Repairmen of Cyclops

by

John Brunner

The sky rang with the reverberation of fierce white

sunlight like the interior of a blue drum. Wind hot as the

breath of a furnace teased the silver ocean into ripples,

and the ripples shattered the sun's image into ablazing

pathway of diamond fragments. Itching with sweat,

aching with tension, Justin Kolb had to narrow his eyes

even behind his wholeface visor because the response-

limit of the glass was exceeded if he turned his head

towards that glistening track over the water and the

opacity curve took a sudden dive towards complete

blankness.

Maddeningly, it was to sunward that he had caught

the first wing-glints.

He had expected that the sight of the Jackson's buz-

zards would crystallise his formless tension into the old

familiar excitement, re-unite mind and body into the effi-

cient combination, as much weapon as person, which was

Juson Kolb at peak operational efficiency. He had been

trying for so long to get away on his own like this, on

the hunter's trail which now had to make do for his old,

preferred pastimes, that the strain of habituation to wait-

ing had soured his keen anticipation of the chase.

Only till I see the buzzards, he had promised himself.

And then

But he'd seen the buzzards at last, when he had half

decided he was too far north even at this season, two

days past midsummer, and the instant of thrill had

beenan instant. Now he was back in the slough of

dreary awareness which had plagued him the whole of

yesterday and the whole of the day before. He was con-

scious of suffocating heat, of blinding brightness, of

prickling perspiration, of cramp from keeping the skim-

mer level and aligned despite the tag of the waves. His

hands were slippery on the controls, and the hard butt of

his harpoon-gan seemed to take up twice as much room

on the skimmer's deck as it usually did.

Briefly, he shut his eyes, wishing with all his force that

somehow time could turn back and he could be free to

return to space.

Cyclops, though, was a relatively poor world. It could

not support luxury spaceflight. Out there, a man had to

be productivemining asteroids, servicing solar power

relays, doing some clock-around job with the absolute

concentration of machinery.

What the hell am I now? A gigolo.

The thought passed. True or not, he was at least able

to indulge this much of his thirst for excitement and

challenge; if he had taken any other of the courses open

to him, he would have been drudging away this glorious

summer in a city or on a farm or in some squalid fish-

ing-port, pestered continually by the demands of other

people, by the need to stack up work-credits, by holes in

his shoes or leaks in his roof.

Even her high-and-mightiness is preferable to that. ..

He biinked. The wing-glints had come again, and this

time remained in view instead of vanishing into the blur

of heat-haze and shimmery reflection along the skyline.

His pulse beat faster as he began to count: five, six

eight, ten, at least a dozen and possibly more.

Name of the cosmos, but it must be a giantf

For one moment, uncharacteristic alarm filled him. He

had come deliberately to this northern extreme of the

wolfsharks* range, because those that beat a path of

slaughter more than a hundred miles from the equatorial

shallows which were their customary habitat were cer-

tain to be the largest and greediest specimens, and after

his long impatient chafing in Frecity he had felt nothing

less than a monster would compensate him.

But seeing a dozen or more buzzards hovering was ft

shock.

It was perhaps the most characteristic sight on Cy-

clops: Jackson's buzzards, swift, cniel-taloned, steely-

winged, on the track of a wolfshark, which killed for

savage delight and not for hunger, so that even the mon-

strous appetites of the birds were easily glutted by its

gore-leaking victims. At this time of year, nearer the

equator, one could look out over the sea and espy as

many as five or six groups of the carrion-eaters follow-

ing the blood-smeared killers, for the ocean teemed with

'life.

Yet it was rare to see more than six buzzards to every

wolfshark. By twos and threes, they would sate them-

selves and flap heavily away, while others took their

place, the total number in the sky remaining roughly

constant. And there were reasons why those that roamed

furthest north were followed usually only by two or

three buzzards: first, the sea offered fewer victims and

hence less carrion; second, the birds were still feeding

their young at this time of year, and could not wander

too far from their breeding-mats, the vast raft-like as-

semblies of Cyclops kelp which occurred only in a nar-

row belt around the planet's centre.

Nonetheless, here it was: a wolfshark so big, so fast,

and so murderous that a hundred miles away from home

it was killing in quantities great enough to tip the bal-

ance in the buzzards' dim minds on the side of greed

rather than loyalty to their offspring.

He pursed his lips and eased his harpoon-gun closer to

the firing-notch out in the forward gunwale of the skim-

mer. Would one shot do the )ob? Would it be better to

load first with an unlined harpoon, to weaken the killer,

before risking a shot with line attached and the conse-

quent danger of being dragged to the bottom? Had this

enormous beast been attacked and escaped beforeif it

had, how many times? The more often, the warier it

would be of an approaching skimmer, and the more

likely" it would be to attack even if there was easy prey

closer to hand.

He weighed possibilities with half his mind, while with

the other half he reviewed the area where he found him-

self.

This was the water-hemisphere of Cyclops, insofar as

the differentiation was meaningful. It was a shallow-sea

planetits moon being rather small, and incapable of

raising large tides either in the cnistal material or in the

oceans, although its sun exerted considerable tidal influ-

ence.

The shallowness of the sea, combined with a total vol-

ume of water close to the average for Class A planets

(those on which human beings could survive, eating

some of the vegetation and at least a few of .the native

animals) meant that the dry-land area was chopped up

into small sections. The other half of the planet boasted

some quite sizeable islands, and even a quasi-conrinent

consisting of a score of large islands linked by isthmuses.

This side was sparsely inhabited, and the largest island

within hundreds of miles was officially not even part of

Cyclops, but a repair and recreation base for the Corps

Galactica.

A certain amount of fishing; a certain amount of

scrap-reclamation; some terrafarms on islands isolated

enough to be worth maintaining as pure-human ecologi-

cal units against the risk of drifting seeds and wandering

fauna from the Cyclops-normal islands around them

that was the sum of human engagement with this hemi-

sphere, apart from solar and tidal power installations

operating with a minimum of manned supervision.

Kolb hesitated. Then he gave a harsh laugh. Was he

going to let the risk of dying alone and far from rescue

prevent him from going after this record-breaking wolf-

shark? He would never be able to face his image in the

mirror again.'

In any case, out in space he had faced death not

hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of miles from the

nearest other humans.

His mind darkened briefly. He never cared to recall

the circumstances that had brought him back from space

to a planet-bound existence, and forbidden him to com-

bine his lust for danger with valuable work. There was

nothing of value to anyone but himself in this single-

handed hunting; men had shared Cyclops with wolf-

sharks for long enough to determine the limits within

which they could be a nuisance, and if the necessity

arose, the species was culled efficiently and with preci-

sion by teams working from the air.

In fact, thought Kolb greyly, there's damned little

value to anybody in anything I've done with my life

lately. Least of all to me...

Slowly, as the wing-glints came closer, following a line

that would pass him within some four or five miles and

if extended would eventually approach the island where

the Corps Galactica maintained its repair base, a kind of

muted exultation filled him. He could see now that the

buzzards were too full already to make more than token

swoops on what the wolfshark killed, yetas though ad-

miring the energy of the beastthey none of them made

to flap back to the south and their breeding-mats.

It'll break all the records. I never even heard of such a

giant!

He put aside the unlined harpoon which his hand had

automatically sought for the first shot. With fingers as

exact as a surgeon's, he loaded a harpoon with line at-

tached, and laid the gun in its firing-notch.

Then he closed his left hand on the control levers, and

without a tremor fed power to the reactor.

The skimmer leapt up on its planes with a shriek loud

enough to startle a wolfshark at twice this range, and in-

stantly the wheeling buzzards disgorged the last food

they had eaten and climbed a safe hundred feet into the

sky. Just audible over the thrum of power from his

craft, Kolb heard their whickering cries, like the neigh-

ing of frightened horses.

And one of his questions was answered, anyway. This

wolfshark had been attacked before, often enough to

recognise a skimmer for the danger it represented. It for-

got its business of stitching a line of destruction across

the peaceful ocean, and spun around in the water to con-

front the fragile boat. It lowered its tail and spread its

fans, and its head rose to the surface.

Kolb's self-possession wavered, so that he had to cling

desperately to his unverbalised decision: it 'doesn't matter

if I die or not! Thinking of it as huge, and seeing how

huge it was, were two different things.

How big, then? Fifty feet from fan-tip to fan-tip, os-

cillating in the water like a manta ray, but having a ta-

pered body which was all keel for the muscles driving

those fans, perfectly streamlined; a mere twitch, a single

shrug of those muscles would hurl it torpedo-swift on

anything else which swam the waters of Cyclops, and

jaws which could open to engulf a man would clamp

serrated rows of fangs into, and through, the victim. The

bite killed, and the Idller forgot. In summer, it was never

hungry. It swallowed what its )aws held, and that suf-

ficed until the next kill, minutes later.

Kolb silenced the yammering alarms in his mind and

lined up the sights of his gun rock-steady on the centre

of the maw.

And then, with the distance closing to two hundred

yards, a hundred and fifty, there came the boom.

It rocked the skimmer. It starded the wolfshark. It was

the noise of a Corps Galactica spacecraft braking at the

edge of atmosphere to put down at the repair base.

By a reflex not even the danger of death could over-

rule, ex-spaceman Justin Kolb glanced up, and the sun

shone full on his wholeface visor, triggering and over-

loading the glare response, so that he was blind. He cried

out, his hand closing on the trigger of his gun. The har-

poon whistled wide of a target, and the wolfshark

charged.

During the flight Maddalena Santos had mostly- sat

staring at nothing, turning over and over in her mind the

decision which now confronted her: to stay on, or not,

in the Patrol Service.

Three other passengers were aboardpersonnel from

an airless Corps base further out towards the limits of

the explored galaxy, on rotating local leave and very ex-

cited about it. Two of them were men. The fact that

these men looked at her once only told her something

about the effect of the last twenty years on her appear-

ance.

It was one thing to know that she was assured of an-

other two centuries of life. It was another to realise on

this first visit to civilisation in so long a time how deep

the impact of two decades on a barbarian world had

gone.

She was assured of her longevity by the Patrol's pay-

scale; in a galaxy where the older worlds were so rich it

literally made no difference whether a given individual

worked or not, it required either accidental dedication or

a tempting bait to enlist volunteers for the necessary

drudgery of governmental service.

Not that you can really call it government, Maddalena

reminded herself listlessly. It's more like herding cattle.

And lazy cattle, at that.

The other branches of government service paid at

lower rates; only the Patrol paid ten-for-one in the

unique currency of life.

She had served twenty years as an on-planet agent,

among stinking barbarians lost in a mud-wallow, and she

was entitledif she chose to take it here and nowto a

guaranteed two centuries of comfortable, healthy life,

anywhere she chose. She could even go clear back to

Earth, for she had been born there.

Wistfully, she looked at the black star-spangled back-

drop of space, wondering what had happened on the

mother world in the period she had been away.

She had been so optimistic . . . Right at the beginning

of her career, when she was making out so badly in the

Corps that she risked not even being promoted lieutenant

from her initial probationer statusand hence losing for-

ever her chance at longevity-paymentshe had saved ev-

erything and indeed acquired some small reputation by a

successful coup on a barbarian planet: one of the isolated

Zarathustra Refugee Planets where fugitives had survived

after fleeing the hell of the Zarathustra nova more than

seven centuries previous.

But when she was offered a post as an on-planet agent,

supervising and watching the progress of these stranded

outcasts of humanity, since she was not permitted to re-

turn to the world where she had stirred up such a to-do,

she had had to pick almost at random from the existing

four or five vacancies.

And she had realised quite shortly after being assigned

her post, in which the minimum stay was twenty years,

that she had chosen wrong.

It had seemed that something was going to happen on

the planet she selecteda transition from the typical

mud-grubbing peasant level where many of the refugees

had got stuck, .to an expanding phase of incipient civilisa-

tion, with some industrialisation and a great deal of

cross-cultural influence: fascinating material to study at

first-hand.

But that occurrence depended on the survival of an

organisational genius who had inherited the headship of a

strategically sited city-state. And within a month of her

arrival, one of his jealous rivals assassinated him and

seized power, condemning the planet to at least one more

generation of stagnancy.

She was absolutely forbidden to interfere. And, having

to sit helplessly- by and watch nothing happen, she had

grown so bored she hardly dared think about it.

Now was time for leave, and reassignment. Her

"death" had been arranged; her successor had been

briefed and was even now aboard the Patrol ship which

would land him with utter secrecy to take over his care-

fully prepared r61e in the local society. . . and she was

on her way to Cyclops, a planet she had never conceived

she might want to visit.

Yet she had welcomed the reasonless order to come

here before proceeding on leave. The delay gave her

time to arrive at the decision she had postponed so long:

stay on, ask for transfer to some lower-paying )ob, or

resign?

She thought enviously of Gus Langenschmidt, the Pa-

trol Major who had maintained the beat including her

assigned world when she first went there; he was aging,

greying, even running to fat when she last saw him, yet

because he could think of no better purpose to which to

devote his accrued longevity, he was continuing far be-

yond the maximum service-time which qualified for ten-

to-one pay. Five centuries was the limit of credit Fifty

years in the Patrol.

More than the total of years Fve yet lived, Maddalena

reflected. How is Gus? Where is he? It would have been

easier to endure my job if I'd .known he was still going

to call two or three times a yearbut they 'pulled him off

his beat to do something else when he topped the limit,

and I could never like his successor so well.

The communicators announced the imminence of

planetfall. The whisper of air began on the hull, like the

drumming of scores of marching feet. Maddalena leaned

back and closed her eyes, struggling once more with the

irresoluble problem. She scarcely noticed the actual land-

ing period, although her fellow passengers were chatter-

ing and joking and exchanging snippets of information

about Cyclops. A rough world, they thought it was.

Rough world.' Maddalena echoed silently. These soft-

handed chair-warmers should go where I've just come

from.'

And yet...

Her mind drifted back two decades on the instant. "A

predatory kind of world"that was the description she

had been given when it was first learned Cyclopeans

were behind the interference with a ZRP which she had

cancelled out by an inspired improvisation.

What did they want her here for, anyway? Why in

the galaxy had that message come through at the Corps

base where she had been trying to decide whether to go

all the way home to Earth for her leave-year, instructing

that she be sent to Cyclops on the next available flight?

The answer turned up the moment the locks were

opened on the landing-groundor rather, pontoon. Cy-

clops, having so much water, had correspondingly little

dry ground available for parking spaceships. More than si

dozen vessels were in view from the seat in which she

still sat listlessly although the others had risen excitedly

to await permission to step outside. The gawky shapes of

cranes, the abstract formations of hulls in process of cut-

ting up for scrap, the clean bright rails of overhead gan-

tries, wove webs of metal across the blinding blue

background of a summer sky.

She had not expected to find such bright light; the pri-

mary of the world she had left was cooler than Earth's,

but that of Cyclops was whiter and hotter.

A man in summer undress uniform, hair clipped close

and indicating that he was called on to fly space where

long hair was forbidden because it was dangerous inside

a helmet, hauled himself dexterously through the lock

even before the mobile gangvroy trundled into position.

He peered down the shadowy aisle of the passenger

cabin.

"Senior Lieutenant Santos?" he inquired.

Maddalena stirred and got up.

"The base commandant is waiting for you," the man

said. "Would you come with me?"

The other passengers exchanged resentful glances, es-

pecially the woman. She had never been out of range of

civilised cosmetic treatment, and her age was impossible

to assess, whereas Maddalena had had to age the full

twenty years she'd spent where cosmetics were mere

primitive pastes and powders.

She obeyed the instruction apathetically. But the mo-

ment she came to the lock and saw who was waiting be-

low in the open cockpit of the ground-skimmer, she

forgot everything in a wave of pure joy.

"Gus."' she shouted, and flew down the gangway three

steps at a time to hurl her arms around his neck.

"Easy, girl, easy!" he said, disengaging her grip. "I

have to maintain some show of authority around this

dump, even though I hate it. Let's have a look at you.

It's been a long time."

Maddalena pulled back to arm's reach and studied her

old friend. "You look better on. it than I do," she said

with a twinge of envy. And indeed he did; his grey hair

had been treated, his face smoothed to wipe away

worry-lines, his waistline trimmed to a lean youthfulness.

In his immaculate commandant-rank uniform, he looked

like a come-on advertisement for Patrol recruitment.

"Have to maintain appearances, the same way you've

had to," he grunted. "Here, get in and I'll run you back

to my HQ for a bit of refreshment. Your gear will be

taken care of. It's not often I get the chance to use my

position for my own amusement, but this time I've done

it, and you're getting the finest treatment the planet can

afford."

"Amusement?" Maddalena said, relaxing with a sigh

into the soft padding of the passenger seat. "Did you

fetch me here simply for amusement?"

Langenschmidt, easing the ground-skimmer around the

tail of the newly-landed shipthe metal shell of the pon-

toon resonated under themshot a starded glance at her.

"Weren't you told why you were being sent here? I'd

have expected you to raise hell at having your leave

postponed when you've waited twenty years for it!"

"No, I just did as I was told." Maddalena narrowed

her eyes against the brilliant sunshine and let her gaze

rove over the ddily-parked spaceships.

"Hm! You must have changed in the years since we

last met," Langenschmidt said. "Yon used to be a con-

siderable spitfire. Well, IWell!" He ran his hand

around the collar of his full-dress jacket. "I'd better start

by explaining, hadn't I? It's to do with the ZRP's, of

course. The row about non-interference has blown up

yet once moreit's been in the wind since shortly before

I was recalled from my beat and put in charge here, and

I was put in charge here for precisely the reason that the

centre of the whole brewing row was right on Cyclops."

Maddalena, hardly paying attention, made some sort of

sound interpretable as an interested comment.

Langenschmidt went on: "In fact, some of it was to

do with our little affair at Carrig. Although they were

never able to come out and complain openly, the pride

of the Cyclops government was badly hurt by the fact

that a hundred or so Cyclopeans had been dropped into

volcanoes by dirty smelly barbarians, and that we hadn't

acted to stop this because of the principle of non-inter-

ference with ZRP development. It takes years to stir up

trouble when there are two hundred and whatevertwo

hundred sixty, isn't it?worlds with a say in running the

Corps, but a determined party can get the wheels turn-

ing eventually. And on Cyclops we have just such a de-

termined party. Her name is Alura Quist, and if there

weren't officially a representative government here I'd

say she was a dictator. She's just ahunstoppable.

"The Cyclopeans don't like having our base here, but

they can't balance their planetary budget without the

revenue it brings in. So short of kicking the Corps off-

planet, there's only one way they can get back at us for

the Carrig business. That's to attack our prized principle

of non-interference. And with a view to this, Quist is

right now staging a big conference on the subject, with

delegates from all kinds of worlds including Earth, and

frankly I'm horrified at the influential names she's man-

aged to rope in.

"The problem is in my lap, Maddalena, and I've wor-

ried myself stupid about it. They put me here to try and

stave off what Quist is doing, and I'm losing out. When I

heard you were at the end of your tour, I thought, 'By

Cosmos! She's from Earth, and out this way Earthborn

Corpsmen are few and far betweenshe's served as an

on-planet agent, so she has first-hand testimony avail-

able.' For all these and several other reasons, I thought

maybe you'd jolt my mind out of its old grooves and

somehow inspire me to get the better of Quist."

Maddalena stirred and turned her finely-shaped head.

Her former look of fragility, Langenschmidt noted, had

faded, and she seemed toughened and far less feminine.

"After twenty years watching a gang of Zarathustra

refugees getting nowhere, Gus, I'm pretty well con-

vinced myself that it's a crime to leave them to make

fools of themselves. I'm sorry to disappoint you within

minutes of our first meeting in years, but that's the way I

feel right now, and if you want to convince the dele-

gates to this conference that non-interference is the right

course, you can start by trying it on me!"

m

For the third time Bracy Dyge began on the miscel-

laneous collection of transistors littering the bottom of

his spares box, hoping against hope that the fault in his

fish-finder would put itself right. He was four days from

port, even if he started home right away, in this sluggish

ancient trawler which represented his whole family's

means of supportwith himself as sole able-bodied

seaman. He had been three days on the fishing-grounds,

and only last night had he cottoned on to the fact that

the reason for his inability to locate any schools of oilfish

lay in an equipment fault, not in a total absence of fish.

For some reason far beyond his rudimentary technical

knowledge to fathom, the fish-finder refused to signal

anything closer than the bottom of the sea. With mad-

dening precision it delineated on its circular screen the

profile of the rocks three hundred feet below his keel,

but it wouldn't even show the big plastic bucket he was

trailing as a sea-anchor.

Transistors were expensive, and it was impossible to

tell by merely looking at them whether they were in

functional condition or not. Accordingly, he couldn't

say whether those he had salvaged at various times and

popped in the spares box were better, or worse, than the

ones installed in the fish-finder already. He could merely

try every possible combination until he had exhausted

the last permutation, and since there were altogether six-

teen transistors in the fish-finder and seven in the spares

box, it was proving an impossibly long job.

At least, however, it was ridding him of some useless

junk. Two of the spares had put the fish-finder com-

pletely out of action, and these he had tossed overboard

with annoyance.

The son was baldng hot, and the sea was completely

featureless. His trawler, shabby and paint-peeling, was

the only sign of life as far as he could see. On the after-

deck, in the exiguous shadow of a torn plastic awning,

he sat with legs crossed, using the front plate off the

fish-finder housing as a tray for the loose parts. He was

very lean, and the summer had tanned his naturally-dark

skin to the colour of old rich leather. His hair hung

around his shoulders in thick braids, and a shiny but

sea-tarnished chrome ring was threaded through the

pierced lobe of his left ear. Anyone with a knowledge of

the culture of Cyclops would have placed him instantly,

even without stopping to consider his off-white loincloth

and elastic sandals: a fisherboy from one of the sea-hemi-

sphere ports, most likely Grarignol, and doing rather

badly this year.

Correct. Morosely, Bracy discovered that another

transistor was worthless, and that made three over the

side.

At least, he promised himself, he was not going to turn

for home before he had exhausted all possibilities for

self-help. Even then.. .

His stomach churned and his mind quailed at the pros-

pect of going home with an empty hold. Better, surely,

to cruise at random until his nets chanced on something

for the family to eat, even if he found no oilfish. Oilfish

were the only salable species in this part of the ocean;

eating fish could be got by anyone, simply by casting a

few lines with bait. Oilfish travelled in vast schools of

eight to ten thousand, but because the schools were so

big they were likewise concentrated, and without a fish-

finder one might hunt for weeks and not cross the path

of a single school.

. If only he belonged to a different family . . . ! If he

were one of the Agmess boys, for instance, six brothers

of whom two had sufficient technical skill not merely to

do their own electronics repairs but actually to build

equipment for other families' boats . .. But by the same

token, they guarded their knowledge well. He would

have to go home and pay for their assistance, or pay

someone elsewhat with, after a fruitless voyage?

Agmess boats had radio, too, and in the event of a break-

down they could signal for help, whereas he was on his

own, in charge of the boat which supported his four sis-

ters, his grandmother and his eight-year-old younger

brother.

He was himself seventeen years old. He had been the

breadwinner of the family since the great storm of the

winter before last during which his parents had been

drowned in the capsizing of a lifeboat put out to rescue

a damned fool.

Add me to the list, Bracy told himself sourly. My

parents would be dreadfully ashamed, to see me in this

stupid mess!

He paused in his thankless task and cast a casual glance

over the bumished shield of the sea, not expecting to see

anything but the water and the sky. His heart gave a

lurch and seemed to go out of rhythm for several beats,

and he almost spilled the spare parts from the makeshift

tray balanced on his legs.

Jackson's buzzards! This far north, they could mean

Only one thinga wolfshark!

With frantic haste he gathered the bits of the fish-

finder and thrust them in a bag where at least he could

find them again, and scrambled to his feet. There was

one other way of tracking oilfish besides using electronic

aids, and that was to follow a wolfshark as the buzzards

did, until its eagerness for prey led it to a school. It

could sense the same nutrient-rich currents as all the

other fish, and those currents always defined the oilfish's

path.

Of course, not all such currents held oilfishthere

were too many of them. But it was an idea.

He hesitated, eyes screwed np against the glare, raising

the sole of one foot to rub it on the calf of the opposite

leg as he always did when concentrating on a problem.

There were several factors to weigh before a decision

was reached. First off, this wolfshark must be a whopper

to have so many blizzards trailing him. Second, he was

already four days from home, and a wolfshark finding

plenty of prey might kill the clock around for a week

before tiring and turning towards the equator again.

Third, although he had heard about using a wolfshark as

a pilot on the traces of an oilfish school, he had never

known anyone really do itit was needlessly chancy

now that everyone sailing from Grarignol could afford a

fish-finder.

Finally, if a wolfshark that size decided to attack his

trawler, it could probably sink it with a single fierce

charge.

Bracy drew a very deep breath. Now was the time for

desperate measures, he concluded, and went to see

whether he was equipped for the job.

Stores were no problem, apart from water, and unless

the weather broke he could keep the solar still going.

- Power, likewiseduring the day he drew enough to

move the boat at a sluggish walking pace from silicon-

dynide sails spread to catch the sun, and at night he

could spare a little of his stored reserves. He could tisk a

couple of days on the wolfshark's trail.

Defending himself if the beast turned nasty was an-

other matter altogether. His only weapons were two

fish-gaffs, rather corroded from long use and one in par-

ticular looking likely to snap soon, and an unreliable

self-seeking seine, not much use for anything except

bringing up jellyfish to be melted in the sun.

One moment! An inspiration struck him. In the

emergency locker he had at least half a dozen signal

rockets, which on a sparsely populated world like this

needed to reach stratospheric altitude if they were to be

any use. They weighed sixty-five pounds apiece, and

were triggered automatically by contact with sea-water

at one-hour intervals after the life-raft was cast over-

board.

He spent fifteen sweaty, swearing minutes manhan-

dling two of them into position on the forward rail, and

fishing up a bucket of sea-water to fire them with. If

luck and judgement combined, he could give even a mon-

ster wolfshark a meal worth remembering with these

things.

Then, feeling remarkably cold despite the heat of the

day, he fed power to the weakly-responding reaction jets

and the trawler began to creep in the wolfshark's general

direction.

He was about a mile distant when the skimmer came

in sight.

It seemed to appear from nowhere. It was so low in

the water, even the shallow troughs of this oily swell had

concealed it until it got up on its planes and spewed a

frothy plume astem. There seemed to be nothing of it,

toojust a platform with a slightly raised rim forward,

and a man lying on it, his face masked with a visor

against the sun.

Bracy gulped. Going after the wolfshark? Yes! For

he was lying on the butt of a harpoon-gun, and a gleam

of sun caught the barbs of the missile.

He saw the wolfshark then, and wished he hadn't

come near after all, for it was gigantic beyond his worst

nightmaresits span as great as the entire length of his

trawler.

