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The Pirates of Ersatz

by Murray Leinster · English · Gutenberg #24035 · 363,783 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Pirates of Ersatz

Author: Murray Leinster

Illustrator: Kelly Freas


        
Release date: December 26, 2007 [eBook #24035]
                Most recently updated: January 3, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24035

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, V. L. Simpson, Bruce Albrecht and
        the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
        https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PIRATES OF ERSATZ ***




Produced by Greg Weeks, V. L. Simpson, Bruce Albrecht and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net





THE PIRATES OF ERSATZ

BY MURRAY LEINSTER


[Illustration]


    _Sometimes it seems nobody loves a benefactor ... particularly
    nobody on a well-heeled, self-satisfied planet. Grandpa always
    said Pirates were really benefactors, though...._


Illustrated by Freas




I


It was not mere impulsive action when Bron Hoddan started for the planet
Walden by stowing away on a ship that had come to his native planet to
hang all his relatives. He'd planned it long before. It was a
long-cherished and carefully worked out scheme. He didn't expect the
hanging of his relatives, of course. He knew that they'd act grieved and
innocent, and give proof that they were simple people leading blameless
lives. They'd make their would-be executioners feel ashamed and
apologetic for having thought evil of them, and as soon as the strangers
left they'd return to their normal way of life, which was piracy. But
while this was going on, Bron Hoddan stowed away on the menacing vessel.
Presently he arrived at its home world. But his ambition was to reach
Walden, so he set about getting there. It took a long time because he
had to earn ship-passage from one solar system to another, but he held
to his idea. Walden was the most civilized planet in that part of the
galaxy. On Walden, Hoddan intended, in order (a) to achieve splendid
things as an electronic engineer, (b) to grow satisfactorily rich, (c)
to marry a delightful girl, and (d) end his life a great man. But he had
to spend two years trying to arrange even the first.

On the night before the police broke in the door of his room, though,
accomplishment seemed imminent. He went to bed and slept soundly. He was
calmly sure that his ambitions were about to be realized. At practically
any instant his brilliance would be discovered and he'd be well-to-do,
his friend Derec would admire him, and even Nedda would probably decide
to marry him right away. She was the delightful girl. Such prospects
made for good sleeping.

And Walden was a fine world to be sleeping on. Outside the capital city
its spaceport received shipments of luxuries and raw materials from
halfway across the galaxy. Its landing grid reared skyward and tapped
the planet's ionosphere for power with which to hoist ships to clear
space and pluck down others from emptiness. There was commerce and
manufacture and wealth and culture, and Walden modestly admitted that
its standard of living was the highest in the Nurmi Cluster. Its
citizens had no reason to worry about anything but a supply of
tranquilizers to enable them to stand the boredom of their lives.

Even Hoddan was satisfied, as of the moment. On his native planet there
wasn't even a landing grid. The few, battered, cobbled ships the
inhabitants owned had to take off precariously on rockets. They came
back blackened and sometimes more battered still, and sometimes they
were accompanied by great hulls whose crews and passengers were
mysteriously missing. These extra ships had to be landed on their
emergency rockets, and, of course, couldn't take off again, but they
always vanished quickly just the same. And the people of Zan, on which
Hoddan had been born, always affected innocent indignation when
embattled other spacecraft came and furiously demanded that they be
produced.

There were some people who said that all the inhabitants of Zan were
space pirates and ought to be hung and compared with such a planet,
Walden seemed a very fine place indeed. So on a certain night Bron
Hoddan went confidently to bed and slept soundly until three hours after
sunrise. Then the police broke in his door.

       *       *       *       *       *

They made a tremendous crash in doing it, but they were in great haste.
The noise waked Hoddan, and he blinked his eyes open. Before he could
stir, four uniformed men grabbed him and dragged him out of bed. They
searched him frantically for anything like a weapon. Then they stood him
against a wall with two stun-pistols on him, and the main body of cops
began to tear his room apart, looking for something he could not guess.
Then his friend Derec came hesitantly in the door and looked at him
remorsefully. He wrung his hands.

"I had to do it, Bron," he said agitatedly. "I couldn't help doing it!"

Hoddan blinked at him. He was dazed. Things didn't become clearer when
he saw that a cop had slit open his pillow and was sifting its contents
through his fingers. Another cop was ripping the seams of his mattress
to look inside. Somebody else was going carefully through a little pile
of notes that Nedda had written, squinting at them as if he were afraid
of seeing something he'd wish he hadn't.

"What's happened?" asked Hoddan blankly. "What's this about?"

Derec said miserably:

"You killed someone, Bron. An innocent man! You didn't mean to, but you
did, and ... it's terrible!"

"Me kill somebody? That's ridiculous!" protested Hoddan.

"They found him outside the powerhouse," said Derec bitterly. "Outside
the Mid-Continent station that you--"

"Mid-Continent? Oh!" Hoddan was relieved. It was amazing how much he was
relieved. He'd had an unbelieving fear for a moment that somebody might
have found out he'd been born and raised on Zan--which would have ruined
everything. It was almost impossible to imagine, but still it was a
great relief to find out he was only suspected of a murder he hadn't
committed. And he was only suspected because his first great achievement
as an electronic engineer had been discovered. "They found the thing at
Mid-Continent, eh? But I didn't kill anybody. And there's no harm done.
The thing's been running two weeks, now. I was going to the Power Board
in a couple of days." He addressed the police. "I know what's up, now,"
he said. "Give me some clothes and let's go get this straightened out."

A cop waved a stun-pistol at him.

"One word out of line, and--_pfft!_"

"Don't talk, Bron!" said Derec in panic. "Just keep quiet! It's bad
enough! Don't make it worse!"

A cop handed Hoddan a garment. He put it on. He became aware that the
cop was scared. So was Derec. Everybody in the room was scared except
himself. Hoddan found himself incredulous. People didn't act this way on
super-civilized, highest-peak-of-culture Walden.

"Who'd I kill?" he demanded. "And why?"

"You wouldn't know him, Bron," said Derec mournfully. "You didn't mean
to do murder. But it's only luck that you killed only him instead of
everybody!"

"Everybody--" Hoddan stared.

"No more talk!" snapped the nearest cop. His teeth were chattering.
"Keep quiet or else!"

Hoddan shut up. He watched--dressing the while as his clothing was
inspected and then handed to him--while the cops completed the
examination of his room. They were insanely thorough, though Hoddan
hadn't the least idea what they might be looking for. When they began to
rip up the floor and pull down the walls, the other cops led him
outside.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a fleet of police trucks in the shaded street outdoors. They
piled him in one, and four cops climbed after him, keeping stun-pistols
trained on him during the maneuver. Out of the corner of his eye he saw
Derec climbing into another truck. The entire fleet sped away together.
The whole affair had been taken with enormous seriousness by the police.
Traffic was detoured from their route. When they swung up on an elevated
expressway, with raised-up trees on either side, there was no other
vehicle in sight. They raced on downtown.

They rolled off the expressway. They rolled down a cleared avenue.
Hoddan recognized the Detention Building. Its gate swung wide. The truck
he rode in went inside. The gate closed. The other trucks went
away--rapidly. Hoddan alighted and saw that the grim gray wall of the
courtyard had a surprising number of guards mustered to sweep the open
space with gunfire if anybody made a suspicious movement.

He shook his head. Nobody had mentioned Zan, so this simply didn't make
sense. His conscience was wholly clear except about his native planet.
This was insanity! He went curiously into the building and into the
hearing room. His guards, there, surrendered him to courtroom guards and
went away with almost hysterical haste. Nobody wanted to be near him.

Hoddan stared about. The courtroom was highly informal. The justice sat
at an ordinary desk. There were comfortable chairs. The air was clean.
The atmosphere was that of a conference room in which reasonable men
could discuss differences of opinion in calm leisure. Only on a world
like Walden would a prisoner brought in by police be dealt with in such
surroundings.

Derec came in by another door, with a man Hoddan recognized as the
attorney who'd represented Nedda's father in certain past interviews.
There'd been no mention of Nedda as toying with the thought of marrying
Hoddan then, of course. It had been strictly business. Nedda's father
was Chairman of the Power Board, a director of the Planetary Association
of Manufacturers, a committeeman of the Banker's League, and other
important things. Hoddan had been thrown out of his offices several
times. He now scowled ungraciously at the lawyer who had ordered him
thrown out. He saw Derec wringing his hands.

An agitated man in court uniform came to his side.

"I'm the Citizen's Representative," he said uneasily. "I'm to look after
your interests. Do you want a personal lawyer?"

"Why?" asked Hoddan. He felt splendidly confident.

"The charges-- Do you wish a psychiatric examination--claiming no
responsibility?" asked the Representative anxiously. "It might ... it
might really be best--"

"I'm not crazy," said Hoddan, "though this looks like it."

The Citizen's Representative spoke to the justice.

"Sir, the accused waives psychiatric examination, without prejudice to a
later claim of no responsibility."

Nedda's father's attorney watched with bland eyes. Hoddan said
impatiently:

"Let's get started so this will make some sense! I know what I've done.
What monstrous crime am I charged with?"

"The charges against you," said the justice politely, "are that on the
night of Three Twenty-seven last, you, Bron Hoddan, entered the
fenced-in grounds surrounding the Mid-Continent power receptor station.
It is charged that you passed two no-admittance signs. You arrived at a
door marked 'Authorized Personnel Only.' You broke the lock of that
door. Inside, you smashed the power receptor taking broadcast power from
the air. This power receptor converts broadcast power for industrial
units by which two hundred thousand men are employed. You smashed the
receptor, imperiling their employment." The justice paused. "Do you wish
to challenge any of these charges as contrary to fact?"

The Citizen's Representative said hurriedly:

"You have the right to deny any of them, of course."

"Why should I?" asked Hoddan. "I did them! But what's this about me
killing somebody? Why'd they tear my place apart looking for something?
Who'd I kill, anyhow?"

"Don't bring that up!" pleaded the Citizen's Representative. "Please
don't bring that up! You will be much, much better off if that is not
mentioned!"

"But I didn't kill anybody!" insisted Hoddan.

"Nobody's said a word about it," said the Citizen's Representative,
jittering. "Let's not have it in the record! The record has to be
published." He turned to the justice. "Sir, the facts are conceded as
stated."

"Then," said the justice to Hoddan, "do you choose to answer these
charges at this time?"

"Why not?" asked Hoddan. "Of course!"

"Proceed," said the justice.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan drew a deep breath. He didn't understand why a man's death,
charged to him, was not mentioned. He didn't like the scared way
everybody looked at him. But--

"About the burglary business," he said confidently. "What did I do in
the power station before I smashed the receptor?"

The justice looked at Nedda's father's attorney.

"Why," said that gentleman amiably, "speaking for the Power Board as
complainant, before you smashed the standard receptor you connected a
device of your own design across the power-leads. It was a receptor unit
of an apparently original pattern. It appears to have been a very
interesting device."

"I'd offered it to the Power Board," said Hoddan, with satisfaction,
"and I was thrown out. You had me thrown out! What did it do?"

"It substituted for the receptor you smashed," said the attorney. "It
continued to supply some two hundred million kilowatts for the
Mid-Continent industrial area. In fact, your crime was only discovered
because the original receptor--naturally--had to be set to draw peak
power at all times, with the unused power wasted by burning carbon. Your
device adjusted to the load and did not burn carbon. So when the
attendants went to replace the supposedly burned carbon and found it
unused, they discovered what you had done."

"It saved carbon, then," said Hoddan triumphantly. "That means it saved
money. I saved the Power Board plenty while that was connected. They
wouldn't believe I could. Now they know. I did!"

The justice said:

"Irrelevant. You have heard the charges. In legal terms, you are charged
with burglary, trespass, breaking and entering, unlawful entry,
malicious mischief, breach of the peace, sabotage, and endangering the
employment of citizens. Discuss the charges, please!"

"I'm telling you!" protested Hoddan. "I offered the thing to the Power
Board. They said they were satisfied with what they had and wouldn't
listen. So I proved what they wouldn't listen to! That receptor saved
them ten thousand credits worth of carbon a week! It'll save half a
million credits a year in every power station that uses it! If I know
the Power Board, they're going right on using it while they arrest me
for putting it to work!"

The courtroom, in its entirety, visibly shivered.

"Aren't they?" demanded Hoddan belligerently.

"They are not," said the justice, tight-lipped. "It has been smashed in
its turn. It has even been melted down."

"Then look at my patents!" insisted Hoddan. "It's stupid--"

"The patent records," said the justice with unnecessary vehemence, "have
been destroyed. Your possessions have been searched for copies. Nobody
will ever look at your drawings again--not if they are wise!"

"Wha-a-at?" demanded Hoddan incredulously. "Wha-a-at?"

"I will amend the record of this hearing before it is published," said
the justice shakily. "I should not have made that comment. I ask
permission of the Citizen's Representative to amend."

"Granted," said the Representative before he had finished.

The justice said quickly:

"The-charges-have-been-admitted-by-the-defendant.
Since-the-complainant-does-not-wish-punitive-action-taken-against-him--"

"He'd be silly if he did," grunted Hoddan.

"And-merely-wishes-security-against-repetition-of-the-offense,
I-rule-that-the-defendant-may-be-released-upon-posting-suitable-bond-for
-good-behavior-in-the-future. That-is, he-will-be-required-to-post-bond
-which-will-be-forfeited-if-he-ever-again-enters-a-power-station
-enclosure-passes-no-trespassing-signs-ignores-no-admittance-signs
-and/or-smashes-apparatus-belonging-to-the-complainant."

"All right," said Hoddan indignantly. "I'll raise it somehow. If they're
too stupid to save money-- How much bond?"

"The-court-will-take-it-under-advisement-and-will-notify-the-defendant
-within-the-customary-two-hours," said the justice at top speed. He
swallowed. "The-defendant-will-be-kept-in-close-confinement-until-the
-bond-is-posted. The-hearing-is-ended."

He did not look at Hoddan. Courtroom guards put stun-pistols against
Hoddan's body and ushered him out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Presently his friend Derec came to see him in the tool-steel cell in
which he had been placed. Derec looked white and stricken.

"I'm in trouble because I'm your friend, Bron," he said miserably, "but
I asked permission to explain things to you. After all, I caused your
arrest. I urged you not to connect up your receptor without permission!"

"I know," growled Hoddan, "but there are some people so stupid you have
to show them everything. I didn't realize that there are people so
stupid you can't show them anything."

"You ... showed something you didn't intend," said Derec miserably.
"Bron, I ... I have to tell you. When they went to charge the carbon
bins at the power station, they ... they found a dead man, Bron!"

Hoddan sat up.

"What's that?"

"Your machine--killed him. He was outside the building at the foot of a
tree. Your receptor killed him through a stone wall! It broke his bones
and killed him.... Bron--" Derec wrung his hands. "At some stage of
power-drain your receptor makes deathrays!"

Hoddan had had a good many shocks today. When Derec arrived, he'd been
incredulously comparing the treatment he'd received and the panic about
him, with the charges made against him in court. They didn't add up.
This new, previously undisclosed item left him speechless. He goggled at
Derec, who fairly wept.

"Don't you see?" asked Derec pleadingly. "That's why I had to tell the
police it was you. We can't have deathrays! The police can't let anybody
go free who knows how to make them! This is a wonderful world, but there
are lots of crackpots. They'll do anything! The police daren't let it
even be suspected that deathrays can be made! That's why you weren't
charged with murder. People all over the planet would start doing
research, hoping to satisfy all their grudges by committing suicide for
all their enemies with themselves! For the sake of civilization your
secret has to be suppressed--and you with it. It's terrible for you,
Bron, but there's nothing else to do!"

Hoddan said dazedly:

"But I only have to put up a bond to be released!"

"The ... the justice," said Derec tearfully, "didn't name it in court,
because it would have to be published. But he's set your bond at fifty
million credits! Nobody could raise that for you, Bron! And with the
reason for it what it is, you'll never be able to get it reduced."

"But anybody who looks at the plans of the receptor will know it can't
make deathrays!" protested Hoddan blankly.

"Nobody will look," said Derec tearfully. "Anybody who knows how to make
it will have to be locked up. They checked the patent examiners. They've
forgotten. Nobody dared examine the device you had working. They'd be
jailed if they understood it! Nobody will ever risk learning how to make
deathrays--not on a world as civilized as this, with so many people
anxious to kill everybody else. You have to be locked up forever, Bron.
You have to!"

Hoddan said inadequately:

"Oh."

"I beg your forgiveness for having you arrested," said Derec in abysmal
sorrow, "but I couldn't do anything but tell--"

Hoddan stared at his cell wall. Derec went away weeping. He was an
admirable, honorable, not-too-bright young man who had been Hoddan's
only friend.

Hoddan stared blankly at nothing. As an event, it was preposterous, and
yet it was wholly natural. When in the course of human events somebody
does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the
numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is
and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he
is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend
people, changes which require them to think are most disliked.

The high brass in the Power Board considered that everything was moving
smoothly. There was no need to consider new devices. Hoddan's drawings
and plans had simply never been bothered with, because there was no
recognized need for them. And when he forced acknowledgment that his
receptor worked, the unwelcome demonstration was highly offensive in
itself. It was natural, it was inevitable, it should have been
infallibly certain that any possible excuse for not thinking about the
receptor would be seized upon. And a single dead man found near the
operating demonstrator.... If one assumed that the demonstrator had
killed him,--why one could react emotionally, feel vast indignation,
frantically command that the device and its inventor be suppressed
together, and go on living happily without doing any thinking or making
any other change in anything at all.

Hoddan was appalled. Now that it had happened, he could see that it had
to. The world of Walden was at the very peak of human culture. It had
arrived at so splendid a plane of civilization that nobody could imagine
any improvement--unless a better tranquilizer could be designed to make
it more endurable. Nobody ever really wants anything he didn't think of
for himself. Nobody can want anything he doesn't know exists--or that he
can't imagine to exist. On Walden nobody wanted anything, unless it was
relief from the tedium of ultra-civilized life. Hoddan's electronic
device did not fill a human need; only a technical one. It had,
therefore, no value that would make anybody hospitable to it.

And Hoddan would spend his life in jail for failing to recognize the
fact.

He revolted, immediately. _He_ wanted something! He wanted out. And
because he was that kind of man he put his mind to work devising
something he wanted, simply and directly, without trying to get it by
furnishing other people with what they turned out not to want. He set
about designing his escape. With his enforced change in viewpoint, he
took the view that he must seem, at least, to give his captors and
jailers and--as he saw it--his persecutors what they wanted.

They would be pleased to have him dead, provided their consciences were
clear. He built on that as a foundation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Very shortly before nightfall he performed certain cryptic actions. He
unraveled threads from his shirt and put them aside. There would be a
vision-lens in the ceiling of his cell, and somebody would certainly
notice what he did. He made a light. He put the threads in his mouth,
set fire to his mattress, and laid down calmly upon it. The mattress was
of excellent quality. It would smell very badly as it smoldered.

It did. Lying flat, he kicked convulsively for a few seconds. He looked
like somebody who had taken poison. Then he waited.

It was a rather long time before his jailer came down the cell corridor,
dragging a fire hose. Hoddan had been correct in assuming that he was
watched. His actions had been those of a man who'd anticipated a
possible need to commit suicide, and who'd had poison in a part of his
shirt for convenience. The jailer did not hurry, because if the inventor
of a deathray committed suicide, everybody would feel better. Hoddan had
been allowed a reasonable time in which to die.

He seemed impressively dead when the jailer opened his cell door,
dragged him out, removed the so-far-unscorched other furniture, and set
up the fire hose to make an aerosol fog which would put out the fire. He
went back to the corridor to wait for the fire to be extinguished.

Hoddan crowned him with a stool, feeling an unexpected satisfaction in
the act. The jailer collapsed.

He did not carry keys. The system was for him to be let out of this
corridor by a guard outside. Hoddan growled and took the fire hose. He
turned its nozzle back to make a stream instead of a mist. Water came
out at four hundred pounds pressure. He smashed open the corridor door
with it. He strolled through and bowled over a startled guard with the
same stream. He took the guard's stun-pistol. He washed open another
door leading to the courtyard. He marched out, washed down two guards
who sighted him, and took the trouble to flush them across the pavement
until they wedged in a drain opening. Then he thoughtfully reset the
hose to fill the courtyard with fog, climbed into the driver's seat of
the truck that had brought him here--it was probably the same one--and
smashed through the gateway to the street outside. Behind him, the
courtyard filled with dense white mist.

He was free, but only temporarily. Around him lay the capital city of
Walden--the highest civilization in this part of the galaxy. Trees lined
its ways. Towers rose splendidly toward the skies, with thousands of
less ambitious structures in between. There were open squares and
parkways and malls, and it did not smell like a city at all. But he
wasn't loose three minutes before the communicator in the truck squawked
the all-police alarm for him.

