An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the editors

Ace edition / July 1990

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Cover art by Walter Velez.

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Introduction copyright © 1990 by David Drake.

“The Only Thing We Leam” by Cyril M. Kombluth. Copyright 1949 by Standard Magazines, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc.

“C-Chute” by Isaac Asimov. Copyright 1951 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation; © renewed 1979 by Isaac Asimov. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Allamagoosa” by Eric Frank Russell. Copyright © 1955 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the agents for the author’s Estate, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.

“A Question of Courage” by J. F. Bone. Copyright © 1960 by Ziff-Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.

“Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke. Copyright 1951 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright renewed © 1979 by Arthur C. Clarke. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022. 

“Hindsight” by Jack Williamson. Copyright 1940 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.; renewed © 1968 by Jack Williamson. Reprinted by permission of the Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc.

“The Last Battalion” by David Drake. Copyright © 1977 by Davis Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Shadow on the Stars” by Algis Budrys. Copyright 1954 by King-Size Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Time Lag” by Poul Anderson. Copyright © 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue. New York, NY 10022. 

One of the problems with figuring out how ships are going to fight in space (assuming that we have ships in space, which isn’t as likely as I wish; and, that we’re still fighting when we get there, which is unfortunately more probable) is that there are a lot of maritime models to choose from. 

It’s also true that some of the maritime models came from very specialized sets of circumstances; and a few of them weren’t particularly good ideas even in their own time.

And it’s also true that some of the writers applying the models have a better grasp of the essentials than others. That isn’t limited to writers of fiction. For example, I recall two essays which were originally published about fifty years ago in Astounding. 

In the first of the essays, Willy Ley, a very knowledgeable man who had been involved with the German rocket program, proved to my satisfaction that warships in space would carry guns, not missiles, because, over a certain small number of rounds, the weight of a gun and its ammunition was less than the weight of the same number of complete missiles. The essay was illustrated with graphs of pressure curves, and was based on the actual performance of nineteenth-century British rocket artillery (“the rockets’ red glare” of Francis Scott Key).

As I say, the essay was perfectly convincing… until I read the paired piece by Malcolm Jameson.

Jameson’s qualifications were relatively meager. Before throat cancer forced him to retire, he’d been a United States naval officer—but he was a mustang, risen from the ranks, rather than an officer with the benefit of an Annapolis education. For that matter, Jameson had been a submariner rather than a surface-ship sailor during much of his career. That was a dangerous specialty—certainly as dangerous a career track as any in the peacetime navy—but it had limited obvious bearing on war in vacuum.

Jameson’s advantage was common sense. He pointed out (very gently) that at interplanetary velocities, a target would move something on the order of three miles between the time a gun was fired and the time the projectile reached the end of the barrel. The rest of Jameson’s essay discussed tactics for missile-launching spaceships—which were possible, as the laws of physics proved gun-laying spaceships were not. Ley could have done that math just as easily. It simply hadn’t occurred to him to ask the necessary questions. 

Light-swift beam weapons were a fictional staple in Jameson’s day (he used them in his stories about Bullard of the Space Patrol) and a realistic possibility in ours. And the advent of the electrically-driven railgun has brought even projectile artillery back into the realm of space warfare.

Present realities don’t prevent a writer from building any number of self-consistent constructs of how space war will work, however. 

At one time, boarding and hand-to-hand combat were common notions in military science fiction (which, in the 1920s and 30s, was rather a lot of science fiction). Boarding has a long naval tradition as, at times, the heaviest available weapons were not by themselves sufficient to sink major warships. When oared warships grew sturdy enough to be equipped with rams, however, ramming replaced boarding as the tactic of choice… 

Until sailing ships replaced oared warships. Sailing ships can’t mount effective rams because their masts and rigging would come down with the shock. The guns available during the next five centuries weren’t effective ship-killers, and boarding returned.

As guns became more powerful and ships were designed to mount large numbers of them along the sides, the sort of melees that characterized the Armada battles and the meeting engagements of the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth century gave way to formal line-of-battle tactics. Opposing fleets were expected to sail along in parallel lines, firing all their guns at one another, until something happened.

Mostly, nothing much happened. A typical example is the action between the fleets of DeGrasse and Graves in 1781 in Chesapeake Bay. This was the crucial battle that decided the fate of the British army at Yorktown—and, thus, the Revolutionary War. It was a draw, with no ships lost on either side (which turned out to be good enough for the American rebels, of course).

Nelson changed matters by what amounted to assertiveness training for the British navy. His captains were expected to close with the enemy and board if necessary, instead of staying at a reasonable range and letting noise and smoke stand in the place of doing real damage. Nelson’s opponents never beat him. In the end, they were able to kill him; but even dead he led his forces to victory. 

The appearance of steam and armored warships in the nineteenth century gave rise to an amazing number of theories and some of the most outlandish warships ever built. What didn’t emerge were major battles between the new vessels. 

At Lissa in 1866, an Austrian fleet humiliated an Italian fleet of more modern and powerful ships, proving that competence and leadership had more to do with victory than equipment alone. (Nelson must have smiled from his grave.) Lissa proved little or nothing about the new hardware (theorists of the time thought otherwise; they were wrong), but it was as good a test as the century provided. 

Ships generally mounted mixed armaments of large and mid-sized weapons, though there was a brief fad of equipping battleships with small numbers of very heavy guns. This was partly in the hope that a single huge shell could smash opposing armor (in the unlikely instance that such a shell hit its target); and partly because the planners wanted an easily quantifiable marker for their arms race. (The dangerous buffoons in the Pentagon and Kremlin with their “My throw weight is bigger than your throw weight” arguments had nineteenth century predecessors.)

Incidentally, as soon as steam removed the necessity for masts and rigging, rams returned as well. There were few successful examples of ramming in war. but in peacetime, rams sank almost as many friendly naval units as decomposing smokeless powder did.

The only real test of nineteenth century warships came in the twentieth century—1905—at the Strait of Tsu Shima, where a Russian fleet that did nothing whatsoever right met a Japanese fleet that did nothing important wrong. The Russians were massacred, and it was heavy gunfire alone that did the butchers’ work.

An idiosyncratic genius named Jackie Cooper was running the British admiralty at the time. He came up with the first good idea in warship construction since Ericsson put a turret and screw propeller on the Monitor: Cooper built the Dreadnought. 

The Dreadnought was big and fast and carried ten of the most powerful naval guns available, with none of the mid-sized weapons that had proved almost useless at Tsu Shima. Every battleship built after the Dreadnought is more similar to her than the Dreadnought was similar to anything that came before her. 

Having had a brilliant idea. Cooper went on to have a lethally bad one: the battle cruiser. The battle cruiser was a dreadnought (the name became generic for all-big-gun warships) which had lighter armor and more powerful engines than a battleship, and was therefore faster. The theory was that “speed is armor.” The reality was quite different, and thousands of sailors (mostly British) died in the two World Wars (the Hood was a battle cruiser) because a clever slogan can’t repeal the laws of physics. 

The dreadnought brought back the concept of the line of battle. It didn’t work any better in the twentieth century than it had in the eighteenth, because both sides had to agree to play the game and the weaker side—the Germans, in this case—would inevitably lose. The German admirals of the World Wars were less than brilliant, but they weren’t stupid. Besides, the fleets of World War II were dominated by aircraft. The one major battleship-to-battleship fleet action of the war occurred at night in the Surigao Strait. It was a close copy of Tsu Shima, with the Japanese playing the part the Russians had forty years earlier. 

There is enough in actual maritime history to provide models for almost any form of space warfare a writer wants to postulate. Because there are so many possibilities, writers can find a solidly-grounded situation that suits their story, rather than forcing the story into a narrow matrix. 

And that, I think, makes for some very good stories.

Dave Drake,

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 

The professor, though he did not know the actor’s phrase for it, was counting the house—peering through a spyhole in the door through which he would in a moment appear before the class. He was pleased with what he saw. Tier after tier of young people, ready with notebooks and styli, chattering tentatively, glancing at the door against which his nose was flattened, waiting for the pleasant interlude known as “Archaeo-Literature 203” to begin.

The professor stepped back, smoothed his tunic, crooked four books on his left elbow, and made his entrance. Four swift strides brought him to the lectern and, for the thousandth-odd time, he impassively swept the lecture hall with his gaze. Then he gave a wry little smile. Inside, for the thousandth-odd time, he was nagged by the irritable little thought that the lectern really ought to be a foot or so higher.

The irritation did not show. He was out to win the audience, and he did. A dead silence, the supreme tribute, gratified him. Imperceptibly, the lights of the lecture hall began to dim and the light on the lectern to brighten.

He spoke.

“Young gentlemen of the Empire, I ought to warn you that this and the succeeding lectures will be most subversive.”

There was a little rustle of incomprehension from the audience—but by then the lectern light was strong enough to show the twinkling smile about his eyes that belied his stern mouth, and agreeable chuckles sounded in the gathering darkness of the tiered seats. Glow lights grew bright gradually at the students’ tables, and they adjusted their notebooks in the narrow ribbons of illumination. He waited for the small commotion to subside.

“Subversive—” He gave them a link to cling to. “Subversive because I shall make every effort to tell both sides of our ancient beginnings with every resource of archaeology and with every clue my diligence has discovered in our epic literature.

“There were two sides, you know—difficult though, it may be to believe that if we judge by the Old Epic alone—such epics as the noble and tempestuous Chant of Remd, the remaining fragments of Krall’s Voyage, or the gory and rather out-of-date Battle For the Ten Suns.” He paused while styli scribbled across the notebook pages. 

“The Middle Epic is marked, however, by what I might call the rediscovered ethos.” From his voice, every student knew that that phrase, surer than death and taxes, would appear on an examination paper. The styli scribbled. “By this I mean an awakening of fellow-feeling with the Home Suns People, which had once been filial loyalty to them when our ancestors were few and pioneers, but which turned into contempt when their numbers grew.

“The Middle Epic writers did not despise the Home Suns People, as did the bards of the Old Epic. Perhaps this was because they did not have to—since their long war against the Home Suns was drawing to a victorious close.

“Of the New Epic I shall have little to say. It was a literary fad, a pose, and a silly one. Written within historic times, the some two score pseudo-epics now moulder in their cylinders, where they belong. Our ripening civilization could not with integrity work in the epic form, and the artistic failures produced so indicate. Our genius turned to the lyric and to the unabashedly romantic novel. 

“So much, for the moment, of literature. What contribution, you must wonder, have archaeological studies to make in an investigation of the wars from which our ancestry emerged?

“Archaeology offers—one—a check in historical matters in the epics—confirming or denying. Two—it provides evidence glossed over in the epics—for artistic or patriotic reasons. Three—it provides evidence which has been lost, owing to the fragmentary nature of some of the early epics.”

All this he fired at them crisply, enjoying himself. Let them not think him a dreamy litterateur, or, worse, a flat precisionist, but let them be always a little off-balance before him, never knowing what came next, and often wondering, in class and out. The styli paused after heading Three.

“We shall examine first, by our archaeo-literary technique, the second book of the Chant of Remd. As the selected youth of the Empire, you know much about it, of course—much that is false, some that is true, and a great deal that is irrelevant. You know that Book One hurls us into the middle of things, aboard ship with Algan and his great captain, Remd, on their way from the triumph over a Home Suns stronghold, the planet Telse. We watch Remd on his diversionary action that splits the Ten Suns Fleet into two halves. But before we see the destruction of those halves by the Horde of Algan, we are told in Book Two of the battle for Telse.” 

He opened one of his books on the lectern, swept the amphitheater again, and read sonorously.

“Or, in less sumptuous language, one fission bomb—or a stick of time-on-target bombs—was dropped. An unprepared and disorganized populace did not take the standard measure of dispersing, but huddled foolishly to await Algan’s gunfighters and the death they brought.

“One of the things you believe because you have seen them in notes to elementary-school editions of Remd is that Telse was the fourth planet of the star, Sol. Archaeology denies it by establishing that the fourth planet—actually called Marse, by the way—was in those days weather-roofed at least, and possibly atmosphere-roofed as well. As potential warriors, you know that one does not waste fissionable material on a roof, and there is no mention of chemical explosives being used to crack the roof. Marse, therefore, was not the locale of Remd, Book Two. 

“Which planet was? The answer to that has been established by X-radar, differential decay analyses, video-coring, and every other resource of those scientists still quaintly called ‘diggers.’ We know and can prove that Telse was the third planet of Sol. So much for the opening of the attack. Let us jump to Canto Three, the Storming of the Dynastic Palace. 

“And so on. Now, as I warned you, Remd is of the Old Epic, and makes no pretense at fairness. The unorganized huddling of Telse’s population was read as cowardice instead of poor A.R.P. The same is true of the Third Canto. Video-cores show on the site of the palace a hecatomb of dead in once-purple livery, but also shows impartially that they were not particularly gorged and that digestion of their last meals had been well advanced. They didn’t give such a bad accounting of themselves, either. 1 hesitate to guess, but perhaps they accounted for one of our ancestors apiece and were simply outnumbered. The study is not complete.

“That much we know.” The professor saw they were tiring of the terse scientist and shifted gears. “If but the veil of time were rent that shrouds the years between us and the Home Suns People, how much more would we learn? Would we despise the Home Suns People as our frontiersman ancestors did, or would we cry: ‘This is our spiritual home—this world of rank and order, this world of formal verse and exquisitely patterned arts’?” 

If the veil of time were rent—?

We can try to rend it …

Wing Commander Arris heard the clear jangle of the radar net alarm as he was dreaming about a fish. Struggling out of his too-deep, too-soft bed, he stepped into a purple singlet, buckled on his Sam Browne belt with its holstered .45 automatic, and tried to read the radar screen. Whatever had set it off was either too small or too distant to register on the five-inch C.R.T.

He rang for his aide, and checked his appearance in a wall mirror while waiting. His space tan was beginning to fade, he saw, and made a mental note to get it renewed at the parlor. He stepped into the corridor as Evan, his aide, trotted up—younger, browner, thinner, but the same officer type that made the Service what it was, Arris thought with satisfaction.

Evan gave him a bone-cracking salute, which he returned. They set off for the elevator that whisked them down to a large, chilly, dark underground room where faces were greenly lit by radar screens and the lights of plotting tables. Somebody yelled “Attention!” and the tecks snapped. He gave them “At ease” and took the brisk salute of the senior teck, who reported to him in flat, machine-gun delivery:

“Object-becoming-visible-on-primary-screen-sir.”

He studied the sixty-inch disk for several seconds before he spotted the intercepted particle. It was coming in fast from zenith, growing while he watched.

“Assuming it’s now traveling at maximum, how long will it be before it’s within striking range?” he asked the teck.

“Seven hours, sir.”

“The interceptors at Idlewild alerted?”

“Yessir.”

Arris turned on a phone that connected with Interception. The boy at Interception knew the face that appeared on its screen, and was already capped with a crash helmet.

“Go ahead and take him, Efrid,” said the wing commander.

“Yessir!” and a punctilious salute, the boy’s pleasure plain at being known by name and a great deal more at being on the way to a fight that might be first-class.

Arris cut him off before the boy could detect a smile that was forming on his face. He turned from the pale lunar glow of the sixty-incher to enjoy it. Those kids—when every meteor was an invading dreadnought, when every ragged scouting ship from the rebels was an armada!

He watched Efrid’s squadron soar off on the screen and then he retreated to a darker corner. This was his post until the meteor or scout or whatever it was got taken care of. Evan joined him, and they silently studied the smooth, disciplined functioning of the plot room, Arris with satisfaction and Evan doubtless with the same. The aide broke silence, asking:

“Do you suppose it’s a Frontier ship, sir?” He caught the wing commander’s look and hastily corrected himself: “I mean rebel ship, sir, of course.”

“Then you should have said so. Is that what the junior officers generally call those scoundrels?”

Evan conscientiously cast his mind back over the last few junior messes and reported unhappily: “I’m afraid we do, sir. We seem to have got into the habit.”

