The blood was pulsing fast out of his shoulder at this point The kill-bird had gotten to his feet and was walking firmly and securely around the tree. One of the wings trailed a little; the kick seemed to have hurt a wing, but not the legs or that horribly strong neck. Once again the bird cocked its comical head. It was his own blood which dripped from the long beak, now red, which had gleamed silver gray at the beginning of the fight. Rod wished he had studied more about these birds. He had never been this close to a mutated sparrow before and he had no idea of how to fight one. All he had known was that they attacked people on very rare occasions and that sometimes the people died in the encounters. He tried to spiek, to let out a scream which would bring the neighborhood and the police flying and running toward him. He found he had no telepathy at all, not when he had to concentrate his whole mind and attention on the bird, knowing that its very next move could bring him irretrievable death. This was no temporary death with the rescue squads nearby. There was no one in the neighborhood, no one at all, except for the excited and sympathetic kookaburras haha-ing madly in the tree above.

He shouted at the bird, hoping to frighten it.

The kill-bird paid him no more attention than if it had been a deaf reptile. The foolish head tipped this way and that. The little bright eyes watched him. The red sword-beak, rapidly turning brown in the dry air, probed abstract dimensions for a way to his brain or heart. Rod even wondered how the bird solved its problems in solid geometry—the angle of approach, the line of thrust, the movement of the beak, the weight and direction of the fleeing object—himself.

He jumped back a few centimeters, intending to look at the bird from the other side of the tree-trunk.

There was a hiss in the air, like the helpless hiss of a gentle little snake. The bird, when he saw it, looked odd—suddenly it seemed to have two beaks. Rod marveled.

He did not really understand what was happening until the bird leaned over suddenly, fell on its side, and lay—plainly dead—on the dry cool ground. The eyes were still open but they looked blank; the bird's body twitched a little. The wings opened out in a dying spasm. One of the wings almost struck the trunk of the tree, but the tree-guarding-device raised a plastic shaft to ward off the blow; a pity the device had not been designed as a people-guard as well.

Only then did Rod see that the second "beak" was no beak at all, but a javelin, its point biting cleanly and tightly right through the bird's skull into its brain.

No wonder the bird had dropped dead quickly!

As Rod looked around to see who his rescuer might be, the ground rose up and struck him.

He had fallen.

The loss of blood was faster than he had allowed for.

He looked around, almost like a child in his bewilderment and dizziness. There was a shimmer of turquoise and the girl Lavinia was standing over him. She had a medical pack open and was spraying his wounds with cryptoderm—the living bandage which was so expensive that only on Norstrilia, the exporter of Stroon, could it be carried around in emergency cans.

"Keep quiet," she said with her voice, "keep quiet, Rod. We've got to stop the blood first of all. Lands of mercy, but you're a crashing mess!"

"Who…?" said Rod weakly.

"The Hon. Sec.," said she immediately.

"You know?" he asked, amazed that she should understand everything so very quickly indeed.

"Don't talk, and I'll tell you." She had taken her field-knife and was cutting the sticky shirt off him, so that she could tilt the bottle and spray right into the wound. "I just suspected you were in trouble, when Bill rode by the house and said something crazy, that you had bought half the galaxy by gambling all night with a crazy machine which paid off. I did not know where you were, but I thought that you might be in that old temple of yours that the rest of them can't see. I didn't know what kind of danger to look for, so I brought this." She slapped her hip. Rod's eyes widened. She had stolen her father's one-kiloton grenade, which was to be removed from its rack only in the event of an off-world attack. She answered his question before he asked her. "It's all right. I made a dummy to take its place before I touched it. Then, as I took it out, the Defense monitor came on and I just explained that I had hit it with my new broom, which was longer than usual. Do you think I would let Old Hot and Simple kill you, Rod, without a fight from me? I'm your cousin, your kith and kin. As a matter of fact, I'm number twelve after you when it comes to inheriting Doom and all the wonderful things there are on this station."

Rod said, "Give me water." He suspected she was chattering to keep his attention off what she was doing to his shoulder and arm. The arm glowed once when she sprayed the cryptoderm on it; then it settled down to mere aching. The shoulder had exploded from time to time as she probed it. She thrust a diagnostic needle into it and was reading the tiny bright picture on the end of the needle. He knew it had both analgesics and antiseptics as well as an ultraminiatured X ray, but he did not think that anyone would be willing to use it unaided in the field.

She answered this question, too before he asked it. She was a very perceptive girl.

"We don't know what the Onseck is going to do next. He may have corrupted people as well as animals. I don't dare call for help, not until you have your friends around you. Certainly not, if you have bought half the worlds." Rod dragged out the words. He seemed short of breath. "How did you know it was him?"

"I saw his face—I hiered it when I looked in the bird's own brain. I could see Houghton Syme, talking to the bird in some kind of an odd way, and I could see your dead body through the bird's eyes, and I could feel a big wave of love and approval, happiness and reward, going through the bird when the job was to have been finished. I think that man is evil, evil!"

"You know him, yourself?"

"What girl around here doesn't? He's a nasty man. He had a boyhood that was all rotten from the time that he realized he was a short-lifer. He has never gotten over it. Some people are sorry for him and don't mind his getting the job of Hon. Sec. If I'd my way, I'd have sent him to the Giggle Room long ago!" Lavinia's face was set in prudish hate, an expression so unlike herself, who usually was bright and gay, that Rod wondered what deep bitterness might have been stirred within her.

"Why do you hate him?"

"For what he did."

"What did he do?"

"He looked at me," she said, "he looked at me in a way that no girl can like. Then he crawled all over my mind, trying to show me all the silly, dirty, useless things he wanted to do."

"But he didn't do anything—?" said Rod.

"Yes, he did," she snapped. "Not with his hands. I could have reported him. I would have. It's what he did with his mind, the things he spieked to me."

"You can report those, too," said Rod, very tired of talking, but nevertheless mysteriously elated to discover that he was not the only enemy which the Onseck had made. "Not what he did, I couldn't," said Lavinia, her face set in anger, but dissolving into grief. Grief was tenderer, softer, but deeper and more real than anger. For the first time Rod sensed a feeling of concern about Lavinia. What might be wrong with her?

She looked past him and spoke to the open fields and the big dead bird.

"Houghton Syme was the worst man I've ever known. I hope he dies. He never got over that rotten boyhood of his. The old sick boy is the enemy of the man. We'll never know what he might have been. And if you hadn't been so wrapped up in your own troubles, Mister Rod to-the-hundred-and-fifty-first, you'd have remembered who I am."

"Who are you?" said Rod, naturally.

"I'm the Father's Daughter."

"So what?" said Rod. "All girls are."

"Then you never have found out about me. I'm the Father's Daughter from 'The Father's Daughter's Song.' "

"Never heard it."

She looked at him and her eyes were close to tears. "Listen, then, and I'll sing it to you now. And it's true, true, true:

You do not know what the world is like,

And I hope that you never will.

My heart was once much full of hope,

But now it is very still.