It was to be expected. All the city would shortly be one enormous
man-trap, set to catch Bron Hoddan. There was only one place on the
planet, in fact, where he could be safe--and he wouldn't be safe there
if he'd been officially charged with murder. But since the police had
tactfully failed to mention murder, he could get at least breathing-time
by taking refuge in the Interstellar Embassy.

He headed for it, bowling along splendidly. The police truck hummed on
its way for half a mile; three-quarters. The great open square before
the Embassy became visible. The Embassy was not that of a single planet,
of course. By pure necessity every human-inhabited world was independent
of all others, but the Interstellar Diplomatic Service represented
humanity at large upon each individual globe. Its ambassador was the
only person Hoddan could even imagine as listening to him, and that
because he came from off-planet, as Hoddan did. But he mainly counted
upon a breathing-space in the Embassy, during which to make more plans
as yet unformed and unformable. He began, though, to see some virtues in
the simple, lawless, piratical world in which he had spent his
childhood.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another police truck rushed frantically toward him down a side street.
Stun-pistols made little pinging noises against the body of his vehicle.
He put on more speed, but the other truck overtook him. It ranged
alongside, its occupants waving stern commands to halt. And then, just
before it swerved to force him off the highway, he swung instead and
drove it into a tree. It crashed thunderously. One of his own wheels
collapsed. He drove on with the crumpled wheel producing an up-and-down
motion that threatened to make him seasick. Then he heard yelling behind
him. The cops had piled out of the truck and were in pursuit on foot.

The tall, rough-stone wall of the Embassy was visible, now, beyond the
monument to the First Settlers of Walden. He leaped to the ground and
ran. Stun-pistol bolts, a little beyond their effective range, stung
like fire. They spurred him on.

The gate of the Embassy was closed. He bolted around the corner and
swarmed up the conveniently rugged stones of the wall. He was well aloft
before the cops spotted him. Then they fired at him industriously and
the charges crackled all around him.

But he'd reached the top and had both arms over the parapet before a
charge hit his legs and stunned them--paralyzed them. He hung fast,
swearing at his bad luck.

Then hands grasped his wrists. A white-haired man appeared on the other
side of the parapet. He took a good, solid grip, and heaved. He drew
Hoddan over the breast-high top of the wall and let him down to the
walkway inside it.

"A near thing, that!" said the white-haired man pleasantly. "I was
taking a walk in the garden when I heard the excitement. I got to the
wall-top just in time." He paused, and added, "I do hope you're not just
a common murderer with the police after him! We can't offer asylum to
such--only a breathing-space and a chance to start running again. But if
you're a political offender--"

Hoddan began to try to rub sensation and usefulness back into his legs.
Feeling came back, and was not pleasant.

"I'm the Interstellar Ambassador," said the white-haired man politely.

"My name," said Hoddan bitterly, "is Bron Hoddan and I'm framed for
trying to save the Power Board some millions of credits a year!" Then he
said more bitterly: "If you want to know, I ran away from Zan to try to
be a civilized man and live a civilized life. It was a mistake! I'm to
be permanently jailed for using my brains!"

The ambassador cocked his head thoughtfully to one side.

"Zan?" he said. "The name Hoddan fits to that somehow. Oh, yes!
Space-piracy! People say the people of Zan capture and loot a dozen or
so ships a year, only there's no way to prove it on them. And there's a
man named Hoddan who's supposed to head a particularly ruffianly gang."

"My grandfather," said Hoddan defiantly. "What are you going to do about
it? I'm outlawed! I've defied the planetary government! I'm disreputable
by descent, and worst of all I've tried to use my brains!"

"Deplorable!" said the ambassador mildly. "I don't mean outlawry is
deplorable, you understand, or defiance of the government, or being
disreputable. But trying to use one's brains is bad business! A serious
offense! Are your legs all right now? Then come on down with me and I'll
have you given some dinner and some fresh clothing and so on. Offhand,"
he added amiably, "it would seem that using one's brains would be
classed as a political offense rather than a criminal one on Walden.
We'll see."

Hoddan gaped up at him.

"You mean there's a possibility that--"

"Of course!" said the ambassador in surprise. "You haven't phrased it
that way, but you're actually a rebel. A revolutionist. You defy
authority and tradition and governments and such things. Naturally the
Interstellar Diplomatic Service is inclined to be on your side. What do
you think it's for?"




II


In something under two hours Hoddan was ushered into the ambassador's
office. He'd been refreshed, his torn clothing replaced by more
respectable garments, and the places where stun-pistols had stung him
soothed by ointments. But, more important, he'd worked out and firmly
adopted a new point of view.

He'd been a misfit at home on Zan because he was not contented with the
humdrum and monotonous life of a member of a space-pirate community.
Piracy was a matter of dangerous take-offs in cranky rocket-ships, to be
followed by weeks or months of tedious and uncomfortable boredom in
highly unhealthy re-breathed air. No voyage ever contained more than ten
seconds of satisfactory action--and all space-fighting took place just
out of the atmosphere of a possibly embattled planet, because you
couldn't intercept a ship at cruising speed between the stars.
Regardless of the result of the fighting, one had to get away fast when
it was over, lest overwhelming force swarm up from the nearby world. It
was intolerably devoid of anything an ambitious young man would want.

Even when one had made a good prize--with the lifeboats darting
frantically for ground--and after one got back to Zan with a captured
ship, even then there was little satisfaction in a piratical career. Zan
had not a large population. Piracy couldn't support a large number of
people. Zan couldn't attempt to defend itself against even single
heavily-armed ships that sometimes came in passionate resolve to avenge
the disappearance of a rich freighter or a fast new liner. So the people
of Zan, to avoid hanging, had to play innocent. They had to be
convincingly simple, harmless folk who cultivated their fields and led
quiet, blameless lives. They might loot, but they had to hide their
booty where investigators would not find it. They couldn't really
benefit by it. They had to build their own houses and make their own
garments and grow their own food. So life on Zan was dull. Piracy was
not profitable in the sense that one could live well by it. It simply
wasn't a trade for a man like Hoddan.

So he'd abandoned it. He'd studied electronics in books from looted
passenger-ship libraries. Within months after arrival on a law-abiding
planet, he was able to earn a living in electronics as an honest trade.

And that was unsatisfactory. Law-abiding communities were no more
thrilling or rewarding than piratical ones. A payday now and then didn't
make up for the tedium of labor. Even when one had money there wasn't
much to do with it. On Walden, to be sure, the level of civilization was
so high that many people needed psychiatric treatment to stand it, and
neurotics vastly outnumbered more normal folk. And on Walden electronics
was only a trade like piracy, and no more fun.

He should have known it would be this way. His grandfather had often
discussed this frustration in human life.

"Us humans," it was his grandfather's habit to say, "don't make sense!
There's some of us that work so hard they're too tired to enjoy life.
There's some that work so hard at enjoying it that they don't get no fun
out of it. And the rest of us spend our lives complainin' that there
ain't any fun in it anyhow. The man that over all has the best time of
any is one that picks out something he hasn't got a chance to do, and
spends his life raisin' hell because he's stopped from doing it.
When"--and here Hoddan's grandfather tended to be emphatic--"he
wouldn't think much of it if he could!"

What Hoddan craved, of course, was a sense of achievement, of doing
things worth doing, and doing them well. Technically there were
opportunities all around him. He'd developed one, and it would save
millions of credits a year if it were adopted. But nobody wanted it.
He'd tried to force its use, he was in trouble, and now he could
complain justly enough, but despite his grandfather he was not the
happiest man he knew.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ambassador received him with a cordial wave of the hand.

"Things move fast," he said cheerfully. "You weren't here half an hour
before there was a police captain at the gate. He explained that an
excessively dangerous criminal had escaped jail and been seen to climb
the Embassy wall. He offered very generously to bring some men in and
capture you and take you away--with my permission, of course. He was
shocked when I declined."

"I can understand that," said Hoddan.

"By the way," said the ambassador. "Young men like yourself-- Is there a
girl involved in this?"

Hoddan considered.

"A girl's father," he acknowledged, "is the real complainant against
me."

"Does he complain," asked the ambassador, "because you want to marry
her, or because you don't?"

"Neither," Hoddan told him. "She hasn't quite decided that I'm worth
defying her rich father for."

"Good!" said the ambassador. "It can't be too bad a mess while a woman
is being really practical. I've checked your story. Allowing for
differences of viewpoint, it agrees with the official version. I've
ruled that you are a political refugee, and so entitled to sanctuary in
the Embassy. And that's that."

"Thank you, sir," said Hoddan.

"There's no question about the crime," observed the ambassador, "or that
it is primarily political. You proposed to improve a technical process
in a society which considers itself beyond improvement. If you'd
succeeded, the idea of change would have spread, people now poor would
have gotten rich, people now rich would have gotten poor, and you'd have
done what all governments are established to prevent. So you'll never be
able to walk the streets of this planet again in safety. You've scared
people."

"Yes, sir," said Hoddan. "It's been an unpleasant surprise to them, to
be scared."

The ambassador put the tips of his fingers together.

"Do you realize," he asked, "that the whole purpose of civilization is
to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a
culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called
its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening
unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good
Old Days?"

"I hadn't thought of it in just those words, sir--"

"It is one of the most-avoided facts of life," said the ambassador.
"Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an
organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the
insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable.
And you have offended against everything that is the foundation of a
stable and orderly and damnably tedious way of life--against
civilization, in fact."

Hoddan frowned.

"Yet you've granted me asylum--"

"Naturally!" said the ambassador. "The Diplomatic Service works for the
welfare of humanity. That doesn't mean stuffiness. A Golden Age in any
civilization is always followed by collapse. In ancient days savages
came and camped outside the walls of super-civilized towns. They were
unwashed, unmannerly, and unsanitary. Super-civilized people refused
even to think about them! So presently the savages stormed the city
walls and another civilization went up in flames."

"But now," objected Hoddan, "there are no savages."

       *       *       *       *       *

"They invent themselves," the ambassador told him. "My point is that the
Diplomatic Service cherishes individuals and causes which battle
stuffiness and complacency and Golden Ages and monstrous things like
that. Not thieves, of course. They're degradation, like body lice. But
rebels and crackpots and revolutionaries who prevent hardening of the
arteries of commerce and furnish wholesome exercise to the body
politic--they're worth cherishing!"

"I ... think I see, sir," said Hoddan.

"I hope you do," said the ambassador. "My action on your behalf is pure
diplomatic policy. To encourage the dissatisfied is to insure against
universal satisfaction--which is lethal. Walden is in a bad way. You are
the most encouraging thing that has happened here in a long time. And
you're not a native."

"No-o-o," agreed Hoddan. "I come from Zan."

"Never mind." The ambassador turned to a stellar atlas. "Consider
yourself a good symptom, and valued as such. If you could start a
contagion, you'd deserve well of your fellow citizens. Savages can
always invent themselves. But enough of apology from me. Let us set
about your affairs." He consulted the atlas. "Where would you like to
go, since you must leave Walden?"

"Not too far, sir--"

"The girl, eh?" The ambassador did not smile. He ran his finger down a
page. "The nearest inhabited worlds, of course, are Krim and Darth. Krim
is a place of lively commercial activity, where an electronics engineer
should easily find employment. It is said to be progressive and there is
much organized research--"

"I wouldn't want to be a kept engineer, sir," said Hoddan
apologetically. "I'd rather ... well ... putter on my own."

"Impractical, but sensible," commented the ambassador. He turned a page.
"There's Darth. Its social system is practically feudal. It's
technically backward. There's a landing grid, but space exports are
skins and metal ingots and practically nothing else. There is no
broadcast power. Strangers find the local customs difficult. There is no
town larger than twenty thousand people, and few approach that size.
Most settled places are mere villages near some feudal castle, and roads
are so few and bad that wheeled transport is rare."

He leaned back and said in a detached voice:

"I had a letter from there a couple of months ago. It was rather
arrogant. The writer was one Don Loris, and he explained that his
dignity would not let him make a commercial offer, but an electronic
engineer who put himself under his protection would not be the loser. He
signed himself prince of this, lord of that, baron of the other thing
and claimant to the dukedom of something else. Are you interested? No
kings on Darth, just feudal chiefs."

Hoddan thought it over.

"I'll go to Darth," he decided. "It's bound to be better than Zan, and
it can't be worse than Walden."

The ambassador looked impassive. An Embassy servant came in and offered
an indoor communicator. The ambassador put it to his ear. After a moment
he said:

"Show him in." He turned to Hoddan. "You did kick up a storm! The
Minister of State, no less, is here to demand your surrender. I'll
counter with a formal request for an exit-permit. I'll talk to you again
when he leaves."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan went out. He paced up and down the other room into which he was
shown. Darth wouldn't be in a Golden Age! He was wiser now than he'd
been this same morning. He recognized that he'd made mistakes. Now he
could see rather ruefully how completely improbable it was that anybody
could put across a technical device merely by proving its value, without
making anybody want it. He shook his head regretfully at the blunder.

The ambassador sent for him.

"I've had a pleasant time," he told Hoddan genially. "There was a
beautiful row. You've really scared people, Hoddan! You deserve well of
the republic! Every government and every person needs to be thoroughly
terrified occasionally. It limbers up the brain."

"Yes, sir," said Hoddan. "I've--"

"The planetary government," said the ambassador with relish, "insists
that you have to be locked up with the key thrown away. Because you know
how to make deathrays. I said it was nonsense, and you were a political
refugee in sanctuary. The Minister of State said the Cabinet would
consider removing you forcibly from the Embassy if you weren't
surrendered. I said that if the Embassy was violated no ship would clear
for Walden from any other civilized planet. They wouldn't like losing
their off-planet trade! Then he said that the government would not give
you an exit-permit, and that he would hold me personally responsible if
you killed everybody on Walden, including himself and me. I said he
insulted me by suggesting that I'd permit such shenanigans. He said the
government would take an extremely grave view of my attitude, and I said
they would be silly if they did. Then he went off with great
dignity--but shaking with panic--to think up more nonsense."

[Illustration]

"Evidently," said Hoddan in relief, "you believe me when I say that my
gadget doesn't make deathrays."

The ambassador looked slightly embarrassed.

"To be honest," he admitted, "I've no doubt that you invented it
independently, but they've been using such a device for half a century
in the Cetis cluster. They've had no trouble."

Hoddan winced.

"Did you tell the Minister that?"

"Hardly," said the ambassador. "It would have done you no good. You're
in open revolt and have performed overt acts of violence against the
police. But also it was impolite enough for me to suggest that the local
government was stupid. It would have been most undiplomatic to prove
it."

Hoddan did not feel very proud, just then.

"I'm thinking that the cops--quite unofficially--might try to kidnap me
from the Embassy. They'll deny that they tried, especially if they
manage it. But I think they'll try."

"Very likely," said the ambassador. "We'll take precautions."

"I'd like to make something--not lethal--just in case," said Hoddan. "If
you can trust me not to make deathrays, I'd like to make a generator of
odd-shaped microwaves. They're described in textbooks. They ionize the
air where they strike. That's all. They make air a high-resistance
conductor. Nothing more than that."

The ambassador said:

"There was an old-fashioned way to make ozone...." When Hoddan nodded, a
little surprised, the ambassador said: "By all means go ahead. You
should be able to get parts from your room vision-receiver. I'll have
some tools given you." Then he added: "Diplomacy has to understand the
things that control events. Once it was social position. For a time it
was weapons. Then it was commerce. Now it's technology. But I wonder how
you'll use the ionization of air to protect yourself from kidnapers!
Don't tell me! I'd rather try to guess."

He waved his hand in cordial dismissal and an Embassy servant showed
Hoddan to his quarters. Ten minutes later another staff man brought him
tools such as would be needed for work on a vision set. He was left
alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

He delicately disassembled the set in his room and began to put some of
the parts together in a novel but wholly rational fashion. The science
of electronics, like the science of mathematics, had progressed away
beyond the point where all of it had practical applications. One could
spend a lifetime learning things that research had discovered in the
past, and industry had never found a use for. On Zan, industriously
reading pirated books, Hoddan hadn't known where utility stopped. He'd
kept on learning long after a practical man would have stopped studying
to get a paying job.

Any electronic engineer could have made the device he now assembled. It
only needed to be wanted--and apparently he was the first person to want
it. In this respect it was like the receptor that had gotten him into
trouble. But as he put the small parts together, he felt a certain
loneliness. A man Hoddan's age needs to have some girl admire him from
time to time. If Nedda had been sitting cross-legged before him,
listening raptly while he explained, Hoddan would probably have been
perfectly happy. But she wasn't. It wasn't likely she ever would be.
Hoddan scowled.

Inside of an hour he'd made a hand-sized, five-watt, wave-guide
projector of waves of eccentric form. In the beam of that projector, air
became ionized. Air became a high-resistance conductor comparable to
nichrome wire, when and where the projector sent its microwaves.

He was wrapping tape about the pistol grip when a servant brought him a
scribbled note. It had been handed in at the Embassy gate by a woman who
fled after leaving it. It looked like Nedda's handwriting. It read like
Nedda's phrasing. It appeared to have been written by somebody in a
highly emotional state. But it wasn't quite--not absolutely--convincing.

He went to find the ambassador. He handed over the note. The ambassador
read it and raised his eyebrows.

"Well?"

"It could be authentic," admitted Hoddan.

"In other words," said the ambassador, "you are not sure that it is a
booby trap--an invitation to a date with the police?"

"I'm not sure," said Hoddan. "I think I'd better bite. If I have any
illusions left after this morning, I'd better find it out. I thought
Nedda liked me quite a lot."

"I make no comment," observed the ambassador. "Can I help you in any
way?"

"I have to leave the Embassy," said Hoddan, "and there's a practically
solid line of police outside the walls. Could I borrow some old clothes,
a few pillows, and a length of rope?"

Half an hour later a rope uncoiled itself at the very darkest outside
corner of the Embassy wall. It dangled down to the ground. This was at
the rear of the Embassy enclosure. The night was bright with stars, and
the city's towers glittered with many lights. But here there was almost
complete blackness and that silence of a city which is sometimes so
companionable.

The rope remained hanging from the wall. No light reached the ground
there. The tiny crescent of Walden's farthest moon cast an insufficient
glow. Nothing could be seen by it.

The rope went up, as if it had been lowered merely to make sure that it
was long enough for its purpose. Then it descended again. This time a
figure dangled at its end. It came down, swaying a little. It reached
the blackest part of the shadow at the wall's base. It stayed there.

Nothing happened. The figure rose swiftly, hauled up in rapid pullings
of the rope. Then the line came down again and again a figure descended.
But this figure moved. The rope swayed and oscillated. The figure came
down a good halfway to the ground. It paused, and then descended with
much movement to two-thirds of the way from the top.

There something seemed to alarm it. It began to rise with violent
writhings of the rope. It climbed--

There was a crackling noise. A stun-pistol. The figure seemed to climb
more frantically. More cracklings. Half a dozen--a dozen sharp, snapping
noises. They were stun-pistol charges and there were tiny sparks where
they hit. The dangling figure seemed convulsed. It went limp, but it did
not fall. More charges poured into it. It hung motionless halfway up the
wall of the Embassy.

Movements began in the darkness. Men appeared, talking in low tones and
straining their eyes toward the now motionless figure. They gathered
underneath it. One went off at a run, carrying a message. Someone of
authority arrived, panting. There was more low-toned argument. More and
still more men appeared. There were forty or fifty figures at the base
of the wall.

One of those figures began to climb the rope hand over hand. He reached
the motionless object. He swore in a shocked voice. He was shushed from
below. He let the figure drop. It made next to no sound when it landed.

Then there was a rushing, as the guards about the Embassy went furiously
back to their proper posts to keep anybody from slipping out Two men
remained swearing bitterly over a dummy made of old clothes and pillows.
But their profanity was in vain.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan was then some blocks away. He suffered painful doubt about the
note ostensibly from Nedda. The guards about the Embassy would have
tried to catch him in any case, but it did seem very plausible that the
note had been sent him to get him to try to get down the wall. On the
other hand, a false descent of a palpably dummylike dummy had been
plausible, too. He'd drawn all the guards to one spot by his seeming
doubt and by testing out their vigilance with a dummy. The only thing
improbable in his behavior had been that after testing their vigilance
with a dummy, he'd made use of it.

A fair distance away, he turned sedately into a narrow lane between
buildings. This paralleled another lane serving the home of a girl
friend of Nedda's. The note had named the garden behind that other
girl's home as a rendezvous. But Hoddan was not going to that garden. He
wanted to make sure. If the cops had forged the note--

He judged his position carefully. If he climbed this tree,--hm-m-m....
Kind of the city-planners of Walden to use trees so lavishly--if he
climbed this tree he could look into the garden where Nedda in theory
waited in tears. He climbed it. He sat astride a thick limb in scented
darkness and considered further. Presently he brought out his five-watt
projector. There was deepest darkness hereabouts. Trees and shrubbery
were merely blacker than their surroundings. But there was reason for
suspicion.