The scene of the man on the skimmer confronting the

horrible aquatic killer lasted just long enough to burn

into his memory, before a sonic boom thundered across

the sky and the tableau, one second old, dissolved into a

chaos of spray and shrieking cries from the buzzards,

which had withdrawn to a safe height after vomiting

their half-digested stomach contents.

The skimmer vanished as suddenly as it had appeared,

in a whirlpool generated by the passage of the wolf-

shark, and a dozen fragments sailed into the air to land at

distances up to a hundred feet away. Of the man who

had been on it, Bracy saw nothing more for the moment.

Chiefly, this was because he was no longer wasting time

on looking. He had stopped his engines on solar power

and feverishly switched to stored reservesnot that that

would enable him to outrun the monster, but at least it

would give him a chance to dodge if he timed the ma-

noeuvre correctly.

He waited, wholly tense. Would the beast ignore him,

or? No, his luck was out. For, having turned in a lazy

circle, it was rising to the surface again and surveying

the upper side of the sea.

This was an old rogue, clearly, as well as a monster.

No sooner had it sighted the trawler than it buried itself

forward.

Bracy was yelling at the top of his voicehe had no

idea what words he was uttering, but they might have

been curses. By crazy guesswork he aligned the trawler

on the wolfshark's course, slopped water over the firing

mechanism of both rockets, and buried himself into the

well of the deck, hoping the blast would be deflected

from him.

Onetwothree heartbeats, as widely spaced as

measured footfalls, intolerably slow.

And the universe exploded.

Dazed, he picked up his bruised body, feeling as if it

belonged to someone else, and put his head over the

well's edge to look at the deck. Two of his solar sails

were ripped, and the plastic awning which had given

him shade had blown clear out of sight; there were

char-marks on the planking and the window of the

stemhouse was smashed.

Bat there had been a very satisfactory- calamity twenty

yards from his bows. He could tell, even before looldng

over the side, because the buzzardsnot choosy about

what carrion they atehad descended already to replace

the food wasted in panicky vomiting.

The writhing corpse of the wolfshark, torn almost in

two, was pumping its life's blood in great oozing gouts

into the ocean.

Limp, Bracy had to cling to the railand instantly

snatched his hand away. It was still hot from the blaze of

the rockets' exhaust. A miracle I didn't set the ship afire,

he thought wanly.

He looked apatherically at the water. Now he'd lost

two solar sails, and his pilot to an oilfish school, for

nothing.

He stiffened abruptly. What was that in the water

yonder? Something writhingas though beating at the

sky?

The man from the skimmer! Still alive, floating on

some buoyant section of his crafteven having the

strength to utter faint cries, now that Bracy's ears were

attuned to the sound half-masked by the whinnying of

the buzzards.

With infinite effort he put the trawler about and drew

alongside the floating man. He was by then too weak to

help himself; Bracy had to gaff him through a pair of

cross-belts on his back. And small wonder he was weak.

When he was dragged from the water, he proved to

have lost one leg from the knee down to the fangs of the

wolfshark.

"Don'tworry," the man whispered, seeing Bracy

stare aghast at the injury. "Suitwill stopthe bleeding."

What suit? Bracy peered closer. The man's skin was

covered with a transparent film of some kind, that must

be it, and it was contracting now of its own accord,

forming an automatic tourniquet around the amputated

leg so that the flesh turned death-white and the bleeding

reduced to a capillary leakage.

Well, that fettles it, Bracy thought glumly, and went

to fetch another signal rocket, this time to cry for help

from wherever it might be available.

IV

Even on a poor world like Cyclops, the Corps en)oyed

the best of everything. It was a necessity to compensate

personnel for the often heartbreaking tasks that faced

them; likewise, however, it was a drawback in the same

way as the pay system based on longevity treatment,

creating envy and troubling Corps selection boards with

mobs of totally unsuitable candidates.

Symptomatic of Corps luxury here was Langen-

schmidt's home and headquarters, a villa crowning the

highest point on the island which the Cyclops govern-

ment leased to them. There was no need for the com-

mandant to be in close physical touch with his

responsibilities in the repair-yard and portelectronic

links served the purpose and permitted the privacy pre-

ferred by a man whose longest service had been on a

lonely Patrol beat one tour of which might take a de-

cade.

His dismay at Maddalena's unexpected response to his

first remarks after their meeting kept him silent until

they were together in the long, low, cool main room of

the villa, with the panorama of the island and its offshore

pontoons spread like a map in front of the wall-high

windows. Then, cradling a drink in both hands, he

leaned back in a contoured chair and stared at this

woman whom subconsciously he had still regarded an

hour ago as the hot-headed stand-in agent of the Carrig

affair, twenty years previous.

He had grown accustomed to the changes wrought in

himself by a return to comfort and civilisationthe rever-

sal of the aging effect, for instance. The sight of Madda-

lena at a "natural" forty-five years of age was a shock to

him. Her bones were still fine, her head still as exquisitely

shaped as an abstract sculpture, her eyes srill bright as

gems on either side of her regal nose, sharp as though to

symbolise her innate curiosity. But her skin was coarse,

her hands were rough, and there was an aura of exhaus-

tion in her attitude and her voice.

Tp try and dispel the disturbance she had caused in his

mind, he said with insincere heartiness, "Well, Mad-

dalena! How have things been going for you since we

last met?"

"Badly." She made no move to sip the drink provided

for her, although she had taken a dry savoury cracker-

ball from a bowl and was rolling it absently between her

fingers. "I doubt if it was more than a logbook entry

for you, but you may remember that Headman Cashus

was assassinated soon after my assignment, and with him

went any hope of progress. So"

She crumbled the crackerball into dust and dropped

the fragments back in the dish. "So I've spent one hell of

a long time watching absolutely nothing happen. And

you?"

"AhI've been learning a new trade and finding I'm

not very good at it. Contemporary diplomacy, I guess

you'd say. I haven't seen nothing happen, but on the

galactic scale things take place so slowly as to make a

fair approximation." Langenschmidt hesitated. "Mad-

dalena, were you serious m what you said earlier, about

non-interference, or was that just due to tiredness after

your trip?"

"The tiredness has been building up for a long, long

time." Now, finally, she tasted her drink, making no

comment on it. "Andyes. I'm serious."

"Are you going clear back to the point of view I had

such trouble kicking you out ofalong with Pavel

Brzeskawhen we were going to Carrig?"

"No. That was the preconceived notion of a silly girl.

It's been a long time, Gus, even for a Corpsman, and

I'vechanged, I guess."

"Now look here!" Langenschmidt leaned forward.

"You've been on Thirteen, which barely counts as Class

A, where the refugees have had extremes of climate to

contend with, and in any case started off on the worst

possible basis by having no adequately trained leaders. I

can understand the sight of a primitive peasant commu-

nity getting anybody down. But before you change sides

on the question of non-interference, think of Fourteen

and Carrigyou should see the recent reports from

there, incidentally. Think of Seven, where they're de-

veloping some new biological and generic skills, or

Eighteen, where there are some language changes going

on which will eventually influence the whole pattern of

human communication."

"Think of Five," Maddalena countered. "Unless they've

licked the cerebral palsy problem, the survivors there are

back to grunting like apes."

There was silence for a feW minutes. Unhappily, Lan-

genschmidt chewed his lower lip and stared at Mad-

dalena, wondering what next to say.

The problem was a recurrent one, and had been de-

bated for a century and a half. Its roots, though, lay

much further backto be precise, some seven hundred

and seventy years before, when the primary of a planet

called Zarathustra went nova. For six hundred and thirty

years thereafter, it was believed that only a small handful

of refugees had escapedto Baucis Alpha, on the

Solward side. Then, without warning, radio signals be-

gan to be received from the opposite direction; fruit of

generation upon generation of dedicated workers start-

ing from no better level than the salvaged scrap in a

single starship, climaxing in the conversion of an as-

teroid into a huge generating station fed by solar power

and oriented to form a bowl-like transmission antenna

for messages limping at light-speed back to civilisation.

They came from Lex's Planet, otherwise known as

ZRP One: the first Zarathustra Refugee Planet to be lo-

cated and recontacted. Now, it was part of the galactic

union, and regarded as a civilised world.

From there, it had been learned that no fewer than

three thousand ships got away from the night side of

Zarathustia, and the far quadrant of its orbit, carrying

some two and a quarter million people. The Patrol, con-

stituted a couple of centuries before, was given the task

of tracking down the remaining survivors, if any.

Twenty-one worlds had now been found where fugi-

tives had landed. On some, they had not only survived,

but built up during their period of isolation quite inter-

esting and respectable cultures. Few of them boasted

technology to more than rudimeritary level, but some

had other achievementssuch as those Langenschmidt

had cited to Maddalenawhich promised new avenues

for human cultural or scientific development.

After much argument and heart-searching, the non-in-

terference rule was formulated and applied. Unless the

ZRP's succeeded in re-contacting civilisation themselves,

they were to be left to evolve along the paths they had

themselves created. There were many reasons for this.

On some planets there had been evolutionary changes

due to environment: on all, there had been cultural dis-

ruption, and centuries of "natural" breeding, four to five

generations per century, had magnified the discontinuity.

Perhaps most significant of all, galactic civilisation was

slowing down its former progress, as though the distance

between the stars imposed a psychological as well as

physical barrier on cross-fertilisation of cultures. Seem-

ingly, one felt there was little point in research or inven-

tiveness when for all one could determine on some other

of the 260 human planets the same work had already

been carried out.

Left to themselves, it was suggested, the ZRP's might

rediscover the basic human drives of curiosity and ulti-

mately re-infect the rest of the race.

Elsewhere, there had been a cultural smoothing

process. Worlds like Earth were looked np to, but only

the superficialities of fashion spread, not the real changes

which underlay them, and consequently things were

much the same everywhere as they had been when the

Patrol was set up. Backward worlds struggled to catch

~up to the average standard, and some did so, but the

worlds above average were placid and lacked any initia-

tive. -

Maddalena stirred in her chair and raised her eyes to

her old friend's rejuvenated face. "Who's spearheading

the campaign this time? ZRP One as usual, presumably."

Langenschmidt pounced. "No, and that's the most in-

teresting part of it. It used to be fashionable for One to

shout about the shocking way their kinfolk were being

left to rot instead of rescued and brought home. But this

conservative tradition has died out lately, and I think this

is because it's taken until now for One to mesh com-

pletely with galactic civilisation and discover just how

great a change was wrought in their own culture by

their isolation period. Now, One's spokesmen are mostly

keeping quiet, and we're hoping they will eventually

plump for non-interference themselves.

"In their place, we have Cyclops beating the drum, as

a result of the Carrig affair in my personal opinion, and a

whole lot of charitably-minded but short-sighted people

from the older worlds, including and especially Earth.

What they fail to understand1 sayis that Earth-type

luxury isn't the perfect human way of life. They want to

impose it as a standard everywhere, whether or not the

recipients enjoy the cultures they have at present,

whether or not these cultures are productive, creative

ones."

"Thirteen's certainly isn't," Maddalena muttered.

Langenschmidt didn't answer. His eyes had turned

towards the window, and widened on seeing a line of

brilliant sparks like stitches sewn upward across the blue

of the sky.

"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "That's an emergency rocket.

Some fisherman in difficulties, presumably. We're always

having to nursemaid local folkeither fisherman who go

too far to sea with inadequate equipment, or upper-crust

playboys out wolfshark-hunring whose nerve fails them

at the crucial moment. Still, it interrupts the monotony."

He addressed himself to a communicator panel

discreetly blended with the room's no-nonsense decor.

"Anyone taking action on that emergency rocket just

now?"

Pause. Then a disembodied voice, sounding irritated,

answered him. "Sorry, commandant, what was that?"

And, as if re-hearing the question in memory: "Oh! The

rocket! Yes, I'll send someone dut to gaff the guy and

drag hmi ashore."

"Fine." Langenschmidt's attention reverted to Mad-

dalena. "You know,' I think before we finish this argu-

ment, I'd better give you a chance to see galactic

civilisation, Cyclops-style, so that you can learn all over

again what a shallow thing it really is. Take the situation

here at present as a shining example. We have this

woman Alura Quist, who runs things, as I told you. She's

certainly very capable and ruthless. But to have to con-

fine her efforts to Cyclops, which is so poor it still runs

on fission rather than fusion, galls her. She doesn't see

why Corps personnel should enjoy longevity payments,

to start with, when she is aging and having to send clear

back to Earth for even her cosmetic treatments. I think

in fact some of her hostility to us is due to nothing more

abstract than simple jealousy. A woman afraid of losing

her youthful looks is a sad case. She has an official lover,

one of the handsomest men I've ever seen, who's also a

kind of planetary hero, a former spaceman who suffered

some kind of crippling injury in creditable circum-

stances. I don't know the full details. She treats him like

aa tame animal, as it were. Shows him off: here he is,

the famous Justin Kolb, and he's my lover. Follow me?"

Maddalena gave a listless nod. She had heard all this,

apart from the story of Kolb, at the time of the Carrig

affair, when a group of Cyclopean entrepreneurs learned

from a failed Corps probationer the location of ZRP

Fourteen and its deposits of high-yield radioactives.

They had operated a mine with local slave-labour for a

considerable time before the Patrol managed to displace

them, and Cyclops had smarted ever since under the

knowledge that a bunch of ZRP barbarians had dropped

civilised menso-calleddown a volcano, the standard

punishment for the crimes they had committed by the

local ethical yardstick.

"I honestly don't think Quist has any interest in the

ZRP's as such," Langenschmidt pursued. "She wants to

get back at the Corps for personal reasons of jealousy,

and the existence of a fund of hostility due to the ep-

isode on Fourteen provides her with a handle. If we

were to abandon non-interference for sound, rational

reasons. I'd swallow the decision gagging, maybe, but

I'd stomach it. But to do it for such a"

The disembodied voice spoke again from the commu-

nicator. "Commandant? "

"Yes?" Langenschmidt half-turned in his chair.

"That signal rocket. I thought you'd be interested to

know about it."

"Not especially, but tell me anyway."

"We've found one of the Grarignol fishermena boy,

rather, not more than seventeen, they say. He's tangled

with a wolfshark being hunted by auhrather notori-

ous person. He fished said notorious person out of the

water short of most of one leg. Luckily for him, he was

wearing a medisuit, and though he's unconscious he isn't

dead. But it's who he is which may interest you."

"Well, then, spit it out," Langenschmidt grunted.

"It's Jusrin Kolb," said the disembodied voice.

Alura Quist was pleased with the way things were go-

ing. Not even the reflection which came back to her

from the polyview mirror at which she was preparing

for the official banquet due at sunset could wholly dispel

the mood of grim satisfaction the offworld delegation

had generated in her.

Of course, those from the wealthier worlds such as

Earth had felt patronising about the best Cyclops could

offer, but it was out of keeping with their professed

charitable intentions towards the underprivileged of the

ZRP's to make open complaint, so they had been on

their best behaviour. And the ferocity of the representa-

tive from ZRP OneOmar Haust, an old man now but

still vehementoutweighed a dozen of his fainter-hearted

colleagues. He still clung to views that most people on

his planet had reluctantly abandoned.

The banquet would be magnificent; the food and

liquor would be so expensive as to have to figure as a

special entry in the planetary budget for the yearbut

never mind, it could appropriately be written off against

a one per cent surcharge on the rental of the Corps

Galactica base. Afterwards there would have to be

speeches, of coursecurious how tradition lingered in

these formal areas of human activity, even after countless

generationsbut she could endure that In sight of a

success schemed for over so many years, she could put

up with acouple of hours' repetitious mouthing.

"We of Cyclops," she said to the mirror, and watched

how the muscles of her throat moved with the words,

"are not among the most prosperous peoples of the

galaxy. Yet what we have we do not regard selfishly.

We would eagerly share it with those who are still

worse off than we. In pre-galactic days, the historians

tell us, there was a fable recounted about a dog which

made its bed on the fodder of a draft-animal and so

caused the animal to starve."

She paused, at first because she was still uncertain

about including this arcane literary reference even now

the speech-compositor had shorn it of obsolete words

like "manger" and "ox", and then to carry out yet one

more inspection of her appearance.

She was still slender; she had the nervous, energetic

constitution which assured her of boniness rather than

excess fat in her declining years. Her hair, fair and

warmly coloured, was impeccably dressed and framed a

strong face in which her eyes were blue and brilliant as

sapphires. Her gown was of Earthside manufacture-

dated, no doubt, in the eyes of the visitors from the

mother world, but suiting her so well she could disre-

gard that minority opinion.

How long would it all last? Her mouth twisted into a

harsh grimace, instantly destroying her usual pretriness,

as the thought of such a man as Gus Langenschmidt

crossed her mind. After fifty years patrolling a beat

among the ZRP barbarians, he was promised survival in

good health and artificial youth when she was long rele-

gated to footnotes in local history records.

That fact could scarcely be changed. But the purpose

to which he had dedicated his life could be emptied of

meaning.

Oh, the draft of her speech would do well enough.

She let that matter drop, and spoke to the attendant

manicuring her toenails on another subject which was

currently worrying her.

"Would you tell Justin Kolb that I wish to speak with

him before the banquet?"

"Is he going to be there, mistress?" the girl countered.

Quist started. Was there mockery in that level voice?

There was no obvious sign of it in the dark eyes which

met hers; she relaxed fractionally.

"What do you mean? Of course he will be there.

Why not?"

"I understood from his valet, mistress, that he had not

returned half an hour ago."

"Returned?" Bewildered, Quist stared down at the

girl. In the past two days, since the arrival of the

offworld delegates, she had spared scarcely a moment to

think of her lover. She had been vaguely aware that he

had gone off somewhere, but had assumed without ques-

tion that he would be back for tonight's major official

function.

She slapped the old-fashioned communicator built into

her dressing-table and spoke to the air. "Has Justin Kolb

come home yet?"

"I am his valet, mistress," a suave voice replied. "No,

he has not yet returned."

"Where is he, then? Has there been a message?"

"No message, mistress. If you wish, I will attempt to

contact him."

"Do you know where he is?" Belatedly, it struck

Quist as bad for her image not to know already, but she

could hardly recall the words once spoken.

"Approximately, mistress. He went wolfshark-hunting

at the extreme northern limit of the species' range."

Time seemed to stand still. Finally, her voice ragged,

she whispered, "Contact him and find outfind out

when he will be back."

And when he does come home, she finished silently,

Pa teach him a lesson he'll never forget for bis im-

pudence in disregarding my orders to be here tonight.

In fact, it might well be time to dispense with Justin

Kolbsend him back to the menial job. where but for her

he would now be slaving out his miserable existence, one

leg reduced to a stump by the freezing cold of space.

Cyclops had no slack in its economy to allow for the

luxury of unproductive cripples.

She was making alterations to the seating arrangements

for the banquet when the communicator sounded again.

Was it Justin calling? She closed her eyes for a second,

wondering how she could bring herself to get rid of this

man whose half-tamed spirit represented the second most

constant challenge of her life.

"Mistress, it is I once more," the valet said. "I have bad

news, I regret to say."

She could not speak, but waited passively. The girl

completed her toe-manicure and gathered her equipment

to move away.

"Justin Kolb is in hospital at the Corps Galactica base.

He was attacked by the wolfshark he was hunting and a

fisherman rescued him. He will live, they say, but" The

valet hesitated.

"Go on," she said in a dead voice. The next of her at-

tendants, charged with fitting her shoes, came and knelt

at her feet.

"He has lost his right foot, and the lower part of his

leg, to the wolfshark's bite."

Does the madman want to be a cripple? The question

sped across her mind, and then was replaced by an

uncontrollable wave of pity and sympathy. But for

tonight's banquet, she would have jumped up that mo-

ment and gone to his hospital bed, to hold his hand and

croon comfort.

Oh, Justin, Justin! What's the love of danger that you

draw your fire from? One day it will kill you, and I

shall instantly be made old . ..

Aloud, she spoke with determination. "Put me in

touch with him. At once!"

"I will try, mistress," was the doubtful answer, and the

communicator went silent.

All thought of the recriminations she was going to

level at her lover had evaporated on this news. She could

visualise the way he would have brought her his trophy,

defiant because he knew it offended her when he courted

danger, yet in some ways shy, toolike a boy uncer-

tainly seeking the praise of his first girl. He would have

intended to return for the banquet, had the accident not

overtaken him, bringing his tribute, and she would have

been both angry and delighted, for knowledge that such

a man was her lover comforted her.

The communicator spoke once more. "Alura Quist?"

it said, and she recognised the voice.

"Commandant Langenschmidt," she said coldly. "I did

not ask to speak to you."

"No, but I thought you'd rather speak to me than no-

body at all. Justin Kolb won't regain consciousness for

some whileat least a couple of hours. He was severely

shocked by his experience. But you can have him back

tomorrow or the day after, the doctors say."

She tensed. "With his leg restored?"

There was a blank pause. Then Langenschmidt gave a

forced chuckle. "Hardly, I'm afraid. Some people seem

to have exaggerated ideas of what our medicine can ac-

complish. Limb-regeneration overnight isn't among our

capabilities."

She had expected no other answer, but she had been

unable to prevent the words from emergingthey were

driven by the savage jealousy she felt towards the

Corpsman for his payment in youth and health.

No matter, anyhow. Justin had lost that leg before,

and more than simply the foot and lower partthe

whole of it, almost all the way to the hip, from space-

gangrene.

"Thank you for your courtesy in telling me," she said

without warmth. "I'd have appreciated earlier notifica-

tion, of course."

"It was my belief that you had other things to occupy

your mind," Langenschmidt countered mildly.

With a snarl which made her glad communicator links

on Cyclops were restricted to sound without vision,

Quist forced herself to maintain calm. She said, "I will

have transport sent in the morning, to bring him home.

Will that be convenient?"

"I imagine so, but send a doctor as well, of course."

Langenschmidt sounded a trifle surprised, as though he

had expected an attempt to persuade him that Kolb's leg

should be restored at the Corps hospital.

"Of course," Quist echoed, and silenced the communi-

cator.

She waited a second. Then she spoke to it again. "Find

me Dr Aleazar Rimerley, and be quick about it!"

Dr Rimerley was enjoying the sunset when the call

came. He was among the wealthiest men on Cyclops,

and his home consisted of the surface and the heart of an

entire island, some mile or so in circumference. His liv-

ing quarters were built out into the ocean, so that when

he choseas nowhe could sit on a higher level and

watch the sky, or else he could move down to the seabed

and enjoy the vivid panorama of the ocean's summer life.

His chief personal servant brought news of the call.

He rubbed his chin in wonder; he had not been intend-

ing to get in contact with Quist again just yet, but a

further deal was certain once simple cosmetic treatment

ceased to stave off time's ravages. Now, therefore, was as

good a time as any to talk to her, since she had initiated

the conversation.

He smiled automatically even though she could not see

him, and said with extreme heartiness, "My dear Alura

Quist! What an honour to speak with you after all this

time!"

She brushed aside the social formalities and went

straight to the point.

"Doctor, I have another job for you. As far as I know,

you're the only person on Cyclops capable of tackling

it."

"Pll do my best," Rimeriey agreed, and repressed a

smile that was more sincere than the original one.

"Justin Kolb has lost his leg again. Wolfshark-hunt-

fag."

Rimerley blinked. He had expected something alto-

gether different, almost certainly for Quist herself. This

request took him aback.

"I'm having him brought to you tomorrow morning. I

count on you to do as thorough a job of regeneration as

you did the last time."

"Ahjust a moment," Rimerley said uncomfortably.

"It's not the sort of job that can be tackled on a few

hours' notice, you understand." In the back of his mind

he was running calculations; so long to locate material,

so long to make the tissue immunologically neutral, so

long to get it here. "I doubt whether it would be pos-

sible to handle the case in less than two weeks, I'm

afraid."

"Two weeks!"

"That's my rough estimate. Of course, I may be-"

"Then I might just as well leave him where he is. He'll

be better looked after than in one of our second-rate

hospitals."

A warning tremor ran down Rimerley's spine. He said

in a voice suddenly fainter than normal, "Ahwhere is

he, then?"

"In the Corps Galactica hospital. He was taken there

after some fisherman rescued him from the water."

Silence.

"Dr Rimerley?" Quist demanded at last, sounding

alarmed.

She was not half as alarmed as Rimerley himself. He

could barely choke out his answer.

"On uh-on second thoughts, perhaps it would be

better to have him brought here. At once, the sooner the

better." He gulped the rest of the drink he had been sip-

ping while he relaxed for the evening. "Yes, certainly

not later than tomorrow morning, on any account!"

He was sweating like a river when he cut the con-

nection.

VI

Soraya was woridng as vsaal at the waterworks, and

having the inevitable argument with Firdausi about mar-

rying him, which he had been urging on her ever since

she achieved puberty, when she heard her name being

frantically shouted.

She motioned Firdausi to be silent, and peered through

the wraiths of steam from the main cauldron, trying to

make out who it was. The voice was a child's, but so

hoarse with agitation she could not recognise its owner.

The waterworks consisted of three parts. First, there

was the dipper which brought water from the natural

pool; this was a chain of buckets on two big wooden

pulleys, driven by a yorb which seemed quite content to

walk around all day in a circle and get an evening re-

ward of food for its trouble. The dipper emptied its

water into the main cauldron, under which a hot fire

burned all the time, raising sluggishly bursting bubbles in

the contents. Although the water seemed perfectly clear

and pure when it was raised from the pool, a scum al-

ways formed during boiling, and it was in removing this

scum with wooden ladles that Soraya and Firdausi were

engaged.

Then the water was run off, a little at a time, into the

cooling tank, a tapered cylindrical container of heavy-

stones mortared with natural cement, whence the towns-

folk could fetch it in bucketfuls for use at home.

"Can you see who it is?" Soraya demanded.

Firdausi clambered down from the ladder on which

they were working, to get below the clouds of steam,

and reported. "It looks like the youngest from next door

to youBaby Hakim."

"Oh no\" Soraya gulped, and dropped to the ground

with a lithe flexing of her long legs. Firdausi's eyes fol-

lowed her hungrily. She was by far the most beautiful

unmarried girl in the whole town: sloe-eyed, olive-

skinned, with long dark hair and supple, graceful limbs.

He wished achingly that his parents were not so con-

cerned with mundanities like a dowry and would give

him permission to marry her anyway. He was sure she

would make an excellent wife . . .

"Hakim baby!" she cried, dropping on her knees and

sweeping her arms around the tearful youngster who

came charging up to her. "What's wrong?"

Between sobs of exhaustion and terror, the child

forced out the news: Soraya's mother had been taken ill

yet again.

"You go straight home," Firdausi instructed. "I'll

bring Marouz to you there."

She shot him a smile of gratitude and went racing

back to the town.

It consisted of two rows of wattle-and-daub houses

facing one another, widely spaced, with large vegetable

gardens and runs for livestock surrounding them. Teth-

ered yorbs regarded her incuriously as she sped past, feet

splashing in puddles left by the overnight rain which the

sky threatened to let flood down again at any moment.

