Yann. "He's still full of the wonder of new worlds."

"Jeer away," Trehearne said equably. "I am."

ELEVEN

Trehearne trailed out with the rest of them, almost the whole ship's company, to gather the weird harvest. The radiation-suit he wore was not too heavy in weight—it couldn't be, for men who had to do hard work—a simple coverall of flexible metallic fabric, with a phone-equipped helmet and a separate knapsack oxygen-pack that could be quickly replaced when its oxygen was worked out.

The world he stood on was like something out of nightmare. Fungi higher than his head grew thickly, like a gruesome travesty of a forest, and in colors ranging from black to crimson and a yellow like spilled brains. The giant star—a sick, mad star, Trehearne thought, like all the short-period true variables—brooded in the poisonous sky, past the maximum peak of its brilliance now but still pouring out its febrile energies in a purplish glare. Trehearne grimaced, and shook his head. "This," he said, "is a planet only Weizsacker could love."

Perri's voice came over the helmet phone, curiously thin but so close at hand that Trehearne started. "Who's Weizsacker?"

"An Earthman with a theory. He advanced the idea that most stars have planets."

Rohan said incredulously, "You mean that anyone ever doubted it?"

"Oh, yes. Matter of fact, the general belief still is that Sol is unique in possessing planets, and that Sol Three, otherwise Earth, is unique in possessing life, particularly intelligent life."

Rohan swore, and then he laughed. "I never heard of such conceit. I thought you said Earthmen were civilized. Only savages have that wonderful conception of their own importance."

Armed with curved knives and big sacks of a thin plasticoid substance as flexible as cloth but air tight when it was sealed, the men spread out through the fungoid jungle. They kept more or less together in small groups. Trehearne could hear them talking, a confusion of voices over the helmet phone. He talked a lot himself, not about anything in particular, just talking for the sake of hearing something human. There was a strange and increasingly unpleasant feeling of isolation, locked up in his armor, breathing artificial air, unable to see much because of the helmet that restricted his field of vision. He moved with difficulty over spongy dust that sucked him down almost to the knees at every step. The light was lurid and hard on the eyes, and the ugly growths grew uglier by the minute, their vivid colors more revolting. It was hard to tell who was near him, with everyone masked out of human semblance by the shapeless suits. He tried to keep close to Yann and the two youngsters, checking them by voice.

"Don't bother with the big ones," Yann told him. "They aren't any good. Here, see the little pretties just coming up? Those are what we want."

Trehearne looked doubtfully at the size of his sack, and then at the nasty little mushroom-like heads thrusting up from the ground. "It'll take a long time to fill this thing."

"Hours. Might as well dig in."

Trehearne began patiently to work, bent over double or squattering clumsily along on his knees. The uncleanness of the place began to get on his nerves. Unavoidably he broke the adult growths from time to time and was showered with sooty black, or liverish pink, or ugly red and yellow dust, or was enveloped in clouds of spores. He tried to watch the others, but he lost track of them now and then. Sometimes they did not answer when he called them. A slow claustrophobia grew on him and had to be fought down. He sweated heavily inside his armor. His muscles tired, and still the huge sack was not filled.

The light of the cumulid star began visibly to fade.

Trehearne looked around. A wall of leprous color closed him in. There was no one in sight. "Yann?" he called. "Perri?"

"Hoi!" That was Perri. "Dull work, isn't it?"

"Disgusting. Where's Yann?"

"I don't know. Yann?"

"Here, damn it. If you'd pick more and talk less we'd be out of this pleasure garden sooner."

Trehearne could not place their positions. They sounded alike, all as though they spoke inside his own helmet. He worked on, hoping to catch sight of someone. The sick sun had worn out its burst of energy and was sinking into exhaustion, dimmer, redder, with the effect of an abnormal sunset. A kind of shadowy dusk crept between the feet of the tall distorted growths. Trehearne began to feel uneasy. He knew it was only the cumulative effect of the surroundings and the prisoning armor. He refused to pay attention to it. But it would not go away. It came in waves, with a prickling of nerve-ends and a lifting of the hair. He continued doggedly to throw the small fungi into his sack. He wanted to talk now more than ever, but he was afraid to, afraid that his unreasoning fear would show in his voice and disgrace him. He began to make long swings back and forth, trying to find somebody, but he could not, though he knew they must be close by. He was very hot, but his back turned cold and trickles of icy moisture ran down it. The unhealthy dusk grew thicker, and the shadows were red. He began to see movement out of the tail of his eye, as though something or someone walked stealthily just out of sight behind the screening growths.