Neither in the house of Nedda's girl friend, nor in the nearer house
between, was there a single lighted window.

Hoddan adjusted the wave-guide and pressed the stud of his instrument.
He pointed it carefully into the nearer garden.

A man grunted in a surprised tone. There was a stirring. A man swore
startledly. The words seemed inappropriate to a citizen merely breathing
the evening air.

Hoddan frowned. The note from Nedda seemed to have been a forgery. To
make sure, he readjusted the wave-guide to project a thin but fan-shaped
beam. He aimed again. Painstakingly, he traversed the area in which men
would have been posted to jump him, in the event that the note was
forged. If Nedda were there, she would feel no effect. If police lay in
wait, they would notice. At once.

They did. A man howled. Two men yelled together. Somebody bellowed.
Somebody squealed. Someone, in charge of the flares made ready to give
light for the police, was so startled by a strange sensation that he
jerked the cord. An immense, cold-white brilliance appeared. The garden
where Nedda definitely was not present became bathed in incandescence.
Light spilled over the wall of one garden into the next and disclosed a
squirming mass of police in the nearer garden also. Some of them leaped
wildly and ungracefully while clawing behind them. Some stood still and
struggled desperately to accomplish something to their rear, while
others gazed blankly at them until Hoddan swung his instrument their
way, also.

A man tore off his pants and swarmed over the wall to get away from
something intolerable. Others imitated him, save in the direction of
their flight. Some removed their trousers before they fled, but others
tried to get them off while fleeing. Those last did not fare too well.
Mostly they stumbled and other men fell over them, when both fallen and
fallen-upon uttered hoarse and profane lamentations--they howled to the
high heavens.

Hoddan let the confusion mount past any unscrambling, and then slid down
the tree and joined in the rush. With the glare in the air behind him,
he only feigned to stumble over one figure after another. Once he
grunted as he scorched his own fingers. But he came out of the lane with
a dozen stun-pistols, mostly uncomfortably warm, as trophies of the
ambush.

As they cooled off he stowed them away in his belt and pockets,
strolling away down the tree-lined street. Behind him, cops realized
their trouserless condition and appealed plaintively to householders to
notify headquarters of their state.

Hoddan did not feel particularly disillusioned, somehow. It occurred to
him, even, that this particular event was likely to help him get off of
Walden. If he was to leave against the cops' will, he needed to have
them at less than top efficiency. And men who have had their pants
scorched off them are not apt to think too clearly. Hoddan felt a
certain confidence increase in his mind. He'd worked the thing out very
nicely. If ionization made air a high-resistance conductor, then an
ionizing beam would make a high-resistance short between the power
terminals of a stun-pistol. With the power a stun-pistol carried, that
short would get hot. So would the pistol. It would get hot enough, in
fact, to scorch cloth in contact with it. Which had happened.

If the effect had been produced in the soles of policemen's feet, Hoddan
would have given every cop a hotfoot. But since they carried their
stun-pistols in their hip-pockets--

The thought of Nedda diminished his satisfaction. The note could be pure
forgery, or the police could have learned about it through the treachery
of the servant she sent to the Embassy with it. It would be worthwhile
to know. He headed toward the home of her father. If she were loyal to
him--why it would complicate things considerably. But he felt it
necessary to find out.

He neared the spot where Nedda lived. This was an especially desirable
residential area. The houses were large and gracefully designed, and the
gardens were especially lush. Presently he heard music ahead--live
music. He went on. He came to a place where strolling citizens had
paused under the trees of the street to listen to the melody and the
sound of voices that accompanied it. And the music and the festivity was
in the house in which Nedda dwelt. She was having a party, on the very
night of the day in which he'd been framed for life imprisonment.

It was a shock. Then there was a rush of vehicles, and police trucks
were disgorging cops before the door. They formed a cordon about the
house, and some knocked and were admitted in haste. Then Hoddan nodded
dourly to himself.

His escape from the Embassy was now known. No less certainly, the
failure of the trap Nedda's note had baited had been reported. The
police were now turning the whole city into a trap for one Bron Hoddan,
and they were looking first at the most probable places, then they'd
search the possible places for him to be, and by the time that had been
accomplished they'd have cops from other cities pouring into the city
and they'd search every square inch of it for him. And certainly and
positively they'd take the most urgent and infallible precautions to
make sure he didn't get back into the Embassy.

It was a situation that would have appalled Hoddan only that morning.
Now, though, he only shook his head sadly. He moved on. He'd gotten into
trouble by trying to make an industrial civilization accept something it
didn't want--a technical improvement in a standard electronic device.
He'd gotten partly out of trouble by giving his jailers what they
definitely desired--the sight of him apparently a suicide in the cell in
the Detention Building. He'd come out of the Embassy, again, by giving
the watchers outside a view they urgently desired--a figure secretly
descending the Embassy wall. He'd indulged himself at the ambuscade, but
the way to get back into the Embassy....

       *       *       *       *       *

It was not far from Nedda's house to a public-safety kiosk, decoratively
placed on a street corner. He entered it. It was unattended, of course.
It was simply an out-of-door installation where cops could be summoned
or fires reported or emergencies described by citizens independently of
the regular home communicators. It had occurred to Hoddan that the
planetary authorities would be greatly pleased to hear of a situation,
in a place, that would seem to hint at his presence. There were all
sorts of public services that would be delighted to operate impressively
in their own lines. There were bureaus which would rejoice in a chance
to show off their efficiency.

He used his microwave generator--which at short enough range would
short-circuit anything--upon the apparatus in the kiosk. It was
perfectly simple, if one knew how. He worked with a sort of tender
thoroughness, shorting this item, shorting that, giving this frantic
emergency call, stating that baseless lie. When he went out of the kiosk
he walked briskly toward an appointment he had made.

And presently the murmur of the city at night had new sounds added to
it. They began as a faint, confused clamor at the edges of the city. The
uproar moved centralward and grew louder as it came. There were clanging
bells and sirens and beeper-horns warning all nonofficial vehicles to
keep out of the way. On the raised-up expressway snorting metal monsters
rushed with squealing excitement. On the fragrant lesser streets, small
vehicles rushed with proportionately louder howlings. Police trucks
poured out of their cubbyholes and plunged valiantly through the dark.
Broadcast-units signaled emergency and cut off the air to make the
placid ether waves available to authority.

All these noises and all this tumult moved toward a single point. The
outer parts of the city regained their former quiet, save that there was
less music. The broadcasts were off. But the sound of racing vehicles
clamoring for right-of-way grew louder and louder, and more and more
peremptory as it concentrated toward the large open square on which the
Interstellar Embassy faced. From every street and avenue fire-fighting
equipment poured into that square. In between and behind, hooting loudly
for precedence, police trucks accompanied and fore-ran them. Emergency
vehicles of all the civic bureaus appeared, all of them with immense
conviction of their importance.

It was a very large open square, that space before the Embassy. From its
edge, the monument to the First Settlers in the center looked small. But
even that vast plaza filled up with trucks of every imaginable variety,
from the hose towers which could throw streams of water four hundred
feet straight up, to the miniature trouble-wagons of Electricity Supply.
Staff cars of fire and police and sanitary services crowded each other
and bumped fenders with tree-surgeon trucks prepared to move fallen
trees, and with public-address trucks ready to lend stentorian tones to
any voice of authority.

But there was no situation except that there was no situation. There was
no fire. There was no riot. There were not even stray dogs for the pound
wagons to pursue, nor broken water mains for the water department
technicians to shut off and repair. There was nothing for anybody to do
but ask everybody else what the hell they were doing there, and
presently to swear at each other for cluttering up the way.

       *       *       *       *       *

The din of arriving horns and sirens had stopped, and a mutter of
profanity was developing, when a last vehicle arrived. It was an
ambulance, and it came purposefully out of a side avenue and swung
toward a particular place as if it knew exactly what it was about. When
its way was blocked, it hooted impatiently for passage. Its lights
blinked violently red, demanding clearance. A giant fire-fighting unit
pulled aside. The ambulance ran past and hooted at a cluster of police
trucks. They made way for it. It blared at a gathering of dismounted,
irritated truck personnel. It made its way through them. It moved in a
straight line for the gate of the Interstellar Embassy.

A hundred yards from that gate, its horn blatted irritably at the car of
the acting head of municipal police. That car obediently made way for
it.

The ambulance rolled briskly up to the very gate of the Embassy. There
it stopped. A figure got down from the driver's seat and walked
purposefully in the gate.

Thereafter nothing happened at all until a second figure rolled and
toppled itself out on the ground from the seat beside the ambulance
driver's. That figure kicked and writhed on the ground. A policeman went
to find out what was the matter.

It was the ambulance driver. Not the one who'd driven the ambulance to
the Embassy gate, but the one who should have. He was bound hand and
foot and not too tightly gagged. When released he swore vividly while
panting that he had been captured and bound by somebody who said he was
Bron Hoddan and was in a hurry to get back to the Interstellar Embassy.

There was no uproar. Those to whom Hoddan's name had meaning were struck
speechless with rage. The fury of the police was even too deep for
tears.

But Bron Hoddan, back in the quarters assigned him in the Embassy,
unloaded a dozen cooled-off stun-pistols from his pockets and sent word
to the ambassador that he was back, and that the note ostensibly from
Nedda had actually been a police trap.

Getting ready to retire, he reviewed his situation. In some respects it
was not too bad. All but Nedda's share in trying to trap him, and having
a party the same night.... He stared morosely at the wall. Then he saw,
very simply, that she mightn't have known even of his arrest. She lived
a highly sheltered life. Her father could have had her kept completely
in ignorance....

He cheered immediately. This would be his last night on Walden, if he
were lucky, but vague plans already revolved in his mind. Yes.... He'd
achieve splendid things, he'd grow rich, he'd come back and marry that
delightful girl, Nedda, and end as a great man. Already, today, he'd
done a number of things worth doing, and on the whole he'd done them
well.




III


When dawn broke over the capital city of Walden, the sight was
appropriately glamorous. There were shining towers and curving
tree-bordered ways, above which innumerable small birds flew
tumultuously. The dawn, in fact, was heralded by high-pitched chirpings
everywhere. During the darkness there had been a deep-toned humming
sound, audible all over the city. That was the landing grid in operation
out at the spaceport, letting down a twenty-thousand-ton liner from
Rigel, Cetis, and the Nearer Rim. Presently it would take off for Krim,
Darth, and the Coalsack Stars, and if Hoddan was lucky he would be on
it. But at the earliest part of the day there was only tranquillity over
the city and the square and the Interstellar Embassy.

At the gate of the Embassy enclosure, staff members piled up boxes and
bales and parcels for transport to the spaceport and thence to
destinations whose names were practically songs. There were dispatches
to Delil, where the Interstellar Diplomatic Service had a sector
headquarters, and there were packets of embassy-stamped invoices for
Lohala and Tralee and Famagusta. There were boxes for Sind and Maja, and
metal-bound cases for Kent. The early explorers of this part of the
galaxy had christened huge suns for little villages and territories back
on Earth--which less than one human being in ten thousand had ever seen.

The sound of the stacking of freight parcels was crisp and distinct in
the morning hush. The dew deposited during darkness had not yet dried
from the pavement of the square. Damp, unhappy figures loafed nearby.
They were self-evidently secret police, as yet unrelieved after a
night's vigil about the Embassy's rugged wall. They were sleepy and
their clothing stuck soggily to them, and none of them had had anything
warm in his stomach for many hours. They had not, either, anything to
look forward to from their superiors.

Hoddan was again in sanctuary inside the Embassy they'd guarded so
ineptly through the dark. He'd gotten out without their leave, and made
a number of their fellows unwilling to sit down and then made all the
police and municipal authorities ridiculous by the manner of his return.
The police guards about the Embassy were very positively not in a cheery
mood. But one of them saw an Embassy servant he knew. He'd stood the man
drinks, in times past, to establish a contact that might be useful. He
summoned a smile and beckoned to that man.

The Embassy servant came briskly to him, rubbing his hands after having
put a moderately heavy case of documents on top of the waiting pile.

"That Hoddan," said the plainclothesman, attempting hearty ruefulness,
"he certainly put it over on us last night!"

The servant nodded.

"Look," said the plainclothesman, "there could be something in it for
you if you ... hm-m-m ... wanted to make a little extra money."

The servant looked regretful.

"No chance," he said, "he's leaving today."

The plainclothesman jumped.

"Today?"

"For Darth," said the Embassy servant. "The ambassador's shipping him
off on the space liner that came in last night."

The plainclothesman dithered.

"How's he going to get to the spaceport?"

"I wouldn't know," said the servant. "They've figured out some way. I
could use a little extra money, too."

He lingered, but the plainclothesman was staring at the innocent,
inviolable parcels about to leave the Embassy for distant parts. He took
note of sizes and descriptions. No. Not yet. But if Hoddan was leaving
he had to leave the Embassy. If he left the Embassy....

       *       *       *       *       *

The plainclothesman bolted. He made a breathless report by the portable
communicator set up for just such use. He told what the Embassy servant
had said, and the inference to be drawn from it, the suspicions to be
entertained--and there he stopped short. Orders came back to him. Orders
were given in all directions. Somebody was going to distinguish himself
by catching Hoddan, and undercover politics worked to decide who it
should be. Even the job of guard outside the Embassy became desirable.
So fresh, alert plainclothesmen arrived. They were bright-eyed and
bushy-tailed, and they took over. Weary, hungry men yielded up their
posts. They went home. The man who'd gotten the infallibly certain clue
went home too, disgruntled because he wasn't allowed a share in the
credit for Hoddan's capture. But he was glad of it later.

Inside the Embassy, Hoddan finished his breakfast with the ambassador.

"I'm giving you," said the ambassador, "that letter to the character on
Darth. I told you about him. He's some sort of nobleman and has need of
an electronic engineer. On Darth they're rare to nonexistent. But his
letter wasn't too specific."

"I remember," agreed Hoddan. "I'll look him up. Thanks."

"Somehow," said the ambassador, "I cherish unreasonable hopes of you,
Hoddan. A psychologist would say that your group identification is low
and your cyclothymia practically a minus quantity, while your ergic
tension is pleasingly high. He'd mean that with reasonable good fortune
you will raise more hell than most. I wish you that good fortune. And
Hoddan--"

"Yes?"

"I don't urge you to be vengeful," explained the ambassador, "but I do
hope you won't be too forgiving of these characters who'd have jailed
you for life. You've scared them badly. It's very good for them.
Anything more you can do in that line will be really a kindness, and as
such will positively not be appreciated, but it'll be well worth
doing.... I say this because I like the way you plan things. And any
time I can be of service--"

"Thanks," said Hoddan, "but I'd better get going for the spaceport."
He'd write Nedda from Darth. "I'll get set for it."

He rose. The ambassador stood up too.

"I like the way you plan things," he repeated appreciatively. "We'll
check over that box."

They left the Embassy dining room together.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was well after sunrise when Hoddan finished his breakfast, and the
bright and watchful new plainclothesmen were very much on the alert
outside. By this time the sunshine had lost its early ruddy tint, and
the trees about the city were vividly green, and the sky had become
appropriately blue--as the skies on all human-occupied planets are.
There was the beginning of traffic. Some was routine movement of goods
and vehicles. But some was special.

For example, the trucks which came to carry the Embassy shipment to the
spaceport. They were perfectly ordinary trucks, hired in a perfectly
ordinary way by the ambassador's secretary. They came trundling across
the square and into the Embassy gate. The ostentatiously loafing
plainclothesmen could look in and see the waiting parcels loaded on
them. The first truckload was quite unsuspicious. There was no package
in the lot which could have held a man in even the most impossibly
cramped of positions.

But the police took no chances. Ten blocks from the Embassy the cops
stopped it and verified the licenses and identities of the driver and
his helper. This was a moderately lengthy business. While it went on,
plainclothesmen worked over the packages in the truck's body and put
stethoscopes to any of more than one cubic foot capacity.

They waved the truck on. Meanwhile the second truck was loading up. And
the watching, ostensible loafers saw that nearly the last item to be put
on it was a large box which hadn't been visible before. It was carried
with some care, and it was marked fragile, and it was put into place and
wedged fast with other parcels.

The plainclothesmen looked at each other with anticipatory glee. One of
them reported the last large box with almost lyric enthusiasm. When the
second truck left the Embassy with the large box, a police truck came
innocently out of nowhere and just happened to be going the same way.
Ten blocks away, again the truck load of Embassy parcels was flagged
down and its driver's license and identity was verified. A
plainclothesman put a stethoscope on the questionable case. He beamed,
and made a suitable signal.

The truck went on, while zestful, Machiavelian plans took effect.

Five blocks farther, an unmarked empty truck came hurtling out of a side
street, sideswiped the truck from the Embassy, and went careening away
down the street without stopping. The trailing police truck made no
attempt at pursuit. Instead, it stopped helpfully by the truck which had
been hit. A wheel was hopelessly gone. So uniformed police, with
conspicuously happy expressions, cleared a space around the stalled
truck and stood guard over the parcels under diplomatic seal. With eager
helpfulness, they sent for other transportation for the Embassy's
shipment.

A sneeze was heard from within the mass of guarded freight, and the
policemen shook hands with each other. When substitute trucks
came--there were two of them--they loaded one high with Embassy parcels
and sent it off to the spaceport with their blessing. There remained
just one, single, large-sized box to be put on the second vehicle. They
bumped it on the ground, and a startled grunt came from within.

There was an atmosphere of innocent enjoyment all about as the police
tenderly loaded this large box on the second truck they'd sent for, and
festooned themselves about it as it trundled away. Strangely, it did not
head directly for the spaceport. The police carefully explained this to
each other in loud voices. Then some of them were afraid the box hadn't
heard, so they knocked on it. The box coughed, and it seemed hilariously
amusing to the policemen that the contents of a freight parcel should
cough. They expressed deep concern and--addressing the box--explained
that they were taking it to the Detention Building, where they would
give it some cough medicine.

The box swore at them, despairingly. They howled with childish laughter,
and assured the box that after they had opened it and given it cough
medicine they would close it again very carefully--leaving the
diplomatic seal unbroken--and deliver it to the spaceport so it could go
on its way.

The box swore again, luridly. The truck which carried it hastened. The
box teetered and bumped and jounced with the swift motion of the vehicle
that carried it and all the police around it. Bitter, enraged, and
highly unprintable language came from within.

The police were charmed. Even so early in the morning they seemed
inclined to burst into song. When the Detention Building gate opened for
it, and closed again behind it, there was a welcoming committee in the
courtyard. It included a jailer with a bandaged head and a look of
vengeful satisfaction on his face, and no less than three guards who had
been given baths by a high-pressure hose when Bron Hoddan departed from
his cell. They wore unamiable expressions.

And then, while the box swore very bitterly, somebody tenderly loosened
a plank--being careful not to disturb the diplomatic seal--and pulled it
away with a triumphant gesture. Then all the police could look into the
box. And they did.

Then there was dead silence, except for the voice that came from a
two-way communicator set inside.

"_And now_," said the voice from the box--and only now did anybody
notice what the muffling effect of the boards had hidden, that it was a
speaker-unit which had sworn and coughed and sneezed--"_we take our
leave of the planet Walden and its happy police force, who wave to us as
our space-liner lifts toward the skies. The next sound you hear will be
that of their lamentations at our departure._"

But the next sound was a howl of fury. The police were very much
disappointed to learn that Hoddan hadn't been in the box, but only
one-half of a two-way communication pair, and that Hoddan had coughed
and sneezed and sworn at them from the other instrument somewhere else.
Now he signed off.

       *       *       *       *       *

The space liner was not lifting off just yet. It was still solidly
aground in the center of the landing grid. Hoddan had bade farewell to
his audience from the floor of the ambassador's ground-car, which at
that moment was safely within the extra-territorial circle about the
spaceship. He turned off the set and got up and brushed himself off. He
got out of the car. The ambassador followed him and shook his hand.

"You have a touch," said the ambassador sedately. "You seem inspired at
times, Hoddan! You have a gift for infuriating constituted authority.
You should plot at your art. You may go far!"

He shook hands again and watched Hoddan walk into the lift which should
raise him--and did raise him--to the entrance port of the space liner.

Twenty minutes later the force fields of the giant landing grid lifted
the liner smoothly out to space. The twenty-thousand-ton vessel went
out to five planetary diameters, where its Lawlor drive could take hold
of relatively unstressed space. There the ship jockeyed for line, and
then there was that curious, momentary disturbance of all one's
sensations which was the effect of the overdrive field going on. Then
everything was normal again, except that the liner was speeding for the
planet Krim at something more than thirty times the speed of light.

Normality extended through all the galaxy so far inhabited by men. There
were worlds on which there was peace, and worlds on which there was
tumult. There were busy, zestful young worlds, and languid, weary old
ones. From the Near Rim to the farthest of occupied systems, planets
circled their suns, and men lived on them, and every man took himself
seriously and did not quite believe that the universe had existed before
he was born or would long survive his loss.