My wife went mad.

She was my love and wore my ring

When both of us were young.

She bore my babes, but then, but then…

And now there isn't anything.

My wife went mad.

Now she lives in another place,

Half sick, half well, and never young.

I am her dread, who was her love,

Each of us has another face.

My wife went mad.

You do not know what the world is like,

War is never the worst of it.

The stars within your eyes can drop,

The lightning in your brain can strike.

My wife went mad.

"And I see you have heard it, too," she sighed. "Just as my father wrote it. About my mother. My own mother."

"Oh, Lavinia," said Rod, "I'm sorry. I never thought it was you. And you my own cousin only three or four times removed. But Lavinia, there's something wrong. How can your mother be mad if she was looking fine at my house last week?"

"She was never mad," said Lavinia. "My father was. He made up that cruel song about my mother so that the neighbors complained. He had his choice of the Giggle Room to die in, or the sick place, to be immortal and insane. He's there now. And the Onseck, the Onseck threatened to bring him back to our own neighborhood if I didn't do what he asked. Do you think I could forgive that?

Ever? After people have sung that hateful song at me ever since I was a baby?

Do you wonder that I know it myself?"

Rod nodded.

Lavinia's troubles impressed him, but he had troubles of his own. The sun was never hot on Norstrilia, but he suddenly felt thirsty and hot. He wanted to sleep, but he wondered about the dangers which surrounded him. She knelt beside him.

"Close your eyes a bit, Rod. I will spiek very quietly and maybe nobody will notice it except your station hands, Bill and Hopper. When they come we'll hide out for the day and tonight we can go back to your computer and hide. I'll tell them to bring food."

She hesitated, "And Rod?"

"Yes?" he said.

"Forgive me."

"For what?"

"For my troubles," she said contritely.

"Now you have more troubles. Me," he said. "Let's not blame ourselves, but for sheep's sake, girl, let me sleep."

He drifted off to sleep as she sat beside him, whistling a loud clear tune with long, long notes which never added up. He knew some people, usually women, did that when they tried to concentrate on their telepathic spieking. Once he glanced up at her before he finally slept. He noticed that her eyes were a deep, strange blue. Like the mad wild faraway skies of Old Earth Itself.

He slept, and in his sleep he knew that he was being carried…

The hands which carried him felt friendly, though, and he curled himself back into deep, deeper dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT: FOE Money, SAD Money

When Rod finally awakened, it was to feel his shoulder tightly bound and his arm throbbing. He had fought waking up because the pain had increased as his mind moved toward consciousness, but the pain and the murmur of voices caused him to come all the way to the hard bright surface of consciousness. The murmur of voices?

There was no place on all Old North Australia where voices murmured. People sat around and spieked to each other and hiered the answers without the clatter of vocal cords. Telepathy made for brilliant and quick conversation, the participants darting their thoughts this way and that, soaring with their shields so as to produce the effect of a confidential whisper. But here there were voices. Voices. Many voices. Not possible. And the smell was wrong. The air was wet—luxuriously, extravagantly wet, like a miser trying to catch a rainstorm in his cabin!

It was almost like the van of the Garden of Death.

Just as he woke, he recognized Lavinia singing an odd little song. It was one which Rod knew, because it had a sharp catchy, poignant little melody to it which sounded like nothing on this world. She was singing, and it sounded like one of the weird sadnesses which his people had brought from their horrible group-experience on the abandoned planet of Paradise VII: Is there anybody here or is everybody dead

at the gray green blue black lake?

The sky was blue and now it is red

over old tall green brown trees.

The house was big but now it looks small

at the gray green blue black lake

And the girl that I knew isn't there any more

at the old flat dark torn place.

His eyes opened and it was indeed Lavinia whom he saw at the edge of vision. This was no house. It was a box, a hospital, a prison, a ship, a cave or a fort. The furnishings were machined and luxurious. The light was artificial and almost the color of peaches. A strange hum in the background sounded like alien engines dispensing power for purposes which Norstrilian law never permitted to private persons. The Lord Redlady leaned over Rod; the fantastic man broke into song himself, chanting:

Light a lantern—

Light a lantern—

Light a lantern,

Here we come!

When he saw the obvious signs of Rod's perplexity, he burst into a laugh.

"That's the oldest song you ever heard, my boy. It's pre-Space and it used to be called 'general quarters' when ships like big iron houses floated on the waters of earth and fought each other. We've been waiting for you to wake up."

"Water," said Rod, "please give me water. Why are you talking?"

"Water!" cried the Lord Redlady to someone behind him. His sharp thin face was alight with excitement as he turned back to Rod. "And we're talking because I have my buzzer on. If people want to talk to each other, they jolly well better use their voices in this ship."

"Ship?" said Rod, reaching for the mug of cold, cold water which a hand had reached out to him.

"This is my ship, Mister and Owner Rod McBan to-the-hundred-and-fifty-first!

An earth ship. I pulled it out of orbit and grounded it with the permission of the Commonwealth. They don't know you're on it, yet. They can't find out right now because my Humanoid-robot Brainwave Dephasing Device is on. Nobody can think in or out through that, and anybody who tries telepathy on this boat is going to get himself a headache here."

"Why you?" said Rod. "What for?"

"In due time," said the Lord Redlady. "Let me introduce you first. You know these people." He waved at a group. Lavinia sat with his hands, Bill and Hopper, with his workwoman Eleanor, with his aunt Doris. They looked odd, sitting on the low, soft, luxurious earth furniture. They were all sipping some earth drink of a color which Rod had never seen before. Their expressions were diverse: Bill looked truculent, Hopper looked greedy, Aunt Doris looked utterly embarrassed and Lavinia looked as though she were enjoying herself.

"And then here…" said the Lord Redlady. The man he pointed to might not have been a man. He was the Norstrilian type all right, but he was a giant, of the kind which were always killed in the Garden of Death.

"At your service," said the giant, who was almost three meters tall and who had to watch his head, lest it hit the ceiling. "I am Donald Dumfrie Hordern Anthony Garwood Gaines Wentworth to the fourteenth generation, Mister and Owner McBan. A military surgeon, at your service, sir!"

"But this is private. Surgeons aren't allowed to work for anybody but government."

"I am on loan to the Earth Government," said Wentworth, the giant, his face in a broad grin.

"And I," said the Lord Redlady, "am both the Instrumentality and the Earth Government for diplomatic purposes. I borrowed him. He's under Earth rules. You will be well in two or three hours."

The doctor, Wentworth, looked at his hand as though he saw a chronograph there: "Two hours and seventeen minutes more."

"Let it be," said the Lord Redlady, "here's our last guest." A short angry man stood up and came over. He glared out at Rod and held forth an angry hand: "John Fisher to-the-hundredth. You know me."

"Do I?" said Rod, not impolitely. He was just dazed.

"Station of the Good Fresh Joey," said Fisher.

"I haven't been there," said Rod, "but I've heard of it."

"You needn't have," snapped the angry Fisher. "I met you at your grandfather's."