"Yann?"

"What?" The bodiless, distanceless voice, speaking thinly in his ear.

"There's no life here, is there? I mean, outside of these stinking mushrooms."

"Not that anyone knows about. Why?"

"Nothing. It was only a trick of the shadows, I guess."

"Getting nervy, little Earthling?"

"Listen, the hell with you and your smart cracks."

"Think nothing of it," Yann said unabashed. "We all get nervy. I'm almost finished. How about you?"

"Pretty soon."

"Well, hurry up."

Silence. An occasional burst of voices over the helmet phones, confusing, jumbled. The men weren't talking so much now. They were tired, and the place oppressed them. Their spirits were going down like the light of the sun, sprawling hugely over half the sky with the red light running out of it like blood. Trehearne watched the shadows constantly, turning uneasily round and about with a blind feeling at his back. His nerves still pricked and rippled, and would not be quieted.

His sack was nearly full. He thought about the ship, about lights and familiar faces and getting off the suffocating armor. There was a monstrous fan-shaped growth glaring crimson in the sinking glow. It was flanked on one side by a bloated puffball colored black, and on the other by a crinkled, convoluted monster blotched with brown and yellow. It had at its feet a brood of little ones, enough to fill the remaining space in Trehearne's sack. He walked toward it, brushing by the blotched and convoluted thing. He felt at his back a sudden tug and a snapping. He turned, floundering in the soft mould with his heavy boots. He turned as fast as he could but there was no one, nothing, and then it dawned on him what had happened. His oxygen line had been ripped loose.

He began to shout. He didn't mind using his breath. He had very little left to use. He shouted in wild panic and began to run, nowhere in particular, butting and stumbling into the fungi, searching desperately for someone to help him before he died. "Where are you?" the voices were clamoring in his helmet. "Where are you?" And he kept screaming, "Here!" as though the word had any meaning, as though they could tell from the sound of his voice whether he was ten feet or half a mile away. The automatic valve-seal had closed at once to prevent the escape of what air there was in the armor, but it was getting hard to breathe. His lungs would exhaust the last of the oxygen in a minute or two, and then he could either suffocate in his armor, or rip off his helmet and burn his insides out with the methanated poison this world used for atmosphere. It was a lousy way to die and he didn't like it, and he couldn't figure out how it had happened. He must have fouled his line on some part of the fungus, that nasty one that looked like a monstrous brain. He must have passed too close to it and got hooked on some tough projection.... It was getting dark and he was sick at his stomach and his lungs were pumping, laboring, achieving nothing.

He tried to yell again, and couldn't make it. His knees caved under him and he fell, almost into the arms of a shapeless but human figure that was saying a lot of things he couldn't understand. He felt himself rolled over. There was a moment when the darkness closed down almost completely and then a stream of oxygen, pure and fresh, poured into his helmet. The mechanism that had so nearly stopped began to work again, not smoothly, with a good deal of gagging and choking, but working. Somebody's voice penetrated to him, telling him for God's sake not to get sick in his helmet, and he managed to sit up and look around.

Two men were bending over him, and a third stood behind them. He could recognize them through their face-plates. None were his bunkmates. There was somebody else behind him, holding him up. Voices were still clattering inside his helmet, demanding to be answered. He thought he heard Rohan and Perri, but he wasn't sure. "Who's that behind me?" he asked. His own voice came out as though there were hooks on it. His throat hurt. "Who's there?"

"Me. Yann. Welcome back, Trehearne. I thought for a minute you'd gone over the edge."

"Damn near it." His tongue felt like a feather bolster. "I don't know what happened...."

"Your air-line got snagged," said one of the men helpfully, telling Trehearne no news. He grunted and said,

"But how? I thought I must have hooked it on one of these ugly brutes, but they break so easily...."