Time passed. Comets let out vast streamers like bridal veils and swept
toward and around their suns. Some of them--one in ten thousand, or
twenty--were possibly seen by human eyes. The liner bearing Hoddan sped
through the void.

In time it made a landfall on the Planet Krim. He went aground and
observed the spaceport city. It was new and bustling with tall buildings
and traffic jams and a feverish conviction that the purpose of living
was to earn more money this year than last. Its spaceport was
chaotically busy. Hoddan had time for swift sightseeing of one city only
and an estimate of what the people of such a planet would be sure they
wanted. He saw slums and gracious public buildings, and went back to the
spaceport and the liner which then rose upon the landing grid's force
fields until Krim was a great round ball below it. Then there was again
a jockeying for line, and the liner winked out of sight and was again
journeying at thirty times the speed of light.

Again time passed. In one of the remoter galaxies a super-nova flamed,
and on a rocky, barren world a small living thing squirmed
experimentally--and to mankind the one event was just as important as
the other.

But presently the liner from Krim and Walden appeared in Darth as the
tiniest of shimmering pearly specks against the blue. To the north and
east and west of the spaceport, rugged mountains rose steeply. Patches
of snow showed here and there, and naked rock reared boldly in spurs and
precipices. But there were trees on all the lower slopes, and there was
not really a timberline.

The space liner increased in size, descending toward the landing grid.
The grid itself was a monstrous lattice of steel, half a mile high and
enclosing a circle not less in diameter. It filled much the larger part
of the level valley floor, and horned _duryas_ and what Hoddan later
learned were horses grazed in it. The animals paid no attention to the
deep-toned humming noise the grid made in its operation.

The ship seemed the size of a pea. Presently it was the size of an
apple. Then it was the size of a basketball, and then it swelled
enormously and put out spidery metal legs with large splay metal feet on
them and alighted and settled gently to the ground. The humming stopped.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were shoutings. Whips cracked. Straining, horn-tossing _duryas_
heaved and dragged something, very deliberately, out from between
warehouses under the arches of the grid. There were two dozen of the
_duryas_, and despite the shouts and whip-crackings they moved with a
stubborn slowness. It took a long time for the object with the
wide-tired wheels to reach a spot below the spacecraft. Then it took
longer, seemingly, for brakes to be set on each wheel, and then for the
draught animals to be arranged to pull as two teams against each other.

More shoutings and whip-crackings. A long, slanting, ladderlike arm
arose. It teetered, and a man with a lurid purple cloak rose with it at
its very end. The ship's air lock opened and a crewman threw a rope. The
purple-cloaked man caught it and made it fast. From somewhere inside the
ship of space the line was hauled in. The end of the landing ramp
touched the sill of the air lock. Somebody made other things fast and
the purple-cloaked man triumphantly entered the ship.

There was a pause. Men loaded carts with cargo to be sent to remote and
unimagined planets. In the air lock, Bron Hoddan stepped to the
unloading ramp and descended to the ground. He was the only passenger.
He had barely reached a firm footing when objects followed him. His own
ship bag--a gift from the ambassador--and then parcels, bales, boxes,
and such nondescript items of freight as needed special designation.
Rolls of wire. Long strings of plastic objects, strung like beads on
shipping cords. Plexiskins of fluid which might be anything from wine to
fuel oil in less than bulk-cargo quantities. For a mere five minutes the
flow of freight continued. Darth was not an important center of trade.

Hoddan stared incredulously at the town outside one side of the grid. It
was only a town--and was almost a village, at that. Its houses had
steep, gabled roofs, of which some seemed to be tile and others thatch.
Its buildings leaned over the narrow streets, which were unpaved. They
looked like mud. And there was not a power-driven ground vehicle
anywhere in sight, nor anything man made in the air.

Great carts trailed out to the unloading belt. They dumped bales of
skins and ingots of metal, and more bales and more ingots. Those objects
rode up to the air lock and vanished. Hoddan was ignored. He felt that
without great care he might be crowded back into the reversed loading
belt and be carried back into the ship.

The loading process ended. The man with the purple cloak, who'd ridden
the teetering belt-beam up, reappeared and came striding grandly down to
ground. Somebody cast off, above. Ropes writhed and fell and dangled.
The ship's air lock door closed.

There was a vast humming sound. The ship lifted sedately. It seemed to
hover momentarily over the group of _duryas_ and humans in the center of
the grid's enclosure. But it was not hovering. It shrank. It was rising
in an absolutely vertical line. It dwindled to the size of a basketball
and then an apple. Then to the size of a pea. And then that pea
diminished until the spaceship from Krim, Walden, Cetis, Rigel and the
Nearer Rim had become the size of a dust mote and then could not be seen
at all. But one knew that it was going on to Lohala and Tralee and
Famagusta and the Coalsack Stars.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan shrugged and began to trudge toward the warehouses. The
_durya_-drawn landing ramp began to roll slowly in the same direction.
Carts and wagons loaded the stuff discharged from the ship. Creaking,
plodding, with the curved horns of the _duryas_ rising and falling, the
wagons overtook Hoddan and passed him. He saw his ship bag on one of the
carts. It was a gift from the Interstellar Ambassador on Walden. He'd
assured Hoddan that there was a fund for the assistance of political
refugees, and that the bag and its contents was normal. But in addition
to the gift-clothing, Hoddan had a number of stun-pistols, formerly
equipment of the police department of Walden's capital city.

He followed his bag to a warehouse. Arrived there, he found the bag
surrounded by a group of whiskered or mustachioed Darthian characters
wearing felt pants and large sheath-knives. They had opened the bag and
were in the act of ferocious dispute about who should get what of its
contents. Incidentally they argued over the stun-pistols, which looked
like weapons but weren't because nothing happened when one pulled the
trigger. Hoddan grimaced. They'd been in store on the liner during the
voyage. Normally they picked up a trickle charge from broadcast power,
on Walden, but there was no broadcast power on the liner, nor any on
Darth. They'd leaked their charges and were quite useless. The one in
his pocket would be useless, too.

He grimaced again and swerved to the building where the landing grid
controls must be. He opened the door and went in. The interior was smoky
and ill-smelling, but the equipment was wholly familiar. Two unshaven
men--in violently colored shirts--languidly played cards. Only one, a
redhead, paid attention to the controls of the landing grid. He watched
dials. As Hoddan pushed his way in, he threw a switch and yawned. The
ship was five diameters out from Darth, and he'd released it from the
landing grid fields. He turned and saw Hoddan.

[Illustration]

"What the hell do you want?" he demanded sharply.

"A few kilowatts," said Hoddan. The redhead's manner was not amiable.

"Get outta here!" he barked.

The transformers and snaky cables leading to relays outside--all were
clear as print to Hoddan. He moved confidently toward an especially
understandable panel, pulling out his stun-pistol and briskly breaking
back the butt for charging. He shoved the pistol butt to contact with
two terminals devised for another purpose, and the pistol slipped for an
instant and a blue spark flared.

"Quit that!" roared the red-headed man. The unshaven men pushed back
from their game of cards. One of them stood up, smiling unpleasantly.

The stun-pistol clicked. Hoddan withdrew it from charging-contact,
flipped the butt shut, and turned toward the three men. Two of them
charged him suddenly--the redhead and the unpleasant smiler.

The stun-pistol hummed. The redhead howled. He'd been hit in the hand.
His unshaven companion buckled in the middle and fell to the floor. The
third man backed away in panic, automatically raising his arms in
surrender.

Hoddan saw no need for further action. He nodded graciously and went out
of the control building, swinging the recharged pistol in his hand. In
the warehouse, argument still raged over his possessions. He went in,
briskly. Nobody looked at him. The casual appropriation of unguarded
property was apparently a social norm, here. The man in the purple cloak
was insisting furiously that he was a Darthian gentleman and he'd have
his share or else--

"Those things," said Hoddan, "are mine. Put them back."

Faces turned to him, expressing shocked surprise. A man in dirty yellow
pants stood up with a suit of Hoddan's underwear and a pair of shoes. He
moved with great dignity to depart.

The stun-pistol buzzed. He leaped and howled and fled. Hoddan had aimed
accurately enough, but prudence suggested that if he appeared to kill
anybody, the matter might become serious. So he'd fired to sting the man
with a stun-pistol bolt at about the same spot where, on Walden, he'd
scorched members of a party of police in ambush. It was nice shooting.
But this happened to be a time and place where prudence did not pay.

There was a concerted gasp of outrage. Men leaped to their feet. Large
knives came out of elaborate holsters. Figures in all the colors of the
rainbow--all badly soiled--roared their indignation and charged at
Hoddan. They waved knives as they came.

He held down the stun-pistol trigger and traversed the rushing men. The
whining buzz of the weapon was inaudible, at first, but before he
released the trigger it was plainly to be heard. Then there was silence.
His attackers formed a very untidy heap on the floor. They breathed
stertorously. Hoddan began to retrieve his possessions. He rolled a man
over, for the purpose.

A pair of very blue, apprehensive eyes stared at him. Their owner had
stumbled over one man and been stumbled over by others. He gazed up at
Hoddan, speechless.

"Hand me that, please," said Hoddan. He pointed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The man in the purple cloak obeyed, shaking. Hoddan completed the
recovery of all his belongings. He turned. The man in the purple cloak
winced and closed his eyes.

"Hm-m-m," said Hoddan. He needed information. He wasn't likely to get it
from the men in the grid's control room. He would hardly be popular with
any of these, either. He irritably suspected himself of a tendency to
make enemies unnecessarily. But he did need directions. He said: "I have
a letter of introduction to one Don Loris, prince of something-or-other,
lord of this, baron of that, and claimant to the dukedom of the other
thing. Would you have any idea how I could reach him?"

The man in the purple cloak gaped at Hoddan.

"He is ... my chieftain," he said, aghast. "I ... am Thal, his most
trusted retainer." Then he practically wailed, "You must be the man I
was sent to meet! He sent me to learn if you came on the ship! I should
have fought by your side! This is disgrace!"

"It's disgraceful," agreed Hoddan grimly. But he, who had been born and
raised in a space-pirate community, should not be too critical of
others. "Let it go. How do I find him?"

"I should take you!" complained Thal bitterly. "But you have killed all
these men. Their friends and chieftains are honor bound to cut your
throat! And you shot Merk, but he ran away, and he will be summoning his
friends to come and kill you now! This is shame! This is--" Then he said
hopefully: "Your strange weapon! How many men can you fight? If fifty,
we may live to ride away. If more, we may even reach Don Loris' castle.
How many?"

"We'll see what we see," said Hoddan dourly. "But I'd better charge
these other pistols. You can come with me, or wait. I haven't killed
these men. They're only stunned. They'll come around presently."

He went out of the warehouse, carrying the bag which was again loaded
with uncharged stun-pistols. He went back to the grid's control room. He
pushed it open and entered for the second time. The red-headed man swore
and rubbed at his hand. The man who'd smiled unpleasantly lay in a heap
on the floor. The second unshaven man jittered visibly at sight of
Hoddan.

"I'm back," said Hoddan politely, "for more kilowatts."

He put his bag conveniently close to the terminals at which his pistols
could be recharged. He snapped open a pistol butt and presented it to
the electric contacts.

"Quaint customs you have here," he said conversationally. "Robbing a
newcomer. Resenting his need for a few watts of power that comes free
from the sky." The stun-pistol clicked. He snapped the butt shut and
opened another, which he placed in contact for charging. "Making him
act," he said acidly, "with manners as bad as the local ones. Going at
him with knives so he has to be resentful in his turn." The second
stun-pistol clicked. He closed it and began to charge a third. He said
severely: "Innocent tourists--relatively innocent ones, anyhow--are not
likely to be favorably impressed with Darth!" He had the charging
process going swiftly now. He began to charge a fourth weapon. "It's
particularly bad manners," he added sternly, "to stand there grinding
your teeth at me while your friend behind the desk crawls after an
old-fashioned chemical gun to shoot me with."

He snapped the fourth pistol shut and went after the man who'd dropped
down behind a desk. He came upon that man, hopelessly panicked, just as
his hands closed on a clumsy gun that was supposed to set off a chemical
explosive to propel a metal bullet.

"Don't!" said Hoddan severely. "If I have to shoot you at this range,
you'll have blisters!"

He took the weapon out of the other man's hands. He went back and
finished charging the rest of the pistols.

He returned most of them to his bag, though he stuck others in his belt
and pockets to the point where he looked like the fiction-tape pictures
of space pirates. But he knew what space pirates were actually like. He
moved to the door. As a last thought, he picked up the bullet-firing
weapon.

"There's only one spaceship here a month," he observed politely, "so
I'll be around. If you want to get in touch with me, ask Don Loris. I'm
going to visit him while I look over professional opportunities on
Darth."

He went out once more. Somehow he felt more cheerful than a half-hour
since, when he'd landed as the only passenger from the space liner. Then
he'd felt ignored and lonely and friendless on a strange and primitive
world. He still had no friends, but he had already acquired some enemies
and therefore material for more or less worthwhile achievement. He
surveyed the sunlit scene about him from the control-room door.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thal, the purple-cloaked man, had brought two shaggy-haired animals
around to the door of the warehouse. Hoddan later learned that they were
horses. He was frenziedly in the act of mounting one of them. As he
climbed up, small bright metal disks cascaded from a pocket. He tried to
stop the flow of money as he got feverishly into the saddle.

From the gable-roofed small town a mob of some thirty mounted men
plunged toward the landing grid. They wore garments of yellow and blue
and magenta. They waved large-bladed knives and made bloodthirsty
noises. Thal saw them and bolted, riding one horse and towing the other
by a lead rope. It happened that his line of retreat passed by where
Hoddan stood.

Hoddan held up his hand. Thal reined in.

"Mount!" he cried hoarsely. "Mount and ride!"

Hoddan passed up the chemical--powder--gun. Thal seized it frantically.

"Hurry!" he panted. "Don Loris would have my throat cut if I deserted
you! Mount and ride!"

Hoddan painstakingly fastened his bag to the saddle of the lead horse.
He unfastened the lead rope. He'd noticed that Thal pulled in the
leather reins to stop the horse. He'd seen that he kicked it furiously
to urge it on. He deduced that one steered the animal by pulling on one
strap or the other. He climbed clumsily to a seat.

There was a howl from the racing, mounted men. They waved their knives
and yelled in zestful anticipation of murder.

Hoddan pulled on a rein. His horse turned obediently. He kicked it. The
animal broke into a run toward the rushing mob. The jolting motion
amazed Hoddan. One could not shoot straight while being shaken up like
this! He dragged back on the reins. The horse stopped.

"Come!" yelled Thal despairingly. "This way! Quick!"

Hoddan got out a stun-pistol. Sitting erect, frowning a little in his
concentration, he began to take pot-shots at the charging small horde.

Three of them got close enough to be blistered when stun-pistol bolts
hit them. Others toppled from their saddles at distances ranging from
one hundred yards to twenty. A good dozen, however, saw what was
happening in time to swerve their mounts and hightail it away. But there
were eighteen luridly-tinted heaps of garments on the ground inside the
landing grid. Two or three of them squirmed and swore. Hoddan had partly
missed, on them. He heard the chemical weapon booming thunderously. Now
that victory was won, Thal was shooting valorously. Hoddan held up his
hand for cease fire. Thal rode up beside him, not quite believing what
he'd seen.

"Wonderful!" he said shakily. "Wonderful! Don Loris will be pleased! He
will give me gifts for my help to you! This is a great fight! We will be
great men, after this!"

"Then let's go and brag," said Hoddan.

Thal was shocked.

"You need me," he said commiseratingly. "It is fortunate that Don Loris
chose me to fight beside you!"

He sent his horse trotting toward the mostly unconscious men on the
ground. He alighted. Hoddan saw him happily and publicly pick the
pockets of the stun-gun's victims. He came back, beaming and now
swaggering in his saddle.

"We will be famous!" he said zestfully. "Two against thirty, and some
ran away!" He gloated. "And it was a good haul! We share, of course,
because we are companions."

"Is it the custom," asked Hoddan mildly, "to loot defenseless men?"

"But of course!" said Thal. "How else can a gentleman live, if he has no
chieftain to give him presents? You defeated them, so of course you take
their possessions!"

"Ah, yes," said Hoddan. "To be sure!"

He rode on. The road was a mere horse track. Presently it was less than
that. He saw a frowning, battlemented stronghold away off to the left.
Thal openly hoped that somebody would come from that castle and try to
charge them toll for riding over their lord's land. After Hoddan had
knocked them over with the stun-pistol, Thal would add to the heavy
weight of coins already in his possession.

It did not look promising, in a way. But just before sunset, Hoddan saw
three tiny bright lights flash across the sky from west to east. They
moved in formation and at identical speeds. Hoddan knew a spaceship in
orbit when he saw one. He bristled, and muttered under his breath.

"What's that?" asked Thal. "What did you say?"

"I said," said Hoddan dourly, "that I've got to do something about
Walden. When they get an idea in their heads...."




IV


According to the fiction tapes, the colonized worlds of the galaxy vary
wildly from each other. In cold and unromantic fact, it isn't so. Space
travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too numerous to justify
the settlement of hostile worlds. There's no point in trying to live
where one has to put on special equipment every time he goes outdoors.
There's no reason to settle on a world where one can't grow the kind of
vegetation one's ancestors adapted themselves to some tens of thousands
of generations ago. It simply doesn't make sense!

So the inhabited worlds of the galaxy are farther apart than they could
be, perhaps, and much more alike than is necessary. But the human race
has a predilection for gravity fields not too far from 980cm-sec
accellerative force. We humans were designed for something like that. We
prefer foodstuffs containing familiar amino compounds. Our metabolism
was designed around them. And since our geneticists have learned how to
put aggressiveness into the genes of terrestrial-origin plants--why
nowadays they briskly overwhelm the native flora wherever they are
introduced. And it's rational to let it happen. If people are to thrive
and multiply on new worlds as they are colonized, it's more convenient
to modify the worlds to fit the colonists than the colonists to fit the
worlds.

Therefore Bron Hoddan encountered no remarkable features in the
landscape of Darth as he rode through the deepening night. There was
grass, which was not luxuriant. There were bushes, which were not unduly
lush. There were trees, and birds, and various other commonplace living
things whose forebears had been dumped on Darth some centuries before.
The ecological system had worked itself out strictly by hit-or-miss, but
the result was not unfamiliar. Save for the star-pattern overhead,
Hoddan could have believed himself on some parts of Zan, or some parts
of Walden, or very probably somewhere or other on Lohala or Kent or
Famagusta or any other occupied world between the Rims.

There was, though, the star-pattern. Hoddan tried to organize it in his
mind. He knew where the sun had set, which would be west. He asked the
latitude of the Darthian spaceport. Thal did not know it. He asked about
major geographical features--seas and continents and so on. Thal had no
ideas on the subject.

Hoddan fumed. He hadn't worried about such things on Walden. Of course,
on Walden he'd had one friend, Derec, and believed he had a sweetheart,
Nedda. There he was lonely and schemed to acquire the admiration of
others. He ignored the sky. Here on Darth he had no friends, but there
were a number of local citizens now doubtless recovered from
stun-pistol bolts and yearning to carve him up with large knives. He did
not feel lonely, but the instinct to know where he was, was again in
operation.

The ground was rocky and far from level. After two hours of riding on a
small and wiry horse with no built-in springs, Hoddan hurt in a great
many places he'd never known he owned. He and Thal rode in an
indeterminate direction with an irregular scarp of low mountains
silhouetted against the unfamiliar stars. A vagrant night-wind blew.
Thal had said it was a three-hour ride to Don Loris' castle. After
something over two of them, he said meditatively:

"I think that if you wish to give me a present I will take it and not
make a gift in return. You could give me," he added helpfully, "your
share of the plunder from our victims."

"Why?" demanded Hoddan. "Why should I give you a present?"

"If I accepted it," explained Thal, "and made no gift in return, I would
become your retainer. Then it would be my obligation as a Darthian
gentleman to ride beside you, advise, counsel, and fight in your
defense, and generally to uphold your dignity."

Hoddan suspected himself of blisters in places that had no dignity about
them. He said suspiciously:

"How about Don Loris? Aren't you his retainer?"

"Between the two of us," said Thal, "he's stingy. His presents are not
as lavish as they could be. I can make him a return-present of part of
the money we won in combat. That frees me of duty to him. Then I could
accept the balance of the money from you, and become a retainer of
yours."

"Oh," said Hoddan.

"You need a retainer badly," said Thal. "You do not know the customs
here. For example, there is enmity between Don Loris and the young Lord
Ghek. If the young Lord Ghek is as enterprising as he should be, some of
his retainers should be lying in wait to cut our throats as we approach
Don Loris' stronghold."