"Oh, yes, Mister and Owner Fisher," said Rod, not really remembering anything at all, but wondering why the short red-faced man was so angry with him.

"You don't know who I am?" said Fisher. "I handle the books and the credits for the government."

"Wonderful work," said Rod. "I'm sure it's complicated. Could I have something to eat?"

The Lord Redlady interrupted: "Would you like French pheasant with Chinesian sauce steeped in the thieves' wine from Viola Siderea? It would only cost you six thousand tons of refined gold, orbited near earth, if I ordered it sent to you by special courier."

For some inexplicable reason the entire room howled with laughter. The men put their glasses down so as not to spill them. Hopper seized the opportunity to refill his own glass. Aunt Doris looked hilarious and secretly proud, as though she herself had laid a diamond egg or done some equal marvel. Only Lavinia, though laughing, managed to look sympathetically at Rod to make sure that he did not feel mocked. The Lord Redlady laughed as loudly as the rest and even the short, angry John Fisher allowed himself a wan smile, while holding out his hand for a refill on his drink. An animal, a little one which looked very much like an extremely small person, lifted up the bottle and filled the glass for him; Rod suspected that it was a "monkey" from Old Old Earth, from the stories he had heard.

Rod didn't even say, "What's the joke?" though he realized plainly that he was himself in the middle of it. He just smiled weakly back at them, feeling the hunger grow within him.

"My robot is cooking you an Earth dish. French toast with maple syrup. You could live ten thousand years on this planet and never get it. Rod, don't you know why we're laughing? Don't you know what you've done?"

"The Onseck tried to kill me, I think," said Rod. Lavinia clapped her hand to her mouth, but it was too late.

"So that's who it was," said the doctor, Wentworth, with a voice as gigantic as himself.

"But you wouldn't laugh at me for that—" Rod started to say. Then he stopped himself.

An awful thought had come to him.

"You mean, it really worked—that stuff with my family's old computer?" The laughter broke out again. It was kind laughter, but it was always the laughter of a peasant people, driven by boredom, who greet the unfamiliar with attack or with laughter.

"You did it," said Hopper. "You've bought a billion worlds." John Fisher snapped at him, "Let's not exaggerate. He's gotten about one point six stroon years. You couldn't buy any billion worlds for that. In the first place, there aren't a billion settled worlds, not even a million. In the second place there aren't many worlds for sale. I doubt that he could buy thirty or forty."

The little animal, prompted by some imperceptible sign from the Lord Redlady, went out of the room and returned with a tray. The odor from the tray made all the people in the room sniff appreciatively. The food was unfamiliar, but it combined pungency and sweetness. The monkey fitted the tray into an artfully concealed slot at the head of Rod's couch, took off an imaginary monkey cap, saluted, and went back to his own basket behind the Lord Redlady's chair. The Lord Redlady nodded, "Go ahead and eat, boy. It's on me."

"That's an odd sight, I must say," said the huge doctor Wentworth. "There's the richest man in many worlds, and he hasn't the price of a new pair of overalls."

"What's odd about that? We've always charged an import fee of twenty million per cent of the orbit price of goods," snapped angry John Fisher. "Have you ever realized what other people have swung into orbit around our sun, just waiting for us to change our minds so they could sell us half the rubbish in the universe? This would be knee-deep in junk if we ever dropped our tariff. I'm surprised at you, Doctor, forgetting the fundamental rules of Old North Australia."

"He's not complaining," said aunt Doris, whom the drink had made loquacious.

"He's just thinking. We all think."

"Of course we all think. Or daydream. Some of us leave and go offplanet to be rich people on other worlds. A few of us even manage to get back here on severe probation when we realize what the offworlds are like. I'm just saying," said the doctor, "that Rod's situation would be very funny to everybody except us Norstrilians. We're all rich with the stroon imports, but we kept ourselves poor in order to survive."

"Who's poor?" snapped the fieldhand Hopper, apparently touched at a sensitive point. "I can match you with mega-credits, Doc, any time you care to gamble. Or I'll meet you with throwing knives, if you want them better. I'm as good as the next man!"

"That's exactly what I mean," said John Fisher. "Hopper here can argue with anybody on the planet. We're still equals, we're still free, we're not the victims of our own wealth— that's Norstrilia for you!" Rod looked up from his food and said, "Mister and Owner Secretary Fisher, you talk awfully well for somebody who is not a freak like me. How do you do it?" Fisher started looking angry again, though he was not really angry: "Do you think that financial records can be dictated telepathically? I'm spending centuries out of my life, just dictating into my blasted microphone. Yesterday I spent most of the day dictating the mess which you have made of the Commonwealth's money for the next eight years. And you know what I'm going to do at the next meeting of the Commonwealth Council?"

"What?" said Rod.

"I'm going to move the condemnation of that computer of yours. It's too good to be in private hands."

"You can't do that!" shrieked aunt Doris, somewhat mellowed by the earth beverage she was drinking, "it's MacArthur and McBan family property."

"You can keep the temple," said Fisher with a snort, "but no bloody family is going to outguess the whole planet again. Do you know that boy sitting there has four mega-credits on Earth at this moment?"

Bill hiccupped, "I got more than that myself." Fisher snarled at him, "On earth? FOE money?"

A silence hit the room.

"FOE money. Four megacredits? He can buy Old Australia and ship it out here to us!" Bill sobered fast.

Said Lavinia mildly, "What's Foe money?"

"Do you know, Mister and Owner McBan?" said Fisher, in a peremptory tone. "You had better know, because you have more of it than any man has ever had before."

"I don't want to talk about money," said Rod. "I want to find out what the Onseck is up to."

"Don't worry about him!" laughed the Lord Redlady, prancing to his feet and pointing at himself with a dramatic forefinger. "As the representative of Earth, I filed six hundred and eighty-five lawsuits against him simultaneously, in the name of your Earth debtors, who fear that some harm might befall you…"

"Do they really?" said Rod. "Already?"

"Of course not. All they know is your name and the fact that you bought them out. But they would worry if they did know, so as your agent I tied up the Hon. Sec. Houghton Syme with more law cases than this planet has ever seen before."

The big doctor chuckled. "Dashed clever of you, my lord and mister. You know us Norstrilians pretty well, I must say. If we charge a man with murder, we're so freedom-minded that he has time to commit a few more before being tried for the first one. But civil suits! Hot sheep! He'll never get out of those, as long as he lives."

"Is he Onsecking any more?" said Rod.

"What do you mean?" asked Fisher.

"Does he still have his job—Onseck?"

"Oh, yes," said Fisher, "but we put him on two hundred years' leave and he has only about a hundred and twenty years to live, poor fellow. Most of that time he will be defending himself in civil suits."

Rod finally exhaled. He had finished the food. The small polished room with its machined elegance, the wet air, the bray of voices all over the place—these made him feel dreamlike. Here grown men were standing, talking as though he really did own Old Earth. They were concerned with his affairs, not because he was Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the hundred-and-fifty-first, but because he was Rod, a boy among them who had stumbled upon danger and fortune. He looked around the room. The conversations had accidentally stopped. They were looking at him, and he saw in their faces something which he had seen before. What was it? It was not love. It was a rapt attentiveness, combined with a sort of pleasurable and indulgent interest. He then realized what the looks signified.

