Macroscope

CHAPTER 10

The mists receded; the shadowless darkness evaporated. In the grandeur of sound the vision came, vastly mechanized: the image of the galaxy, cosmic dish of brilliance turning about its nebulous axis, trailing its spiral arms, radiating into space a spherical chord of energy of which the visible spectrum was less than one percent.

Then came the planets, recognizably Solarian, superimposed upon the nebular framework: Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Luna. And it was as though they rolled around within that bowl at differing velocities, Sol rolling too, and Earth at the center. Merged with that was a second bowl, that shifted against the first without friction: galactic and planetary roulette. The combined motions were diverse and complex; it seemed that no eye could trace where within that melee all the planets were at any given moment or how the bowls aligned. Only if the action stopped could such a survey be accomplished — and such a cessation would destroy it all.

It could not be halted — but it could be photographed, in a manner, and such pictures revealed unique aspects. For the two concavities were marked off in quarters, and each quarter in thirds: twenty-four sections between them, twelve against twelve. Each of these was an open chamber wherein a planet might lodge forever, once caught by the flash of the camera. And the flashes came, four of them, making the planets freeze and the two bowls mesh together, binding themselves to the configurations of the instant; and in each case a form of existence was thereby set.

The motions were such that only the instant fixed the ratios; had the action been halted a fraction sooner or later, an entirely different configuration would have resulted, and reality would have deviated by that amount.

This, then, the symphony of motion and meaning, embracing all experience. The instant of its theoretic cessation, that fixation of all planets, was the horoscope.

There was the swell of massed strings as Ivo descended to the circle of pie-shaped pens, searching out the fire symbols. He found a lion with flaming mane and passed it by; a centaur with drawn bow, the arrow a torch, and gave a nod to the archer that was not himself; and the ram. Here he tarried, approaching the animal with caution. The blades of its pasture were red spears of conflagration and the hairs of its body were coils of spreading smoke, but it was the head that predominated. Upon one mighty horn was written ASPIRATION and upon the other, TRADE.

“O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!” Ivo exclaimed, quoting the words of the poet in the language of music: themes of the violin.

But Aries the Ram turned his molten head and snorted fire. “The beasts they hunger, and eat, and die; And so do we, and the world’s a sty; Hush fellow swine; Why nuzzle and cry? Swinehood hath no remedy.”

And Ivo was afraid of this enormous beast, that spoke of other beasts and was so close to him that its very gaze seemed to burn his flesh, and he comprehended its power and determination. But still he tried: “Does business mean, Die, you — live, I? Then ‘Trade is trade’ but sings a lie: ’Tis only war grown miserly.”

Aries pointed one horn at a scorched scroll illuminated in the massed-string surge, and Ivo read:

Formal galactic history commences with the formation of the first interstellar communications network. Only scattered authentic prior evidences exist for the employment of artificial macronics, and these may be disregarded as transitory phenomena of insignificant galactic moment.

The first two cultures to establish a dialogue were only two hundred light-years apart; but a thousand years elapsed from the onset of broadcasting to confirmation. The second culture received the signals of the first and comprehended them, but delayed some time before deciding to respond. It is conjectured that conservative elements within that culture feared the long-range effect of a dialogue with complete aliens: a caution that was justified if value was placed on the status quo.

During the second millennium fifteen additional cultures joined the network, having observed the successful interchange of the first pair and having gained confidence thereby. This was the nucleus of primitive galactic civilization.

Within a hundred thousand years the initial signal had traversed the galaxy and gone beyond, diffusing into the entropy of macronic debris; but its originator had ceased broadcasting within ten thousand, presumably because of species decline or natural catastrophe. It had not been, in retrospect, a particularly notable culture; it owes its distinction in galactic history solely to the fact that it was the first to precipitate the network. Others, however, stimulated by that sample period, remained active, and the total number of participants increased steadily for the first several million years. Eventually the number stabilized, ushering in the so-called main phase.

Spheres of influence developed, the extent of each determined by the relative commencement time of broadcast the level of knowledge provided, the endurance of the originating culture and the compatibility of neighboring cultures. Certain stations, having nothing original to contribute, closed down and were lost to history. Some became intermittent, doing little more than announcing their presence every millennium or so. Some became “service” stations, relaying material gathered and correlated from others. Some merely acknowledged prevailing broadcasts and expressed identification with the more notable ones. A few broadcast without reference to incoming signals, in this manner avoiding direct competition for prestige.

Thus fairly stable spheres developed amid the general chaos, centered on the most durable and knowledgeable stations. This stability extended beyond individual broadcasters, for when a major station desisted lesser ones would fill its place and continue disseminating its information. Quite a number of prominent spheres were based on long-defunct cultures, since the quality of knowledge developed transcended the details of species or culture. Overall civilization gradually expanded, as individual species profited by the knowledge of their neighbors. At times dominance within a sphere would shift, as a pupil became more vigorous than the instructor; but generally the leading cultures maintained their positions, owing perhaps to greater inherent species ability. This main phase endured for about a hundred million years, and almost all the early cultures were replaced by later ones who could lay claim to very little original knowledge. The time of pioneering was over, galactically, and it seemed that the ultimate in civilization had been attained.

The onset of the First Siege altered this situation drastically. This came in the form of an extragalactic broadcast that intercepted the galaxy broadside and thus saturated it within a few thousand years. This was the first intergalactic communicatory contact made, apart from faint, blurred signals of relatively primitive culture. This one was advanced: more sophisticated in knowledge and application than any hitherto known. By its mere existence it proved that the local level of civilization and technology was fledgling rather than mature. It presented a technique until this point thought to be beyond animated physical capability: the key to what amounted to instantaneous travel between the stars of the galaxy.

It was hailed as a miracle. No longer was commerce confined to the intellect. For the first time, divergent planetary species were able to make physical contact.

But the wiser cultures saw it for what it was — and could not cry the alarm before the consequences were upon them.

The stellar constellation known on Earth as Aries was not a true association of stars at all, for some were relatively close to the planet and others were far removed, in that apparent region of space. Yet this could be construed as a segment of the galaxy, and within it were numerous cultures. In this time of interstellar travel, empires were forming; and it was to one of these that Schön journeyed.

As Ivo had found himself at the Hegemony of Tyre, so Schön landed on an Earth-type but alien planet, feeling its gravity and breathing its atmosphere. There was vegetation, similar in function if not in detail to that of Earth, and there was what passed for civilization.

The planet appeared to be at war.

Schön assimilated the situation almost immediately. He proceeded to the nearest recruiting office. “I am a talented alien in need of employment,” he said to the boothed official.

The beetle-browed, facet-eyed creature contemplated him. “I grant you are alien — sickeningly so,” it honked. “If you are verbally talented, I suggest you make use of your ability to show cause why I should not vaporize you where you stand on your repulsive meaty digits, in three minutes or less.”

Schön could tell by the shade of its carapace that it was suspicious. “Obviously you suspect me of being a representative of a hostile power, since I perceive you are on a war, er, footing here.” The hesitation reflected the creature’s absence of feet. “Obviously, too, I could be a spy or saboteur, since the ability to penetrate your defenses without observation is a requisite for that trade. And my direct approach to you is no guarantee that my motives are innocent; I could be holding a radiation bomb triggered to go off the moment you blast me. That would be my employer’s guarantee that my failure to insinuate myself into your military machine could not lead to awkward exposure of his vile designs. I would naturally prefer to preserve my life and quietly gather whatever useful information I could while maintaining scrupulous cover. I should for that reason be an excellent employee of yours, since suspicion would naturally center on my activities and only months or years of excellent and unimpeachable service could dissipate this doubt — by which time the present crisis should long since be over and my employer could be allied to yours. But if I cannot accomplish this, at least my employer may have the satisfaction of knowing that a cubic mile of this planet’s lithosphere — perhaps a trifle less, if the shoddy workmanship of the past is any criterion — has been rendered uninhabitable by my radioactive demise. Two of my three minutes are done; you may keep the third.”

The creature paused, almost as though in doubt. “Will you accede to fluoroscopic examination?”

“Certainly. But that could be construed as an uncertainty on your part that your superiors would surely question. It would be wiser to blast me right now, before any such complications develop.”

“If you are armed as you describe, that would be disastrous.”

“Perhaps I am bluffing. A bluff is certainly cheaper than a bomb, particularly in these days of runaway inflation.”

“If you are bluffing, then you are probably not a spy and there is no need to blast you. In fact it could be an inadequacy on my record. If you are not bluffing—”

“There is something in what you say, and I commend your perspicacity. Still, I must point out that I could be a real spy who is bluffing merely about the bomb. That is more likely, don’t you agree, than my being an innocent person with a bomb.”

“If you were innocent, you wouldn’t have a bomb.”

Schön shrugged in eloquent defeat not untinged with a hint of well-concealed bad grace. “Have it your way.”

“Assuming that you are a spy, whether armed or unarmed, how could I best deal with you without risking my own life or record?”

“That’s an excellent question. You will no doubt think of much better alternatives, but all that occurs to me at the moment is the possibility of referring the case to your immediate superior, as a matter warranting his discretion.”

It was expeditiously done. After an essentially similar dialogue, Schön was bounced up another link in the chain of command. And another. Eventually he spoke to the chief of intelligence.

“We are satisfied that you are what you claim to be,” the Chief said. “Namely, a talented alien in need of employment. You are also of a physical stock not on record in the galactic speciology, but you are too clever to have been trained on a primitive planet. The probability is, then, that you are a spy for someone — but we hesitate to interrogate you thoroughly until we can be sure you are not an observer from a quote friendly unquote or at least neutral power. Since we have at the moment only one potential enemy and several thousand potential allies, and since we are not adverse to assistance, it behooves us to deal cautiously with you. Probability suggests you are an asset — but how can we minimize the risk?”

“Just don’t try to send me to any temple of Baal.”

“Pardon?”

“It would be expeditious to offer me compensation that is somewhat greater than the amount my overt services warrant. That way, I would be inclined to transfer my allegiance to you, in the event it was not already with your planet. Spies are notoriously underpaid, you know.”

The Chief vibrated a follicle against his beak. “Surely you realize that this is a ridiculous proposition? We would not possibly—”

Schön sighed. “Of course you are right. A captaincy in your navy would be an unheard of reward for a suspected spy, however meritorious his service.”

“Who said anything about — !” the Chief began, his shell crackling with righteous indignation. “A captaincy! I was thinking of Third Lieutenant, J. G., apprentice, probationary.”

Captain Schön docked his sleek destroyer and gave his crew thirty-hour planetary leave while the ship underwent preventive maintenance. He set the thermostat within his flame-red cloak of authority to an invigorating sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, making the mental conversion to local units effortlessly. The few civilians passing him on the street saluted with alacrity; he ignored them. Protocol did no require that an officer return courtesy to any person more than three grades below him, and of course civilians were beneath rank.

He mounted the ramp of the capital and brushed past the rigid guards. The other officers were already assembled in the presidential suite: the five supreme individuals of the planet, gathered about the giant semicircular table. The Monarch, the Prime Minister, the Fleet Admiral, the Chief of Intelligence and the Chancellor of the Exchequer — all waiting somberly for the meeting to begin.

Schön took his place. Not one of the others was particularly pleased at his presence, but they did not dare to make a key decision without him. They knew he was clever enough to foil anything arranged without his consent.

The Prime Minister elevated himself, lifting his venerable thorax above the table. “Gentlemen — we have received an ultimatum from the Hegemony of Lion. We are met here to consider our response.”

The Monarch turned to him. “A précis, if you please.”

“Surrender of all military equipment together with attached personnel. Deportation of hostages to Lion, as itemized. Indemnities. Reconstruction.”

“Standard contract,” the Chief observed.

“All present of this council appear on the hostage list?” the Monarch inquired.

The Minister rattled agreement. “All but the Captain. Together with households.”

The Chancellor coughed. “Households! That means our daughters get dinked.”

“Good for them, I’m sure,” the Chief muttered.

The Chancellor inflated angrily, but the Monarch cut him off by speaking again. “How strict are the indemnities?”

“Standard. Ten percent of Gross Planetary Product for Ram and environs, fifteen percent for subsidiary worlds. Exploitation of subsequently developed offworld resources, fifty percent.”

“Too high,” the Admiral said. “They should not get more than twenty percent of windfall acquisitions.”

“Academic, since we won’t have our navy,” the Chief pointed out. “No ships, no loot — unless you plan to refit merchant vessels for your piracy.”

“Piracy!”

“Gentlemen, let’s not quibble over terminology in this time of crisis,” the Monarch said. “The question is, do we acquiesce?”

“No!” the Admiral exclaimed. “We have the space fold coordinates of their main system updated to the second. We have the missiles for an inundation strike. Act now, and we can wipe them out. Solve the problem once and for all.”

“Very neat,” the Chief said dryly. “Except for their second-strike capability. What use mutual destruction?”

“Better that than slavery!”

“A standard contract is hardly slavery, even with fifty percent windfall appropriation. We have issued similar contracts to lesser species in the past.”

“What makes you think they’ll honor those terms, once our fleet has been dismantled?”

“Haven’t you heard of the Gemini Convention?”

“That’s passé. We never bothered with it. Not for fifty thousand years—”

“Gentlemen,” the Monarch repeated, and the argument subsided fretfully.

“It seems our various opinions are fairly set,” the Minister remarked. “Some are amenable to compromise, some feel we would be foolish to allow ourselves to be read out of power by such means.”

“Better read than dead,” the Chief murmured.

“Treason!” the Admiral exclaimed.

“However,” the Minister continued loudly, “we must agree on some recommendation before this session ends. The Monarch, of course, will make the decision.”

There was a silence.

“I am, as you know, from a far system,” Schön said after an interval. “Possibly my perspective differs from yours.”

They waited noncommittally, grudgingly allowing him to make his case.

“As I understand it, Ram has historically had good relations with Lion. Both hegemonies rose to sapience about a million years before the Traveler appeared, and because of their proximity — within a hundred light-years of each other — an intense dialogue was feasible. The development of spacefold transport was hailed as the beginning of an era of splendor, now that these longtime and compatible correspondents could meet physically and without a time delay of centuries.”

“Ancient history,” snorted the Admiral.

“Yet instead of a mutually beneficial interchange — trade — you developed antipathy. You were at war within a thousand years, and have fought intermittently and inconclusively ever since, just as Tyre fought with Sidon.”

“Tyre? Sidon?” the Admiral inquired. “Where in the galaxy are they? What kind of fleets do they have?”

“Mixed fleets: war galleys and merchanters,” Schön replied straight-faced. “The point is, they depleted their resources and discommoded their navies by striving senselessly against each other, instead of mobilizing against their mutual enemies.”

“That’s an oversimplification,” the Minister said. “We have had numerous encounters with other systems—”

“Three wars with Centaur, two with Swan, altercations with Eagle, Horse, Dog, Hare—” Schön put in.

“Alliances with Bear, Beaver, Dragon—” the Minister interposed in turn, retaining his equanimity.

“All of which were violently sundered. Why? What happened to the mighty era of knowledge and prosperity heralded by the availability of interstellar travel?”

“Our neighbors disappointed us.”

“They all were unworthy. Sure. And now Lion has issued an ultimatum demanding your conditional surrender. Surely they had provocation?”

The Admiral and the Minister rustled their scales discordantly.

“There was a border incident,” the Chief admitted after a small delay.

“Of what nature. Practically speaking, you don’t have a border with Lion. You have to use spacefold — and you can’t just rub up against your neighbor by accident. Not when you have to compress an object of near-planetary mass into its gravitational radius in order to poke through. For that matter, spacefold transport and accurate coordinates make the entire galaxy your neighbor. Light velocity limitation means nothing anymore.”

“It was a reconnaissance mission,” the Admiral said.

“A two-thousand-mile diameter moon on reconnaissance? Equipped to service several thousand warships, each potentially armed with planet-busters? Your euphemism hardly becomes the situation. And I’ll bet you planted it within five light-seconds of their homeworld.”

“Three light-seconds,” the Admiral said almost inaudibly.

“And you didn’t bother with any ultimatum, did you? Just a nice, neat fait accompli. You thought. Sneak your battlemoon right within range of their capital-planet, while their own ships were elsewhere. So what happened?”

“They were ready for us,” the Minister said. “They had complete information.”

“Incredible bungling,” the Chancellor of the Exchequer muttered. “Have you any idea what a battlemoon costs?”

“Obviously there was a leak,” Schön said. He was beginning to get bored.

“Obviously.” The Admiral glared at the Chief, who averted his facets.

“So now Lion has your, er, expedition, and the balance of power has shifted in its favor. Thus the ultimatum.”

None of them replied.

“I have,” Schön continued after a pause, “been doing a little research. I find that this entire question is unimportant.”

Their eyes appraised him stonily.

“Ram and Lion are two principalities amid a galaxy of kingdoms, federations and empires. The only reason neither has been gobbled up yet is that there is insufficient wealth between you to warrant the trouble. However, the flux of major powers is at the state where it has become economically feasible to absorb you both, rather than tolerate your petty raids on civilized installations any longer. You Phoenicians and Greeks are ripe for Egypt or Assyria — or even Alexander.”

The Monarch contemplated him sadly through a golden facet. “Are you ready now to inform us whom you represent? This Alexander, perhaps?”

“I represent no one but myself. I am merely stating facts that should be obvious to any objective party. Your shortsightedness is destroying you. You are wasting each other’s resources while the wolves look on, and they are only waiting until you are at your weakest stage before snapping you up. You would be far better off to make an honest alliance with Lion — even to the extent of accepting that so-called contract — and thus perhaps postpone a more final loss of identity.”

Still they did not comment.

At last the Monarch looked up. “What you say makes sense to us, Captain. We are in the wrong, but it is not too late. We shall accept the contract.”

There was no dissent, of course. The Monarch of Ram had spoken.

Two weeks later Schön’s ship berthed within the transport satellite: another moon of minimum effective mass. It had been stripped, the Chief informed him, and was nothing but a ball of rock, with the exception of the tube leading down into the compression mechanism compartment. The equipment, Schön knew, was far more sophisticated than that constructed by the human party on Triton; this could make use of a far smaller mass, and the location perceptors were precise. This, together with the up-to-date spacefold maps of this area of the galaxy, made a controlled jump routine. He had done his homework here, too, and was familiar with the equipment.

He was alone. He had been selected to make the trip to Lion bearing the capitulation message. “They would not trust any sizable party,” the Chief had explained. “But you, an alien, can negotiate the details, and return with their expeditionary party. We shall be ready, then.”

Yeah, sure, bugeye.

Schön entered the control compartment and examined the telltales. The mechanism had been set and locked: transport was scheduled to occur within the hour, and this had been timed exactly. The express position of the object was important, as the human explorers had known; what the dull-witted humans had not suspected was that the precise time of transport was equally critical. For the universe was not stable; it had been expanding, and now was in a state of flux preparatory to contraction, and this affected every part of it. Some sections were still expanding, while others were already contracting, and special stresses acted even on the interiors of galaxies and stellar systems that appeared to the fleeting animate observer to maintain their original sizes and positions. And this flux caused a drift between adjacent surfaces of jumpspace; the loops were fairly constant, but their fabric continued to stretch, eventually forming new loops of similar size or abolishing old ones. As a result, the differential between adjacent surfaces could be a swift current. In some instances, as shift piled upon shift and jumpspace warped frantically to compensate, the passage of minutes meant a similar number of light-minutes deviation from the calculated location of emergence.

So his journey had been carefully calculated in advance, and the equipment sealed to prevent potentially disastrous distortion. Emergence at the wrong point in space, even if only a few million miles off, could be taken as an indication of betrayal, and the waiting warships would open fire.

Schön unlimbered the special equipment he had brought (smuggled) and powdered the locking devices with single applications of his limited-slip laser. The panel opened, exposing the intricate circuitry. He manipulated his tools with the dexterity and competence he naturally possessed and made certain minor adjustments.

He was not traveling quite where the good Monarch of Ram had arranged.

He returned to his ship, sealed himself in, and entered the melting chamber. The ten-second melt-radiation warner sounded; then—

He came out of it whole, knowing that many hours had passed while his body melted, vaporized and finally compressed along with the ship and moon into a comparative speck — and then reversed the process at the other end of the jump.

He set himself before the ship’s macroscope and looked out at the universe.

There was no destroyer signal, as he had known. The ship’s computer shifted through the configurations and matched his present location: approximately one light-hour away from his scheduled rendezvous in the home-system of Lion.

He smiled. It had worked.

He had set the contraction mechanism for a triple sequence with a delay of only minutes between each effort. Thus the moon had made the first jump to Lion, hesitated momentarily, and gone into the return cycle before protoplasmic reconstitution could start. The brief interim and the relative motion of the two surfaces of space had sent it back at an angle, and it had emerged several light-minutes from its origin. Before the home-crowd could respond, since it took minutes for them even to see it, it had gone into the third compression, to emerge at its present spot. Its route had been a kind of N figure, the displacement magnified by the stress exerted on the fabric of space by adjacent punchthroughs. Dangerous — but what were heroes for, if not to brave danger?

Only then had the reconstitution process commenced. This had taken hours — but his displacement in space should have been sufficient for security. Just about now things should be popping.

They were. The sweep showed the traces that indicated an armada encircling the inhabited world of this system: battleships traveling at speed. The Lions had anticipated treachery.

And the anticipation had been well fulfilled. Two uncharted moons drifted within the system, light-hours apart, and he knew that at least one more was present on the far side, too far from his own location to register yet. Observation by optics or macronics was so slow! It was an all-out attack; the inundation strike the Ram Admiral had urged.

What of the Lion second-strike capability the Chief had so carefully mentioned? Schön smiled again. The solution to that inhibitor was obvious. The Rams had underestimated the perspicacity of the stranger, thinking to set him up as a duped emissary. They had staged a mock meeting and made a mock decision, while the war preparations moved ahead full-scale. There had never been a true capitulation, and probably not even a genuine ultimatum. This thrust had been decades in the making.

Lion ships still cruised in the vicinity of the supposed emergence, though the bulk of that fleet was already heading toward him. They had thought that his moon was merely another unit in the invasion — as indeed it was. But it had not stayed long enough to allow their planet-busters to score, and now was in an unscheduled location. Doubly unscheduled: naturally the Ram schedule differed from that set up for the truce mission, and his own schedule differed from Ram’s.

He adjusted the macroscope to focus within his own moon and took a look on sweep. Sure enough, the buried warships were already coming to life, their crews having emerged from mass gasification. He had at least done them the favor of saving them from the planet-busters; Lion intelligence was better than Ram’s. Not that it made any difference to him.

Strange that they had trusted him with the spacefold mechanism. Perhaps they had feared that he would recognize a dummy-panel — a correct assumption — and had felt that the lock sufficed against incidental mischief. If they really thought he was an important Lion spy, verisimilitude required that he be allowed to observe the setting for himself.

There were hundreds of simpler and surer ways of doing it, naturally. But the military mind had never been noted for its subtlety or efficiency, fortunately. Fortunately? It would not be the military mind if it were clever. Most likely, the Ram strategists had simply underestimated him by a factor of two or three.

In due course his Ram escort would get around to dispatching him as superfluous. His ship was unarmed — theoretically in accordance with the negotiations setup — and lacked working fluid for any extended trip. They were sure they had him penned safely; their immediate concern was the approaching fleet of Lion.