"They toughen up as they age. Look here." The man reached out and took a horny protuberance in his hand. "Plenty of resistance, especially if your coupling was not properly tightened."

He didn't remember any such protuberances, and the blotched brain-shaped thing had looked bright and youthful. But he let it drop. He didn't know quite what other answer there could be, and right now he didn't want to think about it any more. Everything was lost in an overpowering desire to get back to the ship. He started to flounder up onto his feet, and Yann's powerful arm helped him. "Anyway," he said to the men in front of him, "thanks for saving my neck."

"Thank Yann. He had your air-line recoupled by the time we came. You were running right toward us, but you might not have made it if he hadn't found you first."

Trehearne turned round to face Yann. "Thanks."

"No trouble at all. I don't say I'd save you out from under the claws of something or other at the risk of my own skin, Trehearne, but since this was a simple task, think nothing of it. I was just lucky to find you. And next time don't stray so far away." He grinned and shoved Trehearne forward. "You aren't finished yet. You still have to explain to the Old Man why you lost your sack."

"Oh God," Trehearne muttered. But he didn't turn back. If the Skipper wanted that sack he could go and look for it. For the time being, Trehearne was through.

The Saarga creaked and groaned and lurched her way deeper and deeper into the Cluster, touching like a tramp freighter at this port and that one, wherever there was trading to do and cargo to be had. Only her ports were planets, and her seas were the nighted gulfs between them. The memory of what had happened on the world of the variable star faded out of Trehearne's conscious mind, though he sometimes started awake in his bunk with the ghastly feeling of suffocation strong on him from a dream. But the succession of places and peoples, ever-shifting, ever-new, gave him too much to think about to waste his time brooding over something that was over and done. Insensibly, through habit and association, he was losing all sense of personal strangeness, becoming as thoroughly a Vardda as though he had been born on Llyrdis. Some of the first fine childlike glow of wonder wore off. It began to seem the most natural thing in life to go between the stars as between islands. The interest remained, but the feeling of awe departed.

They touched at systems that had a high degree of civilization, where Trehearne first saw the Vardda factories, vast walled compounds held under treaty, and crammed with warehouses full of goods from all over the galaxy. The system of the compound, the separate landing field, and the Vardda factory were universal wherever there was trade enough to warrant them, even on barbarian planets. "That's where the fortunes are made," Yann told him, and grinned. "I know. A few years in a factory, and you can retire."

Trehearne made a mental note of that, though he had no wish to be a factor. The Saarga moved on. They traded with scaly humanoids under the glare of a blue-white sun. They stripped the worlds of a red giant, leaving cheap gilded trinkets in exchange for rare radioactive minerals, and the small wild people felt themselves enriched. Trehearne had been amazed at the persistent recurrence of the humanoid form even when the root-stock from which a particular race had evolved was not even remotely human, and Yann had explained to him what every Vardda school-child was taught in General Biology, that the development of the humanoid form (i.e., possessing a recognizable head, carried in a vertical or erect posture, two lower limbs used for purposes of locomotion, and two upper limbs used for manual tasks) rested simply upon the necessity of a species that intended to progress beyond the animal level of intelligence to evolve hands, or a workable substitute, and free them for use.

But human or humanoid, furred, scaled, feathered, or normally integumented, of whatever color or size or state of social development, one thing was common to all the races of all the worlds. They hated the Vardda. It was a hatred based purely on envy, and Trehearne became so used to it that he hardly thought about it any more, except to notice its variation according to cultures—the aboriginals who mixed with it a worshipful, superstitious fear of the Vardda starlords, the barbarians who would have killed them except that they were greedy for the luxuries of trade, the civilized folk who treated them with cold respect and ate their hearts out with jealous longing. The only thing that really bothered Trehearne was the children, especially the young boys, who followed the Vardda up and down the streets and as near as they were allowed to the ship, asking over and over the same eternal question—"What is it like to fly among the stars?"

He had almost forgotten Earth. And then they swung in toward the world of a yellow sun, a green world that tore his heart quite suddenly with a rush of memories. He stared out the port at distant fields and trees, and at a city that might have been an Earthly city, shorn of its dirt and slums and spreading along the bank of a mighty river, and he was astonished that he could still feel homesick.