They were giving him the adoration which they usually reserved only for cricket players, tennis players, and great track performers—like that fabulous Hopkins Harvey fellow who had gone offworld and had won a wrestling match with a "heavy man" from Wereld Schemering. He was not just Rod any more. He was their boy.

As their boy, he smiled at them vaguely and felt like crying. The breathlessness broke when the large doctor, Mister and Owner Wentworth, threw in the stark comment: "Time to tell him, Mister and Owner Fisher. He won't have his property long if we don't get moving. No, nor his life, either."

Lavinia jumped up and cried out, "You can't kill Rod—" Doctor Wentworth stopped her: "Sit down. We're not going to kill him. And you there, stop acting foolish! We're his friends here." Rod followed the line of the doctor's glance and saw that Hopper had snaked his hand back to the big knife he wore in his belt. He was getting ready to fight anyone who attacked Rod.

"Sit, sit down, all of you, please," said the Lord Redlady, speaking somewhat fussily with his singsong Earth accent. "I'm host here. Sit down. Nobody's killing Rod tonight. Doctor, you take my table. Sit down yourself. You will stop threatening my ceiling or your head. You, ma'am and owner," said he to aunt Doris, "move over there to that other chair. Now we can all see the doctor."

"Can't we wait?" asked Rod. "I need to sleep. Are you going to ask me to make decisions now? I'm not up to decisions, not after what I've just been through. All night with the computer. The long walk. The bird from the Onseck—"

"You'll have no decisions to make if you don't make them tonight," said the doctor firmly and pleasantly. "You'll be a dead man."

"Who's going to kill me?" asked Rod.

"Anybody who wants money. Or wants power. Or who would like unlimited life. Or who needs these things to get something else. Revenge. A woman. An obsession. A drug. You're not just a person now, Rod. You're Norstrilia incarnate. You're Mister Money himself! Don't ask who'd kill you! Ask who wouldn't? We wouldn't…

I think. But don't tempt us."

"How much money have I got?" said Rod.

Angry John Fisher cut in: "So much that the computers are clotted up, just counting it. About one and a half stroon years. Perhaps three hundred years of Old Earth's total income. You sent more Instant Messages last night than the Commonwealth government itself has sent in the last twelve years. These messages are expensive. One kilocredit in FOE money."

"I asked a long time ago what this 'foe money' was," said Lavinia, "and nobody has got around to telling me."

The Lord Redlady took the middle of the floor. He stood there with a stance which none of the Old North Australians had ever seen before. It was actually the posture of a master of ceremonies opening the evening at a large night club, but to people who had never seen those particular gestures his movements were eerie, self-explanatory and queerly beautiful.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, using a phrase which most of them had only read in books, "I will serve drinks while the others speak. I will ask each in turn. Doctor, will you be good enough to wait while the financial secretary speaks?"

"I should think," said the doctor irritably, "that the lad would be wanting to think over his choice. Does he want me to cut him in two, here, tonight, or doesn't he? I should think that would take priority, wouldn't you?"

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the Lord Redlady, "the Mister and Doctor Wentworth has a very good point indeed. But there is no sense in asking Rod about being cut in two unless he knows why. Mister Financial Secretary, will you tell us all what happened last night?"

John Fisher stood up. He was so chubby that it did not matter. His brown, suspicious, intelligent eyes looked over the lot of them.

"There are as many kinds of money as there are worlds with people on them. We here on Norstrilia don't carry the tokens around, but in some places they have bits of paper or metal which they use to keep count. We talk our money into the central computers which even out all our transactions for us. Now what would happen if I wanted a pair of shoes?"

Nobody answered. He didn't expect them to. "I would," he went on, "go to a shop, look in the screen at the shoes which the offworld merchants keep in orbit. I would pick out the shoes I wanted. What's a good price for a pair of shoes in orbit?"

Hopper was getting tired of these theoretical questions so he answered promptly,

"Six bob."

"That's right. Six minicredits."

"But that's orbit money. You're leaving out the tariff," said Hopper.

"Exactly. And what's the tariff?" asked John Fisher, snapping. Hopper snapped back, "Two hundred thousand times, what you bloody fools always make it in the Commonwealth council."

"Hopper, can you buy shoes?" said Fisher.

"Of course I can!" The station hand looked belligerent again but the Lord Redlady was filling his glass. He sniffed the aroma, calmed down and said,

"All right, what's your point?"

"The point is that the money in orbit is SAD money—S for secure, A for and, D

for delivered. That's any kind of good money with backing behind it. Stroon is the best backing there is, but gold is all right, rare metals, fine manufactures, and so on. That's just the money off the planet, in the hands of the recipient. Now how many times would a ship have to hop to get to Old Old Earth Itself?"

"Fifty or sixty," said aunt Doris unexpectedly. "Even I know that."

"And how many ships get through?"

"They all do," said she.

"Oh, no," cried several of the men in unison.

"About one ship is lost every sixty or eighty trips, depending on the solar weather, on the skills of the pinlighters, and go-captains, on the landing accidents. Did any of you ever see a really old captain?"

"Yes," said Hopper with gloomy humor, "a dead one in his coffin."

"So if you have something you want to get to Earth, you have to pay your share of the costly ships, your share of the go-captain's wages and the fees of his staff, your share of the insurance for their families. Do you know what it could cost to get this chair back to earth?" said Fisher.

"Three hundred times the cost of the chair," said Doctor Wentworth.

"Mighty close. It's two hundred and eighty-seven times."

"How do you know so mucking much?" said Bill, speaking up. "And why waste our time with all this crutting glubb?"

"Watch your language, man," said John Fisher. "There are some mucking ladies present. I'm telling you this because we have to get Rod off to Earth tonight, if he wants to be alive and rich—"

"That's what you say!" cried Bill. "Let him go to his house. We can load up on little bombs and hold up against anybody who could get through the Norstrilian defenses. What are we paying these mucking taxes for, if it's not for the likes of you to make sure we're safe? Shut up, man, and let's take the boy home. Come along, Hopper."

The Lord Redlady leaped to the middle of his own floor. He was no prancing Earthman putting on a show. He was the old Instrumentality itself, surviving with raw weapons and raw brains. In his hand he held something which none of them could see clearly.

"Murder," he said, "will be done this moment if anybody moves. I will commit it. I will, people. Move, and try me. And if I do commit murder, I will arrest myself, hold a trial, and acquit myself. I have strange powers, people. Don't make me use them. Don't even make me show them." The shimmering thing in his hand disappeared. "Mister and Doctor Wentworth, you are under my command, by loan. Other people, you are my guests. Be warned. Don't touch that boy. This is Earth territory, this cabin we're in." He stood a little to one side and looked at them brightly out of his strange Earth eyes.