“I shall write a memorandum about it. How do you account for that very peculiar habit?”

“Well, sir, they do have something like a fleet, and they did take over the Regulus Cluster, didn’t they?”

What had got into this incredible fellow, Arris wondered in amazement. Why, the thing was self-evident! They had a few ships—accounts differed as to how many—and they had, doubtless by raw sedition, taken over some systems temporarily. 

He turned from his aide, who sensibly became interested in a screen and left with a murmured excuse to study it very closely.

The brigands had certainly knocked together some ramshackle league or other, but— The wing commander wondered briefly if it could last, shut the horrid thought from his head, and set himself to composing mentally a stiff memorandum that would be posted in the junior officer’s mess and put an end to this absurd talk.

His eyes wandered to the sixty-incher, where he saw the interceptor squadron climbing nicely toward the particle— which, he noticed, had become three particles. A low crooning distracted him. Was one of the tecks singing at work? It couldn’t be!

It wasn’t. An unsteady shape wandered up in the darkness, murmuring a song and exhaling alcohol. He recognized the Chief Archivist, Glen.

“This is Service country, mister,” he told Glen.

“Hullo, Arris,” the round little civilian said, peering at him. “I come down here regularly—regularly against regulations—to wear off my regular irregularities with the wine bottle. That’s all right, isn’t it?”

He was drunk and argumentative. Arris felt hemmed in. Glen couldn’t be talked into leaving without loss of dignity to the wing commander, and he couldn’t be chucked out because he was writing a biography of the chamberlain and could, for the time being, have any head in the palace for the asking. Arris sat down unhappily, and Glen plumped down beside him.

The little man asked him, “Is that a fleet from the Frontier League?” He pointed to the big screen. Arris didn’t look at his face, but felt that Glen was grinning maliciously.

“I know of no organization called the Frontier League,” Arris said. “If you are referring to the brigands who have recently been operating in Galactic East, you could at least call them by their proper names.” Really, he thought— civilians!

“So sorry. But the brigands should have the Regulus Cluster by now, shouldn’t they?” he asked, insinuatingly. This was serious—a grave breach of security. Arris turned to the little man.

“Mister, I have no authority to command you,” he said measuredly. “Furthermore, I understand you are enjoying a temporary eminence in the non-Service world which would make it very difficult for me to—ah—tangle with you. I shall therefore refer only to your altruism. How did you find out about the Regulus Cluster?”

“Eloquent!” murmured the little man, smiling happily. “I got it from Rome.”

Arris searched his memory. “You mean Squadron Commander Romo broke security? I can’t believe it!”

“No, commander. I mean Rome—a place—a time—a civilization. I got it also from Babylon, Assyria, the Mogul Raj—every one of them. You don’t understand me, of course.”

“I understand that you’re trifling with Service security and that you’re a fat, little, malevolent, worthless drone and scribbler!”

“Oh, commander!” protested the archivist. “I’m not so little!” He wandered away, chuckling.

Arris wished he had the shooting of him, and tried to explore the chain of secrecy for a weak link. He was tired and bored by this harping on the Fron—on the brigands.

His aide tentatively approached him. “Interceptors in striking range, sir,” he murmured.

“Thank you,” said the wing commander, genuinely grateful to be back in the clean, etched-line world of the Service and out of that blurred, water-color, civilian land where long-dead Syrians apparently retailed classified matter to nasty little drunken warts who had no business with it. Arris confronted the sixty-incher. The particle that had become three particles was now—he counted—eighteen particles. Big ones. Getting bigger.

He did not allow himself emotion, but turned to the plot on the interceptor squadron.

“Set up Lunar relay,” he ordered.

“Yessir.”

Half the plot room crew bustled silently and efficiently about the delicate job of applied relativistic physics that was lunar relay.’ He knew that the palace power plant could take it for a few minutes, and he wanted to see. If he could not believe radar pips, he might believe a video screen. 

On the great, green circle, the eighteen—now twenty-four—particles neared the thirty-six smaller particles that were interceptors, led by the eager young Efrid.

“Testing Lunar relay, sir,” said the chief teck.

The wing commander turned to a twelve-inch screen. Unobtrusively, behind him, tecks jockeyed for position. The picture on the screen was something to see. The chief let mercury fill a thick-walled, ceramic tank. There was a sputtering and contact was made.

“Well done,” said Arris. “Perfect seeing.”

He saw, upper left, a globe of ships—what ships! Some were Service jobs, with extra turrets plastered on them wherever there was room. Some were orthodox freighters, with the same porcupine-bristle of weapons. Some were obviously home-made crates, hideously ugly—and as heavily armed as the others.

Next to him, Arris heard his aide murmur, “It’s all wrong, sir. They haven’t got any pick-up boats. They haven’t got any hospital ships. What happens when one of them gets shot up?”

“Just what ought to happen, Evan,” snapped the wing commander. “They float in space until they desiccate in their suits. Or if they get grappled inboard with a boat hook, they don’t get any medical care. As I told you, they’re brigands, without decency even to care of their own.” He enlarged on the theme. “Their morale must be insignificant compared with our men’s. When the Service goes into action, every rating and teck knows he’ll be cared for if he’s hurt. Why, if we didn’t have pick-up boats and hospital ships the men wouldn’t—” He almost finished it with “fight,” but thought, and lamely ended,—“wouldn’t like it.”

Evan nodded, wonderingly, and crowded his chief a little as he craned his neck for a look at the screen.

“Get the hell away from here!” said the wing commander in a restrained yell, and Evan got.

The interceptor squadron swam into the field—a sleek, deadly needle of vessels in perfect alignment, with its little cloud of pick-ups trailing, and farther astern a white hospital ship with the ancient red cross.

The contact was immediate and shocking. One of the rebel ships lumbered into the path of the interceptors, spraying fire from what seemed to be as many points as a man has pores. The Service ships promptly riddled it and it should have drifted away—but it didn’t. It kept on fighting. It rammed an interceptor with a crunch that must have killed every man before the first bulwark, but aft of the bulwark the ship kept fighting.

It took a torpedo portside and its plumbing drifted through space in a tangle. Still the starboard side kept squirting fire. Isolated weapon blisters fought on while they were obviously cut off from the rest of the ship. It was a pounded tangle of wreckage, and it had destroyed two interceptors, crippled two more, and kept fighting.

Finally, it drifted away, under feeble jets of power. Two more of the fantastic rebel fleet wandered into action, but the wing commander’s horrified eyes were on the first pile of scrap. It was going somewhere— 

The ship neared the thin-skinned, unarmored, gleaming hospital vessel, rammed it amidships, square in one of the red crosses, and then blew itself up, apparently with everything left in its powder magazine, taking the hospital ship with it.

The sickened wing commander would never have recognized what he had seen as it was told in a later version, thus:

Lunar relay flickered out as overloaded fuses flashed into vapor. Arris distractedly paced back to the dark corner and sank into a chair.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice of Glen next to him, sounding quite sincere. “No doubt it was quite a shock to you.”

“Not to you?” asked Arris bitterly.

“Not to me.”

“Then how did they do it?” the wing commander asked the civilian in a low, desperate whisper. “They don’t even wear .45’s. Intelligence says their enlisted men have hit their officers and got away with it. They elect ship captains! Glen, what does it all mean?” 

“It means,” said the fat little man with a timbre of doom in his voice, “that they’ve returned. They always have. They always will. You see, commander, there is always somewhere a wealthy, powerful city, or nation, or world. In it are those whose blood is not right for a wealthy, powerful place. They must seek danger and overcome it. So they go out—on the marshes, in the desert, on the tundra, the planets, or the stars. Being strong, they grow stronger by fighting the tundra, the planets, or the stars. They—they change. They sing new songs. They know new heroes. And then, one day, they return to their old home.

“They return to the wealthy, powerful city, or nation or world. They fight its guardians as they fought the tundra, the planets, or the stars—a way that strikes terror to the heart. Then they sack the city, nation, or world and sing great, ringing sagas of their deeds. They always have. Doubtless they always will.”

“But what shall we do?”

“We shall cower, I suppose, beneath the bombs they drop on us, and we shall die, some bravely, some not, defending the palace within a very few hours. But you will have your revenge.”

“How?” asked the wing commander, with haunted eyes.

The fat little man giggled and whispered in the officer’s ear. Arris irritably shrugged it off as a bad joke. He didn’t believe it. As he died, drilled through the chest a few hours later by one of Algan’s gunfighters, he believed it even less.

The professor’s lecture was drawing to a close. There was time for only one more joke to send his students away happy. He was about to spring it when a messenger handed him two slips of paper. He raged inwardly at his ruined exit and poisonously read from them:

“I have been asked to make two announcements. One, a bulletin from General Sleg’s force. He reports that the so-called Outland Insurrection is being brought under control and that there is no cause for alarm. Two, the gentlemen who are members of the S.O.T.C. will please report to the armory at 1375 hours—whatever that may mean—for blaster inspection. The class is dismissed.”

Petulantly, he swept from the lectern and through the door.

Copyright (c) 1951 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

It was a long time since the Bustler had been so silent. She lay in the Sirian spaceport, her tubes cold, her shell particle-scarred, her air that of a long-distance runner exhausted at the end of a marathon. There was good reason for this: she had returned from a lengthy trip by no means devoid of troubles. 

Now, in port, well-deserved rest had been gained if only temporarily. Peace, sweet peace. No more bothers, no more crises, no more major upsets, no more dire predicaments such as crop up in free flight at least twice a day. Just peace.

Hah!

Captain McNaught reposed in his cabin, feet up on desk, and enjoyed the relaxation to the utmost. The engines were dead, their hellish pounding absent for the first time in months. Out there in the big city, four hundred of his crew were making whoopee under a brilliant sun. This evening, when First Officer Gregory returned to take charge, he was going to go into the fragrant twilight and make the rounds of neon-lit civilization.

That was the beauty of making landfall at long last. Men could give way to themselves, blow off surplus steam, each according to his fashion. No duties, no worries, no dangers, no responsibilities in spaceport. A haven of safety and comfort for tired rovers.

Again, hah!

Burman, the chief radio officer, entered the cabin. He was one of the half-dozen remaining on duty and bore the expression of a man who can think of twenty better things to do.

“Relayed signal just come in, sir.” Handing the paper across, he waited for the other to look at it and perhaps dictate a reply.

Taking the sheet, McNaught removed the feet from his desk, sat erect, and read the message aloud.

Terran Headquarters to Bustler. Remain Siriport pending further orders. Rear Admiral Vane W. Cassidy due there seventeenth. Feldman. Navy Op. Command, Sirisec. 

He looked up, all happiness gone from his leathery features, and groaned.

“Something wrong?” asked Burman, vaguely alarmed.

McNaught pointed at three thin books on his desk. “The middle one. Page twenty.”

Leafing through it, Burman found an item that said:

Vane W. Cassidy, R-Ad. Head Inspector Ships and Stores. 

Burman swallowed hard. “Does that mean—?”

“Yes, it does,” said McNaught without pleasure. “Back to training-college and all its rigmarole. Paint and soap, spit and polish.” He put on an officious expression, adopted a voice to match it. “Captain, you have only seven ninety-nine emergency rations. Your allocation is eight hundred. Nothing in your logbook accounts for the missing one. Where is it? What happened to it? How is it that one of the men’s kit lacks an officially issued pair of suspenders? Did you report his loss?”

“Why does he pick on us?” asked Burman, appalled. “He’s never chivvied us before.”

“That’s why,” informed McNaught, scowling at the wall. “It’s our turn to be stretched across the barrel.” His gaze found the calendar. “We have three days—and we’ll need ‘em! Tell Second Officer Pike to come here at once.”

Burman departed gloomily. In short time, Pike entered. His face reaffirmed the old adage that bad news travels fast.

“Make out an indent,” ordered McNaught, “for one hundred gallons of plastic paint, Navy gray, approved quality. Make out another for thirty gallons of interior white enamel. Take them to spaceport stores right away. Tell them to deliver by six this evening along with our correct issue of brushes and sprayers. Grab up any cleaning material that’s going for free.”

“The men won’t like this,” remarked Pike, feebly.

“They’re going to love it,” McNaught asserted. “A bright and shiny ship, all spic and span, is good for morale. It says so in that book. Get moving and put those indents in. When you come back, find the stores and equipment sheets and bring them here. We’ve got to check stocks before Cassidy arrives. Once he’s here we’ll have no chance to make up shortages or smuggle out any extra items we happened to find in our hands.”

“Very well, sir.” Pike went out wearing the same expression as Burman’s.

Lying back in his chair, McNaught muttered to himself. There was a feeling in his bones that something was sure to cause a last-minute ruckus. A shortage of any item would be serious enough unless covered by a previous report. A surplus would be bad, very bad. The former implied carelessness or misfortune. The latter suggested barefaced theft of government property in circumstances condoned by the commander.

For instance, there was that recent case of Williams of the heavy cruiser Swift. He’d heard of it over the spacevine when out around Bootes. Williams had been found in unwitting command of eleven reels of electric-fence wire when his official issue was ten. It had taken a court-martial to decide that the extra reel—which had formidable barter-value on a certain planet—had not been stolen from space-stores, or, in sailor jargon, “teleportated aboard.” But Williams had been reprimanded. And that did not help promotion. 

He was still rumbling discontentedly when Pike returned bearing a folder of foolscap sheets.

“Going to start right away, sir?”

“We’ll have to.” He heaved himself erect, mentally bid good-bye to time off and a taste of the bright lights. “It’ll take long enough to work right through from bow to tail. I’ll leave the men’s kit inspection to the last.”

Marching out of the cabin, he set forth toward the bow, Pike following with broody reluctance.

As they passed the open main lock, Peaslake observed them, bounded eagerly up the gangway and joined behind. A pukka member of the crew, he was a large dog whose ancestors had been more enthusiastic than selective. He wore with pride a big collar inscribed: Peaslake—Property of S.S. Bustler. His chief duties, ably performed, were to keep alien rodents off the ship and, on rare occasions, smell out dangers not visible to human eyes. 

The three paraded forward, McNaught and Pike in the manner of men grimly sacrificing pleasure for the sake of duty, Peaslake with the panting willingness of one ready for any new game no matter what.

Reaching the bow-cabin, McNaught dumped himself in the pilot’s seat, took the folder from the other. “You know this stuff better than me—the chart room is where I shine. So I’ll read them out while you look them over.” He opened the folder, started on the first page. “K1. Beam compass, type D, one of.” 

“Check,” said Pike.

“K2. Distance and direction indicator, electronic, type JJ, one of.” 

“Check.”

“K3. Port and starboard gravitic meters, Casini models, one pair.” 

“Check.”

Peaslake planted his head in McNaught’s lap, blinked soulfully and whined. He was beginning to get the others’ viewpoint. This tedious itemizing and checking was a hell of a game. McNaught consolingly lowered a hand and played with Peaslake’s ears while he ploughed his way down the list.

“K187. Foam rubber cushions, pilot and co-pilot, one pair.” 

“Check.”

I smelled the trouble the moment I stepped on the lift and took the long ride up the side of the Lachesis. There was something wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it but five years in the Navy gives a man a feeling for these things. From the outside the ship was beautiful, a gleaming shaft of duralloy, polished until she shone. Her paint and brightwork glistened. The antiradiation shields on the gun turrets and launchers were folded back exactly according to regulations. The shore uniform of the liftman was spotless and he stood at his station precisely as he should. As the lift moved slowly up past no-man’s country to the life section, I noted a work party hanging precariously from a scaffolding smoothing out meteorite pits in the gleaming hull, while on the catwalk of the gantry standing beside the main cargo hatch a steady stream of supplies disappeared into the ship’s belly. 

I returned the crisp salute of the white-gloved sideboys, saluted the colors, and shook hands with an immaculate ensign with an O.D. badge on his tunic.

“Glad to have you aboard, sir,” the ensign said.