In the fifth house from the left was her home; she

slammed back the crude wooden gate in the fence en-

closing its garden, and ran indoors.

Hakim's elder sister, Yana, was bending over the bed

on which lay the wheezing form of apparently an old

woman. In truth, Soraya's mother was no more than

thirty-seven, but in this harsh environment age descend-

ed with the swiftness of tropical night.

And yet it was not mere ageendurable, because vis-

ited on everyonewhich afflicted her. It was something

random, and more deadly. There was a name for it; the

quakes. But simply to have a name was no help. What

was needed was a cure.

Sick with despair, Soraya glanced at Yana. "Has she

been like this long?"

"I found her on the floor by the hearth," the other girl

answered in low tones. "See, her dress is scorchedit was

lucky I chanced to look in, or she might have been

burned to death."

Soraya shuddered. "When? Just now?"

"So long ago as it took Hakim to reach you." Yana

shrugged. "I sent him at once."

Soraya clutched her mother's hand, feeling the uncon-

trollable trembling that racked her weak body, and

railed mentally against the capriciousness of fate.

"Shall I go for Marouz?" Yana suggested.

"Thank you, but Firdausi was with me at the water-

works, and he has gone already. Not that he'll be any

help," Soraya added bitterly.

"You shouldn't talk so. He's the wisest man among us

as well as the oldest!" Yana sounded horrified.

"What use is wisdom without practical applications?

He can tell us to be duriful children and loving parents,

and we do our bestand my mother who is the kindest

of women has the quakes." Soraya put up her hand to

wipe away a tear.

"Sssh! He's coming now," Yana murmured, and

turned to bow as Marouz dipped his white-bearded head

under the low lintel.

"Honour and profit upon this house," the mage said in

a single rapid burst, and limped to a chair which Yana

brought up beside the bed. "Hmmm! Has your mother

drunk unboiled water, Soraya?"

"You think I would let her?" Soraya jumped to her

feet, appalled. "I, who work where I do? What do you

take me for?"

"Soraya, that's unwise," Firdausi said softly; he had

come in just behind Marouz, holding Baby Hakim's

chubby hand.

"I don't care!" Tears were gathering in Soraya's eyes

also now. "I don't care! My mother lies sick to death,

and all he can think of is that she might have drunk un-

boiled water! What has water to do with it, anyway?

My father tended the waterworks before me, and he'd

never have let her do such a thing, and I wouldn'tand

still she has the quakes! What can water possibly have to

do with it?"

Marouz's face went hard as stone. "We are taught by

the wisdom of the ancients" he began.

"And a fat lot of good it does us!" Soraya blazed. But

on the last word she collapsed to her knees before him,

her shoulders heaving in helpless sobs.

"There, there," Marouz said, giving her an awkward

pat on top of the head. "These things are sent to try us,

daughter. We do what we can, but we are still far from

understanding all life's mysteries. When you grow as old

as Iwhich may you do!you'll have learned patience

with the inescapable."

"I'm sorry," Soraya choked out. "But I love my

mother, and she's done so much for me . . . Is there no

help you can give?"

"Spiritual comfort I would offer, but I know your

mother as a fine, noble-hearted woman in small need of

my advice." Marouz waggled his flowing beard regret-

fully. "The only counsel I can give is to you. And yon

know what that is, for I've suggested it before."

"I've urged it on her also," Firdausi put in. "And she

won't listen."

"Take my mother away from her own home, and send

her who knows where?" Soraya exclaimed. "It seems to

me soso heartless!"

"Now, now, my daughter," Marouz soothed. "We all

hate necessity, but that's no use. The Receivers of the

Sick are good men, full of ancient wisdom and kindly in-

tentions. Is it not better to see your mother in safe keep-

ing than lying here quivering her life away on this

narrow hard bed?"

There was silence after that blunt question, until at last

Marouz stirred. "Well, I can do no more than I've

done," he said, and reached for Yana's arm to get to his

feet. "Make your mind up quickly, Soraya the Re-

ceivers are coming to this area in a few days' time, I

hear, and they won't be back for months, at least."

He hobbled out, and automatically they threw good

wishes after him in the form traditional for very old per-

sons"May good health attend you to your grave."

Firdausi caught Yana's eye and she took the hint.

Crossing the dirt floor to retrieve her young brother, she

said in a strained voice, "Well, I have things to see to

next door. I guess you'd like to be alone, anyway."

The moment she was out of sight, Firdausi put his arm

around Soraya. "Dearest, why do you torture yourself

and your motherthis way?"

She shook off his grip and took the chair Marouz had

vacated, to sit gazing down at her mother, fingers driv-

ing their nails deep into her palms as though to share her

mother's suffering by self-inflicted pain.

"Shall I sell her like a yorb?" she snapped. "You know

as I do that but for the payment we'd never have let a

single person go from this town to the Receivers! It may

be well enough for towns where they don't teach love

for one's parents, but it disgusts me."

"Can you do more for her than the Receivers?"

Firdausi countered.

"What do they do?" Soraya demanded. "No one will

tell me that! What becomes of those committed to their

mercies?"

"You should ask Marouz."

"I did, the first rime he made this suggestion. And he

could only say that he didn't doubt'didn't doubt'!that

their fate was better than we ignorant folk could offer."

"Wouldn't almost anything be better than this?"

Firdausi argued. "Lying helpless among others equally

helpless?"

He dropped to his knees, face pleading. "I admire you

for your wish to keep your mother with you, believe

me! But looking at her, knowing there's nothing we can

dohow can you condemn her to it any longer? Look,

why don't you ask her views when she's able to talk

again?"

Soraya's face was very pale as she murmured, "I did."

"What did she say?" Firdausi pressed.

"That the paymentif the Receivers accept her

would be dowry for me and I could marry you and in-

herit the house." She formed the words as though each

tasted bad in her mouth.

"But in that case!" Firdausi rocked back on his heels.

"If it's her own wish, what holds you back?"

"They might not accept her," Soraya whispered.

"They don't take everyone, do they?"

"But it's a chance, don't you see? What chance has she

here of any other fate but a lingering, unpleasant death?"

Soraya delayed her answer for long moments. Finally

she said, "Firdausi, all you care about is freeing me to

marry you. Suppose I say that ifif1 take my mother

to the Receivers, this does not mean I intend to marry

you."

It was Firdausi's turn to hesitate.

"I think," he said slowly, "that the way you're keeping

your mother here, suffering needlessly, is likely to make

me less eager to have you for my wife."

She flinched as though from a physical blow, and fresh

tears gathered in her eyes. Seeing his advantage, Firdausi

pressed it.

"There's something almost selfish about it. You've just

told me what her own desires are, yet you insist on go-

ing against them. If that's not pandering to your own

self-esteem, I don't know what is."

She bit down on her lower lip to stop it quivering, and

was only able to speak after a further pause. The words

came like leaden footfalls.

"Very well. Go to Marouz and find out when the Re-

ceivers are due, and where. And I'll try and borrow a

wagon and a yorb to take her."

Firdausi's jubilation showed in his face, although his

voice was sober enough as he said, "I do really think it's

the wisest course."

He turned and went out.

So I'll do it, Soraya thought bitterly. But I won't

marry you or anyone eke in this horrible town. If they

take her, I'll burn the house and we the pay to go some-

where I can hide from my shame.

Abruptly she turned to the water-bucket and began to

rinse her hands, over and over, as though to remove

some clinging invisible foulness.

vn

Maddalena and Langenschmidt ate their evening meal

together in the main base restaurant. Under the influence

of the nearest approach to civilised luxury she had en-

joyed for many yearsthe Corps base where she had

been most recently was as spartan as any of the other

outlying stations Maddalena's mood of exhaustion and

apathy faded. The music, food and wine made her ex-

pand like a flower to the sun, so that even before she

took the course of cosmetic treatment she was due for

traces of the impetuous girl Langenschmidt had formerly

known began to peek through.

Unfortunately, it was his turn to become distracted

and stare for long silent periods into nowhere. It was

some while before Maddalena noticed the factshe had

been gossiping about her experiences on ZRP Thirteen

and when she did, she spoke teasingly to him.

"Why, Gus! Is this any way to treat a guest? I

thought you'd spent your time here learning all the cor-

rect social behaviour!"

"Hm?" He snapped back to the present with a start.

"Oh, I'm sorry. There's something bothering me, and I

think I just figured out what it has to be. Please excuse

me for a few minutes. I have to check on it."

Maddalena stared at him. Suddenly she leaned forward

and put her hand on his. "I'm sorry, Gus. I didn't intend

to act this way on seeing you for the first time in so

many years. You do have problems to handle, and I

shouldn't be disregarding them the way I have been."

"No, this is nothing directly to do with you. At least I

don't believe it is. Will you excuse me?"

"Is it something I'm not allowed to know about, or

may I come with you?"

"Sure, come if yon like. I'm not going far. To a com-

municator first, then to the hospital if my suspicions

prove correct."

"Something about this man Justin Kolb?"

"Very much so."

She pushed back her chair and rose.

The network of communicator links knitted the base

together as intimately as the nerves in a living body, so

that none of the key personnel need ever be oat of reach

in the rare event of an emergency. Here, Maddalena

thought as she studied Langenschmidt's strong profile

against the wall of the restaurant communicator booth,

emergencies would be even less common than on most

Corps bases. He must make a first-class commandant:;

thorough, patient, farsighted.

But he had been a first-class Patrol Major, too, and

would have been equally efficient as an on-planet agent

like herselfhad stood in as one during the Carrig crisis,

and proved that.

She sighed imperceptibly, envying his adaptability and

dedication. By comparison she felt herself pliable, weak

and self-centred.

The signal indicating access to the base computer

memory shone out of the screen in the booththe Corps

was the only regular user of vision circuits on Cyclops

apart from the government.

"Justin Kolb, Cyclopean," Langenschmidt said briskly.

"Circumstances attending his retirement from the Cy-

clops space service, please."

The last word tickled Maddalena's fancy. Imagine say-

ing "please" to a machine! But after a second it didn't

seem fannyonly characteristic of the man who uttered

it.

"Select auditory or visual presentation," the machine

requested, and he selected sound, thinking it was more

convenient for Maddalena, - yho had to peer into the

booth from outside.

The machine spoke dates key-ed to an unfamiliar calen-

dar, and continued. "Kolb, Jusrin. Asteroid mining engi-

neer, spaceman. Second in command of local system

mine-ship Sigma. Awarded Medal of Cyclops for hero-

ism following accidental destruction of Sigma with loss

of captain and fifteen crew. Sustained space-gangrene of

right leg to mid-thigh, resulting in permanent retirement

from space service. More?"

The gently questioning tone of the last word was a

marvel of sophisticated engineering, if you thought

about it, Maddalena informed herself absently. What was

Gus driving at?

"Who was responsible for regenerating his leg?" Lan-

genschmidt demanded.

"No information specific to this question," the

machine answered.

"Damn. Uhwhat doctor was in charge of his case

and supervised his eventual recovery?"

"Dr Aleazar Rimerley," the machine said.

"Thought it might have been," Langenschmidt mut-

tered, and made as though to turn away. He hesitated,

and at length voiced another question.

"What facilities exist on Cyclops for the major regen-

eration of human limbs?"

"The hospital at the Corps Galactica base is fully

equipped for limb-regeneration."

"Are there no other facilities for the )ob here?"

"No information," the machine said after a pause.

"Ve-ery interesting," Langenschmidt said, and shut the

communicator off. "Come on!" he added to Maddalena.

"We're going down to the hospital. Are you with me so

far?"

"His right legboth times, including today?"

"You're not stupid, are you?" Langenschmidt said af-

fectionately, and put his arm through hers to lead her

away.

"I think you're glad to see me in spite of what I said

earlier," she murmured when they had gone a short dis-

tance.

"Hm? Oh, of course I am!"

"You have learned the socially correct things here!"

she snapped, and withdrew her arm.

He seemed still to be puzzling over that crack when

they reached the hospital and were shown into the

presence of a tall, brown-bearded man in self-sterilising

whites, passing time with a chess problem.

"This isDr Anstey Nole, our senior medical officer,"

Langenschmidt told Maddalena in passing. "Doc! It's

about this Justin Kolb. How is he?"

"As well as you'd expect, seeing he's lost half his right

calf and the foot, endured a medisuit tourniquet for long

enough to starve the tissues of blood, and been

frightened nearly out of his wits by that wolfshark. Not

to mention almost being blown to pieces when this

fisher-lad let go his rockets."

"What? I saw one of the rockets go up myself

seemed to work perfectly." Langenschmidt biinked.

"Oh, not the one he used to call for help. Didn't they

tell you how he dealt with the wolfshark? Set up two of

these damned great fireworks on the foredeck of his

trawler and let them go pointblank. Tore the wolfshark

to ribbons, I gather. Quite a bright kid, I can tell you.

He's in here too, being treated for malnutrition, incipient

lupus and minor burns sustained when he let the rockets

go. Lost half his hair."

"Lupus? " Maddalena put in inquiringly.

"Strictly that's incorrect, I grant you, but it's the term

we apply. A skin disease common among the fisher-

folkthey get it from overexposure to sunlight and the

irritants secreted by oilfish scales. Life on a backward

world like this is a pretty unpleasant business sometimes.

Sorry to have brought the subject up." Nole looked

uncomfortable.

"You don't have to tell me," Maddalena snapped. "I

just completed a twenty-year tour on a ZRP."

Nole looked still more uncomfortable and changed the

subject hastily.

"Alatter of fact, as soon as he recovers I mean to send

this kid to see you, commandant. His name's Bracy

Dyge, by the way. Says he wants to be considered for

Corps membership. I laughed at him at first, frankly.

Then I thought it over, and finally decided: hell, he has

initiative, anyway!"

"Every waterfront on the planet is swarming with kids

who think they want to join the Corps," Langenschmidt

said cynically. "I'm surprised at you, doc. It's the pay

they're after."

"He doesn't know about the pay,'* the doctor said.

"At least, I don't think he can."

"What? Of course he must! Everybody"

Nole interrupted firmly. "No, all the time we were

talking it was never mentioned. He just wants to be able

to support his familyparents are both deadsome better

way than by chasing oilfish. His fish-finder has been out

of order, and . . . I asked for it to be seen to in our

workshops, by the way. Hope you've no objection. It

seemed liketheleastwe "

"Hell, I didn't come down here to talk about thisthis

Bracy Dyge!" exclaimed Langenschmidt. "I came to talk

about Kolb. In particular, about Kolb's leg."

Nole shrugged. "I've told you all I can, I guess."

"Wrong. You haven't started. You didn't even men-

tion that he'd lost it before."

It was Nole's turn to be astonished, "Nobody told me

so! Are you sure about that? Why, it looked like a

natural legwhat was left of itwhen I examined him

earlier."

"You wouldn't expect it to look like a false one, would

you? Does the name of Dr Aleazar Rimerley mean any-

thing to you?"

"No, I don't believe so. A local sawbones, perhaps?"

"You could call him that. The most successful doctor

on Cyclopshas been retamed by Quist at least once.

Would he be able to regenerate Kolb's leg?"

Nole pursed his lips and looked dubious. "Just pos-

sibly. Regeneration of a legahyes, with half a mega-

brain computer capacity you could do a fair job from

the knee down. It is conceivable, but I didn't realise Cy-

clops could afford medical computers on this scale."

"This wasn't for a knee-down job. This was from

mid-thigh."

"Then I don't believe it," Nole said. "You'd need a

full megabrain, and at that the job might not come off."

He gave Maddalena an apologetic glance, as though fear-

ing this was distasteful to her. "It's the joint, you seees-

pecially the synovial membranes. Very tricky to

programme well."

"What are you standing there for?" Langenschmidt

inquired sweetly. "Has, or has not, Justin Kolb two func-

tioning knees?"

Nole made a wordless noise and spun on his heel.

Maddalena sat down on the corner of the table where

Nole had set out his chessboard, and stared at Langen-

schmidt.

"I don't quite see the significance of this," she ven-

tured. "There are places where regeneration is available,

and if this man Kolb is the uh accepted lover of Alura

Quist, could she not have pulled strings to have him

treated on some more advanced planet?"

"If she had done so, the memory bank would have

mentioned it." Langenschmidt began to pace the room.

"I didn't. It gave me an unequivocal answer when I

asked who was responsible for Kolb's eventual recov-

cry it named a Cyclopean doctor, who's probably very

good in his limited sphere, but simply hasn't got access

to the medical computer capacity needed for regener-

ation."

Maddalena paled. "But what alternative treatment

could he have offered? Kolb did regain his leg, didn't

he? Nole might have overlooked the fact that the limb

wasn't an original, but he couldn't have overlooked a

prosthetic!"

"Exactly," Langenschmidt muttered, and fell silent.

They waited, neither saying anything, for twenty

minutes before Nole returned, his face pale above his full

brown beard.

"I don't know what put you onto this, commandant,"

he began, "and equally I don't know how I came to

miss"

"Save the apologies. What have you found now yon

have looked?"

"His right leg isn't his own. It's not regenerated is

what I meanregeneration counts as own-tissue sub-

stance." Nole combed his beard with agitated fingers.

"That leaves one possibility. It's a graft. An exception-

ally good one, what's moreit must have been selected

most carefully to make a pair with the left leg. Well, of

course, the moment I discovered this I took a cell-sample

and processed it for genetic structure, and I've come up

with the most alarming result."

Langenschmidt's face was quite calm, as though he had

already worked out what revelation Nole had brought

them. He said merely, "Go on."

"Well, it's hard to be absolutely certain, but I'd say on

the basis of what I've just seen that the leg's not merely

not his ownit's also not Cyclopean in origin. At any

rate, the particular gene-structure of the cells I processed

has never been recorded on Cyclops."

"Can you tell me where it is from?" Langenschmidt

snapped.

"I've set the computers to search, but there may not

be a definite reading." Nole combed his beard again.

"Commandant, this is the most extraordinary thing I ever

heard of!"

vm

The screen of the subspace communicator lit. The

venture was a profitable one; the partners in it had be-

come able to allow themselves such refinements as inter-

stellar vision circuits. It showed a man with a face as

cruelly beaked as a Jackson's buzzard, clad in the decent

black robe of a Receiver of the Sick, with the hood

thrown back on his shoulders. His hair was greying but

still luxuriant, and his face was lined more by reflected

concentration than by the passage of time.

This was Lors Heirndall, on whom Rimerley was to-

tally dependent.

"What is it?" he grunted, eyes scanning the image of

the doctor confronting him. Vaguely in the background

could be seen the interior of his headquarters, with a

rack of robes hanging like dead bats on the wall, a video-

graph playing over a recording of some music-drama or

other.

If he can't read the crisis straight off my face, Rimer-

ley thought, / must be over the worst of the shock.

Indeed, he felt considerably better than he had done

when he finished speaking to Quist. As well as taking an-

other stiff drink, he had given himself a shot of mixed

tranquillisers and mind-keeners, a blend which he usually

only relied on when making the preparations for a major

operation. But this affair, of course, might turn out to be

a major operation in its own way...

"Two things," he said crisply. "Sorry to disturb you,

by the way, but you'll see the urgency when I tell you

the background. Did I interrupt anything?"

"No, it's early morning here, half an hour past dawn.

We weren't ready to move off yet." Heirndall was

doubtless impatient, but his tone was superficially affable.

"Where are you at present?"

"Working south from Idiot's Head towards Encamp-

ment Hills. Am I to take it you have a special order for

us?"

Rimerley nodded. "A double. First off, how would

you like to do a favour for Justin Kolb?"

"Another?" Heirndall said acidly. "The bastard has

had too many breaks in life already. True, but for his in-

competence I wouldn't be where I am nowbut I've

settled that score, and I'd rather not know. Cosmos, he

wasn't even a moderately capable spacemanjust a

hothead with a specious brand of charmand they made

him a hero. Or rather, Quist did." He scowled. "Okay.

What sort of a favour?"

Rimerley had to wipe away a trace of itching sweat.

"Hot herefull summer," he muttered in explanation to

Heirndall. "Well, as a matter of fact he's lost his leg

again. To a wolfshark 'this time. The same leg."

"And Quist no doubt wants her tame monkey cured,"

Heirndall agreed briskly. "Also we must fill the order

quickly to keep her sweet against the day when she be-

comes our biggest client. We have the specifications on

record, so it should be fairly easy. Yes?"

"Not altogether," Rimerley muttered. "I mean, that

part of it is. But what's resulted from his encounter with

the wolfshark isn't so cheerful. He was rescued by some

ignorant fisherman and taken to the Corps Galacdca hos-

pitalit was the nearest point from which help could get

to him, I suppose."

Heirndall's face darkened like the sky before a thun-

derstorm. "In that case, we're leaving here at once! I

want to be on some good and distant planet before the

pan boils over, with a change of name and a change of

identitraces!"

"Wait!" Rimerley instructed in a soothing tone. "All

is not lost, you know. I told Quist to get her boyfriend

out of there tomorrow morning at the latest, and bring

him to me. There's an excellent chance they won't be in-

terested enough in Cyclopean scandal to know Kolb's

historythere's little contact between the Corps and the

Cyclopeans, as you're well aware."

"Any atall is too much for me," Heirndall scowled.

"How about the genetic pattern of the graft, though?"

"Why should it occur to them to check it?" Rimerley

countered. "If they don't know Kolb's story, they'll as-

sume it's his original legthe mafch was eye-perfect,

remember. Didn't I give you hell finding the exact

match, and reject who knows how many faulty samples

first?"

Heirndall nodded, but looked worried even so. Rimer-

ley plunged on.

"Even if they do know his story, they'll most likely

take it for a regenerated limb. After all, if he's Quist's

lover, who would be more likely to afford the journey

offworld to somewhere he could find that standard of

medical computation? The only thing which would

make them stumble on the unmatched genetic pattern

would be if they attempted a fresh regeneration them-

selves, and cross-checked to the left leg."

"Might they not do that?" Heirndall suggested. "It's

an open secret that Quist has no love for them, and

would discontinue their lease on the island they use if

she could. It might occur to them to fix up Kolb to

sweeten her a little. A sort of bribe."

"If that were their intention," Rimerley said with ex-

aggerated confidence, "she wouldn't have offered, of her

own accord, to have him brought here tomorrow morn-

ing, would she? She'd never have bothered to get in

touch with me at all, in fact."

"No, I guess that figures," conceded Heirndall.

"And besides," Rimerley pursued, leaning closer to the

screen, "we are the ones who are going to offer Quist a

bribe. A bribe she couldn't possibly refuse, even if the

price were something very helpful to us, likelet's say

ordering the Corps to abandon their base on Cyclops

with immediate effect. That should give them enough to

occupy their minds without worrying about Jusrin

Kolb's leg!"

A spark gleamed in Heirndall's eyes. He said, "If yon

can pull a trick like that to divert the storm, you're clev-

erer than I thought you were. How will you organise

it?"

"Like this," Rimerley said, and began to explain.

The banquet had passed tolerably swiftly, but the

speeches afterwards were dragging on to all eternity.

Alura Quist had given up listening to the actual words

a quarter-hour earlier, and was lost in a maze of private

contemplation.

Every now and again her eyes strayed to the seat on

her left, occupied by the senior representative of the par-

ticipants from Earth, which should have been Jusrin's

tonight.

/ feel horribly old, she told herself. And if anyone

cares to peer closely enough at me, more than likely I

look old. And when I die, what will stand to my

memory other than a weatherworn gravestone and some

dates in my career which no one off Cyclops will learn

in school?

Even the long-schemed-for plan to overset the Corps's

prized principle of non-interference with ZRP's was sour

to the taste now, as she contemplated the old man at her

right: Omar Haust, from ZRP One, honoured by being

seated next to her because he was the only person present

whose ancestors had had to endure the mud-grubbing

existence of a refugee planet.

And he was disgracing himself.

He had drunk too much, to start with. At the com-

mencement of the evening he had looked ascetic, almost

saintly, with his fierce white moustache fringing his up-

per lip, his halo-like white hair circling his shiny bald

pate. But he had continued to drink heavily; for the later

courses, he had insisted on waving aside cutlery and

eating with his fingers, as a sort of gesture of solidarity

with those on the ZRP's who were denied any other im-

plements. Twice his hand, made greasy with the food, let

fall full goblets of liquor that splashed all over his seat-

neighbour-including Quist, whose prized Earth-made

gown was spattered with dark stains. And for the past

several minutes, during the speech by the senior Earth

delegate, he had been muttering insulting remarks in his

own mother-tongue, a divergent offshoot of the common

Galactic language which was still sufficiently close for

Quist to have flinched at what she half-understood.

Since letting herself drift off into her private worries,

however, she had paid no more attention.

Suddenly she was snatched out of a mingled kaleido-

scope of self-pity and optimism, in which Justin Kolb

figured very frequently, to realise that the old man's pa-

tience was at an end. He was on his feet, hammering

with the base of his goblet on the table, and every blow

splashed fresh gouts of liquor far and wide. The delegate

delivering the current speech broke off in horror as

Haust bellowed in his thick accent.

"It makes me sick! It makes me want to vomit! Here's

all this fine talk about our poor miserable brothers and

sisters out on the refugee planets, which we're for-

bidden to liberate and bring back to the fold of civilisa-

tionand who's spewing out these platitudes? Hm?

Who's mouthing these pious nothings about what we

ought to do?"

Aghast, the assembled company of notables looked

elsewhere for some less embarrassing spectacle than the

aged drunkard, slobbering down his chin.

"I'll tell you!" he roared. "A gang of dirty lying hypo-

crites! That's what you all are! Look at you!" He

hurled his goblet in the general direction of the speaker

from Earth, a mild-mannered woman of ninety or a

hundred with a distinguished political record on her

home world; fortunately the missile sailed wide of her.

"Look at you!" Haust repeated. "With the rolls of

Earthside fat wobbling around your middle! And all the

rest of you, the same. As for you"

He rounded on Quist, who shrank back in her chair.

Alarmed attendants moved close, uncertain whether to

try and restrain Haust or wait till he actually struck

their mistress. She was frozen and could offer them no

clue for guidance.

"You're as bad as the rest!" the old man raved. "Who

keeps the ZRP's in subjusubju'arion? The Corps stink-

ing Galacrica, that's who, and their whining lackeys in

the Patrol! And who leases a base right here on Cy-

closhShyclopsright on this filthy world whatever its

name is!to the triply damned Corps? Why, you do!

Aargh! Give me some more drink to wash away the

taste of you!"

H snatched at the nearest goblet, which happened to

be Quist's own, and as he made to raise it to his lips lost

his precarious grip on stability and went crashing to the

floor.