Hopper deliberately spat on the floor. "I suppose I would be a puddle of mucking glue if I helped old Bill?"

"Something like it," said the Lord Redlady. "Want to try?" The things that were hard to see were now in each of his hands. His eyes darted between Bill and Hopper.

"Shut up, Hopper. Well take Rod if he tells us to go. But if he doesn't—it crudding well doesn't matter. Eh, Mister and Owner McBan?" Rod looked around for his grandfather, dead long ago: then he knew they were looking at him instead.

Torn between sleepiness and anxiety he answered, "I don't want to go now, fellows. Thank you for standing by. Go on, Mister Secretary, with the Foe money and the Sad money."

The weapons disappeared from the Lord Redlady's hands.

"I don't like Earth weapons," said Hopper, speaking very loudly and plainly to no one at all, "and I don't like Earth people. They're duty. There's nothing in them that's good honest crook."

"Have a drink, lads," said the Lord Redlady with a democratic heartiness which was so false that the workwoman Eleanor, silent all the evening, let out one wild caw of a laugh, like a kookaburra beginning to whoop in a tree. He looked at her sharply, picked up his serving jug, and nodded to the financial secretary, John Fisher, that he should resume speaking.

Fisher was flustered. He obviously did not like this Earth practice of quick threats and weapons indoors, but the Lord Redlady—disgraced and remote from Old Earth as he was— was nevertheless the accredited diplomat of the Instrumentality, and even Old North Australia did not push the Instrumentality too far. There were things supposed about worlds which had done so. Soberly and huffily he went on,

"There's not much to it. If the money is discounted thirty-three and one third per cent per trip and if it is fifty-five trips to get to Old Earth, it takes a heap of money to pay up in orbit right here before you have a minicredit on earth. Sometimes the odds are better. Your Commonwealth government waits for months and years to get a really favorable rate of exchange and of course we send our freight by armed sailships, which don't go below the surface of space at all. They just take hundreds or thousands of years to get there, while our cruisers dart in and out around them, just to make sure that nobody robs them in transit. There are things about Norstrilian robots which none of you know, and which not even the Instrumentality knows"—he darted a quick look at the Lord Redlady, who said nothing to this, and went on—"which make it well worth while not to muck around with one of our perishing ships. We don't get robbed much. And we have other things that are even worse than Mother Hitton and her littul kittons. But the money and the stroon which finally reaches Old Earth is FOE money. F, O, E. F is for Free, O is for On, E is for Earth." F,O,E—

free on Earth. That's the best kind of money there is, right on Old Old Earth Itself. And Earth has the final exchange computer. Or had it."

"Had it?" said the Lord Redlady.

"It broke down last night. Rod broke it. Overload."

"Impossible!" cried Redlady. "I'll check." He went to the wall, pulled down a desk. A console, incredibly miniature, gleamed out at them. In less than three seconds it glowed. Redlady spoke into it, his voice as clear and cold as the ice they had all heard about:

"Priority. Instrumentality. Short of War. Instant. Instant Redlady calling. Earthport."

"Confirmed," said a Norstrilian voice, "confirmed and charged."

"Earthport," said the console in a whistling whisper which filled the room.

"Redlady - instrumentality - official - centputer - all - right-question cargo - approved - question - out."

"Centputer - all - right - cargo - approved - out," said the whisper and fell silent.

The people in the room had seen an immense fortune squandered. Even by Norstrilian standards, the faster-than-light messages were things which a family might not use twice in a thousand years. They looked at Redlady as though he were an evil-worker with strange powers. Earth's prompt answer to the skinny man made them all remember that though Old North Australia produced the wealth, Earth still distributed much of it and that the supergovernment of the Instrumentality reached into far places where no Norstrilian would even wish to venture.

The Lord Redlady spoke mildly, "The central computer seems to be going again, if your government wishes to consult it. The 'cargo' is this boy here."

"You've told Earth about me?" said Rod.

"Why not? We want to get you there alive."

"But message security—?" said the doctor.

"I have references which no outside mind will know," said the Lord Redlady.

"Finish up, Mister Financial Secretary. Tell the young man what he has on Earth."

"Your computer outcomputed the government," said John Fisher to-the-hundredth,

"and it mortgaged all your lands, all your sheep, all your trading rights, all your family treasures, the right to the MacArthur name, the right to the McBan name, and itself. Then it bought futures. Of course, it didn't do it. You did, Rod McBan."

Startled into full awakeness, Rod found his right hand up at his mouth, so surprised was he. "I did?"

"Then you bought futures in stroon, but you offered them for sale. You held back the sales, shifting titles and changing prices, so that not even the central computer knew what you were doing. You bought almost all of the eighth year from now, most of the seventh year from now, and some of the sixth. You mortgaged each purchase as you went along, in order to buy more. Then you suddenly tore the market wide open by offering fantastic bargains, trading the six-year rights for seventh-year and eighth-year. Your computer made such lavish use of Instant Messages that the Commonwealth defense office had people buzzing around in the middle of the night. By the time they figured out what might happen, it had happened. You registered a monopoly of two year's export, far beyond the predicted amount. The government rushed for a weather recomputation, but while they were doing that you were registering your holdings on Earth and remortgaging them in FOE money. With the FOE money you began to buy up all the imports around Old North Australia, and when the government finally declared an emergency, you had secured final title to one and a half stroon years and to more megacredits, FOE money megacredits, than the Earth computers could handle. You're the richest man that ever was. Or ever will be. We changed all the rules this morning and I myself signed a new treaty with the Earth authorities, ratified by the Instrumentality. Meanwhile, you're the richest of the rich men who ever lived on this world and you're also rich enough to buy all of Old Earth. In fact, you have put in a reservation to buy it, unless the Instrumentality outbids you."

"Why should we?" said the Lord Redlady. "Let him have it. We'll watch what he does with the Earth after he buys it, and if it is something bad, we will kill him."

"You'd kill me, Lord Redlady?" said Rod. "I thought you were saving me?"

"Both," said the doctor, standing up. "The Commonwealth government has not tried to take your property away from you, though they have their doubts as to what you will do with Earth if you do buy it. They are not going to let you stay on this planet and endanger it by being the richest kidnap victim who ever lived. Tomorrow they will strip you of your property, unless you want to take a chance on running for it. Earth government is the same way. If you can figure out your own defenses, you can come on in. Of course the police will protect you, but would that be enough? I'm a doctor, and I'm here to ship you out if you want to go."

"And I'm an officer of government, and I will arrest you if you do not go," said John Fisher.

"And I represent the Instrumentality, which does not declare its policy to anyone, least of all to outsiders. But it is my personal policy," said the Lord Redlady, holding out his hands and twisting his thumbs in a meaningless, grotesque, but somehow very threatening way, "to see that this boy gets a safe trip to Earth and a fair deal when he comes back here!"

"You'll protect him all the way!" cried Lavinia, looking very happy.

"All the way. As far as I can. As long as I live."