He refocused the scope on the farther reaches of the system. Sure enough: the third expedition had appeared. No moonlet, this; Ram had transported its entire home-world! That was their answer to Lion’s second-strike capability, as he had suspected. Removal of the target from the target-system.

A third time he smiled. Such naïveté!

For now the Lion home-planet was gone, leaving only the massed offensive arm to attack the Ram planet before its inhabitants could be reconstituted. Two could play at this game of treachery and system-jumping!

Oh, the fragments would be small, very small, when the first accredited empire came collecting!

Now it was time to make contact with Lion, on the way to larger things. In three hours the jumpspace mechanism would initiate its fourth and final cycle, with disastrous consequences for any unprepared troops in the vicinity. Those outside the field of compression would be smashed by the moon’s collapse and displacement; those still within it would be preserved — but not in animate state. Only the resilient gas-form could sustain that terrible implosion alive.

Schön paused before the chamber entrance. Exactly how grateful, he wondered, would the opposing monarch — the Pride of Lion — be for a complete undamaged military moon, together with a number of serviceable warships?

Not grateful enough, he decided. Lion would attempt to string him along as had Ram, exercising the eternal governmental prerogative of amorality and fallibility. Meanwhile the internecine struggle would continue, each home-world in orbit about its neighbor’s sun, its native life suffering from the unfamiliar radiation.

No, the real rewards for the entrepreneur would not occur until an empire made its move.

Perhaps such a move could be hastened by a little judicious manipulation…

Still smiling, Schön stepped into the chamber. “Alexander, where are you?” he murmured as the warner sounded.

“A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly upon the bosom of that harmony…” And Ivo was that flute, or of it, and the chambers he descended into were liquid. First he encountered the scorpion resting on the beach, not a horror, huge as it was, but rather with an aspect of creativity and fairness. Then he passed the crab, who watched patiently from under the surface, housed beneath a shell. At last he stopped at the tank wherein the fishes were swimming, like twin animate feet wading under the wave. Upon the one was written SYMPATHY, and upon the other HEART.

“From the warm concave of the fluted note Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float, As if a rose might somehow be a throat…” Ivo said to Pisces in the prescribed mode.

And the first fish replied: “Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone Breathes through life’s strident polyphone…”

And the second fish continued: “Yea, all fair forms, and sounds and lights, And warmths, and mysteries, and mights, Of Nature’s utmost depths and heights…”

And the first: “So Nature calls through all her system wide, Give me thy love, O man, so long denied…”

And the second: “Trade! is thy heart all dead, all dead? And hast thou nothing but a head? I’m all for heart,” the flute-voice said.

And on the bottom of the tank was written in sand and shell:

Physical contact between the stellar cultures of the galaxy in fact meant chaos. All species had needs and ambitions, and few were ethical in galactic sense when subject to meaningful temptation. Prejudices submerged during the long purely-intellectual contact reappeared now with renewed force. It developed that certain warm, liquid-blooded species had an inherent aversion to certain cold mucous-surfaced species, however equivalent their intellects, and many other combinations were similarly incompatible. Certain species turned pirate, preying on others and taking wealth, slaves and food without fair recompense; others inaugurated programs of colonization that led rapidly to friction. Not all encounters were violent; some were mutually beneficial. But the old, stable order had been completely overturned, and power shifted radically from the intellectual to the biological and physical. Highly civilized cultures were overrun and annihilated by barbarians.

A new order arose, dominated by the most ruthless and cunning species. Greed and distrust acted to split and weaken the empires of these new leaders, forcing further change and breakup, in an ever more dissolute spiral. In the course of half a million years, galactic civilization as an entity disappeared entirely, submerged in the tide of violence; no macroscopic broadcasting stations remained except the extragalactic Traveler. Isolated by their own released savagery, all species declined. It was the Siege of Darkness.

Approximately one million years after its inauguration the Traveler beam terminated. The siege was over — but the progress of galactic civilization had been set back immeasurably. As time passed, macroscopic stations began again to broadcast, and a new network was established — but the scars of the Siege were long in healing. Love, once denied, recovered slowly.

“You are better now,” the voice said hopefully.

Beatryx opened her eyes, that were still stinging from the salt, and squinted into the warm sunlight. She was wearing a black bathing suit somewhat more scant than seemed appropriate. “Oh, yes!” she agreed, a little dizzy from her recent immersion. It had seemed she was drowning…

The young man’s face seemed to shine. “Lida! Persis! Durwin! A paean, for she who was lost is healed!”

Three handsome young persons bounded across the sand. “Joy!” the leader cried, a muscular giant, sleek with the water dripping from his torso.

In moments they stood before her: two bronzed young men, two lovely girls, each radiating vitality. All had lustrous black hair and classically sculptured features.

The first man spoke again, more formally: “This is Persis, girl of peace.” The girl performed a motion suggestive of a curtsy, smiling. Her teeth were bright and even. “This is Lida, beloved of us all.” The second girl genuflected, smiling as politely as the first. “And my dear friend Durwin.” The second man raised his hand in a formal wave rather like a salute, hoisting an eyebrow merrily.

“And I,” the speaker said diffidently, “am Hume — lover of my home.” His smile was the most winning of all.

Beatryx tried to speak, but Hume squatted to touch her lips lightly with his slender finger. “Do not name yourself. Surely we know you already. Have you not brought joy to us?”

“She who brings joy!” Durwin exclaimed. “Her name would be—”

“Beatrice!” the two girls cried.

“No,” Hume said solemnly. “That would be common joy, and hers is uncommon.”

Durwin studied her. “You are right. Look at her hair! She is as a diamond amidst quartz. Yet joy must be her designation. Not Beatrice, nor Beatrix—”

“But Beatryx!” Hume finished.

“We shall call her Tryx,” the girl Persis said;

Beatryx listened to all of this with tolerance. “You knew my name already,” she said.

“We knew what it had to be,” Hume said, and offered no further explanation.

“Where is this?” She looked at the white sand and he strings of seaweed and the green-white surf.

“Where,” Hume inquired gently, “would you like it to be?”

“Why, I don’t really know. I suppose it doesn’t matter. It must be like Ivo’s dream, when he went to Tyre — only it seems so real!”

“Come,” Durwin said. “Evening is hard upon us, and the village is not in sight.”

“Yes,” Lida agreed. “We must show you to our companions.”

Then Beatryx was walking down the long beach, seeing the light of the setting sun refracted off the rolling water in splays of colored light. The men paced her on either side and the girls skipped next to them. Inland the palmlike vegetation rose, casting long and waving shadows in the distance. The air was warm and moist, rich with the briny odors of the sea. Underfoot — all feet were bare, including hers, she suddenly realized — the sand was hot but not uncomfortable, spiced with multihued pebbles and occasional conchlike shells. The word “murex” came to her, but she could not place either the source or the meaning; certainly she had never seen shells quite like these before.

Half a mile down the curving shoreline rested the village, a cluster of conical tents on the beach. In the center she saw a bonfire, great fat sparks leaping into the darkening sky, occasional fluffy wood-ashes drifting in the air current coming in across the water. She could smell the burning cellulose, together with hot stones and charred seaweed, and the hungry aroma of roasting fish.

Hume took her by the arm and guided her into the crowd. “This is Tryx,” he proclaimed. “Come from the water, and great joy to us that she is sound and well.”

“Another rescued!” someone cried. They gathered about, dark-haired, slender, glowing with health and friendliness. There were about thirty in all, as comely a group as she had ever seen. “See how fair she is!” a girl exclaimed.

Beatryx laughed, embarrassed. “I am not fair! I’m almost forty!” With that she wondered where Harold was. It was strange to be anywhere without him, and not entirely comfortable, though these were certainly nice people. Harold and Ivo and Afra — were they still back in the floating chamber, watching her as the three had watched Ivo before? But she had no Schön-personality to direct the trip… it was all so complicated.

The others smiled. “We must build a house for you,” one said, and immediately there was a flurry of action. One of the tents was evidently a storehouse; from it the men and women, working in cheerful concert, brought poles and rolls of clothlike material and lengths of cord. Some quickly planted the poles deep in the sand and bound them together at the top, while others wrapped the cloth around the outside of the resultant structure. Beatryx noticed that there were snap fastenings at the edges, so that the material could be easily joined to itself and to the uprights.

And it was complete: a many-colored teepee residence for her to stay in while she was here. They stood back and looked at her expectantly.

“It’s very nice,” she said. “But—”

They waited, but she could not go on. It way very nice, and their society was very nice — but how could she inquire the purpose of it all? She had entered some kind of — diagram? — something with little balls falling and wheels spinning, and she had seen strange animals as though one of Harold’s charts had come to life, and finally she had fallen into a pond with talking fish — or had she been the fish, somehow? — and some kind of writing on the bottom. She understood vaguely that it all had to do with history and the reason she and Harold and Ivo and Afra had come to this place. That place. But now she was by herself, and there was no history and no explanation, and she did not know how to phrase her question.

If only Harold were here to take charge! He was so practical about such things.

“Thank you so much,” she finally said.

“A paean!” Hume cried, and suddenly the group was in song, a melody of sheer exuberance and youthful glee. The voices of the girls were like flutes, marvelously clear and high.

Then they were all sitting around the fire, now a ring of dimming coals, and passing spicy, juicy fish around, each one wrapped in tough green leaves. For drink there was something very like coconut milk, but richer and more filling. She worried that it might be alcoholic, but was soon satisfied that it was not.

No one seemed to have lamps, and when the last of the fire died they were sitting in the dark. The men were exchanging stories of the fish they had speared or almost speared that day, and the territory they had explored: some fabulous fish, some astonishing territory, if everything were to be believed. The girls spoke of the pretty flowers they had seen inland, and the colored stones they had collected. No one asked Beatryx where she had been, and she was glad of that because she did not see how she could explain.

It was all very pleasant, and even the sea-breeze was not cold; but there was one problem. She had dined well and sipped well, and certain urgencies of nature were developing. But which tent…?

On her left sat Hume; on her right, Durwin. She could not inquire.

At last the gathering broke up and the merry voices faded into the night. It was time to retire.

She stood up uncertainly. She was no longer sure where her tent was, or what she should do once she reached it. As for the other—

A gentle hand took her arm. “Will you walk with me?” Persis’ soft voice came.

Thankfully she accepted the guidance. They walked out of the village and into the line of vegetation; she could tell only by the retreating sound of the waves and by the occlusion of a swath of stars by overhanging branches every so often. Now and then her foot came down on a twig or pebble, but there was nothing harsh enough to cause pain.

“Here.”

“Here?” They were still in the forest; she was sure of that much. Night insects chirruped and fluttered nearby. Where was the building?

Persis squatted down.

Beatryx realized, with a despairing shock, that this was it. There were no lavatory facilities! Nothing but the bushes. And these people weren’t even disturbed!

Harold would have arranged to build a privy, at least…

There was a fluffy mattress on the floor of her domicile, and no wind entered to disturb things. Persis showed her where to hang her bathing suit, and left. The advantage of the teepee format was that everything was within reach in the dark. It was comfortable enough.

Comfortable enough physically, but not aesthetically. To sleep without night clothing… and no sanitary facilities! She knew she was being foolish, but these were aspects of the primitive idyl that disturbed her profoundly.

Now she wondered about the sleeping arrangements of her companions. It seemed to her that there had been fewer than twenty structures in the village. Not enough for each person to have one. Were a number of these young men and women married? She had seen no sign of this; no rings on any fingers, no marital designations.

Perhaps Hume and Durwin shared a tent, and Lida and Persis. Young people often did not like to remain alone. Nor, for that matter, did people like Beatryx herself. Still—

She knew what Harold would say: other peoples, other customs. Let them be.

If only he were here!

In the morning the young men gathered more dry branches for the fire, but did not light it. The girls brought fruit from the forest, harvesting it from somewhere, and more coconuts. The nectar, it turned out, was from these. Teams of men punched holes in the mighty-husked objects and skillfully poured the juice into gourds. The women added flavoring from crushed berries.

Breakfast was as supper had been: a communal gathering around the fire — still unlit — and distribution of succulent sections of fruit and cups of drink. Instead of tales of the day’s adventures, the dialogue was about forthcoming projects: where the best fishing might be had, whether it was time to move the camp to a new location, the prospects for rain.

“I,” Hume said, “shall scout to the south this morning. Maybe I can find a suitable campsite.”

“And who will go with you?” Persis demanded with a twinkle. “Do you think we can trust a man to make such an important survey?”

“Tryx will go with me!” he replied jovially. “Was I not first to find her?”

“Are you sure it was not her sunbeam hair you found first?” Persis concentrated with mock-brooding on a strand of her own black tresses.

“I really don’t know anything about campsites,” Beatryx protested. It was foolish again, but she felt flattered by the frequent references to her hair. Once, of course, it had been quite fair, and some of the color lingered. Of course it would be subject to comment amid a black-haired group such as this, but it really was nothing remarkable.

“Do you think he does?” Persis said. Beatryx took a moment to remember that this referred to knowledge of campsites. The matter seemed to be decided.

She and Hume walked down the beach, not hurrying. Beatryx worried about sunburn, but clouds were growing in the sky and rain seemed to be a more likely problem.

“Is it like this — all the time?” she asked, still having trouble framing her question. She had not understood, before, why Ivo had not simply snapped out of his Tyre-dream. Now she appreciated his situation. This world included sleep! Waking up was merely waking up, not a return. There was nothing to take hold of, no way to — she still couldn’t formulate it.

“All summer,” he said. He carried a fishing spear that he used as a staff.

So that was it! A summer holiday. “Where are your families?”

“Oh, they’re inland. It is too dangerous for them on the beaches.”

“Dangerous?” That didn’t sound like vacation!

“The blacks,” he said, as though that explained it.

“What are the blacks?”

He looked uncomfortable. “They come up from the sea. I thought you knew all about — that. We have to stop them from infesting the land. Every year some try. If they ever take hold and start breeding—” He looked ahead. “There it is! I wanted you to see it.”

She followed his gaze and spied an abutment of rock — a sheer cliff rising out of the sea, twenty feet high. It was an unusual formation, since the vertical side faced away from the ocean and toward the beach. Harold would have made some observation about reverse tidal undercutting, but she didn’t really understand that kind of thing. It was very pretty.

The clouds had overcast the sun, but as if stage-directed they parted to let a beam come down. It struck the sea-side of the rock, and there was a brilliant flash from the edge.

“What is that?” she asked, concerned.

“The sun-stone,” he said, running toward it. She had to follow, bewildered.

The overcast closed in again, but as she came up to the cliff she discovered why the rock had seemed to take fire. It was mirror-surfaced! The face toward the beach was a clean fracture that had been polished by nature or man until it shone. The beach was reflected in it, and the distant trees, making it appear almost like a window to another world.

Could she step through? Would that convey her back to—

Then she saw herself within it, and gasped.

She had lost twenty years. Her hair was thick and blonde, as it had been before she settled in to married life. Her face was thin, narrow-chinned, like those of the girls here, and her figure appallingly trim.

“And you said you were not fair!” Hume said, divining her thoughts. “You said you were forty.”

“But I was — am,” she said, confused. “I don’t understand this.”

“Why try? Too much understanding only brings sorrow, as we well know.” And he was off again down the beach, the mirror-rock a fancy only of the moment.

She lingered, ostensibly to investigate the other facets of the structure, all as clear as the first but much smaller, but actually taking in the marvelous picture. The too-scant suit — now it was voluptuous. She was young again, and… fair. Perhaps she had known it before, and not believed.

“Tryx!”

She jumped, surprised by his impatience, and ashamed to be caught indulging in schoolgirl vanity, and ran to him. Yes, she could recognize it now: she had the vitality of a girl of seventeen.

But Hume’s exclamation had not been impatient. He had found something.

A line of footprints crossed the beach from the water to the trees. They were not human; the indentations were too large and shallow, even where the moist sand near the surf held them well. Webbed prints.

“It must have crossed within the hour,” Hume said tersely.

A reaction ran up her bare back and tightened the nape of her neck. “A — black?”

He nodded. “We can’t catch it now. Impossible to run it down in the brush, except with a full party.”

“What can we do?” The tension made her feel nauseated in exactly the way Ivo had described.

“I’ll stand guard here. You run back to the village and warn the others. And be careful — they usually travel in pairs and cross in different places, so that if we get one — hurry!”

Fear gave her fleetness. She skipped over the sand, running at the line where the water gave it firmness, though the ocean horrified her now. Creatures from the deeps!

She passed the mirror-stone and went on, panting already. How far had they come down the beach? At least a mile — a long, long distance, now. What if the black came back before she fetched the others? Hume had only his spear. Those awful footprints…

She had to slow down. She was young, but she could not keep up this headlong pace. Her side ached.

She walked, recovering. She felt guilty, as though she were malingering, but this was the best she could do. She glanced over her shoulder, half afraid something would be coming after her, and saw that the mirror-stone was already out of sight. That made her more nervous than ever.

Something caught her eye in the water, and she turned back. She jumped, though she knew it was only a wave, or perhaps a bit of driftwood coming into sight between the swells. She started to run again, but the pain in her side came back quickly, dragging at her strength.

Again that shape in the ocean, attracting her unwilling eye. She forced herself to look carefully, trying to convince herself all the way down inside that it was nothing. Only a freak swell caused by adjoining currents in the tide; that was what Harold would say, comfortingly.

A black, monstrous-eyed head rose out of the whitening froth, two glossy antennae quivering.

Beatryx screamed.

It was the wrong thing to do. Instantly the head swiveled to cover her. She saw its banded snout, the fixed round hole of a toothless mouth beneath. It was earless, but it had heard her — and now it was swimming or slithering toward her with alarming speed.

She bolted for the forest, but the loose dry sand caught at her feet while giving way beneath them, impeding her and throwing her off balance. She fell, sand flying up and into her face. She choked on it and tried to brush it out of her eyes, but her hands were covered with it.

Somehow she could not get coordinated. She remained on hands and knees in the sand, watching the creature through streaming eyes.

The thing rose out of the water and came at her, a towering ebony figure. The scales of its thick body gleamed metallically. She saw through her sandy tears that its extremities — all four of them — were webbed. This was a black!

Then it loomed above her, hoisted upon two legs, the great square bulk of its forward segment swaying near. The antennae vibrated, casting off drops of moisture…

A cry in the distance! The black’s head rotated toward the sound and its dangling flipper-forefeet hoisted up. The others had heard her cries! They were coming! The brute shuffled around and away, driving for the ocean. But already a party of men were running along the fringe of surf, cutting off its retreat. The black was clumsy; it could not move rapidly on land, and she saw that the powdery sand inhibited its grossly webbed feet even more than her own. It was trapped.

“Joy! You are all right!” Persis cried, running up to her and flinging herself to her knees.

“Hume!” Beatryx gasped, remembering. “He — he’s watching for another one! Beyond the mirror-stone!”

“The sun-stone!” Several men detached themselves and pounded on down the beach, holding their spears aloft. They understood.

Meanwhile six men were closing in on the nearby creature. It spun about awkwardly, seeking some passage to the water, but there was none. At last it charged, a caged bull, raising its solid forelimbs threateningly.

Durwin’s spear thunked into its body. The black stumbled, clutching at the shaft but not mortally wounded, and the men were on it.

“Kill it! Kill it!” Persis screamed, her eyes dilated, her fingers curved into claws.

“Kill it!” Beatryx echoed, horrified by the narrowness of her escape.

The spears rose and fell in a frenzy of attack. The sea-thing’s gross body twisted and fell, bright red blood dripping down its scales. A kind of groan issued from it; then it collapsed face-down in the sand, the water lapping at the tip of one forelimb.

“It’s dead,” Durwin said with grim satisfaction. “Now let’s go after that other one. Spread out and watch for any more along the beach, too.”

The men moved on, leaving the vanquished hulk where it lay bleeding into the moist sand. It was the women who spread out, facing the ocean, each one scrutinizing the ocean for signs. Their grim expressions differed strikingly from the simple camaraderie of the evening before.

“How fortunate we heard you in time!” Persis said, helping Beatryx to her feet. “In another moment it would have touched you.”

“I thought I was dead, when I fell,” Beatryx said, still shaking with reaction. “I couldn’t get up again, I was so frightened.”

“Dead?” A fine dark eyebrow arched inquisitively.

“I mean, I couldn’t get away from it.”

Persis nodded. “That’s horrible, I know. One of them touched me once, on the arm, and I thought I’d never wash that spot clean. I was an outcast for weeks. Filthy thing!”

Something was strange. “It didn’t hurt you?”

“Of course not. They wouldn’t dare attack a human being.”

A sick feeling crept over Beatryx. “What do they do, then? I mean, if you hadn’t come here in time—”

“Don’t you know? It probably would have touched you, tried to talk to you. Disgusting.”

“They talk?”

“They talk. But let’s get off this depressing subject. You must be very tired, after what you went through.”

Beatryx looked toward the body. “What about it?”

“The men will burn it and bury the suit. We don’t need to look. They’ll put on special gloves, and bury them too, afterward. That’s the worst part of it — having to handle them.”

Something else nagged her. “The suit?”

“The diving suit. They use those rigs for swimming under the water. Didn’t you see?”

Beatryx walked to the body, appalled at what she knew she would find. “That’s a man!”

“That’s a black!” Persis corrected her. Then, horrified: “What are you doing?”

Beatryx ignored her. She kneeled beside the corpse, seeing now the machined parts she had taken for scales. The protective face-mask attached to the large goggles, almost the way the macroscope headgear did. The breathing apparatus — what she had seen as the “snout” — was fastened below the helmet to a ribbed diving outfit. She put her hands to the helmet and twisted, and the mask snapped loose. She worked it away from the face.

The head inside was that of a young man, as handsome in his own way as Hume was in his. This man was dark, however: a Negro.

A black.

Beatryx stumbled along in the dusk. The stones and brush and sharp twigs hurt her feet but did not slow her. The cries of the men and women of the beach village were lost behind her; they would not find her tonight, and tomorrow did not matter.

That such a lovely world could have such horror! It had been so appealing at first, with the delicious climate, attractive seascape, and friendly people. And her own gift-body, youthful and vigorous.

But to kill fellow-men so brutally simply because they came from the sea — she could not comprehend or accept this. Harold would never have abided it. He was a peaceful man but could be moved to severe measures when something really important came up. “The horoscope does not specify race,” he would have said.

So she had fled. Not bravely, not openly; she was not a courageous woman, and she did not know what was best. She had washed her hands again and again, as they demanded, though in truth she was not ashamed of the touch of the black; rather she was painfully remorseful that she had failed to touch the man when it had counted, in her fatal ignorance. She had waited until night, then gone into the forest as though to — to employ the facilities. Then she had plunged into the darkness, though the branches struck cruelly at her bare flesh and the rocks turned under her bruising feet.

No, she did not have physical courage, and the darkness terrified her, with its thousand lurking suggestions of spiders and snakes and centipedes. But there was something she had to do. It was the thing Harold would have done.

She made her way to the beach and found the corpse. Then she moved down toward the mirror-cliff. Even in the night she was sure she could find that landmark, and of course it was not completely dark. The stars were out in vaguely unfamiliar constellations, and the ocean glowed gently. It was cool, now, but her motion kept her warm.