“I’m Marsden,” I said. “Lieutenant Thomas Marsden. I have orders posting me to this ship as executive.”

“Yes, sir. We have been expecting you. I’m Ensign Halloran.”

“Glad to meet you, Halloran.”

“Skipper’s orders, sir. You are to report to him as soon as you come aboard.”

Then I got it. Everything was SOP. The ship wasn’t taut, she was tight! And she wasn’t happy. There was none of the devil-may-care spirit that marks crews in the Scouting Force and separates them from the stodgy mass of the Line. Every face I saw on my trip to the skipper’s cabin was blank, hard-eyed, and unsmiling. There was none of the human noise that normally echoes through a ship, no laughter, no clatter of equipment, no deviations from the order and precision so dear to admirals’ hearts. This crew was G.I. right down to the last seam tab on their uniforms. Whoever the skipper was, he was either bucking for another cluster or a cold feeling automaton to whom the Navy Code was father, mother, and Bible. 

The O.D. stopped before the closed door, executed a mechanical right face, knocked the prescribed three times and opened the door smartly on the heels of the word “Come” that erupted from the inside. I stepped in followed by the O.D.

“Commander Chase,” the O.D. said. “Lieutenant Marsden.”

Chase! Not Cautious Charley Chase! I could hardly look at the man behind the command desk. But look I did—and my heart did a ninety degree dive straight to the thick soles of my space boots. No wonder this ship was sour. What else could happen with Lieutenant Commander Charles Augustus Chase in command! He was three classes up on me, but even though he was a First Classman at the time I crawled out of Beast Barracks, I knew him well. Every Midshipman in the Academy knew him—Rule-Book Charley—By-The-Numbers Chase—his nicknames were legion and not one of them was friendly. “Lieutenant Thomas Marsden reporting for duty,” I said.

He looked at the O.D. “That’ll be all, Mr. Halloran,” he said.

“Aye, sir,” Halloran said woodenly. He stepped backward, saluted, executed a precise about face and closed the hatch softly behind him.

“Sit down, Marsden,” Chase said. “Have a cigarette.”

He didn’t say, “Glad to have you aboard.” But other than that he was Navy right down to the last parenthesis. His voice was the same dry schoolmaster’s voice I remembered from the Academy. And his face was the same dry gray with the same fishy blue eyes and rat trap jaw. His hair was thinner, but other than that he hadn’t changed. Neither the war nor the responsibilities of command appeared to have left their mark upon him. He was still the same lean, undersized square-shouldered blob of nastiness.

I took the cigarette, sat down, puffed it into a glow, and looked around the drab 6x8 foot cubicle called the Captain’s cabin by ship designers who must have laughed as they laid out the plans. It had about the room of a good-sized coffin. A copy of the Navy Code was lying on the desk. Chase had obviously been reading his bible.

“You are three minutes late, Marsden,” Chase said. “Your orders direct you to report at 0900. Do you have any explanation?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Don’t let it happen again. On this ship we are prompt.”

“Aye, sir,” I muttered. 

He smiled, a thin quirk of thin lips. “Now let me outline your duties, Marsden. You are posted to my ship as Executive Officer. An Executive Officer is the Captain’s right hand.”

“So I have heard,” I said drily.

“Belay that, Mr. Marsden. I do not appreciate humor during duty hours.”

You wouldn’t, I thought.

“As I was saying, Marsden, Executive Officer, you will be responsible for—” He went on and on, covering the Code-chapter, book and verse on the duties of an Executive Officer. It made no difference that I had been Exec under Andy Royce, the skipper of the Clotho, the ship with the biggest confirmed kill in the entire Fleet Scouting Force. I was still a new Exec, and the book said I must be briefed on my duties. So “briefed” I was—for a solid hour. 

Feeling angry and tired, I finally managed to get away from Rule Book Charley and find my quarters which I shared with the Engineer. I knew him casually, a glum reservist named Allyn. I had wondered why he always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. Now I knew.

He was lying in his shock-couch as I came in. “Welcome, sucker,” he greeted me. “Glad to have you aboard.”

“The feeling’s not mutual,” I snapped.

“What’s the matter? Has the Lieutenant Commander been rolling you out on the red carpet?”

“You could call it that,” I said. “I’ve just been told the duties of an Exec. Funny—no?”

He shook his head. “Not funny. I feel for you. He told me how to be an engineer six months ago.” Allyn’s thin face looked glummer than usual.

“Did I ever tell you about our skip—captain?” Allyn went on. “Or do I have to tell you? I see you’re wearing an Academy ring.”

“You can’t tell me much I haven’t already heard,” I said coldly. I don’t like wardroom gossips as a matter of policy. A few disgruntled men on a ship can shoot morale to hell, and on a ship this size the exec is the morale officer. But I was torn between the two desires. I wanted Allyn to go on, but I didn’t want to hear what Allyn had to say. I was like the proverbial hungry mule standing halfway between two haystacks of equal size and attractiveness. And like the mule I would stand there turning my head one way and the other until I starved to death.

But Allyn solved my problem for me. “You haven’t heard this,” he said bitterly. “The whole crew applied for transfer when we came back to base after our last cruise. Of course, they didn’t get it, but you get the idea. Us reservists and draftees get about the same consideration as the Admiral’s dog—No! dammit!—Less than the dog. They wouldn’t let a mangy cur ship out with Gutless Gus.” 

Gutless Gus! That was a new one. I wondered how Chase had managed to acquire that sobriquet.

“It was on our last patrol,” Allyn went on, answering my question before I asked it. “We were out at maximum radius when the detectors showed a disturbance in normal space. Chase ordered us down from Cth for a quick look—and so help me, God, we broke out right in the middle of a Rebel supply convoy—big, fat, sitting ducks all around us. We got off about twenty mark VII torpedoes before Chase passed the word to change over. We scooted back into Cth so fast we hardly knew we were gone. And then he raises hell with Detector section for not identifying every class of ship in that convoy!

“And when Bancroft, that’s the exec whom you’ve relieved, asked for a quick check to confirm our kills, Chase sat on him like a ton of brick. ‘I’m not interested in how many poor devils we blew apart back there,’ our Captain says. ‘Our mission is to scout, to obtain information about enemy movements and get that information back to Base. We cannot transmit information from a vaporized ship, and that convoy had a naval escort. Our mission cannot be jeopardized merely to satisfy morbid curiosity. Request denied. And, Mr. Bancroft, have Communications contact Fleet. This information should be in as soon as possible.’ And then he turned away leaving Bancroft biting his fingernails. He wouldn’t even push out a probe—scooted right back into the blue where we’d be safe!

“You know, we haven’t had one confirmed kill posted on the list since we’ve been in space. It’s getting so we don’t want to come in any more. Like the time—the Atropos came in just after we touched down. She was battered— looked like she’d been through a meatgrinder, but she had ten confirmed and six probable, and four of them were escorts! Hell! Our boys couldn’t hold their heads up. The Lachesis didn’t have a mark on her and all we had was a few possible hits. You know how it goes—someone asks where you’re from. You say the Lachesis and they say ‘Oh, yes, the cruise ship.’ And that’s that. It’s so true you don’t even feel like resenting it.” 

I didn’t like the bitter note in Allyn’s voice. He was a reservist, which made it all the worse. Reservists have ten times the outside contacts we regulars do. In general when a regular and reservist tangle, the Academy men close ranks like musk-oxen and meet the challenge with an unbroken ring of horns. But somehow I didn’t feel like ringing up.

I kept hoping there was another side to the story. I’d check around and find out as soon as I got settled. And if there was another side, I was going to take Allyn apart as a malicious trouble-maker. I felt sick to my stomach.

We spent the next three days taking on stores and munitions, and I was too busy supervising the stowage and checking manifests to bother about running down Allyn’s story. I met the other officers—Lt. Pollard the gunnery officer, Ensign Esterhazy the astrogator, and Ensign Blakiston. Nice enough guys, but all- wearing that cowed, frustrated look that seemed to be a Lachesis trademark. Chase, meanwhile, was up in Flag Officer’s Country picking up the dope on our next mission. I hoped that Allyn was wrong but the evidence all seemed to be in his favor. Even more than the officers, the crew was a mess underneath their clean uniforms. From Communications Chief CPO Haskins to Spaceman Zelinski there was about as much spirit in them as you’d find in a punishment detail polishing brightwork in Base Headquarters. I’m a cheerful soul, and usually I find no trouble getting along with a new command, but this one was different. They were efficient enough, but one could see that their hearts weren’t in their work. Most crews preparing to go out are nervous and high tempered. There was none of that here. The men went through the motions with a mechanical indifference that was frightening. I had the feeling that they didn’t give a damn whether they went or not—or came back or not. The indifference was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Yet there was nothing you could put your hand on. You can’t touch people who don’t care. 

Four hours after Chase came back, we lifted gravs from Earth. Chase was sitting in the control chair, and to give him credit, we lifted as smooth as a silk scarf slipping through the fingers of a pretty woman. We hypered at eight miles and swept up through the monochromes of Cth until we hit middle blue, when Chase slipped off the helmet, unfastened his webbing, and stood up.

“Take over, Mr. Marsden,” he said. “Lay a course for Parth.”

“Aye, sir,” I replied, slipping into the chair and fastening the web. I slipped the helmet on my head and instantly I was a part of the ship. It’s a strange feeling, this synthesis of man and metal that makes a fighting ship the metallic extension of the Commander’s will. I was conscious of every man on duty. What they saw I saw, what they heard I heard, through the magic of modern electronics. The only thing missing was that I couldn’t feel what they felt, which perhaps was a mercy considering the condition of the crew. Using the sensor circuits in the command helmet, I let my perception roam through the ship, checking the engines, the gun crews, the navigation board, the galley—all the manifold stations of a fighting ship. Everything was secure, the ship was clean and trimmed, the generators were producing their megawatts of power without a hitch, and the converters were humming contentedly, keeping us in the blue as our speed built to fantastic levels.

I checked the course, noted it was true, set the controls on standby and relaxed, half dozing in the chair as Lume after Lume dropped astern with monotonous regularity.

An hour passed and Halloran came up to relieve me. With a sigh of relief I surrendered the chair and headset. The unconscious strain of being in rapport with ship and crew didn’t hit me until I was out of the chair. But when it did, I felt like something was crushing me flat. Not that I didn’t expect it, but the Lachesis was worse than the Clotho had ever been. 

I had barely hit my couch when General Quarters sounded. I smothered a curse as I pounded up the companionway to my station at the bridge. Chase was there, stopwatch in hand, counting the seconds. 

“Set!” Halloran barked.

“Fourteen seconds,” Chase said. “Not bad. Tell the crew well done.” He put the watch in his pocket and walked away.

I picked up the annunciator mike and pushed the button. “Skipper says well done,” I said.

“He got ten seconds out of us once last trip,” Halloran said. “And he’s been trying to repeat that fluke ever since. Bet you a munit to an “F” ration that he’ll be down with the section chief trying to shave off another second or two. Hey!—what’s that—oh…“He looked at me. “Disturbance in Cth yellow, straight down—shall we go?”

“Stop ship,” I ordered. “Sound general quarters.” There was no deceleration. We merely swapped ends as the alarm sounded, applied full power and stopped. That was the advantage of Cth—no inertia. We backtracked for three seconds and held in middle blue.

“What’s going on?” Chase demanded as he came up from below. His eyes raked the instruments. “Why are we stopped?”

“Disturbance in Cth yellow, sir,” I said. “We’re positioned above it.”

“Very good, Mr. Marsden.” He took the spare helmet from the Exec’s chair, clapped it on, fiddled with the controls for a moment, nodded, and took the helmet off. “Secure and resume course,” he said. “That’s the Amphitrite—fleet supply and maintenance. One of our people.” 

“You sure, sir?” I asked, and then looked at the smug grin on Halloran’s face and wished I hadn’t asked.

“Of course,” Chase said. “She’s a three converter job running at full output. Since the Rebels have no three converter ships, she had to be one of ours. And since she’s running at full output and only in Cth yellow, it means she’s big, heavy, and awkward—which means a maintenance or an ammunition supply ship. There’s an off phase beat in her number two converter that gives a twenty cycle pulse to her pattern. And the only heavy ship in the fleet with this pattern is Amphitrite. You see?” 

I saw—with respect. “You know all the heavies like that, sir?” I asked.

“Not all of them—but I’d like to. It’s as much a part of a scoutship commander’s work to know our own ships as those of the enemy.”

“Could that trace be a Rebel ruse?”

“Not likely—travelling in the yellow. A ship would be cold meat this far inside our perimeter. And besides, there’s no Rebel alive who can tune a converter like a Navy mechanic.”

“You sure?” I persisted.

“I’m sure. But take her down if you wish.”

I did. And it was the Amphitrite. 

“I served on her for six months,” Chase said drily as we went back through the components. I understood his certainty now. A man has a feeling for ships if he’s a good officer. But it was a trait I’d never expected in Chase. I gave the orders and we resumed our band and speed. Chase looked at me.

“You acted correctly, Mr. Marsden,” he said. “Something I would hardly expect, but something I was glad to see.”

“I served under Andy Royce,” I reminded him.

“I know,” Chase replied. “That’s why I’m surprised.” He turned away before I could think of an answer that would combine insolence and respect for his rank. “Keep her on course, Mr. Halloran,” he tossed over his shoulder as he went out.

We kept on course—high and hard despite a couple of disturbances that lumbered by underneath us. Once I made a motion to stop ship and check, but Halloran shook his head.

“Don’t do it, sir,” he warned.

“Why not?”

“You heard the Captain’s orders. He’s a heller for having them obeyed. Besides, they might be Rebs—and we might get hurt shooting at them. We’ll just report their position and approximate course—and keep on travelling. Haskins is on the Dirac right now.” Halloran’s voice was sarcastic. 

I didn’t like the sound of it, and said so.

“Well, sir—we won’t lose them entirely,” Halloran said comfortingly. “Some cruiser will investigate them. Chances are they’re ours anyway—and if they aren’t there’s no sense in us risking our nice shiny skin stopping them—even though we could take them like Lundy took Koromaja. Since the book doesn’t say we have to investigate, we won’t” His voice was bitter again. 

At 0840 hours on the fourth day out, my annunciator buzzed. “Sir,” the talker’s voice came over the intercom, “Lieutenants Marsden and Allyn are wanted in the Captain’s quarters.”

Chase was there—toying with the seals of a thin, brown envelope. “I have to open this in the presence of at least two officers,” he said nodding at Allyn who came in behind me. “You two are senior on the ship and have the first right to know.” He slid a finger through the flap.

“Effective 12, Eightmonth, GY2964,” he read, “USN Lachesis will proceed on offensive mission against enemy vessels as part of advance covering screen Fleet Four for major effort against enemy via sectors YD 274, YD 275, and YD 276. Entire scouting Force IV quadrant will be grouped as Fleet Four Screen Unit under command Rear Admiral simms. Initial station Lachesis coordinates X 06042 Y 1327 Betelgeuse-Rigel baseline. ETA Rendezvous point 0830 plus or minus 30, 13/8/64. 

A. Evars, Fleet Admiral USN Commanding”

There it was! I could see Allyn stiffen as a peculiar sick look crossed Chase’s dry face. And suddenly I heard all the ugly little nicknames—Subspace Chase, Gutless Gus, Cautious Charley—and the dozen others. For Chase was afraid. It was so obvious that not even the gray mask of his face could cover it.

Yet his voice when he spoke was the same dry, pedantic voice of old. “You have the rendezvous point, Mr. Marsden. Have Mr. Esterhazy set the course and speed to arrive on time.” He dismissed us with the traditional “That’s all, gentlemen,” and we went out separate ways. I didn’t want to look at the triumphant smile on Allyn’s face. 