"That's pretty long," muttered Hopper, "conceited little pommy cockahoop."

"Watch your language, Hopper," said the Lord Redlady. "Rod?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Your answer?" The Lord Redlady was peremptory.

"I'm going," said Rod.

"What on Earth do you want?" said the Lord Redlady ceremoniously.

"A genuine Cape triangle."

"A what?" cried the Lord Redlady.

"A Cape triangle. A postage stamp."

"What's postage?" said the Lord Redlady, really puzzled.

"Payments on messages."

"But you do that with thumbprints or eyeprints!"

"No," said Rod, "I mean paper ones."

"Paper messages?" said the Lord Redlady, looking as though someone had mentioned grass battleships, hairless sheep, solid cast-iron women, or something else equally improbable. "Paper messages?" he repeated, and then he laughed, quite charmingly. "Oh!" he said, with a tone of secret discovery.

"You mean antiquities…?"

"Of course," said Rod. "Even before Space itself."

"Earth has a lot of antiquities, and I am sure you will be welcome to study them or to collect them. That will be perfectly all right. Just don't do any of the wrong things, or you will be in real trouble."

"What are the wrong things?" said Rod.

"Buying real people, or trying to. Shipping religion from one planet to another. Smuggling underpeople."

"What's religion?" said Rod.

"Later, later," said the Lord Redlady. "You'll learn everything later. Doctor, you take over."

Wentworth stood very carefully so that his head did not touch the ceiling. He had to bend his neck a little. "We have two boxes, Rod." When he spoke, the door whirred in its tracks and showed them a small room beyond. There was a large box like a coffin and a very small box, like the kind that women have around the house to keep a single party-going bonnet in.

"There will be criminals, and wild governments, and conspirators, and adventurers, and just plain good people gone wrong at the thought of your wealth—there will be all these waiting for you to kidnap you or rob or even kill you—"

"Why kill me?"

"To impersonate you and to try to get your money," said the doctor. "Now look. This is your big choice. If you take the big box, we can put you in a sailship convoy and you will get there in several hundred or thousand years. But you will get there, ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent. Or we can send the big box on the regular planoforming ships, and somebody will steal you. Or we scun you down and put you in the little box."

"That little box?" cried Rod.

"Scunned. You've scunned sheep, haven't you?"

"I've heard of it. But a man, no. Dehydrate my body, pickle my head, and freeze the whole mucking mess?" cried Rod.

"That's it. Too bloody right!" cried the doctor cheerfully. "That'll give you a real chance of getting there alive."

"But who'll put me together? I'd need my own doctor—?" His voice quavered at the unnaturalness of the risk, not at the mere chanciness and danger of it.

"Here," said the Lord Redlady, "is your doctor, already trained."

"I am at your service," said the little Earth-animal, the 'monkey,' with a small bow to the assembled company. "My name is A'gentur and I have been conditioned as a physician, a surgeon and a barber." The women had gasped. Hopper and Bill stared at the little animal in horror.

"You're an underperson!" yelled Hopper. "We've never let the crutting things loose on Norstrilia."

"I'm not an underperson. I'm an animal. Conditioned to—" The monkey jumped. Hopper's heavy knife twanged like a musical instrument as it clung to the softer steel of the wall. Hopper's other hand held a long thin knife, ready to reach Redlady's heart.

The left hand of the Lord Redlady flashed straight forward. Something in his hand glowed silently, terribly. There was a hiss in the air. Where Hopper had been, a cloud of oily thick smoke, stinking of burning meat, coiled slowly toward the ventilators. Hopper's clothing and personal belongings, including one false tooth, lay on the chair in which he had been sitting. They were undamaged. His drink stood on the floor beside the chair, forever to remain unfinished.

The doctor's eyes gleamed as he stared strangely at Redlady.

"Noted and reported to the Old North Australian Navy."

"I'll report it too," said the Lord Redlady, "as the use of weapons on diplomatic grounds."

"Never mind," said John Fisher to-the-hundredth, not angry at all, but just pale and looking a little ill. Violence did not frighten him, but decision did. "Let's get on with it. Which box, big or little, boy?" The workwoman Eleanor stood up. She had said nothing, but now she dominated the scene. "Take him in there, girls," she said, "and wash him like you would for the Garden of Death. I'll wash myself in there. You see," she added, "I've always wanted to see the blue skies on earth, and wanted to swim in a house that ran around on the big, big waters. I'll take your big box, Rod, and if I get through alive, you will owe me some treats on Earth. You take the little box, Roddy, take the little box. And that little tiny doctor with the fur on him. Rod, I trust him." Rod stood up.

Everybody was looking at him and at Eleanor. "You agree?" said the Lord Redlady.

He nodded.

"You agree to be scunned and put in the little box for instant shipment to Earth?"

He nodded again.

"You will pay all the extra expenses?"

He nodded again.

The doctor said, "You authorize me to cut you up and reduce you down, in the hope that you may be reconstituted on Earth?"

Rod nodded to him, too.

"Shaking your head isn't enough," said the doctor. "You have to agree for the record."

"I agree," said Rod quietly.

Aunt Doris and Lavinia came forward to lead him into the dressing room and shower room. Just as they reached for his arms, the doctor patted Rod on the back with a quick strange motion. Rod jumped a little.

"Deep hypnotic," said the doctor. "You can manage his body all right, but the next words he utters will be said, luck willing, on Old Old Earth Itself." The women were wide-eyed but they led Rod forward to be cleaned for the operations and the voyage.

The doctor turned to the Lord Redlady and to John Fisher, the financial secretary.

"A good night's work," he said. "Pity about that man, though." Bill sat still, frozen with grief in his chair, staring at Hopper's empty clothing in the chair next to him.

The console tinkled, "Twelve hours, Greenwich Mean Time. No adverse weather reports from the channel coast or from Meeya Meefla or Earthport building. All's well!"

The Lord Redlady served drinks to the misters. He did not even offer one to Bill. It would have been of no use, at this point.

From beyond the door, where they were cleaning the body, clothes and hair of the deeply hypnotized Rod, Lavinia and aunt Doris unconsciously reverted to the ceremony of the Garden of Death and lifted their voices in a sort of plainsong chant:

Out in the Garden of Death, our young

Have tasted the valiant taste of fear.

With muscular arm and reckless tongue,

They have won, and lost, and escaped us here.

The three men listened for a few moments, attentively. From the other washroom there came the sounds of the workwoman Eleanor, washing herself, alone and unattended, for a long voyage and a possible death.

The Lord Redlady heaved a sigh, "Have a drink, Bill. Hopper brought it on himself."

Bill refused to speak to them but he held forth his glass. The Lord Redlady filled that and the others. He turned to John Fisher-to-the-hundredth and said, "You're shipping him?"

"Who?"

"The boy."

"I thought so."

"Better not," said the Lord Redlady.

"You mean—danger?"

"That's only half the word for it," said the Lord Redlady. "You can't possibly plan to offload him at Earthport. Put him into a good medical station. There's an old one, still good, on Mars, if they haven't closed it down. I know Earth. Half the people of Earth will be waiting to greet him and the other half will be waiting to rob him."