"Hm-m-m," said Hoddan grimly. But Thal seemed undisturbed. "This system
of gifts and presents sounds complicated. Why doesn't Don Loris simply
give you so much a year, or week, or whatnot?"

Thal made a shocked sound.

"That would be pay! A Darthian gentleman does not serve for pay! To
offer it would be insult!" Then he said, "Listen!"

He reined in. Hoddan clumsily followed his example. After a moment or
two Thal clucked to his horse and started off again.

"It was nothing," he said regretfully. "I hoped we were riding into an
ambush."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan grunted. It could be that he was being told a tall tale. But back
at the spaceport, the men who came after him waving large knives had
seemed sincere enough.

"Why should we be ambushed?" he asked. "And why do you hope for it?"

"Your weapons would destroy our enemies," said Thal placidly, "and the
pickings would be good." He added: "We should be ambushed because the
Lady Fani refused to marry the Lord Ghek. She is Don Loris' daughter,
and to refuse to marry a man is naturally a deadly insult. So he should
ravage Don Loris' lands at every opportunity until he gets a chance to
carry off the Lady Fani and marry her by force. That is the only way the
insult can be wiped out."

"I see," said Hoddan ironically.

He didn't. The two horses topped a rise, and far in the distance there
was a yellow light, with a mist above it as of illuminated smoke.

"That is Don Loris' stronghold," said Thal. He sighed. "It looks like we
may not be ambushed."

They weren't. It was very dark where the horses forged ahead through
brushwood. As they moved onward, the single light became two. They were
great bonfires burning in iron cages some forty feet up in the air.
Those cages projected from the battlements of a massive, cut-stone wall.
There was no light anywhere else underneath the stars.

Thal rode almost underneath the cressets and shouted upward. A voice
answered. Presently a gate clanked open and a black, cavelike opening
appeared behind it. Thal rode grandly in, and Hoddan followed. Now that
the ride seemed over, he let himself realize where he ached from the
unaccustomed exercise. Everywhere. He also guessed at the area of his
skin first rubbed to blisters and then to the discomfort of raw flesh
underneath.

The gate clanked shut. Torches waved overhead. Hoddan found that he and
Thal had ridden into a very tiny courtyard. Twenty feet above them, an
inner battlemented wall offered excellent opportunities for the
inhabitants of the castle to throw things down at visitors who after
admission turned out to be undesired.

Thal shouted further identifications, including a boastful and entirely
untruthful declaration that he and Hoddan, together, had slaughtered
twenty men in one place and thirty in another, and left them lying in
their gore.

The voices that replied sounded derisive. Somebody came down a rope and
fastened the gate from the inside. With an extreme amount of creaking,
an inner gate swung wide. Men came out of it and took the horses. Hoddan
dismounted, and it seemed to him that he creaked as loudly as the gate.
Thal swaggered, displaying coins he had picked from the pockets of the
men the stun-pistols had disabled. He said splendidly to Hoddan:

"I go to announce your coming to Don Loris. These are his retainers.
They will give you to drink." He added amiably, "If you were given food,
it would be disgraceful to cut your throat."

He disappeared. Hoddan carried his ship bag and followed a man in a
dirty pink shirt to a stone-walled room containing a table and a chair.
He sat down, relieved to have a rest for his back. The man in the pink
shirt brought him a flagon of wine. He disappeared again.

Hoddan drank sour wine and brooded. He was very hungry and very tired,
and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension.
Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture from his grandfather
on Zan.

"It's no use!" it was the custom of his grandfather to say. "There's not
a bit o' use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A
lucky idiot's ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him!
A smart man starts thinkin', and he thinks himself into a jail cell if
his luck is bad, and good luck's wasted on him because it ain't
reasonable and he don't believe in it when it happens! It's taken me a
lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin' me! No, sir! I hope none o' my
descendants inherit my brains! I pity 'em if they do!"

Hoddan had been on Darth not more than four hours. In that time he'd
found himself robbed, had resented it, had been the object of two
spirited attempts at assassination, had ridden an excruciating number of
miles on an unfamiliar animal, and now found himself in a stone dungeon
and deprived of food lest feeding him obligate his host not to cut his
throat. And he'd gotten into this by himself! He'd chosen it! He'd
practically asked for it!

He began strongly to share his grandfather's disillusioned view of
brains.

       *       *       *       *       *

After a long time the door of the cell opened. Thal was back, chastened.

"Don Loris wants to talk to you," he said in a subdued voice. "He's not
pleased."

Hoddan took another gulp of the wine. He picked up his ship bag and
limped to the door. He decided painfully that he was limping on the
wrong leg. He tried the other. No improvement. He really needed to limp
on both.

He followed a singularly silent Thal through a long stone corridor and
up stone steps until they came to a monstrous hall with torches in
holders on the side walls. It was barbarically hung with banners, but it
was not exactly a cheery place. At the far end logs burned in a great
fireplace.

Don Loris sat in a carved chair beside it; wizened and white-bearded, in
a fur-trimmed velvet robe, with a peevish expression on his face.

"My chieftain," said Thal subduedly, "here is the engineer from Walden."

Hoddan scowled at Don Loris, whose expression of peevishness did not
lighten. He did regard Hoddan with a flicker of interest, however. A
stranger who unfeignedly scowls at a feudal lord with no superior and
many inferiors is anyhow a novelty.

"Thal tells me," said Don Loris fretfully, "that you and he, together,
slaughtered some dozens of the retainers of my neighbors today. I
consider it unfortunate. They may ask me to have the two of you hanged,
and it would be impolite to refuse."

Hoddan said truculently:

"I considered it impolite for your neighbors' retainers to march toward
me waving large knives and announcing what they intended to do to my
inwards with them!"

"Yes," agreed Don Loris impatiently. "I concede that point. It is
natural enough to act hastily at such times. But still-- How many did you
kill?"

"None," said Hoddan curtly. "I shot them with stun-pistols I'd just
charged in the control room of the landing grid."

Don Loris sat up straight.

"Stun-pistols?" he demanded sharply. "You used stun-pistols on Darth?"

"Naturally on Darth," said Hoddan with some tartness. "I was here! But
nobody was killed. One or two may be slightly blistered. All of them had
their pockets picked by Thal. I understand that is a local custom.
There's nothing to worry about."

But Don Loris stared at him, aghast.

"But this is deplorable!" he protested. "Stun-pistols used here? It is
the one thing I would have given strict orders to avoid! My neighbors
will talk about it. Some of them may even think about it! You could have
used any other weapon, but of all things why did you have to use a
stun-pistol?"

"Because I had one," said Hoddan briefly.

"Horrible!" said Don Loris peevishly. "The worst thing you could
possibly have done! I have to disown you. Unmistakably! You'll have to
disappear at once. We'll blame it on Ghek's retainers."

Hoddan said:

"Disappear? Me?"

"Vanish," said Don Loris. "I suppose there's no real necessity to cut
your throat, but you plainly have to disappear, though it would have
been much more discreet if you'd simply gotten killed."

"I was indiscreet to survive?" demanded Hoddan bristling.

"Extremely so!" snapped Don Loris. "Here I had you come all the way from
Walden to help arrange a delicate matter, and before you'd traveled even
the few miles to my castle--within minutes of landing on Darth!--you
spoiled everything! I am a reasonable man, but there are the facts! You
used stun-pistols, so you have to disappear. I think it generous for me
to say only until people on Darth forget that such things exist. But the
two of you ... oh, for a year or so ... there are some fairly cozy
dungeons--"

Hoddan seethed suddenly. He'd tried to do something brilliant on Walden,
and had been framed for jail for life. He'd defended his life and
property on Darth, and nearly the same thing popped up as a prospect.
Hoddan angrily suspected fate and chance of plain conspiracy against
him.

       *       *       *       *       *

But there was an interruption. A clanking of arms sounded somewhere
nearby. Men with long, gruesome, glittering spears came through a
doorway. They stood aside. A girl entered the great hall. More spearmen
followed her. They stopped by the door. The girl came across the hall.

She was a pretty girl, but Hoddan hardly noticed the fact. With so many
other things on his mind, he had no time for girls.

Thal, behind him, said in a quivering voice:

"My Lady Fani, I beg you to plead with your father for his most faithful
retainer!"

The girl looked surprisedly at him. Her eyes fell on Hoddan. She looked
interested. Hoddan, at that moment, was very nearly as disgusted and as
indignant as a man could be. He did not look romantically at her--which
to the Lady Fani, daughter of that Don Loris who was prince of this and
baron of that and so on, was news. He did not look at her at all. He
ground his teeth.

"Don't try to wheedle me, Fani!" snapped Don Loris. "I am a reasonable
man, but I indulge you too much--even to allowing you to refuse that
young imbecile Ghek, with no end of inconvenience as a result. But I
will not have you question my decision about Thal and this Hoddan
person!"

The girl said pleasantly:

"Of course not, Father. But what have they done?"

"The two of them," snapped Don Loris again, "fought twenty men today and
defeated all of them! Thal plundered them. Then thirty other men,
mounted, tried to avenge the first and they defeated them also! Thal
plundered eighteen. And all this was permissible, if unlikely. But they
did it with stun-pistols! Everybody within news range will talk of it!
They'll know that this Hoddan came to Darth to see me! They'll suspect
that I imported new weapons for political purposes! They'll guess at the
prettiest scheme I've had these twenty years!"

The girl stood still. A spearman leaned his weapon against the wall,
raced across the hall, shifted a chair to a convenient position for the
Lady Fani to sit on it, and raced back to his fellows. She sat down.

"But did they really defeat so many?" she asked, marveling. "That's
wonderful! And Thal was undoubtedly fighting in defense of someone you'd
told him to protect, as a loyal retainer should do. Wasn't he?"

"I wish," fumed her father, "that you would not throw in irrelevances! I
sent him to bring this Hoddan here this afternoon, not to massacre my
neighbors' retainers--or rather, not to not massacre them. A little
blood-letting would have done no harm, but stun-pistols--"

"He was protecting somebody he was told to protect," said Fani. "And
this other man, this--"

"Hoddan. Bron Hoddan," said her father irritably. "Yes. He was
protecting himself! Doubtless he thought he did me a service in doing
that! But if he'd only let himself get killed quietly the whole affair
would be simplified!"

The Lady Fani said with quiet dignity:

"By the same reasoning, Father, it would simplify things greatly if I
let the Lord Ghek kidnap me."

"It's not the same thing at all--"

"At least," said Fani, "I wouldn't have a pack of spearmen following me
about like puppies everywhere I go!"

"It's not the same--"

"Their breaths smelling of wine except when they smell of beer, and they
breathe very noisily and--"

"It's not--"

"And it's especially unreasonable," said the Lady Fani with even greater
dignity, "when you could put Thal and this--Hoddan person on duty to
guard me instead. If they can fight twenty and thirty men at once, all
by themselves, it doesn't seem to me that you think much of my safety
when you want to lock them up somewhere instead of using them to keep
your daughter safe from that particularly horrible Ghek!"

Don Loris swore in a cracked voice. Then he said:

"To end the argument I'll think it over. Until tomorrow. Now go away!"

Fani, beaming, rose and kissed him on the forehead. He squirmed. She
turned to leave, and beckoned casually for Thal and Hoddan to follow
her.

"My chieftain," said Thal tremulously, "do we depart, too?"

"Yes!" rasped Don Loris. "Get out of my sight!"

Thal moved with agility in the wake of the Lady Fani. Hoddan picked up
his bag and followed. This, he considered darkly, was in the nature of a
reprieve only. And if those three spaceships overhead did come from
Walden--but why three?

       *       *       *       *       *

The Lady Fani went out the door she'd entered by. Some of the spearmen
went ahead, and others closed in behind her. Hoddan followed. There were
stone steps leading upward. They were steep and uneven and interminable.
Hoddan climbed on aching legs for what seemed ages.

Stars appeared. The leading spearmen stepped out on a flagstoned level
area. When Hoddan got there he saw that they had arrived at the
battlements of a high part of the castle wall. Starlight showed a
rambling wall of circumvallation, with peaked roofs inside it. He could
look down into a courtyard where a fire burned and several men busily
did things beside it. But there were no other lights. Beyond the castle
wall the ground stretched away toward a nearby range of rugged low
mountains. It was vaguely splotched with different degrees of darkness,
where fields and pastures and woodland copses stood.

"Here's a bench," said Fani cheerfully, "and you can sit down beside me
and explain things. What's your name, again, and where did you come
from?"

"I'm Bron Hoddan," said Hoddan. He found himself scowling. "I come from
Zan, where everybody is a space pirate. My grandfather heads the most
notorious of the pirate gangs."

"Wonderful!" said Fani, admiringly. "I knew you couldn't be just an
ordinary person and fight like my father said you did today!"

Thal cleared his throat.

"Lady Fani--"

"Hush!" said Fani. "You're a nice old fuddy-duddy that father sent to
the spaceport because he figured you'd be too timid to get into trouble.
Hush!" To Hoddan she said interestedly, "Now, tell me all about the
fighting. It must have been terrible!"

She watched him with her head on one side, expectantly.

"The fighting I did today," said Hoddan angrily, "was exactly as
dangerous and as difficult as shooting fish in a bucket. A little more
trouble, but not much."

Even in the starlight he could see that her expression was more admiring
than before.

"I thought you'd say something like that!" she said contentedly. "Go
on!"

"That's all," said Hoddan.

"Quite all?"

"I can't think of anything else," he told her. He added drearily: "I
rode a horse for three hours today. I'm not used to it. I ache. Your
father is thinking of putting me in a dungeon until some scheme or other
of his goes through. I'm disappointed. I'm worried about three lights
that went across the sky at sundown and I'm simply too tired and
befuddled for normal conversation."

"Oh," said Fani.

"If I may take my leave," said Hoddan querulously, "I'll get some rest
and do some thinking when I get up. I'll hope to have more entertaining
things to say."

He got to his feet and picked up his bag.

"Where do I go?" he asked.

Fani regarded him enigmatically. Thal squirmed.

"Thal will show you." Then Fani said deliberately, "Bron Hoddan, will
you fight for me?"

Thal plucked anxiously at his arm. Hoddan said politely:

"If at all desirable, yes. But now I must get some sleep."

"Thank you," said Fani. "I am troubled by the Lord Ghek."

She watched him move away. Thal, moaning softly, went with him down
another monstrosity of a stone stairway.

"Oh, what folly!" mourned Thal. "I tried to warn you! You would not pay
attention! When the Lady Fani asked if you would fight for her, you
should have said if her father permitted you that honor. But you said
yes! The spearmen heard you! Now you must either fight the Lord Ghek
within a night and day or be disgraced!"

"I doubt," said Hoddan tiredly, "that the obligations of Darthian
gentility apply to the grandson of a pirate or an escap.... To me."

He'd been about to say an escaped criminal from Walden, but caught
himself in time.

"But they do apply!" said Thal, shocked. "A man who has been disgraced
has no rights! Any man may plunder him, any man may kill him at will.
But if he resists plundering or kills anybody else in self-defense, he
is hanged!"

Hoddan stopped short in his descent of the uneven stone steps.

"That's me from now on?" he said sardonically. "Of course the Lady Fani
didn't mean to put me on such a spot!"

"You were not polite," explained Thal. "She'd persuaded her father out
of putting us in a dungeon until he thought of us again. You should at
least have shown good manners! You should have said that you came here
across deserts and flaming oceans because of the fame of her beauty. You
might have said you heard songs of her sweetness beside campfires half a
world away. She might not have believed you, but--"

"Hold it!" said Hoddan. "That's just manners? What would you say to a
girl you really liked?"

"Oh, then," said Thal, "you'd get complimentary!"

Hoddan went heavily down the rest of the steps. He was not in the least
pleased. On a strange world, with strange customs, and with his weapons
losing their charge every hour, he did not need any handicaps. But if he
got into a worse-than-outlawed category such as Thal described--

At the bottom of the stairs he said, seething:

"When you've tucked me in bed, go back and ask the Lady Fani to arrange
for me to have a horse and permission to go fight this Lord Ghek right
after breakfast!"

He was too much enraged to think further. He let himself be led into
some sort of quarters which probably answered Don Loris' description of
a cozy dungeon. Thal vanished and came back with ointments for Hoddan's
blisters, but no food. He explained again that food given to Hoddan
would make it disgraceful to cut his throat. And Hoddan swore
poisonously, but stripped off his garments and smeared himself lavishly
where he had lost skin. The ointment stung like fire, and he presently
lay awake in a sort of dreary fury. And he was ravenous!

       *       *       *       *       *

It seemed to him that he lay awake for aeons, but he must have dozed off
because he was awakened by a yell. It was not a complete yell; only the
first part of one. It stopped in a particularly unpleasant fashion, and
its echoes went reverberating through the stony walls of the castle.
Hoddan was out of bed with a stun-pistol in his hand in a hurry, before
that first yell was followed by other shouts and outcries, by the
clashing of steel upon steel, and all the frenzied tumult of combat in
the dark. The uproar moved. In seconds the sound of fighting came from a
plainly different direction, as if a striking force of some sort went
rushing through only indifferently defended corridors.

It would not pass before Hoddan's door, but he growled to himself. On a
feudal world, presumably one might expect anything. But there was a
situation in being, here, in which etiquette required a rejected suitor
to carry off a certain scornful maiden by force. Some young lordling
named Ghek had to carry off Fani or be considered a man of no spirit.

A gun went off somewhere. It was a powder gun, exploding violently to
send a metal bullet somewhere. It went off again. There was an instant
almost of silence. Then an intolerable screeching of triumph, and
shrieks of another sort entirely, and the excessively loud clash of arms
once more.

Hoddan was clothed, now--at least clothed enough to have places to stick
stun-pistols. He jerked on the door to open it, irritably demanding of
himself how he would know which side was which, or for that matter which
side he should fight on.

The door was locked. He raged. He flung himself against it and it barely
quivered. It was barred on the outside. He swore in highly indecorous
terms, and tore his bedstead apart to get a battering-ram.

The fighting reached a climax. He heard a girl scream, and without
question knew that it was the Lady Fani, and equally without question
knew that he would fight to keep any girl from being abducted by a man
she didn't want to marry. He swung the log which was the corner post of
his bed. Something cracked. He swung again.

The sound of battle changed to that of a running fight. The objective of
the raiders had been reached. Having gotten what they came for--and it
could only be Fani--they retreated swiftly, fighting only to cover their
retreat. Hoddan swung his bed leg with furious anger. He heard a flurry
of yells and sword strokes, and a fierce, desperate cry from Fani among
them, and a plank in his guest-room-dungeon door gave way. He struck
again. The running raiders poured past a corner some yards away. He
battered and swore, swore and battered as the tumult moved, and he
suddenly heard a scurrying thunder of horses' hoofs outside the castle
altogether. There were yells of derisive triumph and the pounding,
rumbling sound of horses headed away in the night until it was lost.

Still raging inarticulately, Hoddan crashed his small log at the door.
He was not consciously concerned about the distress Don Loris might feel
over the abduction of his daughter. But there is an instinct in most men
against the forcing of a girl to marriage against her will. Hoddan
battered at his door. Around him the castle began to hum like a hive of
bees. Women cried out or exclaimed, and men shouted furiously to one
another, and off-duty fighting men came belatedly looking for somebody
to fight, dragging weapons behind them and not knowing where to find
enemies.

Bron Hoddan probably made as much noise as any four of them. Somebody
brought a light somewhere near. It shone through the cracks in the
splintered planks. He could see to aim. He smote savagely and the door
came apart. It fell outward and he found himself in the corridor
outside, being stared at by complete strangers.

"It's the engineer," someone explained to someone else. "I saw him when
he rode in with Thal."

"I want Thal," said Hoddan coldly. "I want a dozen horses. I want men to
ride them with me." He pushed his way forward. "Which way to the
stables?"

But then he went back and picked up his bag of stun-pistols. His air was
purposeful and his manner furious. The retainers of Don Loris were in an
extremely apologetic frame of mind. The Lady Fani had been carried off
into the night by a raiding party undoubtedly led by Lord Ghek. The
defenders of the castle hadn't prevented it. So there was no special
reason to obey Hoddan, but there was every reason to seem to be doing
something useful.

He found himself almost swept along by agitated retainers trying to look
as if they were about a purposeful affair. They went down a long ramp,
calling uneasily to each other. They eddied around a place where two men
lay quite still on the floor. Then there were shouts of, "Thal! This
way, Thal!" and Hoddan found himself in a small stone-walled courtyard
doubtless inside a sally-port. It was filled with milling figures and
many waving torches. And there was Thal, desperately pale and
frightened. Behind him there was Don Loris, his eyes burning and his
hands twitching, literally speechless from fury.

"Pick a dozen men, Thal!" commanded Hoddan. "Get 'em on horses! Get a
horse for me, dammit! I'll show 'em how to use the stun-pistols as we
ride!"

Thal panted, shaking:

"They ... hamstrung most of the horses!"