She saw the somber hump of rock and knew that her bearings were good. Only a little way beyond this spot…

Now, cautiously, she began to call. “Black — black, I don’t have any weapon… black, if you’re there, I want to talk with you… black, where are you?…”

For somewhere was the second black. The men had not found it — found him. They had followed the traces, but the man from the sea had eluded them in the brush. Tomorrow they were going to burn the forest here, to drive him out.

He had to be here somewhere, Hume had explained, for in the chase the man’s face-plate had been knocked out. It had fallen to the ground, and Hume had it. He had hurled it into the fire with gloved hands so that it could never be used again. The black could not go under the sea again without it.

Neither could he get far inland, for the second line of defense was canine. The big, vicious dogs would be released if they winded him, and the black surely knew that. They were cunning that way, Hume had explained. They knew enough to stay clear of the hounds. He would not venture out of the shoreline foliage.

Tomorrow, the fire…

“Black,” she called again. “I have the other faceplate…”

It had been a grisly task, in the dark, prying out the plate from the helmet of the corpse. But what else could she do? She could not let them kill another man.

For an hour she tramped up and down the beach, not daring to call too loudly lest the others hear. There was no answer. Then she cut into the forest, hurting her feet again but keeping on, still calling. She could think of nothing else to do.

And finally blind purpose prevailed. Somewhere in the night she had an answer.

“I hear you, white.”

It was a woman’s voice.

And Beatryx found her, lying in the hollow between two fallen trunks. The woman had a tiny electric lantern she had kept hooded until now — until she was sure that the calling voice was not a trap. By its abruptly unfettered light Beatryx saw that the woman had removed her useless helmet and much of the rest of the underwater outfit. She lay on her side, her rather attractive dark head propped against her elbow.

“You have to move,” Beatryx said urgently. “They’re going to set fire to the forest. They’re going to—”

“One place is as good as another,” the woman replied philosophically.

“You don’t understand. Tomorrow morning—”

“Tomorrow morning you be gone from here, white. And don’t tell them you saw me, or they’ll kill you too. I can’t move.”

“But I brought you the face-plate. From the dead man. So you can go back under the water. That’s why I—”

“White.”

The tone stopped her. The woman angled the light of the lantern so that it illuminated the area around her feet.

Then Beatryx understood. Both flippers were off, and one black ankle was swollen grotesquely. The woman could not walk.

“I’ll help you get to the water,” Beatryx said quickly. “You can swim slowly, can’t you? Using your hands and one foot?”

“I could.” But the tone was fatalistic. Obviously the woman did not intend to try. “Where would I go in the sea, what would I do, and my husband dead on land?”

Her husband!

What would Beatryx do if Harold were dead? If some stranger had casually mentioned the fact and offered his belongings for her use? There would not be much point in going on. Why should this woman feel any differently?

“I am Dolora,” the woman said. “The lady of sorrows.”

“I am Beatryx. But I don’t bring any joy to you.” How stupid her name seemed now! And how pitiful the delayed introduction, abreast of tragedy.

Dolora carefully removed a capsule from a sealed pocket in her suit and swallowed it.

“Your foot?” Beatryx inquired sympathetically. “For the pain?”

“For the pain, yes.”

“How did this happen?” Beatryx asked after a pause. “Why do they hate you? Why do you come from the ocean?”

And Dolora explained: In the time of the Traveler Siege the whites of this planet had embarked upon conquest and plunder, recognizing no law but force. The blacks of the neighboring less-technological world had been defeated and subjugated. Great numbers of them had been brought to this world as slaves.

“But you are both human!” Beatryx protested. “How could—”

“We are of the same stock, yes,” Dolora said, misunderstanding the nature of her objection. “There must have been a prior siege, before the dawn of history, and one world colonized the other. We could not have evolved independently. But this world is not so good for us as was our own; its sun is too dim.”

Beatryx had meant to protest the enslavement of one human race by another, rather than the genetic probabilities. Now she remembered how similar it had been on Earth, and did not bring the matter up again.

When the siege ended (Dolora continued) and the Traveler signal was gone, the slaves were stranded on the alien world. But, deprived of foreign conquests, the whites returned to planetary matters, and gradually a liberalizing sentiment grew among them. In time they formally abolished the institution of slavery. But there followed a considerable minority reaction against this, as certain economic interests suffered; and trouble was continuous. The blacks had mastered the white technology but were refused admittance into white society.

At last a compromise was achieved. The blacks were given a country of their own — under the water. They built tremendous dome-cities there, with artificial sunlight approximating that of their homeworld, and they cultivated the flora and fauna of the sea-floor efficiently. They traded with the landborne whites, shipping up ocean produce and metals from undersea mines in exchange for grams and wood.

The separation was not complete. A few blacks had elected to remain on land in spite of stringent discrimination there, and a few whites had joined the undersea kingdom. Both minorities had a difficult time of it, being under constant suspicion, though their motives had been high. Periodically some land-blacks would give up and seek the sea, and some sea-whites would return to land. These were welcomed by both groups as rescued personnel, and encouraged to publish lurid narratives of their hardships among the barbarians.

Beatryx realized at this point what the whites had taken her for.

But gradually this supposedly ideal compromise had soured. Too many on each side believed they somehow had the worst of the bargain. Politicians forwarded their careers by making a scapegoat of the other culture, and after a time polemics became policy. Trade became disrupted, and the blacks found their diet lacking in trace elements that only land-grown produce could provide, while the whites’ industry suffered for lack of the sea metals. It seemed to each that the other was maliciously trying to destroy it.

White militants made preparations for what they claimed would be an effective solution to the problem: not a kind one. But they acted subtly, because the great majority still believed in the double-culture compromise, and would protest if the truth were to become known. Meanwhile the black militants were also making their moves. They had almost achieved control of their government, and would take military action against the whites as soon as the proper power was theirs. They, too, believed in simple solutions.

At best, somebody was going to be badly hurt. At worst…

“We don’t want this strife either,” Dolora said. Her voice had become lower and sadder, as though she were very tired, and Beatryx had to strain to hear. “It will be the end. We have to establish lines of communication. To put the reasonable blacks in touch with the reasonable whites, acquaint them all with the leadership crisis, reintegrate the two societies. This two-culture compromise is sundering the planet…”

“But why don’t you just send a — a message? Telling them? Or talk with—”

“Governments do not listen very well,” Dolora said, her voice a whisper. “Particularly ‘conservative’ governments. And as for talking — that is what the two of us set out to do. We were not the first. For many years people like us have been trying, but none has returned, and no one has come to us from the whites. But my husband and I — we did not believe that the average white would actually refuse to listen, if approached without malevolence. So we came without weapons, spreading out in the hope of making individual contact sooner, thinking good intentions were enough—”

And had met savagery. And Beatryx herself, caught up in the fever, had cried “Kill it!” with the others.

And thus this girl’s well-meaning husband had been butchered, and she pursued through the forest by a killer mob — all because the man had seen Beatryx and come to talk with her.

“But I see now that we were wrong,” Dolora whispered. “They do not want to listen. So there is nothing to be done.”

Beatryx herself had been so ignorant. She had screamed instead of listening. What could she say?

“Dolora, I—”

But the girl was not paying attention. She lay still, her head resting in dry leaves. Asleep?

Beatryx picked up the lantern and shone it on Dolora. Then she touched the flaccid hand.

The girl appeared to be dead.

Now, too late, Beatryx realized the significance of the capsule. Dolora had taken it after she was assured that her husband was dead…

Beatryx looked for something to dig with. It seemed important that the girl be buried before the fire came. Then she realized that something more important remained. No whites had gone to the undersea city…

Tediously she stripped the remainder of the suit from the dead girl’s body. She experimented with the various attachments and controls, learning how the air supply operated. She fitted in the alternate face-plate. The suit was well designed and largely automatic; otherwise, she knew, she could never have succeeded in using it. Probably if the face-plate had not been designed to pop out without disturbing the goggles, it would not have come loose.

“You were not wrong, Dolora,” she said.

She put on the suit and all its equipment, sealed herself in, and made her way to the water. It was almost morning.

Beatryx was not a proficient swimmer, but her strong new body and the diving equipment made the endeavor possible. She was tired, she was clumsy, she was afraid, but she could do it because she had to. She entered the water, her feet stinging as the salt brine pried into the multiple scratches. She submerged, relieved to discover that she could breathe well enough, and followed the coastal shelf down. The suit was heavy, holding her down, so that she actually walked as much as she swam.

She pushed forward for what seemed like many hours. Her arms and legs became tremendously weary, and the unfamiliar suit chafed, but she kept on. She fought down her mounting and unreasonable fear of sharks, stingrays, octopi, huge-clawed crabs, murky black crevices in the ocean floor…

If she could only reach the dome-city, wherever it was—

“Ahoy!” The voice startled her. It was coming from her helmet!

Someone was addressing her over the suit’s radio. She had made contact!

A pair of shapes came out of the murk, bearing search beams. “Identify yourself, stranger! Don’t you know this is restricted water?”

“I — I am Beatryx. I — I borrowed this suit so that I could come and tell you—”

“That’s a white!” the voice said, shocked.

“Kill it!” another voice said, charged with loathing. “Don’t let it contaminate our waters.”

“But you don’t understand!” Beatryx cried. “You have to listen—”

Then the powered spear transfixed her, and she died.

Not the heat of the flame or the coolness of water, this time, but the ambience of atmosphere. First he encountered the twins, two handsome young men breathing the fresh air, exuding life and joy. Then the loyal water-carrier, walking in mist, whose burden was truth; and if the slowly marching man resembled a portrait of Sidney Lanier, this was not surprising. Ivo had tried all his life to assume the task of this man, to carry perhaps one of his heavy buckets, but had never quite succeeded. Finally he came to the balance: the great ornate scales of Libra, out in the open sky, paired dishes swinging gently in the breeze. Upon the one was written EQUIVALENCE, and upon the counterweight, JUSTICE.

Ivo had watched the machinations of the ram with one part of his mind, and the tragedy of the fishes with another. They were only dreams, in one sense — yet real information had been conveyed through them, and he knew that real resolutions were necessary. He could not act, himself, for the moment he stopped playing the symphony everything would stop, in whatever state it existed. Perhaps here, with the scales, was the assistance so desperately required concurrently for the flute; here amid the hornlike air of the symphony.

“There thrust the bold straightforward horn,” he began. “To battle for his lady lorn…”

And the scales replied in that voice of the horn: “Is Honor gone into his grave? Hath Faith become a catiff knave, And Selfhood turned into a slave, To work in Mammon’s cave, Fair Lady?”

And Ivo read the print behind the scales, written in vapors in the atmosphere, certain that everything would be all right.

But a hundred million years is a long time, and civilization developed again after the passing of the Traveler. Some cultures dwindled in importance, unable to adapt again to purely intellectual contact; some overcame their setback and achieved new elevation. The net long-range effect of the siege could be construed as a selection: those cultures unfit for galactic contact eliminated themselves by their own violence. Unfortunately, they took with them a similar number of those that were not suicidally violent. Nevertheless civilization, once it recovered, went on to a new height, for there was the spur of the potential demonstrated by the Traveler.

But suppose the Traveler itself returned, to wreak devastation again? Certain evidences suggested that there had been prior sieges, possibly many of them; perhaps civilization had risen, flourished and perished many times, leaving not even a memory. Were the cultures of this period simply to disappear at such time as the Traveler laid siege again? Or could something be done to stop a recurrence?

Plans were made. Theory was perfected, special stations were constructed. A select cadre was trained and maintained from generation to generation and millennium to millennium. If the Traveler came again, this galaxy was ready.

And it did come, as projected — one hundred million years after the earlier siege. Dissolution proceeded where it touched, as species far too young to remember or appreciate the devastation of the last siege embarked upon trade and its corollary, conquest. Some of these did not know about the Plan, however — and sought in their naïveté to prevent it. A number of stations were disrupted…

Harold Groton came out of it as he had before: not with nausea or alarm, but simply a feeling of stress, of internal acceleration. The sensation did not bother him; in a manner of speaking he had been rehatched and matured in minutes and hours, and in another sense he had retraced the entire evolutionary experience of the hive in the same period. It was the nature of the reconstitution.

He leapfrogged out of the chamber and looked around. The room was unfamiliar, but elegant. A daylight-emulating ceiling of muted yellow, richly muraled walls depicting hive activities, resilient flooring, uniquely styled furniture — a very plush accommodation.

There was a triple-refraction mirror — one of many, he noticed — at hand, and he positioned himself before it to assess his condition before dressing. He did not recall undertaking a melting cycle this time, though; in fact, he had been—

Small-thought ceased abruptly.

The image in the mirror was man-sized, as far as he could tell. The creature was basically tripodal, so that two small feet offset one very large center foot. Perambulation was by leapfrog: the center leg provided most of the power, the side legs incidental support, somewhat like a one-legged man on crutches. He was able to stand on the center leg alone and spin about in a small circle, but the pair of legs were less stable. Walking human-fashion was impossible; the side legs acted in concert when supporting weight unless he concentrated directly on them, much as had the toes of his erstwhile human foot. Offsetting the third leg in front was a mound that tapered into the torso.

The upper limbs were also triple, with the third arm rising from what he thought of as the chest area. Unlike the third leg, this limb was slender and delicate. Evidently this species had evolved from six-legged stock, modified for an upright posture. Three eyes decorated the head, and each saw in a different color and fashion, making an impressive composite picture. He closed one eye and found that the image differed substantially; much could be learned by using only one or two eyes at a time, and analyzing the result and filtered view. There were three ears on the back of the head, and these were also very good in concert, each responding to a different range. He was sure he could detect much more intricate and extended sound than ever as an Earthman.

It was a good body, in good condition; he could sense its general health. He realized that this was to be his home for the duration: this alien body. The experience was novel but not alarming.

“Drone!” an imperious inhuman voice called from the adjacent room, sonically assaulting all three ears.

“Immediately, mistress,” he replied on the center frequency, and perambulated hastily in that direction. He had supposed walking would be awkward, but for this creature it was not. Observing it in action, he suspected that if this body were to engage in a foot race on even terms with his human form, this one would win.

The language employed, like the body, was alien to anything in his prior experience, yet he handled both with expertise. He had not intended to respond: his body had done that automatically. Was this the way of Ivo’s gift of tongues at Tyre?

The female he approached was similar in construction to himself, but larger and adapted for reproduction. He presumed that she laid eggs, perhaps thousands of them. Her swollen midsection was certainly geared for it. Yet her form was the essence of sex appeal by the definition of this species. He was of this species now, and he felt himself becoming interested, despite his human background. Well, other cultures, other ways.

“Groom me for presentation,” she snapped (her mandibles making it literal), not bothering to give a reason.

Groton rebelled at the tone — but his body was already active, rushing to a cabinet, unsealing the waxy fastening easily, taking out a brushlike device, and approaching the female with due deference.

This time he was sure the process was involuntary. This body he occupied was strongly conditioned. Unless he exercised conscious control all the time, it went about its business as usual.

He/it played the brush over the fur of her thorax, some electrical interaction making the pelt brighten and fluff out with each pass. Groton let the task continue while he explored his situation internally. There ought to be an explanation somewhere, a mind belonging to this body—

There was. As easily as his intention to search had come, the object was realized.

He was the Drone: consort to the Queen. He was expected to do nothing other than cater to the whims of his mistress. In return, he received respect and the best of all physical things — so long as he retained her favor.

“Fetch a new brush,” she said. She did not explain what objection she had to this one. Why should she? The Drone did not need to know. He needed only to obey.

He was in the hall and swinging toward the supply depot before he could assert himself. Perhaps it was just as well; what could his human mind have done except aggravate an untenable situation?

“One static brush for the Queen,” he snapped at the clerk, his own mandibles clicking as he addressed the inferior. This was the first worker he had seen: an apparently neuter creature, similar in outline to himself but only two-thirds his size.

The worker affected not to hear him, going about its ruminating without a pause. This was unprecedented contempt — yet there was nothing he could do. He was a Drone going out of favor, and the workers knew it. Soon he would be cast off entirely, and the neuters would have the sadistic pleasure of ignoring him while he starved to death. He was unable to provide for himself, if the workers did not make food available; he and the Queen were royalty, requiring service for life. His body tensed in hopeless fury.

Groton-human viewed the situation more dispassionately. He saw that it was conditioning, not physical capability, that made the Drone dependent. He did not appreciate the insult either, but realized that there was a more practical danger. If he delayed unduly in fulfilling this mission, the Queen’s short temper would vent itself upon him immediately — as this insolent worker hoped. The creature was maliciously hastening his demise.

It had not been like this a year ago, he remembered with the Drone’s mind. Then, flush with the Queen’s favor, he had been an object of virtual worship. The neuters had gone out of their way to do him little favors. It had seemed that he had complete control of the situation.

Fond illusion! He saw himself now as the vehicle he was, to be used by both Queen and workers, possessing no personal value to either apart from convenience. An ambulatory reservoir of egg-fertilizer. He had known it would inevitably come to this, for all Queens were fickle — but, dronelike, he had refused to accept it for himself.

Groton did not consider himself to be a man of violence, but the emotion of the despised being that was the Drone affected the more analytical human mind, and brought forth an atypical response. Atypical for both beings. The Drone was a creature of emotion, as befitted the royal consort; Groton was a man of action. The combination converted impotency to potency, perhaps in more than figurative terms.

He swung the two side arms over the counter and caught the worker by the shoulders. He lifted, and the light creature dangled in the air.

Groton held it there for a moment, letting it feel the great physical strength of the Drone — a strength that could crush it easily. No words were necessary. The worker’s cud drooled from its mouth in its astonishment and shock. The Drone had done the unthinkable: it had acted for itself. It would hardly be more astonishing for a neuter to impregnate the Queen.

He set it down, and in a moment he had the brush and was returning to his mistress. It would be a long time before that worker allowed its courtesy to slip again — and the message would spread.

Expectations of this drone’s downfall were premature.

Unfortunately, setting back one predacious worker did not alter the fundamental situation. The Queen was tiring of him, and unless he acted to preserve himself in her esteem, his fate was assured. A simple demonstration of muscle was sufficient to faze a simple worker — but not the Queen.

The Drone body and mind quivered with reaction and fear. The act it had just participated in was plainly beyond its nature, and it did not yet realize what agency was responsible. Once possessed of a fine intellect, it had largely succumbed to apathy, protecting itself from injury by ignoring it. Even the momentary surges of emotion were generally well disciplined, externally.

Groton calmed it, discovering that it reacted as subserviently to his control as to that of the Queen. But now it knew — and he felt its mixed elation and alarm.

If he had to occupy another creature’s body, this one had been an obvious choice. The Drone had a good physique, a position of enormous potential influence — and very little genuine will-power. Yet that did not explain why he, Harold Groton, had been selected to enter this picture. How had his quest for information about the nature of galactic civilization been diverted into such a channel?

Probably some answers were in the Drone’s mind — but it would be a tedious chore digging them out and organizing the information for his own comprehension. There was a hundred times the store of facts he needed — relevant only to the Drone’s life, not his own.

The Queen glanced at him with a single eye to hint at her displeasure at his slight tardiness, but did not make an issue of it. He had performed within tolerance — this time.

The communication screen came alive before he finished the grooming. “Mistress,” the pictured neuter said respectfully, keeping its third eye lidded in respect for royalty.

“Crisis already?” the Queen demanded.

“A Felk battlemoon has materialized four twis distant.”

Groton felt the reaction of his host. A twi was a unit of spatial measurement equivalent to about eighty-five light-seconds. The Felks — enemies — were within six light-minutes.

“So soon! So close!” the Queen exclaimed angrily. “How did they know?”

But she did not wait for an answer. Obviously there had been a leak, and the Felks had followed this expedition in. They could not have traced it in space so rapidly, since this would require years by lightspeed observation.

The Queen was already traveling down the hall at a pace that pressed even the trailing Drone hard. She was a magnificent specimen of life, large and sleek and strong, one who had been not merely born to command, but evolved for it.

The supervisory workers were already assembled in the royal hall. “Show me your deployment,” the Queen snapped, having no need of query or courtesy.

A sphere of light appeared, bright dots within it. A map of space, Groton realized, that covered a volume half a light-hour in diameter. A sun, several planets, and two free moons showed within it: the Queen’s battlemoon and the Felks’.

A sun? No, the Drone memory corrected him: that was merely the identifier for their point of focus, the scheduled location of the station. There was no sun within two light-years.

The magnification increased in response to an imperative gesture by the Queen, and the pattern of ships appeared. The Queen’s moon was englobed by dreadnoughts — but already similar armor was emerging from the enemy moon.

“What kind of disposition is that?” the Queen demanded. “They will penetrate it in hours.”

“Our tactician was lost in the last engagement,” the leading officer-worker reminded her carefully. “We did not pause to pick up a replacement.”

“Naturally not. I would not tolerate an alien in my hive. Where is the next tactician-egg? Hasn’t it been hatched yet?”

Almost, the Queen reminded Groton of someone. Would her next expostulation be against the need to take care of every detail herself?

“I am it,” the officer said, answering her question. “But the enemy has surprised us and I lack experience.”

The Queen brooded over the sphere. “My Drone could make a better deployment,” she said.

The officer very nearly dared to show its ire at the disparagement. “Perhaps your Drone should assume tactical command.”

The Drone-mind suffered a flare of rage at the well-turned sarcasm. The Drone would never have implemented it or even expressed it in the presence of the Queen; but Groton, caught off-guard by the ferocity of the emotion, did.

“The Drone will assume command,” he said, with the resonance of triple-range vocal chords.

The Queen turned, about to rebuke him — such rebuke possessing the force of exile — but changed her mind. “Yes — he will. You tactician — attach yourself to him as apprentice. It should be an intriguing experience.”

Thus had a single incontinent outburst netted him stellar responsibility. The whim of the Queen was cruel.

Desperately, Groton assessed his resources. The Drone-mind was cowering in horror, as a man might who had just broken wind vociferously while saluting his country’s flag. He had to detach himself from its emotional state and suppress that mind almost entirely to prevent being overwhelmed by cowardice. This meant taking over most of its remaining functions and dispensing with its store of information. He became the Drone.

Yet it seemed to him that the joke was not as farfetched as the Drone’s diminished status had encouraged the neuters to believe. The Drone had spent several years in close attendance upon the Queen, and surely had overheard many of her directives. The Drone had a good mind and excellent information; it was its timidity and dependence on the Queen that made the notion of command ludicrous.

Neither Queen nor workers knew that a determined human personality had taken control. The Drone had strong emotions and weak initiative; Groton had mild emotions and strong will. The combination could have meant weakness in both departments — but fortunately that was not the case. This worm could turn, as the experience with the supply depot worker had shown.

The Queen was gone, leaving him to his mess.

The tactician-worker waited beside him as directed. Groton perceived the distress caused by this ultimate indignity — but the Queen’s word really was law. The officer, like himself, was captive to its own indiscretion. The Queen had her own ways of dealing with insolence — and the remaining workers had had another lesson.

“What is the immediate objective?” Groton asked the officer, determined to do his best, whatever became of it.

“To drive off the enemy, so that the station can be installed and activated, and the mines placed,” it replied.

“And the mines will prevent subsequent attacks?”

“Yes.”

“How does the Felk armament compare to ours?”

“It is superior. In number, not in kind. We suffered losses in prior placements.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Time for what?”

Groton perceived another weakness of the worker-mind. “How much time do we have before the enemy breaks through and destroys the station?”