"I am sure," said the next speaker, "we ought to learn

a lesson from what too many of us took simply as a dis-

gusting exhibition." He was a lean man from the twin

worlds of Alpha and Beta Lobulae, which having been

blessed with few internal troubles had much surplus en-

ergy for meddling in those of other systems. "It should

have reminded us all that we are not dealing with ab-

stracts, but with human beings, with a capacity to suffer,

and suffer more greatly than we fortunate children of

happier worlds can know. Indeed, it comes as no great

surprise to me to realise that Omar Haust feels himself

unnecessarily mocked by the presence of the Corps

Galacrica base on this planetwhose hospitality and

whose government's sympathy with our aims I do not

question, but whose action in this respect perhaps casts

doubt in the minds of waverers about our ultimate deter-

mination."

That, Quist realised with a sinking heart, called for a

reply. And it would be useless to state the truththat but

for the income the leasing of that island to the Corps

brought to Cyclops, the delegates would not be here; the

revenue tipped the balance between Cyclops affording

and not affording an interstellar fleet, small though it had

to be.

She rose and looked around. She could use the opening

of her original speech, she decided, and began on it. The

compositor had worked well, and it soon had the dele-

gates listening in calm self-approval, bar the man from

Lobulae.

To him, finally, she said with an air of desperation, "It

must of course be recalled that in the days when the

agreement between my our government and the Corps

was reached, the first of the ZRP's had not yet been

chanced upon. Far be it from me to decry the useful

work the Corps has done, in its capacity as the interstel-

lar counterpart to a police force. It seems only to be in

the area of framing policy that they have exceeded their

intended brief."

Nods to that.

"However, we are grateful for the suggestion. I'll have

the proposal investigated, and if on balance it does ap-

pear th;kt such an action would be an effective lever in

securing our aims against the opposition of the Corps, I

will make a formal statement to that effect."

Appla?ase. She sat down, wishing with all her heart

that justin were here to shower his praise on her, forced

though she knew it to be.

Heaven help Cyclops if I have to act on that vaporous

promise, she thought grimly, and turned to smile at those

delegates who were complimenting her on what she had

said*

Nole had gone off again, still in a state of agitation, to

see whether there was a print-out from the computer

which he had set to tracking the gene-type of the tissue

in Kolb's leg-graft.

It was very quiet in the office where Maddalena and

Langenschmidt waited for news. The hospital hummed

with the same soft efficient noise as an advanced auto-

matic factory; since its business was the repair and main-

tenance of what were after all the highly complex

mechanisms of human flesh, that wasn't surprising. Dimly

from beyond the walls noise of other repair work reached

them: clashing as hull-plates were fitted to ships under-

going overhaul, the subdy disturbing moan of drive units

on test.

Maddalena had been staring at tonight's half moon-

small, and reduced in size still further by its distance

from Cyclopsfor some minutes before she spoke again.

"There are an awful lot of things I can't get clear

about the situation here, Gus. Maybe you'd better edu-

cate me."

"Hm?" Langenschmidt jerked his head. "Oh! Oh yes.

I'm sorryI'm still working on the false assumption that

you were briefed before you were sent to Cyclops. Since

you weren't, presumably you know practically nothing

about it. After all, it's never been a world to hit the

galactic headlines."

"The last rime I paid it any attention was twenty years

back. There must have been many changes since then."

"Yes and no." Langenschmidt had been perching on

the end of the room's single large table; now he grew

uncomfortable and moved to a contoured chair, drop-

ping his body into it absently and letting it slump.

"Thethe mood of Cyclops, the planetaiy average of

human attitudes, so to speak, is constant over a long

period, as it is anywhere. What was the word I beard

you apply?"

"Predatory?"

"Exactly. Ummmm . . . Where the hell ought I to

start?" Langenschmidt rubbed his face tiredly. "Clear

back at the beginning, I guess. It must start with the fact

that it's an unsupendsed foundation."

Maddalena started. "Is is now? That accounts for a

great deal, I imagine."

"I'm sure it does. Of the two hundred and sixty civil-

ised worlds, over two hundred followed the standard of-

ficial patternexploration, selected colonisation under the

direction of a polymath trained intensively for the de-

velopment of one and only one particular planet, and

eventually opening to immigration. Cyclops is among the

anomalous fifty-odd. It's a second-stage offshoot from

Dagon. Ring any bells?"

"Of course it does." Maddalena hesitated, then gave a

little nervous laugh. "Dear Gus! How little you've

changed! You still have exactly the same lecturing man-

ner as you did when you first briefed me on ZRP Four-

teentouchy, expecting this conceited Earthgirl to have

ignorance of unplumbable depth."

"I'm sorry." Langenschmidt gave a crooked smile. "So

we take the rest as read. They made one of their rare

mistakes on Dagon, and picked for its polymath a man

who couldn't stand the strain. He clashed with one of his

continental managers, who finally couldn't endure it any

more and decided he could do better by himself on some

other planet. He, and about four thousand followers, left

Dagon and set out towell, to homestead Cyclops, I

guess.

"It was as tough in the early days as it must have been

on ZRP One, or some other comparatively hospitable

ZRP. Naturally, since he'd attracted his followers on the

basis of liberty- from the authoritarian whims of a bad

polymath, the original leader insisted on at least the

structure of a representative government, and that's sur-

vived, but only as a formality to the degree required to

qualify Cyclops as a member of galactic civilisation.

Their laws follow the Unified Galactic Code, too. In

theory.

"In fact, starting off with so great a handicap, they let

all this remain a formality and proceeded to develop a

hand-to-mouth pattern they've never escaped from. It's

one of the few civilised planets where ruthlessness brings

power. Quist, who has been the de facto head of govern-

ment for a long time now, has no better qualifications

for the )ob than sheer love of authority. She enjoys giv-

ing orders and having them obeyed that significant one

per cent more than anyone else.

"If you want handy comparisonswell, they have to

be pre-Galactic. First century atomic era. Earthside areas

like Spain, some countries of Latin America, and some of

South Asia. Where you had an economy too impover-

ished to support the governmental structure of a finan-

cially efficient administration, but a sort of crust of great

wealth overlying it. Half the population are at the pov-

erty line, a third are illiterate, a quarter are diseasedbut

perhaps one in twenty have achieved some kind of per-

sonal success by pure doggedness."

"I didn't realise you knew Earthside history as well as

that," Maddalena said after a moment's silence.

"I don't, really, I just needed some guide to Cyclops

when they posted me here, and these are the examples

our social psychologists dredged up for me."

"What does support the Cyclopean economy? And

wliat's the total population now?"

"Efficient census-taking is one of the expensive luxuries

they don't enjoy, but our best estimates are around seven

to eight hundred million. Mark you, life expectancy is

low; one child in eight dies in its first year. As to the

economy: it's self-sapporring in respect of food and

housingthe climate in the equatorial belt is an ad-

vantage there, with very mild rainy seasons and no real

wintersand several other basics like textiles . . . It's a

safe Class A planet, or the original settlers would never

have survived.

"About the only exports are fish-oil, which serves as a

source of proteins for farther synthesis and ultimate use

as a diet-supplement on some nearby vitamin-poor worlds,

and raw materials from the asteroid belt. There are some

lumps of ore pure enough to be worth shipping long dis-

tances. But the margin is slender, and two invisible ex-

ports make the crucial difference between getting by and

relapsing to starvation.

"One of them is a small tramp space-fleet, consisting of

a hundred-odd interstellar vessels. And the other isall

this." Langenschmidt gestured to embrace their surround-

ings. "Cyclops is conveniently sited with respect to the

forward bases in this sector, and we've rented this island

since shortly after the Corps was constituted.

"Trapped in their economic snare, the Cyclopeans

don't like having us beret Isn't it a truly ancient platitude

that the poor don't like the police? But here we are, and

they can't afford to be rid of us."

The office communicator sounded, and Nole's voice,

nervous, addressed them. "Commandant, can you come

down to the computing room? I'm getting results I can't

make sense of, and I think you'll want to see them."

"Coming!" Langenschmidt said briskly, and rose.

Very cautiously, Bracy Dyge swung his legs over the

side of the bed. It was further to the floor than he had

expected. Anyway, this hardly fitted his concept of a

bedit was an elaborate therapeutic installation with a

disturbing aura of near-sentience about it, and he would

much rather have been on the pile of inflated fish-skins

which he was used to at home, three inches from the

ground.

He had been instructed to lie here and sleep, but he'd

been unable to. After ashort lifetime on the edge of

starvation, the nutrient and restorative shots he had been

given had acted like a violent stimulantsomething the

doctors should have made allowances for, but hadn't,

being used to scaling their treatment to the healthier and

better-fed patients they- normally had.

He felt, in short, fighting fit. The burns he had suf-

fered when he let off his signal rockets against the wolf-

shark had been dressed with something to relieve the

pain, and although he had lost half his braided hair and

several square inches of skin, the injured area was cool

and perfectly comfortable. Nothing distracted him from

what was uppermost in his mindto wit, the fact that he

had been brought to half-legendary Corps Island, from

which the local inhabitants were strictly excluded.

Tomorrow he would have to ask to be sent awayhe

owed it to his family to get back to sea and try and

complete his unfinished business. He had ventured to tell

the doctor of his dream-ambitionbeing allowed to join

the Corpsbut something in the answering laugh had

convinced him it was a ridiculous proposal. They had

promised to mend his fish-finder, and he would have to

be content with that as his reward for rescuing the wolf-

shark-hunter.

If only it had been one of the men from the Corps

base . . .! But it was useless to wish that the past were

different.

Maybe he could beg replacements for his torn solar

sails, too. Even so, tomorrow he would have to leave

and lying wakeful without using this opportunity to see

how the Corps lived was more than he could endure.

He stole to the door and fumbled with the latch. It

proved to be simple in operation, and after pressure .on a

raised patch in its centre the panel slid back into the

wall, revealing an empty corridor beyond.

After cautious listening for footsteps or hushing

wheels such as he had heard earlier, when he was being

brought in, he darted down the passage and around the

first corner.

Here the nature of his surroundings changed com-

pletely. Instead of barely delineated doors, there were

large oblong windows, and not giving on to the outside,

either, like any windows he had seen before. They re-

vealed the interior of the adjacent rooms.

He crept to the first one and peered through. All he

could see was a tangle of equipment like the interior of

his fish-finder, but much more complicated. He tried to

discern its function, and failed; then it moved of its own

accord, some shining arm making a connection, and

alarmed at this he moved on.

Here what he found was far more interesting. There

was a naked woman.

She was tall, and very beautiful even though her skin

was darker than Bracy's owna sign, according to his

standards, that she was of his own low class, too poor to

sit in the shade when the sun was hot. She lay supine on

a padded trolley, eyes closed. Around her, the whole

room was filled with mechanisms that moved slowly,

slowly, on incomprehensible tasks.

His eyes traced the curves of her shapely body: left

arm here, folded over her breast, right armwhere?

With sudden shock he realised that her right arm was

in the maw of one of the machines, which was moving

up it in precisely the same way as a suckermouth lam-

prey engulfed its unfortunate prey.

Like all poverty-line children on Cyclops, he had been

threatened with the vengeance of the Corps when he

misbehaved as a youngster. To see what he mistook for

some terrible torture unnerved him, and he uttered a cry

nf terror.

"What was that?" a voice said, distant but distinct, and

he realised abruptly that had he not been so fascinated

by what he had discovered he would have heard foot-

steps approaching. Gasping, he spun, and caught sight of

a man and a woman at the intersection of corridors be-

hind him.

"Who in the-?" the man said. "Hey, you!''

Bracy took to his heels, fleeing randomly down the

blank-walled passages. Behind him came the fearful pur-

suers, shouting, until the superior speed which terror lent

enabled him to outstrip them, and he came to a dark tun-

nel-like tube down which he dived, thinking to find

sanctuary.

"That must be the fisherboy who rescued Kolb," Lan-

genschmidt told Maddalena. "No one else with hair like

that would be in the hospital. And where the hell he's

managed to disappear to, I don't know. But one thing's

surehe was heading for master operations control, and

we've got to winkle him out before he breaks something.

See a communicator anywhere? Whatever Nole has

found it will just have to wait."

Overnight rain had made the track into a muddy

swamp. The patient, immensely strong yorb floundered

many times, its broad pads sliding on the greasy ground

as it strove to drag the laden cart past a particularly

treacherous patch. On each occasion, however, Firdausi

got down without complaint to break branches from the

surrounding undergrowth and spread them in front of

the wheels.

The reins limp and slippery in her hands, Soraya

found herself stirred to dim gratitude for the boy's

silence. Almost, she was minded to go back on her deci-

sion that if the Receivers of the Sick accepted her

mother she would leave home forever. Perhaps Firdausi

did indeed have her best interests at heart. . .

The old woman lay uncomplaining on the heap of soft

skins with which they had padded the crude wooden

cart. Occasionally her hands twitched in her sleep. It was

better that she should sleep, Soraya thought. Even

though she had had a long lucid period since her near-fa-

tal attack of the quakes, the disease had weakened her

dreadfully; she could hardly walk more than a dozen

steps without a fit of fainting, and her skin was shrunken

over her wasted flesh.

She had said she was pleased at Soraya's decision to try

and get her taken by the Receivers, declaring she had

been a useless burden for far too long. But was that a ra-

tional opinion, or the apathetic consequence of the debil-

itating sickness? After so many bouts of it, anyone might

wish to get things over and done with.

"Not far now," Firdausi whispered. "One more hill,

and we shall be on a good dry road for the rest of the

trip."

She gave a nod, but in reality scarcely heard what he

had said.

The sky was grey above; the trees around, draped

with their curious hair-like foliage, were grey-green and

still dripping from the last downpour before dawn. It

was a setting which exactly matched her depressed

mood.

Suppose they don't take her after all? Suppose they

say Fve delayed too longthat if Fd brought her to

them a month sooner, they could have helped her, but

now it's useless? I shall never forgive myself. Never!

The yorb drew the cart over the crest of the last hill

before their destination, and as Firdausi had promised

they found themselves on a good hard road, well beaten

down and with a top dressing of compacted gravel.

Ahead, the town loomed, much larger than the village

where she had spent her life: there must be almost a

thousand houses, she told herself.

It was hard to credit the stories of the ancients that

men had once been numbered in millions, and dwelt

among the shining stars. . .

A little distance further on, they encountered a farm

labourer backing a balky yorb into the shafts of a cart

piled high with edible roots, and he greeted them civilly.

When they explained the purpose of their errand, he

pointed towards the town.

"The Receivers aren't yet here, but they're expected

hourly, I believe. Good health attends my family, luck-

ily, so I made no special inquiry this time. Go to the

market squareyou'll find others gathered who are af-

flicted as you are."

"Many thanks," Firdausi said, and urged their yorb

onward.

Lors Heirndall's lip curled with utter contempt as the

first sign reached him that they were nearing the goal;

the smell.

The stupidity of these people! The dirt, the disease,

the lack of hygiene! How could they be regarded as hu-

man at all when they lived like wild beasts? If this were

truly man's "natural state", from which only a slow

process of technical evolution had lifted him towards the

clean bright cities of galactic civilisation, it was a won-

der any progress was ever achieved.

They seemed to lack all rational system, operating by

a bunch of crude uncomprehended near-superstitions:

boiling their drinking-water, for examplefrom here, it

was possible to see the plume of steam ascending over

the local waterworks. That was presumably a diktat im-

posed by one of the original refugees who had kept his

head in the aftermath of disaster, and would have made

sense in the context of a proper sanitary code. As it

stood, it was a pointless ritual negated by the lack of de-

cent drainage.

Still, some of the accidents of cultural evolution had

turned out to be advantageous: the institution of the Re-

ceivers of the Sick, for instance. That must have begun

as a form of quarantine and isolation for sufferers from

diseases which the rudimentary facilities of the refugees

could not cope with; it woTild have been hoped that

some at least of the patients might recover naturally, but

as a precaution they were removed from their own com-

munities to special locations.

The system had fallen almost completely into disuse,

because the staff of these quarantine areas were them-

selves successively wiped out by infections caught from

those they were trying to help. But reviving it had pro-

vided Heirndall and his men with an excellent cover for

their work.

And if it ever came to light what had been done here,

there was little chance of swift retribution. Most civilised

planets recognised the right of euthanasia for the incura-

biy sick, and provided the debate about non-interference,

yes or no, could be kept on the boil the Corps would

never dare execute summary punishment.

He found these reflections comforting to some

degreeand he needed comfort. For all his mask of dedi-

cated ruthlessness, Heirndall was capable of anxiety, and

what Rimerley had told him had been alarming, to say

the least.

It was to be hoped that his ingenious trick to provide

the Corps with another major headache and distract their

interest would work.

His train of attendantsriding yorbs, as he was: no

other transportation was known here apart from rough

cartsfollowed him down the hill road towards the

town. Behind came the wagon, covered with an opaque

cloth screen on wooden poles, in which were the well-

guarded secrets of their job. A party of local notables

waited to greet them at the town's edge, and after a

suitably grave exchange of good wishes they all

proceeded together to the market square.

We shall have to do some more propaganda here,

Heirndall advised himself as he scanned the horrible col-

lection of palsied and maimed and sickly candidates for

the good offices of the Receivers. We must get it through

their heads that an aged crone, or an ill-nourished infant,

is beyond hope--rwhat we can "offer to help" is typically

a healthy but injured late adolescent.

Suddenly, as he was about to turn away, he saw the

girl sitting with her boy-friend on the last-arrived cart at

the side of the square. His heart gave an uncharacteristic

leap. To a first glance, it appeared that what he had been

asked by Rimerley to locate had turned up without his

even looking. Of course, it would require closer exam-

ination to make sure, but the chance was so good he

found himself grinning in a fashion quite unsuited to his

pose in this society.

Nervously, Soraya waited as the Receivers made their

rounds of the sick. Firdauri wanted to hold her hand

while they watched, but she could not bear anyone's

touch except her mother's. The old woman was awake

and kept trying to lift her head, but failed.

At last the Receivers came to their cart, and after ac-

knowledging good wishes peered down solemnly at the

wasted body on the heap of skins.

"Your mother?" the leader of the Receivers inquired

of them.

"Mine," Soraya said. "Uhthis young man is a friend

who came with us."

"I see." The Receiver nodded. He had a face of such

sternnessnose cruelly beaked, mouth thin and

straightthat Soraya found it hard to recall what Mar-

ouz had told her: that these were good men, full of an-

cient wisdom and kind intentions.

"Come with me, please," he said abruptly, and ges-

tured Soraya to descend from the cart. Shivering a little,

she complied, and was astonished when the Receiver set

off at a brisk pace towards his own wagon.

Following, she tried to point out that it was her

mother and not herself who had come to seek help. The

man ignored her protestations, saying nothing until they

came to the wagon. Then he made her get up on it,

holding back the cloth screens to let her through.

Beyond, in a tiny enclosure, there was a table with

many strange things on it: little glass tubes, white tiles

marked in squares on some of which were smears of

blood, dishes and jars containing coloured liquids. There

were also two chairs, one this side, one that side of the

table.

A man in Receiver robes with his hood thrown back

appeared from between the hangings that concealed the

rear part of the wagon. He instructed her to sit down,

taking from a pad on the table a sharp needle which

he Jabbed without warning into the ball of her thumb.

She gave a litde cry, and the Receiver who had escort-

ed her uttered a few words of mechanical reassurance.

There followed a sort of ritual whose meaning she did

not understand. The blood from the needle-prick was

taken in a glass tube and smeared on the white tiles; then

some more was dropped into a )ar of coloured liquid;

then more still, which had to be squeezed out, was taken

out of sight into the back of the wagon. Incomprehensi-

ble sounds followedhumming like insects', a gentle clat-

tering, muttered comments in near-whispers.

The man with his hood thrown back returned and

gave a nod to the other man waiting at Soraya's side. He

had brought with him another needle, which he drove

into the fleshy part of her forearmonce more without

warning her.

Eyes pleading, Soraya mutely sought an explanation

for all this.

"There is nothing we can do for your mother," said

the man who had brought her. "We have said often and

often that the aged are beyond our help. Sickness must

mostly be overcome by the sufferer; we can best help

those who have youth and strength on their side."

Soraya's ears were full of the rushing of blood.

"However, by the same token, that makes you very

lucky," the Receiver said.

"What?" Though the beginnings of tears she gazed

Tip.

"You are young enough to be helped, and it is still

early in the course of"

"What?" She leapt to her feet. "I'm not sick! 1-1-"

The rushing in her ears gave way to ringing; the cloth

walls, the tall black-garbed Receivers, everything seemed

to swirl around like water in a stirred pot.

She collapsed.

With great apprehension Firdausi saw the Receiver

returning alone from their wagon. He glanced at So-

ray-a's mother and saw she had drifted back into coma.

But where was Soraya?

"I have good and bad news for you, young man," the

Receiver said, coming close.

"Idon't understand!" Firdausi stammered.

"Your girl-friend has come to us in good time, and we

will accept her."

"But!" His mind froze; his eyes sought a key- to this

mystery on the Receiver's face.

"I presume you will be entitled to accept the payment

we customarily make?" the black-robed man encour-

aged, and lifted into sight a heavy jingling bag which

could only contain the crude soft metal which served as

currency here.

Greed fought with amazement in Firdausi's baffled

brain. That bag looked heavythe size of a rich girl's

dowry. Nonetheless, he choked out, "But her mother?"

"She is old, and past our help."

There was a moment of silence. Then he said with a

surge of determination, "But Soraya is fit and well!"

"You think so? Then come with me!"

Dumb, he complied, and trailed the Receiver across

the square to the space before the covered wagon.

There, his astonished eyes met the spectacle of Soraya,

being carried down the steps to be laid on a pallet on the

ground. There was absolutely no mistaking the tremors

that racked her slender young body.

The quakes. The dread killer was afflicting her as it

had done her mother.

"In our care, there is hope for her," the Receiver was

saying. "If you are fond of her, you'll raise no objec-

tion."

Firdausi wasn't listening. He barely felt the tug on his

hand as the string of the metal-heavy bag was looped

around his nerveless fingers.

Nonetheless, since it was the only consolation he was

likely to be offered, he finally clutched it to him.

XI

AJarm lights were already flashing and bells sounding

discreet but insistent warnings everywhere in the hospi-

tal when Nole came running full pelt to join Langen-

schmidt and Maddalena outside the entry to master

operations control.

"I've alerted as many of the staff as I can reach," he

panted. "Not many, of coarsewe don't maintain a night

schedule normally. And this isn't the kind of emergency

we have drills prepared for. What exactly happened?"

Langenschmidt explained how they came to spot

Bracy on their way to )oin him in the computing office.

Nole gave a comprehending nod.

"He must have been looking in at one of the regener-

ation roomsprobably the end one. There's a woman in

there who lost her right hand in an accident at the main

repair dock last week. What this fisherboy was doing

out of his own room, thoughthat's what I can't under-

stand. He seemed very tired and perfectly co-operative

when I checked him earlier."

"I'll make a guess," Maddalena said sourly. "He didn't

want to miss his one and only chance of seeing over the

premises."

"That doesn't matter," Langenschmidt cut in. "The

fact is he's gone down that tunnel there, and it's taking

him where he can cause one hell of a mess if he's not

stopped quickly."

"Where does it lead?" Maddalena demanded.

"I told you, didn't I? The hospital's power-plant is

down there, all its automatic service controls, all its sup-

plies of things like activated water, oxygen, life-sustain-

ing nutrient flows, artificial tissue-synthesisthe whole

lot."

"Why in the galaxy, then, do you just leave the tunnel

open like that?" Maddalena exclaimed, astonished.

"Anyone likely to come this way in the normal course

of events is a Corpsman, and too sensible to pry into

dark corners," Langenschmidt grunted. "I'm going to

have your hide, Noleyou realise that, don't you.? Leav-

ing the kid in an unlocked room! "

"Yes, but" Nole recognised the futility of making

excuses, and turned away.

Men and women were joining them now from every

direction, one or two in the same self-sterilising whites as

Nole, the majority in casual clothing, having been routed

out of their quarters or called back from recreation.

Langenschmidt briefed them crisply on the situation.

Dismayed, they exchanged glances.

"Is there any risk of him doing deliberate damage?"

one of the earliest arrivals inquired.

"No, but he's probably in panic. He ran as soon as he

saw us. Any suggestions?"

For a moment there was silence. Then an elderly

woman who had apparently left the solar therapy room

to come here, for she wore only a muslin thigh-length

shift, spoke up.

"Not more than two people to go after him, wearing

respirators, and carrying cylinders of some anaesthetic

would be easier than trying to reason with him."

"Great," Langenschmidt said. "Let's"

"Just a moment," Nole put in. "How about the radia-

tion?"

"What?" Langenschmidt biinked. "We're on fusion,

aren't we? What radiation?"

"I have a couple of cases at the moment in need of iso-

tope treatment. I'm processing iodine-131 and potas-

sium-40. I'm not saying he will, but he might go too

close to the bombardment source."

"Marvellous," Langenschmidt said bitterly. "So we

don't just go after him looking like monsterswe go

looking like mechanical men, in armoured suits. Well, if

it's got to be done, it's got to be done. Volunteers?"

"I'll go," Nole muttered. "My fault."

Bracy Dyge was hardly thinking at all now. The ef-

fect of irrational terror had been multiplied a score of

times in his mind by the combined impact of the drugs

he had been given and the violent expenditure of energy

while he was fleeing from unnamable horrors. To find

himself among machineryseemingly without end, floor

to ceilingwhich at any moment might devour him as

the naked woman behind the window had appeared to

be being consumed, was more than the fragile web of his

self-control could stand. He was moaning and panting as

he stumbled around the banked machines seeking a place

of safety.

When he first came down here, it had been dark, but

some distant switch had been turned and now the whole

huge room glowed with sourceless light. Was there no

shadowy corner for him to skulk in?

Movements at the corner of vision terrified him; lamps

signalling on instrument panels made him jump. Even the

high-ozone smell, indicative of the immense power slum-

bering within the apparatus, was fearful to him who had

never before been so near a fusion plant.

Gasping for breath, he halted on a gleaming panel set

into the floor, which was warm to his bare feet, and

heard a noise behind him. Jerking his head around, he

saw two white, bulky forms like distorted human beings

approaching noiselessly, carrying what his fright-warped

eyes interpreted as guns. He screamed wordlessly and

ran forward again, randomly, to begin a deadly game of

cat-and-mouse all over the big hall.

It was not long before his remnants of cunning discov-

ered that there was one place where his pursuers were

reluctant to go; twice, he saw them sidle away from a

large black machine the body of which was a metal tube

as long as his ann, with thick power cables snaldng away

from it across the floor. Why they avoided it, he

conidn't guess, but as soon as he found a means of doing

so, he dived for this tabooed zone.

Bat those attending him had not bothered to remove

the chrome ear-ring he wore, once they were satisfied it

was adequately sterile. As soon as he came in range of

the eddy-currents surrounding the machinery, the metal

heated up. It was as well Cyclops was not so totally

backward as still to use metal tooth-fillings, for the effect

on those would have been agonising. As it was, he felt as

though he had been seized by the ear-lobe in a pair of

red-hot pincers, and screamed, and incontinently fled

back towards the door.