"You represent the Earth government, Sir and Commissioner," said John Fisher,

"that's a rum way to talk about your own people."

"They are not that way all the time," laughed Redlady. "Just when they're in heat. Sex hasn't a chance to compare with money when it comes to the human race on Earth. They all think that they want power and freedom and six other impossible things. I'm not speaking for the Earth government when I say this. Just for myself."

"If we don't ship him, who will?" demanded Fisher.

"The Instrumentality."

"The Instrumentality? You don't conduct commerce. How can you?"

"We don't conduct commerce, but we do meet emergencies. I can flag down a long-jump cruiser and he'll be there months before anybody expects him."

"Those are warships. You can't use one for passengers!"

"Can't I?" said the Lord Redlady, with a smile.

"The Instrumentality would?" said Fisher, with a puzzled smile. "The cost would be tremendous. How will you pay for it? It'd be hard to justify."

"He will pay for it. Special donation from him for special service. One megacredit for the trip."

The financial secretary whistled. "That's a fearful price for a single trip. You'd want SAD money and not surface money, I suppose?"

"No. FOE money."

"Hot buttered moonbeams, man! That's a thousand times the most expensive trip that any person has ever had."

The big doctor had been listening to the two of them. "Mister and Owner Fisher," he said, "I recommend it."

"You?" cried John Fisher angrily. "You're a Norstrilian and you want to rob this poor boy?"

"Poor boy?" snorted the doctor. "It's not that. The trip's no good if he's not alive. Our friend here is extravagant, but his ideas are sound. I suggest one amendment."

"What's that?" said the Lord Redlady quickly.

"One and a half megacredits for the round trip—if he is well and alive and with the same personality, apart from natural causes. But note this. One kilocredit only if you deliver him on Earth dead."

John Fisher rubbed his chin. His suspicious eyes looked down at Redlady, who had taken a seat, and up at the doctor, whose head was still bumping the ceiling.

A voice behind him spoke: "Take it, Mister Financial Secretary. The boy won't use money if he's dead. You can't fight the Instrumentality, you can't be reasonable with the Instrumentality, and you can't buy the Instrumentality. With what they've been taking off us all these thousands of years, they've got more stroon than we do. Hidden away somewhere. You, there!" said Bill rudely to the Lord Redlady, "do you have any idea what the Instrumentality is worth?" The Lord Redlady creased his brow. "Never thought of it. I suppose it must have a limit. But I never thought of it. We do have accountants, though."

"See," said Bill. "Even the Instrumentality would hate to lose money. Take the doctor's bid, Redlady. Take him up on it, Fisher." His use of their surnames was an extreme incivility, but the two men were convinced.

"I'll do it," said Redlady. "It's awfully close to writing insurance, which we are not chartered to do. I'll write it in as his emergency clause."

"I'll take it," said John Fisher. "It's to be thousands of years until another Norstrilian financial secretary pays money for a ticket like this, but it's worth it—to him. I'll square it in his accounts. To our planet."

"I'll witness it," said the doctor.

"No, you won't," said Bill savagely. "The boy has one friend here. That's me. Let me do it"

They stared at him, all three.

He stared back.

He broke. "Sirs and Misters, please let me be the witness." The Lord Redlady nodded and opened the console. He and John Fisher spoke the contract into it. At the end Bill shouted his full name as witness. The two women brought Rod McBan, mother-naked, into the room. He was immaculately clean and he stared ahead as though he were in an endless dream.

"That's the operating room," said the Lord Redlady. "I'll spray us all with antiseptic, if you don't mind."

"Of course," said the doctor. "You must."

"You're going to cut him up and boil him down—here and now?" cried aunt Doris.

"Here and now," said the Lord Redlady, "if the doctor approves. The sooner he goes the better chance he has of coming through the whole thing alive."

"I consent," said the doctor. "I approve." He started to take Rod by the hand, leading him toward the room with the long coffin and the small box. At some sign from Redlady, the walls had opened up to show a complete surgical theater.

"Wait a moment," said the Lord Redlady. "Take your colleague."

"Of course," said the doctor.

The monkey had jumped out of his basket when he heard his name mentioned. Together, the giant and the monkey led Ron into the little gleaming room. They closed the door behind them.

The ones who were left behind sat down nervously.

"Mister and Owner Redlady," said Bill, "since I'm staying, could I have some more of that drink?"

"Of course, Sir and Mister," said the Lord Redlady, not having any idea of what Bill's title might be.

There were no screams from Rod, no thuds, no protest. There was the cloying sweet horror of unknown medicines creeping through the airvents. The two women said nothing as the group of people sat around. Eleanor, wrapped in an enormous towel, came and sat with them. In the second hour of the operations on Rod, Lavinia began sobbing. She couldn't help it.

CHAPTER NINE: Traps, Fortunes and Watchers

We all know that no communications systems are leak-proof. Even inside the far-reaching communications patterns of the Instrumentality, there were soft spots, rotten points, garrulous men. The MacArthur-McBan computer, sheltered in the Palace of the Governor of Night, had had time to work out abstract economics and weather patterns, but the computer had not tasted human love or human wickedness. All the messages concerning Rod's speculation in the forward santaclara crop and stroon export had been sent in the clear. It was no wonder that on many worlds, people saw Rod as a chance, an opportunity, a victim, a benefactor, or an enemy. For we all know the old poem:

Luck is hot and people funny,

Everybody's fond of money.

Lose a chance and sell your mother,

Win the pot and buy another.

Other people fall and crash:

You may get the ton of cash!

It applied in this case too. People ran hot and cold with the news. On Earth, same day, within Earthport Itself

Commissioner Teadrinker tapped his teeth with a pencil. Four megacredits FOE

money already and more, much more to come.

Teadrinker lived in a fever of perpetual humiliation. He had chosen it. It was called "the honorable disgrace" and it applied to ex-Lords of the Instrumentality who chose long life instead of service and honor. He was a thousandmorer, meaning that he had traded his career, his reputation, and his authority for a long life of one thousand or more years. (The Instrumentality had learned, long ago, that the best way to protect its members from temptation was to tempt them itself. By offering "honorable disgrace" and low, secure jobs within the Instrumentality to those Lords who might be tempted to trade long life for their secrets, it kept its own potential defectors. Teadrinker was one of these.)

He saw the news and he was a skilled wise man. He could not do anything to the Instrumentality with money, but money worked wonders on Earth. He could buy a modicum of honor. Perhaps he could even have the records falsified and get married again. He flushed slightly, even after hundreds of years, when he remembered his first wife blazing at him when she saw his petition for long life and honorable disgrace: "Go ahead and live, you fool. Live and watch me die without you, inside the decent four hundred years which everybody has, if they work for it and want it. Watch your children die, watch your friends die, watch all your hobbies and ideas get out of date. Go along, you horrible little man, and let me die like a human being!"

A few megacredits could help that.