“About six hours — unless we can outmaneuver them or frighten them away.” The time had been given in alien units, but Groton had no difficulty in comprehending.

He studied the map-sphere. “You plan to wait for them to attack?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“How else can we observe the nature of their thrust?” Orders or no, the officer had little respect for the Drone. Groton was reminded of a somewhat similar experience many years ago. Then it had been high school students. Now, as then, he had no higher appeal, contrary to the theoretical situation; he had to handle the matter by himself or be washed out.

“Yet,” he said, “with their ships massed and traveling at high velocity, our scattered forces cannot hope to stop them all. And one ship should be sufficient to blast the station.”

The neuter did not bother to reply.

“You have no manuals of strategy?”

“Of course not. A tactician learns by experience.”

The military mind! “Provided he lives.”

“Yes,” the officer agreed. “My predecessor—”

“And the Felks are similarly organized? No study of the lessons of history?”

“I assume so. How else should it be?”

How else indeed!

It appeared that a noncombative but practical-minded Earthman was as well equipped to handle galactic battle tactics as the galactic commands were.

“All right. Relay this directive: All ships, repeat all ships, to proceed immediately to the Felk battlemoon, there to attack without englobement.”

The officer, true to its nature, relayed the command. Groton heard the controller giving directions to individual ships. Then, thinking about it, the officer objected. “What?”

“You wouldn’t be familiar with the dictum ‘The best defense is a good offense’?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, chalk it up to experience, once you see it happen. We know we can’t stop their attack, if we wait for it to develop, nor can we hope to overcome the enemy in a normal encounter — but our ships do have an advantage of several hours in deployment. We can hit the Felk before the Felk hits us.”

“But with no defense—”

“Wait and see.” Inwardly, Groton prayed that his audacious gamble paid off. He was not, ordinarily a gambling man. He was exchanging almost certain defeat for a fifty-fifty chance at victory — but had he been a real tactician, he might have known how to play for two- or three-to-one odds in his favor. “Now you and I will board the fleet flagship,” he finished.

That made another stir. It seemed that commanders of naval operations generally ensconced themselves safely within the base moon and jumped to another location in space when the battle went against them. No wonder losses could be heavy!

He had no time to concern himself with the details of the ship he boarded. It was a standard cruiser, heavy on armament, slow on maneuver, but capable of high velocity under sustained acceleration.

Three hours later they were closer to the enemy moon than to their own. The Felk fleet was still emerging, though about half of it was now positioned around its base.

“Form our ships into three wedges,” Groton said. “Send them in simultaneously from three directions.” And it was done.

The enemy fleet deployed to counter this move. “Why don’t they mass and attack our station?” the officer asked, baffled.

“Would you attack the enemy home-base — if your ships were needed to save your own hide?”

“Hide?”

“Carapace. Chitin integument. Personal dignity.”

“Oh. Yes. Self-preservation.”

An underling-worker reported: “Felk commander has a message for Queen commander.”

“Is that safe to accept?”

“Yes,” the officer replied. “The Felks are reputed to be honorable in battle.”

“Let’s see it then. Maybe he wants to negotiate.”

“Negotiate?”

“Don’t you ever bargain for some settlement short of total victory?”

“Bargain?”

Groton shrugged and watched the communications screen. A picture of a two-eyed creature with a caved-in face formed, manlike in its way. Do we look that ugly? he asked himself, already acclimatized to the shell-gloss outlines of the hive personnel.

The Felk commander spoke in whistles, pursing its flaccid lips, but there was a running translation. “Commander, I am impressed by your technique.” There was no opportunity for normal dialogue, since there was almost a minute’s delay owing to lightspeed limitation of communications. By the time a rapid conversation was feasible, they would be virtually on top of the enemy moon. “I did not anticipate such initiative on the part of the Queen’s forces. From the facility with which you are adjusting formation, I suspect that you, commander, are aboard one of the ships in the area. This demonstrates courage, and gives a tactical advantage over me, since my communications delay is much greater than yours. I am authorized to offer you a generous commission in our navy, if you will defect to our side.”

Groton stood before the silent screen, amazed at the audacity of it, “He’s losing — so he offers his enemy a commission!”

“Felks are adroit,” the officer agreed indifferently. “That’s how we lost my predecessor.”

“He defected?”

“He tried to. But the Queen overheard and cut off his head. The mission was successful.”

Groton gained respect for the Queen. She, at least, had unquestioned loyalty to her side. Of course, she was her side, largely…

Still, the notion of blatantly buying off the opposition… “Well, beam back a picture of me,” he said hotly. “Nothing else. We’ll see if the Felks figure to bribe away the Queen’s Drone.”

He had his answer in two minutes. “As it happens,” the Felk commander whistled, “we hold captive a Queen of your species, obtained as the result of a singularly fortunate maneuver. Unfortunately her Drone died. She has been very lonely for a year, though we permit her a reasonable retinue of her neuters, hatched from the few remaining eggs she has in storage. I suspect she would not tire of a serviceable mate for a very long time, knowing she could not obtain another. As you know, the favor extended to individual Drones is normally of short duration — two or three years. I can arrange to send you to her.”

Again Groton was astonished. Would this creature stop at nothing? The Drone’s memory verified that the Felks had overrun an outpost some time ago — one staffed by a Queen — and that a Queen could not raise her own Drone from an egg. Incest did not exist, in this culture.

The Drone-mind clamored for attention. The offer, it developed was attractive, particularly to one who faced the prospect of early retirement by his present Queen. A Drone could live as long as a Queen could — if permitted. That amounted to decades. Felks did not lie; the offer was valid.

Sorry, Groton said to the Drone. Then, to the officer: “Tell the Felk to look to his defenses. This commander is not about to be bought off by the boudoir.”

In the interval between messages, the officer fidgeted, then spoke. “Request permission to voice an opinion.” The third eye was now lidded.

“Granted, provided it is brief.”

“I had thought it was an insult to serve under Drone command. I was mistaken.”

“We all make mistakes,” Groton said, touched but not forgetting that it would be a mistake to betray any personal softness. The mission was not yet over. More and more he appreciated the lessons of that hectic school-teaching session of his earlier life. Then it had been merely his pride and self-confidence that took beatings; now the lives of thousands were at stake.

The third message showed that the Felk had not given up. “You evince a handsome loyalty to your Queen. But have you properly considered the nature of your loyalty to your species, and to other technological species? Surely you are intelligent enough to perceive that this station and the others in your program will hurt all of us. All we ask is the right to travel — yet only one species in a thousand is to be permitted this, if the stations function. Neither your species nor mine is among the select. Why cooperate as the tool of the destroyer?”

The destroyer! Suddenly the meaning of all this settled into focus. He was participating in the origin of the destroyer station — perhaps the very one that had blanked out Earth’s finest minds. Would blank, for what he experienced now had to be history at least fifteen thousand years past. His mystic journey had finished on target; there could be no more significant event.

And he was on the wrong side.

Or was he? He had learned, in his human existence, to consider things carefully. Surely the Queen had not gone to the immense trouble and danger of setting up an interference that would prevent her own kind from using the spaceways, without very good reason. He should understand that reason, before making his own decision.

Meanwhile there was the practical problem of the enemy fleet. If he did not destroy it, it would destroy him, making his personal decision less relevant than his indecision. Unless he defected… but that would doom the station, and might be a mistake.

“Send this reply,” he said. “MESSAGE RECEIVED. SUGGEST YOU WITHDRAW.”

The officer obeyed, then came back to question the directive. “Do you expect the Felk to retreat merely because you ask him to?”

“We’ll see.”

In due course they saw. The Felk ships decelerated, looped about, and drew in toward their base. As time passed they docked within their moon in orderly fashion.

“A ruse!” the officer said.

“Yet you told me the Felk were honorable.”

The officer looked confused.

More time passed. The last enemy ship docked while Groton held his own fleet back, suspending fire. For three hours they globed the moon at a safe distance. Then it vanished.

The release of its gravitational influence jolted the Queen’s fleet, sending ships tumbling outward. Space had been drawn into a knot and rent, and had healed itself. There was no doubt the Felk force had withdrawn.

“He will pop back on the opposite side, close to the destroyer station,” the officer predicted. “He didn’t say he wouldn’t, anyway.”

But the Felk did not return. In the course of the following twelve hours the workships finished laying their mines and activating the mines’ perceptors and trackers. The area was impregnable. A mine could not travel, but it was supreme in its area of space. Anything that approached, even an entire fleet, would be blasted, unless it carried the nullifying code-signal. The Queen’s fleet possessed this, of course — but its nature was a secure secret known only to the Queen.

The Queen’s moon detached the destroyer station and let the ships adjust its position. As it warmed up, its tremendous field of gravity took hold, hauling the moon into orbit around it, though it was two miles in diameter compared to the moon’s two thousand. Child’s-play, for this technology; gravity could be turned on and off as though it were a magnetic field. Probably the station had reclined in null-G aboard the moon, so as not to be crushed in storage. To think that the entire fabulous layout that was the destroyer-complex was no more than an installation problem to the Queen…!

Then the destroyer signal was cut in, and Groton knew that it was spreading out in a sphere whose radius expanded at lightspeed. Any battlemoon that transferred in would not transfer out again — and the six mines would finish whatever stayed.

“Request permission to ask a question.”

Groton understood the hive signals now. This was something important to the officer. “Granted.”

“By what reasoning did you determine that the Felk would leave upon request? I saw nothing in your conversation to indicate such a response.” It paused. “I wish to learn, for I note that you accomplished the mission without loss of ships, when I surely would have failed.”

This was not a question Groton particularly wanted to answer, but he felt an obligation to give a serious response to a serious query. “Put yourself in the place of the Felk commander, he said, seeing a discreet way to handle the matter.

“Defect to the Felk?”

Oops! “No — I mean to imagine that your situation was his. You emerge from spacefold to set up your attack, and instead you find the enemy, whose force is inferior to yours, attacking you. What would you do?”

The officer concentrated, adjusting to this unfamiliar mode of thinking. “I would wait for further developments,” it said at last. “I would want to ascertain what advantage the enemy had that made him so bold.”

“Precisely. And if he maneuvers with such facility and confidence that you find yourself at a disadvantage in spite of your superior resources?”

It thought some more. “I would attempt to subvert its commander.” Then its center arm lifted in the gesture of sudden illumination, and its center eye blinked. “That is what the Felk did!”

“Right. And if you could not buy off the enemy strategist?”

“I would attempt to negotiate honorably.” It paused again, now translating from actuality. “I would — appeal to that officer’s loyalty to its species, and attempt to convince it that our causes were one. But — not too obviously, for its honor should not be impugned.”

“And if he agreed to consider the matter?”

“If my position were already too bad to recover, I would have to leave the decision up to it. Perhaps that commander would — change its mind — once left to its own devices.” It looked at him. “May I—”

“You may not inquire. Perhaps you can decide for yourself what my decision will be.”

The officer remained silent, accepting it. Groton hoped the mental effort would do it good and that it would be a better tactician in the future. It certainly had come a long way in the past hours.

And what was his decision to be? Here was his chance to change history, perhaps even to give his species — mankind — freedom of space travel. In one sense this adventure might be a dream, a vision; but in another he was certain it was real. Now he understood why Ivo had been unwilling to dismiss his Tyre episode out of hand. It was likely that the body that remained at the starting point was the mockup; the better portion of reality was here.

Should he act now, sabotage the destroyer station before it could blank out the thousand traveling species for every one it promoted? He could fire a volley from his flagship that would wreck the station mechanism. What right did the Queen have to repress a major section of the galaxy in such fashion?

He refused to act without information. That was the way of prejudice, and could only stir up catastrophe. If he wanted to know the motivation of the Queen, he would have to ask her.

She was waiting for him as the operation closed down. “Drone, that was a creditable byplay. I had expected to have to retreat to one of our alternate locales during the enemy’s commitment, perhaps even to leave you behind, but you surprised me by prevailing. What came over you?”

He tried to say “Sometimes the worm does turn,” but it came out, in this situation, as “Upon occasion the annelid completes a circuit.”

“You seem to have demonstrated your point. It would not be expedient to adopt a new Drone at this stage,” she said. “Here to me, my cherished.”

Realizing her intent, Groton tried to resist. He was human whatever his present body, and infidelity was not in his nature. How would he face Beatryx, if — ?

But the Drone-body was already advancing to its destiny. The Queen was mistress, the dual concept a single one in this society. She was wife and monarch, never to be denied in either capacity. The Drone motor response, in this instance, was involuntary. Groton could observe but not control.

From the hump before his middle leg a member of specific purpose telescoped out. His legs and arms reached to embrace her in the fashion peculiar to this association, and the act of intimacy precipitated itself.

It lasted a long time, this fertilizing of several score eggs, and afterward, exhausted, he slept. His body had been drained in a fashion far more literal than that of human intercourse.

When he woke, Groton was tired but in control again — and gifted with a unique appreciation of the meaning of rape.

“Drone!” the Queen’s voice came — and once more he was on his feet at her behest. His control extended only to the extent she permitted it; he could not disobey a direct order.

“Groom me,” she said as he arrived. Nothing had changed.

“What is the reason for the destroyer?” he inquired as he worked, relieved that he could communicate to this extent.

“The Horven knows,” she said. “Shall I send you to it in my stead?” Then, as was her wont, she made her decision immediately. “Yes. Groom yourself, feed yourself, and go. I have eggs to lay.”

Obediently he turned the brush on his own fur, less handsome than hers, and set about procuring a meal of the royal nectar.

Who or what was the Horven? The Drone had never been curious, and consequently knew very little on this subject. The Horven was a member of a civilized species of long standing — a species that did not deign to trade with others, or even to communicate with them. Yet one was resident within this moon.

He searched the Drone’s memory. Three times before, the Queen had descended into the depths of the Horven apartments, after setting up destroyer stations. On her return, the moon had begun the transmission cycle leading to the emplacement of the next unit. Did she have to make a report? Receive orders? This was an unacceptable concept to the Drone. The Queen bowed to no creature.

Why, then, these regular journeys? What passed between them, the Queen and the strange alien? He was about to find out.

The Queen put him aboard the hanging descent-car with something almost like affection. “Do not linger, male-thing.”

The capsule was translucent; distorted images entered to tantalize him. The polished metal walls of the upper landing gave way to bleak stone as the unit swung along at a rapid pace. Sometimes it seemed he was traveling through natural caverns; at other times the walls were so close as to resemble a tunnel. Once light blazed, as though he were navigating a fiery hell.

He gathered that the Horven liked its privacy.

What was he supposed to say to it? He had no idea.

At least he knew that one could make such a visit and return intact. Whatever business the one species had with the other, it was not physically dangerous. Still, the Drone-mind within him gibbered with fear.

Was it right to use this body so callously? He had control, and he had exercised it ruthlessly. How would he feel, if an alien intellect had taken over his own body and suppressed the higher centers of his brain?

“I believe this is a temporary phenomenon,” he said to the Drone. “When I have finished my business here, you will have your body back.”

And was surprised to pick up a fiercer burst of terror than any before.

The capsule halted before he had a chance to ascertain the reason for this reaction. Its side panel opened and the vehicle tilted to disgorge him.

He looked about. He was in a spacious hall, and standing on a circular platform. A manlike figure was before him, dressed in an enveloping robe. Its head was inhuman in a manner he could not quite define. It was as though his three eyes were unable to focus on it. Had they been able, he was sure he would have discovered truly alien features — alien in ways his imagination had never hitherto touched on. Somehow his eyes ceased to track whenever he looked at it, whether he used one or two or three at once. The effect was frustrating in much the way an Earth-blackout was: the direct glance at a given object was less productive than a peripheral view.

“Welcome, Harold,” the creature addressed him. Its voice, like its face, was undefined; perhaps it had spoken telepathically.

“I’m not sure I—”

It gestured benignly with a blurred extremity. “Certainly we know you, Harold. We most appreciate your difficult excursion from hence. You are the only Earthman to participate in our venture, and we comprehend the peculiar courage required.”

Groton had not been aware of any exercise of courage, and in any event this development was contrary to anything he could have expected, let alone feared. “You know where I — when I come from?”

“Approximately one hundred million years hence, in the Third Siege. We have a number of volunteers from that period, since the cultures of that time have a superior perspective on history.”

“I thought I was a messenger from the Queen. I’m wearing the body of her consort.”

“So you are,” the Horven said, as though just noticing. “That means that the last unit is in place and activated, and we can begin on the next. I shall initiate the cycle.”

“You handle the gravity compression? I thought the Queen—”

“Once the unit has been activated, the ordinary species cannot attune to the Traveler,” the Horven explained gently. “Several hundred personnel must be discorporated, which means they must be assessed by the Traveler. I will handle juxtaposition.”

Of course! The destroyer blocked off that macroscopic band, as Ivo had observed, making it impossible for most minds to draw on the intergalactic knowledge. Ivo had set it up, for the human party; the Horven—

“You are the one-in-a-thousand!” Groton exclaimed. “The species that is immune to the destroyer.”

The Horven donned a surprisingly Earthlike helmet and touched a panel. “There will be several shifts,” it said. “This will take some time, but it only occupies a portion of my intellect. Please do not interrupt your discourse.”

The Queen’s workers, Groton realized, would be lining up and passing through Traveler introductions, exactly as he and Beatryx and Afra had while Ivo guided them past the lurking destroyer. But the Horven must be handling them a score at a time! “You — you built the destroyer!”

“We — with companion species — designed it,” the Horven admitted. “We cannot construct or emplace the individual units.”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you reserving true space travel for yourselves?”

“It must be.” Lights were flickering within the helmet, and Groton wondered what circuitry was being utilized. A lead to the macroscope, naturally, and trunk lines to the upper regions…

“Wait! I need to get back upstairs before the cycle begins.” Shifts there might be, but if he missed the last one it would be the end, for him.

“For what purpose? Your destiny is with us.”

“It is?” He was confused.

“We have weighted the repressive side of the scales. The destroyers have been installed. Now we must balance the other side, or the task remains half-complete. Another representative will replace me here; you and I travel to Horv.”

“And I am supposed to — to participate in the other side too? When I’m not even certain I agree with this side?”

“I apologize for my neglect,” the Horven said. “I forgot that you have not been adequately informed, since your species evolved many millions of years after mine passed.

“The Traveler destroyed the civilization of our galaxy once, and perhaps many times. This travel-power is too great for juvenile species; it only releases and amplifies their destructive impulses. Therefore we of the Second Civilization, rising from the ruins of the First, have had to take defensive measures against this Second Siege. Only we who have left violence behind can safely travel from star to star. In this manner we may preserve galactic civilization until the Siege is over.”

At last it was beginning to fall into place. Now he remembered a fragment of — history? — he had heard or read at some point, that reinforced this explanation. “The destroyer — only destroys evil minds?”

“Not evil minds, no. To be savage is not to be evil. It is a necessary phase in the evolution of a mature species. But until it passes, that species must be protected from itself. It must be confined to its planet of origin and that planet’s immediate environs. It does not have the discretion to indulge in galactic contacts — apart from purely communicatory, of course. Maturity requires an extended apprenticeship.”

“And you Horven are one of the mature species?” He had thought to put irony into his tone, but it misfired; he was already convinced that the Horven was mature. “Why do you make younger species do your bidding? Why not simply place the destroyer-units yourselves?”

“Because there is insufficient violence in our nature. We can conceive of suppressive strategy, though with discomfort, but cannot implement it. We could not survive the destroyer ourselves, if such pacifism diminished in us.”

Thus this temporary cooperation between forward-looking juveniles and inactive seniles. Were they correct? Was this necessary to save civilization?

He thought about the incalculable violence of human history, and was not prepared to deny the need for this step. Man had always been willing, even eager, to spend much more effort on calamitous war than on any peaceful pursuit. Governments had spent billions of dollars, francs, rubles for war every year, while allowing their own less fortunate citizens to starve. Man in space would be the same — except that the stakes would be larger.

“I am a member of a juvenile species,” he said.

“Of the juvenile stage in your species evolution, yes. No species is inherently young or old. It may be that the climax of mankind will be a far greater thing than that of the Horven. Possibly some visitor from the Fourth Siege will know. We hope the measures we have taken here will enable your species to achieve such distinction.”

“I hope so too,” Groton said fervently. Then, remembering: “What is the other side of the scale? If this side is the forced preservation of galactic civilization?”

“Exploration, comprehension, knowledge. The nature of the Traveler, and the reason for its infliction upon us. The civilization that developed such technique is as far beyond the Horven as the Horven is beyond the Queen’s hive. Surely its purpose was not to extinguish our progress.”

“Why don’t you just pay the source a visit and find out?”

“That was attempted during the First Siege. But our predecessors were unable to map intergalactic convolutions prior to exploration there, and intergalactic ventures were unsuccessful.”

“What happened to them?”

“They never returned. Some survived, but their travel mechanisms were inoperative.”

“How could you learn about them, then?”

“Their traces were picked up subsequently on the macroscope.”

“But that could take millions of years, if they were in intergalactic space!”

“Yes. It was the Second Civilization that recorded the signals, and they only succeeded in this because they were specially attuned and alert. The macroscope is hardly effective beyond our own galaxy, ordinarily. By the time the signals had been identified, it was far too late to come to the assistance of their originators, even had travel been feasible at that time. But these casualties did assist in the mapping of deep space in a general way, and provide clues as to the nature of its dynamics. We believe we can now achieve the other galaxies in our cluster.”

Intergalactic travel! “So you mean to discover the truth about the origin of the Traveler,” Groton said. He realized that this was a similar quest to the one the party of human beings had embarked on. They had seen the destroyer as their enemy, when in fact it was their friend (though a stern one!); Earth might have been ravaged many times by other aggressor species, except for that protection, and the sapience of man might never have had the opportunity to develop. The true enemy was the Traveler — but this too was only conjecture, until its rationale was known.

“Your invitation tempts me,” Groton said. “The prospect of such explorations is fascinating. But my essential loyalty is with my own. I can’t simply—”

“You are not among your own. I assure you, the Queen’s ire at losing her present Drone will pass quickly. The King is the game, for us. Though of course we can arrange to have you occupy a different body, and return this one to—”

No! No! the Drone-mind screamed. Do not send me back alone!

“Oh, I see,” the Horven said. “Thoughtless of me. Of course you would be unable to cope with the revised situation.” It was addressing the Drone directly. “But it would not be kind to keep you in subservience here—”

The other Queen!

“Yes, we could do that,” the Horven agreed. “You realize you would be captive of the Felk, however—”

The Drone was more than willing to take that chance.

“You have no objection to assuming some other form?” the Horven inquired of Groton. “We cannot act unless all parties are amenable. It would be quite unlike your normal one.”

“The horoscope does not specify species,” Groton murmured. What was he getting into?

The Horven continued to wear the helmet, but Groton was sure it was simultaneously setting about preparations for the other transfer. “There are still horoscopes in your time?”

“Still? You mean you practice astrology here?”

“That depends on what you mean by the term. I don’t know enough about your conception either to believe or disbelieve in it, let alone practice it. If you would clarify—”

“It — I—” Groton found himself at a loss for words, never having anticipated this turn of conversation. He finally had to settle for a concrete example, his well-versed summaries having fled his mind. “Well, I was born on October 11, 1940, at Key West, Florida. That means — but you don’t know Earth chronology or geography!”

“I comprehend your meaning, nevertheless. Go on.”