Yann looked at him sourly. He was brushing and sprucing up his uniform, and Rohan and Perri were brushing theirs, and none of them looked happy.

"Looks pretty, doesn't it?" said Yann.

Trehearne nodded. He was looking at the river and thinking of the Mississippi. His mind was a long way off.

"Well, it is pretty," Yann muttered. "The climate's fine, the people are civilized, the women are handsome, and I'll bet even the food is good. But we're not allowed to enjoy them. We aren't even—"

The buzzing signal of the ship's intercom interrupted him, and the captain's face appeared on the small tele-screen.

"This is a warning, and a reminder. Here is where we do our trading with our hats in our hands and a humble look. Have you got that, all of you? You are to remain within the trading compound. You are not to fraternize with the natives. You are to show all deference to such members of the Hedarin as you may have contact with. And you are not, under any circumstances, to take offence at anything that may be said by them. In other words, keep your mouths shut until you're forced to open them, and then sing small. Those are orders, and I'll discipline any man that breaks them!"

The screen went dark. Trehearne looked at the others. "What kind of a place is this?"

"You heard the Old Man. It's a place where the Vardda apologize for living."

"Who are the Hedarin?"

"The lawgivers. The wise men. The speakers of the last word."

Young Perri gave his shoulders an expressive twist. "Creepy beggars," he said. "They're parapsychs."

TWELVE

The compound was large and chiefly empty, except for an open-sided building like a fair pavilion at one end of it. There was no factory, only the compound adjoining a landing field, outside the city. Large crowds were gathered beyond the low walls, much like any crowd on Earth, laughing, pushing, pointing at the ship, sending up an incessant gabble of talk. But the compound had only a few dozen men in it. They were inside the pavilion, waiting, and Trehearne was treated to the unusual spectacle of the Vardda captain and his officers marching humbly forward to ask permission to trade.

"Come a little closer," Yann whispered to him. "See those two tall men in the dun-colored robes, sitting at the back? They're Hedarin. Watch."

The Vardda officers spoke to the two men, and received a brief answer. "They give us two days," said Rohan. "Generous of them." Trehearne looked longingly over the compound wall. There were clumps of trees out there, and it must be coming on to fall, for the leaves were turning. The sky was intensely blue, with a soft haze low on the horizon, and the air was crisp. If you didn't look too closely it might be Ohio in October, and he wanted to go somewhere and walk alone, remembering. He didn't know why. Earth was behind him, and he did not regret it. But he wanted to go and walk among the turning trees.

Instead he got out lists and manifests and stood by, while the trading began. Goods and samples of goods, from trinkets to medicines and light machinery were brought out of the ship, and the bringing was done by the Vardda themselves. Trehearne helped, and all the cursing that was done was done quietly. "Too goddam proud to supply porters," somebody said. "The people wouldn't mind, but the Hedarin think it's debasing. Not the physical labor, you understand, but even the appearance of working for us. Me, I'd let 'em rot before I'd trade with them."

"The Old Man doesn't feel that way, so tail on, will you? This crate is heavy."

In the pavilion, the business went briskly. Only the Hedarin, sitting aloof, seemed unfriendly. Their faces gave Trehearne a peculiar feeling. Rather too small for their massive heads, though not so much as to be deformed, their features had a sort of iron strength that was almost chilling, as though the mind behind them had overswayed all the weaknesses of the flesh. Their eyes, deep set and light in color, seemed to look inward, not in the usual foggy contemplative way of people pondering over their thoughts, but as down a bright, clear vista where nothing was dark or doubtful, where no trivia could exist, no stirrings of emotion, no wayward impulse. They were splendid looking men. He had to admire them. But there was no thought of liking them. They watched the trading, and Trehearne began to notice that every item was offered for their approval before any bargain was struck. Most often it was granted, but now and then there would be a shake of the head and the article was rejected. The merchants might look regretful, but they did not protest.

"They swing an awful lot of weight," Trehearne said under his breath to Yann.

The First Officer, a slightly greying man who knew the Cluster like his own flower garden, was standing near and heard him. "So would you," he said, "if you could look inside a man's head and see all his thoughts, and into his body and trace the course of every gut, simply by using the power of your own mind."