And that was where they gassed him down, but not

before he had acquired a dose of hard radiation sufficient

to strip the other half of his head bare of his prized black

hair.

"We got him," Nole said unnecessarily as the limp

body was placed on a trolley for removal to the wards.

"But he'll be one sick boy for at least a week."

"You're an idiot, Nole," Langenschmidt said in a tone-

less voice. "That's only the start of the trouble. How

about the family he's said to have left in Grarignol?

Now we'll have to send them some sort of relief, and if

we don't gauge it exactly right we'll have half the poor

fisherfolk of the planet begging for handouts to match

those given to this one family . . . Hell, that's my worry,

and it can wait for tomorrow. I'm getting tired, you

know? I've had a pretty wearing time lately, and dealing

with emergencies when I ought to be catching up on lost

sleep isn't helping me any! "

Nole hesitated. "Uh don't you want to know about

the data I got on Kolb's leg?"

It seemed like last year, instead of an hour earlier,

when they had set out to the computing room to inspect

these carious findings. Langenschmidt ran a weary hand

through his hair.

"Okay, I guess so. But there's not much point, really. I

can hardly take any action before the morning, and even

thenoh. I'm rambling! Hurry up, then, before I keel

over and take my nap on the floor!"

Following him down the corridor with Nole, Madda-

lena found herself regretting that she had. ever uttered

her contrary opinion when Langenschmidt told her

about the ZRP controversy. The pleasure he had felt on

seeing her had masked the toll the problem had taken

from him. Now, she was coming to realise that if it af-

fected him so deeply she had no right to judge it on the

basis of her own miserable experience on a single ZRP

which, after all, she had chosen herself, with her eyes

open.

"Here's the print-out," Nole said, with a kind of eager

nervousness perhaps intended to disguise his embarrass-

ment at letting the Dyge boy get out of his room and

cause so much bother. "You'll see it come in three sec-

tions. First off, I asked for a local identificationin other

words, for a likely point of origin on Cyclops."

"And got a zero reading, hm?" Langenschmidt's brow

was furrowing; he seemed to have recovered a little

from his fit of exhaustion.

"That's right. The gene-type is non-Cyclopean, yoa

may take that as definite. His other leg, from which I

took a comparison sample, is local and quite common.

"Now the memory does contain a list of those

worldssome eight or ten of them, I believewhere do-

nor-grafting is still accepted medical practice. Some cul-

tures regard it as an honorable thing to permit part of

one's body to continue in service after one's death. But

there's nowhere within about thirty parsecs where this

applies.

"Anyway, I got another zero out of that line of in-

quiry. So I set for all-galaxy parameters, and I got non-

sense!"

He made an impatient gesture at the print-out, and

Langenschmidt read it through very slowly and care-

fully.

"How many's that? Ninety-some worlds.?" he grunted.

"Ninety-twobut blazes, look at them, will you?

Highest probability, which isn't a match even so, is

Earth! And who would conceivably have got Kolb a

limb-graft from Earth?"

"What do you think, Maddalena?" Langenschmidt de-

manded.

"Unless things have changed beyond belief," Mad-

dalena said slowly, "no Earthborn person would consider

letting part of his body be exported after death."

"But that's not the whole story!" Nole rapped. "The

computer was hesitant about assigning these locations.

The correspondence is marginal. And the direction in

which the variations are significant is ridiculous! I could

print the information if you want, but it's highly techni-

cal."

"We'll take your word," Langenschmidt said. "Just

make it a bit clearer, will you?"

"Welluhone could say that the direction of the

anomalies is away from the human."

There was a puzzled silence. Maddalena broke it. "It

couldn't be a synthesised prosthetic, could it? I've never

heard of such a thing, but it seems a reasonable sugges-

tion."

Impressed, Nole gave a nod. "Yon mean a limb syn-

thesised to an approximate specification, instead of regen-

erated to make a match with the opposite limb? It could

be, it just conid."

"But is there anywhere to your knowledge where such

a technique is employed?" Langenschmidt asked.

"No . . . Though with the log)am we have in scien-

tific communication these days, that's not conclusive. If

you like, I'll have the data sifted and give you a verdict

jn the morning."

"You do that," Langenschmidt sighed. "Right now, I

want to call it a day. I'm sorry I fouled up your first

evening here, Maddalena, because I was really intending

to give you a good time."

"What? Oh!" Maddalena had clearly not been listen-

ing. "That doesn't matter, Gus. But before we go, can I

just check out another idea I had a moment ago?"

"Why not?"

Maddalena looked at Nole. "Can you fix an Earthside

location with your equipment? In other words, can you

determine the areas where the correspondence is closest?"

"Earth's population is pretty damned mixed," Nole

said, staring. "After all, every single gene-type in the

galaxy is found there, barring a few late mutations."

"I'm pretty mixed myself," Maddalena agreed impa-

tiently. "Iberian, Amerind, and who knows what? But

check, will you?"

Nole shrugged and put the question to the machine.

"Below the limit of acceptable probability," he an-

nounced. The closest approach isuh how do you pro-

nounce that? Iran, would it be?"

"Gus," Maddalena said, barely audible, "there was a

second language on Zarathustra, wasn't there?"

"Of course there was! You've been speaking a bastard

cross between Irani and Galactic for the past twenty"

Langenschmidt broke off, his face going milk-pale.

"Dr Nole," Maddalena pursued, "did you compute

your findings with non-civilised gene-types as well as

civilised? I'll wager you didn't!" A trifle maliciously, she

added, "I'm referring, of course, to the ZRP's."

Nole gave a strangled gasp and revised his instructions

to the machine. Almost instantly there was a fresh

print-out.

"Probability seventy per cent plus or minus two," he

reported. "No, I'm afraid you're wrong, in that case

which is a relief. The reading would have to exceed

eighty to be actionable."

"Even if we turn out to be dealing with ZRP Number

Twenty-two?" Maddalena said softly.

There was a frozen pause. Then Langenschmidt

clapped his hands and exploded. "Maddalena, how have I

managed without you for all this time? Nole, where the

hell is the nearest communicator? Maddalena, you're a

geniusdamn you!"

xn

Looldng slightly- dazed, Nole stared at Maddalena

while Langenschmidt waited for his communicator con-

nection to be made.

"NumberTwenty-two," he said, as though weighing

the statement for some elusive additional meaning. "I'm

sorry, but I'm not yet sure what you mean."

"Oh, come now!" Maddalena snapped. "If you weren't

so worried about Gus's threat to have your hide for let-

ting the fisherboy get loose, you'd have seen it before I

did. That leg of Kolb isn't regenerated and it isn't origi-

nal. So it's got to be either a graft or a synthesised pros-

thetic. You said yourself you didn't know of anywhere

the latter technique was being applied, though it's per-

fectly feasible. So it's almost certainly a graft.

"You saidagainyou don't know of any nearby

worlds where they make graft material available. More-

over, the computer virtually rules out the chance of a

gene-type corresponding to the tissue of the leg occur-

ring on any planet near Cyclops. But it does suggest that

the ultimate origin of the ancestral strain might well

have lain in the Iran area of Earth.

"At the time when the Zarathustra nova took place,

some ten or twelve per cent of the planet's population

were of predominantly Irani stockenough to support

their own language as a minority tongue against the

pressure of Galactic, and to develop a Zarathustran di-

alect with Irani admixtures." Maddalena checked. "Stop

me, by the way, if I'm ploughing old ground for you."

Nole shook his head quickly. "Candidly, even though

at least half the patients who get sent here for ma)or

overhaul have been on the ZRP's, I've never really

studied the events which led to the present situation."

'Ton should," Maddalena said grimly. "The ZRP's are

the most significant single factor in this sector of the

galaxy. But never mindthis'll help me to get my theory

straight to my own satisfaction.

"Where was I? Oh yes. Traditions preserved on ZRP

One indicate that the incredible number of three thou-

sand ships carrying well over two million people proba-

bly managed to lift from Zarathustrafrom the night

side, which was protected from the fury of the nova by

-the mass of the planet for several hours after its incep-

tion.

"We've located to date twenty-one refugee planets on

which people have at least survived, even if only at the

most primitive level. But these account between them for

a mere ten per cent of the rumoured three thousand

ships which got awayin fact, just about three hundred

and six. On ZRP One, for instance, we know that pre-

cisely two ships landed; on Fourteen, only one. On Thir-

teen, where I've spent two decades, about sixty made

landingsthe first arrivals left a subradio beacon in orbit,

and others homed on it. Which was a disastrous mistake,

the casualties hit eighty per cent in the first year, and

despair overwhelmed the remainder to such a degree

they still haven't made a full psychological recovery. But

I'm digressing.

"The essential point is this. Since the episode on Four-

teen with which Gus and I were involved twenty-odd

years agothe time when a gang of Cyclopean entre-

preneurs were led by a failed Corps probationer to de-

posits of radioactive ore there, and used the local people

as slave labour to exploit themwe've kept so keen a

watch on the known ZRP's that the chance of outsiders

from space being able to pull another such trick is negli-

gible.

"On a hitherto undiscovered ZRP, though, all the facts

would fit neatly. The gene-type of that graft would

correspond well with an isolated group of refugees, from

Irani basal strains, and one of the reasons why the Corps

maintains its base here is that Cyclops is conveniently

located for the entire volume of space through which

the ZRP's are scattered."

Nole's face was haggard and pale. She broke off and

gave him a look inviting comment.

"In other words," he said, "you think someone from

Cyclops is using an unknown ZRP as aa spare-parts

bank."

"Exactly," Maddalena agreed.

"But that's murder!"

"Of course it is, if they're killing the original owners

of the organs they're taking. But don't think murder is

so shocking to all human beings as it is to you! Where

I've just come from, assassination is a recognised political

weaponand here on Cyclops, Gus tells me, one child in

eight doesn't survive its first year. When lifd is short like

that, it becomes cheap."

That was too much for Nole. A Corps medical officer

was of necessity dedicated to the preservation of life no

matter what the cost to himself. The theory Maddalena

had put to him was too cold-blooded for him to endure.

He excused himself with a whisper and headed for the

nearest convenience to overcome the nausea which had

revolted him.

"Where's Nole off to?" Langenschmidt demanded,

turning away from his communicator.

"By the look of him, he needs to vomit!" Maddalena

shrugged. "I've been explaining to him that Kolb's leg

was probably cut off some poor devil on a lost ZRP, and

he's upset."

"Not surprised," Langenschmidt grunted. "Though

he's by no means a practical manwitness what he al-

lowed to happen tonight!he's a nice guy at heart, and a

damned good doctor. But for pity's sake, Maddalena,

don't go spreading this notion of yours broadcast, will

yon? There are all lands of possibilities we have to elim

inate before we can act on the suggestion."

"Such as?" Maddalena said sourly.

"Well, the most likely is this one you put forward

yourselfthat the leg is synthetic. This would be much

easier to do than a normal regeneration job, you realise,

and probably within the capacity of medical computers

such as you might find here. I'm having a search of the

data initiated to determine whether Nole's right in say-

ing the practice is unknown. If it is, I'll be surprised."

"Why? The number of worlds which can't afford full

regeneration techniques is strictly limited, and of those,

damned few would support a short-term stopgap ar-

rangementthey'd rather go for the advanced method as

soon as possible."

"I guess so," Langenschmidt sighed. "Nonetheless, I'm

making the check. I'm also requesting the latest informa-

tion on all the known ZRP's. I've asked for fullest details

on the gene-type records which the Corps has made."

"But you think I'm right," Maddalena pressed him.

He was silent for long seconds. At last he gave a reluc-

tant nod.

"I hope you're wrong, blast it! To have another scan-

dal on Cyclops will give me headaches fbr the rest of my

tour as Commandant, and if we find out that this is a

collective-guilt case, so we have to administer punitive

measures, we shall be living here like an occupying

army."

"Is that likely?"

"Yes and no. The mass of the people, insofar as they

understand the ZRP problem, sympathise with a plight

which so nearly resembles their own. Otherwise Quist

wouldn't have popular support for her campaign against

the policy of non-interference, and she certainly does. So

a dirty business like this could scarcely be public

knowledgeand indeed if it were we'd have stumbled on

it before.

"But Kolb's isn't likely to be an isolated case. And we

still have here a top twentieth of the population who've

reached positions of wealth and power by ruthlessness. I

said this to you earlier, didn't I? And if you find being

callous pays, then you're quite likely to feel that some

primitive survivor on a ZRP isis a null quantity. Who

the hell cares what becomes of him so long as I'm made

whole?"

"The pattern would be similar to that in the Carrig af-

fair, then?" Maddalena hazarded. "A small group would

be in full possession of the facts, but because what they

have to offer is so valuable, those who benefit from it

won't investigate what they're gettingturn a blind eye,

as they say.'*

"What?"

"Turn a blind eye. It's a phrase that's survived on

Thirteen, where there are a good many eye afflictions. I

believe it's pre-galactic in origin."

"Prehistoric, I'd have said," Langenschmidt muttered.

"Except on the ZRP's, I've never seen a blind person.

When eyesight is so valuable, it's worth taking the trou-

ble to preserve."

"Hmmm . . ." Maddalena cocked her head. "You said

Kolb's isn't apt to be a unique case, didn't you? Would

it be possible to find out whether any of the 'top twenti-

eth' of the people of Cyclops have made unexpected

recoveries from serious injuries or illnesses lately? Failure

of their eyesight strikes me as a good starting-point."

"I must be tired," Langenschmidt said. "Or else life on

this damned planet has sapped my intelligence. I should

have thought of that myself. I'll get the matter looked

into in the morning. I don't think there's much I can do

tonight. It's gone midnight, you realise?"

"I've been keeping Corps time for the past few weeks

on an airless base-planet," Maddalena said tardy. "I've

got out of gear with natural day and night." But the

reference to the lateness of the hour made her stretch ab-

sent-mindedly and repress a yawn.

"What action do you propose talong if my guess turns

out to be well-founded? Will you hold Kolb here in-

stead of letting them take him off to this local doctor

Rimerley, I think the name was?"

"Of course not!" Langenschmidt snapped.

"But he's the only evidence we have"

"He's a two-edged sword," Langenschmidt internipt-

ed. "To use one of the archaic phrases you seem to like!

If I do hold him instead of sending him off to Rimerley,

it'll be like sounding an alarm bell. You can bet that Ri-

merley is involved, to start with. He'll signal the team

collecting material on the ZRP, they'll pull out instantly,

and even if we do locate the planet we'll never find

proof of any connection with Cyclops apart from a ten-

uous link via the gene-type of the tissue. And short of

finding the rest of the original owner, or his surviving

identical twin, we'll never bring the matter to trial."

"You're quite right, of course," Maddalena confirmed.

"Will you wait until they actually bring the new graft

down for him?"

"If we can spot that being done. Which I doubt. I ex-

pect we'll have to locate the ZRP and catch the collec-

tors red-handed. And I don't have to tell you what a )ob

that'll be!"

"I don't even see how" Maddalena checked. "Oh yes,

I guess it could be done, at that. It must be possible to

find out the high-Irani areas of Zarathustra, and compute

the most likely courses which ships leaving that part of

the planet would have followed. But it'll be the devil's

own problem, even then, and the search might take

months."

"Years," said Langenschmidt succinctly. "Damn it,

we're searching for ZRP's all the time, and if we haven't

found this one by now, it must be in a highly improba-

ble corner of space."

"How could the Cyclopeans have found it, do you

think?"

"Shall we ask them when we catch them?" Langen-

schmidt snapped, and was immediately repentant. "Sorry!

I didn't mean to bark at you like that."

"No, I'm the one who should apologise. After all, it's

still only a suspicion, and I've no business pestering you

as if it was already proven. And you are tired. I'll leave

you in peace. Will you have me roused in the morning

in time to see Kolb collected? I'd beinterested."

"Surely," Langenschmidt agreed, and gave her a

weary smile which she returned with warmth.

As she was walking away, he called after her.

"Maddalena!"

"Yes?"

"Too soon to ask your views on non-interference

again, hub?"

"Now who's treating my suspicions as a proven fact?"

"Right." Langenschmidt smiled again, with greater

naturalness this time. "Good night. Andit's good to see

you after all this time."

"In spite of all the trouble I've brought with me? I'm

flattered."

XTT

"Get away from that girl!" rasped Lors Heirndall.

The two members of his team who had been bending

over the unconscious form of Soraya jerked and spun

around. They had drawn back the light coverlet to ex-

pose her high, youthful bosom and flat firm belly, and

the next stage in their plan took very little deduction to

work out.

"What's wrong with you?" the older of them grunted.

"Are we getting a high price for virgins this trip, or

something? It's not going to make any odds in the long

run!"

"Get the hell out of here!" Heirndall thundered, and

tugged aside his black robe to reveal the butt of his en-

ergy gun.

The two men exchanged glances, shrugged, and com-

plied.

Heirndall re-belted his robe and wiped a trace of sweat

from his face. He dared not tell his subordinates just

how necessary it was to get the girl home in perfect con-

dition; one hint of the danger they had all been running

since Kolb was taken to the Corps hospital, and they

would desert forthwith.

Still, luck was on his side so far. To have got his hands

on the girl, the very same day he received the request

from Rimerley, was remarkable, and had greatly built up

his confidence. Of course, she was rather dark-complex-

ioned, like nine out of ten of the inhabitants, but there

were ways of eliminating the melanin secretion which

caused that. And in every other respect she was close to

perfect: the right build, the right proportions, the right

category as regards immunological reactions. . . Rimer-

ley had said, in view of the importance attaching to this

)ob, that he was prepared to accept far less adequate

material and work it over to the required specifications;

so much trouble would not after all be necessary.

He bent to spread the coverlet over Soraya again, and

paused with his hands grasping the cloth. Of course, it

was quite true that in the long run it wouldn't matter

no actual physical damage would result, apart from the

inevitable minimum, and on any world with reasonable

sexual standards that would have been sustained within a

year or two of puberty, while as to psychological dam-

age, that was absolutely irrelevant.

He blocked off the train of thought with deter-

mination, however, and threw the coverlet back to its

former position. Then he crossed the room and seated

himself before the carved wooden chest which concealed

the subspace communicator.

Rimerley had been waiting tensely for the call ever

since Kolb was brought in and he finished making his

checks of the man's condition. As he had expected, he

was in amazingly good shape considering what he had

been through less than one full day earlierthe Corps

hospital offered treatment which Rimerley simply had

no facilities for.

But the facilities he could offer had brought him im-

mense wealth and not inconsiderable hidden power.

Now was the time to use that power, to protect himself.

The moment the call came, he knew from the ex-

pression of near-gloating on Heirndall's face that the

worst of the risks had passed: that resulting from delay

in making the key proposition to Quist.

"You got someone?" he rapped, leaning forward ex-

citedly.

"I think so," Heirndall nodded. "I haven't yet found

the material for Kolb, but"

"The hell with that," Rimerley interrupted. "We can

attend to Kolb at our leisure. First we have to make sure

the leisure happens!" He peered at the corner of the

screen, where a draped body was dimly visible, slightly

out of focus, beyond Heirndall's shoulder. "Is that the

girl behind you?"

"That's the one. We had to bring her in by giving her

a phoney attack of the local killing diseasethe quakes,

as they call itbut she's over the symptoms now and in

artificial coma. In view of the circumstances, we weren't

able to find out much about her barring what her boy-

friend told us, but it is definite that she's no older than

her midteens, and all the items which you listed for me

when you put in the request appear to be satisfactory.

She even has the right blood-group, which I gather you

were worried about."

"Has she? That's amazing!" Rimerley felt tension go

out of him like air from a punctured spacesuit. "The

commonest groups on Cyclops seem to be the least com-

mon out there. I take it you're sending her home straight

away?"

"I was wondering, in view of the urgency, whether

we ought not to risk bringing the ship down directly to

some point near here. The chance of it being seen"

"Isn't worth taking," Rimerley cut in. "No, even if it

means a day's delay, transport her by inconspicuous

means to the usual landing-area in the hills. There re-

mains a slight chance of being caught, you know, and

the compounding what we've done by exposing a ZRP

to open contact with space-travel is a needless additional

danger."

"I've always assumed they'll throw the book at us if

they catch us," Heirndall grunted.

"I've had this out with you a dozen times," Rimerley

countered. "There are enough worlds offering voluntary

euthanasia for us to make a case Just a moment! Have

you told the girl anything?"

"Haven't spoken to her since we gave her the fake dis-

ease, of course!"

"Hpi . . . We'll have to convince her, for the sake of

appearances, that she's deathly ill and better off enjoying

a quiet demise."

"We've done that successfully more times than I can

count," Heirndall commented with a cynical smile.

"Yes, butHell, why I'm wasting time / don't know!

I'm going to see Quist now. Wish me luck."

The message was brought to Quist during the second

session of the day's conference. Dr Aleazar Rimerley was

waiting to see her at her earliest convenience.

Damn the man! Picking this moment to comeand in

person, for some inconceivable reason! A communicator

would have served for any message, surely!

She bit her lip, looking around the conference hall

while the servant who had brought the message waited

discreetly at the back of her tall chair. The morning had

seen the last of the differences of opinion between dele-

gates ironed out to acceptable levels; this afternoon,

there had been several much-applauded suggestions for

lines of action to secure a reversal of the non-interfer-

ence policy. Two of them even, in Quist's view, offered

a better-than-fifty-fifty chance of succeeding; a record.

Omar Haust hadn't shown up after his disgraceful ex-

hibition of last evening. Maybe that had something to do

with itdelegates from wealthy advanced worlds always

seemed to be uncomfortable in the presence of a genuine

ZRP native.

The speaker who had the floor at the moment sensed

that something was amiss. He paused courteously and

looked at Quist. So did everyone else.

Cursing again silently, but keeping her face composed,

she stood up.

"I'll beg your indulgence," she said. "A very dear

friendas some of you may have heardwas savaged by

a wolfshark yesterday."

A murmur of sympathy spread around the meetings,

she saw one or two baffled expressions, but seat-neigh-

bours of those who didn't know about wolfsharks soon

explained.

"I'm told that the doctor attending him wishes to see

me urgently. If you can forgive me?"

"Of course!" exclaimed a dozen voices, and she slipped

away with a bow.

Rimerley was waiting for her in an audience room

with delicate silver-filigree walls. The setting seemed

particularly appropriate to the most highly reputed med-

ical man on the planet, Quist thought, and her irritation

at being summoned away from the conference gave way

to anxiety at Kolb's condition. If Rimerley had come

here in person, that might all too easily mean bad news.

She said, "Doctor, is it something about?"

He cut her short brusquely. "Before we discuss any-

thing, I want your assurance that we are neither over-

heard nor recorded."

"Doctor! I assure you"

"Save it. I know that no one gets to the heights you've

scaled on a planet like ours without being very cautious

and far-sighted. But caution says we talk privately about

the matter I've come to raise with you."

She stared at him. Previously, Rimerley had treated

her with urbane courtesyeven obsequiousness. Now he

was addressing her not merely as an equal, but even as an

inferior. The last statement was an order: gift-wrapped,

but an order nonetheless.

Colouring, she snapped, "I prefer not to be spoken to

in those terms!"

"I know. But if you care about Justin Kolb, you'll

have to put up with it."

There was a pause. Finally she shrugged and crossed

the room to the far side. Lifting one of the elaborate fili-

gree decorative motifs, she exposed a small switch and

twisted it through ninety degrees.

"All right. The record will show nothing now, not

even the fact that I came in to join you. What is it you

want to say? Have youhave you attended to Jusdn

yet?"

"No. Oh, there's nothing to worry about as far as he's

concernedthe Corps doctors did a good first-aid job on

the stump and it'll heal quickly."

"The reference to a stump made her flinch. To cover his

out-of-character weakness, she countered him harshly.

"How soon will he be well? And why, if that's all

that's been done to him so far, have you left him directly

after taking him into your care?"

"There's nothing I can do until we find a graft for

him," Rimerley said. And waited for his meaning to sink

in.

"A graft?'* Quist listened to her own repetition of the

word, as if it were mere noise. "But I thought you used

regeneration. Isn't that what it's called?"

"For a woman who's been the effective government of

a planet for so long, you're astonishingly ignorant," Ri-

merley said. "I'll cheerfully regenerate the limb for

youif you'll buy me a megabrain-capacity medical

computer to do it, and pay for having it stocked with

the appropriate data for Cyclops. Since you can't afford

to do that, Kolb will have to get the same as he did be-

fore: a limb-graft, which is easier and cheaper."

"Before? You mean-"

"I'm coming to what I mean. And it's going to take a

lot of explaining, so I'd better sit down." Rimerley

glanced around for a chair and did as he said.

"Graft!" he continued. "The taking of an existing or-

gan and the incorporation of it into another body.

Clear? You gave me Justin Kolb with a leg lost to space-

gangrene, and I replaced it with a nearly perfect match,

immunologically neutral, the nerves and muscles tied in

as well as might be hoped. Not well enough for him to

endure the strain of space-side work any longer, but this

wasn't a drawback you'd object to in view of your

uh relationship."

"Rimerley," Quist said between clenched teeth, "I

don't know what you're getting at, but"

"Then wait till you find out!" Rimerley ordered.

"Yesterday that leg was being attended to by Corps doc-

tors. I have no way of knowing whether they looked at

it closely enough to determine its origin, but if they did,

you're in trouble. Apparently you didn't actually know

that limb-regeneration was beyond our facilities; it's

common knowledge, however, and it would be assumed

that you connived at what was done"

Quist was waving a feeble hand, floundering two sen-

tences behind Rimerley's urgent flow of words.

"Origin?" she forced out.

"Yes, origin. What do you think I didbought the leg

off some dockside layabout in Gratignol, maybe? Even a

starving fisherman wouldn't be likely to sell a healthy

limb, would he? No, it was imported. From somewhere

where none of the natives can spread the newsto be

precise, from an unnumbered ZRP."

Quist's mouth worked, but no sound emerged.

"I was going to say," Rimerley pursued, "no intelli-

gent outsider would credit that you, Alura Quist, imag-

ined I'd regenerated the leg! You must have known. And

what happens to your precious conference, to start with,

when the word gets out?"

The prospect of this news reaching the delegates was

appalling. Quist clenched her hands into bony fists.

"This is blackmail!" she whispered. "You won't get

away with it! I'll denounce you1 don't care what hap-

pens to Jusrin. Maybe the Corps will mend his leg when

I tell them about"

"Denounce me? It'll look like panic to save your cam-

paign against the Corps, and they won't fall for it!

Besides, the Corps will have other things on their minds.

After what you do to them!"

She gave him a blank stare.

"The Corps mightyes, }ust possibly might heal Jasrin

Kolb as a generous gesture," Rimerley conceded with a

judicious air. "But they won't offer you a new lease of

life, as I will. You're afraid of old age, aren't you?