We hit rendezvous at 0850, picked up a message from the Admiral at 0853, and at 0855 were on our way. We were part of a broad hemispherical screen surrounding the Cruiser Force which englobed the Line and supply train —the heavies that are the backbone of any fleet. We were headed roughly in the direction of the Rebel’s fourth sector, the one top-heavy with metals industries. Our exact course was known only to the brass and the computers that planned our interlock. But where we were headed wasn’t important. The Lachesis was finally going to war! I could feel the change in the crew, the nervousness, the anticipation, the adrenal responses of fear and excitement. After a year in the doldrums, Fleet was going to try to smash the Rebels again. We hadn’t done so well last time, getting ambushed in the Fifty Suns group and damn near losing our shirts before we managed to get out. The Rebs weren’t as good as we were, but they were trickier, and they could fight. After all, why shouldn’t they be able to. They were human, just as we were, and any one of a dozen extinct intelligent races could testify to our fighting ability, as could others not-quite-extinct. Man ruled this section of the galaxy, and someday if he didn’t kill himself off in the process he’d rule all of it. He wasn’t the smartest race but he was the hungriest, the fiercest, the most adaptable, and the most unrelenting. Qualities which, by the way, were exactly the ones needed to conquer a hostile universe. 

But mankind was slow to learn the greatest lesson, that they had to cooperate if they were to go further. We were already living on borrowed time. Before the War, ten of eleven exploration ships sent into the galactic center had disappeared without a trace. Somewhere, buried deep in the billions of stars that formed the galactic hub, was a race that was as tough and tricky as we were—maybe even tougher. 

This was common knowledge, for the eleventh ship had returned with the news of the aliens, a story of hairbreadth escape from destruction, and a pattern of their culture which was enough like ours to frighten any thinking man. The worlds near the center of humanity’s sphere realized the situation at once and quickly traded their independence for a Federal Union to pool their strength against the threat that might come any day.

But as the Union Space Navy began to take shape on the dockyards of Earth and a hundred other worlds, the independent worlds of the periphery began to eye the Union with suspicion. They had never believed the exploration report and didn’t want to unite with the worlds of the center. They thought that the Union was a trick to deprive them of their fiercely cherished independence, and when the Union sent embassies to invite them into the common effort, they rejected them. And when we suggested that in the interests of racial safety they abandon their haphazard colonization efforts that resulted in an uncontrolled series of jumps into the dark, punctuated by minor wars and clashes when colonists from separate origins landed, more or less simultaneously, on a promising planet, they were certain we were up to no good.

Although we explained and showed them copies of the exploration ship’s report, they were not convinced. Demagogues among them screamed about manifest destiny, independence, interference in internal affairs, and a thousand other things that made the diplomatic climate between Center and Periphery unbearably hot. And their colonists kept moving outward.

Of course the Union was not about to cooperate in this potential race suicide. We simply couldn’t allow them to give that other race knowledge of our whereabouts until we were ready for them. So we informed each of the outer worlds that we would consider any further efforts at colonizing an unfriendly act, and would take steps to discourage it.

That did it.

We halted a few colonizing ships and sent them home under guard. We uprooted a few advance groups and returned them to their homeworlds. We established a series of observation posts to check further expansion—and six months later we were at war.

The outer worlds formed what they called a defensive league and with characteristic human rationality promptly attacked us. Naturally, they didn’t get far. We had a bigger and better fleet and we were organized while they were not. And so they were utterly defeated at the Battle of Ophiuchus. 

It was then that we had two choices. We could either move in and take over their defenseless worlds, or we could let them rebuild and get strong, and with their strength acquire a knowledge of cooperation—and take the chance that they would ultimately beat us. Knowing this, we wisely chose the second course and set about teaching our fellow men a lesson that was now fifteen years along and not ended yet.

By applying pressure at the right places we turned their attention inward to us rather than to the outside, and by making carefully timed sorties here and there about the periphery we forced them through sheer military necessity to gradually tighten their loosely organized League into tightly centralized authority, with the power to demand and obtain—to meet our force with counterforce. By desperate measures and straining of all their youthful resources they managed to hold us off. And with every strain they were welded more tightly together. And slowly they were learning through war what we could not teach through peace.

Curiously enough, they wouldn’t believe our aims even when captured crews told them. They thought it was some sort of tricky mental conditioning designed to frustrate their lie detectors. Even while they tightened their organization and built new fleets, they would not believe that we were forcing them into the paths they must travel to avoid future annihilation.

It was one of the ironies of this war that it was fought and would be fought with the best of intentions. For it was This was common knowledge, for the eleventh ship had returned with the news of the aliens, a story of hairbreadth escape from destruction, and a pattern of their culture which was enough like ours to frighten any thinking man. The worlds near the center of humanity’s sphere realized the situation at once and quickly traded their independence for a Federal Union to pool their strength against the threat that might come any day.

It was one of the ironies of this war that it was fought and would be fought with the best of intentions. For it was obvious now that we could never win—nor could they. The Rebels, as we called them, were every whit as strong as we, and while we enjoyed the advantages of superior position and technology, they had the advantage of superior numbers. It was stalemate—the longest, fiercest stalemate in man’s bloody history. But it was stalemate with a purpose. It was a crazy war—a period of constant hostilities mingled with sporadic offensive actions like the one we were now engaged in—but to us, at least, it was war with a purpose— the best and noblest of human purposes—the preservation of the race.

The day was coming, not too many years away, when the first of the aliens would strike the Outer worlds. Then we would unite—on the League’s terms if need be—to crush the invaders and establish mankind as the supreme race in the galaxy.

But this wasn’t important right now. Right now I was the executive officer of a scout ship commanded by a man I didn’t trust. He smelled too much like a stinking coward. I shook my head. Having Chase running the ship was like putting a moron in a jet car on one of the super-highways— and then sabotaging the automatics. Just one fearful mistake and a whole squadron could be loused up. But Chase was the commander—the ultimate authority on this ship. All I could do was pray that things were going to come out all right.

We moved out in the lower red. Battles weren’t fought in Cth. There was no way to locate a unit at firing range in that monochromatic madness. Normal physical laws simply didn’t apply. A ship had to come out into threespace to do any damage. All Cth was, was a convenient road to the battlefront. 

With one exception.

By hanging in the infra band, on the ragged edge of threespace, a scout ship could remain concealed until a critical moment, breakout into threespace—discharge her weapons—and flick back into Cth before an enemy could get a fix on her. Scouts, with their high capacity converters, could perform this maneuver, but the ponderous battle-wagons and cruisers with their tremendous weight of armor, screens, and munitions couldn’t maneuver like this. They simply didn’t have the agility. Yet only they had the ability to penetrate defensive screens and kill the Rebel heavies. So space battle was conducted on the classic pattern—the Lines slugging it out at medium range while the screen of scouts buzzed around and through the battle trying to add their weight of metal against some overstrained enemy and ensure his destruction. A major battle could go on for days—and it often did. In the Fifty Suns action the battle had lasted nearly two weeks subjective before we withdrew to lick our wounds.

For nearly a day we ran into nothing, and such are the distances that separate units of a fleet, we had the impression that we were alone. We moved quietly, detectors out, scanning the area for a light-day around as we moved forward at less than one Lume through Cth. More would have been fatal for had we been forced to resort to a quick breakout to avoid enemy action, and if were travelling above one Lume when we hit threespace, we’d simply disappear, leaving a small spatial vortex in our wake.

On the “morning” of the third day the ships at the apex of Quadrant One ran into a flight of Rebel scouts. There was a brief flurry of action, the Rebels were englobed, a couple of cruisers drove in, latched onto the helplessly straining Rebel scouts and ragged them into threespace. The Rebs kept broadcasting right up to the end—after which they surrendered before the cruisers could annihilate them. Smart boys.

But the Rebels were warned. We couldn’t catch all their scouts and the disturbance our Line was making in Cth would register on any detector within twenty parsecs. So they would be waiting to meet us. But that was to be expected. There is no such thing as surprise in a major action.

We went on until we began to run into major opposition. Half a dozen scouts were caught in englobements at half a dozen different places along the periphery as they came in contact with the Rebels’ covering forces. And that was that. The advance halted waiting for the Line to come up, and a host of small actions took place as the forward screening forces collided. Chase was in the control chair, hanging in the blackness of the infra band on the edge of normal space. But we weren’t flicking in and out of threespace like some of the others. We had a probe out and the main buffeting was taken by the duralloy tube with its tiny converter at its bulbous tip. With consummate pilotage Chase was holding us in infra. It was a queasy sensation, hanging halfway between normalcy and chaos, and I had to admire his skill. The infra band was black as ink and hot as the hinges of hell—and since the edges of threespace and Cth are not as knife sharp as they are further up in the Cth components, we bucked and shuddered on the border, but avoided the bone-crushing slams and gut-wrenching twists that less skillful skippers were giving their ships as they flicked back and forth between threespace and Cth. Our scouting line must have been a peculiar sight to a threespace observer with the thousand or so scouts flickering in and out of sight across a huge hemisphere of space. 

And then we saw them. Our probe picked up the flicker of enemy scouts.

“Action imminent,” Chase said dryly. “Stand by.” 

I clapped the other control helmet over my head and dropped into the exec’s chair. A quick check showed the crew at their stations, the torpedo hatches clear, the anti-radiation shields up and the ship in fighting trim. I stole a quick glance at Chase. Sweat stood out on his gray forehead. His lips were drawn back into a thin line, showing his teeth. His face was tense, but whether with fear or excitement I didn’t know. 

“Stand by,” he said, and then we hit threespace, just as the enormous cone of the Rebel Line flicked into sight. The enemy line had taken the field, and under the comparatively slow speeds of threespace was rushing forward to meet our Line which had emerged a few minutes ago. Our launchers flamed as we sent a salvo of torpedoes whistling toward the Rebel fleet marking perhaps the opening shots of the main battle. We twisted back into Cth as one of the scanner men doubled over with agony, heaving his guts out into a disposal cone. I felt sorry for him. The tension, the racking agony of our motion, and the fact that he was probably in his first major battle had all combined to take him for the count. He grinned greenly at me and turned back to his dials and instruments. Good man! 

“Target—range one eight zero four. Azimuth two four oh, elevation one oh seven,” the rangefinder reported. “Mass four.” Mass four:—a cruiser.

“Stand by,” Chase said. “All turrets prepare to fire.” And he took us down. We slammed into threespace and our turrets flamed. To our left rear and above hung the mass of an enemy cruiser, her screens glowing on standby as she drove forward to her place in the line. We had caught her by surprise, a thousand to one shot, and our torpedoes were on their way before her detectors spotted us. We didn’t stay to see what happened, but the probe showed an enormous fireball which blazed briefly in the blackness, shooting out globs of scintillating molten metal that cooled and disappeared as we watched.

“Scratch one cruiser,” someone in fire control yelped.

The effect on morale was electric. In that instant all doubts of Chase’s ability disappeared. All except mine. One lucky shot isn’t a battle, and I guess Chase figured the same way because his hands were shaking as he jockeyed us along on the edge of Cth. He looked like he wanted to vomit.

“Take it easy, skipper,” I said.

“Mind your own business, Marsden—and I’ll mind mine,” Chase snapped. “Stand by,” he ordered, and we dove into threespace again—loosed another salvo at another Reb, and flicked out of sight. And that was the way it went for hour after hour until we pulled out, our last torpedo fired and the crew on the ragged edge of exhaustion. Somehow, by some miracle compounded of luck and good pilotage, we were unmarked. And Chase, despite his twitching face and shaking hands, was one hell of a combat skipper! I didn’t wonder about him any more. He had the guts all right. But it was a different sort of courage from the icy contempt for danger that marked Andy Royce. Even so, I couldn’t help thinking that I was glad to be riding with Chase. We drove to the rear, heading for the supply train, our ammunition expended, while behind us the battle-wagons and cruisers were hammering each other to metal pulp. 

In the quiet of the rear area it was hardly believable that a major battle was going on ahead of us. We raised the Amphitrite, identified ourselves, and put in a request for supply. 

“Lay aboard,” Amphitrite signaled back. “How’s the war going?” 

“Don’t know. We’ve been too busy,” our signalman replied.

“I’ll bet—you’re Lachesis aren’t you?” 

“Affirmative.”

“How’d you lose your ammo? Jettison it?”

“Stow that, you unprintable obscenity,” Haskins replied. “We’re a fighting ship.”

Amphitrite chuckled nastily. “That I’ll believe when I see it!” 

“Communications,” Chase snapped. “This isn’t a social call. Get our heading and approach instructions.” He sounded as schoolmasterish as ever, but there was a sickly smile on his face, and the gray-green look was gone.

“Morale seems a little better, doesn’t it, Marsden?” he said to me as the Amphitrite flicked out into threespace and we followed. 

I nodded. “Yes, sir,” I agreed. “Quite a little.”

Our cargo hatches snapped open and we cuddled up against Amphitrite’s bulging belly while our crew and the supply echelon worked like demons to transfer ammunition. We had fifty torpedoes aboard when the IFF detector shrilled alarm. 

Three hundred feet above us the Amphitrite’s main battery let loose a salvo at three Rebel scouts that had flickered into being less than fifty miles away. Their launchers flared with a glow that lighted the blackness of space. 

“Stand by!” Chase yelled as he threw the converter on.

“Hatches!” I screamed as we shimmered and vanished.

Somehow we got most of them closed, losing only the crew on number two port turret which was still buttoning up as we slipped over into the infra band. I ordered the turret sealed. Cth had already ruined the unshielded sighting mechanisms and I had already seen what happened to men caught in Cth unprotected. I had no desire to see it again—or let our crew see it if it could be avoided. A human body turned inside out isn’t the most wholesome of sights.

“How did they get through?” Chase muttered as we put out our probe. 

“I don’t know—maybe someone wasn’t looking.”

“What’s it like down there?” Chase asked. “See anything?”

“Amphitrite‘s still there,” I said. 

“She’s what?” 

“Still there,” I repeated. “And she’s in trouble.”

“She’s big. She can take it—but—”

“Here, you look,” I said, flipping the probe switch.

“My God!” Chase muttered—as he took one look at the supply ship lying dead in space, her protective batteries flaming. She had gotten one of the Rebel scouts but the other two had her bracketed and were pouring fire against her dim screens.

“She can’t keep this up,” I said. “She’s been hulled—and it looks like her power’s taken it.”

“Action imminent,” Chase ordered, and the rangefinder took up his chant. 

We came storming out of Cth right on top of one of the Rebel scouts. A violent shock raced through the ship, slamming me against my web. The rebound sent us a good two miles away before our starboard battery flamed. The enemy scout, disabled by the shock, stunned and unable to maneuver took the entire salvo amidships and disappeared in a puff of flame.

The second Rebel disappeared and we did too. She was back in Cth looking for a better chance at the Amphitrite. The big ship was wallowing like a wounded whale, half of one section torn away, her armor dented, and her tubes firing erratically. 

We took one long look and jumped back into Cth. But not before Haskins beamed a message to the supply ship. “Now you’ve seen it, you damned storekeeper,” he gloated. “What do you think?” Amphitrite didn’t answer. 

“Probe out,” Chase ordered, neglecting, I noticed, to comment on the signalman’s act.

I pushed the proper buttons but nothing happened. I pushed again and then turned on the scanners. The one aft of the probe was half covered with a twisted mass of metal tubing that had once been our probe. We must have smashed it when we rammed. Quickly I shifted to the auxiliary probe, but the crumpled mass had jammed the hatch. It wouldn’t open.

“No probes, sir,” I announced.

“Damn,” Chase said. “Well, we’ll have to do without them. Hold tight, we’re going down.”

We flicked into threespace just in time to see a volcano of fire erupt from Amphitrite’s side and the metallic flick of the Rebel scout slipping back into Cth. 

“What’s your situation, Amphitrite?” our signal asked. 

“Not good,” the faint answer came back. “They’ve got us in the power room and our accumulators aren’t going to stand this load very long. That last salvo went through our screens, but our armor stopped it. But if the screens go down—”

Our batteries flared at the Rebel as he again came into sight. He didn’t wait, but flicked right back into Cth without firing a shot. Pollard was on the ball.