"Get the ones that are left!" barked Hoddan. He suddenly raged at Don
Loris. "Here's another time stun-pistols get used on Darth! Object to
this if you want to!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoofbeats. Thal on a horse that shied and reared at the flames and
confusion. Other horses, skittish and scared, with the smell of spilt
blood in their nostrils, fighting the men who led them, their eyes
rolling.

Thal called names as he looked about him. There was plenty of light. As
he called a name, a man climbed on a horse. Men thrust swords,
spears--all manner of weapons upon them. Some of the chosen men
swaggered because of their choice. Some looked woefully unhappy. But
with Don Loris glaring frenziedly upon them in the smoky glare, no man
refused.

Hoddan climbed ungracefully upon the mount that four or five men held
for him. Thal, with a fine sense of drama, seized a torch and waved it
above his head. There was a vast creaking, and an unsuspected gate
opened, and Thal rode out with a great clattering of hoofs and the
others rode out after him.

There were lights everywhere about the castle, now. All along the
battlements men had set light to fire-baskets and lowered them partway
down the walls, to disclose any attacking force which might have
dishonorable intentions toward the stronghold. Others waved torches from
the battlements.

Thal swung his torch and pointed to the ground.

"They rode here!" he called to Hoddan. "They ride for Ghek's castle!"

Hoddan said angrily:

"Put out that light! Do you want to advertise how few we are and what
we're doing? Here, ride close!"

Thal flung down the torch and horses trod it underfoot as the knot of
men rode on. Thal boomed:

"The pickings should be good, eh? Why do you want me?"

"You've got to learn something," snapped Hoddan. "Here! This is a
stun-pistol. It's set for single-shot firing only. You hold it so, with
your finger along this rod. You point your finger at a man and pull this
trigger. The pistol will buzz--briefly. You let the trigger loose and
point at another man and pull the trigger again. Understand? Don't try
to use it over ten yards. You're no marksman!"

There on a galloping horse beside Hoddan in the darkness, Thal zestfully
repeated his lesson.

"Show another man and send him to me for a pistol," Hoddan commanded
curtly. "I'll be showing others."

He turned to the man who rode too close to his left. Before he had fully
instructed that man, another clamored for a weapon on his right.

This was hardly adequate training in the use of modern weapons. For that
matter, Hoddan was hardly qualified to give military instruction. He'd
only gone on two pirate voyages himself. But little boys on Zan played
at pirate, in dutiful emulation of their parents. At least the
possibilities of stun-guns were envisioned in their childish games. So
Hoddan knew more about how to fight with stun-pistols than somebody who
knew nothing at all.

The band of pursuing horsemen pounded through the dark night under
strangely patterned stars. Hoddan held on to his saddle and barked out
instructions to teach Darthians how to shoot. He felt very queer. He
began to worry. With the lights of Don Loris' castle long vanished
behind, he began to realize how very small his troop was.

Thal had said something about horses being hamstrung. There must, then,
have been two attacking parties. One swarmed into the stables to draw
all defending retainers there. Then the other poured over a wall or in
through a bribed-open sally-port, and rushed for the Lady Fani's
apartments. The point was that the attackers had made sure there could
be only a token pursuit. They knew they were many times stronger than
any who might come after them. It would be absurd for them to flee....

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan kicked his horse and got up to the front of the column of riders
in the night.

"Thal!" he snapped. "They'll be idiots if they keep on running away, now
they're too far off to worry about men on foot. They'll stop and wait
for us--most of them anyhow. We're riding into an ambush!"

"Good pickings, eh?" said Thal.

"Idiot!" yelped Hoddan. "These men know you. You know what I can do with
stun-pistols! Tell them we're riding into ambush. They're to follow
close behind us two! Tell them they're not to shoot at anybody more than
five yards off and not coming at them, and if any man stops to plunder
I'll kill him personally!"

Thal gaped at him.

"Not stop to plunder?"

"Ghek won't!" snapped Hoddan. "He'll take Fani on to his castle, leaving
most of his men behind to massacre us!"

Thal reined aside and Hoddan pounded on at the head of the tiny troop.
This was the second time in his life he'd been on a horse. It was two
too many. This adventure was not exhilarating. It came into his mind,
depressingly, that supposedly stirring action like this was really no
more satisfying than piracy. Fani had tricked him into a fix in which he
had to fight Ghek or be disgraced--and to be disgraced on Darth was
equivalent to suicide.

His horse came to a gentle rise in the ground. It grew steeper. The
horse slacked in its galloping. The incline grew steeper still. The
horse slowed to a walk, which it pursued with a rhythmically tossing
head. It was only less uncomfortable than a gallop. The dim outline of
trees appeared overhead.

"Perfect place for an ambush," Hoddan reflected dourly.

He got out a stun-pistol. He set the stud for continuous fire--something
he hadn't dared trust to the others.

His horse breasted the rise. There was a yell ahead and dim figures
plunged toward him.

He painstakingly made ready to swing his stun-pistol from his extreme
right, across the space before him, and all the way to the extreme left.
The pistol should be capable of continuous fire for four seconds. But it
was operating on stored charge. He didn't dare count on more than three.

He pulled the trigger. The stun-pistol hummed, though its noise was
inaudible through the yells of the charging partisans of the Lord Ghek.

[Illustration]




V


Hoddan swore from the depths of a very considerable vocabulary.

"You (censored)--(deleted)--(omitted)--(unprintability)", he roared.
"Get back up on your horse or I blast you and leave you for Ghek's men
to handle when they're able to move about again! Get back on that horse!
One--two--"

The man got back on the horse.

"Now go on ahead," rasped Hoddan. "All of you! I'm going to count you!"

The dozen horsemen from Don Loris' stronghold rode reluctantly on ahead.
He did count them. He rode on, shepherding them before him.

"Ghek," he told them in a blood-curdling tone, "has a bigger prize than
any cash you'll plunder from one of his shot-down retainers! He's got
the Lady Fani! He won't stop before he has her behind castle walls!
We've got to catch up with him! Do you want to try to climb into his
castle by your fingernails? You'll do it if he gets there first!"

The horses moved a little faster. Thal said with surprising humility:

"If we force our horses too much, they'll be exhausted before we can
catch up."

"Figure it out," snapped Hoddan. "We have to catch up!"

He settled down to more of the acute discomfort that riding was to him.
He did not think again of the ambush. It had happened, and it had
failed. Four-fifths of the raiding party that had fought its way into
Don Loris' stronghold and out again, had been waiting for pursuers atop
a certain bit of rising ground. They'd known their pursuers must come
this way. There were certain passes through the low but rugged hills.
One went this way or that, but no other. Their blood already warmed by
past fighting, when Hoddan and his dozen seemed to ride right into
destruction, they flung themselves into a charge.

But Hoddan had a stun-pistol set for continuous fire. He used it like a
hose or a machine gun, painstakingly sweeping it across the night before
him, neither too fast nor too slowly. It affected the rushing followers
of Lord Ghek exactly as if it had been an oversized meat-chopper. They
went down. Only three men remained in their saddles--they'd probably
been sheltered by the bodies of men ahead. Hoddan attended to those
three with individual, personalized stun-pistol bolts--and immediately
had trouble with his men, who wanted to dismount and plunder their
fallen enemies.

He wouldn't even let them collect the horses of the men now out of
action. It would cost time, and Ghek wouldn't be losing any that he
could help. With a raging, trembling girl as prisoner, most men would
want to get her behind battlements as soon as possible. But Hoddan knew
that his party was slowed down by him. Presently he began to feel
bitterly sure that Ghek would reach his castle before he was overtaken.

"This place he's heading for," he said discouragedly to Thal. "Any
chance of our rushing it?"

"Oh, no!" said Thal dolefully. "Ten men could hold it against a
thousand!"

"Then can't we make better time?"

Thal said resignedly:

"Ghek probably had fresh horses waiting, so he could keep on at top
speed in his flight. I doubt we will catch him, now."

"The Lady Fani," said Hoddan bitterly, "has put me in a fix so if I
don't fight him I'm ruined!"

"Disgraced," corrected Thal. He said mournfully, "It's the same thing."

       *       *       *       *       *

Gloom descended on the whole party as it filled their leaders.
Insensibly, the pace of the horses slackened still more. They had done
well. But a horse that can cover fifty miles a day at its own gait, can
be exhausted in ten or less, if pushed. By the time Hoddan and his men
were within two miles of Ghek's castle, their mounts were extremely
reluctant to move faster than a walk. At a mile, they were kept in
motion only by kicks.

The route they followed was specific. There was no choice of routes,
here in the hills. They could only follow every twist and turn of the
trail, among steep mountain-flanks and minor peaks. But suddenly they
came to a clear wide valley, yellow cressets burned at its upper end, no
more than half a mile distant. They showed a castle gate, open, with the
last of a party of horsemen filing into it. Even as Hoddan swore, the
gate closed. Faint shouts of triumph came from inside the castle walls
to the completely frustrated pursuers without.

"I'd have bet on this," said Hoddan miserably. "Stop here, Thal. Pick
out a couple of your more hang-dog characters and fix them up with their
hands apparently tied behind their backs. We take a breather for five
minutes--no more."

He would not let any man dismount. He shifted himself about on his own
saddle, trying to find a comfortable way to sit. He failed. At the end
of five minutes he gave orders. There were still shouts occasionally
from within Ghek's castle. They had that unrhythmic frequency which
suggested that they were responses to a speech. Ghek was making a fine,
dramatic spectacle of his capture of an unwilling bride. He was
addressing his retainers and saying that through their fine loyalty,
co-operation and willingness to risk all for their chieftain, they now
had the Lady Fani to be their chatelaine. He thanked them from the
bottom of his heart and they were invited to the official wedding, which
would take place sometime tomorrow, most likely.

Before the speech was quite finished, however, Hoddan and his weary
following rode up into the patch of light cast by the cressets outside
the walls. Thal bellowed to the battlements.

"Prisoners!" he roared, according to instructions from Hoddan. "We
caught some prisoners in the ambush! They got fancy news! Tell Lord Ghek
he'd better get their story right off! No time to waste! Urgent!"

Hoddan played the part of one prisoner, just in case anybody noticed
from above that one man rode as if either entirely unskilled in riding
or else injured in a fight.

He heard shoutings, over the walls. He glared at his men and they
drooped in their saddles. The gate creaked open and the horsemen from
Don Loris' castle filed inside. They showed no elation, because Hoddan
had promised to ram a spear-shaft its full length down the throat of any
man who gave away his stratagem ahead of time. The gate closed behind
them. Men appeared to take their horses. This could have revealed that
the newcomers were strangers, but Ghek would have recruited new and
extra retainers for the emergency of tonight. There would be many
strange faces in his castle just now.

"Good fight, eh?" bellowed an ancient, long-retired retainer with a wine
bottle in his hand.

"Good fight!" agreed Thal.

"Good plunder, eh?" bellowed the ancient above the heads of younger men.
"Like the good old days?"

"Better!" boomed Thal.

At just this instant the young Lord Ghek appeared. There were scratches
on his cheek, acquired during the ride with Fani across his saddlebow.
He looked thrilled by his victory but uneasy about his prize.

"What's this about prisoners with fancy news?" he demanded. "What is
it?"

"Don Loris!" whooped Thal. "Long Live the Lady Fani!"

Hoddan painstakingly opened fire; with the continuous-fire stud of this
pistol--his third tonight--pressed down. The merrymakers in the
courtyard wavered and went down in windrows. Thal opened fire with a
stun-pistol. The others bellowed and began to fling bolts at every
living thing they saw.

"To the Lady Fani!" rasped Hoddan, getting off his horse with as many
creakings as the castle gate.

His followers now rushed, dismounting where they had to. They fired with
reckless abandon. A stun-pistol, which does not kill, imposes few
restraints upon its user. If you shoot somebody who doesn't need to be
shot, he may not like it but he isn't permanently harmed. So the twelve
who'd followed Hoddan poured in what would have been a murderous fire if
they'd been shooting bullets, but was no worse than devastating as
matters stood.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were screams and flight and utterly hopeless defiances by
sword-armed and spear-armed men. In instants Hoddan went limping into
the castle with Thal by his side, searching for Fani. Ghek had not
fallen at the first fire. He vanished, and the castle was plainly fallen
and he made no attempt to lead resistance against its invaders. Hoddan's
men went raging happily through corridors and halls as they came to
them. They used their stun-pistols with zest and at such close quarters
with considerable effect. Hoddan heard Fani scream angrily and he and
Thal went swiftly to see. They came upon the young Lord Ghek trying to
let Fani down out of a window on a rope. He undoubtedly intended to
follow her and complete his abduction on the run. But Fani bit him, and
Hoddan said vexedly:

"Look here! It seems that I'm disgraced if I don't fight you somehow--"

The young Lord Ghek rushed him, sword out, eyes blazing in a fine frenzy
of despair. Hoddan brought him down with a buzz of the stun-gun.

One of Hoddan's followers came hunting for him.

"Sir," he sputtered, "we got the garrison cornered in their quarters,
and we've been picking them off through the windows, and they think
they're dropping dead and want to surrender. Shall we let 'em?"

"By all means," Hoddan said irritably. "And Thal, go get something
heavier than a nightgown for the Lady Fani to wear, and then do what
plundering is practical. But I want to be out of here in half an hour.
Understand?"

"I'll attend to the costume," said the Lady Fani vengefully. "You cut
his throat while I'm getting dressed."

She nodded at the unconscious Lord Ghek on the pavement. She disappeared
through a door nearby. Hoddan could guess that Ghek would have prepared
something elaborate in the way of a trousseau for the bride he was to
carry screaming from her home. Somehow it was the sort of thing a
Darthian would do. Now Fani would enjoyably attire herself in the best
of it while--

"Thal," said Hoddan, "help me get this character into a closet
somewhere. He's not to be killed. I don't like him, but at this moment I
don't like anybody very much, and I won't play favorites."

Thal dragged the insensible young nobleman into the next room. Hoddan
locked the door and pocketed the key as Fani came into view again. She
was splendidly attired, now, in brocade and jewels. Ghek had evidently
hoped to placate her after marriage by things of that sort and had spent
lavishly for them.

Now, throughout the castle there were many and diverse noises.
Sometimes--not often--there was still the crackling hum of a
stun-pistol. There were many more exuberant shoutings. They apparently
had to do with loot. There were some squealings in female voices, but
many more gigglings.

"I need not say," said the Lady Fani with dignity, "that I thank you
very much. But I do say so."

"You're quite welcome," said Hoddan politely.

"And what are you going to do now?"

"I imagine," said Hoddan, "that we'll go down into the courtyard where
our horses are. I gave my men half an hour to loot in. During that half
hour I shall sit down on something which will, I hope, remain perfectly
still. And I may," he added morbidly, "eat an apple. I've had nothing to
eat since I landed on Darth. People don't want to commit themselves to
not cutting my throat. But after half an hour we'll leave."

The Lady Fani looked sympathetic.

"But the castle's surrendered to you," she protested. "You hold it!
Aren't you going to try to keep it?"

"There are a good many unpleasant characters out yonder," said Hoddan,
waving his hand at the great outdoors, "who've reason to dislike me very
much. They'll be anxious to express their emotions, when they feel up to
it. I want to dodge them. And presently the people in this castle will
realize that even stun-pistols can't keep on shooting indefinitely here.
I don't want to be around when it occurs to them."

       *       *       *       *       *

He offered his arm with a reasonably grand air and went limping with her
down to the courtyard just inside the gate. Two of Don Loris' retainers
staggered into view as they arrived, piling up plunder which ranged from
a quarter keg of wine to a mass of frothy stuff which must be female
garments. They went away and other men arrived loaded down with their
own accumulations of loot. Some of the local inhabitants looked on with
uneasy indignation.

Hoddan found a bench and sat down. He conspicuously displayed one of the
weapons which had captured the castle. Ghek's defeated retainers looked
at him darkly.

"Bring me something to eat," commanded Hoddan. "Then if you bring fresh
horses for my men, and one extra for each to carry his plunder on, I'll
take them away. I'll even throw in the Lord Ghek, who is now unharmed
but with his life in the balance. Otherwise--"

He moved the pistol suggestively. The normal inhabitants of Ghek's
castle moved away, discussing the situation in subdued voices.

The Lady Fani sat down proudly on the bench beside him.

"You are wonderful!" she said with conviction.

"I used to cherish that illusion myself," said Hoddan.

"But nobody before in all Darthian history has ever fought twenty men,
and then thirty men, and destroyed an ambush, and captured a castle, all
in one day!"

"And without a meal," said Hoddan darkly, "and with a lot of blisters!"

He considered. Somebody came running with bread and cheese and wine. He
bit into the bread and cheese. After a moment he said, his mouth full:

"I once saw a man perform the unparalleled feat of jumping over nine
barrels placed in a row. It had never been done before. But I didn't
envy him. I never wanted to jump over nine barrels in a row! In the same
way, I never especially wanted to fight other men or break up ambushes
or capture castles. I want to do what I want to do, not what other
people happen to admire."

"Then what do you want to do?" she asked admiringly.

"I'm not sure now," said Hoddan gloomily. He took a fresh bite. "But a
little while ago I wanted to do some interesting and useful things in
electronics, and get reasonably rich, and marry a delightful girl, and
become a prominent citizen on Walden. I think I'll settle for another
planet, now."

"My father will make you rich," said the girl proudly. "You saved me
from being married to Ghek!"

Hoddan shook his head.

"I've got my doubts," he said. "He had a scheme to import a lot of
stun-pistols and arm his retainers with them. Then he meant to rush the
spaceport and have me set up a broadcast-power unit that'd keep them
charged all the time. Then he'd sit back and enjoy life. Holding the
spaceport, nobody else could get stun-weapons, and nobody could resist
his retainers who had 'em. So he'd be top man on Darth. He'd have
exactly as much power as he chose to seize. I think he cherished that
little idea,--and I've given advance publicity to stun-pistols. Now he
hasn't a ghost of a chance of pulling it off. I'm afraid he'll be
displeased with me."

"I can take care of that!" said Fani confidently. She did not question
that her father would be displeased.

"Maybe you can," said Hoddan, "but though he's kept a daughter he's lost
a dream. And that's bereavement! I know!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Horses came plodding into the courtyard with Ghek's retainers driving
them. They were anxious to get rid of their conquerors. Hoddan's men
came trickling back, with armsful of plunder to add to the piles they'd
previously gathered. Thal took charge, commanding the exchange of
saddles from tired to fresh horses and that the booty be packed on the
extra mounts. It was time. Nine of the dozen looters were at work on the
task when there was a tumult back in the castle. Yellings and the clash
of steel. Hoddan shook his head.

"Bad! Somebody's pistol went empty and the local boys found it out. Now
we'll have to fight some more--no."

He beckoned to a listening, tense, resentful inhabitant of the castle.
He held up the key of the room in which he'd locked young Ghek.

"Now open the castle gate," he commanded, "and fetch out my last three
men, and we'll leave without setting fire to anything. The Lord Ghek
would like it that way. He's locked up in a room that's particularly
inflammable."

The last statement was a guess, only, but Ghek's retainer looked
horrified. He bellowed. There was a subtle change in the bitterly
hostile atmosphere. Men came angrily to help load the spare horses.
Hoddan's last three men came out of a corridor, wiping blood from
various scratches and complaining plaintively that their pistols had
shot empty and they'd had to defend themselves with knives.

Three minutes later the cavalcade rode out of the castle gate and away
into the darkness. Hoddan had arrived here when Ghek was inside with
Fani as his prisoner, when there were only a dozen men without and at
least a hundred inside to defend the walls. And the castle was
considered impregnable.

In half an hour Hoddan's followers had taken the castle, rescued Fani,
looted it superficially, gotten fresh horses for themselves and spare
ones for their plunder, and were headed away again. In only one respect
were they worse off than when they arrived. Some stun-pistols were
empty.

Hoddan searched the sky and pieced together the star-pattern he'd noted
before.

"Hold it!" he said sharply to Thal. "We don't go back the same way we
came! The gang that ambushed us will be stirring around again, and we
haven't got full stun-pistols now! We make a wide circle around those
characters!"

"Why?" demanded Thal. "There are only so many passes. The only other one
is three times as long. And it is disgraceful to avoid a fight--"

"Thal!" snapped an icy voice from beside Hoddan, "you have an order!
Obey it!"

Even in the darkness, Hoddan could see Thal jump.

"Yes, my Lady Fani," said Thal shakily. "But we go a long distance
roundabout."

       *       *       *       *       *

The direction of motion through the night now changed. The long line of
horses moved in deepest darkness, lessened only by the light of many
stars. Even so, in time one's eyes grew accustomed and it was a
glamorous spectacle--twenty-eight beasts moving through dark defiles and
over steep passes among the rugged, ragged hills. From any one spot they
seemed at once to swagger and to slink, swaying as they moved on and
vanished into obscurity. The small wild things in the night paused
affrightedly in their scurryings until they had gone far away.