You're afraid of death, and the long dark silence be-

yond."

There was something so evocative of terror in the

words that Quist found herself nodding numbly.

"So now we come to the point," Rimerley said. "The

proposal I have for you, which is to the advantage of

both of us. I don't want this story to get out, even

though you'd be the worst sufferer. I'm saving my own

skin, and I won't deny the fact. But the chance of the

Corps being sufficiently intrigued by Kolb's leg to make

investigations depends on what else they have to occupy

them, and you're in a position to give them a problem

which will drive everything else into the background

for good, let's hope. What's more, I see from the news

reports on your current conference that you've already

prepared the ground for what I want you to do."

He added, offhand, "Kolb will get his leg back too, of

course."

Quist was absolutely frozen for long moments. Finally,

in a voice drained of emotion, she said, "What, then?"

"What I offer?" Rimerley countered. "Oh, nothing

much. Twenty years of additional youth. Maybe fifty!"

Greed blazed in Quist's eyes for a moment, until it

was extinguished by tears. "It's a cruel joke!" she said

hoarsely. "It's the foulest, dirtiest"

"I'm not joking." Rimerley leaned back in his chair

with such complete calm she was again tempted to be-

lieve him.

"How?"

"That I'm not telling you. Yet. I'm simply making the

offer. Twenty years, possibly a lot more." He studied

her with insolent directness. "How's the unsupported

shape of your breasts these days? Flabby, I imagine! And

the belly-muscles must be giving way by now, in spite of

cosmetic treatment. I could fix all that."

Once more, silence filled the room. It dragged on and

dragged on. Rimerley broke it, shrugging and rising.

"Too bad. I didn't really expect you to prefer public

humiliation and probably trial for an infringement of the

laws against interference with ZRP's. Which will be a

very ironical climax to your campaign, won't it?"

"Wait," she whispered. "Damn you! You knew there

was one bribe I couldn't resist!"

"Of course I did," Rimerley said with a sneer.

"Whatwhat do I have to do? "

He told her, in a single crackling sentence, and added,

"Today!"

XIV

As promised, they had fetched Justin Kolb away early

in the morning. Maddalena saw him go, in a white-paint-

ed hospital 'copter which went droning towards the

southwest. Its design strucK her as somehow archaic, but

after twenty years in surroundings absolutely devoid of

technology beyond crude tool-making, she found she

was ill-attuned to refinements in engineering practice.

"I wish there was some way we could have put a

tracer on him," Langenschmidt had muttered as he stood

beside her, gazing at the diminishing white speck against

the vivid blue sky.

"I'd have thought there was!"

"I asked Nole what a reasonably thorough medical

check might overlook, and he said, point-blank, 'Noth-

ing.' Rimerley can't be incompetenthis patients have

included some of the most notable people on Cyclops."

"Did you ask Nole how it was in that case he came to

overlook the nature of Kolb's mended leg?"

"As a matter of fact"Langenschmidt looked slightly

uncomfortable"I did. We had some words about it. But

the point stands; no tracer, for fear of alerting them."

"Surely you know where he's going, though."

"Allegedly, to Rimerely's private island. But I'd be

happier if I was convinced of that. As you said last

night, he's our evidence."

"You've kept some tissue-samples, presumably."

"Nole took some from places where they wouldn't be

noticed, and they're preserved as a calibration standard

for this analysis of gene-types he's doing. At least, that's

our story if the matter comes up." The 'copter had van-

ished. Briskening: "Well, I can't stand here all day. I

have a base to run."

"I haven't," Maddalena said demurely. "And since you

had me brought to Cyclops, I guess there's something

you can have me do instead of 'standing here all day'."

"Actually there are a couple of things . . . I wasn't

very eager to ask you, since it seems unfair when

you're theoretically on long furlough, but as the subject

has come up"

"You're a poor diplomat, Gus, in spite of your boast-

ing. Well?"

"What spare time I have right now is generally taken

up with studying the progress of this damned conference

of Quist's. The local news bulletins are full of it,

painting it as an unselfish venture by Cyclops on behalf

of their poor brothers neglected by the rich greedy

worlds ofetcetera; why should I tell you what you can

imagine easily enough? There was some land of outburst

at an official banquet last nightthe delegate from ZRP

One got drunk and uttered a few home truths which

embarrassed the organisers dreadfully. Catch the reports

of the morning session of the conference, will you? Let

me have a digest of their progress if any at the noon

break. That's one thing. And the other is of your own

making. Go help my overworked programming staff to

get a line on the probable location of Twenty-two. We

probably won't get the margin of error lower than a

hundred parsecs, but if we can possibly shave it to fifty I

think I can swing the assignment of a couple of search

ships."

The problem was fascinating, and intensely compli-

cated. It was known what the populations distribution

had been on Zarathustra at the time of the nova, so it

was possible to determine which of the high-Irani areas

would have been on the day side and hence wiped out

immediately. On the night side, however, there were

three notable zones where the minority language was

spoken, and in any of these such a gene-type as they had

found in Kolb's leg might have occurred.

With this as a basis, it was then necessary to compute

whether one or two or all three stood a chance of get-

ting people from their homes to the nearest spaceport be-

fore the planet turned far enough on its axis to expose

the rising ships to the nova. Only those which had been

able to keep in shadow of the planet for several million

miles had escaped the storm of radiation.

One of the key zones had been in darkness for a full

seven hours; the other two, for a mere half of that.

Settling on that as the most likely course of events, the

team instructing the computers then had to work out

what trajectory ships would have followed to remain in

shadow if they had stayed till the last moment picking

up refugees; if they had left with an hour to spare, or

two hours, and so on, backward through the Zarathus-

tran night. And from these hypothetical lines of flight,

they attempted to calculate where they would have

wound up.

The process went smoothly for a while; several pos-

sible courses were at once ruled out because the Corps

had explored the volume of space through which they

led, to the extreme range any ship could have covered

with its passengers in a fit state to endure a landing. Af-

ter that, though, it was like plodding through heavy fog

and deep mud.

Maddalena complied vidth Langenschmidt's request to

hear the local news bulletins about the conference; they

were platitudinous, merely giving extracts from pious

speeches interlarded with praise for Quist's and Cyclops's

noble compassion towards the ZRP's. Listening, she was

reminded of what Langenschmidt had said last night,

when he asked if it was too soon to re-question her on

her attitude towards the non-interference policy.

She was no longer sure what her attitude was. And to

find this reaction in heiself so soon after her arrival here

was disturbing.

She was glad to lose herself again in the complexities

of interstellar course-plotting, and was deep in what ap-

peared to be a promising assumption when an argent

message came through to the computing room for her:

would she go see the commandant at once?

Reluctantly she complied, framing a jocular complaint

to utter when she saw Langenschmidt. It died on her

lips. One glance told her he had been badly shocked by

something.

"Gus!" she exclaimed. "You look as though you've

)ust heard this sun is going nova too!"

"Next best thing," grated Langenschmidt. "At any

rate, it's having the same effectwe're compelled to

evacuate."

"What?"

"Sit down and I'll play you back a recording of the

news. I couldn't trust myself to repeat it coherently." He

slammed switches on the desk at which he sat, and a

screen lit. Maddalena moved numbly to a seat from

which she could see it properly.

At first there was only a blur, with an automatic

voice-over signal identifying the time of reception and

dating it on the basic Corps scale; then the blurring

faded, and a harsh incisive voice with a Cyclops accent

rang out.

"Personal and official from Alura Quist to the Com-

mandant, Corps Galactica Repair, Refit and Recreation

Base, Cyclops. Alura Quist!"

A face appeared on the screen. Maddalena studied it

with interest; this was the first time she had seen the fa-

mous Quist, who had for so many years been undisputed

arbiter of this planet's fate. She saw a pretty blonde

woman whose best attempts to stand off the effects of

age had not entirely succeeded.

"Commandant, you will learn from the appended

recording of my address to the Conference on Non-in-

terference with Zarathustra Refugee Planets at which I

am currently- presiding what it is that you are required

to do. I only wish to add that action is to fae taken forth-

with to implement the decision of the government of my

planet."

The face vanished, and re-appeared, this time in the

context of a large conference hall, in which sat delegates

from worlds affecting over a dozen different styles of

dress. Quist was addressing them, and had clearly won

the approval of all those listening.

"You will recall," she was saying, "that the respected

representative from ZRP Onewho is regrettably indis-

posed and cannot hear me make this public pronounce-

mentsuggested a lever to oust the Corps from its role

of policy-maker in this area. I have reflected on what

was suggested, and come to an inescapable conclusion: it

is not consistent with our professed ideals to tolerate the

Corps's presence here while they are flouting our

wishes."

Stunned silence, from the audience in the screen and

from Maddalena.

"I therefore wish to inform you that I am serving no-

tice today on the base's commandant to withdraw all

Corps personnel from Cyclops and close the base. This

cannot presumably be done overnight, but it must be

done quickly, and in any case from this moment forward

the base will be quarantined, and all contact whatever

between Cyclops and the Corps Galactica will cease bar-

ring such official conversations as the evacuation may

call for. I-"

Stormy applause drowned out the remainder of the

statement. Langenschmidt snapped the switch to stop the

replay.

"Well?" he rapped.

Maddalena shook her head, dazed. "I thought you said

the planet couldn't afford to lose the base!"

"It can't. Which means the Quist woman has gone in-

sane. Insane or not, though, she's legally the boss of Cy-

clops, and when I get word from Corps HQwhich I've

sent forI'm damned sure they'll tell me I've got to do

as she orders."

XV

Langenschmidt's gloomy assessment of the situation

was justified; his own computers assured him of that

even before a verdict came through from headquarters.

No inhabited world was compelled to provide facilities

for the Corps. To obtain those which it needed and

could not adequately arrange on the airless lumps of

rock where most of its bases were sited, the Corps wrote

treaties like an independent sovereign planet. But it

wasn't one, and in the event of a planetary- government

deciding that it wished to withdraw leased territory, the

decision was unilateral and unarguable.

When the legal experts from HQ informed him of this

situation, Langenschmidt railed at them, demanding why

such a predicament had not been foreseen and guarded

against. There was a chilly tone in the voice of the man

he was talking to as he retorted that the circumstances

were unique and unprecedented, and after' all hethe

base commandant on the spothad been in the ideal posi-

tion to do the foreseeing.

Sweating, Langenschmidt cut the connection.

But that crack was srill ringing in his memory the next

morning when he went out on the main pontoon of the

repair docks to meet the official Cyclopean representa-

tive he had been warned to expect. This was a very tall,

very thin, very bitter young man in immaculate white

uniform, who stepped down the gangway from the big

skimmer which had brought him and even before Lan-

genschmidt had a chance to speak waved a brisk hand at

the men who had gathered on the vessel's deck as she ap-

proached the pontoon.

"My staff," he said. "Empowered by the government

of Cyclops to supervise the evacuation of Corps person-

nel."

Langenschmidt looked them over. In all, they num-

bered at least two hundred. Like a good many worlds

whose economy was too precarious to support full em-

ployment and too poor to pass the leisure barrier beyond

which working became irrelevant for the individual, Cy-

clops made the worst of both worlds by maintaining a

government labour force analogous to the pregalactic

armed forces of Earthside nation-states. These would be

a detachment of picked men drawn from that pool.

They were armed, Langenschmidt saw sickly, with

obsolete but doubtless workable energy guns. Quist must

have lost her mind!

"And madriel!" he snapped.

The tall thin young man biinked at him. "My instruc-

tions are not definite on that point," he replied. "I am

simply to see that this base is evacuated of all its person-

nel within a reasonable time. Unofficially, I'm to inform

you that the government regards seven days as reason-

able."

"Seven days!" Langenschmidt hadn't meant to let the

exclamation go, but he could not restrain his dismay as

he surveyed the immense repair docks and all the build-

ings beyonda complete self-contained city, with some

of its foundations including those under the space-drive

test-beds going clear to the bedrock of the planet.

"Seven days," the tall thin young man said, and gave a

cadaverous smile. "My name is Bengt Early, incidentally.

I hold the rank of major in the Cyclops space-force."

"Hold tight," Langenschmidt told him savagely.

"You're apt to drop it any moment."

He swung on his heel and signalled one of his subordi-

nates.

"This is Major Early" he snapped. "No doubt he

would prefer to deal with someone of his own status.

Certainly I'd rather he did so."

Early coloured bright pink, which gave Langen-

schmidt a moment of gloomy satisfation. But that was

the last such moment he enjoyed for sometime.

What possibilities were open to him, other than com-

plying with the edict of the government? His superiors

said there were none; ships would be detached from

other posts and sent to conduct the evacuation in the

speediest and most efficient manner available resources

would allow. And that was that.

He drove fist into palm in helpless fury. Clearly, the

only recourse was to overset the Quist governmentand

how could he do that? If only they had delayed this

lunatic expulsion order another couple of days, long

enough to pile up concrete evidence on the matter of

Kolb's leg!

Which reminded him that Maddalena hadn't shown up

this morning. He looked around vaguely for her, but she

wasn't to be seen, and immediately his other worries

drove her out of his thoughts.

Overset the Quist government . . . This was the obvi-

ous lever. But already, during the night, radar-carrying

vessels had encircled the base island, and a ship had gone

into stationary orbit at twenty-three thousand miles,

watching through sensitive detectors for any breach of

the rule that there was to be no contact whatever be-

tween the Corps and the rest of Cyclops. Even a sub-

mersible wouldn't get away to hunt the evidence

Maddalena had suggested and check on rich Cyclopeans

who had made miraculous recoveries lately. After all,

even the Bracy kid's trawler had an electronic fish-

finder, and submarine detectors would certainly be

watching the nearby waters

The trawler!

He stopped himself, by a tremendous effort, from

turning to look at the ramshackle craft, with its peeling

paint and torn solar sails which were in fact currently

being replaced by a robot to which no one had remem-

bered to give contrary orders.

Hmmm . . . / But the idea was only- a germ so far,

and there still remained his other obligations: more ines-

capable ones. He shelved the problem of what could be

done with a sure method of escape from the island, and

went to attend to another pressing matter. It derived

from one of his unsuccessful pleas to headquarters; beg-

ging for orders to decline Quist's ultimatum, he had

suggested that this was a plot to get the Cyclopeans'

hands on the material resources at the base, and perhaps

set up a commercial starship repair service with what

they inherited.

The staff of Corps HQ were sufficiently cynical for

that to register. But they didn't change their instructions.

They merely recommended the installation of a new

switch, radio-controlled, on the main fusion generator

buried at the island's heart, so that as soon as the person-

nel had been evacuated what was left could be reduced

to a smolang crater.

That would be a small consolation. Sighing, Langen-

schmidt set off to rout out his chief power engineer.

Maddalena had thought of the trawler much sooner

last night, to be precise, while restlessly trying to doze

off. She had also taken into consideration the fact that,

not being on the established strength of the Corps here,

she figured in the computer records only as "personnel

on leave" and a tap on a computer keyboard could abol-

ish her without explaining where she had gone.

These points led her to pester Nole for half an hour,

until in sheer desperation he allowed her what she

wanted: to see Bracy Dyge, in private.

When she opened the door of his room, the fisherboy

cowered back like a frightened animal, doubtless having

taken the shaving of his headpart of the treatment

necessitated by his exposure to an overdose of radia-

tionas a prelude to some terrible punishment for his

temerity last night.

It took all Maddalena's experience as a diplomat

among primitive peoples to bring him to the point where

he would listen to her without trembling. Time was

wasting; she had to seize her hard-won advantage.

"Bracy," she coaxed, "didn't you say when you first

came here that you had always dreamed of working for

the Corps?"

The boy's answer was inaudible; she had to wheedle

for minutes to get him to speak his mind honestly. Then

what he had to say was hardly promising. She damned

Nole for the sarcastic reception he must have given the

boy's reluctant plea; it had closed him up tighter than a

Pelagian clam.

She was forced to make wild promises and offer wild-

er bribesnot to him: for his family, which was more

honourablebefore she got the assurance of his help.

Langenschmidt wouldn't like this, but then he might

well not like any of it.

The door of the room slid aside, and there he was.

"Beat me to it again, did you?" he muttered.

Maddalena was bewildered for a moment, and then she

started to laugh. "You mean you thought of it too?"

"Of course I did!" Langenschmidt rapped. "Did you

expect me to lie down under the edict of this damned

idiot Quist? Nole told me you were down here, and I

immediately saw why I'd had that boat of Dyge's on my

mind all day, in spite of the swarm of Cyclopean officials

crawling over the base like bedbugs."

"Well, it's no good to you, is it?" Maddalena coun-

tered. "Your chance of staying behind on Cyclops is

zero."

"I could swing it so that"

"Could you, hell! The protocol of the evacuation of a

Corps base traces all the way back to the abandonment

of a sea-going ship on Earth. I'm closer to my Corps

training than you are, by a long way. You've probably

forgotten the irrelevancies you pick up in traininglike

that onebut there's the regulation if you care to check:

the commandant is the last to leave the base, and the per-

son responsible for handing over control to the successor

authority."

Langenschmidt gave a groan. "They planned this to

drive me out of my mind with frustration! But what

good is the boat to you?"

"If you'll let me finish what I was saying to young

Bracy here, you'll see soon enough." And, turning to the

fisherboy, who had listened with blank incomprehension

to this exchange, she resumed, "Now if you had good

maps, and perhaps a radio, you wouldn't mind sailing

half around the planet, would you?"

"I'd sail to the stars if I had a ship," Bracy declared

with a sudden fit of braggadocio.

"I believe you. You're a brave boy man. Anyone

could tell that after hearing how you killed the giant

wolfshark. Now here's your chance to prove it still fur-

ther, and to do the kind of job which will interest the

Corps in you, as well as earning you that new set of so-

lar sails, and a new set of reactors, and a radio for your

ship." Maddalena eyed Langenschmidt as she spoke, and

received a shrug to indicate that if the Corps was leaving

behind much of its mat6riel here at the base it could af-

ford to give Bracy a few such odds and ends.

The coaxing went on, the flattery, the cajolement.

Langenschmidt's mind, greatly preoccupied, went dart-

ing away. If only they had waited till this business of

Maddalena's "undiscovered ZRP" had been cleared

up ... Was it coincidence or not? Oh, surely it must

be! True, Rimerley was in the space parts trade up to his

neckmust be, as the surgeon who performed the graft

on Kolbbut surely he couldn't have a hold over Quist

sufficient to compel her to act this wayl The existence of

a link between them wasn't proof of criminal complicity.

Even if he was blacimiailing her because she knew the

source of Kolb's new leg, that alone wouldn't make her

jeopardise the planetary budget of Cyclops for the indef-

inite future. As soon as the drawbacks of losing the

Corps' rent began to be felt, she would be done for any-

way. Someone else would overthrow her government

and more than likely invite the Corps back. In which

case, perhaps he shouldn't blow up the baserepossessing

a workable installation was one thing, rebuilding a pile

of rubble was another, and progress over the past cen-

tury had probably made the job uneconomic.

Running the base here wasn't as challenging as

maintaining his old Patrol beat, but it had its own re-

wards, and he had enjoyed the work.

If I do leave here for good, he told himself sourly, I

can go two waysback to headquarters to serve as the

walkitlg spokesman for a computer, or out of the Corps.

Or eke I can jump in space.

He grew suddenly aware that Maddalena was ad-

dressing him, and muttered an apology for his rudeness.

"I was aslang," she repeated with a twinkle, "whether

you've booby-trapped the island."

"How did you? Oh, I guess it's an obvious precau-

tion. Yes, I have, but with a radio-activated trigger."

"Don't be in too much of a hurry to press the button,

then. Bracy here has just agreed to smuggle me out of

the area and around the world to Rimerley's private is-

land, and with his help I may very well give you back

your job when the Quist government falls in the wake

of the row I'm cooking up."

"You? " Langenschmidt said.

"Yes, me!" She gave him a defiant stare. "Gus, the rea-

son I've been hanging around making up my mind what

to do with my furlough is perfectly simple. I don't want

to 'rest up' on Earth or any other soft-centred planet.

I've been doing damn-all for twenty mortal years. I want

some action to get my blood flowing againand here it

comes!"

XVI

"What's thatobject over there?" inquired the insuf-

ferable Major Barly, gesturing.

Langenschmidt turned, hoping that his personal

concern with the "object" would not show. The sun lay

bright and full over the gloaming hulls of the vessels

from space currently in the repair dock, making the con-

trast between them and the tiny, dirty trawler all the

more marked. Around the fishing-boat, robots and men

were busy in a manner that could not be glossed over ex-

cept by a half-truth.

"That?" he said with maximum smoothness. "Oh,

you'll recall that Justin KolbQuist's friendwas res-

cued from an encounter with a wolfshark. That trawler

belongs to the boy who saved him. We don't want to ex-

acerbate relations with the populace more than we can

help, so we thought we'd overhaul it for him while he's

recovering from his experience."

Major Barly's opinion was clear from his expression:

Only idiots would concern themselves with one worth-

less fisherboy at a juncture like this. However, he vouch-

safed his gracious permission to carry on, so long as it

did not interfere with the speedy departure of all Corps

personnel.

It was lucky, Langenschmidt reflected, that Quist had

sent them a fool to supervise the evacuation. Maybe

there were none but fools in the Cyclopean government

forces, but that was doubtful. An intelligent man, Lan-

genschmidt suspected, would have wondered what was

amiss when the base commandantso gruff and ill-man-

nered on first meetingsuddenly turned extremely affa-

ble and insisted on spending the entire working day

escorting his visitors over the base, snapping at subordi-

nates who seemed reluctant to comply- with the Cy-

clopeans' requests, apologising for any- delay longer than

two minutes, and in general being co-operative to the

point of parody.

Registers of personnel were printed out of the com-

puters; roll-calls were taken to ensure that no one slipped

away unaccounted for; ships were called in from nearby

stations to orbit Cyclops until the momentscheduled

for day six after the ultimatumwhen loading of person-

nel and salvageable goods would begin.

Damned if I don't think I made a mistake in running

such an efficient base, Langenschmidt told himself glum-

ly. If I hadn't given strict orders to the contrary, I think

we could have done the whole job in two days flat.

Meantime, while he cast around for new ways of

stalling the Cyclopeans, two significant tasks were in

progress. A friendly executive of the Corps personnel

branch, back at headquarters, was tracing one Pavel

Brzeska, on promotion furlough following his tour as

commandant of the Patrol sector which included Lan-

genschmidt's old beatnormally, Langenschmidt pre-

ferred not to have more truck with generals than he

could avoid, but this was a special caseand some highly

interesting work was going on at the dock, under the

rough wooden deck of Bracy's trawler.

Already it had had enough trickery and gadgets

crammed into its small hull to make it the envy of the

richest fishing family in Grarignol. If there was room for

all the machinery Maddalena had specified as "poten-

tially handy", it would wind up being the envy of the

richest private yachtsman this side of Earth.

Not that the said yachtsman would ever get to hear of

it.

By the evening of Day Two, as Langenschmidt was

now mentally labelling it, both these matters arrived at a

satisfactory conclusion. The trawler would have to make

its departure as openly as possible, so there was no ques-

tion of a night sailinga waste of several hours, but on

the other hand no matter how fast the ship could poten-

tially travel it would have to dawdle until it was beyond

the watchful ring of Cyclopean forces, which would

make the start of the trip very slow anyway. Maddalena

was closeted with Bracy, training him in some of the

techniques the rebuilt vessel would call on him to em-

ploy.

And the call came through from Pavel Brzeska. Lan-

genschmidt, having made quite certain that the Cy-

clopean inspectors would be kept away for an hour or

two, took it in his villa.

"Gus!" the new general exclaimed as the connection

came through. "I )ust got the news of the pickle you're

in out on Cyclops! What possessed you to get backed

into a corner by that crowd? You've tangled with them

before, haven't you? During the affair on Fourteen, I

seem to remember."

"That's right." Langenschmidt nodded. "With Mad-

dalena Santoswho's here, by the way; I sent for her be-

cause of the Conference on Non-Interference with

ZRP's they're holding."

"Heard about it. The first time Cyclops has made the

news in the Old System since its original breakaway

from Dagon, I imagine. There's a powerful lobby work-

ing on the subject, and a good deal of sentimental propa-

ganda being splashed around." Brzeska scowled. "What

does it look like from the Cyclops end, anyway?"

"Much the same as those we've had beforepious and

empty. But listen, Pavel! What I need you for is some-

thing more or less related to the ZRP's, and with your

background you can tell me a lot of things I daren't ob-

tain conspicuously through normal channels. I'm going

on a. string of suspicions, and though I'm morally certain

I'm right I can't call for full Corps support without more

solid evidence."

"Explain!" Brzesica commanded.

Langenschmidt did so. He wound up, "It's been very-

tricky trying to complete the calculations involved, of

coursewe have to keep taking the Cyclopean inspectors

in and out of the computing rooms to check on

manifests and personnel registers and so forth. But by

nha bit of dodging we've managed to narrow the

search area in which the missing ZRP must lie down to a

fifty-parsec sphere. Who do I ask to loan me some ships

to find it?"

Brzeska scowled again, this time ferociously. "Damna-

tion! What's become of the Corps in your sector since I

came home? Time was, if a suspicion like yours blew up,

they'd assign you the entire Fourth Fleet and no ques-

tions asked!"

"If they hadn't issued this ultimatum to me, I'd have

been in a position to make the request officially. As it

stands, the assumption is that I'm costing the Corps its

base here through incompetence, poor intelligence and

general mishandling of relations with the local govern-

ment."

Brzeska eyed him keenly. "I know. There's a three-

member commission of inquiry on its way to you

should reach you just about in time to see you leave, if

this one week's grace stands. And ah did you foul

things up that way?"

"I did not. I took it for granted that Cyclops wouldn't

cut its collective throat. Without the income from the

base their planetary budget will go to hell in two years."

"I know."

"I didn't realise you'd made a special study of the mat-

ter," Langenschmidt said vidth some bitterness.

"But I have," Brzeska countered softly. "It was touch

and go whether another commandant was appointed af-

ter your immediate predecessor, or whether the base

should be closed as obsolete and saperfluous. The de-

pendence of Cyclops on the revenue from it tipped the

balance. Actually, when they consulted me I advised

continuance1 went there on local leave and enjoyed

some wolfshark-hunting when I was younger."

"It sounds as though I picked the right man to con-

tact," Langenschmidt said, pleased.

"You certainly did. Nowlet's see . . ." Brzeska stared

at nothing for a moment. "Oh yes. You want Keita Bak-

ary, at my old base. He'll fix what you want in short or-

der."

"Thanks very much. What I do plan to do, inciden-

tally, is slip away under the pretext of being called to a

top-level conference on the redeployment of personnel

from here and the selection of a substitute base-location,

and by the time they finish investigating the circum-

stances I should have the rope braided to hang Quist by

the neck."