“Brave lad, that Reb,” Chase said. There was a sneer in his voice.

For the moment it was stalemate. The Reb wasn’t going to come into close range with a warship of equal power to his own adding her metal to the Amphitrite’s, but he could play cat and mouse with us, drawing our fire until we had used up our torpedoes, and then come in to finish the supply ship. Or he could harass us with long range fire. Or he could go away. 

It was certain he wouldn’t do the last, and he’d be a fool if he did the second. Amphitrite could set up a mine screen that would take care of any long range stuff,—and we could dodge it. His probe was still working and he had undoubtedly seen ours crushed against our hull. If he hadn’t he was blind—and that wasn’t a Rebel characteristic. We could hyper, of course, but we were blind up there in Cth. His best bet was to keep needling us, and take the chance that we’d run out of torps. 

“What’s our munition?” Chase asked almost as an echo to my thought. I switched over to Pollard.

“Thirty mark sevens,” Pollard said, “and a little small arms.”

“One good salvo,” Chase said, thoughtfully. The Rebel flashed in and out again, and we let go a burst. “Twenty, now,” I said.

Chase didn’t hear me. He was busy talking to Allyn on damage control. “You can’t cut it, hey?—All right— disengage the converter on the auxiliary probe and break out that roll of duralloy cable in the stores—Pollard! Don’t fire over one torp at a time when that lad shows up. Load the other launchers with blanks. Make him think we’re shooting. We have to keep him hopping. Now listen to me—Yes, Allyn, I mean you. Fasten that converter onto the cable and stand by. We’re going to make a probe.” Chase turned to me.

“You were exec with Royce,” he said. “You should know how to fight a ship.”

“What are you planning to do?” I asked.

“We can’t hold that Rebel off. Maybe with ammunition we could, but there’s less than a salvo aboard and he has the advantage of position. We can’t be sure he won’t try to take us in spite of Amphitrite’s support and if he does finish us, Amphitrite’s a dead duck.” The Lachesis quivered as the port turrets belched flame. “That leaves nineteen torpedoes,” he said. “In Cth we’re safe enough but we’re helpless without a probe. Yet we can only get into attack position from Cth. That leaves us only one thing to do—improvise a probe.” 

“And how do you do that?” I asked.

“Put a man out on a line—with the converter from the auxiliary. Give him a command helmet and have him talk the ship in.”

“But that’s suicide!”

“No, Marsden, not suicide—just something necessary. A necessary sacrifice, like this whole damned war! I don’t believe in killing men. It makes me sick. But I kill if I have to, and sacrifice if I must.” His face twisted and the gray green look came back. “There are over a thousand men on the Amphitrite, and a vital cargo of munitions. One life, I think, is fair trade for a thousand, just as a few hundred thousand is fair trade for a race.” The words were school-masterish and would have been dead wrong coming from anyone except Chase. But he gave them an air of reasonable inevitability. And for a moment I forgot that he was coldbloodedly planning someone’s death. For a moment I felt the spirit of sacrifice that made heroes out of ordinary people. 

“Look, skipper,” I said. “How about letting me do it?” I could have kicked myself a moment later, but the words were out before I could stop them. He had me acting noble, and that trait isn’t one of my strong suits.

He smiled. “You know, Marsden,” he said, “I was expecting that.” His voice was oddly soft. “Thanks.” Then it became dry and impersonal. “Request denied,” he said, “This is my party.”

I shivered inside. While I’m no coward, I didn’t relish the thought of slamming around at the end of a duralloy cable stretching into a nowhere where there was no inertia. A hair too heavy a hand on the throttle in Cth would crush the man on the end to a pulp. But he shouldn’t go either. It was his responsibility to command the ship.

“Who else is qualified?” Chase said answering the look on my face. “I know more about maneuver than any man aboard, and I’ll be controlling the ship until the last moment. Once I order the attack I’ll cut free, and you can pick me up later.” 

“You won’t have time,” I protested.

“Just in case I don’t make it,” Chase continued, making the understatement of the war with a perfectly straight face, “Take care of the crew. They’re a good bunch—just a bit too eager for the real Navy—but good. I’ve tried to make them into spacemen and they’ve resented me for it. I’ve tried to protect them and they’ve hated me—” 

“They won’t now—” I interrupted.

“I’ve tried to make them a unit.” He went on as though I hadn’t said a thing. “Maybe I’ve tried too hard, but I’m responsible for every life aboard this ship.” He picked up his helmet. “Take command of the ship, Mr. Marsden,” he said, and strode out of the room. The Lachesis shuddered to the recoil from the port turrets. Eighteen torpedoes left, I thought. 

We lowered Chase a full hundred feet on the thin strand of duralloy. He dangled under the ship, using his converter to keep the line taut.

“You hear me, skipper?” I asked.

“Clearly—and you?”

“Four-four. Hang on now—we’re going up.” I eased the Lachesis into Cth and hung like glue to the border. “How’s it going, skipper?” 

“A bit rough but otherwise all right. Now steer right— easy now—aagh!”

“Skipper!”

“Okay, Marsden. You nearly pulled me in half—that’s all. You did fine. We’re in good position in relation to ‘Amphitrite.’ Now let’s get our signals straight. Front is the way we’re going now—base all my directions on that—got it?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Good, Marsden, throttle back and hang on your converters.”

I did as I was told.

“Ah—there she is—bear left a little. Hmm—she’s looking for us—looks suspicious. Now she’s turning toward Amphitrite. Guess she figures we are gone. She’s in position preparing to fire. Now! Drop out and fire—elevation zero, aximuth three sixty—Move!.” 

I moved. The Lachesis dropped like a stone. Chase was dead now. Nothing made of flesh could survive the punishment but we—we came out right on top of them, just like Chase had done to the other—except that we fired before we collided. And as with the other Rebel we gained complete surprise. Our eighteen torpedoes crashed home, her magazines exploded, and into that hell of molten and vaporized metal that had once been a Rebel scout we crashed a split second later. Two thousand miles per second relative is too fast for even an explosion to hurt much if there isn’t any solid material in the way, and we passed through only the outer edges of the blast, but even so, the vaporized metal scoured our starboard plating down to the insulation. It was like a giant emery wheel had passed across our flank. The shock slammed us out of control and we went tumbling in crazy gyrations across space for several minutes before I could flip the Lachesis into Cth, check the speed and motion, and get back into threespace. 

Chase was gone—and Lachesis was done. A week in dry-dock and she’d be as good as new, but she was no longer a fighting ship. She was a wreck. For us the battle was over—but somehow it didn’t make me happy. The Amphitrite hung off our port bow, a tiny silver dot in the distance, and as I watched two more silver dots winked into being beside her. Haskins reported the I.F.F. readings. 

“They’re ours,” he said. “A couple of cruisers.”

“They should have been here ten minutes ago,” I replied bitterly. I couldn’t see very well. You can’t when emotion clogs your tubes. Chase—coward?—not him. He was man clear through—a better one than I’d ever be even if I lived out my two hundred years. I wondered if the crew knew what sort of man their skipper was. I turned up the command helmet. “Men—” I began, but I didn’t finish.

“We know,” the blended thoughts and voices came back at me. Sure they knew! Chase had been on command circuit too. It was enough to make you cry—the mixture of pride, sadness and shame that rang through the helmet. It seemed to echo and reecho for a long time before I shut it off.

I sat there, thinking. I wasn’t mad at the Rebels. I wasn’t anything. All I could think was that we were paying a pretty grim price for survival. Those aliens had better show up pretty soon—and they’d better be as nasty as their reputation. There was a score—a big score—and I wanted to be there when it was added up and settled.

1951 Fantasy House Inc.

SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE CIGAR.

But Brek Veronar didn’t throw it away. Earth-grown tobacco was precious, here on Ceres. He took another bite off the end, and pressed the lighter cone again. This time, imperfectly, the cigar drew - with an acrid, puzzling odor of scorching paper.

Brek Veronar - born William Webster, Earthman - was sitting in his big, well-furnished office, adjoining the arsenal laboratory. Beyond the perdurite windows, magnified in the crystalline clarity of the asteroid’s synthetic atmosphere, loomed a row of the immense squat turret forts that guarded the Astrophon base - their mighty twenty-four-inch rifles, coupled to the Veronar autosight, covered with their theoretical range everything within Jupiter’s orbit. A squadron of the fleet lay on the field beyond, seven tremendous dead-black cigar shapes. Far off, above the rugged red palisades of a second plateau, stood the many-colored domes and towers of Astrophon itself, the Astrarch’s capital.

A tall, gaunt man, Brek Veronar wore the bright, close-fitting silks of the Astrarchy. Dyed to conceal the increasing streaks of gray, his hair was perfumed and curled. In abrupt contrast to the force of his gray, wide-set eyes, his face was white and smooth from cosmetic treatments. Only the cigar could have betrayed him as a native of Earth, and Brek Veronar never smoked except here in his own locked laboratory.

He didn’t like to be called the Renegade.

Curiously, that whiff of burning paper swept his mind away from the intricate drawing of a new rocket-torpedo gyropilot pinned to a board on the desk before him, and back across twenty years of time. It returned him to the university campus, on the low yellow hills beside the ancient Martian city of Toran - to the fateful day when Bill Webster had renounced allegiance to his native Earth, for the Astrarch.

Tony Grimm and Elora Ronee had both objected. Tony was the freckled, irresponsible redhead who had come out from Earth with him six years before, on the other of the two annual engineering scholarships. Elora Ronee was the lovely dark-eyed Martian girl - daughter of the professor of geodesics, and a proud descendant of the first colonists-whom they both loved.

He walked with them, that dry, bright afternoon, out from the yellow adobe buildings, across the rolling, stony, ocher-colored desert. Tony’s sunburned, blue-eyed face was grave for once, as he protested.

“You can’t do it, Bill. No Earthman could.”

“No use talking,” said Bill Webster, shortly. “The Astrarch wants a military engineer. His agents offered me twenty thousand eagles a year, with raises and bonuses - ten times what any research scientist could hope to get, back on Earth.”

The tanned, vivid face of Elora Ronee looked hurt. “Bill - what about your own research?” the slender girl cried. “Your new reaction tube! You promised you were going to break the Astrarch’s monopoly on space transport. Have you forgotten?”

“The tube was just a dream,” Bill Webster told her, “but probably it’s the reason he offered the contract to me, and not Tony. Such jobs don’t go begging.”

Tony caught his arm. “You can’t turn against your own world, Bill,” he insisted. “You can’t give up everything that means anything to an Earthman. Just remember what the Astrarch is - a superpirate.”

Bill Webster’s toe kicked up a puff of yellow dust. “I know history,” he said. “I know that the Astrarchy had its beginnings from the space pirates who established their bases in the asteroids, and gradually turned to commerce instead of raiding.”

His voice was injured and defiant. “But, so far as I’m concerned, the Astrarchy is just as respectable as such planet nations as Earth and Mars and the Jovian Federation. And it’s a good deal more wealthy and powerful than any of them.”

Tense-faced, the Martian girl shook her dark head. “Don’t blind yourself, Bill,” she begged urgently. “Can’t you see that the Astrarch really is no different from any of the old pirates? His fleets still seize any independent vessel, or make the owners ransom it with his space-patrol tax.”

She caught an indignant breath. “Everywhere - even here on Mars—the agents and residents and traders of the Astrarch have brought graft and corruption and oppression. The Astrarch is using his wealth and his space power to undermine the government of every independent planet. He’s planning to conquer the system!”

Her brown eyes flashed. “You won’t aid him, Bill. You - couldn’t!” Bill Webster looked into the tanned, intent loveliness of her face-he wanted suddenly to kiss the smudge of yellow dust on her impudent little nose. He had loved Elora Ronee, had once hoped to take her back to Earth. Perhaps he still loved her. But now it was clear that she had always wanted Tony Grimm.

Half angrily, he kicked an iron-reddened pebble. “If things had been different, Elora, it might have been - ” With an abrupt little shrug, he looked back at Tony. “Anyhow,” he said flatly, “I’m leaving for Astrophon tonight.”

That evening, after they had helped him pack, he made a bonfire of his old books and papers. They burned palely in the thin air of Mars, with a cloud of acrid smoke.

That sharp odor was the line that had drawn Brek Veronar back across the years, when his nostrils stung to the scorched-paper scent. The cigar came from a box that had just arrived from Cuba, Earth - made to his special order.

He could afford such luxuries. Sometimes, in fact, he almost regretted the high place he had earned in the Astrarch’s favor. The space officers, and even his own jealous subordinates in the arsenal laboratory, could never forget that he was an Earthman - the Renegade.

The cigar’s odor puzzled him.

Deliberately, he crushed out the smoldering tip, peeled off the brown wrapper leaves. He found a tightly rolled paper cylinder. Slipping off the rubber bands, he opened it. A glimpse of the writing set his heart to thudding.

It was the hand of Elora Ronee!

Brek Veronar knew that fine graceful script. For once Bill Webster had treasured a little note that she had written him, when they were friends at school. He read it eagerly:

“Well, I’m sorry it stopped working,” Senator Stone answered irritably over his shoulder, “but since the late news was one of the things I got a mountain cabin to avoid …”

“Well, it is strange,” his wife repeated. She was as trim-bodied at fifty as she had been when he married her just after VD Day, the first time he could think of a future after three years of flying Mustangs into hostile skies. She was still as stubborn as the WAAF he had married, too. “It was fine and then the color went off in flashes and everything got blurry. And it’s getting worse, Hershal.”

Stone sighed, closing a file that was long, confidential, and involved the potential expenditure of $73,000,000. The cabin’s oak flooring had an unexpected tingle as he walked across it in slippers to the small TV. His feet were asleep, he thought; but could they both be? Not that it mattered. He slapped the set while Miriam waited expectantly. The screen continued to match colored pulses to the bursts of raw noise coming from the speaker. Occasionally an intelligible word or a glimpse of Dan Rather slipped through.

“Some kind of interference,” Stone said. He was six feet tall, with a plumpness that his well-cut suits concealed from the public but was evident in pajamas. His hair had grayed early, but it was still thick and smooth after sixty-one years, no small political asset. Stone was no charmer, but he had learned years before that a man who is honest and has the physical presence to be called forthright will be respected even if he is wrong—and there are never many candidates the voters can respect. Shrugging, he clicked the set off. “If you needed somebody to fix your TV, you should have married some tech boy,” he added.

“Instead of my hotshot pilot?” Miriam laughed, stretching out an arm to her husband. She paused as she stood, and at the same moment both realized that the high-pitched keening they had associated with the television was now louder. The hardwood floor carried more of a buzz than a trembling. Miriam’s smile froze into a part of her human architecture, like the ferrous curls of hair framing her face.

Earthquake’! thought Stone as two strides carried him to the south door. Not in the Smokies, surely; but politics had taught him even more emphatically than combat that there were always going to be facts that surprised you, and that survivors were people who didn’t pretend otherwise. He threw the door open. Whipsnake Ridge dropped southward, a sheer medley of grays formed by mist and distance. The sky should have been clear and colorless since the Moon had not yet risen, but an auroral glow was flooding from behind the cabin to paint the night with a score of strange pastels. The whine was louder, but none of the nearby trees were moving. 

“Miriam,” Stone began, “you’d—”

The rap of knuckles on the north door cut him off.

“I’ll get it,” Miriam said quickly.

“You’ll stay right here!” the senator insisted, striding past her; but her swift heels rapped down the hallway just behind him.

Stone snapped on the entryway light before unlatching the door. The cabin had no windows to the north as the only view would have been the access road and a small clearing in the second-growth pine of the Ridge, a poor exchange for the vicious storms that ripped down in winter. The outside door opened into an anteroom to further insulate the cabin, and that alcove, four feet square in floor plan, was filled by two men in black uniforms. 