[Illustration]

Fani said in a soft voice:

"This is nice!"

"What's nice about it?" demanded Hoddan.

"Riding like this," said Fani enthusiastically, "with men who have
fought for me to guard me in the darkness, with the leader who has
rescued me by my side, underneath the stars-- It's a delicious feeling!"

"You're used to riding horseback," said Hoddan dourly.

He rode on, while mountains stabbed skyward and the pass they followed
wound this way and that and he knew that it was a very roundabout way
indeed. And he had unpleasing prospects to make it seem less
satisfying, even, than it would have been otherwise.

But they came, at last, to a narrow defile which opened out before them
and there were no more mountains ahead, but only foothills. And there,
far and far away, they could see the sky as vaguely brighter. As they
went on, indeed, a glory of red and golden colorings appeared at the
horizon.

And out of that magnificence three bright lights suddenly darted. In
strict V-formation, they flashed from the sunrise toward the west. They
went overhead, more brilliant than the brightest stars, and when partway
down to the horizon they suddenly winked out.

"What on Earth are they?" demanded Fani. "I never saw anything like that
before!"

"They're spaceships in orbit," said Hoddan. He was as astounded as the
girl, but for a different reason. "I thought they'd be landed by now!"

It changed everything. He could not see what the change amounted to, but
change there was. For one thing--

"We're going to the spaceport," he told Thal curtly. "We'll recharge our
stun-pistols there. I thought those ships had landed. They haven't. Now
we'll see if we can keep them aloft! How far to the landing grid?"

"You insisted," complained Thal, "that we not go back to Don Loris'
castle by the way we left it. There are only so many passes through the
hills. The only other one is very long. We are only four miles--"

"Then we head there right now!" snapped Hoddan. "And we step up the
speed!"

He barked commands to his followers. Thal, puzzled but in dread of acid
comment from Fani, bustled up and down the line of men, insisting on a
faster pace. And the members of the cavalcade had not pushed these
animals as they had their first. Even the lead horses, loaded with loot,
managed to get up to a respectable ambling trot. The sunrise proceeded.
Dew upon the straggly grass became visible. Separate drops appeared as
gems upon the grass blades, and then began gradually to vanish as the
sun's disk showed itself. Then the angular metal framework of the
landing grid rose dark against the sunrise sky.

       *       *       *       *       *

When they rode up to it. Hoddan reflected that it was the only really
civilized structure on the planet. Architecturally it was surely the
least pleasing. It had been built when Darth was first settled on, and
when ideas of commerce and interstellar trade seemed reasonable. It was
half a mile high and built of massive metal beams. It loomed hugely
overhead when the double file of shaggy horses trotted under its lower
arches and across the grass-grown space within it. Hoddan headed
purposefully for the control shed. There was no sign of movement
anywhere. The steeply gabled roofs of the nearby town showed only the
fluttering of tiny birds. No smoke rose from chimneys. Yet the slanting
morning sunshine was bright.

As Hoddan actually reached the control shed, he saw a sleepy man in the
act of putting a key in the door. He dismounted within feet of that man,
who turned and blinked sleepily at him, and then immediately looked the
reverse of cordial. It was the red-headed man he'd stung with a
stun-pistol the day before.

"I've come back," said Hoddan, "for a few more kilowatts."

The red-headed man swore angrily.

"Hush!" said Hoddan gently. "The Lady Fani is with us."

The red-headed man jerked his head around and paled. Thal glowered at
him. Others of Don Loris' retainers shifted their positions
significantly, to make their oversized belt-knives handier.

"We'll come in," said Hoddan. "Thal, collect the pistols and bring them
inside."

Fani swung lightly to the ground and followed him in. She looked
curiously at the cables and instrument boards and switches inside. On
one wall a red light pulsed, and went out, and pulsed again. The
red-headed man looked at it.

"You're being called," said Hoddan. "Don't answer it."

The red-headed man scowled. Thal came in with an armful of stun-pistols
in various stages of discharge. Hoddan briskly broke the butt of one of
his own and presented it to the terminals he'd used the day before.

"He's not to touch anything, Thal," said Hoddan. To the red-headed man
he observed, "I suspect that call's been coming in all night. Something
was in orbit at sundown. You closed up shop and went home early, eh?"

"Why not?" rasped the red-headed man. "There's only one ship a month!"

"Sometimes," said Hoddan, "there are specials. But I commend your
negligence. It was probably good for me."

He charged one pistol, and snapped its butt shut, and snapped open
another, and charged it. There was no difficulty, of course. In minutes
all the pistols he'd brought from Walden were ready for use again.

He tucked away as many as he could conveniently carry on his person. He
handed the rest to Thal. He went competently to the pulsing call-signal.
He put headphones to his ears. He listened. His expression became
extremely strange, as if he did not quite understand nor wholly believe
what he heard.

"Odd," he said mildly. He considered for a moment or two. Then he
rummaged around in the drawers of desks. He found wire clips. He began
to snip wires in half.

The red-headed man started forward automatically.

"Take care of him, Thal," said Hoddan.

He cut the microwave receiver free of its wires and cables. He lifted it
experimentally and opened part of its case to make sure the thermo
battery that would power it in an emergency was there and in working
order. It was.

"Put this on a horse, Thal," commanded Hoddan. "We're taking it up to
Don Loris'."

The red-headed man's mouth dropped open. He said stridently:

"Hey! You can't do that!" Hoddan turned upon him and he said sourly:
"All right, you can. I'm not trying to stop you with all those hard
cases outside!"

"You can build another in a week," said Hoddan kindly. "You must have
spare parts."

Thal carried the communicator outside. Hoddan opened a cabinet, threw
switches, and painstakingly cut and snipped and snipped at a tangle of
wires within.

"Just your instrumentation," he explained to the appalled red-headed
man. "You won't use the grid until you've got this fixed, too. A few
days of harder work than you're used to. That's all!"

He led the way out again, and on the way explained to Fani:

"Pretty old-fashioned job, this grid. They make simpler ones nowadays.
They'll be able to repair it, though, in time. Now we go back to your
father's castle. He may not be pleased, but he should be mollified."

He saw Fani mount lightly into her own saddle and shook his head
gloomily. He climbed clumsily into his own. They moved off to return to
Don Loris' stronghold. Hoddan suffered.

       *       *       *       *       *

They reached the castle before noon, and the sight of the Lady Fani
riding beside a worn-out Hoddan was productive of enthusiasm and loud
cheers. The loot displayed by the returned wayfarers increased the
rejoicing. There was envy among the men who had stayed behind. There
were respectfully admiring looks cast upon Hoddan. He had displayed, in
furnishing opportunities for plunder, the most-admired quality a leader
of feudal fighting men could show.

The Lady Fani beamed as she and Thal and Hoddan, all very dusty and
travel-stained, presented themselves to her father in the castle's great
hall.

"Here's your daughter, sir," said Hoddan, and yawned. "I hope there
won't be any further trouble with Ghek. We took his castle and looted it
a little and brought back some extra horses. Then we went to the
spaceport. I recharged my stun-pistols and put the landing grid out of
order for the time being. I brought away the communicator there." He
yawned again. "There's something highly improper going on, up just
beyond atmosphere. There are three ships up there in orbit, and they
were trying to call the spaceport in nonregulation fashion, and it's
possible that some of your neighbors would be interested. So I postponed
everything until I could get some sleep. It seemed to me that when
better skulduggeries are concocted, that Don Loris and his associates
ought to concoct them. And if you'll excuse me--"

He moved away, practically dead on his feet. If he had been accustomed
to horseback riding, he wouldn't have been so exhausted. But now he
yawned, and yawned, and Thal took him to a room quite different from the
guest-room-dungeon to which he'd been taken the night before. He noted
that the door, this time, opened inward. He braced chairs against it to
make sure that nobody could open it from without. He lay down and slept
heavily.

He was waked by loud poundings. He roused himself enough to say
sleepily:

"Whaddyawant?"

"The lights in the sky!" cried Fani's voice outside the door. "The ones
you say are spaceships! It's sunset again, and I just saw them. But
there aren't three, now. Now there are nine!"

"All right," said Hoddan. He lay down his head again and thrust it into
his pillow. Then he was suddenly very wide awake indeed. He sat up with
a start.

Nine spaceships? That wasn't possible! That would be a space fleet! And
there were no space fleets! Walden would certainly have never sent more
than one ship to demand his surrender to its police. The Space Patrol
never needed more than one ship anywhere. Commerce wouldn't cause ships
to travel in company. Piracy-- There couldn't be a pirate fleet! There'd
never be enough loot anywhere to keep it in operation. Nine spaceships
at one time--traveling in orbit around a primitive planet like Darth--a
fleet of spaceships.

It couldn't happen! Hoddan couldn't conceive of such a thing. But a
recently developed pessimism suggested that since everything else, to
date, had been to his disadvantage, this was probably a catastrophe
also.

He groaned and lay down to sleep again.




VI


When frantic bangings on the propped-shut door awakened him next
morning, he confusedly imagined that they were noises in the
communicator headphones, and until he heard his name called tried
drearily to make sense of them.

But suddenly he opened his eyes. Somebody banged on the door once more.
A voice cried angrily:

"Bron Hoddan! Wake up or I'll go away and let whatever happens to you
happen! Wake up!"

It was the voice of the Lady Fani, at once indignant and tearful and
solicitous and angry.

He rolled out of bed and found himself dressed. He hadn't slept the full
night. At one time he couldn't rest for thinking about the sounds in the
communicator when he listened at the spaceport. He listened again, and
what he heard made him get his clothes on for action. That was when he
heard a distinctly Waldenian voice, speaking communications speech with
crisp distinctness, calling the landing grid. The other voices were not
Waldenian ones and he grew dizzy trying to figure them out. But he was
clothed and ready to do whatever proved necessary when he realized that
he had the landing grid receiver, that there would be no reception even
of the Waldenian call until the landing grid crew had built another out
of spare parts in store, and even then couldn't do much until they'd
painfully sorted out and re-spliced all the tangled wires that Hoddan
had cut. That had to be done before the grid could be used again.

He'd gone back to sleep while he tried to make sense of things. Now,
long after daybreak, he shook himself and made sure a stun-pistol was
handy. Then he said:

"Hello. I'm awake. What's up? Why all the noise?"

"Come out of there!" cried Fani's voice, simultaneously exasperated and
filled with anxiety. "Things are happening! Somebody's here from Walden!
They want you!"

Hoddan could not believe it. It was too unlikely. But he opened the door
and Thal came in, and Fani followed.

"Good morning," said Hoddan automatically.

Thal said mournfully:

"A bad morning, Bron Hoddan! A bad morning! Men from Walden came riding
over the hills--"

"How many?"

"Two," said Fani angrily. "A fat man in a uniform, and a young man who
looks like he wants to cry. They had an escort of retainers from one of
my father's neighbors. They were stopped at the gate, of course, and
they sent a written message in to my father, and he had them brought
inside right away!"

Hoddan shook his head.

"They probably said that I'm a criminal and that I should be sent back
to Walden. How'd they get down? The landing grid isn't working."

Fani said viciously:

"They landed in something that used rockets. It came down close to a
castle over that way--only six or seven miles from the spaceport. They
asked for you. They said you'd have landed from the last liner from
Walden. And because you and Thal fought so splendidly--why, everybody's
talking about you. So the chieftain over there accepted a present of
money from them, and gave them horses as a return gift, and sent them
here with a guard. Thal talked to the guards. The men from Walden have
promised huge gifts of money if they help take you back to the thing
that uses rockets."

"I suspect," said Hoddan, "that it would be a spaceboat--a lifeboat.
Hm-m-m.... Yes. With a built-in tool-steel cell to keep me from telling
anybody how to make--" He stopped and grimaced. "If they had time to
build one in, that's certain! They'd take me to the spaceport in a
sound-proofed can and I'd be hauled back to Walden in it. Fine!"

"What are you going to do?" asked Fani anxiously.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan's ideas were not clear. But Darth was not a healthy place for
him. It was extremely likely, for example, that Don Loris would feel
that the very bad jolt he'd given that astute schemer's plans, by using
stun-pistols at the spaceport, had been neatly canceled out by his
rescue of Fani. He would regard Hoddan with a mingled gratitude and
aversion that would amount to calm detachment. Don Loris could not be
counted on as a really warm personal friend.

On the other hand, the social system of Darth was not favorable to a
stranger with an already lurid reputation for fighting, but whose
weapons would be useless unless frequently recharged--and who couldn't
count on that as a steady thing.

As a practical matter, his best bet was probably to investigate the nine
inexplicable ships overhead. They hadn't co-operated with the
Waldenians. It could be inferred that no confidential relationship
existed up there. It was possible that the nine ships and the Waldenians
didn't even know of each other's presence. There is a lot of room in
space. If both called on ship-frequency and listened on ground-frequency,
they would not have picked up each others' summons to the ground.

"You've got to do something!" insisted Fani. "I saw Father talking to
them! He looked happy, and he never looks happy unless he's planning
some skulduggery!"

"I think," said Hoddan, "that I'll have some breakfast, if I may. As
soon as I fasten up my ship bag."

Thal said mournfully:

"If anything happens to you, something will happen to me too, because I
helped you."

"Breakfast first," said Hoddan. "That, as I understand it, should make
it disgraceful for your father to have my throat cut. But beyond that--"
He said gloomily. "Thal, get a couple of horses outside the wall. We may
need to ride somewhere. I'm very much afraid we will. But first I'd like
to have some breakfast."

Fani said disappointedly:

"But aren't you going to face them? The men from Walden? You could shoot
them!"

Hoddan shook his head.

"It wouldn't solve anything. Anyhow a practical man like your father
won't sell me out before he's sure I can't pay off better. I'll bet on a
conference with me before he makes a deal."

Fani stamped her foot.

"Outrageous! Think what you saved me from!"

But she did not question the possibility. Hoddan observed:

"A practical man can always make what he wants to do look like a noble
sacrifice of personal inclinations to the welfare of the community. I've
decided that I've got to be practical myself, and that's one of the
rules. How about breakfast?"

He strapped the ship bag shut on the stun-pistols his pockets would not
hold. He made a minor adjustment to the space communicator. It was not
ruined, but nobody else could use it without much labor finding out what
he'd done. This was the sort of thing his grandfather on Zan would have
advised. His grandfather's views were explicit.

"Helping one's neighbor," he'd said frequently in Hoddan's hearing while
Hoddan was a youth, "is all right as a two-way job. But maybe he's
laying for you. You get a chance to fix him so he can't do you no harm
and you're a lot better off and he's a hell of a lot better neighbor!"

This was definitely true of the men from Walden. Hoddan guessed that
Derec was one of them. The other would represent the police or the
planetary government. It was probably just as true of Don Loris and
others.

Hoddan found himself disapproving of the way the cosmos was designed.
Even though presently he sat at breakfast high up on the battlements,
and Fani looked at him with interesting anxiety, he was filled with
forebodings. The future looked dark. Yet what he asked of fate and
chance was so simple! He asked only a career and riches and a delightful
girl to marry and the admiration of his fellow-citizens. Trivial things!
But it looked like he'd have to do battle for even such minor gifts of
destiny!

Fani watched him breakfast.

"I don't understand you," she complained. "Anybody else would be proud
of what he'd done and angry with my father. Or don't you think he'll act
ungratefully?"

"Of course I do!" said Hoddan.

"Then why aren't you angry?"

"I'm hungry," said Hoddan.

"And you take it for granted that I want to be properly grateful," said
Fani in one breath, "and yet you haven't shown the least appreciation of
my getting two horses over in that patch of woodland yonder"--she
pointed and Hoddan nodded--"and having Thal there with orders to serve
you faithfully--"

       *       *       *       *       *

She stopped short. Don Loris appeared, beaming, at the top of the steps
leading here from the great hall where conferences took place. He
regarded Hoddan benignly.

"This is a very bad business, my dear fellow," he said benevolently.
"Has Fani told you of the people who arrived from Walden in search of
you? They tell me terrible things about you!"

"Yes," said Hoddan. He prepared a roll for biting. He said: "One of
them, I think, is named Derec. He's to identify me so good money isn't
wasted paying for the wrong man. The other man's police, isn't he?" He
reflected a moment. "If I were you, I'd start talking at a million
credits. You might get half that."

He bit into the roll as Don Loris looked shocked.

"Do you think," he asked indignantly, "that I would give up the rescuer
of my daughter to emissaries from a foreign planet, to be locked in a
dungeon for life?"

"Not in those words," conceded Hoddan. "But after all, despite your deep
gratitude to me, there are such things as one's duty to humanity as a
whole. And while it would cause you bitter anguish if someone dear to
you represented a danger to millions of innocent women and
children--still, under such circumstances you might feel it necessary to
do violence to your own emotions."

Don Loris looked at him with abrupt suspicion. Hoddan waved the roll.

"Moreover," he observed, "gratitude for actions done on Darth does not
entitle you to judge of my actions on Walden. While you might and even
should feel obliged to defend me in all things I have done on Darth,
your obligation to me does not let you deny that I may have acted less
defensibly on Walden."

Don Loris looked extremely uneasy.

"I may have thought something like that," he admitted. "But--"

"So that," said Hoddan, "while your debt to me cannot and should not be
overlooked, nevertheless"--Hoddan put the roll into his mouth and spoke
less clearly--"you feel that you should give consideration to the claims
of Walden to inquire into my actions while there."

He chewed, and swallowed, and said gravely:

"And can I make deathrays?"

Don Loris brightened. He drew a deep breath of relief. He said
complainingly:

"I don't see why you're so sarcastic! Yes. That is a rather important
question. You see, on Walden they don't know how to. They say you do.
They're very anxious that nobody should be able to. But while in
unscrupulous hands such an instrument of destruction would be most
unfortunate ... ah ... under proper control--"

"Yours," said Hoddan.

"Say--ours," said Don Loris hopefully. "With my experience of men and
affairs, and my loyal and devoted retainers--"

"And cozy dungeons," said Hoddan. He wiped his mouth. "No."

Don Loris started violently.

"No, what?"

"No deathrays," said Hoddan. "I can't make 'em. Nobody can. If they
could be made, some star somewhere would be turning them out, or some
natural phenomenon would let them loose from time to time. If there were
such things as deathrays, all living things would have died, or else
would have adjusted to their weaker manifestations and developed
immunity so they wouldn't be deathrays any longer. As a matter of fact,
that's probably been the case, some time in the past. So far as the
gadget goes that they're talking about, it's been in use for half a
century in the Cetis cluster. Nobody's died of it yet."

Don Loris looked bitterly disappointed.

"That's the truth?" he asked unhappily. "Honestly? That's your last word
on it?"

"Much," said Hoddan, "much as I hate to spoil the prospects of
profitable skulduggery, that's my last word and it's true."

"But those men from Walden are very anxious!" protested Don Loris.
"There was no ship available, so their government got a liner that
normally wouldn't stop here to take an extra lifeboat aboard. It came
out of overdrive in this solar system, let out the lifeboat, and went on
its way again. Those two men are extremely anxious--"

"Ambitious, maybe," said Hoddan. "They're prepared to pay to overcome
your sense of gratitude to me. Naturally, you want all the traffic will
bear. I think you can get half a million."

Don Loris looked suspicious again.

"You don't seem worried," he said fretfully. "I don't understand you!"

"I have a secret," said Hoddan.

"What is it?"

"It will develop," said Hoddan.

       *       *       *       *       *

Don Loris hesitated, essayed to speak, and thought better of it. He
shrugged his shoulders and went slowly back to the flight of stone
steps. He descended. The Lady Fani started to wring her hands. Then she
said hopefully:

"What's your secret?"

"That your father thinks I have one," said Hoddan. "Thanks for the
breakfast. Should I walk out the gate, or--"

"It's closed," said the Lady Fani forlornly. "But I have a rope for you.
You can go down over the wall."

"Thanks," said Hoddan. "It's been a pleasure to rescue you."

[Illustration]

"Will you--" Fani hesitated. "I've never known anybody like you before.
Will you ever come back?"

Hoddan shook his head at her.

"Once you asked me if I'd fight for you, and look what it got me into!
No commitments."

He glanced along the battlements. There was a fairly large coil of rope
in view. He picked up his bag and went over to it. He checked the
fastening of one end and tumbled the other over the wall.

Ten minutes later he trudged up to Thal, waiting in the nearby woodland
with two horses.

"The Lady Fani," he said, "has the kind of brains I like. She pulled up
the rope again."

Thal did not comment. He watched morosely as Hoddan made the perpetually
present ship bag fast to his saddle and then distastefully climbed
aboard the horse.

"What are you going to do?" asked Thal unhappily. "I didn't make a
parting-present to Don Loris, so I'll be disgraced if he finds out I
helped you. And I don't know where to take you."

"Where," asked Hoddan, "did those characters from Walden come down?"

Thal told him. At the castle of a considerable feudal chieftain, on the
plain some four miles from the mountain range and six miles this side of
the spaceport.