"Uncomfortable people to have for rulers."

"They don't rule, in that sense. They're the physicians, the judges, the scientists—purely intellectual, a separate caste. They wouldn't stoop to anything as physical as ruling. They live entirely in and for the mind. In temporal matters they merely advise."

Remembering a certain Dr. Rhine, Trehearne asked, "Can they do everything? I mean, teleportation, telekinesis, telepathy, all the tricks?"

"They never discussed it with me, but I should think they could do all that, and more."

"Insolent bastards," said young Perri, scowling. His Vardda pride was hurt. Rohan kicked him. "Keep it to yourself. And don't even think too loud." Trehearne fidgeted. For the moment there was nothing to do, and he was standing with the others, six or seven of them, waiting. Finally he whispered, "What do we get here that makes it worth while?"

"Gem-stones," said Yann. "Fabulous. And their lapidaries rank as just about the best in the galaxy." He bent his head very close to Trehearne's and whispered, "All the same, I agree with Perri. Look at those merchants. Damned if I'd let anybody tell me what I could buy, and what I couldn't."

The Hedarin were out of earshot, and no whisper could possibly have carried to them over the buzz and chatter of the trading that was going on in front of them. Yet all at once they turned their heads, and Trehearne found himself looking straight into the glare of those clear light eyes. He felt Yann start involuntarily, and then something passed like a cold wind through his mind, touching every hidden corner of it with a casual ease that horrified him, and dropping it immediately after with an unmistakable contempt that enraged him. He shook his head in a futile but instinctive attempt to clear it of the invading presence and started forward in a blind temper, forgetting orders completely. The First Officer grabbed him and whispered fiercely, "Shut up!", though he hadn't said anything yet. The cold something winked out of his mind like a light going off. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the disturbed, astonished faces of his comrades, and he knew that the same thing had happened to them. And then a sudden glance passed between the Hedarin. They rose. One held up his arm and said, "The trading is ended."

All sound ceased at once. The merchants stood, disappointed and surprised, looking at the Hedarin, and then out of the uncomfortable silence came the voice of the Vardda captain, held rigidly under control. "But you gave us two days!"

"It is ended. Take up what is yours, and go."

The captain's voice was not now as polite. "I wish to know why. We've kept all the conventions...."

"We gave permission. Now we revoke it."

They gestured to the merchants, busy middle-aged men who looked like all the businessmen Trehearne had ever seen. Reluctant, but obedient, they turned away and began to walk out of the pavilion. Somebody—it sounded like the captain—said, "Of all the goddamned high-handed...." And then some other Vardda voice shouted to the merchants, "What are you, a bunch of children to be ordered around? Why don't you trade if you want to?"

One of the merchants answered, "The Hedarin are wise."

"Maybe," said Trehearne angrily. "Or maybe they just like to show off." He demanded of the men in the dun-colored robes, "What have you got against us?"

They did not answer, and Rohan said, laughing, "The same thing all the non-Vardda have against us. Also, we're crass, crude traders. We don't think."

"You think," said the Hedarin quietly. "And we do not want your thoughts. Among you there is more than baseness. There is murder."

Again there was a silence, and this time it had a quality of shock. The Vardda looked at one another, and suddenly Trehearne's spine turned cold. Shadows under a waning star, an ugly forest tight around him like a leprous wall, a tug, a snap, and death, unseen and unexplained but very capable, closing on him like a great dark fist.

Murder?

Voices, Vardda voices, aroused, indignant, challenging. The merchants were leaving, and the Hedarin had stepped down. The Vardda were demanding proof.

It couldn't be. No one aboard the Saarga had anything against him. It must have been an accident. There was no reason to think it wasn't.

"Who is it?" roared the captain. "You can't make an accusation like that and then walk out...."

"We have no part in your affairs. You demanded a reason, and it was given. That is all."

Murder. It was an ugly word. Trehearne wished they hadn't said it. He wished the episode of the air-line hadn't happened. It opened the way for so much speculation. It made him apply the threat to himself, when after all, every member of the crew probably had at least one enemy he wouldn't mind killing. Everybody thought about it at one time or another. He had thought himself about killing Kerrel, but thinking was one thing, and doing it another.