“You will forgive the intrusion, Senator and Madame Stone,” stated the foremost in a rusty voice more used to commands, “but we could not very well contact you in more normal fashion in our haste.” The speaker was as tall as Stone, a slim ramrod of a man whose iron-gray hair was cropped so short as to almost be shaven beneath the band of his service hat. The dull cloth of his uniform bagged into jackboots as highly polished as his waist-belt and pistol holster. It was not the pistol, nor the long-magazined rifle the other visitor bore that struck the first real fear into Stone, though: both men wore collar insignia, the twin silver lightning-bolt runes Stone thought he had seen the last of thirty years before. They were the badge of Hitler’s SS.

“May we enter?”

“You go straight to Hell!” Stone snarled. His left hand knotted itself in the nearer black shirt while reflex cocked his right for as much of a punch as desks and the poisonous atmosphere of Washington had left him. The second Nazi was as gray as the first and was built like a tank besides, but there was nothing slow about his reactions. The barrel of his rifle slammed down across Stone’s forearm. Almost as part of the same motion the stock pivoted into the senator’s stomach, throwing him back in a sprawl over Miriam’s legs. The entranceway light haloed the huge gunman as he swung his weapon to bear on the tangle of victims almost at its muzzle.

“Lothar!” the slim German shouted.

His subordinate relaxed, “Ja, mein Oberfiihrer,” he said as he again ported his rifle.

With a smile that was not wholly one of satisfaction, the black-shirted officer said, “Senator, I am Colonel Ernst Riedel. My companion—what would you say—Master-Sergeant Lothar Mueller and I have reached a respectable age without inflicting our presence on you. I assure you that only necessity causes us to do so now.”

Stone rose to his feet. Riedel did not offer a hand he knew would be refused. Miriam remained silent behind her husband, but her right arm encircled his waist. Stone looked from the men to the rifle used to club him down. It was crude, a thing of enameled metal and green-black plastic: an MP-44, built in the final days of the Third Reich. “You’re real, aren’t you!” the senator said. “You aren’t just American slime who wanted something different from white sheets to parade in. Where do you hide, Nazi? Do you sell cars in Rio during the week and take out your uniform Sundays to look at yourself in the mirror?”

“We are real, Senator Stone,” Riedel said through his tight smile. He raised his left cuff so that the motto worked on the band there showed. It read “Die Letze” in old-style letters. “We are the Last Battalion, Senator. And as for where we hide—that you will know very shortly, for we were sent to bring you there.

“Madame Stone,” he went on formally, “we will have your husband back to you in days if that is possible. I assure you, on my honor as a true Aryan and before the good God and my Leader, that we mean no harm to either of you.”

“Oh, I’ll trust your honor,” Miriam blazed. Fifteen years as a senator’s wife had taught her the use of tact, but nothing would ever convince her that every situation should be borne in silence. “How many prisoners did you shoot in the back at Malmedy?” 

For the first time, Riedel’s chalky face pinched up. “It is well for you both, Madame, that Mueller does not speak English.” He added, “You may trust my honor or not, as you will. But it is not in our interests alone that we have been sent to you, nor in those alone of the country you represent. If we fail, Senator, there may well in a short time be no Aryan life remaining on Earth.”

His hand gestured Stone toward the door. “You will please precede us.”

Without hesitation or a backward glance, Stone brushed past the two Germans. Had he looked back he would have called attention to his wife, erect and dry-eyed in the hall. He had known enough killers while he was in service to realize that Mueller’s bloodlust was no pretense. The big man had been a finger’s pressure away from double murder, and they would not have been his first. 

The outside door opened and dragged a gasp from Stone in the rush of warmed air. Instead of the clear night sky, a convex lens of metal roofed the clearing a dozen feet over Stone’s head. The size of the clearing gave the object dimension: it was a two-hundred-foot saucer resting on a central gondola and three pillar like legs spaced halfway between the center and the rim. Through the windows of the gondola could be seen other men, both seated and standing. An incandescent light flooded stairs which extended from the gondola to the ground, but the whole scene was lighted by the burnished iridescence of the saucer itself. 

Behind Stone, the Nazi officer laughed. “It is not heat so much as the eddy currents from the electromagnetic motors that make the hull plates glow so handsomely. But walk ahead, please, Senator. She glows as much on the upper side as well and we—we do not wish to attract close attention while we are grounded.”

Stone’s carpet slippers brushed crisply through the ankle-high grass. The dew that should have gemmed the blades had evaporated under the hot metal lid. Stone always wore slippers and pajamas when he did not expect company, but it was one hell of an outfit in which to take the surrender of a batch of Nazi holdouts in a flying saucer.

Except that Stone knew inside him that men like Riedel were not about to surrender.

“This is Dora, the largest of our experimental models,” Riedel said with pride. “She is sheathed with impervium— chromium-vanadium alloy, you perhaps know. There is no limit, nearly, to the speeds at which she may be driven without losing the strength of her hull, even in the thickest of atmospheres.”

Closer to the gondola, Stone could see that it rested not on wheels but on inflated rubber cushions that must have been heavily reinforced to bear the weight of the craft.

There were small signs of age visible at a nearer glance, too—if Dora was experimental, it was an old experiment. The rectangular windows whose plane surfaces suggested glass or quartz instead of nonrefractive Plexiglas were fogged by tiny pits, and the stair runners appeared to be of several different materials as if there had been replacements over the years. All the men in the gondola were bald or as gray-haired as Mueller and Riedel. The colonel noticed Stone’s surprise and said, “Everyone volunteered for the mission, but we Old Fighters, of course, had preference. Everyone here was of my original crew.”

The man who reached through the hatch to hasten Stone up the last high step wore gray coveralls from which any insignia had long been removed, though his air of authority was evident. He was not even middle-aged. His hands were thin and gnarled, their hairs gleaming silvery against the age-dappled skin, and the bright lights within the gondola shadowed his wrinkles into a road map through eighty years. His exchange in German with Riedel was quick and querulous. The colonel did not translate for Stone’s benefit, but tones and the flash of irritation in the eyes of both men explained more than the bland, “Over-Engineer Tannenberg is anxious that we be under weigh. You will please come with me to the control room. We will have time to discuss matters fully after we have lifted off.” 

All ice and darkness, the Nazi strode to one of the pair of latticework elevators in the center of the gondola. Flipping one of a bank of switches, toggles instead of buttons, he set the cage in smooth but squealing upward motion. Wholly fascinated, the senator stared around him.

A bell pinged each time the cage rose to another level. Through the sides, Stone saw identical masses of copper and silicon iron, suggesting the inside of a transformer rather than the computer room the craft’s gleaming exterior had left him to expect. Narrow gangways threaded into the mass, and twice Stone glimpsed aged men in stained coveralls intent on their hand-held meters. There was nothing subtle in the vessel’s layout. It reeked of enormous power as surely as it did of ozone and lubricant. There were eight levels above the gondola, each of them nearly identical to the others, before the cage pinged a ninth time and grated to a stop. 

“Sit there, please,” Riedel directed, gesturing toward a frame-backed couch that looked unpleasantly like a catafalque. Stone obeyed without comment, his eyes working quickly. They had entered a circular room fifty feet across. Its eight-foot ceiling was soundproofed metal, but the whole circumference was open to the world through crystalline panels like those of the gondola. The saucer, domed with more of a curve on the upper side than the lower, was a fountain of pale iridescence against which the grim SS runes stood out like toppling tombstones.

A dozen preoccupied men shared the control room with Stone and Riedel. Sgt. Mueller was one of them, looking no less dangerous for having put aside his rifle. The others appeared to be officers or gray-suited engineers like Tannenberg. Three of the latter clustered in front of a console far more complex than those sprouting from the deck beside the other benches. One of the men spoke urgently into a throat mike while his companions followed the quivering motions of a hundred dials apiece.

Riedel stood, arms akimbo, and snapped out a brief series of orders. The heavyset man nearest him nodded and began flipping toggles. All three of the engineers were now speaking intently in low voices. Lights dimmed in the control room, and the air began to sing above the range of audibility.

Stone felt his weight shift. Trees climbing into the night slanted and suddenly shrank downward. Stone’s cabin was below, now, visible past the glowing dome of the saucer. Lone in the pool of the yard light stood Miriam, waving her clenched right fist. Then the disk tilted again and Stone was driven flat onto his bench by a vertical acceleration not experienced since he had reached the age limit and could no longer zoom-climb a Phantom during Reserve training. The sensation lasted for longer than Stone would have believed possible, and by the time it settled into the queasiness of steady forward motion, the sky had changed. It was black, but less from the absence of light than the utter lack of anything to reflect light.

Riedel was returning. “Not bad,” Stone said with a trace of false condescension, “but can you outrun a Nike Zeus?”

“The Russian equivalent, yes indeed, Senator,” replied the German, capping Stone’s gibe. “Each couch”—his gesture disclosed rubber lips edging the top of the bench— “can enfold a man like an oyster’s shell and hold him in a water suspension. For the strongest accelerations we use even a fluid breathing medium, though of course”—and Riedel frowned in concentration at the thought—“that requires time for preparation that we do not always have.”

He seated himself beside Stone. The American blinked, more incredulous than angry at what seemed an obvious lie. “You expect me to believe that this—my God, it must weigh a thousand tons! This could out accelerate an antimissile missile?” 

Riedel nodded, delighted with the effect he had made. “Yes, yes, the power is here—is it not obvious? That was Schauberger’s work, almost entirely. But to make it usable for human beings took our Engineer Tannenberg.” The colonel chuckled before adding, “Have you noticed that when men of genius grow old, they become more like old women than even old women do? Tannenberg is afraid every moment we are not aloft that the Russians will catch us. 

The earlier name had snagged Stone’s attention. “Schauberger?” he repeated. “Sure, I remember him. In the fifties he was touting an implosion motor or some damned thing. I remember a major from Wright-Patterson telling me about it. But then nothing came of it.”

“But then your FBI questioned poor Viktor with, shall we say, a little too much enthusiasm,” Riedel corrected with a tolerant smile, “and he was reported beaten to death by Chicago hoodlums. The implosion motor was only a smokescreen, though, for the electromagnetic engine he had already developed for his Fuhrer. Think of it, this craft and these mighty engines that you see filling it—able to draw fuel from the Earth, from the very fabric of space itself!”

“If that were true,” Stone said carefully, “I frankly don’t see why you would need me.” He chose his words to deny what he reared, that the story was as solid as the steel floor beneath his feet. To admit that aloud would gratify this colonel whose arrogance only slightly increased the disgust Stone already felt for his uniform.

The implied question reminded the Nazi sickeningly of his mission. He sighed, wondering how much to tell the fellow now. Stone was the only man short of his unapproachable president who had enough power with military and political leaders to act with the necessary swiftness. Without his willing cooperation, more than the whole Plan was a ruin. “At first we were based at Kertl,” Riedel began, “where the airframe had been fabricated.” He was avoiding a direct answer partly in hope that it would somehow become unnecessary if he explained the background. Riedel owned to few superiors, but there was One—and of late, with age and the pressure He bore most of all of them, that One had displayed an ever-lowering acceptance of failure. “The engines arrived by train, at last, from Obersalzberg, and we worked all night to unload them before the bombers came.”

Riedel laid his service cap beside him and scrabbled the fingers of his left hand through hair that for thirty-seven years had been cropped to between five and ten millimeters’ length. While everything else had changed, that precision had not. “There was no time to do what was required—you have seen the engines—but we did it anyway. It was like shifting mountains with a spoon to emplace them in the airframe using the equipment we had, and all the work underground as well. But in those days the impossible was normal, and we were Waffen-SS. The time that we had was being bought for us with the lives of our comrades on the front lines, fighting tanks with hand grenades.”

Of the men in the control room, only Sgt. Mueller was openly watching Stone and Riedel; but the inattention of the others was the studied sort, that of jackals waiting for lions to end their meal. Ail of the crew understood the importance of their mission.

“The final order came by courier from Berlin, an SS major with an attaché case in the sidecar of his motorcycle. It had been chained to his right wrist, he told us, but the shell that killed his driver had taken that arm off at the elbow. With teeth and one hand he had tourniqueted himself before retrieving the case. The orders were not those we expected, but in the face of such dedication we could not have refused them.” 

“You ran,” Stone interjected flatly, knowing that truth would twist the edged words deeper than any emphasis he could give them.

“We took off in three hours,” the German said, his face a block of gray iron. “It was the first time, as soon as final engine hookups had been made. All of us were aboard, even the kitchen staff. Everything worked. I could not believe it—five years of design and construction, and then no flaws. But again, there was no choice. From the air we could see British tanks already within three kilometers and nothing but the forest itself to slow them. Had we left fifteen minutes later, they might have captured our base before the demolition charges exploded.”

“What you seem to be afraid to admit,” Stone pressed, “is that a single plane—saucer, whatever—isn’t worth a damn no matter how advanced it is.” He stood, a commanding presence again now that he had recovered his poise. The mass and smooth power of the vessel made its speed a matter of only conscious awareness. “It’s only a bargaining chip, to be sold to one side or the other since you can’t develop it yourself. And we and the Russians both will soon have equipment in the air that will match it, so you’re running out of time to deal.”

“You are incorrect to assume we are alone,” Riedel said, as careful as the American to avoid theatrical emphasis that would only give truth a false patina. “We escaped alone, but there were fifty-three submarines of Type XXI—no, I do not exaggerate—that could run submerged all around the world with their snorkels. They carried above 3,000 persons, couples and young people, out before the Russians captured Danzig; and in Norway they picked up … some who had flown by jet out of Tempelhof just at the end.” 

Stone licked dry lips but his voice was firm as he insisted, “Even then they couldn’t go anywhere. I’ve heard about the money Himmler was spreading around in South America, but even so there wasn’t a country there that could have hidden such a fleet without word leaking out. A fleet needs a base.”

“It has one.” It was time for the final hammerblow of truth. “In New Swabia, where we met them.”

“Huh?” grunted Stone, surprised and uncomprehending.

“Imbecile!” snarled the Nazi, seeing all his preparation threatened by his listener’s ignorance. “In Antarctica, Queen Maud Land as you and your Allies call it! Kapitan Ritscher explored it in 1937 and we have held the interior since, no matter what color the coast is painted on a pretty map. And there is one other place we have been for twenty years, my good Senator,” Riedel said, loudly now and wagging his finger like a pedant’s pointer, “though others seem to believe they were the first there.”

He paused, breathing very rapidly. “This vessel is not limited to the atmosphere, Senator; indeed, we are above it now to all intents and purposes. We have a base on the Moon where we have manufactured a hundred ships of this design!”

But as Stone’s jaw worked in stunned silence, Riedel’s pride too dissolved in despair. “We had a hundred, yes,” he repeated, “but the Russians have a thousand, and they are destroying us. You must help us fight them, or Aryan man is doomed.”

The sky was an emptiness that would have been violet if it had color. Pits on the crystal windows prevented the stars from gaining any real body, but a slight course correction brought the Moon in sight to port. It was gibbous and the gray of fresh-cut lead. “I don’t believe that,” Stone insisted. “I’ve made it my business over the years to know about Russian strength. Our intelligence people trust me. They aren’t lying to me, and notwithstanding all the nonsense my colleagues and the media like to spout, the Russians aren’t fooling our people either. Besides, if the Reds had a whole fleet like this, we’d have learned about it the hard way long since. Unless there’s more to detente than I’ve ever believed.” 

Riedel shrugged. “‘When one has eliminated the impossible… ,’” he quoted, then paused to consider how he should continue. Stone’s logic was impeccable, its only flaw being Russia‘s unfathomable, senseless subtlety in not showing an apparently pat hand. Riedel had not believed it at first, either, but facts were facts. “At the first report in 1947, we thought rumors of our Dora, here, were being retailed in garbled form,” he explained. “At that time, we had only the one ship—no others had been completed before the final holocaust, and the Antarctic base was not suitable for manufactures this major. It was not until we could process aluminum on the Moon that we could expand, and that was five years later.