“The time was 4:10 p.m., Eastern Standard. That’s important for the house structure. So the configuration of the signs and planets at that moment — well, I’m a Libra personality, sun in the seventh house, moon in Aquarius, Mercury—”

“If you will provide an exact listing, I will transpose to my framework,” the Horven said. “I perceive that your astrology does approximate one of our disciplines, but of course your local viewpoint does not coincide.”

“You can convert my terms to your chart?” This was as marvelous an accomplishment as any he had witnessed here.

“We Horven specialize in orderly intellectualization. One of the tools we have developed is a unified-orientation conception of horoscopy that enables us to apply the details of any local system in the galaxy to our own framework. A precise interpolation would take much time, of course, since we have to compensate in your case for a sizable time differential, but we can certainly make a crude alignment now.”

For the next hour they compared notes, oblivious to all else except for the Horven’s continued helmet-transaction. It needed no chart on which to post information, keeping complete data in its head.

“My tentative plotting indicates that you will enter a new cycle of experience at a life duration of about forty-two of your years,” the Horven remarked at last.

“Mine also,” Groton said. “My sun passes out of Scorpio at that point.” He stopped. “Ouch! That’s now!”

“Of course, since you are coming with us.”

Very neat. “But my wife—”

“Provide me her configuration, and we shall see how she fits into this picture.”

Groton did so, though he felt increasingly uneasy about it. This being, this representative of a mature species, was frighteningly intelligent in obscure ways.

“I am sorry,” the Horven said then. “This is not an aspect that would normally be evidenced in your more limited framework; but mine is, if I may say so without giving offense, somewhat more advanced. Your wife is dead.”

The words struck with a physical impact. “But—”

“Your astrology cannot pinpoint such an event specifically, but ours can. Even after making due allowance for error introduced in transposition, the probability is virtually conclusive. Her skein terminates abruptly.”

Groton remained stunned, not yet ready to believe it “How — when — ?”

“On that I cannot yet provide exact details, but can say that there were ironic elements. She perished as the result of her own decision, in an effort to do what she believed was proper. She was mistaken, but it was a noble demise. As for when — in this framework, approximately ninety-eight million years ago. In yours — ten minutes.”

“I must go back to her!”

The Horven removed the helmet. “It is better that you do not.”

Groton looked into the indefinite countenance and knew with terrible certainty that truth had emerged. The life he had known was over; his return could only wreak havoc. He was committed to a new existence — alone.

The mellow music of the bassoon welled up as he explored the final triad. Ivo saw his resources falling away. The horn had failed him after all; it had departed, never to return. Only one hope remained — yet in this concurrency, it was impossible for him to affect its theme.

On the ground stood a fair young woman. She cast a smile at him as though it were a handful of soil, seeking to assimilate him into her world, but he passed her by. Next was a massive bull stroking the sod with its hoof, epitome of power yet not aggressive. Last was the goat: a gentle doe, horned and bearded after the nature of her kind, and with a fine udder. Surely the symbol had been of a virile male-goat, a buck, most indefatigable of animals! Perhaps it was, elsewhere; but this was what he saw, and he would not deny it.

She contemplated him, the gaze of one eye suggesting DISCRIMINATION, and the gaze of the other — and he paused to verify this, taken aback — LOVE. He stood before Capricorn, responding to the bleat of the bassoon and the ambience of earth, and could not speak.

She said: “Music is love in search of a word.”

Then he saw behind her, written upon an erosion-ragged mountain cliff, as it were a palimpsest:

There was some initial difficulty emplacing the suppressors — popularly known as “destroyers” — as many immature cultures were unable to appreciate the long-range purpose of these devices. The mission was nevertheless accomplished. Although galactic communications were necessarily inhibited during the Second Siege, civilization itself suffered stasis instead of abolition.

In fifteen to twenty thousand years the fields of the several destroyers overlapped each other, and crews were dispatched to place their defenses on standby. As more time passed, these units became repositories for galactic artifacts, and even assumed museum-status. As individual species came of age and thus were immune to the interference signal, they tended to visit the stations, and sometimes to leave examples of their own cultures for display. No untended immatures were able to visit the stations, because of the nature of the broadcasts, so selectivity was no problem.

The Second Siege, like the First, endured about a million years. This time civilization rebounded almost immediately, no worlds having been ravaged or cultures destroyed by other than natural means.

The destroyer network was considered to be only a holding action, not a solution. The major thrust was of a different nature. The first concerted extragalactic exploration was undertaken, and entire civilized planets made the jump into deep space. Chief among the advanced species participating were the Ngslo, the Horven and the Dooon. Their objective was the realization of the true nature of the Traveler and its reason for being. They departed — and did not return.

The ultimate nature of the Traveler was not discovered until the Third Civilization picked up reports from the surviving explorers, many millions of light-years removed. The truth, as brought out by the dispatch from Horv, was remarkable, and it changed the entire complexion of galactic intercourse.

Afra felt the impetus shoving her into an alternate existence. She felt the compulsion of the music, the fascination of galactic history, so much more vast than anything she had studied before. There was a period of timelessness, of drifting to melody; then the surroundings firmed and she was standing in—

A supermarket.

Ahead of her was an aisle bordered by towering promontories of canned goods: on one side beans — lima, pinto, kidney, navy, great northern, vegetarian, pork , black-eyed peas. On the other side, other vegetables — potatoes, canned sliced white; corn, whole kernel; corn, cream-style; tomatoes, stewed; peas, baby; peas, dried; beets, cut. To one side beyond the near islands were the fresh vegetable bins, leafy green, round red, puffy white. To the other side was the main portion of the store, neat hanging signposts identifying the aisles; there were pyramidding displays of canned fruit juice, boxed powdered milk, cartoned cigarettes, bagged charcoal and the eleventh volume of a cheap coupon-encyclopedia.

Shoppers moved with their wire push-baskets, their noisy children running free to sneeze into the wilting lettuce, splatter bottles of grape-juice on the worn tiles, and eat bananas before they were weighed and marked, dropping the peels behind the larger boxes of detergent where the cleanup crews wouldn’t discover them for days. Harried housewives changed their minds about half-gallon cardboard containers of ice cream and left them melting on the racks of chewing gum by the cash registers. Pot-bellied, sun-baked men ambled along in shorts and the hairs on their chests, picking up six-packs of beer. Freshly nubile girls clustered titteringly near the magazine rack, ignoring the PLEASE DO NOT READ IN STORE sign.

Afra stood there, absorbing it all. This was not the kind of vision she had anticipated. The market was ordinary, the people typical. Everything was routine middle-class, and there was nothing alien or even outré about it, apart from its slightly old-fashioned aspect. Certainly it illuminated the “truth” about the Traveler signal in no obvious way.

She turned about, seeking the exit. It was her conjecture that this vision would endure for an established period, and that whatever was to be manifested would be manifested regardless of her own actions. All she could do was wait it out, and act to preserve her equanimity.

Her eye fixed on a man standing in the nearest checkout line. He was muffled up as though braced against a storm, though the temperature within the store was comfortable, and he wore a tall silk hat tilted at a rakish angle. His hand was buried in a pocket as though he were searching for small change, and there was something familiar about him.

And she was screaming and running down the aisle away from that sight, terrified. She lurched into the bean shelf, hurting her shoulder and sending cans toppling down about her and bouncing to the floor and rolling across the aisle. People turned to look at the commotion, surprised.

“No!” she cried shrilly. “I reject it! I refuse—”

So negative was her reaction that the scene itself wavered, losing its reality. She knew it was a vision, and she had a strong will and a fundamental aversion, and it was enough. The setting could not hold her any more than a nightmare could hold the sleeper who once consciously realized that it was dream-fabric and rejected it.

The room in the destroyer station came into view, the other people floating in their places. She had broken out.

Harold and Beatryx appeared to be conscious also, until she saw that they were not reacting to tangible events. Their eyes moved, their limbs worked, and now and then one of them would speak — but they paid no attention to her or to each other. They were deep in vision.

Ivo still played his instrument. His hands did all of it; he did not need to blow into any type of mouthpiece. The sounds were a medley of instruments, an entire orchestra, but with four predominating: the violin, the flute, the French horn and the bassoon. She could even pick out the individual themes. Strongest, for her, was that of the bassoon, though she knew it to be a difficult instrument to play effectively. Once someone had told her a story of a bassoonist who had gone crazy because of the reaction of his body to the reed vibration, tight lip-compression and extended breath pressure; he had suffered from chronic suffocation during long passages because he never had enough time to breathe out, and so his brain had been starved of oxygen. She had rejected this notion even in childhood, but knew that the bassoon in certain respects defied the conventional laws of sound, and that standard fingering did not guarantee proper notes.

She remembered hearing — minutes ago? hours? — one of the distinctive bassoon passages that composers were fond of; they were typically enamored of the coloring of this instrument’s tone, and of the clownlike propensities of its upper register. She had experienced both a short while ago, when she had been a—

A goat?

She shrugged away the suggestion. Evidently music did have power — the power to project the members of the present company into individual visions. Was Ivo himself having a vision? He was playing — yet his eyes moved and his lips parted as though in speech, without a sound. A partial vision, perhaps.

She had escaped the nightmare planned for her, but did not seem to be much better off. She was with the others physically, but in effect alone. What had gone wrong? Surely she should have entered an illumination of history or philosophy, not a supermarket!

Beatryx spoke: first an embarrassed laugh, then words. “I am not fair! I’m almost forty!”

Almost. Harold had of course made up one of his horoscopes on her, saying something about a “seesaw” planetary typing. From that, ironically, he was able to conclude that Beatryx was the proper wife for him. Was he right? It did seem so. And what did he have to say about Afra’s own marital propensities, determined by her moment of birth? She had never admitted it to him, but she was quite curious.

As though in answer to his wife, Harold said: “One static brush for the Queen.”

Ivo went on playing, and from his weird instrument the music of the symphony projected throughout the chamber. Afra continued to respond to the passages of the bassoon, neither loud nor sharp yet truly penetrating in their fashion. Almost, as she watched, she could make out the outline of the unique woodwind within the framework of his moving hands. Eight feet of tubing, narrowing and folding back upon itself, with the tilted slender mouthpiece containing the double reed, and with holes to govern the notes. The theme was expressive, distinctive, evocative, expert, soulful; it moved her, drew her down into—

She yanked herself out, refusing to reenter that vision.

“It’s very nice,” Beatryx said. “But—”

“The Drone will assume command,” Harold replied.

A pause. “Thank you so much.”

Afra watched and listened, confining the encompassing music to the background of her awareness. They were participating, and she was not, and that bothered her — but her own vision was unacceptable. Could she enter one of theirs?

“What is the immediate objective?” Harold asked. Afra arched an eyebrow at him. “The immediate objective? To find out exactly what is—”

“And the mines will prevent subsequent attacks?”

“That depends what—”

“How does the Felk armament compare to ours?”

Afra shrugged. “I don’t think you’re paying proper attention, Harold.”

“How much time do we have?”

She looked at Beatryx and at Ivo. “We may have forever, Harold, if we don’t get out of here before we starve. If we can starve in vision-land. Dreaming may be entertaining, but, as Frost said—”

“How much time do we have before the enemy breaks through and destroys the station?”

“Really, Robert Frost is hardly an enemy. He—”

“You plan to wait for them to attack?”

“As Frost said: ‘The dreams are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And—’ ”

“Why?”

“Harold, you don’t ask ‘why?’ to a poem!”

“Yet with their ships massed and traveling at high velocity, our scattered forces cannot hope to stop them all. And one ship should be sufficient to blast the station.”

“Of course Frost said ‘woods’ rather than ‘dreams’ but I thought I’d—”

“You have no manuals of strategy?”

“No I don’t, damn you! I stick to simple sex appeal.”

“Provided he lives.”

“Provided you live. You are impossible, Harold.”

“And the Felks are similarly organized? No study of the lessons of history?”

She turned away from him, finding the amusement shallow. The mellow bassoon theme surrounded her again, and she fought it off again. She could even make out the rosewood length of the instrument, the distinctive circle of ivory around the top opening. Despite the bizarre circumstance she was moved by the poignant beauty of Ivo’s music. He had taken this alien contraption and produced — a symphony, each theme, each instrument of which was discrete and perfect. He was a skilled bassoonist, as well as a remarkable flutist. If only she had known about his musical gifts earlier!

Beatryx looked unhappy. “Here?” she inquired.

Afra wondered what it was that so disturbed the woman; then, observing her actions, began to understand. Inadequate sanitary facilities, in that particular vision. She went to help Beatryx, so as to spare her embarrassment when she came out of it. It turned out to be the motions only, and a little later the older woman slept.

Time passed.

Harold talked again, of ships and tactics and negotiations. Never, oddly, of astrology. She would have been happier if he had.

Afra practiced swimming in the air, and made her way away from the others. She searched for the boundaries of the chamber, but the mist became dense — “lovely, dark and deep,” she thought — and in this free-fall state she had no internal sense of direction. She realized that she could lose herself here, from even that pseudo-companionship the others provided, and did not relish the prospect.

She returned to the group, fixed her eyes on Ivo and his mythical band, and allowed herself to drift toward sleep. When this was over, there would be — oh, important matters — to discuss with him. His — well, his talents, and… his…

Nothing had changed when she woke.

“I really don’t know anything about campsites,” Beatryx was saying.

Several hours had passed, certainly — yet she was not hungry or otherwise in distress, physically. It was as though bodily processes had ceased for the duration, except as suggested (but not consummated) in the visions for verisimilitude. Somehow consciousness, direct or indirect, persisted in each person in spite of this stasis. Another marvel of galactic science? Why not.

Ivo still played. She wondered how his steadily agile hands were enduring. No fatigue either, here? At any rate, the visions were likely to end when the music finished. Then what?

Their mission — her mission — had brought them to this dread place, yet the climax was oddly insubstantial. Where was the enemy? Where the denouement? She had not really expected to struggle bloodily against a horde of ravening monsters; but this?

More hours passed. Harold slept. Beatryx went through a mysterious episode of terror, crying “Kill it!” and after subsiding from that, “That’s a man!” Then she was very quiet.

Harold talked to someone or something evidently inhuman, unhuman. Portions of his dialogue were revealing. “You are the one-in-a-thousand! The species that is immune to the destroyer… You — you built the destroyer!… Why are you doing this? Why are you reserving true space travel for yourselves?” Then: “And I am supposed to — to participate in the other side too? When I’m not even certain I agree with this side?”

Waking or dreaming, at least Harold seemed to know which side he was on. He was putting up, in his fashion, a good fight. Afra, in his (assumed) position, would have deleted the polite qualifications and told somebody to go to hell sideways.

“The destroyer — only destroys evil minds?”

Afra was forming more of the picture. Evil minds — like that of Bradley Carpenter? Surely Harold would not succumb to casuistry of that ilk.

But certain other bits he uttered stirred the beginnings of a profound doubt in her. Had they misjudged the destroyer, after all this? Impossible — yet…

Beatryx began to speak again. She was talking with someone about fire, and water, and humanity. Before that she had spent considerable time calling “Black — black — where are you?” Afra had had to tune out the plaintive repetition. Now they were talking together, and Harold was finally on the subject of astrology. It was difficult to follow both conversations simultaneously, and she had to settle for snatches from one or the other.

Then: “You were not wrong, Dolora.”

Beatryx went through an inexplicable series of contortions, then was walking or swimming strenuously, while Harold continued blithely discoursing on astrological technology. Then a sudden outburst: “But you don’t understand! You have to listen—”

Her voice was cut off by an inarticulate noise, and Beatryx doubled over, her face twisted in agony.

Afra paddled over as rapidly as she could, aware that a new and ugly element had been added. A crisis of some sort was at hand.

Ivo went on playing.

Beatryx was lying quietly by the time she got there. Afra tried to lift the older woman, but in the null-G only wrestled herself around. It was pointless, anyway — position made no difference, when there was no weight to support. She was acting without thinking, and to no avail.

Suddenly she realized that Beatryx was not breathing.

Afra clasped the woman’s head, poked a finger in her mouth to clear it of any possible obstruction, and applied the kiss of life: mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

There was no immediate response, but she kept on, exhaling into Beatryx’s lungs, breaking to inhale herself while hugging the inert chest to force out the air. Again, she could not depend on gravity to assist.

As she labored in such measured desperation, hearing Ivo’s bassoon and Harold’s intermittent remarks in the background, scenes of their association illuminated her vision.

Beatryx, at the torus-station, carrying a platter of food in to their first meal as a foursome: She and Harold, Afra and Ivo… and Brad too, then. Beatryx, beside her as Joseph blasted into space with the macroscope. Beatryx, trying to comprehend a difficult concept during an early discussion. Beatryx, declaring “Meeting come to order!” Beatryx in spacesuit, tentatively exploring the Schön-moonlet of Triton.

Beatryx, always ameliorative. Unimportant flashes — yet so poignant now, as Afra realized how important the quiet presence and support of the older woman had been to her.

Older? Beatryx had never looked so young as she did at this moment…

Still she did not breathe — and there was no heartbeat.

Beatryx, tending her garden on Triton. Beatryx, waxing hysterical in Afra’s defense, during that mock, not-so-mock trial.

“Tryx, Tryx!” she cried. “You were the only one who understood—”

It was no use. Beatryx was dead.

Afra wrenched away and launched herself at Harold. She took hold of his shoulders and shook, rocking herself more violently than him. “Wake up! Wake up!”

Harold did not respond.

“Harold — your wife is dead!” she cried in his ear, slapping him.

Now he began to react. “But—”

“She just died and I can’t — I can’t — you’ve got to do something! Wake up!”

He looked stunned. “How — when — ?”

Hastily Afra explained, continuing to shake him so that he could not relapse.

His eyes widened. “I must go back to her!”

Then, gradually, he went limp, and nothing she could do revived him. The dream had reclaimed him.

Afra looked around in a fever of desperation — and saw Ivo, still playing. It was time for the music to end.

She went to Ivo and yanked the instrument from his grasp.

The orchestra stopped, the sound dying away from all the misty reaches of the hall.

The floor reappeared beneath them, and walls around them, much closer than she had supposed, and doors in front and back. Weight returned.

She watched Ivo, waiting for his awareness. He sat for a moment, eyes unfocused. Then he raised his head with a sharpness of decision that was not typical and looked directly at her.

“Thanks, doll,” he said.

“Ivo — something terrible has happened. Beatryx—” He stood up smoothly, flexing his fingers as though they were stiff. “I know. A black shot her with a speargun. Silly woman.”

Afra stared at him.

“And your engineer — he’s in stasis on the way to deep space. He’s beyond the reach of this toy, now. It’ll be years before he comes out of it, if he ever does. That cuts it down to two, baby.”

She backed away. “You’re not Ivo! You’re—” He picked up the orchestral instrument. “Ivo — Ivon — Ivan — Johan — John — Sean — Shane — Schön! You broke the chain, blue-eyes. You interfered — again! — and Ivo-at-the-idiot-end lost out, just as Brad did. You do have a talent for that. Now—”

A memory — something important — nudged the surface of her awareness, but she had no time for it now. Afra raced toward the door, not pausing to consider where she might be going or why.

“Not so hasty, dish,” Schön called after her. “I am not finished with you.” He lifted the musical device and held it dramatically before him. “In fact, I have not yet begun to fight.”

She had almost reached the door, and could see a lighted hall beyond. It was not the one they had entered by. She reached toward it—

And rebounded from a pliant rail.

The recoil threw her to the floor. She landed on her fanny, facing back toward the center of the room.

It was not a room any more. It was a stadium, filled by faces peering up, none distinguishable, and by crowd noises that remained in the background. She perched on a raised platform enclosed by resilient cord. It was a square: the type of arrangement known as a boxing or wrestling ring.

Schön was entering at the far corner, dressed in fighting trunks and laced footwear. His muscular torso shone brown in the glare of the overhead light, and his eyes and teeth were brilliant.

Her glance caught him in that pose: a pugilist entering the ring. It was, as she saw it, the moment of supreme power for him; he dominated. There was nothing she could do to stop him or even inhibit him, whatever he intended.

As though recognizing the strength of the image, he paused, head inside the ring, one foot outside, the rope held up by one hand. “You don’t understand, do you, stupid,” he said. “You don’t know what any of this means. Hell, you purebred clod, you can’t even face your own symbol.”

She pulled herself up, but hesitated to climb out of the rope enclosure until she knew what Schön was planning, and what other barriers he was able to conjure. It just might be safer in the ring than out.

He did not move immediately, and in that interim of tension she assessed herself. She was dressed as she had been: culottes halted above the knee, snap-slippers designed to fit within the large space-suit shoes, elastic blouse, ribbon tie-down for her hair. The outfit was brief, for the sake of mobility and air-circulation within the space suit, and attractive, for the sake of appearances outside. She cared about those appearances and didn’t mind admitting it, and she had had special reason to be presentable at this time.

Now Beatryx was dead and Harold gone, and Ivo had given way grotesquely to Schön. Beatryx, looking raptly at alien pictures. Harold, fascinated by strange machines. Ivo—

Her aspirations of yesterday were meaningless. She could not even spare attention for proper grief, though that would come the moment this chase abated.

Her assessment was now in terms of physical fitness: the clothing she wore would not encumber her in any way, and she had the health to move quickly and with stamina. She knew from fairly intimate observation that the Ivo/Schön physique was not particularly impressive. The apparent musculature of his present body was a function of the illusion, the waking vision he had somehow simulated for them both. She had no doubt that Schön, with his multiple and devastating skills, could overcome her readily if he once caught her — but he might not be able to catch her.

She confined her assessment to those physical terms. She did not question his mental superiority. Emotionally he might be a child, or at best an adolescent; intellectually he was the leading genius mankind had produced.

He had been talking while she considered these things. He seemed to be showing off his knowledge: bragging, now that he had the opportunity.

“No, you don’t comprehend at all.” Schön repeated. “So I’ll have to lecture you on the fine points, or you won’t appreciate any of it. Too bad you’re such a puny audience, but you’re the only part of it that’s real.”

Afra waited with one hand on the rope, ready to dive out of the ring the moment he entered. She knew she was in trouble, but she was also aware that unreasoned flight would get her nowhere she wanted to go. That had already been demonstrated. Somehow Schön had the power to form a setting that physically inhibited her — and she would be well advised to discover exactly how he did it. This time it had been a square formed of rope; next time it might be worse.

“The key,” Schön said, “is this tool of the galactics.” He held the instrument aloft, the one Ivo had played, and she realized that it must have been in his hand all the time. She had not noticed it before, since the ring. “And ‘key’ is exactly what I mean. The key to the inner sanctum; the key to history; the key to personality. Call it the symbolizer. SYMBOLIC = SYMBOL PRIME = S′. It transmutes reality to symbols and vice versa, and thereby makes plain the truth. I recognized it for what it was immediately, of course.” He snickered. “Ivo thought it was a flute! He tried to play Sidney Lanier on it!”

And succeeded, she thought, knowing better than to interrupt now. She was recovering confidence in herself; if she maintained the proper spirit, she would be supreme over this situation, somehow. Schön had been overrated.

“Actually, it is a teaching device,” he continued. “By bringing to life the symbolic essence of a situation or personality, it instructs the participant and viewer. Of course it is necessary to interpret the symbols correctly, but anyone with a smattering of — yet you lack even that, naturally.”