Brzeska shuddered visibly. "You pick some unpleasant

similes, Gus. Must be the effect of your long-time con-

tact with the ZRP's. Well, I wish you success, and a

speedy return to your base."

It was still quite dark, lacking another hour till dawn,

when Maddalena stole down the steps to the dock at

which Bracy's trawler was moored. A tightly co-ordi-

nated plan to distract the attention of the Cyclopean in-

spectors, nodding at their guard-posts, ensured that she

reached her goal safely and was able to slip below unno-

ticed.

There, she laid herself down in a concealed compart-

ment )ust forward of the engines and ran a quick check

of the new instrumentation which had been fitted. All

seemed to be in perfect order. She repressed a chuckle

due to sheer exhilaration and spoke in a whisper to the

microphone she wore taped against her vocal chords.

"Gas! I got aboardno troubleand your engineers

have done a magnificent )ob on the boat. I don't know

where it's all been put, but one still has so much room I

was afraid at first sight something had been left out!"

"If you really want to know," Langenschmidt an-

swered in a tinny buzz from the bone-conduction re-

ceiver Nole had fitted to her, "they took out the original

lining of the hull and replaced it with solid-state and

printed circuitry. Be careful not to foul any rocksa

dent in the hull could put a dozen gadgets out of oper-

ation."

"If you wanted to hit a rock with this kind of nav

equipment, you'd have to aim deliberatelyand at that

the automatics would probably overrule you." Mad-

dalena made reflexively to brush back her hair, and

remembered belatedly that last evening she had had it

trimmed to the regulation Patrol length of one inchas a

safety precaution when wearing a space-helmet. She

wasn't sure why, but a set of space-kit was among the

gear she had asked to have put aboard.

"Just a second," from Langenschmidt, and then:

"That was Nole. Bracy is now awake and they're check-

ing him over. His condition last night appeared good,

but you'll have to make sure he continues to take drugs

against the dose of radiation he received. Also he doesn't

like the flavour of our standard high-vitamin rations. I

tried him on synthesiser cake and he likes that okay, so

he'll be coming aboard with a portable diet-synthesiser

a 'farewell gift' from his friends in the Corps."

"Barly will probably take it off him," Maddalena said

sourly.

"He won't get the chance. I obtained his permit to

clear the trawler for open sea last night, and then Nole

fixed himuha liquid lullaby. He'll sleep till noon."

"A shame. I had as much as I could stand of synthe-

siser cake away back when on Fourteen. Well, all I have

to do now, I guess, is wait."

"Exactlyanril you're hull-down away from the last

of the Cyclopean ships watching this area. And then-

swift journey!"

Maddalena gave a throaty laugh and signed off.

Bracy Dyge played his part magnificently, Langen-

schmidt had to admit. He came down the steps to the

dock with just the right mixture of regret at leaving the

comfortable island and the luxuries the Corps enjoyed,

and eagerness to try out the new solar sails and mended

fish-finder which were the official extent of the modifica-

tions to his boat.

"There was no call to go to such trouble for the lad,"

said one of the Cyclopean inspectors, a man with a face

like a lemon whom Langenschmidt had preferred not to

fix a name on in case it was as ugly as he was. "I'm sure

Alura Quist will see he gets properly rewarded."

"I'm sure," Langenschmidt agreed blandly, forbearing

to mention that if all went well Quist would be getting a

reward of her own quite shortly.

He was almost holding his breath as the trawler eased

out to open water, with Bracy proudly waving at his

new solar sails. Then he relaxed. In two hours, or three

at the most, the boat would have passed the outermost

circle of quarantine vessels, and then some remarkable

changes would come over it.

The solar sails would be furled, and a pair of hydro-

foils would extrude from a hidden compartment under

the hull, and the compact fusion reactor which had re-

placed the old stored-power accumulators would feed

power to the pipesand the trawler, shaking a little, but

perfectly sound after what the engineers had done to it,

would take off for Rimerley's private island at a com-

fortable hundred and fifty knots.

Quite neat. Quite neat. He only hoped he would have

been able to wipe the grin from his face by the time he

next had to confront Barly and explain about the need

for his departure to attend this important conference

about a base to substitute for the one being closed down.

xvn

That voyage was among the most extraordinary ex-

periences of Maddalena's chequered life. She had hung

from the talons of a parradile; she had dropped through

atmosphere with nothing but a spacesuit's reacdon jets to

save her from a fatal crash; she had canoed over rapids

and ridden all manner of odd beasts of burden. But

streaking across the oceans of Cyclops was perhaps the

weirdest journey of all.

To start with, the news that a Gratignol trawlerlast

seem limping along at a typical speed of a few knots-

was outrunning all but the fastest passenger skimmers

plying between the more densely inhabited islands would

certainly have alerted someone's interest if it had been

noised around. Accordingly, whenever the automatic de-

tectors spotted another vessel in the vicinity, they cut

the power and spread the solar sails. Bracy and Mad-

dalena then sat out idly on the deck looking as though

they hadn't a worry in the universe bar the shortage of

oilfish in these waters. The danger past, the power re-

turned, the sails furled, and once more they leapt

towards their goal at the front tip of a mile-long jet of

heated water.

Bracy, although he had been very willing to start on

this mission, and at the outset was delighted with what

had been done to his craft, grew bored within a few

hours. Maddalena had shown him the operation of ev-

erything, including the devices which had no connection

with seafaring, in order to entertain him, but the fact

that control of his vessel had been given over to

machinery disturbed him, and he sat with a worried ex-

pression staring at the wake and listening with head

cocked to the hum of power emanating from below.

What was chiefly worrying him, Maddalena puzzled

out at last, was not being able to see where they were

going with his own eyes; he had known of radar, of

coursesome of the wealthier fishing-families in Grad-

gnol could afford both it and a fish-finder, whereas the

poor families had to settle for the latter onlybut the

little screen was no psychological equivalent for eye-

sight.

It was, naturally, out of the question to go on deck

with a hundred-fifty-knot wind howling past them; they

were only able to sit in the after cockpit because the

fairing over the cabin had been subtly altered to make it

aerodynamically efficient at these speeds. But when

Bracy showed signs of real distress at this headlong

career, she decided they might risk running for a while

on manual control, to show that the ultimate responsibil-

ity had not been ceded to the machines.

That was almost the last decision she took in life.

Some enormous marine creaturenot a wolfshark, but

nearly as large and quite as solidshowed up on the

fish-finder, and seeing such a huge obstacle dead ahead

Bracy yelled with alarm and put the helm hard over.

The boat dipped its side in the water, because the foils

could not cope with such a violent change of direction,

and for half a mile they skidded in a tight circle with

spray streaming over the deck and great shuddering

slams of water battering the hull.

By the time Maddelena got the helm away from him

and let the boat straighten of her own accord, the cause

of the trouble was miles astern. But that was the last at-

tempt the fisher-boy made to control his craft at its new

maximum velocity.

Especially when they were compelled to slow to avoid

comment on sighting other ships, Maddalena had a good

deal of time to talk to the boy, and by the end of the

voyage had come to like him a great deal. Faced with

such problems as he had, many youths would have given

np at once; instead, orphaned, with nothing but this

trawler as a means of livelihood, he had grimly set out to

replace two healthy, hard-working adults with decades

of seafaring experience. That sort of thing took guts of a

different kind than those needed to save one from panic

at the sight of strange armoured figures chasing a hospi-

tal patient through a nightmare of menacing machinery.

She had thought of him entirely as an instrument, a way

to escape the surveillance of the Cyclopeans and follow

Kobi to Rimerley's island; now at last she came to see

him as a personshy, ambitious even though trapped by

circumstances, and intensely proud.

Also, handicapped as he was by his overdose of radia-

tion, he had the kind of tough persistence legend attrib-

uted to the pre-galactic coolie who, half-starved,

half-frozen, dressed in rags, had maintained unstoppable

energy.

By the time they came over the horizon to Rimerley's

island, and accordingly had to slow to typical trawler

speed to escape notice, she had extensively revised her

original plan and spent a couple of hours before nightfall

and the landing in briefing him with the new instruc-

tions.

It was ironical that they should be able to drift with

the current here, in plain view, Maddalena thought as she

surveyed the doctor's private domain. So much the bet-

ter, thoughto have had to wait till dark before coming

into line-of-sight would have imposed extra difficulties.

With a powerful magnifying periscope which had

been built into the mast of the trawler and projected a

needle-sharp image on a screen at the bottom, she studied

the prospect before her. Clearly, Rimerley was one of

Cyclops's "top twentieth", as Gus Langenschmidt called

themindeed, he must be among the thousand wealthiest

men on the planet to maintain premises like these. A

huge house, part of it extending out into the ocean so

mat one coma en)oy tne sensation or t)emg in a vast

aquarium by descending a short flight of steps; a private

dockyard with two skimmers at the quay; a 'copter

parked behind the house, and beyond that a road wind-

ing up to the topmost point on the island, where trees

concealed the ground.

If it was true that he had built his fortune by selling

the spare parts of human beings, he must have run

through scorespossibly hundredsof victims, Mad-

dalena thought, and the realisation made her stomach

churn with nausea.

Faint from below came the sound of martial music,

and then a voice too muted for her to catch the words,

but having a distinctly coaxing tone. Bracy was playing

with the radio again. Though his family had had one be-

fore his parents died, he had had to sell it, he told her,

during the hungry month of last winter, and in any case

the one which the Corps had fitted aboard the trawler

was far superior to any in Grarignol.

She continued her study of the land ahead, looking for

signs of life. Some turned up: a man came back from

taking in fish-lines, carrying a large basket of gloaming

sea-creatures; a man in white, probably a mechanic, came

out to attend to some job on the 'copter and went into

the house again.

"Bracy! "she called.

"Just a moment." There was a pause, and then he put

his head out of the cockpit. "Yes?"

"I'm sorrywere you listening to something?"

The boy's lip curled. "A government announcement.

The man was saying how the closing of your base would

make life more difficult, but we must think of our poor

brothers on the refugee planets. What I want to know is,

why are they so eager to have more poor people to cope

with when they can't even give us a decent living?"

Good question, Maddalena commented silently. Dur-

ing the voyage Bracy had plied her with questions about

Cyclops and other planets, and had shown a surprising

degree of natural insight into the problems they dis-

cussed. Most likely, Maddalena assumed, his parents had

been comparatively literate as Cyclopean fisherfolk -went,

and had done their best to pass on their education to

their son.

"You wanted something?" Bracy added.

"Yes. I want to find out if there's any communication

going on between the island and some other part of the

planet. There's a device for doing that among the equip-

ment below. I showed you how it worksdo you think

you can remember the details?"

"Yes, I think so. If I can't, I'll be honest." He gave her

a flashing grin and vanished again.

She chuckled, resuming her examination of the island's

image. Shortly, he called back to her.

"No, there are no communicators operating as close as

that. The nearest is over to the eastward1 think it's a

pleasure-boat acknowledging an alteration of schedule."

"Goodthank you. Now how about internal commu-

nicators?"

"Right!"

And within minutes: "Maddalena! There's a conversa-

tion going on I think you might like to hear."

She rose in a lithe movement and dropped through the

open hatch. A voice was coming from the remote tapper

which enabled eavesdropping on room-to-room commu-

nicators at distances up to ten miles.

"everything ready by midnight," the crisp words

rang out. "Now there must be no delays! I know I al-

ways say that, but tonight is more crucial than usual,

even. We must have the entire job finished within half

an hour."

A different voice said, "With this quarantine and em-

bargo business, what happens if they recognise an un-

scheduled landing and take it for a Corps intrusion?"

Maddalena tensed.

"They won't!" the first voice snapped. "It's not an un-

scheduled landing. This one is for Quist, remember?

And I got her to have it officially scheduled. I don't

blow what it's being called: luxury goods for private

consumption, I think"

An appreciative though fawning laugh broke in, and a

muttered, "Very good, very good!"

"So!" the first speaker said. "Anything else?"

"No, I guess not."

"Get on with it, then."

The tapper went silent; there were no communicators

in use on the island any longer.

"What was all that about?" Bracy demanded, staring.

"Something is going to be brought down-from space,

for Quist," Maddalena said. "At about midnight. That

much is clear, but exactly what"

She broke off, a light dawning. Langenschmidt had

mentioned to her his half-formed suspicion that the ulti-

matum for evacuation of the Corps base might be con-

nected with Kolb's leg and the risk of its origin being

discovered, but he had been unable to see what link

could compel Quist into action. Suppose, though, it

wasn't a matter of compulsion, but of bribery; suppose

she was due to become one of Rimerley's customers for

the renewal of some failing organfrom her recorded

image at the Non-Interference Conference it was plain

she was no longer youthfuland Rimerley had told her

that she would lose her chance if the Corps cut off the

supply of spare parts . . .

"That must be it!" she exclaimed, and ignoring Bracy's

bewilderment she dived for the subspace communicator

which was her link with the Corps. The bands it used

were untappable, as far as was known, by any equipment

on Cyclops, but just in case Corps intelligence was faulty

in that area there was an automatic scrambler on the cir-

cuit as well.

"Maddalena Santos," she said as soon as she had her

connection. *1 want to speak to Commandant Langen-

schmidt."

"I'm sorry," came the smooth reply. "The comman-

dant has been called off the planet for a conference on

redeployment of base personnel."

"Damnalready? Then give me whoever*s acting for

him."

"Dr Nole is the senior officer at present on duty, bat

he's engaged with the Cyclopean inspection team at the

hospital. Is there anyone else you wish to speak to?"

"Not particularly," Maddelena sighed. "Wait a second,

though, I have an idea. Can you record a scrambled

message and get it to Langenschmidt for me?"

"Yes, certainly. Just one moment." A series of clicks;

then"Go ahead now, please. Recording."

In terse words Maddalena summed up her suspicions

and ended, "By the way, Gus! Since you're so sure

you'll be back as soon as the Cyclopeans feel the pinch,

why not try and con the authorities into assigning this

evacuation fleet to search for the unknown ZRP, instead

of just tamely spreading our personnel here over a dozen

bases and leaving it at that? It's going to take at least

thirty ships to shift what's being lifted awayhalf that

number could carry out a thorough sweep of the high-

probability locations.

"Of course, knowing you, that's probably exactly

what you're doing at the moment."

She closed the message and thanked the Corps opera-

tor. Then she turned to Bracy.

"Can you use an energy gun?" she demanded.

The boy shook his head.

"I think I'll pass the next half hour teaching you.

Whatever's being brought down here at midnight is

valuable, and if we interfere there may be trouble.

Lucky I brought a spare gun along, isn't it?"

xvm

Darkness closed around the boat, still drifting as any

fishing-boat might when awaiting the arrival of a shoal

along the line of a nutrient-rich current.

"That makes us effectively invisible to the naked eye,"

Maddalena muttered. "Now let's make ourselves invisible

to his burglar alarms, and we can go ashore."

Bracy had tried and failed to comprehend the concepts

behind this cryptic statement. He put out his arm pas-

sively, and Maddalena strapped a miniature radio beacon

around it.

She had programmed a geepee computer for the task

of making them electronically invisible, and it was per-

haps the neatest trick of all those they were using. Essen-

tially she had shifted frequencies on the tapper and

connected both it and the computer to an ultra-tight-

beam transmitter. The beacons would show their loca-

tion at any given moment; the tapper would indicate on

what band the detectors were operating, and the trans-

mitter would put out an eddy current, so to speak,

which would confuse the circuits in the detectors and

cause them to record something as diffuse and harmless

as a patch of sea-mist. The fact that slight mist usually

followed sundown at these latitudes in summer was an

additional advantage.

"Remember, though," Maddalena admonished Bracy

sternly, "even if it is pitch dark, and you're masked for

the detectors, you can still make noise, and that'll give us

away. Be careful."

Bracy nodded and grinned. The grin vanished as he

glanced down at the butt of his energy gun, protruding

from its water-proof holster. Maddalena felt a twinge of

worrywas it wise to have given him the weapon when

any instruction had necessarily to be theoretical? She

had restrained him from firing it only with difficulty,

but she dared not let him see a bolt actually fireden-

ergy guns were not the sort of weapons common fisher-

folk could afford, and their discharge was extremely

conspicuous, especially over water where they raised a

wall of steam fifty or more feet high.

Too late to change her mind nowtime was wasting,

and well before midnight they had to explore the house,

the nearby estate and the high ground behind, among the

trees. For that, in Maddalena's judgement, was the only

place a spaceship could put down near here, unless it

landed on water, and that too was an attention-getting

event attended by clouds of spray and high waves.

Almost certainly among the trees, she had concluded.

And going at a snail's pace, it would talte a couple of

hours to carry out their preliminary survey, let alone

prepare counter-action against Rimerley and his staff.

"Anchor!" she told Bracy.

Silent as a ghost, he lowered it to the bottom and gave

a cautious tug to ensure it had gripped. On his whispered

confirmation, Maddalena let herself over the side and,

using a stroke that created minimum disturbance in the

water, set off for the shore.

There were lights on in the extension of the house that

ran along the sea-bed, but the room within was empty.

On a low table lay the remains of a mealthe eater, ap-

parently, had had little appetite tonight. Through win-

dows higher up, women could be seen moving about

three of them in all, one in white, the others in dark

green gowns.

Maddalena led Bracy some distance along the shore

before heading inland. She had already got a clear idea

of the layout of the house: the seaward side was the

owner's, the landward included servants' quarters and all

the domestic and mechanical offices. There seemed to be

no trace of children; presumably either Rimerley was

unmarried or he maintained a separate establishment else-

where. Or, of course, he might be old enough to have

children already grownshe had somehow been thinking

of him as a young man, greedy and ruthless, rather than

an old man, merely callous.

Their first stop was the dock where the skimmers

were moored. No one noticed them as they bent over

first one, then the other, of the graceful craft. From

there, they went to the 'copter. The mechanic was just

finishing his job, wiping his hands and putting away

some tools. They waited for five minutes to let him get

clear, and then Maddalena tossed a small sticky object at

the side of the machine. It clung as it touched.

Now, anyone attempting to leave the island by skim-

mer or 'copter would attract the unwelcome attention of

a homing rocket with a shaped-charge head, unless he

was sufficiently observant to remove the sticky objects

Maddalena had planted.

Which she doubted. The said person was likely to be

in a wild panic.

"Door shut," Maddalena whispered very softly. "Now

the ventilators."

The house's air-conditioning system was quite conspic-

uous from the trawler: two high circulating stacks led

down to the pump-chamber on the roof. Bracy had as-

sured her that he, accustomed to grappling with solar

sails in unexpected gales of wind, could get to the top

easily; nonetheless, she waited with heart in mouth and

hand on gun while he scaled the intake stack and placed

at the top the three glass canisters tied into a bundle with

an explosive cord which she had given him. There was a

radio-activated fuse on the end of the cord.

She had been puzzling for some time over the matter

of where Justin Kolb would be located; it wasn't until

she was planning this job on the air-conditioning that she

saw the most likely possibility. Any sensible doctor tak-

ing patients into his private dwelling would put them at

the terminal end of the air-circulation system, in case

they had infections which draughts could carry to the

other occupants. As soon as Bracy had come down

safely, she told him to keep watch for her and ap-

proached the window of the room adjacent to the base

of the discharge stack.

And there he was, in a large room full of medical

equipment, watching a musical recording and sipping a

cup of wine. No one else was in the room with him, but

there were open communicators on both sides of the

bed, and a medical scanner was focused on his torso.

Her original plan had ended with the location of Jus-

tin Kolb and his removal to a point from which the

Corps could send down a ship to retrieve him, and she

was glad that she had acquired information leading to a

change of plan. It would have been far too easy, as she

had envisaged it. Just fire the radio-fuse, wait ten

minutes until everyone in the house was unconscious,

smash a way in to bring Kolb to the boat, andend.

Tame. This way was much better.

She had seen enough of the house now, and led Bracy

away from it towards the high ground. They kept a

course parallel to the road, but out of sight of it, a pre-

caution she was glad of when a fast ground-skimmer

hummed up from the house to the concealing trees

ahead, and within minutes came back.

The trees were thickly leaved and prickly, some local

species she hadn't been warned about; before Bracy was

able to show her how to avoid the dropping branches,

she sustained several scratches on her face. They made

the last stretch of their )oumey interminably slow, but at

length they emerged into sight of a small plateau crown-

ing the island.

Maddalena pursed her lips. Even without more help

than starlight, she could see that this was one of the

best-equipped private landing-grounds she had ever

heard of. A squat building dominated it, with an im-

pressive array of antennae on top, mcinding one unmis-

takable one meant for subspace communication over

interstellar distancesa real shock, to find that sort of

equipment here. Maybe the Cyclopean government was

conniving at Rimerley's actions'

And what could it be that was expected at or soon af-

ter midnight? A new leg for Justin Kolb? Such a

gruesome piece of evidence as that would be enough to

convict Rimerley and his associates even in a Cyclopean

court, let alone a galactic one!

"What now?" Bracy whispered, touching her arm to

attract her attention.

"I'm going to try and plan an ambush for the people

who are coming from space," Maddalena told him,

equally softly. "I don't know how many there may be of

them, nor how many of the staff from the house will

come with Rimerley to greet the ship. Those who stay

behind, of course, won't pose any problems . . . Oh,

damnation!"

She clapped her hand to her forehead.

"What's wrong?" Bracy demanded. He had put on a

wolfish grin at the thought of what was to hold back

those in the house from interferingit was a trick that

tickled him immensely, especially since he had had per-

sonal experience of the same brand of anaesthetic gas

when he was cornered in the operations control room of

the Corps base. The grin had vanished immediately Mad-

dalena let out her stifled exclamation.

"Rimerley may not come up here by ground-skimmer.

He may prefer to use the 'copter, and if he does, it'll be

brought down instantly. I'll have to go back and unbug

the damned thing!"

"Let me go," Bracy suggested.

She hesitated. But so far he had shown himself reliable,

and after all there was little time now . . .

"Okay!" she decided. "All you have to do is get close

enough to take off the sticky thingyon saw -where I

threw it?"

"Yes. I can do it quicidy and come back soon!"

"Good luck!" she shot after him as he disappeared.

Then, furious with her own excess of ingenuity, she

set off on a tour of the miniature spaceport, looking for

the best hiding-places and points of vantage. To ambush

the crew of an interstellar ship with only two persons

was a tall order, but there was equipment in the trawler

which should make it possible, if she could get back

there, collect it, and get it installed in time . . . What was

keeping Bracy? Was it necessary to wait for himcould

she not meet him on the way back to the shore and save

time?

Better not.

The stars crept around the sky towards the midnight

configuration, and still no Bracy. With a start she real-

ised that if he took any longer it would already be too

late to fetch what she needed from the trawler.

And it was too late! From the direction of the house

came the distinctive drone of the 'copter's engines; she

could see lights moving around its parking-place, and

shadowy figures crossing bright lamps.

It began to rise, and for long moments she was imagin-

ing the whish and crash of the rocket which was keyed

to home on the sticky beacon. But nothing happened.

The 'copter merely turned towards the tiny spaceport.

There was a rusde in the undergrowth beside her, and

she spun, hand slapping the butt of her gun.

"Bracy!" the boy said in alarm, and she recognized

him. Furious, she railed at him.

"What kept yon? Now we have no time to go to the

trawler and get what we need!"

"I'm sorry. I dared not go close. They were working

on the machinefitting something like a tray under its

belly. In the end I could not wait any more. I caught

one of the men, about my size, as he went out of sight of

the others, and did so." Graphically, he closed his hand

on his own throat and groaned. "Then I took his clothes

and went openly to the machine to remove the sticky

thing. I was just in timea man of great importance

came from the house to see that all was well with the

work. So I went back and killed the man I had taken

clothes from, and got rid of his body. They looked for

as long as I was near enough to hear, but I think they

will not find him. There is a wolfshark in the baydid

you see it, earlier?"

"No r'Maddalena exclaimed.

"Yes. Not feeding, not followed by buzzards, but they

are always hungry for human meat."

Maddalena digested that information as well as she

could.

"What now?" Bracy pressed her.

She shrugged. "We play by ear, I guess."

"What?"

"Never mind. Watch, and listen, and take your orders

from my signals. We shall simply have to do as well as

we can with two energy guns and the advantage of sur-

prise."

She motioned him silent, for the 'copter was humming

down over the treetops, and the last scene of the night's

drama was all set

XIX

As the ship slanted through the fringes of the air, Lors

Heirndall wondered grimly )ust how much of his ex-

planation his men had believed. He'd told them that this

deal was so profitable they could afford to return home

ahead of schedule, and there weren't likely to be many

complaints about thatthe natives could get along with-

out Receivers of the Sick for a while, until the next time

some death-fearing client put in for a new heart or some

wealthy idiot crossed up another wolfshark, like Justin

Kolb.

Nonetheless, it was quite unprecedented in the history

of their venture to pull the entire team off the ZRP and

go home en masse.

He'd taken the decision to do this in cold blood. If by

any chance Rimerley had been wrong in his estimate of

the effect on the Corps of Quist's ultimatum, and some

too-nosy doctor had thought to check the gene-type of

Kolb's leg, he didn't want to be trapped by the Patrol on

a noisome, dirty, mud-grubbing planet not worth a snap

of the fingers.

There wasn't any question of cancelling their long-

term plans completely, of course. In a few years more,

he himself would inevitably become a customer for Ri-

merley's skilled attentionssometimes, after great effort,

he found it hard to breathe, and knew that his lungs and

bronchi were aging. And why should he squander most

of his hard-earned fortune on a trip to some prosperous

world, for medical treatment, when he was indispensable

to Rimerley and could persuade the doctor to overhaul

him without charge?

All this aside, though, he did wonder very seriously

whether his men had not guessed the truth behind his or-

der to pull out.

It was lucky the trip was such a short one; the ship

was crowded, and in a confined space tempers could eas-

ily be rubbed raw.

Also there was the girl, who was indisputably attrac-

tive. Most of the men hadn't been able to overcome their

revulsion against dirt and take themselves a native

woman during their stay on the ZRP. Now Soraya had

been washed and disinfected, though . . . Yes: the

shortness of the journey was something to be thankful

for.

"They're waiting for us at the landing ground," the

pilot reported unnecessarily. "I'm going straight in."

"You're watching out for Patrol ships? With the evac-

uation of the Corps base, I'd expected local space to be

crawling with them."

"They're over the shoulder of the planet," the pilot

grunted. "Two, two and a half thousand miles from

where we're setting down."

Not a hitch. Heirndall found himself relaxing from un-

noticed tension.

Everything, indeed, went with such smoothness that he

was almost disappointed to have wasted so much energy

on needless apprehension. The ship settled with hardly a

bumpthe pilot had become accustomed to rough land-

ings on the ZRP, and this was the next best thing to a.

public spaceport. Heirndall was already at the port when

the all-clear lamps winked on, and the panels slid back to

reveal the night outside, and a few glinring lights silhou-

etting a parked 'copter with a group of four men close

by.