“There were too many reports. We were very careful with Dora, you must understand; and though we had our contacts with the world outside, no one beyond the Battalion knew anything except our Plan, to control the balance when at last East and West joined in Gotterdammerung.” Riedel’s face gleamed with the sweat of earnestness. He brushed at his face and extended both thin hands toward Stone. “Our rocket scientists, you and the Russians had captured; but we thought all but the least word of the Diskus Projekt had been hidden. Now we began to fear that the other sightings were more than imagination, and that our secret had escaped.” 

“You never saw them yourselves?” Stone asked. “The other UFOs, I mean?”

“I did,” Riedel said, pride warming his words. “We had completed the first disk to be built on the Moon and I was flight-testing it. Because we expected fleet maneuvers in the future, Engineer Tannenberg had coupled a locator to the engines to display other users of the spectrum—our own vessels, we intended. But as we began our first atmospheric approach—” and Riedel lived again the moments as he described them to Stone.

In a voice as wizened as his face, Tannenberg had announced, “Colonel, there is another ship within a kilometer, at five degrees to our heading and a little lower.”

“Nonsense!” Riedel snapped. At thirty kilometers altitude their test craft could have encountered only Dora, and she would have been a bright dot on their radar screen.

A bead glared suddenly against the screen’s green background. It was near them, much closer than it should have been before being picked up in the radar’s fifteen-second sweep. “Navigation!” he called, his temper that of a wounded bear looking for a victim. First trial of the new hull in the pressures and powerful magnetic fields of Earth was a tense enough business without having unknown vessels slip through undetected.

“S-sir,” said the white-faced technician at the main radar display, “it just now appeared.”

“Colonel,” Sgt. Mueller said, his hair-spined forefinger pointing downward into the blue-white haze into which their craft was descending. Metal winked, a reflection with no definable color.

“It’s off the screen again!” the fearful radarman was bleating, but Riedel’s voice cut through his junior’s without hesitation: “Attention! All crewmen to acceleration couches! Sergeant Mueller, arm the rockets and stand by.” Disconnecting his throat mike, for he spoke to himself rather than his men, Riedel added, “They think to play with us, do they? Well then, we will play with them.”

Only Sgt. Mueller heard, and he grinned a wolf’s grin as he ran his hands over the switches of his console.

At 300 meters, the black, portless hull of the foreign disk was stark against the sky-curve beyond. It bore no marking. Both craft were steady at a little over 1800 kph, far below the capacity of Riedel’s engines. This was not his Dora, though, he thought with rage. Impervium hulls were beyond their ability to forge on the Moon—or on Earth without arousing the interest of the nations who had to be lulled into forgetfulness. Aluminum was cheap, given lunar ores and abundant power, but the new hulls could not stand the friction heating of 4,000 kph or more in the atmosphere.

“Unknown craft, identify yourself,” Riedel ordered in German. He was broadcasting only on eleven meters, but with a 10 kw transmitter driving his beam, even the light bulbs on the other craft would be repeating his words.

There was no response. He tried again in English, for they were over northern Canada. All his subordinates but Mueller had slipped into their clamshell couches, taking their information from the gauges slaved into the panels over their faces. Riedel started to rebuke the sergeant, then realized that with the enemy able to evade radar, only visual control could be used for the rockets.

And there seemed little doubt that the black disk was an enemy. “Does anyone aboard speak Russian?” No one answered. Besides, what did they have to discuss with the conquerors of Berlin? “Fire one, sergeant,” Riedel said evenly.

Mueller’s finger stroked a 20 cm rocket from the ventral weapons bay. Its hundred kilos of explosive could be wire-guided 5,000 meters, but the gap between the two ships was point-blank range.

The charge went off scarcely halfway to the black vessel.

The spurt of red on black smoke, half a second early, was a greater surprise to Riedel than the howl of air through the fragment-riddled panels before him. The missile’s own fuse should not have armed at so short a distance. Something invisible surrounding the other craft had detonated the weapon while it was almost as dangerous to its user as its target, and the target was diving away. Riedel followed, ignoring for the moment the stresses to which he was subjecting his ship and his own unshielded body. Sgt. Mueller had yanked down a whole handful of switches and four guidance flares leaped together after the black craft. It wobbled under the multiple Shockwave, but a beam as pale as an icteric sclera needled back from its dome. Riedel saw the hull directly in front of him boil away as the laser struck it. His instant course change bagged his cheeks and flattened his eyeballs. The black vessel did not attempt pursuit.

The executive officer in his acceleration couch had taken over when Riedel regained full consciousness. They had resumed their planned course toward Antarctica, flying below 2,500 meters because of the gashed hull. Sgt. Mueller was clenching his hands in fierce frustration. “We need something better to kill them with,” he kept repeating. 

“And we got it,” Riedel concluded, affect raining out of his voice. “Tannenberg said his detector could easily be modified to cause a surge in other electromagnetic engines, to cause them to vaporize. For twenty-three years he was right and we hunted the Russians throughout space. There were losses, since their lasers could very quickly slit the hulls of the ships we built—not a bad weapon, lasers; we might have fitted our bases with them sooner had not Tannenberg’s induced overloads left so little of their targets.” He paused in an aura of satisfaction, looking out over the clean, black sky but seeing something very different. “From a pip of light the disks we destroy become great expanding balls that are all the colors of the rainbow. In atmosphere even the copper burns, so intense is the energy released.”

“You bastards,” Stone said with utter conviction. “I wonder if you’ll find it so pretty when they come up with your gadget?” 

“Colonel, we are closing with another vessel,” broke in one of the crewmen.

“It may be ours. We were to have an escort when we reached open sea, if the situation permitted it,” Riedel replied on his throat mike. To Stone he continued, “The Russians are an ignorant people, able only to steal from their betters. In all that time they have not duplicated the weapon.”

He took a deep breath, adding, “But six months ago, they found a defense against it. And since then only the few lasers for which we have been able to buy components have kept them from our bases.”

“You can’t be serious,” Stone said. But Riedel’s mind was like his body—gray and honed and rigid. He could no more accept the superiority of an “under race” than could a computer which had been misprogrammed to deny it. That quirk has caused Riedel and his men to ignore the obvious.

“Look, lasers—I don’t know how long we’ve had them, but they weren’t weapons back in 1950. And this detonator screen or whatever, we damned well don’t have it now. If—” 

“Colonel! The ship is not one of ours. It is closing!”

“Couches!” Riedel ordered. He stood, pressing as he did the switch that turned Stone’s bench into an enveloping cushion. “Raise your legs and lie down, Senator. The television will show you what occurs, and we will release you as soon as possible.”

The hull curve, a smooth violet as Riedel strode to his station, suddenly blazed white in a meter-long knife edge. The impervium alloy held, but Dora’s evasive action in response to the laser thrust hurled the slender officer to the deck. He gripped a chart table, then let skewed acceleration fling him in the direction he wanted to go. He was safely within his couch before the third zigzag snatched at him.

“Riedel,” he announced, “taking command.” His fingers caressed switches they knew by touch. The enemy craft was an eddy in the frozen blue swirls of Earth’s magnetic fields pictured on the detector screen. Riedel set the television cameras to track the detector anomally, though he would not need the picture. By the time Dora had been retrofitted with television, he was used to being guided to battle by the detector alone. And even with their surge weapon ineffective, there would still be a battle with Riedel at the controls. He knew his Dora.

The other craft was within two kilometers now. It fingered Dora’s hull with another short burst, probably unaware that its target was more refractory than earlier victims. The Nazi commander’s face was a grinning death’s head within his couch as he cut forward thrust and flipped Dora to spin like a coin toward the icecap twenty kilometers below. The blue eddy danced around the center of the detector screen and the TV began to flash images of a black disk seeming to approach at a thousand angles. Fluid-filled membranes clamped down on every surface of Riedel’s body, but still the maddening spin worked on his ear canals and the colloid of his brain itself.

The eddy was almost in the center of the detector. Riedel’s fingers acted more through instinct than by conscious calculation. On the television, the spinning edge of the black vessel froze and expanded. There was a terrible, rending crash as Dora’s impervium edge buzz sawed into the unknown material of her enemy’s hull. A sheet of white fire enveloped both craft as the chrome-van alloy proved tougher than what it impacted. Objects vomited from the spiraling gash in the hostile craft. One of them tumbled almost against Dora, now motionless as her enemy fell away from her. The thing was momentarily alive and quite visible on the television screens. It was about nine feet tall, with four limbs that looked like ropes knotted over a thin framework. Its mouth was working and its eyes glittered fear of death through each of their facets.

“You butchers,” a voice rasped through Riedel’s earphones. His anger awakened him to the fact that he still had Dora to pilot, and the anger faded when he realized it was the American who had spoken and not one of his crewmen. “It wasn’t enough to fight the whole rest of the world. You Nazis had to start an interstellar war.”

There was an air leak between compartments F-87 and F-88; a bulkhead had crumpled but the outer skin, though indented, was not seriously torn. Riedel touched switches. As his acceleration couch withdrew into itself, Dora plunged down as smoothly as an elevator and swiftly enough that her passengers neared the weightlessness of free fall.

“Murderers! Criminals!”

Riedel ripped out the jack of his headset. In two steps he had snapped the outside latch on Stone’s couch, effectively silencing and isolating the senator. “Lieutenant Wittvogel,” he ordered, “raise the base. Secrecy is no longer necessary.”

“No reply, sir,” the tall communications officer called across the room. “Not even to the emergency signal.”

“We’re within fifty kilometers,” Riedel said, but he spoke under his breath. “Keep trying,” he ordered.

With an atmosphere to scatter it, sunlight and its reflection from the ice below blazed through the windows. The computer installed three years earlier—a massive thing, not a sophisticated “black box”; but Dora was not a volume-starved turbojet—was guiding them back at 3,000 kph and there was no need for Riedel to stare tensely into the rippling whiteness they skimmed. Beside him stood Sgt. Mueller, as silent as a bored sentry. He had been out of his couch before his commander. When Stone had been locked in, Mueller’s responsibility had ended and he had relaxed with a grin. Even so, it was his ease rather than Riedel’s stark anticipation that caught the first sight of the base.

“Sir, there’s something ahead there that glows!”

Riedel took instant manual control, cutting speed and raising Dora to a kilometer’s altitude. They circled the glow, banked inward for observation rather than flight necessity. A hole had been blasted in the ice, four kilometers across and of a depth obscured by the boiling lake that snarled at its rim.

“The Fuehrer,” Sgt. Mueller whispered. He jackknifed and vomited across the deck plates. Lt. Wittvogel had hurled away his microphone and, like several of his fellow crewmen, was openly weeping. Riedel himself was the least visibly affected, but as he unlatched Stone’s prison he muttered, “I wonder if we taught them about the Bomb, too. They were such bad fighters, no instinct for it at all…” 

Riedel was back at the controls, following at full speed and a kilometer’s altitude the brown rim of beach against gray-green water, when Stone touched his shoulder. “You’re done now, aren’t you?” the American said softly.

“‘He could have escaped. He could be at the Moon base now—perhaps they had only one bomb. He—” Riedel’s throat choked him into sudden silence.

“He?” Stone echoed. His face went as white and cold as the ice below. “I fought three years for a chance to kill—that one. If these others have done that, they have my thanks. Whatever else they intend.”

On the horizon was a small freighter static in the shadow of shear, snow-browed cliffs. Inshore of it were a huddle of Quonset huts set in a splotch of snow dirtied by human habitation. “I swore an oath to your wife,” Riedel forced out through tight lips, “and I would prefer to keep it. But if you say another word, Senator, you will go out at a thousand meters.” 

The landing legs squealed while Riedel’s practiced fingers brought the disk to a hover over the Quonsets. “Wohlman,” the colonel ordered abruptly, and his executive officer took the controls with a nod.

“What will you do now?” Stone asked as he stepped to the elevator in anticipation of a command.

“The Moon base will need us,” Riedel said, his black and silver chest separated from the American’s by an invisible wall of grief.

“If it’s still there. They would have hit it first, wouldn’t they?”

The cage ground to a halt in the observation gondola. The four men there were tense, hands close to their sidearms. “Inform your people, Senator,” Riedel said. He riffled a worn, mimeographed book, then handed it to Stone. “Our maintenance manual. Perhaps your experts can construct their down disks from it. I have nothing better to offer you here.” 

Men in furs were running out of the huts. A blast of dry, chill air hammered the compartment as the hatch opened and the stairway extended. “These are Argentineans. At this time of year you should have no trouble getting a swift return to your country.” 

“But what are you going to do?” Stone insisted, the rubberized treads warm under his feet though the wind was a knife across the rest of his body.

Riedel’s eyes, colder than the ice, thrust the American down the gangway. “Do?” he repeated. “We are SS, Senator. We will continue to fight.”

Dora was rising again even before the stairs had fully retracted. A dozen startled Argentineans clustered around Stone, their parka fringes blending indistinguishably with their bushy facial hair. Around them all a huge disk had been etched in the powdered snow by the radiant metal above it. 

The Antarctic sky was clear, except for a speck that vanished even as Stone’s eyes followed it upward.

522 Anno Coloniae Conditae:

Elva was on her way back, within sight of home, when the raid came.

For nineteen thirty-hour days, riding in high forests where sunlight slanted through leaves, across ridges where grass and the first red lampflowers rippled under springtime winds, sleeping by night beneath the sky or in the hut of some woodsdweller—once, even, in a nest of Alfavala, where the wild little folk twittered in the dark and their eyes glowed at her—she had been gone. Her original departure was reluctant. Her husband of two years, her child of one, the lake and fields and chimney smoke at dusk which were now hers also, these were still too marvelous to leave.

But the Freeholder of Tervola had duties as well as rights. Once each season, he or his representative must ride circuit. Up into the mountains, through woods and deep dales, across the Lakeland as far as The Troll and then following the Swiftsmoke River south again, ran the route which Karlavi’s fathers had traveled for nearly two centuries. Whether on hailu-back in spring and summer, through the scarlet and gold of fall, or by motorsled when snow had covered all trails, the Freeholder went out into his lands. Isolated farm clans, forest rangers on patrol duty, hunters and trappers and timber cruisers, brought their disputes to him as magistrate, their troubles to him as leader. Even the flitting Alfavala had learned to wait by the paths, the sick and injured trusting he could heal them, those with more complex problems struggling to put them into human words. 

This year, however, Karlavi and his bailiffs were much preoccupied with a new dam across the Oulu. The old one had broken last spring, after a winter of unusually heavy snowfall, and 5000 hectares of bottom land were drowned. The engineers at Yuvaskula, the only city on Vaynamo, had developed a new construction process well adapted to such situations. Karlavi wanted to use this.

“But blast it all,” he said, “I’ll need every skilled man I have, including myself. The job has got to be finished before the ground dries, so the ferroplast can bond with the soil. And you know what the labor shortage is like around here.”

“Who will ride circuit, then?” asked Elva.

“That’s what I don’t know.” Karlavi ran a hand through his straight brown hair. He was a typical Vaynamoan, tall, light-complexioned, with high cheekbones and oblique blue eyes. He wore the working clothes usual to the Tervola district, leather breeches ending in mukluks, a mackinaw in the tartan of his family. There was nothing romantic about his appearance. Nonetheless, Elva’s heart turned over when he looked at her. Even after two years.

He got out his pipe and tamped it with nervous motions. “Somebody must,” he said. “Somebody with enough technical education to use a medikit and discuss people’s difficulties intelligently. And with authority. We’re more tradition-minded hereabouts than they are at Ruuyalka, dear. Our people wouldn’t accept the judgment of just anyone. How could a servant or tenant dare settle an argument between two pioneers? It must be me, or a bailiff, or—” His voice trailed off.