“Lack what?” she asked, wiling to cooperate in order to keep the dialogue going. He was teasing her, childishly; she knew that, but already she had a valuable hint. If she could get the galactic instrument — S prime — away from him—

“Astrology,” he said. “You have closed your mind to it, and that makes it ideal for my purpose. So the symbolic ascendant means nothing to you.”

She waited, refusing this time to rise to the bait. Schön, obviously, had dipped into Ivo’s memory and picked up her continuing debate with Harold. He was trying to annoy her — and that could mean that his power would be diminished if she refused to react. The sophisticated response to his exertions was best.

“The ascendant is the overall indication of personality; the rising sign for each individual. My own ascendant falls at Aries 21, and the symbol for that position is A PUGILIST ENTERING THE RING, as you can readily perceive if you concentrate. This indicates full confidence in my own powers — justified, of course — and a complete lack of personal sensitiveness. Thus the galactic machine has dramatized my basic personality and graphically illustrated the power inherent in me.”

“That isn’t the way Harold described astrology,” Afra murmured, wishing this time that she had taken the trouble to learn more about it, whether she believed in it or not. Its rules were evidently governing this game.

“Harold was an engineer, not an astrologer. His approach was too conventional and conservative, though last I saw of him he was getting disabused in a hurry. Those old galactics really had their sciences worked out.”

He was still toying with her. If she tried to defend Harold, she would be defending his hobby as well, and so be on exceedingly tenuous ground. “What about Ivo?”

Schön gazed at her speculatively across the ring, but did not challenge the shift in topic. “Ah yes, Ivo. There’s someone really confused, for all that I invented him. He oriented on something from each of you, not really knowing the proper use of S-prime, and came up with a mélange that must have made the galactic creators wince. Harold Groton’s astrology, Sidney Lanier’s poetry, darlin’ Afra Glynn’s supposed intellectual discrimination and Tryx Groton’s suicidal sympathy — all tied in with a galactic history text that the instrument put out as a kind of sideshow attraction. Fascinating juxtaposition, I admit. I was a fiery ram, ‘Aspiration’ astrologically, ‘Trade’ poetically, and the strings musically. I engaged in First Siege internecine power politics. I had a good thing going, too — until you torpedoed Ivo for me.”

Suddenly the goat image made sense to her, and the evocative music of the bassoon. These had been her symbols, in the combined context. And love — where the poem had specified Trade for him, it had specified Love for her. And she had felt it—

“What is my symbol?” she inquired, genuinely curious now. “My — ascendant.”

“You don’t want to know it, cutie. You are afraid of it, neurotic that you are.”

“Am I? Or is it that you are afraid to animate my symbol, instead of yours? Would that give me dominance?”

“Lady, I’ll gladly match symbols with you planet by planet. That would put us on an even footing, in spite of my inordinate superiority in overt life. But you would achieve parity only if you are able to face your own nature when you see it objectively — and you aren’t. Your ascendant controls you, and probably your planets do too. It is a contest you would lose by your own prejudice.”

“I’ll take that chance — if you will. I don’t think you know how to compete, on an even basis.”

He smiled, the vicious grin of the warrior tasting blood. “Calling my bluff, Glynn?”

She smiled back, as maliciously as he, though she was afraid of him. “Yes, prettyboy. And if you cheat, you lose.” She wasn’t sure what to expect, or whether Schön would really bind himself to the outcome of a fair competition, but if it nullified the advantage of his intellect…

“Take it, child,” he said, touching the instrument. “Your ascendant is Taurus 15 — A MAN MUFFLED UP, WITH A RAKISH SILK HAT.”

And she was back in the supermarket, the same one she had fled, and she was facing the man beside the checkout counter. She had asked for it — and she was terrified.

Something obscure happened. People backed away from the cash register. The muffled man looked up, around, pausing a moment as though considering. It seemed that he was looming over Afra, and she was very small, very fragile. Something remarkable was about to happen—

The large man moved.

There was the sound of a gun being fired.

She wrenched herself out of it — and was out of the rope enclosure and passing through the door she had originally been running toward. She had escaped one vision only to return to another — unless she could also escape Schön and the galactic, the demonic, S′ device.

This room was thoroughly finite, at least, and well lighted. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment stood against the walls, and there were a number of screens flashing what she took to be broadcast patterns. This was, by her reckoning, a communications center. That suggested some kind of occupation of the station, at least at intervals. Automatic machinery would not be set up for viewing like this.

Schön was there ahead of her. He sat on a podium in the center of the room, behind a table whose white cloth extended down to touch the floor. He wore a high turban and stared into a shiny crystal ball. “Man,” he said grandiosely, “has the capacity to bring the entire universe within the purview of his mind.”

She had either to retreat into the original chamber or to pass directly by him. Neither alternative appealed, so she temporized. “I thought you were supposed to be a pugilist.”

“That, my dear, as I so tediously explained, was the ascendant. Now we are with the sun, and it behooves us to be more acute. My sun is in Aries 19, and so I am as you see me: A CRYSTAL GAZER. So it is written in the most authoritative text.” He stared into the ball. “I see that the referee has graded the first round on the ten-point must system: ten points to Fire, no points to Earth, who washed out. An excellent start — though it would be more entertaining if you were to at least put up some show of competition.”

So she hadn’t lost yet! “How do I know that’s an honest score?”

He shoved the ball in her direction. “Witness.”

She stepped up to look into it. Inside was a great-horned ram copulating with a frightened doe.

“Miscegenation is all I see,” she said. Then, saying it, she realized that the animals too were symbols: the ram of Aries and the goat of Capricorn. Schön had played his little prank on her. Two different species — somewhat as the two of them were of different races. A bald proposition, a dirty joke — or a threat. He had said that her own prejudice would cost her victory…

“Too bad nature forbids it,” she said in reply to his mocking gaze. She resented the implication that this was the only use for her — to submit to the sexual assault of the male — knowing it to be a conventional objection of womankind but still stirred by it. There was that about Schön that fascinated her in ways Ivo had not; yet she was not about to encourage his casual lewdness. In her mind was the remark Ivo had made about childhood sexual activity at their project: homo, hetero and group. She would contest the issue more fiercely in the coming rounds.

It was amazing what a difference the mind made. Schön did not resemble Ivo at all, though the body was the same.

“Yes, you would lecture on nature,” he remarked, as though that proved something. “Your symbol for Capricorn 12 is A STUDENT OF NATURE LECTURING.”

“How do you know?” she demanded, nettled again in spite of her disbelief in the personal relevance of such things.

“Dear little Ivo studied your horoscope. Now all that information is mine.” He grinned. “You are, you see, in my power. That chart has you laid out and nakedly displayed, and I can sample any part of you I desire. Fortunately I don’t desire your mind.”

She controlled her mounting irritation. “How much do you expect to accomplish, depending on astrology?” Again, she had to keep him talking, while waiting for an opportunity to gain some advantage. Genius he might be, but his youthful arrogance might defeat him yet.

“There are many ways to view existence,” Schön said. “Symbols are useful for minds of any potential, and astrology is an organized system of symbols as valid as any. I would accept it as readily as, say, religion. Of course, no symbol has validity apart from the values and qualities assigned to it by the user. What alternative would you prefer for your nuptial?”

“What makes you think the ram is so damned attractive to the doe?”

“What makes you think the ram is trying to be?”

“You imagine your word is my command?”

“Sister, there is no other functioning homo-sapiens man within fifty thousand light-years, and you can’t penetrate the destroyer field by yourself. I can. The question is, am I to be obliged, however clumsily, on my way home, or do I travel alone?”

Could he travel alone? Even if he turned off the destroyer broadcast — a thing he might not be able to do, assuming it had safeguards against interference — he would not succeed in freeing the spaceways of its effect. Earth was in the field of another station, and in any event it would require at least fifteen thousand years for the destroyer to clear itself, limited as it was by light velocity.

Yet he was in control of his body and Ivo’s experience now. That meant he had found a way around the destroyer memory — and, therefore, the destroyer itself.

Or so he wanted her to believe.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I don’t think you can go home without my help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be chasing me now, or trying so hard to impress me.”

“Or winning rounds against you. Maybe I’m too softhearted to leave you here alone. Are you calling my bluff again?” he inquired scornfully.

Suddenly she was afraid again, and could not answer. Ivo’s body had been possessed by a demon. How important was this peculiar contest, and how badly was she losing? Evidently the verbal interchange was part of it, and she was at a disadvantage there. Brad had always been able to twist around her statements and confuse her, and Schön had the same ability.

On the other hand, if she should somehow win — and theoretically she had an equal chance to do so, if she could only marshal her complete resources — what would be her victory? A liaison with Schön?

“You always were slow to get the message,” he said. “I sent you an obvious one as soon as Brad lost out, but naturally you fouled it up.”

“You sent me a message!”

“Surely you didn’t think I needed to send Ivo one? I had to borrow his hand to type it.”

Her curiosity had been aroused, and she didn’t care that this was what he had intended. “Then why didn’t you just tell him what you wanted?”

“He wouldn’t listen.”

That simple? That all the mystery and confusion engendered by the obscure missives had been Ivo’s fault? Again, she doubted it.

“Why, you wonder, did I not address the message to you? And, I explain — for you are exceedingly interested in explanations at the moment, your symbol says — I found it necessary to be circumspect. Ivo was almost always on guard, and only in rare moments of negligence was I able to assume control of so much as a single limb. He happened to pass the teletype section while in a condition of shock from the Senator’s demise and Brad’s discommodation, and I froze him unaware and set up the message. But I didn’t dare to do it in any style he comprehended, or mention you at all, or he would have snapped right out of it then. I had very little time, so I just jotted down the opening line of Lanier’s “The Marshes of Glynn” in polyglot, sticking to languages you could interpret. I thought you’d be smart enough to follow that up and get the real message.”

“Well, I wasn’t and I didn’t,” she snapped. “So what was the ‘real message’?”

“The terminal couplet of the poem, stupid. ‘And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in / On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.’ Anybody with a note of savvy could see that what swam below Ivo’s Glynn was Schön, and of course a Georgia girl would be familiar with the poem. Once you fluttered your pale pink eyelashes and told him to give over—”

“What makes you so sure I would have told him?”

“Back in that hour you fancied you were enamored of Brad Carpenter. You thought Schön would help you get him back. You were charmingly naïve. Still are, too.”

She remembered. Had she known the truth then, she would have sacrificed Ivo… foolishly. It had taken the phenomenal chain of events of the ensuing period to change her thinking — and her values.

“After that, Ivo was on to the polyglot dodge, so I had to try other stuff. He wasn’t exactly bright, but he did know enough not to get taken twice on the same boat, and he was stubborn as hell. The problem was to identify him without alerting him, and there were not many opportunities. Fortunately he never did catch on to the fact the messages were not intended for him, so the arrow-address gimmick got through.”

“So you made a Neptune-symbol to send us so far out we’d be dependent on you to get us home again—”

“Obliged to cry uncle, yes. Neptune is the planet of obligation, if we accept the view of your engineer’s main authority on the subject. Traditionally, of course, Neptune is allied with liquids, gases, mystery, illusion, dreams, deceit — but that simple hint passed you by, naturally. At least Groton, duffer that he was, began to catch on that—”

“And a shorthand message once we were there,” she said, cutting him off. She was furious with herself for not delving beyond the superficial, at the time of that message. Liquids and gases — as in the melting process? Could Schön actually have foreseen that? Mystery, illusion — as in the whereabouts of Schön behind the illusion of Ivo. A multileveled communiqué indeed, and she had missed it. Brad would have grasped all of it…

“But why did you want to take over if you couldn’t help Brad?” she asked him then. “Surely you didn’t care about the world crisis?”

“There was an entertaining situation developing. Why else?”

She stared at him, aghast at his indifference, but he met her gaze levelly. “Brad’s mind gone and a United States Senator dead, the very future of the macroscope project in peril — and you found it amusing?”

“Entertaining. There’s a distinction, had you but the wit to grasp it, chick. The challenge of a signal from space that could stupefy and kill—”

“Why did the Senator die? No one else did.”

“The rules of the game require me to remind you that every serious question I answer seriously is gaining me points.”

“And any you can’t or won’t answer will gain me points.” She hoped.

He shrugged. “More people would have died had more been exposed. Your others were all mature, sedate, pacifistic scientists who had largely come to terms with reality. The destroyer activates a neural feedback that varies directly with intelligence and inversely with maturity. Thus an intelligent mature person is unaffected, or an unintelligent immature person. But an intelligent immature one is hit with all the voltage of the disparity between those qualities. The Senator was a primitive genius (I use the term loosely) — so he died. Brad was a medium-mature genius, as were the other scientists.”

“And what are you?” she inquired bitterly.

“I’m like the Senator, only more so. I’m smarter and less mature than he was. That was part of the challenge: to handle that alien signal, when its direct impact on me would have fried my brain — almost literally. I dare say I’m the brightest primitive ever to be spawned on Earth.”

She was not going to debate that. “You plan to do a lot of maturing in the next few hours — or whenever you decide to toddle off home?”

“Hardly. I’m happy the way I am. No point in going the way Brad did. I could, incidentally, have saved his life, there on Triton, had I been on hand. Not that you would have wanted me to.”

“What?” Afra knew that he was trying to shock her again. He was succeeding. He was also leading her on to more questions and so eroding her competitive position farther. Yet her recognition of this process did not halt it; she had to know. She was hooked on the bits of knowledge he injected.

“No, I don’t mean you were in love with Ivo then. You still were fixed on Brad, for what that was worth. But you wouldn’t have wanted him to live.”

She continued to stare at him, at his mercy.

Now his eyes dropped to the ball. “I see,” he murmured, “I see the evolution of man, from a speck of protoplasm to maturity. I see the free-swimming larvae of the echinoderms developing into the radially-symmetrical forms of adulthood. But I also see neoteny: the larval form preempting the reproductive capacity, and so bypassing maturity. I see a long evolution of such ambitious larval forms, extending even beyond the sea and onto land where true maturity becomes not merely impractical but impossible. Thus, instead of mature starfish, larval Man.”

“Are you trying to suggest—”

“You knew we derive from the Echinoderm superphylum. You know the characteristics of that type of life. What did you suppose would happen, when you interfered with the evolutionary reconstitution? By abolishing the timing mechanism, you permitted the subject to run its full course — without benefit of the proper terminal environment.”

“Oh, Brad!” she cried in anguish.

“But you wouldn’t have cared to marry a starfish, however mature. So — you arranged to kill him.”

“I didn’t know!”

“Sweetie, ignorance of the law is never an excuse — particularly the law of nature, and most particularly when you are supposed to be a student of nature lecturing.”

“But—”

“But even proper attention would not have reconstituted his blasted mind. Recycling can’t extirpate tissue damage; it merely reshapes what’s there. He would have made a very stupid starfish.”

“Stop it!” she cried.

“You stop it. You know how — if you have the courage.”

And she was in the supermarket again, still terrified.

The sound of the gun’s explosion was fresh in her ears. There was a struggle occurring at the counter. The checkout girl screamed, a man fell. The silk hat rolled across the floor toward Afra. It was huge, and it grew larger as it came, swelling as though to crush her beneath its turning mass.

She screamed and ran. She crashed into the bean shelf, hurting her shoulder and sending cans toppling heavily… somehow aware that this had happened before, but unable to stop. People turned to stare, but she ignored them, crying “No! No! No!”

Somehow her unguided rush took her through a door at the rear, and she was hustling through a winter chamber with hanging slabs of raw meat, stumbling among tremendous boxes. A man with a cleaver loomed over her, and she saw the dark blood on it, and she screamed again and crashed through another door.

Then she was in a narrow alley, running between steaming garbage cans. The door behind her burst open and a man charged out. “Little girl!” he bellowed. “Little girl! Come back here!”

He was twice her size in every direction, and his skin was dark, his teeth great and white, and she fled.

There were trucks with baked black rubber tires taller than she was, and an ambience of gasoline odors and growling motors and the choking fog of exhausts, and she was trapped between them and the black man. She screamed again and dashed for yet another door, symbol of escape. It was closed. Desperately she reached up to grasp the handle and pull down the stiff latch, while the black pursuer closed in.

Suddenly it opened and she burst inside. These were strange quarters: tables of alien contour, bed-pallets of singular discomfort, toilet facilities embarrassingly foreign to biped anatomy. Yet they were obviously quarters, intended to be of comfort for resident creatures of established form, if not for man.

Afra went through the rooms of this complex, wondering whether the owners were present or when they might return. Obviously someone ran this station, or at least attended it periodically, and this was where the caretakers reclined in comfort during their off-hours.

One room terminated in a low wall, emptiness above it. She found that it was a balcony. It overlooked a courtyard of fair size, and green shrubbery sprouted from planters about its nether perimeter. This suggested that the caretakers were not so different from human beings in the things that mattered. This was essentially Earth-air, Earth-gravity, human-comfort temperature, and the decor was harmonious to manlike tastes. There had to be strong biological resemblances between the species, however many eyes or ears or antennae either had.

Noise; and into the court below marched a troop of men, a motley mob. They were in blue-collar working clothes — overalls, protective helmets, grime. Some were white in the face, some black, some yellow; most were composite shades.

She discovered that she had with her a huge shopping bag, evidently acquired at the supermarket, and she was holding it in her arms as she tried to lean over the rail for a better view. The balcony had been constructed with adults in mind, and she had a hard time of it. It did not occur to her to put down the shopping bag; that was filled with nameless but wonderfully promising things. Things that her mother would undoubtedly fashion mysteriously into chocolate cake, raspberry ice cream and crisp pin-wheel cookies. She could not let that bag go, even for a moment.

But as she poked her head over, so that one pigtail flopped against the rail, the men beneath spotted her. A rolling cry went up. “We want REPRESENTATION!” the workers cried.

“Well, send up your represen — repre — somebody!” she called back, not expecting her soprano voice to be heard in all that clamor.

A single man entered behind her. “I am he,” he said, startling her. She began to cry, but stopped in a moment, realizing that it could do no good.

The man was Schön, tremendous.

“I thought you were a crystal gazer,” she remarked in an attempt to conceal her lingering tears. She was not, actually, as surprised as she might have been.

“That was back at Aries 9,” he said. “The sun. The ref scored it 10 to 2, favor of the crystal gazer, incidentally. This is the moon: Gemini 21 for me, Capricorn 19 for you. I see you are dressed for the part.”

“The part?” This adult conversation was difficult.

“Your symbol. A CHILD OF ABOUT FIVE WITH A HUGE SHOPPING BAG.”

“I’m seven,” she corrected him primly. Then she reacted to her own statement. “I am?”

She was. No wonder adults appeared so large.

“And you called me immature!” he exclaimed, laughing. “What a fine time you had analyzing me, after I injected a little excitement into Ivo’s determined mundanity. You — a card-carrying WASP — wanted to psychoanalyze me in absentia. Little appreciating the inherence of aggression in the human species, the factor that brought it to dominance on Earth. Well, call me a BLASP, you who think in terms of acronyms.”

“A what?”

“A black Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Or a brown Mongolian Catholic, or a yellow Hottentot Moslem. I represent all of them; I am all of them, as you see by my symbol outside. And perhaps it is fitting, precious, that your name is Afra. That’s very close to Afram, or Afro-American, the convenient designation for—”

“A whole group. A whole — labor demonstration?”

“Exactly. I am Man’s universal spirit, and I reject all property and private rights as invalid limitations, other than purely social. I tell you that right and justice only prevail when properly dramatized — when the issue is forced. And I attack this problem, as I do all problems, with courage.”

“And not a trace of false modesty,” she murmured. Yet she felt the need to help the demonstrating workers, whatever their problem might be. She wanted to be a part of the group, to participate, to conform, even in rebellion. “What do you want, speci — anyway?” Her stature as a five- or seven-year-old child (physically five, mentally seven?), though it prevented her from getting out the entire word “specifically,” was not any more incongruous than the rest of this bizarre sequence.

“I want freedom,” Schön said, menacing in his emphasis. “I want security. I want power. I want equality. I, the hapless peoples of the world, want everything you have now.”

“Me — the modern white?”

“Yes. You have the good life. I want the right to ravage the world as you have done. I want to destroy as much as you have done. I want to drive myself to the brink of extinction as you have done, you smug white turd. You little bitch, I mean to take—”

And she was fleeing his madness again, whether in the station or on the streets of Macon she could not tell, nor did it make a difference.

Outside was an ocean shore, and the day was windy. Ancient Indian women sat facing outward, their quick hands fashioning useful artifacts. Afra peered up and down and found no hiding place, knowing the pursuer was not far behind. He could quickly catch her here, unless—

Near at hand lay a blanket, woven of many colors but only half complete. She plumped herself down, full-size now, and composed her aging features. She took up the blanket and its attached apparatus and became one of the artisans.

Schön did not appear. Afra became interested in the blanket, noticing the fineness of its warp and weft, and the skill of her own wrinkled brown hands as they manipulated the strands. She discovered in this dull routine an excellence of self-expression, a meeting of human needs. She found that she could accept this calm, unhurried work, and take special pleasure from it. She was preserving an art, and this was a worthwhile thing to do, no matter how far beyond it the machines of civilization went. The old ways were not inferior, when the larger framework of existence was considered. There was reward in simple diligence.

Over the troubled waters flew a white dove. She watched it with minor interest, expecting it to be confused in the general turbulence of wave and cloud, but it was not. Its direction was clear, its mission firm. It flew low over the surf, skillfully reconciling the difficulties of gust and spray and maintaining its orientation. A clever bird.

It sailed over the beach toward her, and came to rest only a few feet away. She could smell the tangy spume it carried on its feathers, now fluffing dry. It walked over the sand, cocking its head forward at each step in the manner of a chicken. Then it fixed an eye on her.

“Welcome to Mars, honey,” it said.

Schön! She had been discovered after all, in the way she least expected. “How did you find me?”

“I had to give you the score, sugar. You did better on Luna, but you flubbed it when you ran out again. No problem is solved that way. Ref called it 10 to 5, me.”

“Who is this referee?”

“Funny thing. My Mars is in Taurus, where your Ascendant is, while your Mars is in Aries. Do you suppose this inversion is significant? Mars is the planet of initiative, you know.”

“You are avoiding my questions, pigeon,” she remarked. But she knew the answer to the problem. Obviously they were still personifying their symbols, and her seeming act of free will had been mere conformity. He knew what the symbols were, so still had an advantage over her. He would keep on winning, as long as he could shock her or scare her into running. She had to gain the initiative — and this was the obvious place to start.

She stood up, breaking the spell of the symbol. She was in a large room filled with machinery, and it had been the steady sound of its operation that had suggested the breaking of ocean surf. This appeared to be a section of the station’s power plant, and the generators were keening, rumbling and pulsating with internal potential. Somewhere there was probably an atomic furnace utilizing the total conversion of matter into energy, and these were merely the units that harnessed and channeled that awesome power.

Schön was standing before her, still mocking her. Had it been physical capture he desired, he would have had her long ago, contest or no contest. It was her mind he was after, despite his denial, and he would not give up that chase until the ram had his way or the doe escaped entirely.

Had there, she wondered, ever been a ewe for him?

“Do you know the derivation of the Mars symbol?” he inquired. He sketched it in the air: the circle with the northeast arrow emerging.