"Wait a moment!" Heirndall snapped to those of his

own team who were excessively eager to jump down,

and called in a low voice across the field. "Doctor?"

"Here I am," Rimerley answered. "You weren't Jboth-

ered, were you?"

"No, no challengesnothing. Can you take the girl

down in the 'copter? I've kept her in coma all the way."

"Yes, there's a cradle slung for her stretcher. Get her

over here quickly and we'll take her to the house. Then

I'll come back for you."

"Right!" Heirndall turned and gestured curtly for the

girl to be carried to the lock. He thought it as well not

to tell Rimerley yet that there would have to be at least

three trips with the 'copter to bring down all the men

who had returned with him.

Soraya was carried by two complaining bearers over

to the 'copter and placed in the cradle. Heirndall walked

with her, and as soon as the job was done nodded to Ri-

merley.

"Off you gobut don't be too long over sending back

the 'copter, will you?"

Rimerley, edgy, caught a false note in the words, and

gave him a long hard stare. Then he walked a few paces

away, beyond the pool of light in which the 'copter

rested, so that he could see the dim glow of the ship's

lock. There were more craning, peering heads in view

than there ought to have been.

"Heirndall, have you brought your whole damned

team with you?" he rasped.

Heirndall took a deep breath. "Yes. And we're not go-

ing back till the pressure is off."

Starded, the men who had come up with Rimerley

closed on their boss; similarly, catching Heirndall's words

and finding their half-formed suspicions confirmed, ev-

eryone from the ship came scrambling out of the lock

and hurried to ask frantic questions. There was a bab-

bling argument within seconds, and accusations and

counter-accusations poured out as though a dam had

burst.

Couldift be better, Maddalena thought. That's every-

one from the ship outside now. I'll bet on itthere sim-

ply wovldn't be room for any more. And they said

something about bringing a girl with them. From the

ZRP, beyond doubt.

She nudged Bracy, who slipped away into the

darkness a score of paces, and as soon as he was at his ap-

pointed position she rose to her feet.

Her voice rang out with shocking authority, amplified

to ten rimes natural volume. "Stand still, all of you! I am

an executive officer of the Corps Galacrica, and you arc

under arrest for violations of the Unified Galactic

Code!"

The effect of the roaring order was all Maddalena had

hoped for. Long seconds passed with everyone on the

port immobilised by shock; during the passage of those

seconds, she pressed the little button on a device clipped

to her belt and transmitted the signal which would ex-

plode the cord tying the three glass cylinders together at

the top of the intake stack supplying the house's air.

Enough anaesthetic to knock out an army flowed slug-

gishly down to the ventilators.

Then the man whom she had managed to identify as

Rimerley quicker-witted than his companionsbroke

from the group and ran hell-bent for the 'copter. Shouts

greeted this act, and someone with good sense yelled,

"Stop him!"

"Patrol Probationer Bracy!" Maddalena shouted into

her loud-hailer. "Disable that helicopter!"

And for pity's sake, do it without injuring the girl

slung underneath!

She thought he would never respond, and was lifting

her own gun when at last he did.

Perfect.

He had displayed the unexpected good sense not to

hurry over this first use of his weapon; he had remained

calm enough to sight as he had been told, to steady his

arm, hold his breath, and only then let go the bolt.

It blazed across the field, illuminating the entire island

as brilliantly as lightning, and sheared away the rotor

from the 'copter just as Rimerley got the power on and

turned the blades into a shimmering disc.

Droplets of molten metal shattered the transparent

roof of the pilot compartment into shards of opaque

plastic, and Rimerley screamed like a frightened beast.

But it was unlikely the girl, protected by the craft's hull,

had suffered any hurt.

"Thank you, Bracy," Maddalena said at full volume.

"The rest of you, stay where you are, and if one of these

disgusting butchers makes a move, or tries to run for it,

burn him, understood? Bracy, come over and help me

disarm them."

There was a powerful psychological impact in the un-

leashed violence of an energy gun, even to people raised

on Cyclops, where violence was far commoner than on

most civilised worlds. Sullen, sick-faced with terror, the

cluster d { men waited as patiently as cattle in a slaugh-

terhouse for Bracy and Maddalena to come up to them.

Bracy was grinning all over his face, he was so pleased

with his contribution to the night's work; Maddalena

had to scowl ferociously before he smoothed his features

into a pattern more suited to a probationer on official

business.

The technique Maddalena had devised for this stage of

the proceedings worked beautifully. Bracy came up to

each man in turn, gun in his right hand, palming in his

left an anaesthetic capsule with a self-injector attached.

He clapped the victim on the shoulder and left the cap-

sule sticking to the flesh while he withdrew any weapon

the man had at his belt: in all, four of them had arms. A

look of vague surprise would cross the man's face, and

he would slump about half a minute later.

Meantime, Maddalena had gone over to the 'copter,

playing a handlight on the wreckage. Rimerley was sit-

ting still and moaning. Below him, the girl lay uncaring,

long black hair draped over the end of the stretcher.

Hminm! Very pretty! I wonder if they toere going

toto dismantle her for spares!

But she had no time for such gruesome reflections.

There was a flash from behind her, and she whirled. The

tall, cruel-nosed man who had supervised the bringing of

the girl from the shipHeirndall, Rimerley had called

himhad broken from the group and was dashing

towards the dark shelter of the trees. Bracy had loosed a

bolt at him, and fired wide.

Maddalena's gun was np on the instant, and her bolt

did not miss.

Those of the group who were still conscious gaped,

and then, in comical unison, doubled up to vomit on the

ground. At this range, an energy gun turned a man into

a handful of calcined bones, and a smell, sickeningly de-

licious, of well-roasted meat...

Maddalena waited till she was sure Bracy had the situ-

ation under control again, holstered her gun, and turned

back to Rimerley. He had regamed some of his self-pos-

session, and was bieating into the communicator, trying

to raise his staff back at the house.

"That won't do you any good," Maddalena said curt-

ly. "I gassed the house and they'll sleep till morning.

Come onget down from there! "

Like a badly operated marionette, Rimerley complied,

falling awkwardly and twisting his ankle. He limped

when Maddalena ordered him to move towards his col-

leagues, and made a whimpering complaint about such

treatment.

"If you complain once more," Maddalena told him

stonily, "I'll take a leg off you, the way you did to the

poor bastard who provided a graft for Jusdn Kolb. Is

that clear?"

Rimerley gulped enormously, and began to waddle

hastily forward.

"That's the lot," Bracy said proudly, indicating the

scattered forms oa the ground. "And I've piled their

guns over there."

"Excellent," Maddalena said. "I never thought we'd do

it, to be frank. You've been quite amazing." She clapped

him on the shoulder, forgetful for the moment of what

he had )ust been doing, and was first startled, then

amazed, when he put up his hand anxiously to make cer-

tain it was not the end of his usefulness and his turn to

be knocked unconscious.

Rimerley, breathing raggedly, fought to recover his

dignity. He said, "I demand to know by what right

you"

"I told you," Maddalena snapped. "If you want spe-

cific charges, the main one will probably be murder, and

the subsidiary, interference with a Zarathustra Refugee

Planet."

Rimerley gave an oily smile. He said, "My govern-

ment contests the legality of the non-interference rule, as

you ought to know. And plenty of planets recognise the

right of euthanasia. If you're assuming that we commit-

ted murder to obtain the grafts we have employed,

you're wrong. I can show you a release for each of the

donors, agreeing to euthanasia because of incurable

illness or serious injury."

"Including the girl over there?" Maddalena countered,

and saw with satisfaction the look of horror that wiped

away the doctor's smile.

"What now?" Bracy pressed her.

"Well, since they've been so kind as to provide the

means," Maddalena said, "I think we might as well go

directly to see Commandant Langenschmidt. I haven't

flown a spaceship for several years, but I was taught how

in Corps indoctrination, and they say what the Corps

teaches you can never be forgotten. Want to try space

for a change, Bracy?"

The boy hesitated. Then self-respect overcame his

doubts, and he pat his shoulders back and nodded vigor-

ously.

"Then help me drag this load of carrion aboard, and

we'll leave." Maddalena said.

XX

The ship bringing the three-merober board of inquiry

from Earth, which had pat the parsecs behind it at a

speed to make light look like a tired snail, dropped into

its assigned slot at the Cy-clops base. The three board

members emerged: Senior General Lyia Baden, small of

build but large of voice, and two colonelsa staff rank,

indicating that they had not served in the Patrol, but had

spent their entire careers in administration.

"General Baden?" said Dr Anstey Nole, stepping for-

ward to greet them. "My name is Nole, second senior

officer here at present."

General Baden looked at her surroundings with an icy

blue eye. She said at length, "You're under ultimatum to

leave this base by tomorrow at latest, aren't you? Where

are your preparations for departure?"

Indeed, it was obvious to the most casual glance that

the work of the base was proceeding normallyfar from

tearing down the installations, men and robots were at

work on repair and renovation, a fact which had given

the Cyclopean inspectors a bad time recently. It made

them feel peculiarly helpless, for there was nothing

whatever a backward world like Cyclops could do

against the Corps if it decided to dig in its heels.

Major Barly strode forward from where he had been

standing, next to Nole. "I want to register the strongest

possible protest against the defiant behaviour of your

base commandant!" he thundered. "Until yesterday he

was according us full cooperation. Then suddenly he

turned about and countermanded all his orders, and re-

fused to see me and explain his high-handed obstinacy."

"Hmmm!" General Baden looked him over. "Who

are you?"

"My apologies." Barly recollected himself and clicked

his heels. "Bengt Barly, Major, Cyclops Space Force, as-

signed to supervise the evacuation of this base."

"I see. Where is this commandant now? Why didn't

he come down to meet us on our arrival?" A chill per-

vaded the general's words.

"Commandant Langenschmidt is awaiting you in his

villa. General," Nole said calmly. "I am asked to take

you there at once."

"Carry on, then," the general said grimly. "I shall

want an explanationand it will have to be a good one."

Langenschmidt greeted the newcomers with a mask of

inscrutability. He was not alone in the room where he

received them. In addition to six armed Corpsmen, there

were an aging man who looked to be ill from some cause

subtler than diseasepossibly fear; a youth who held

himself as erect as a Corpsman but clearly wasn't, for his

hair was completely shaven, not trimmed to the Patrol's

standard inch; a very young girl with dark hair and

wide, doe-like eyes full of alarm; and a woman in

undress Corps uniform around whose mouth played the

suspicion of a smile.

Without preamble. General Baden said, "I'm told by

the head of the Cyclopean inspection team that you've

countermanded the orders to evacuate. Why?"

Not twitching an eyelid, Langenschmidt retorted, "Be-

cause the base is not going to be closed. Furthermore, I

intend to ask that the ships assigned to transport our per-

sonnel away, which are released from that duty now, be

reassigned to me for a special task." He paused. "In fact,

I think about half the total number of ships will suffice

the rest can return to regular duty."

"Have you taken leave of your senses, man?" rapped

the general, emphasising the last word as though she had

long ago ceased to expect intelligence in members of the

opposite sex.

"General, if you'd sit down? Chairs!" Langenschmidt

barked, and the Corpsmen moved hastily to bring some.

"I think you need only listen to me for a few minute

to see I know what I'm talking about. I'd like to

start by introducing all those present, if I may. Ah . . .

Maddalena Santos here is attached to my staff for special

duties, and I'll be asking you to take back with you a

commendation in her name for diligence above the call

of duty. But that's by the way. This young man here is a

Cyclopean fisherboy from a place called Grarignol,

Bracy Dyge; he has applied for probadoner status in the

Corps and has so conducted himself as to earn my max-

imum approval for the application."

Bracy grinned broadly and went back to the pastime

mainly engaging his attention at the moment: looking at

the slender, attractive girl next to him.

"This," Langenschmidt continued, "is Dr Aleazar Ri-

merley, who is not here under quite such favourable aus-

pices. He is in fact under arrest for systematic and

flagrant violation of several clauses of the Unified Galac-

tic Code, details of which I shall be giving you.

"And thischild, I think one must say," he concluded,

turning, "is named Soraya. She doesn't understand much

of what we are saying, which is hardly surprising. She

wasn't brought up to speak pure Galactic, but an Irani.

dialect with some Galactic admixtures. She is, in

fact''and he looked straight at General Baden, wanting

to see the full impact of his bombshell"a native of ZRP

Number Twenty-two, whose location we haven't yet es-

tablished, but which narrows down to a thirty-parsec

sphere now, and"

"Twenty-two?" echoed the general in a strangled

voice.

"But" said both colonels simultaneously.

Langenschmidt let his face relax at last, into a beaming

smile. "Have I your permission to explain my actions

now?"

It had been decided at the last moment to make the

closing session of the Conference on Non-Interference

with Zarathustra Refugee Planets a public affair, with as

much pomp and spectacle as Cyclopean resources could

furnish at short notice, and full coverage by the planet's

news services. There was much adulation of Omar

Haust, the living representative of those who on un-

tamed worlds struggled to wrest a precarious living from

a hostile environmentat least, that was how Quist's

speech compositor put it, and she was far too preoccu-

pied to worry about the phrase herself. But there were

some worried faces in the public seats, where Cyclopean

notables, hurriedly summoned to show themselves, sat

listening and scrutinising the offworld delegates arranged

at a long table on the dais of the conference hall.

The matter troubling Quist was the same as it had

been since she first yielded to Rimerley's irresistible

bribe: would or would not the Corps leave enough sal-

vageable material to balance the planetary budget this

year, while they cast around for some other external rev-

enue to replace what was being thrown away?

Gradually, through her mood of anxiety, a noise from

outside the hall began to seep. She started, turning to

gaze at the window which offered a view of the large

square outside. There, thousands of the city's people

were watching on public telescreens the proceedings of

the conference.

They shouldn't be shouting like that. The thought

briefly crossed her mind, and as it passed she leapt in

amazement from her seat.

Down across the frame of the tall window a mon-

strous shining shape had moved, like a fish settling

through clear water. A spaceship. A spaceship so large

that the entire square was barely wide enough to afford

it room.

Others in the hall had seen it go by, and the bewil-

dered speaker at therostram one of the lesser delegates

from Earth, heaping praise on Cyclops for its noble self-

sacrificebroke off his address. The shouting from out-

side turned to real screaming now.

The ranked notables started to get up, muttering in

alarm, and then the scene was frozen by the impact of

shock.

The tall main doors of the hall were slammed open

not sliding back into the walls as they were meant to

move, but simply buried from their frames by a tremen-

dous blow from the far side. Over them, with the stolid

tramp of machines, came what most of the people

present had never seen except in historical recordings: a

squadron of the Corps Galactica in full battle equipment,

armour tough enough to repel an energy bolt, so heavy

that it was driven by miniaturised fusion reactors mounted

at the back, and polished to more-than-mirror brilliance

in every band of the spectrum. The crazy reflections

rendered it almost impossible to focus on the wearers,

making them seem like nightmare illusions.

That was why Gus Langenschmidt had insisted it be

worn. He didn't expect any resistance fierce enough to

justify its actual use.

The squadron wheeled right and left and filed around

the hill, taking station to surround it entirely, and he

came in last of all, striding directly towards Quist where

she stood, petrified, among the offworld delegates.

He wanted to get his opening statement out before

any of the news technicians regained enough presence of

mind to switch off the exterior transmissions.

"Alura Quist" he said, and the words rang around the

hall like the knell of doom, "I am Commandant Gustav

Langenschmidt, a duly appointed executive of the Corps

Galactica, and I arrest you for complicity in the follow-

ing violations of the Unified Galactic Code, to wit: mur-

der with malice, murder by default, conspiracy to"

The screaming and panic began then. Langenschmidt

paused; his squadron was fully- briefed on how to handle

this sort of trouble. It took only a few minutes to restore

calm, with the local notables sitting white-faced in their

chairs, their hands between their knees as though they

were trying to shrink and become too small to be seen,

the offworld delegates muttering frantic unanswerable

questions to each other, and the places of the news tech-

nicians taken by Corpsmen to ensure that the transmis-

sions would go on without a break.

Langenschmidt resumed. "Conspiracy to interfere with

the autonomous development of a Zarathustra Refugee

Planet, conspiracy with Aleazar Rimerley and Lors Heim-

dall and others to murder one Ekim Hakimi and dismem-

ber his corpse, and certain other charges."

He wheeled where he stood, knowing that two ar-

moured men had stamped to Quist's side and pinioned

her arms, and confronted the cowering Cyclopeans in

the public seats. He had intercepted a list of those invited

which was supplied to the news service, and knew that

all those he would name were present.

"Sophy Alt, I charge you with conspiracy with Alea-

zar Rimerley and Lors Heirndall and others to kill one

Mara Rustum and dismember her corpse. Don Ambon-

ine, I charge you with conspiracy with the same parties

to kill one Ali Qurab and dismember his corpse. Ved

Conakry, I charge you"

And so on, the entire miserable tale of Rimerley's rich

clients and their miserable victims, until there were more

than thirty men and women shivering with terror before

him.

Then he handed the documents from which he had

been reading to one of his men, threw back his helmet,

and strode to the dais. With the entire attention of the

planet riveted on him, he began.

"People of Cyclops, and in particular you offworld

visitors who have come here to attend the conference I

so rudely interrupted"he gave them a a sidelong glance

and saw they were listening as inteody as everyone

else"I want to explain the story behind the shocking

scene you have just witnessed.

"You all know about the Zarathustra Refugee Planets.

You perhaps also know that many moreperhaps well

over a million morepeople escaped from the Zarathus-

tra nova than we have to date accounted for.

"Well, we have learned in the past few days that an-

other shipload survived, on a world whose existence was

discovered by accident and not notified to my Corps.

The discoverer was the captain of a tramp space-

freighter, named Lors Heirndall. He was making a some-

what unusual journey along a route served by no regular

space-lines, when the strain proved too great for his en-

gines and he was forced to make an emergency landing

to conduct repairs on a Class Athat's a tolerably habit-

ableplanet in an unvisited system.

"There, he discovered the descendants of a group of

Irani-stock Zarathustrans, making the best of what they

had.

"He kept the discovery to himself and his crew, be-

lieving that in some way he would eventually be able to

exploit this secret. Not long afterwards, his chance oc-

curred. A certain Justin Kolb, celebrated on Cyclops for

his part in an accident in space, required the replacement

of his right leg. Although he was in the care of your

planet's leading surgeon, Aleazar Rimerley, the facilities

here were not adequate for full-scale limb regeneration,

and sending a patient to a more prosperous world is

costly.

"Heirndall went to Rimerley with a proposition. He

could secure for Kolb a replacement graft, a limb

matched closely to his own, for a fraction of the cost of

regeneration; Rimerley could charge his clientnot

Kolb; Alura Quist was paying, out of your planetary

fundsthe cost of a regeneration, and Heirndall and Ri-

merley could split the surplus profit.

"Rimericy accepted the offer. And Heirndall sectired

the limb as promised, by a peculiarly unpleasant decep-

tion practised on the unfortunate inhabitants of his pri-

vate ZRP.

"In the early days of their life there, they had insti-

tuted a humane system of quarantine for people suffering

from disease beyond their limited resources to cureand

there were plenty of those. Volunteers acted as what

they called Receivers of the Sick, to convey them away

from their community and the danger of infecting oth-

ers, and tended them until they recovered or died.

"This system was on the verge of disappearanceso

often had the Receivers died of the same illness as their

patients, the idea seemed no longer practical. But Heim-

dall set himself and his men up as a new team of Re-

ceivers, worming their way into the natives' confidence

and taking away not the truly ill, whom they preferred

to disregard, but those whose bodily characteristics ren-

dered them suitable as suppliers of spare parts.

"For Rimerley had seen the possibilities in an unlim-

ited supply of graft material. Not many people on Cy-

clops are rich, but those who are are disproportionately

so, and as greedy for youth as for material wealth. As

you have heard, no fewer than thirty people in this hall

have enjoyed the fruits of Rimerley's butcherynew

limbs, new eyes, new vital organs!

"It is being pleaded that they did no more than offer

euthanasia to the hopelessly sick, a practice tolerated

here and on most inhabited planets. This is not true.

How do we know?

"You may have heard that the Corps base is under or-

ders to close, ostensibly as a symbol of protest against

non-interference with ZRP's." He twisted his mouth

around the words, and knew the irony was not lost on

his hearers. "You may have seen this as an idealistic ges-

ture, since Cyclops can ill afford to lose the revenue

from the base. Or you may equally have wondered what

possessed Alura Quist to issue her ultimatum.

"She issued it because Rimerley offered her a bribe: a

new lease of life. He knew we were within sight of his

secret; he thought to provide us with a distraction that

would make our half-formed suspicions seem not worth

the trouble of investigation. And the bait he dangled be-

fore Quist was the body, complete and healthy, of a

young girl named Soraya: a source of new organs to re-

place her failing ones.

"That girl is aliveby a miracleand in our hands.

And she has told how, perfectly well, she was caused to

appear to her friends as the victim of a fatal disease, a

suitable subject for the ministrations of the Receivers of

the Sick. She was not ill at all; she was not offered an

easy death under the pretence that she was sick and in-

curableshe was simply shipped to Cyclops like an ani-

mal to the slaughter."

Langenschmidt paused. "People of Cyclops, it is no

part of the Corps's duty to tell you what you should do.

But I have worked on your planet for many years, and

come to know you at least a little. I am sure you will

knowwha.t you should do."

He turned to look at the pale, trembling conference

delegates. "And as for you," he said, "I hardly need say

that you have seen a Zarathustra Refugee Planet 'inter-

fered with'. Think it over. Andgo home."

For long moments, no one moved. Then, as if in a

dream, the old man from ZRP One, Omar Haust, stood

up and approached Quist. He looked at her as though at

something disgusting found under a stone. Pursed his

lips. Spat full in her face.

Langenschmidt snapped his helmet back over his head

and gave the signal to his men. They left their stations

and went to take hold of the men and women named in

the long criminal indictment. Some passive and hopeless,

some struggling and yelling hysterically, they were led

away.

Last of all, with Langenschmidt at her heels, Qnist was

taken to endure the execration of her planet's people as

she was marched towards the waiting spaceship.

XXI

"Made up your mind about non-interference?" Lan-

genschmidt said to Maddalena with a tone of false jocu-

larity.

There was no attempt to match it in her reply-

depressed, abstracted.

"Gus, that isn't fair. Cyclops isn't a typical civilised

planet, and come to that Heirndall and Rimerley aren't

typical Cyclopeans."

"Granted." He looked down from the wall-length

window of his villa towards the base, now back in full

operation after the cancellation of the evacuation. "On

the other hand, they do seem to be typical of those who

get power, get influence, get wealth simply because they

desire them so greedily. Truly civilised people don't crave

power. They havewhat would one call it?empathy,

perhaps, which holds them back."

"There's another and much older word," Maddalena

said.

"Which is?"

"Conscience." Maddalena stirred as though unable to

find a comfortable position on the luxuriously padded

seat she was using. "But look at it another way, Gus. It's

also empathy which makes me curse when I remember

all the poor sick and crippled people I saw on Thir-

teenin twenty solid years, remember. You've never had

an on-planet assignment lasting longer then weeks or

months. We ought to fix a limitwe ought to say if

these people don't show signs of progress within such a

time, we'll re-contact them openly and help them."

"Can we define progress?" countered Langenschmidt.

"I thought that was one of the basic precepts behind

non-interference. We must have lost our sense of direc-

rion if we can breed Heirndalls and Rimerleys on a so-

called 'civilised world'. Maybe the ZRP's will re-discover

what we've lost."

"I've heard all that," Maddalena snapped. "It still

doesn't Well, take a current conspicuous example. That

poor girl Soraya had a boy-friend at home, and a sick

mother. She was going to be married. We apply the non-

interference rule strictly, and forbid her to return to

her own planet with the memory of what she's seen since

she was kidnapped. Precious little that must be, if she was

kept in coma, but there the ruling stands, and I can't say

I like it."

"In fact, you've chosen a bad example," Langen-

schmidt grunted. "Her adoring boy-friend accepted the

payment Heirndall offered as a means of keeping the

people eager to part with their sick kinfolk, took it

home, and was promptly so well off he could take his

pick of the eligible girls. And did, within the week."

"What? How do you know?" Disbelieving, Mad-

dalena stared at him.

"Report came in a few hours ago. Using the informa-

tion supplied by Heirndall's crew, a Corps party dressed

themselves up as Receivers of the Sick and went to So-

raya's home village. It's going to be a very useful dis-

guise for our permanent agents, thatand I think you

can rely on the non-interference rule being bent far

enough to heal a really deserving case, now and again."

He grinned maliciously. "Wouldn't like your next as-

signment to be a Twenty-two, would you? Or are you

leaving the Corps?"

"Nono, I don't think so. Not yet." Maddalena's at-

tention had been caught by two figures moving beyond

the window: a youth and a girl both with long black

hair. "Is that Bracy and Soraya out there?"

"Haven't you noticed how much time they're spend-

ing together? I took Bracy aside and told him what she'd

been through, and gave him his first Corps assignment

looking after her. Not that he needed orders."

"He's already had his first Corps assignment. With

me."

"He hadn't even applied for probationary status

thenexcept verbally, to Nole, and that doesn't count.

This time it's official: rehabilitation of victim of criminal

assault."

Maddalena laughed, and the sound was gratifyingly

unforced to Langenschmidt's keen ears. "Damn you,

Gus! Why do you have to be such a nice guy?"

"Long practice," he retorted. "When you reach my

age-"

"You're also an idiot, but that must be congenital."

Maddalena's face clouded again. "Seriously, you know

. . . I had had it in mind to apply for another on-planet

posting. In spite of what I said when I first came here.

But I feel I wouldn't be able to tackle the )ob ob)ecriv&-

ly. I've been so submerged in dirt and disease and stupid-

ity and barbarism I'm in danger of thinking of galactic

civilisation as the next thing to paradise. Well, I guess in

some senses it is, but it isn't my idea of paradise. Not

basically."

She paused and looked directly at him.

"Gus, I'd like to postpone my leave. I can, if I wish. I

don't much want to go back to Earthif I was attached

to my home world, I'd never have left it in the first

place. At this distance it seems like an illusion. But

planets like Cyclops are all too real. Could you bear to

have me on your staffsay for a yearwhile I catch up

on reality by degrees?"

"I'd be honoured," Langenschmidt said. "Do you

know something? Long ago1 hadn't thought of it in

years until I spoke to Pavel Brzeska the other day1 told

him I thought you were going to make history eventu-

ally, and I'd like to be around when it happened. Well,

twenty years passed and no history to speak of. And

then suddenly you orbit back into my sector and things

happen. I want to thank you for staying your hand until

I was present as a witness and could have my wish

granted."

"You're a sweetheart," Maddalena said fondly, and put

out her fingers to meet his.