Elva caught the implication. “No!” she exclaimed. “I can’t! I mean… that is—”

“You’re my wife,” said Karlavi slowly. “That alone gives you the right, by well-established custom. Especially since you’re the daughter of the Magnate of Ruuyalka. Almost equivalent to me in prestige, even if you do come from the other end of the continent, where they’re fishers and marine farmers instead of woodsfolk.” His grin flashed. “I doubt if you’ve yet learned what awful snobs the free yeomen of Tervola are!” 

“But Hauki, I can’t leave him.”

“Hauki will be spoiled rotten in your absence, by an adoring nanny and a villageful of ten wives. Otherwise he’ll do fine.” Karlavi dismissed the thought of their son with a wry gesture. “I’m the one who’ll get lonesome. Abominably so.” 

“Oh, darling,” said Elva, utterly melted.

A few days later she rode forth.

And it had been an experience to remember. The easy, rocking motion of the six-legged hailu, the mindless leisure of kilometer after kilometer—where however the body, skin and muscle and blood and all ancient instinct, gained an aliveness such as she had never before felt; the silence of mountains with sunlit ice on their shoulders, then birdsong in the woods and a river brawling; the rough warm hospitality when she stayed overnight with some pioneer, the eldritch welcome at the Alfa nest—she was now glad she had encountered those things, and she hoped to know them again, often.

There had been no danger. The last violence between humans on Vaynamo (apart from occasional fist fights, caused mostly by sheer exuberance and rarely doing any harm) lay a hundred years in the past. As for storms, landslides, flood, wild animals, she had the unobtrusive attendance of Huiva and a dozen other “tame” Alfavala. Even these, the intellectual pick of their species, who had chosen to serve man in a doglike fashion rather than keep to the forests, could speak only a few words and handle only the simplest tools. But their long ears, flat nostrils, feathery antennae, every fine green hair on every small body, were always aquiver. This was their planet, they had evolved here, and they were more animal than rational beings. Their senses and reflexes kept her safer than an armored aircraft might.

All the same, the absence of Karlavi and Hauki grew sharper each day. When finally she came to the edge of cleared land, high on the slopes of Hornback Fell, and saw Tervola below, a momentary blindness stung her eyes.

Huiva guided his hailu alongside hers. He pointed down the mountain with his tail. “Home,” he chattered. “Food tonight. Snug bed.”

“Yes.” Elva blinked hard. What sort of crybaby am I, anyhow? she asked herself, half in anger. I’m the Magnate’s daughter and the Freeholder’s wife, I have a University degree and a pistol-shooting medal, as a girl I sailed through hurricanes and skindove into grottos where fang-fish laired, as a woman I brought a son into the world… I will not bawl! 

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s hurry.”

She thumped heels on the hailu’s ribs and started downhill at a gallop. Her long yellow hair was braided, but a lock of it broke loose, fluttering behind her. Hoofs rang on stone. Ahead stretched grainfields and pastures, still wet from winter but their shy green deepening toward summer hues, on down to the great metallic sheet of Lake Rovaniemi and then across the valley to the opposite horizon, where the High Mikkela reared into a sky as tall and blue as itself. Down by the lake clustered the village, the dear red tile of roofs, the whale shape of a processing plant, a road lined with trees leading to the Freeholder’s mansion. There, old handhewn timbers glowed with sun; the many windows flung the light dazzlingly back to her.

She was halfway down the slope when Huiva screamed. She had learned to react fast. Thinly scattered across all Vaynamo, men could easily die from the unforeseen. Reining in, Elva snatched loose the gun at her waist. “What is it?”

Huiva cowered on his mount. One hand pointed skyward.

At first Elva could not understand. An aircraft descending above the lake… what was so odd about that? How else did Huiva expect the inhabitants of settlements hundreds of kilometers apart to visit each other?—And then she registered the shape. And then, realizing the distance, she knew the size of the thing.

It came down swiftly, quiet in its shimmer of antigrav fields, a cigar shape which gleamed. Elva holstered her pistol again and took forth her binoculars. Now she could see how the sleekness was interrupted with turrets and boat housings, cargo locks, viewports. An emblem was set into the armored prow, a gauntleted hand grasping a planetary orb. Nothing she had ever heard of. But— 

Her heart thumped, so loudly that she could almost not hear the Alfavala’s squeals of terror. “A spaceship,” she breathed. “A spaceship, do you know that word? Like the ships my ancestors came here in, long ago…. Oh, bother! A big aircraft, Huiva. Come on!”

She whipped her hailu back into gallop. The first spaceship to arrive at Vaynamo in, in, how long? More than a hundred years. And it was landing here! At her own Tervola!

The vessel grounded just beyond the village. Its enormous mass settled deeply into the plowland. Housings opened and auxiliary aircraft darted forth, to hover and swoop. They were of a curious design, larger and blunter than the fliers built on Vaynamo. The people, running toward the marvel, surged back as hatches gaped, gangways extruded, armored cars beetled down to the ground.

Elva had not yet reached the village when the strangers opened fire.

There were no hostile ships, not even an orbital fortress. To depart, the seven craft from Chertkoi simply made rendezvous beyond the atmosphere, held a short gleeful conference by radio, and accelerated outward. Captain Bors Golyev, commanding the flotilla, stood on the bridge of the Askol and watched the others. The light of the yellow sun was incandescent on their flanks. Beyond lay blackness and the many stars. 

His gaze wandered off among constellations which the parallax of fifteen light-years had not much altered. The galaxy was so big, he thought, so unimaginably enormous…. Sedes Regis was an L scrawled across heaven. Tradition claimed Old Sol lay in that direction, a thousand parsecs away. But no one on Chertkoi was certain any longer. Golyev shrugged. Who cared?

“Gravitational field suitable for agoric drive, sir,” intoned the pilot.

Golyev looked in the sternward screen. The planet called Vaynamo had dwindled, but remained a vivid shield, barred with cloud and blazoned with continents, the overall color a cool blue-green. He thought of ocherous Chertkoi, and the other planets of its system, which were not even habitable. Vaynamo was the most beautiful color he had ever seen. The two moons were also visible, like drops of liquid gold.

Automatically, his astronaut’s eye checked the claims of the instruments. Was Vaynamo really far enough away for the ships to go safely into agoric? Not quite, he thought— no, wait, he’d forgotten that the planet had a five percent greater diameter than Chertkoi. “Very good,” he said, and gave the necessary orders to his subordinate captains. A deep hum filled air and metal and human bones. There was a momentary sense of falling, as the agoratron went into action. And then the stars began to change color and crawl weirdly across the visual field.

“All’s well, sir,” said the pilot. The chief engineer confirmed it over the intercom.

“Very good,” repeated Golyev. He yawned and stretched elaborately. “I’m tired! That was quite a little fight we had at that last village, and I’ve gotten no sleep since. I’ll be in my cabin. Call me if anything seems amiss.”

“Yes, sir.” The pilot smothered a knowing leer.

Golyev walked down the corridor, his feet slamming its metal under internal pseudogravity. Once or twice he met a crewman and accepted a salute as casually as it was given. The men of the Interplanetary Corporation didn’t need to stand on ceremony. They were tried spacemen and fighters, every one of them. If they chose to wear sloppy uniforms, to lounge about off-duty cracking jokes or cracking a bottle, to treat their officers as friends rather than tyrants—so much the better. This wasn’t the nice-nelly Surface Transport Corporation, or the spit-and-polish Chemical Synthesis trust, but IP, explorer and conqueror. The ship was clean and the guns were ready. What more did you want?

Pravoyats, the captain’s batman, stood outside the cabin door. He nursed a scratched cheek and a black eye. One hand rested broodingly on his sidearm. “Trouble?” inquired Golyev.

“Trouble ain’t the word, sir.”

“You didn’t hurt her, did you?” asked Golyev sharply.

“No, sir. I heard your orders all right. Never laid a finger on her in anger. But she sure did on me. Finally I wrassled her down and gave her a whiff of sleepy gas. She’d’a torn the cabin apart otherwise. She’s probably come out of it by now, but I’d rather not go in again to see, captain.”

Golyev laughed. He was a big man, looming over Pravoyats, who was no midget. Otherwise he was a normal patron-class Chertkoian, powerfully built, with comparatively short legs and strutting gait, his features dark, snubnosed, bearded, carrying more than his share of old scars. He wore a plain green tunic, pants tucked into soft boots, gun at hip, his only sign of rank a crimson star at his throat. “I’ll take care of all that from here on,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Despite his wounds, the batman looked a shade envious. “Uh, you want the prod? I tell you, she’s a troublemaker.”

“No.”

“Electric shocks don’t leave any scars, captain.”

“I know. But on your way, Pravoyats.” Golyev opened the door, went through, and closed it behind him again.

The girl had been seated on his bunk. She stood up with a gasp. A looker, for certain. The Vaynamoan women generally seemed handsome; this one was beautiful, tall and slim, delicate face and straight nose lightly dusted with freckles. But her mouth was wide and strong, her skin suntanned, and she wore a coarse, colorful riding habit. Her exoticism was the most exciting thing: yellow hair, slant blue eyes, who’d ever heard of the like? 

The tranquilizing after-effects of the gas—or else plain nervous exhaustion—kept her from attacking him. She backed against the wall and shivered. Her misery touched Golyev a little. He’d seen unhappiness elsewhere, on Imfan and Novagal and Chertkoi itself, and hadn’t been bothered thereby. People who were too weak to defend themselves must expect to be made booty of. It was different, though, when someone as good-looking as this was so woebegone.

He paused on the opposite side of his desk from her, gave a soft salute, and smiled. “What’s your name, my dear?”

She drew a shaken breath. After trying several times, she managed to speak. “I didn’t think… anyone … understood my language.”

“A few of us do. The hypnopede, you know.” Evidently she did not. He thought a short, dry lecture might soothe her. “An invention made a few decades ago on our planet. Suppose another person and I have no language in common. We can be given a drug to accelerate our nervous systems, and then the machine flashes images on a screen and analyzes the sounds uttered by the other person. What it hears is transferred to me and impressed on the speech center of my brain, electronically. As the vocabulary grows, a computer in the machine figures out the structure of the whole language—semantics, grammar, and so on—and orders my own learning accordingly. That way, a few short, daily sessions make me fluent.”

She touched her lips with a tongue that seemed equally parched. “I heard once … of some experiments at the University,” she whispered. “They never got far. No reason for such a machine. Only one language on Vaynamo.”

“And on Chertkoi. But we’ve already subjugated two other planets, one of ‘em divided into hundreds of language groups. And we expect there’ll be others.” Golyev opened a drawer, took out a bottle and two glasses. “Care for brandy?”

He poured. “I’m Bors Golyev, an astronautical executive of the Interplanetary Corporation, commanding this scout force,” he said. “Who are you?” 

She didn’t answer. He reached a glass toward her. “Come, now,” he said, “I’m not such a bad fellow. Here, drink. To our better acquaintance.”

With a convulsive movement, she struck the glass from his hand. It bounced on the floor. “Almighty Creator! No!” she yelled. “You murdered my husband!”

She stumbled to a chair, fell down in it, rested head in arms on the desk and began to weep. The spilled brandy crept across the floor toward her.

Golyev groaned. Why did he always get cases like this? Glebs Narov, now, had clapped hands on the jolliest twany wench you could imagine, when they conquered Marsya on Imfan: delighted to be liberated from her own drab culture.

Well, he could kick this female back down among the other prisoners. But he didn’t want to. He seated himself across from her, lit a cigar out of the box on his desk, and held his own glass to the light. Ruby smoldered within.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “How was I to know? What’s done is done. There wouldn’t have been so many casualties if they’d been sensible and given up. We shot a few to prove we meant business, but then called on the rest over a loudspeaker, to yield. They didn’t. For that matter, you were riding a six-legged animal out of the fields, I’m told. You came busting right into the fight. Why didn’t you ride the other way and hid out till we left?” 

“My husband was there,” she said after a silence. When she raised her face, he saw it gone cold and stiff. “And our child.”

“Oh? Uh, maybe we picked up the kid, at least. If you’d like to go see—”

“No,” she said, toneless and yet somehow with a dim returning pride. “I got Hauki away. I rode straight to the mansion and got him. Then one of your fire-guns hit the roof and the house began to burn. I told Huiva to take the baby—never mind where. I said I’d follow if I could. But Karlavi was out there, fighting. I went back to the barricade. He had been killed just a few seconds before. His face was all bloody. Then your cars broke through the barricade and someone caught me. But you don’t have Hauki. Or Karlavi!”

As if drained by the effort of speech, she slumped and stared into a corner, empty-eyed.

“Well,” said Golyev, not quite comfortably, “your people had been warned.” She didn’t seem to hear him. “You never got the message? But it was telecast over your whole planet. After our first non-secret landing. That was several days ago. Where were you? Out in the woods?—Yes, we scouted telescopically, and made clandestine landings, and caught a few citizens to interrogate. But when we understood the situation, more or less, we landed openly in, uh, your city. Yuvaskula, is that the name? We seized it without too much damage, captured some officials of the planetary government, claimed the planet for IP and called on all citizens to cooperate. But they wouldn’t! Why, one ambush alone cost us fifty good men. What could we do? We had to teach a lesson. We announced we’d punish a few random villages. That’s more humane than bombarding from space with cobalt missiles. Isn’t it? But I suppose your people didn’t really believe us, the way they came swarming when we landed. Trying to parley with us first, and then trying to resist us with hunting rifles! What would you expect to happen?”

His voice seemed to fall into an echo-less well.

He loosened his collar, which felt a trifle tight, took a deep drag on his cigar and refilled his glass. “Of course, I don’t expect you to see our side of it at once,” he said reasonably. “You’ve been jogging along, isolated, for centuries, haven’t you? Hardly a spaceship has touched at your planet since it was first colonized. You have none of your own, except a couple of interplanetary boats which hardly ever get used. That’s what your President told me, and I believe him. Why should you go outsystem? You have everything you can use, right on your own world. The nearest sun to yours with an oxygen atmosphere planet is three parsecs off. Even with a very high-powered agoratron, you’d need ten years to get there, another decade to get back. A whole generation! Sure, the time-contraction effect would keep you young—ship’s time for the voyage would only be a few weeks, or less—but all your friends would be middle-aged when you came home. Believe me, it’s lonely being a spaceman.” 

He drank. A pleasant burning went down his throat. “No wonder man spread so slowly into space, and each colony is so isolated,” he said. “Chertkoi is a mere name in your archives. And yet it’s only fifteen light-years from Vay-namo. You can see our sun on any clear night. A reddish one. You call it Gamma Navarchi. Fifteen little light-years, and yet there’s been no contact between our two planets for four centuries or more!

“So why now? Well, that’s a long story. Let’s just say Chertkoi isn’t as friendly a world as Vaynamo. You’ll see that for yourself. We, our ancestors, we came up the hard way, we had to struggle for everything. And now there are four billion of us! That was the census figure when I left. It’ll probably be five billion when I get home. We have to have more resources. Our economy is grinding to a halt. And we can’t afford economic dislocation. Not on as thin a margin as Chertkoi allows us. First we went back to the other planets of our system and worked them as much as practicable. Then we started re-exploring the nearer stars. So far we’ve found two useful planets. Yours is the third. You know what your population is? Ten million, your President claimed. Ten million people for a whole world of forests, plains, hills, oceans… why, your least continent has more natural resources than all Chertkoi. And you’ve stabilized at that population. You don’t want more people!”

Golyev struck the desk with a thump. “If you think ten million stagnant agriculturists have a right to monopolize all that room and wealth, when four billion Chertkoians live on the verge of starvation,” he said indignantly, “you can think again.”

She stirred. Not looking at him, her tone small and very distant, she said, “It’s our planet, to do with as we please.

If you want to breed like maggots, you must take the consequences.”

Anger flushed the last sympathy from Golyev. He ground out his cigar in the ashwell and tossed off his brandy. “Never mind moralizing,” he said. “I’m no martyr. I became a spaceman because it’s fun!”

He got up and walked around the desk to her.