“Of course. It represents—”

“Not that cute little fib you tried to hand the engineer. Surely you realized the phallic essence of that pictograph? And Venus—” he described that symbol also in the air — “Venus is about as direct an image of the female apparatus—”

“It depends on your viewpoint,” she said, interrupting him. But she hadn’t thought of the symbols in this way, in spite of their normal application to designate male or female.

Schön was in effect jabbing at her now, keeping her off-balance while he set up for his pugilistic KO. The ascendant evidently influenced his entire mode of play. Similarly, her own ascendant was a continuing liability that she had to face and reconcile, if she were ever to match him on an even basis. How many planets, how many rounds remained before the terminus? Seven?

“And did you realize that innocent little Ivo thought you were having an affair with Harold Groton?”

She tried to halt her reaction, but it was as though he had knocked her breath out of her. “What?”

“Ivo failed utterly to comprehend your capricious Capricorn ways, and he labored under his own bumbling reverse-prejudice. White girl, white man, and all that suggestive dialogue—”

“But that was only because Harold understood how I’d—” She paused, then went on brokenly. “How I had let Brad go and — and—”

“And presented your fickle heart to Ivo — without bothering to inform him. So you just waltzed around with the engineer, enjoying the sensation, waiting for some romantic moment to let Ivo discover what was in store for him, totally insensitive to his interim feelings. Oh, lass, that was your finest hour. It was beautiful! How the irony of that little contretemps delighted me! But you know, he almost caught on at one point. Luckily, I succeeded in diverting him before it became conscious.”

She turned a horrified glance on him. “You — you actually — ?”

“Be practical, doll. Why should I match Mars to Venus, or give the water-carrier his goat? If Ivo had known how you really felt, he never would have yielded to me. As it was, the thing was near. Only his depression and the sudden breaking of the theme while he was in harness—”

“Oh, Ivo!” she exclaimed with the sharpest pang yet.

“A little late for regrets, cutie. Ivo no longer exists, unless you count his special memories, that are now part of my own experience. He has no more reality than I did while he was in control. You will have to settle for his body.”

She was running again, routed again, and it was Macon. She knew that the man behind must inevitably catch up, for there was no place to hide, no one to protect her. Her father was gone; she had seen him fall when the gun fired, there in his great overcoat; and his hat, not really silk, had rolled gruesomely toward her as though it were his severed head…

Now the black murderer was almost upon her, seeking to kill her too. In a moment his hands would fall heavily on her frail body and tear her apart—

She tripped and fell headlong on the cold pavement. He came up, his giant body looming over hers, and, as in a nightmare, she could not move.

“Got you!” he exclaimed.

It was an Easter sunrise service. Jesus Christ had died and had risen again, and she was present to give thanks, this lovely anniversary of this holy occasion. Yet her heart was heavy, for no miracle of this nature had come into her own life. Twice, three times her warning might have saved a life, the life of someone dear to her — a warning she had been too confused or self-centered to provide.

She had lost, again — yet somehow she had acquired a spiritual resource, an immortal strength to bear whatever had happened. This dawn ceremony—

She was near a tree, in this open country gathering for worship. It was a spreading live-oak, the moss festooned upon it elegantly, and on the bark of the most proximate branch nestled a large and rather handsome cocoon. As she watched, momentarily distracted from the service, the chrysalis opened and a butterfly emerged, damp and gleaming. It spread its new wings, waiting for them to dry, and it was a beautiful creature unlike any other.

Iridescence traveled along its vanes. “They don’t call me Schön for nothing,” it said to her.

She snapped out of it. The room was another mass of machinery in the bowels of the station. Monstrous power cables drained into a multi-layered grid whose purpose she could not fathom. It, too, in its way, was beautiful; everything during this session seemed to be rainbow.

“Gravity generator,” Schön remarked. “Neat trick, converting electrical power to gravitrons so efficiently. Of course they learned it millions of years ago from other species, via the macroscope; no one knows who first developed the technology for broadcasting, because the early species were hesitant to use it. Once we return to Earth, we’ll set up a local station; lots of things that process is good for besides sending information to space.”

“Is that all you’re interested in? How to make a profit from this?”

“By no means, babe. I would hardly be wasting my effort on you, in that case. I routed you by six points in Mars, by the way.”

That put him ahead 40 to 11, cumulative point score. She had to begin fighting back, or the final rounds would be meaningless. “Why are you wasting time on me? Because I’m the only viable girl within fifty thousand light-years?”

“Simplistic thought. You always did view male-female interaction as primarily sexual. That was one of the things that put Ivo off. He gave you love, and in exchange you offered pudenda.” He paused, but she had no comment. “Strange notion, that it is the woman who does the giving, in intellectual or physical love. In truth, all she does is acquiesce to the gifts of the man.”

“Assuming she acquiesces at all. Not every gift is attractive.”

“Fortunately, in the human species it is the male who has control. This is one of the reasons Man developed intelligence and culture instead of remaining backward. The control of reproduction, and thus of evolution, had to be taken away from the female before progress could be made. Some claim that man’s capacity for rape makes him more evil than those animals that are not up to such activity, but the opposite is true.”

“Of all the — !” But she was failing into his verbal snare again. That was the way of defeat.

“Even so, sex is overrated. The moment the urge is indulged, it becomes uninteresting. My real passion is for knowledge; satisfaction there only begets the desire to know even more. I have an insatiable appetite for intellectual experience. A man can sustain himself for a long time, acquiring comprehension, particularly with the macroscope.”

He still hadn’t admitted his real reason for pursuing her, in that case. Once she knew what he wanted from her, she might have the clue to prevail against him, somehow.

“How did you get around the destroyer?” she inquired, trying another approach. “You claim that exposure to it would kill you immediately, but yet you plan to travel.”

“You wouldn’t understand the technical medical description, so I’ll make it foolishly simple,” he said with a fine air of condescension. She had learned not to challenge him, and did not. He continued: “The problem was in blocking off a memory without experiencing it. I knew it was there, but I did not dare touch any part of it. It did not hurt Ivo because his personality was incomplete, acting as an inherent barrier; but the moment I absorbed that facet into the rest, the network would be complete, the circuit closed, the dam breached. Yet without that portion, I could not control the body, so I had to have it. And, unfortunately, memory is not confined to any particular area of the brain. A single impression may be laid down across untold synapses, like a thin layer of snow. It really is a generalized acid conversion. So I had to delineate the particular memory layer that was the destroyer concept, and isolate it a step at a time, neutralizing it synapse by synapse until every avenue had been caulked.”

He walked about the room, happy to be telling of his achievement. “I had to do it by developing spot enzymes attuned to, and only to, the acidic configurations typical of the destroyer trace. All without leaving my own body or brain. You ever try exerting conscious control over your own enzymes, when you didn’t even have it for your body? I dare say that was the most remarkable act of surgery ever performed by man.”

Afra was impressed in spite of herself. “You operated on your own brain-chemistry?”

“It took me six months,” he said. “The final step was rephasing the synapses I’d blocked, so that I had access to other memories without invoking the destroyer. I didn’t want to be stuck with Ivo’s superficiality, which was what would have happened had I merely hurdled the gap without reestablishing the lines. I wasn’t crossing over into his world, I was assimilating it into mine, with that one culvert remaining. But that involved mass testing and alignment. So I cast him into a historical adventure with a fair variety of experience, where I had a certain measure of supervisory control, and set up my alternate connections while that barrage of new signals was coming through.”

“All that — just so you could come out and chase a girl around the office?”

“All that for self-preservation, chick. Ivo was bound to foul up somewhere, and he could have gotten us all killed instead of just the two or three he did manage. I don’t appreciate having my destiny managed by a moron. I had to be ready to step in if he ever got smart enough to cry uncle.”

“Or even a moment before.”

“He didn’t always know when he had had enough.”

“If you were able to accomplish something as complex as blocking off a single memory,” she said slowly, “why didn’t you simply block off Ivo while you were at it? You seem to be able to function well enough without him. What prevented you from taking control any time you chose?”

“Honey, if I told you that, I would be in your power forever,” he said.

His attitude suggested that he was lying; and so she believed him.

The next room contained no heavy machinery. Instead it was laid out rather like a lecture hall, with benches lined up before a podium. Afra passed through it and paused before going on. “Did you run out of symbols, genius?” she called back. She knew that she had not lost the Venus round by much; perhaps two points.

Then the benches became occupied — by perching birds. Sparrows, storks, hummingbirds, eagles, parakeets and buzzards — all species were represented, crowded together in the close atmosphere, wings rustling, feathers drifting, ordure falling. And she was among them, a bird herself, of a type she could not quite identify. She, too, was confined within the tremendous cage the room had become.

Outside, in the area that a moment ago had held the podium, were the human attendees. They were spectacularly dressed, as though seeking to out-splendor the avian horde. Each couple was more elegantly garbed than the last, and all paraded by without a glance into the aviary. In fact, the people were oblivious to it, far more concerned with the display of their own finery.

She recognized the nature of it at last: this was an Easter promenade, following fittingly the sunrise service of the prior vision. But this was as vain an assemblage as she had ever seen. Every member of it seemed to crave attention, and to fear for the least fleck of dirt in the vicinity.

Schön was in it too, resplendent in… a tall silk hat.

She did not even notice what else he had on. He had gone too far. Furious, she looked about to see in what manner she might act. Surely something in this situation could be turned to her advantage. It was merely necessary to extend the breadth of her resources.

She scrambled — it was far too crowded to fly — to the large front gate that separated aves from homo, jostling aside the other birds officiously. This should be about where, in station geography, the podium stood. There should be a — yes, the catch was a simple one, not intended to withstand the attack of a human-brained bird. An ordered prying of the beak, a tuned shove with the wing, and—

The gate swung open.

The birds exploded outward, screeching. Feathers, dust and dung enveloped the passing people. There was a grand melee, and consternation, as everyone tried to get out of the way of the dirty birds. An albatross, taking off clumsily, crashed into Schön’s hat and knocked it from his head. Perhaps Afra had done it herself. And the lecture room was back.

The podium had been shoved askew, and Schön stood disheveled beside it. There had indeed been contact, and not of his choosing. He had dissolved the vision, this time.

She held on to the initiative. She sat down on the nearest bench, sure that this would trigger — the presentation.

It did. The illumination dimmed, and in the air of the front of the room a picture appeared. It was the Shape — the same subtle, tortuous, flexing color she had seen back near Earth when she glimpsed the destroyer-sequence. The same red mass, the same blue dot, as though a blue-white dwarf star were orbiting a red giant. The same symbolic agglutination of concepts, building, building—

She could not withdraw from it; the thing had hold upon her brain. She suspected that Schön was similarly transfixed. The destroyer had pounced at last.

But the emphasis shifted, and suddenly she realized that this was not the mind-ravager. It was the same technique, but not the same message — and the message, despite what certain fringe-interests claimed, was far more vital than the medium. Instead of oblivion, it brought information. It expanded her horizons. In another moment her mind had assimilated its universal language, the galactic gift of tongues, and she saw and heard — the lecture.

Formal galactic history commences with the formation of the first interstellar communication network. Only scattered authentic prior evidences exist…

She absorbed it, entranced. She had not been offered the full history before. This lecture went on to cover the expansion of the macroscopic network, spheres of cultural influence, and the onset of the First Siege.

An illustration, it said. Then the partial concepts became complete, and her full apperceptive mass responded. She was on a civilized planet, responding to its gravity, temperature and odors as well as its sights and sounds.

“I can tell you how it comes out,” Schön said. His voice interfered with her concentration, and she observed the shifting color-shapes that were telling the story, now three-dimensional and almost physical in substance.

Then her mind became attuned again, and the planet returned. She passed among the ghastly yet ordinary (by galactic standards) creatures of this world, conversed with them, and learned about the desperate struggle they were engaged in. It was planetary, interplanetary war, and this species was in danger of enslavement or destruction.

She came to understand the reason: the Traveler impulse permitted wars of conquest by immature cultures. It was like giving motorboats to hostile islanders previously separated from each other by miles of shark-infested shallows and reefs. Transportation without maturity spelled intercultural war — and mutual disaster.

Physical contacts between the stellar cultures of the galaxy in fact meant chaos, the lecture said, and now she agreed emphatically, having seen it in action. More information came, describing the termination of the siege. There was another animate, full-perception episode, showing the manner in which linked species had rejoined, sharing a planet, but not harmoniously. The creatures, like the last, were completely unhuman, yet she felt sympathy for their plight. She felt that she was there as a group of shoreline vigilantes killed an envoy from the undersea culture; and she reacted with dismay as she followed an enlightened land-dweller making a return quest into the ocean, only to be similarly slain by the border patrol of the other side. War broke out again, decimating both species and setting back the civilization of the planet disastrously; but still the mutual hate did not abate. Removal of the Traveler had not solved galactic problems; it had only suppressed them painfully. Better that it had never come.

But she learned also the positive side of it: the resurgence of civilization in the absence of the Traveler. She followed the positive preparations to alleviate the foreseen Second Siege. The destroyer was put into perspective: it was like a hurricane, that prevented the savages from using their modern boats. Many died trying — but this was better than what had happened before.

She saw the other phase of the destroyer project: the quest into the origin and nature of the Traveler signal.

It had to be assumed that the Traveler was beamed to the other galaxies of the local cluster. Had they gone through similar ravages? The macroscope did not provide the answer.

Yet, the conjecture continued, if the Traveler touched other galaxies, it had the aspect of a universal conspiracy to destroy civilization wherever it occurred. If so, it was essential that it be stopped at its source.

Still, journeys to these near galaxies had failed. Six expeditions to Andromeda had never returned. If there were a traveler there, a round trip should be possible. If there were not, then high-level macroscopic technology should have been developed and retained, and at least a few programs should have been beamed for intergalactic communication. Ordinary spherical broadcasts dissipated in the vast intergalactic reaches, but beams did not, as the Traveler itself had demonstrated.

Could it be that the Travelers encountered the other galaxies at different times? The local program appeared to originate about three million light-years distant, at a point source, and to expand to saturate the entire galaxy and its environs: the globular clusters, the Magellanic clouds, but not Fornax or Sculptor. About thirty thousand light-years beyond the rim (arbitrarily assigned; there was no physical discontinuity marking the edge of the galaxy) the beam stopped; its total cross section at this stage was about 150,000 light-years. By the time the beam might, in its onward travel, intercept another galaxy beyond the Milky Way, it would have spread into a tremendous cone-segment far too diffuse for proper effect. It had obviously been tailored to this particular locale.

If other beams were similarly tailored, and if they originated from the same spot in space, it might be that they had to take turns. A million years of traveler could be directed at one galaxy; then, while it was on its way, the projector could be reoriented to cover another galaxy. Thus direction and distance and schedule would determine the status of any particular galaxy.

After the Second Siege the confirmations began to come in. Civilized planets that had jumped to other galaxies and had been stranded there had broadcast back portions of the truth. They had made the transit, but had been unable to come out of organic stasis because of the absence of the traveler signal necessary for the reconstitution. Thus millions of years had had to pass before a Traveler intercepted the new location of an exploring world. At that point reconstitution had occurred, but with losses, since even the gaseous state did not have indefinite shelf-life. Then no return was feasible, unless another delay of tens of millions of years was undertaken while waiting for the local Third Siege.

This was the substance of the first report from Horv, stranded in a globular cluster orbiting Andromeda. It was almost as though the Travelers had been arranged to prevent intergalactic commerce. But Horven research continued, for the same signal that revived the sadly decimated populace now allowed the planet to travel freely around Andromeda. In due course the second, more remarkable report was broadcast.

Meanwhile, one drone moon from the Dooon did reappear in the Milky Way Galaxy, carrying their full report and recordings of their Traveler signal. The recordings had no potency in themselves, but were useful for direct comparison with similar records of the local Traveler. This established that two different Travelers were involved; the “fingerprint” differed in slight but consistent ways. One more fact had replaced conjecture, and another item in the tentative map of Traveler activity had been confirmed. Data was now available on three local beams — and all had emanated from the same point source.

No other drone-moon returnees were discovered. Evidently a number had been dispatched, but were either lost in the uncharted configurations of jumpspace or had arrived but not been located in or near the Milky Way. A continuous and complete scan of the entire volume of the galaxy simply was not feasible, so chance played its part.

Finally, utilizing several of the delayed macroscopic return-messages, the records of the single recovered moon, and detailed analysis of the Traveler itself when the Third Siege began, the locals were able to come at the complete story.

It was the dawning of a new era.

The lecture was over. The convoluting shapes faded, and on the stage a prima donna was singing. Her talent was superlative; she seemed to represent the pinnacle of human art, the culmination of individual opportunity. This was as close, in a cappella, as one could come to perfection. This was excellence personified.

Afra considered her human heritage, and that of the galaxy. It was as though six great manifestations of culture had occurred, in whatever mode they were considered. The galaxy had gone through three long civilizations and three short sieges, the last still in progress, and now was on the brink of the seventh and perhaps climactic manifestation. Every individual, every species, every culture was on the threshold. The mirror of history provided the reflection of all the past — but that past was a lesser history than what was about to be.

The prima donna was Schön; the symbols paid scant attention to the sex of the individual. Afra was not certain of the nature of her own symbol this time, having experienced no transformation other than purely conjectural, but the incipient realization of the truth — personal and galactic and universal — was enough. Schön might represent the ultimate in Man’s prior evolution, juvenile as he was, but he did not represent Man’s future. Neither did the starfish form that Brad had become; that type of maturity had been cast aside long ago as a dead-end attempt for adjustment to a bygone and limited environment. Man was destined for something else. Not physically, not technologically, but socially and emotionally. It might be millions of years before he achieved it, but that was a mere instant, galactically. The threshold was now, in his realization of his potential, in his vision of his own esthetic future.

With only moderate effort, Afra shifted into station reality. The room had changed; this was another busy complex. Machines were turning out the element-display samples and feeding them into conveyor-slots, undoubtedly for transport to the several visitors’ lounges. Art was being reproduced, and foodstuffs manufactured. This section was, in fact, an extensive but comparatively routine station production center. Either there was a considerable turnover in samples, implying many visits here, or the displays were replaced frequently as a matter of course.

Schön was present, and he held the S′ device. “Mercury was yours, 10 to 5,” he announced. “Your damned birds…” He slapped the instrument.

She had won a round at last! But the vision was upon her:

The street of Macon, she at age seven, the Negro man standing over her. But now her terror was gone. Six manifestations — ascendant, sun, moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury — transmuted to the seventh — Jupiter — and the auspices were beneficent. She knew that the Negro had not come to hurt her; he was not the gunman. The holdup man had been white.

“Little girl, you got to come with me. Your daddy’s been hurt.”

“I know,” she said.

“I work at the store,” he continued, helping her to her feet. “I saw you bolt, and I knew you was scared. But it’s all right now. Your daddy grabbed that robber and held him, and he’s in jail by now I know, but—”

Her knee was skinned, and her shoulder was bruised from the collision in the store, but these were minor injuries. She took the man’s hand and began the walk back. “How bad — I mean, my father—”

“He’s not hurt bad. I’m sure. He’s a brave man, doing that, stepping into a gun like that. A brave man.”

Afra stepped out of the memory-vision again, independent of its power as well. She did not have to run any more.

Schön was watching her, aware that he was losing ground. He had thought to win the round by throwing her into the vision of terror and forcing her to capitulate once more, but this time she had conquered her fear. Her liability was gone. Whatever type of conquest he had contemplated was farther from realization now than it had been during their initial encounter in the ascendant.

She was still gaining strength, riding the crest of her victory in Mercury and her release from the continuing repression of the ascendant. She was ready to expand her horizons even more, to encompass the ultimate information and profit thereby.

“Did you consider,” she demanded of Schön, “the essential paradox of the Traveler? The single fact that makes it distinct from all other broadcasts, and makes its very existence proof that its Type III technology is qualitative as well as quantitative?”

“Certainly,” he said — but there had been a fractional hesitation that betrayed his oversight. He had missed the obvious, as had they all, and worked it out only in this instant of her challenge. Another point for her side! “The Traveler, as an impulse moving at light velocity, could never supervise so complex a chronological process as melting and reconstitution of an unfamiliar creature, since no memory of prior experience could exist in a pattern traveling past the subject at the ultimate velocity. The portion of the Traveler that directed the reduction of the epidermis would be twenty-four light-minutes beyond, by the time the heart dissolved. And the portion that finished the job would not have been advised when the process started — not when it couldn’t, relativistically, catch up for that same twenty-four minutes. Information cannot travel through the material universe faster than light. So the Traveler could not handle the job — yet did. Paradox.”

“You’ve missed it!” she cried. “Genius, you’re blind to the truth. You don’t understand the Traveler any more than the early galactics did.”

“Ridiculous,” he said, irritated. “I can tell you how the melting cycle is accomplished within that limitation. Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“This won’t fit on any picture, stupid.”

Schön intercepted a carbon-cube — one of the tremendous diamonds — on its way to some display and set it on top of one of the art-machines. He trotted down the hall to procure something resembling chalk, and returned to make a sketch on his improvised blackboard. A chalk sketch on a diamond!

“The beam originates at point A, strikes the subject at point B and goes on to point C, never to return,” he said, drawing a cartoon figure. She had no doubt he could turn out a work of art if he chose, but the chalk was clumsy, the surface slick, and he was preoccupied by the reversal of their competitive fortunes.

“For the sake of simplicity,” he continued, “we’ll ignore such refinements as the manufactured melt-beam that actually does the work; that’s merely an offshoot produced ad hoc when triggered by a suitable situation. The point is, the Traveler only touches once and moves on at light velocity. It doesn’t stay to see the job finished, any more than a river stays to watch the wader crossing it. There’s always new water.”

“You’re still all wet,” she said.

“But an object in water will set up a stationary ripple,” he continued, seemingly unperturbed. She knew he had to make his point — or lose points. “Because the impulse is not confined to one direction. In the case of our Traveler, the interaction at point B initiates a feedback that meets and prepares the oncoming impulses. So an extended interaction is feasible.” He drew another figure on a second face of the cube. “Call point D that secondary interaction, though it occurs at no fixed place. It does alert the oncoming signal in advance, making a type of memory and planning possible.

“So the melting is actually a function of B — the A-beam modified by the BD feedback. The only time the A-beam is encountered directly is during the introduction; and this is the reason for that introduction. Without that BD feedback, the melting would be a simple chaotic reduction of flesh leading inevitably to death. As it is, when a critical point approaches — such as the need to close down one lung while preserving the other — the Traveler knows, and modifies its program accordingly. The same holds for the reconstitution, which is hardly the natural reformulation of evolution it appears. It doesn’t matter where it occurs, so long as the Traveler is present; the beam is geared to react to a given stimulus in the proper way. A very sophisticated program, particularly since no part of its component is solid, liquid or even gaseous; but effective, as we know.”

“You’re talking about details and missing the whole, just as the galactics did,” she said. “The old trees/forest ignorance. You know what? I think you can’t comprehend the Traveler by yourself. You blocked it off along with the destroyer-memory! The truth is out of your reach!”

His face was calm, but she was sure he was furious. “What can you do with your alleged comprehension that I can’t do with mine? Show me one thing.”

“I can talk to the Traveler,” she said.

“To be sure. I can even talk to my foot. But what kind of a reply do you get?”

She concentrated all her attention and will-power on this one effort, knowing that her thesis, her one superiority over Schön, depended for its proof on the performance. “Traveler,” she cried, “Traveler, can you hear me?”

Nothing happened. Schön gazed at her with a fine affectation of pity.