"We ride there," said Hoddan. "Liberty is said to be sweet, but the man
who said that didn't have blisters from a saddle. Let's go."

They rode away. There would be no immediate pursuit, and possibly none
at all. Don Loris had left Hoddan at breakfast on the battlements. The
Lady Fani would make as much confusion over his disappearance as she
could. But there'd be no search for him until Don Loris had made his
deal.

Hoddan was sure that Fani's father would have an enjoyable morning. He
would relish the bargaining session. He'd explain in great detail how
valuable had been Hoddan's service to him, in rescuing Fani from an
abductor who would have been an intolerable son-in-law. He'd grow almost
tearful as he described his affection for Hoddan--how he loved his
daughter--as he observed grievedly that they were asking him to betray
the man who had saved for him the solace of his old age. He would
mention also that the price they offered was an affront to his paternal
affection and his dignity as prince of this, baron of that, lord of the
other thing and claimant to the dukedom of something-or-other. Either
they'd come up or the deal was off!

But meanwhile Hoddan and Thal rode industriously toward the place from
which those emissaries had come.

All was tranquil. All was calm. Once they saw a dust cloud, and Thal
turned aside to a providential wooded copse, in which they remained
while a cavalcade went by. Thal explained that it was a feudal chieftain
on his way to the spaceport town. It was simple discretion for them not
to be observed, said Thal, because they had great reputations as
fighting men. Whoever defeated them would become prominent at once. So
somebody might try to pick a quarrel under one of the finer points of
etiquette when it would be disgrace to use anything but standard
Darthian implements for massacre. Hoddan admitted that he did not feel
quarrelsome.

They rode on after a time, and in late afternoon the towers and
battlements of the castle they sought appeared. The ground here was only
gently rolling. They approached it with caution, following the reverse
slope of hills, and dry stream-beds, and at last penetrating horse-high
brush to the point where they could see it clearly.

If Hoddan had been a student of early terrestrial history, he might have
remarked upon the re-emergence of ancient architectural forms to match
the revival of primitive social systems. As it was, he noted in this
feudal castle the use of bastions for flanking fire upon attackers, he
recognized the value of battlements for the protection of defenders
while allowing them to shoot, and the tricky positioning of sally ports.
He even grasped the reason for the massive, stark, unornamented keep.
But his eyes did not stay on the castle for long. He saw the spaceboat
in which Derec and his more authoritative companion had arrived.

It lay on the ground a half mile from the castle walls. It was a clumsy,
obese, flattened shape some forty feet long and nearly fifteen wide. The
ground about it was scorched where it had descended upon its rocket
flames. There were several horses tethered near it, and men who were
plainly retainers of the nearby castle reposed in its shade.

Hoddan reined in.

"Here we part," he told Thal. "When we first met I enabled you to pick
the pockets of a good many of your fellow-countrymen. I never asked for
my split of the take. I expect you to remember me with affection."

Thal clasped both of Hoddan's hands in his.

"If you ever return," he said with mournful warmth, "I am your friend!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan nodded and rode out of the brushwood toward the spaceboat--the
lifeboat--that had landed the emissaries from Walden. That it landed so
close to the spaceport, of course, was no accident. It was known on
Walden that Hoddan had taken space passage to Darth. He'd have landed
only two days before his pursuers could reach the planet. And on a
roadless, primitive world like Darth he couldn't have gotten far from
the spaceport. So his pursuers would have landed close by, also. But it
must have taken considerable courage. When the landing grid failed to
answer, it must have seemed likely that Hoddan's deathrays had been at
work.

Here and now, though, there was no uneasiness. Hoddan rode heavily,
without haste, through the slanting sunshine. He was seen from a
distance and watched without apprehension by the loafing guards about
the boat. He looked hot and thirsty. He was both. So the posted guard
merely looked at him without too much interest when he brought his dusty
mount up to the shadow the lifeboat cast, and apparently decided that
there wasn't room to get into it.

He grunted a greeting and looked at them speculatively.

"Those two characters from Walden," he observed, "sent me to get
something from this thing, here. Don Loris told 'em I was a very honest
man."

He painstakingly looked like a very honest man. After a moment there
were responsive grins.

"If there's anything missing when I start back," said Hoddan, "I can't
imagine how it happened! None of you would take anything. Oh, no! I bet
you'll blame it on me!" He shook his head and said "_Tsk. Tsk. Tsk._"

One of the guards sat up and said appreciatively:

"But it's locked. Good."

"Being an honest man," said Hoddan amiably, "they told me how to unlock
it."

He got off his horse. He removed the bag from his saddle. He went into
the grateful shadow of the metal hull. He paused and mopped his face and
then went to the entrance port. He put his hand on the turning bar. Then
he painstakingly pushed in the locking-stud with his other hand. Of
course the handle turned. The boat port opened. The two from Walden
would have thought everything safe because it was under guard. On Walden
that protection would have been enough. On Darth, the spaceboat had not
been looted simply because locks, there, were not made with separate
vibration-checks to keep vibration from loosening them. On spaceboats
such a precaution was usual.

"Give me two minutes," said Hoddan over his shoulder. "I have to get
what they sent me for. After that everybody starts even."

He entered and closed the door behind him. Then he locked it. By the
nature of things it is as needful to be able to lock a spaceboat from
the inside as it is unnecessary to lock it from without.

He looked things over. Standard equipment everywhere. He checked
everything, even to the fuel supply. There were knockings on the port.
He continued to inspect. He turned on the visionscreens, which provided
the control room--indeed, all the boat--with an unobstructed view in all
directions. He was satisfied.

The knocks became bangings. Something approaching indignation could be
deduced. The guards around the spaceboat felt that Hoddan was taking an
unfair amount of time to pick the cream of the loot inside.

He got a glass of water. It was excellent. A second.

The bangings became violent hammerings.

Hoddan seated himself leisurely in the pilot's seat and turned small
knobs. He waited. He touched a button. There was a mildly thunderous
bang outside, and the lifeboat reacted as if to a slight shock. The
visionscreens showed a cloud of dust at the spaceboat's stern, roused by
a deliberate explosion in the rocket tubes. It also showed the retainers
in full flight.

He waited until they were in safety and made the standard take-off
preparations. A horrific roaring started up outside. He touched controls
and a monstrous weight pushed him back in his seat. The rocket swung,
and lifted, and shot skyward with greater acceleration than before.

It went up at a lifeboat's full fall-like rate of climb, leaving a trail
of blue-white flame behind it. All the surface of Darth seemed to
contract swiftly below him. The spaceport and the town rushed toward a
spot beneath the spaceboat's tail. They shrank and shrank. He saw other
places. Mountains. Castles. He saw Don Loris' stronghold. Higher, he saw
the sea.

The sky turned purple. It went black with specks of starshine in it.
Hoddan swung to a westward course and continued to rise, watching the
star-images as they shifted on the screens. The image of the sun, of
course, was automatically diminished so that it was not dazzling. The
rockets continued to roar, though in a minor fashion because there was
no longer air outside in which a bellow could develop.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan painstakingly made use of those rule-of-thumb methods of
astrogation which his piratical forebears had developed and which a boy
on Zan absorbed without being aware. He wanted an orbit around Darth. He
didn't want to take time to try to compute it. So he watched the
star-images ahead and astern. If the stars ahead rose above the planet's
edge faster than those behind sank down below it--he would be climbing.
If the stars behind sank down faster than those ahead rose up--he would
be descending. If all the stars rose equally he'd be climbing straight
up, and if they all dropped equally he'd be moving straight down. It was
not a complex method, and it worked.

Presently he relaxed. He sped swiftly back past midday and toward the
sunrise line on Darth. This was the reverse of a normal orbit, but it
was the direction followed by the ships up here. He hoped his orbit was
lower than theirs. If it was, he'd overtake them from behind. If he were
higher, they'd overtake him.

He turned on the space phone. Its reception-indicator was piously placed
at "Ground." He shifted it to "Space," so that it would pick up calls
going planetward, instead of listening vainly for replies from the
nonoperative landing grid.

Instantly voices boomed in his ears. Many voices. An impossibly large
number of voices. Many, many, many more than nine transmitters were in
operation now!

"_Idiot!_" said a voice in quiet passion, "_sheer off or you'll get in
our drive-field!_" A high-pitched voice said; "_... And group two take
second-orbit position--_" Somebody bellowed: "_But why don't they
answer?_" And another voice still said formally: "_Reporting group five,
but four ships are staying behind with tanker_ Toya, _which is having
stabilizer trouble...._"

Hoddan's eyes opened very wide. He turned down the sound while he tried
to think. But there wasn't anything to think. He'd come aloft to scout
three ships that had turned to nine, because he was in such a fix on
Darth that anything strange might be changed into something useful. But
this was more than nine ships--itself an impossibly large space fleet.
There was no reason why ships of space should ever travel together.
There were innumerable reasons why they shouldn't. There was a limit to
the number of ships that could be accommodated at any spaceport in the
galaxy. There was no point, no profit, no purpose in a number of ships
traveling together--

Darth's sunrise-line appeared far ahead. The lifeboat would soon cease
to be a bright light in the sky, now. The sun's image vanished from the
rear screens. The boat went hurtling onward through the blackness of the
planet's shadow while voices squabbled, and wrangled, and formally
reported, and now and again one admonished disputants to a proper
discipline of language.

During the period of darkness, Hoddan racked his brains for the vaguest
of ideas on why so many ships should appear about an obscure and
unimportant world like Darth. Presently the sunset line appeared ahead,
and far away he saw moving lights which were the hulls of the volubly
communicating vessels. He stared, blankly. There were tens-- Scores-- He
was forced to guess at the stark impossibility of more than a hundred
spacecraft in view. As the boat rushed onward he had to raise the guess.
It couldn't be, but--

He turned on the outside telescope, and the image on its screen was more
incredible than the voices and the existence of the fleet itself. The
scope focused first on a bulging, monster, antiquated freighter of a
design that had not been built for a hundred years. The second view was
of a passenger liner with the elaborate ornamentation that in past
generations was considered suitable for space. There was a bulk-cargo
ship, with no emergency rockets at all and crews' quarters in long
blisters built outside the gigantic tank which was the ship itself.
There was a needle-sharp space yacht. More freighters, with streaks of
rust on their sides where they had lain aground for tens of years....

The fleet was an anomaly, and each of its component parts was separately
a freak. It was a gathering-together of all the outmoded and obsolete
hulks and monstrosities of space. One would have to scavenge half the
galaxy to bring together so many crazy, over-age derelicts that should
have been in junk yards.

Then Hoddan drew an explosive deep breath. It was suddenly clear what
the fleet was and what its reason must be. Why it stopped here could not
yet be guessed, but--

Hoddan watched absorbedly. He couldn't know what was toward, but there
was some emergency. It could be in the line of what an electronic
engineer could handle. If so--why--it could mean an opportunity to
accomplish great things, and grow rich, and probably marry some
delightful girl and be a great man somewhere--an assortment of ambitions
one could not easily gratify on Zan, or Walden, or Darth.




VII


The spaceboat floated on upon a collision-course with the arriving
fleet. That would not mean, of course, actual contact with any of the
improbable vessels themselves. Crowded as the sunlit specks might seem
from Darth's night-side shadow, they were sufficiently separated. It was
more than likely that even with ten-mile intervals the ships would be
considered much too crowded. But they came pouring out of emptiness to
go into a swirling, plainly pre-intended orbit about the planet from
which Hoddan had risen less than an hour before.

There was inevitable confusion, though, and the spacephone proved it.
There were disputes between freakish ships when craft with the
astrogational qualities of washtubs tried to keep assigned positions,
and failed, and there were squabbles when ships had to pass close
together. One had to shut off its drive-field to keep from blowing the
fuses of both.

But there were some ships which proceeded quietly to their positions and
others which did the same after tumult amounting to rebellion. And
naturally there were a few others which seemed incapable of co-operation
with anybody. They went careening through the other ships' paths in what
must have seemed to the planet's sunset area like a most unlikely
dancing of brand-new stars.

It was a gigantic traffic tangle, and Hoddan's boat drifted toward and
into it. He'd counted a hundred ships long before. His count now passed
two hundred and continued. Before he gave up he'd numbered two hundred
forty-seven space-oddities swarming to make a whirling band--a
ring--around the planet Darth.

He was fairly sure that he knew what they were, now. But he could not
possibly guess where they came from. And most mysterious of all was the
question of why they'd come out of faster-than-light drive to make of
themselves a celestial feature about a planet which had practically
nothing to offer to anybody.

Presently the spaceboat was in the very thick of the fleet. His
communicator spouted voices whose tones ranged from basso profundo to
high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more
widely still.

"_You there!_" boomed a voice with deafening volume. "_You're in our
clear-space! Sheer off!_"

The volume of a signal in space varies as the square of the distance.
This voice was thunderous. It came apparently from a nearby, pot-bellied
tripper ship of really ancient vintage. Rows of ports in its sides had
been welded over. It had rocket tubes whose size was indicative of the
kind of long-obsolete fuel on which it once had operated. Slenderer
nozzles peered out of the original ones now. It had been adapted to
modern propellants by simply welding modern rockets inside the old ones.
It was only half a mile away.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan's spaceboat floated on. The relative position of the two ships
changed slowly. Another voice said indignantly:

"_That's the same thing that missed us by less than a mile! You, there!
Stop acting like a squig! Get on your own course!_"

A third voice;

"_What boat's that? I don't recognize it! I thought I knew all the
freaks in this fleet, too!_"

A fourth voice said sharply:

"_That's not one of us! Look at the design! That's not us!_"

Other voices broke in. There was babbling. Then a harsh voice roared:

"_Quiet! I order it!_" There was silence. The harsh voice said heavily,
"_Relay the image to me._" There was a pause. The same voice said
grimly: "_It is not of our fleet. You, stranger! Identify yourself! Who
are you and why do you slip secretly among us?_"

Hoddan pushed the transmit button.

"My name is Bron Hoddan," he said. "I came up to find out why three
ships, and then nine ships, went into orbit around Darth. It was
somewhat alarming. Our landing grid's disabled, anyhow, and it seemed
wisest to look you over before we communicated and possibly told you
something you might not believe. But you surely don't expect to land all
this fleet! Actually, we can't land any."

The harsh voice said as grimly as before:

"_You come from the planet below us? Darth? Why is your ship so small?
The smallest of ours is greater._"

"This is a lifeboat," said Hoddan pleasantly. "It's supposed to be
carried on larger ships in case of emergency."

"_If you will come to our leading ship_," said the voice, "_we will
answer all your questions. I will have a smoke flare set off to guide
you._"

Hoddan said to himself:

"No threats and no offers. I can guess why there are no threats. But
they should offer something!"

He waited. There was a sudden huge eruption of vapor in space some two
hundred miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosive had been introduced
into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized,
added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive's
gases. A cauliflowerlike shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew
larger and thinner.

Hoddan drove toward the spot with very light touches of rocket power. He
swung the boat around and killed its relative velocity. The leading ship
was a sort of gigantic, shapeless, utterly preposterous ark-like thing.
Hoddan could neither imagine a purpose for which it could have been
used, nor a time when men would have built anything like it. Its huge
sides seemed to be made exclusively of great doorways now tightly
closed.

One of those doorways suddenly gaped wide. It would have admitted a
good-sized modern ship. A nervous voice essayed to give Hoddan
directions for getting the spaceboat inside what was plainly an enormous
hold now pumped empty of air. He grunted and made the attempt. It was
tricky. He sweated when he cut off his power. But he felt fairly safe.
Rocket flames would burn down such a door, if necessary. He could work
havoc if hostilities began.

The great cargo door swung shut. The outside-pressure needle swung
sharply and stopped at thirty centimeters of mercury pressure. There was
a clanging. A smaller door evidently opened somewhere. Lights came
on--old-fashioned glow tubes. Then figures appeared through a door
leading to some other part of this ship.

Hoddan nodded to himself. The costume was odd. It was awkward. It was
even primitive, but not in the fashion of the soiled but gaudily colored
garments of Darth. These men wore unrelieved black, with gray shirts.
There was no touch of color about them. Even the younger ones wore
beards. And of all unnecessary things, they wore flat-brimmed hats--in a
spaceship!

Hoddan opened the boat door and said politely:

"Good morning. I'm Bron Hoddan. You were talking to me just now."

The oldest and most fiercely bearded of the men said harshly:

"I am the leader here. We are the people of Colin." He frowned when
Hoddan's expression remained unchanged. "The people of Colin!" he
repeated more loudly. "The people whose forefathers settled that planet,
and brought it to be a world of peace and plenty--and then foolishly
welcomed strangers to their midst!"

"Too bad," said Hoddan. He knew what these people were doing, he
believed, but putting a name to where they'd come from told him nothing
of what they wanted of Darth.

"We made it a fair world," said the bearded man fiercely. "But it was my
great-grandfather who destroyed it. He believed that we should share it.
It was he who persuaded the Synod to allow strangers to settle among us,
believing that they would become like us."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hoddan nodded expectantly. These people were in some sort of trouble or
they wouldn't have come out of overdrive. But they'd talked about it
until it had become an emotionalized obsession that couldn't be
summarized. When they encountered a stranger, they had to picture their
predicament passionately and at length.

This bearded man looked at Hoddan with burning eyes. When he went on, it
was with gestures as if he were making a speech, but it was a special
sort of speech. The first sentence told what kind.

"They clung to their sins!" said the bearded man bitterly. "They did not
adopt our ways! Our example went for naught! They brought others of
their kind to Colin. After a little they laughed at us. In a little more
they outnumbered us! Then they ruled that the laws of our Synod should
not govern them. And they lured our young people to imitate
them--frivolous, sinful, riotous folk that they were!"

Hoddan nodded again. There were elderly people on Zan who talked like
this. Not his grandfather! If you listened long enough they'd come to
some point or other, but they had arranged their thoughts so solidly
that any attempt to get quickly at their meaning would only produce
confusion.

"Twenty years since," said the bearded man with an angry gesture, "we
made a bargain. We held a third of all the land of the planet, but our
young men were falling away from the ways of their fathers. We made a
bargain with the newcomers we had cherished. We would trade our lands,
our cities, our farms, our highways, for ships to take us to a new world
with food for the journey and machines for the taming of the planet we
would select. We sent of our number to find a world to which we could
move. Ten years back, they returned. They had found it. The planet
Thetis."

Again Hoddan had no reaction. The name meant nothing.

"We began to prepare," said the old man, his eyes flashing. "Five years
since, we were ready. But we had to wait three more before the
bargainers were ready to complete the trade. They had to buy and collect
the ships. They had to design and build the machinery we would need.
They had to collect the food supplies. Two years ago we moved our
animals into the ships, and loaded our food and our furnishings, and
took our places. We set out. For two years we have journeyed toward
Thetis."

Hoddan felt an instinctive respect for people who would undertake to
move themselves, the third of the population of a planet, over a
distance that meant years of voyaging. They might have tastes in costume
that he did not share, and they might go in for elaborate oratory
instead of matter-of-fact statements, but they had courage.

"Yes, sir," said Hoddan. "I take it this brings us up to the present."

"No," said the old man, his eyes flashing. "Six months ago we considered
that we might well begin to train the operators of the machines we would
use on Thetis. We uncrated machines. We found ourselves cheated!"

[Illustration]

Hoddan found that he could make a fairly dispassionate guess of what
advantage--say--Nedda's father would take of people who would not check
on his good faith for two years and until they were two years' journey
away. The business men on Krim would have some sort of code determining
how completely one could swindle a customer. Don Loris, now--

"How badly were you cheated?" asked Hoddan.

"Of our lives!" said the angry old man. "Do you know machinery?"

"Some kinds," admitted Hoddan.

"Come," said the leader of the fleet.

With a sort of dignity that was theatrical only because he was aware of
it, the leader of the people of Colin showed the way. Hoddan had been
admitted with his spaceboat into one gigantic cargo hold. He was now
escorted to the next. It was packed tightly with cases of machinery. One
huge crate had been opened and its contents fully disclosed. Others had
been hacked at enough to show their contents.

The uncrated machine was a jungle plow. It was a powerful piece of
equipment which would attack jungle on a thirty-foot front, knock down
all vegetation up to trees of four-foot diameter, shred it, loosen and
sift the soil to a three-foot depth, and leave behind it smoothed,
broken, pulverized dirt mixed with ground-up vegetation ready to break
down into humus. Such a machine would clear tens of acres in a day and
night, turning jungle into farmland ready for terrestrial crops.

"We ran this for five minutes," said the bearded man fiercely as Hoddan
nodded approval. He lifted a motor hood.

The motors were burned out. Worthless insulation. Gears were splintered
and smashed. Low-grade metal castings. Assembly bolts had parted.
Tractor treads were bent and cracked. It was not a machine except in
shape. It was a mock-up in worthless materials which probably cost its
maker the twentieth part of what an hon

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