Was she wrong? She had been so certain—

“Traveler,” she repeated urgently, “do you hear me? Please answer—”

Y E S

It came from every direction, that godlike response. It assaulted her senses, scorched her fingers, swelled her tongue, blasted her eardrums, lanced into her eyeballs with letters of fire. Was this what Moses had experienced on the mountain?

Schön stood dazed. He had received it.

“What are you?” she asked, frightened herself but aware that this might be her only opportunity to make this contact. Only while she rode the crest—

And it came at her again, a torrent of information, projected into her mind in the same fashion the melting cycle had acted on the cells of her body. The passing portions of the Traveler beam triggered nerve synapses in her brain and spoke to her in true telepathy.

In essence, this: Just as interstellar travel required the reduction of solid life to liquid life, and thence to gaseous life, so true intergalactic travel required one further stage: radiation life. The Traveler was not a broadcast beam; it was a living, conscious creature. Originally it had evolved from mundane forms, but its technology and maturity had enabled it to achieve this unforeseeable level, freeing it of any restraint except the limitation of the velocity of radiation through space. Even that could be circumvented by using the jumpspace technique — once space had been cartographically explored by lightspeed outriders.

There was nowhere in the universe this species could not range.

But very few life-forms ever achieved this level. Why? The Travelers investigated and discovered that in the confined vicious cauldron that was the average life-bearing galaxy, the first species to achieve gaseous-state jumpspace capacity acted to suppress all others — then stagnated for lack of stimulus. The problem was that technology exceeded maturity. Only if more species could be encouraged to achieve true maturity could universal civilization become a fact. They needed time — time to grow.

And so the Travelers became missionaries. Each individual jumped to a set spot in space and underwent the transposition to radiation, retaining awareness throughout. Physical synapses became wave-synapses, thought occurring from the leading edge backwards, but lucidly. And each individual personally brought jumpspace capacity to Type II technologies resident in individual galaxies.

It was the Milky Way as a whole that was being cultivated. The Traveler beneficence resembled that of the destroyer: it seemed cruel, but actually fostered an acceleration of maturity. Species might suffer, but galaxies were prodded into growth. Those galaxies that achieved control over their immature elements — so strikingly defined by their actions in the face of jumpspace temptation — were on their way to success. The Milky Way, after several failures, had finally gained that self-control, and was on the verge of true maturity — as an entity. This was the gift of the Traveler: the passport to the universe, and to universal civilization.

“The white man bringing his god to the ignorant natives,” Schön muttered. “Big deal.” He stepped into the next chamber.

“It is a big deal, even if you’re too immature to admit that extragalactic aliens can do things you can never hope to do,” she cried, pursuing him. “And mankind, too, may share in that distinction, if it survives its own adolescence. Not by becoming smarter, but by maturing. We—”

Schön was in a soldier’s uniform, unkempt, and in his hand was a bottle of cheap whisky. If he had a post to guard, he was derelict in duty. Somewhere he had made an error, a nondiscriminating decision, and the consequence was upon him.

Afra was in a glorious gown, a golden-haired goddess, as she swept into the room. She observed banks of computerlike machinery, and took it for the sensitive, quality-control mechanism of the station, but she was intent on her personal opportunity. Schön’s deviation was her reward, his faithlessness to the common welfare her good fortune — so long as she proceeded with confidence.

He lifted the bottle to her in a drunken salute. “My candle burneth over,” he said. “You won again.”

Then that elusive special memory unlocked itself and emerged from its dungeon of security: something Bradley Carpenter had told her. In times of stress it had pushed up, only to retreat before scrutiny. Now at last she had it. “Schön is dangerous — make no mistake about that. He has no scruples. But there is a way to bring him under control, if the need exists and the time is proper. Now I’m going to describe it to you, but I want you to tell no one — particularly not Ivo.”

“Who is Ivo?” she had inquired, for this was before it all had started.

“He’s my contact with Schön. But this is the one thing about Schön he doesn’t know. I’m going to implant in you a hypnotic block against divulgence.”

And he had done so, skilled as he had been in such matters. She had not remembered it until this moment — this moment of discovering Schön in his weakness, knowing that his vulnerability was temporary, dictated only by transitory animation of symbols. Schön still led her in points, and she knew what tremendous resources he possessed; she would never overcome him if she did not finish him now. Uranus or Neptune might swing the pendulum back to him, and with it the initiative and the final victory.

“Do you remember Yvonne?” she asked him.

The image vanished. Schön turned on her, the bottle in his hand replaced by S′, and it was as though the fire of his essence took physical form. “Brad, you bastard!” he cried. “You told!”

But he was in his weakness, she in her strength. “You have a memory like mine, one you can’t face,” she said. “It is the reason you could not take over control from Ivo, whatever else you managed. It is the knowledge that gives me power over you.” But only if the circumstance were appropriate — and that could be a matter of definition.

For there had been a third genius of the project, one falling between Brad and Schön. Yvonne — “The Archer” — and there had been intense conflict.

They were five years old when the culmination came, both having experienced more of life in all areas than had most adults, but both remaining children emotionally. It was the classic case of two scorpions in a bottle, two nations with nuclear overkill and insufficient patience: two children with the powers of adults. Because they were male and female, there was a certain mitigating attraction; but their rivalry was stronger, and when the camaraderie ended they put it on the line: a game, a contest, more than physical, more than intellectual, whose precise rules no other person comprehended. For a day and a night they had faced each other, locked in a private room, and in the end Schön had won and Ivo had committed suicide.

Then Schön, protecting himself, had operated on the body and made it resemble a mutilated version of his own in certain ways that would deceive the outside world. He had arranged an impressive “accident” of conflagratory nature that made the deception complete, and had then assumed her place in the project community. Thus he had become Ivo, and somehow managed to alter the records to confuse the prying adults. It seemed to them that a male child had died, yet the count did not confirm this; instead one male had been mislabeled female. Yet if a female had been lost, which one? Schön had gotten away with murder. But he had not confused his contemporaries. They were not as clever as he, but they knew him, and they knew the score. They were his peer-group, and it operated with unprecedented force. They did not report his crime to the adults, for that was not the peer-code; they did pass the word informally and judge him themselves and impose a sentence on him. He became Ivo, then. No longer could he masquerade as another person by choice and convenience. For the group had this special power over its members, part ethics, part force, part religion, part family: what the group decreed, the individual honored. It could not be otherwise, even for Schön.

The secret had been kept, but he had been punished. Even after the project disbanded, the peer-power remained, the inflexible code, a geis on him he could not break.

Only Ivo himself could set him loose when the need arose — and Ivo had never known the truth, and was stubborn to boot. Ivo had thought it was the tedium of daily existence that kept Schön buried originally. He had never heard of Ivo.

As the Traveler disciplined the universe; as the destroyer disciplined the galaxy; as circumstance disciplined mankind; so the peer-group disciplined Schön.

And nothing else! Schön still had the galactic instrument, S′, and this was not Earth-locale, and Afra was not a peer of the project. “You cannot get home without me,” he said. “The sentence cannot be invoked, here; there is still need for me.”

So the grand ploy had failed, and now that pendulum was swinging back, restoring his power, diminishing hers. It was her turn to retreat.

The next room was another highly technical one: a strange conduit admitted something invisible, and stranger equipment manipulated it.

“Conversion,” Schön remarked with some of his old confidence. “Channeled gravitrons adapted to macrons for the broadcast.” He touched S′.

Five people stood on an Earthscape in the sunshine. A woman and two men faced south; two women — one older, one younger — stood fifty feet away, in the trio’s line of sight.

For the first time Afra saw the symbols and remained in doubt as to which one was hers. The woman in the northern group might be herself; the men might be Schön and Ivo. One of the southern pair was an old-fashioned woman; the other was an up-to-date girl. The one pinched, stiff; the other alert, open-faced. Their clothing and manner identified their types — but which of the three women, really, was Afra?

This seemed to be the time for indecision, and Schön evidently shared the mood. “Am I so bad?” he demanded somewhat plaintively. “I never tortured to death an animal, and not many who pass through conventional childhood can say that. I never shot a man, and not many who served in the armed forces can say that. All I did was play a fair game for high stakes and win. Had I lost, I would have died. I have always abided by the rules of the game.”

Then Afra knew that the woman between the two men was Ivo, as she might have been at maturity. Schön was bracketed by his past, and by competing demands, and it was not in her to condemn him out of hand.

But Afra was bracketed too. She had witnessed the history of the galaxy and absorbed its significance. Was she now to return to her old, narrow ways and attitudes, or was she to open her mind and personality to change, movement, spontaneity? Which woman was she? There was advantage in conventionality, but also in initiative.

She had never realized before that her own prejudice against Negroes stemmed at least in part from that chase in her childhood by a well-meaning supermarket employee. She had remembered that pursuit subconsciously and associated it with the sudden, crushing death of her father, fatally wounded that day, and she had somehow blamed all Negroes for it. Yet it had been a white man who fired the shot, attempting to hold up the cashier. It had been a Negro who had tried to help, even to the extent of expressing an unjustified confidence in her father’s health. The strongest elements of the experience had been the killing and the Negro, and her subconscious had made a connection her conscious had not. No doubt the climate of her upbringing had promoted this, too…

There were no answers for either of them here. They moved to the next room.

Maintenance: cleaners, repair machines, testing robots. She walked down the aisle, Schön following several paces behind. At the far end was a spherical dance of light, communicating in the galactic code. She studied it — and understood that it was warning all comers that the next compartment contained the destroyer programming mechanism.

The other chambers had not had warnings; why did this one?

She was sure she knew. Theoretically, any creature who was able to travel to this station had achieved the maturity to be immune to the destroyer concept. But there could be less mature associates, as in the case of the species that had actually emplaced this unit; the truly mature individuals were not capable of violence, however practical its application. Younger species would have to maintain the equipment and do the work.

Or — there could be children, recapitulating evolution, poking aggressively into dangerous nooks. So — a warning. There could be stray destroyer emanation here.

“This is the end of the line,” she said, showing him the warner. “We have to go back. Why don’t we stop this foolish contest and try to help each other?” And she wondered whether her distaste for him had dissipated with her fear.

He brightened. “We are prisoners of what we are. These symbolic animations are only projections of our two personalities. We are Neptune now, planet of obligation… and such. For you this is A HOUSE RAISING, helpfulness, cooperation, joy in common enterprise. That is why you have spoken as you have.”

“Then what is your symbol?”

“A MAN IN THE MIDST OF BRIGHTENING INFLUENCES.”

She saw that the game was not over, and that he had almost won. Beatryx was dead; Harold was gone; Ivo had been replaced by this stranger — and she was ready, in her overwhelming spirit of helpfulness, to give whatever she had to offer to the victor. Perhaps there had been a time when she would have felt otherwise; intellect told her so. But not at this moment.

“The score stands at 78 to 69, my favor,” he said. “If we stop here, and I agree we might as well—”

She tried to reach the Traveler again, but that wave of ability had subsided. She might never again achieve the peak of awareness and drive necessary to call it forth directly. No help there.

Without letting herself consciously realize what she was doing in her desperate effort to stave off defeat, Afra stepped backward into the destroyer-room.

“Hey!” Schön called, taken by surprise. He dived for her, astonishingly swift on his feet — but too late.

Ivo resumed control as the destroyer sequence hit. A rainbow of color/concept threatened to overwhelm his perception, building with merciless velocity toward oblivion — but he had had long experience diverting it. He deflected the impact and concentrated on Afra.

She was kneeling on the floor, trying to cover her face, but the emanations were everywhere. They leaked out in forms susceptible to reception by ears and skin as well as eyes. There was no physical way to block the destroyer off, this close.

He reached her and clamped both hands on her wrists, hauling her around and up and back through the doorway. Her eyes were fixed, her lips parted in the obsessive rapture of assimilation. As they passed from the chamber the barrage stopped, sealed off by some unseen shield.

Afra slumped into unconsciousness. He propped her up against an inactive scrubbing machine and peered anxiously into her face. Had he brought her out in time? If he revived her now, would she awaken to personality — or mindlessness?

She had won the game with Schön. Her daring had scored a clean sweep of Pluto, for she had survived where he could not. It was the one situation where lesser intelligence was an advantage. The extra minute she had withstood the destroyer was the same as a knockout victory.

Schön had had to have her help, if he were ever to leave the station, since only by burying his own personality could he have faced the destroyer. He could have fashioned an idiot personality for the purpose — but then the geis on him would have taken effect, keeping him bottled. Only if another person released him could he reemerge, in the absence of Ivo. A simple request would have been enough: “Schön — come out!” — but it had to be from someone who acted independently. Someone outside the bottle, for the seal could not be broken from within. Someone who knew him and knew what the request meant.

Certainly Schön would never have let Ivo resume control. Not when both knew that Afra was in love with that alternate personality. But an idiot — capable only of a directed reception of the Traveler — she would have had to banish that. Her temperament would have forced her to uncork the responding mind, even though she hated it. And of course she would have felt obligated to honor the terms of the agreement, having lost the game.

But she had won. Ivo was sure of this — because he had been the referee. Had it been otherwise — that is, had Schön not arranged to make it fair — the results would not have been binding. A legitimate win for Schön would have forced Ivo to return control to him, even after saving him from the destroyer. Ivo, too, was bound by the geis, having agreed to arbitrate the contest.

As it was, that intervention to save their mutual mind had cost Schön all ten points of the final round, putting Afra ahead 79 to 78, and it was over. She had won the right to choose her companion on the way home. She had made the nature of that choice plain during her dialogue with Schön.

Provided she retained, literally, the wit to make that decision. Otherwise, she too had lost, and rendered the round a tie that was meaningless. A mindless Afra could not serve Schön’s purpose.

Ivo contemplated her face, so lovely in its repose. He had longed for this from the moment he saw her the first time. He had traveled the galaxy only to please her.

The surface of the machine against which she leaned was reflective. He saw in that mirror the head of a man. It seemed to smile knowingly at him. He knew, as the gift of one of Schön’s conscious thoughts during the contest, that this was Afra’s symbol in Pluto — A MAN’S HEAD — just as the rainbow he had seen as he took over had been Schön’s. But whose head was it to be?

Had all his life been leading to this crisis, this empty vigil with an unconscious girl? If she were gone, what was left?

Ivo held her, afraid to wake her, and remembered.

There had been the project breakup, thrusting them all abruptly into the massive, confused, tormented world — yet most had greeted it as a release and a challenge. They had exploded across the planet, three hundred and thirty eager youngsters seeking experience… and had been absorbed by it without a ripple. Brad had gone to college; Ivo had followed the melody of the flute, searching out the obscure monuments of the life of Sidney Lanier. Quite a number of the others had married nonproject people. All had sworn to keep in touch forever, but they were young then, and somehow had forgotten. There had been some almost-random encounters, however — enough to circulate news of most. From time to time Ivo had dreamed of a grand convening, a project reunion — recognizing the very desire as a reflection of his inadequacy, his poor adjustment to the world of the ’70’s.

Then Groton, on a hot Georgia street, and adventure had been thrust upon him. Brad needed Schön! Afra, vision of love, bait of trap — would he have stepped into it had he not wanted to? The proboscoids of Sung, overrunning their world heedlessly, and mankind doing the same. Human organs, black-market. Plump Beatryx, wife of an engineer. Image of a school crisis: boy in classroom, cigarette, smirk. Senator Borland, man of ambition, power. Destroyer image: one dead, one ruined, one untouched? Sprouts, a winning configuration, S D P S, Kovonov, who had meant to go himself…

Joseph the rocket, accommodations for five. Learning to use the macroscope, that instrument of galactic civilization. Astrology: “The complex of your life and the complex of the universe may run in a parallel course.” UN pursuit. Image of a living cell. The handling — identity confirmation or sexual experience? The melting — skull canting, gray-white fluid coursing out eye-socket. Reconstitution — from cell to self in four hours.

Mighty Neptune, sea-storm world of methane. Triton, where Tryx found a bug. Schön, moon of a moon. There he had come to appreciate real people, to know the meaning of friendship, its prerogatives and its miseries. Terraforming: a joint effort. Poetry, prejudice, a chess analogy. Starfish. Afra’s horoscope, the chart that defined her. The flip of a bus token. Trial: another case of handling, really. Spacefold diagrams. Visual penetration of Neptune — dwarf with the breath of a giant, yet more ancient than Sol. Gravitational radius.

Tyre. Mattan, talking of superpowers. Baal Melqart, hungry for children. Swords and torches in the night. Aia: “We shall have joy in one another, while both being true to our memories.” Image of Astarte, milk spurting from her breasts. Stench of rotting shellfish, for purple robes. Gorolot, offered an imperious housemaid. Afra, volunteering in lieu of Aia, comfortable harbor for ships. All because Schön craved freedom.

Well, Schön had lost, whether Afra had mind or not.

Suddenly Ivo could stand the suspense no longer. He put his hands under Afra’s arms, drew her to her feet against him, and kissed her with all the passion he had suppressed for so long. Try that for handling!

She woke abruptly. She brought her arms up outside his, wedged her stiffened fingers against his cheeks, and shoved back his head. “Get away from me!” she exclaimed angrily.

Ivo released her with guilty haste. She had not chosen him!

Then he realized with shivering relief that she thought he was Schön. She had no way to know about the contest result and changeover. He opened his mouth to explain.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ivo,” she snapped. “I can tell you two apart easily. Aside from that, I knew Schön couldn’t get me out of there. It had to be you — or nothing.”

His feeling of stupidity was back in full force. He tried to speak again.

“You thought if only Schön were gone, everything would be just fine. Boy gets girl, curtain lowers on happy sunset. Sorry — when I want a lapdog, I’ll whistle.”

What had happened? Her dialogue with Schön had suggested that she was in love with Ivo, but now she was treating him with greater contempt than ever before.

“Schön was right about one thing,” she remarked, adjusting her clothing. “You certainly aren’t very bright — and I do dislike stupidity.”

Was she saying she wanted Schön back? That made no sense to him. But if she didn’t want Schön and didn’t want Ivo—

Afra faced about and began to walk away, back toward the chamber where the visions had started. Somehow he knew that if he let her go, he would never recover her — yet he could not act. He had lost her without ever speaking a word.

Jumps of thousands of light-years, until they stood outside the great disk of the galaxy itself, and returned — that he remembered clearly, yet he could not bridge the gap of a few paces between two people now. A history of the Solar System, billions of years strong — yet seconds were undoing him. Where had he gone wrong?

Approach to the destroyer complex: “It’s tracking us!” His foolish jealousy of Harold Groton, returning his concept of the man to the impersonal surname. Afra’s excitement at the element display. The final chamber. S′. Wheels on wheels, symbols meshing in “The Symphony.” Simultaneous yet chronological adventures of galactic history. Schön: “That means our daughters get dinked.” Beatryx: “You were not wrong, Dolora.” Harold: “I had thought it was an insult to serve under Drone command.” Where had he gone wrong?

Now Schön had been nullified, Beatryx was dead, Harold was seeking the Traveler, and Afra disliked stupidity. Yet he remained, and so did his responsibilities. Where had he heard that? Promises to keep, and miles to go before… He had to do something for the gallant Groton couple, sundered so unfairly; then—

But I love you! he cried subvocally at Afra. Imperious she might be, problems she might have — but underneath that surface beauty was an extraordinary woman. She had fought Schön…

She continued walking, culottes shaping a trim derriere, bright hair flouncing loose.

Afra, whose Capricorn history segment had slipped somehow, throwing her instead into a savage personal conflict. Yet that program error had saved her — and him — from a dream-state that might have endured until their bodies disintegrated. The normal person did not emerge from that slumber, as Harold and Beatryx had shown. That, apparently, was the final test: only a mind that could survive and finally break the stasis was fit to go free again. The human mind lacked that capability. Even Schön had been trapped.

Strange, fortunate coincidence, that Afra should have been evicted from that clinging mold. And that she alone, subsequently, should establish a momentary rapport with the supercreature, the Traveler. The Traveler: nerve impulse between galactic cells, whose capabilities spanned from macrocosmic to microcosmic with equal finesse.

Coincidence? Perhaps the Traveler had touched her intentionally! This was easily within its compass. To nudge her just enough to break the trance, and then again to win a vital point from Schön… and it could not touch Schön himself — or Ivo! — because of the mind-block against the destroyer-concept Schön had so carefully arranged. Afra had been the only one available with an open yet sharp enough mind…

Why? Why interfere at all, this creature with a galaxy to supervise? Could it have seen some hope in her, in humanity? Did it want them to return to Earth with their message of galactic and intergalactic culture? Yet Afra could not return to Earth by herself, and she had turned her back on him.

At least, he thought with transitory irony, he didn’t have to worry about Schön interfering. Geis apart, Schön could not take over again, since Afra wouldn’t cooperate with him and the destroyer fields suffused all the galaxy. Schön was barred from space. He, Ivo, could now draw freely on any or all of Schön’s talents as required without risking his identity. He could get home. He had only to reduce his personality when actually dealing with the destroyer, protecting his immunity; at other times he could, literally, be a genius.

Fat consolation, he thought, watching Afra’s dainty feet moving. You can use it to fathom why you lost her.

Yes — the genius of Schön would clarify that, at least. Ivo reached… sunburst! He understood exactly what Afra was doing.

“Girl,” he said clearly.

She halted. She had not been walking rapidly and had not yet entered the adjacent chamber. She was still, in the imagery of the recent contest, in Pluto or Neptune. Obsession, obligation — yet so much more, positive as well as negative.

“What the cloud doeth,” he said, “the Lord knoweth; the cloud knoweth not.”

She turned slowly. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a quote from Sidney Lanier. The course of the cloud may be predestined, but Man possesses free will.” He had spoken in Russian.

Her capitulation was as sudden as her awakening. She skipped across the room and threw herself into his arms. “I knew you weren’t a cloud, Ivo!” she murmured before she kissed him.

Further explanation was unnecessary, yet the hard-core Ivo in him ran it through during their extended embrace. Afra had wanted neither the omniscient supercilious Schön nor the stodgy ignorant Ivo. She required compromise: Ivo’s personality with Schön’s abilities. For neither identity alone represented the complete man. Schön had never grown up, while Ivo had shied away from the exercise of his rightful talents. How could a woman really love half of a schizoid personality?

But the destroyer had shifted the balance and broken the stalemate, making Ivo the artist. He could unify and control — and time and experience had made his identity the more fit of the two for human intercourse. A child normally grew into an adult — and to abolish the adult Ivo in favor of the child Schön would be a foolhardy inequity.

Thus the personal equation. Boy had not won girl; man had won woman.

What, now, of Earth? Mankind was a child-culture with adolescent technology; were they to present it with devastating adult technology? Or would it be better to stay clear and allow natural selection to function, as it did elsewhere in the galaxy?

“What the artist doeth,” he murmured, “the Lord knoweth; knoweth the artist not?”

Copyright © 1969 by Piers Anthony.

Certain astrological passages used in the text are quoted and/or adapted from ASTROLOGY, How and Why It Works by Marc Edmund Jones, copyright 1945, and The Sabian Symbols by Marc Edmund Jones, copyright 1966, both published by the Sabian Publishing Society. Reference is also made to Astrology and Its Practiced Application by E. Parker, translated from the Dutch by Coba Goedhart: P. Dz. Veen, Publisher, Amersfoort, Holland, 1927.

ISBN: 0-380-00209-4