Teadrinker was in charge of incoming visitors. His underman, the cattle-derived B'dank, was custodian of the scavenger spiders—half-tame one-ton insects which stood by for emergency work if the services of the tower failed. He wouldn't need to have this Norstrilian merchant very long— just long enough for a recorded order and a short murder.

Perhaps not. If the Instrumentality caught him, it would be dream-punishments, things worse than Shayol itself.

Perhaps yes. If he succeeded, he would escape a near immortality of boredom and could have a few decades of juicy fun instead.

He tapped his teeth again.

"Do nothing, Teadrinker," he said to himself, "but think, think, think. Those spiders look as though they might have possibilities." On Viola Siderea, at the Council of the Guild of Thieves

"Put two converted police cruisers in orbit around the sun. Mark them for charter or sale, so that we won't run into the police.

"Put an agent into every liner which is Earthbound within the time stated.

"Remember, we don't want the man. Just his luggage. He's sure to be carrying a half-ton or so of stroon. With that kind of fortune, he could pay off all the debts we gathered with that Bozart business. Funny we never heard from Bozart. Nothing.

"Put three senior thieves in Earthport itself. Make sure that they have fake stroon, diluted down to about one-thousandth, so that they can work the luggage switch if they have the chance…

"I know all this costs money, but you have to spend money to get it. Agreed, gentlemen of the larcenical arts?"

There was a chorus of agreement around the table, except for one old, wise thief who said, "You know my views."

"Yes," said the chairman, with toneless polite hatred, "we know your views. Rob corpses. Clean out wrecks. Become human hyenas instead of human wolves." With unexpected humor the old man said, "Crudely put but correct—and safer."

"Do we need to vote?" said the chairman, looking around the table. There was a chorus of noes.

"Carried, then," said the presiding chief. "Hit hard, and hit for the small target, not the big one."

Ten kilometers below the surface of the Earth

"He is coming, father! He is coming."

"Who is coming?" said the voice, like a great drum resounding. E'lamelanie said it as though it were a prayer: "The blessed one, the appointed one, the guarantor of our people, the new messenger on whom the robot, rat and Copt agreed. With money he is coming, to help us, to save us, to open to us the light of day and the vaults of heaven."

"You are blasphemous," said the E-telekeli.

The girl fell into a hush. She not only respected her father. She worshiped him as her personal religious leader. His great eyes blazed as though they could see through thousands of meters of dirt and rock and still see beyond into the deep of space. Perhaps he could see that far… Even his own people were never sure of the limits of his power. His white face and white feathers gave his penetrating eyes a miraculously piercing capacity. Calmly, rather kindlily, he added, "My darling, you are wrong. We simply do not know who this man McBan really is."

"Couldn't it be written?" she pleaded. "Couldn't it be promised? That's the direction of Space from which the robot, the rat and the Copt sent back our very special message, 'From the uttermost deeps one shall come, bringing uncountable treasure and a sure delivery.' So it might be now! Mightn't it?"

"My dear," he responded, "you still have a crude idea of real treasure if you think it is measured in megacredits. Go read The Scrap of the Book, then think, and then tell me what you have thought. But meanwhile—no more chatter. We must not excite our poor oppressed people."

The temporary Council of the Commonwealth of Old North Australia

"All the riffraff of all the worlds. They're all going to make a run for that silly boy of ours."

"Right."

"If he stays here, they'll come here."

"Right."

"Let's let him go to Earth. I have a feeling that little rascal Redlady will smuggle him out tonight and save us the trouble."

"Right."

"After a while it will be all right for him to come back. He won't spoil our hereditary defense of looking stupid. I'm afraid he's bright but by Earth standards he's just a yokel."

"Right."

"Should we send along twenty or thirty more Rod McBans and get the attackers really loused up?"

"No."

"Why not, Sir and Owner?"

"Because it would look clever. We rely on never looking clever. I have the next best answer."

"What's that?"

"Suggest to all the really rum worlds we know that a good impersonator could put his hands on the McBan money. Make the suggestion so that they would not know that we had originated it. The starlanes will be full of Rod McBans, complete with phony Norstrilian accents, for the next couple of hundred years. And no one will suspect that we will set them up to it. Stupid's the word, mate, stupid. If they ever think we're clever, we're in for it!" The speaker sighed: "How do the bloody fools suppose our forefathers got off Paradise VII if they weren't clever? How can they think we'd hold this sharp little monopoly for thousands of years? They're stupid not to think about it, but let's not make them think. Right?"

"Right."

CHAPTER TEN: The Nearby Exile

Rod awoke with a strange feeling of well-being. In a corner of his mind there were memories of pandemonium—knives, blood, medicine, a monkey working as surgeon. Rum dreams! He glanced around and immediately tried to jump out of bed.

The whole world was on fire!

Bright blazing intolerable fire, like a blowtorch.

But the bed held him. He realized that a loose comfortable jacket ended in tapes and that the tapes were anchored in some way to the bed.

"Eleanor!" he shouted, "Come here."

He remembered the mad bird attacking him, Lavinia transporting him to the cabin of the sharp Earthman, Lord Redlady. He remembered medicines and fuss. But this— what was this?

When the door opened, more of the intolerable light poured in. It was as though every cloud had been stripped from the sky of Old North Australia, leaving only the blazing heavens and the fiery sun. There were people who had seen that happen, when the weather machines occasionally broke down and let a hurricane cut a hole in the clouds, but it had certainly not happened in his time, or in his grandfather's time.

The man who entered was pleasant, but he was no Norstrilian. His shoulders were slight, he did not look as though he could lift a cow, and his face had been washed so long and so steadily that it looked like a baby's face. He had an odd medical-looking suit on, all white, and his face combined the smile and the ready professional sympathy of a good physician.

"We're feeling better, I see," said he.

"Where on earth am I?" asked Rod. "In a satellite. It feels odd."

"You're not on Earth, man."

"I know I'm not. I've never been there. Where's this place?"

"Mars. The Old Star Station. I'm Jeanjacques Vomact." Rod mumbled the name so badly that the other man had to spell it out for him. When that was straightened out, Rod came back to the subject.

"Where's Mars? Can you untie me? When's that light going to go off?"

"I'll untie you right now," said Doctor Vomact, "but stay in bed and take it easy until we've given you some food and taken some tests. The light—that's sunshine. I'd say it's about seven hours, local time, before it goes off. This is late morning. Don't you know what Mars is? It's a planet."

"New Mars, you mean," said Rod proudly, "the one with the enormous shops and the zoological gardens."

"The only shops we have here are the cafeteria and the PX. New Mars? I've heard of that place somewhere. It does have big shops and some kind of an animal show. Elephants you can hold in your hand. They've got those too. This isn't that place at all. Wait a sec, I'll roll your bed to the window." Rod looked eagerly out of the window. It was frightening. A naked, dark sky did not have a cloud in sight. A few holes showed in it here and there. They almost looked like the "stars" which people saw when they were in spaceship transit from one cloudy planet to another. Dominating everything was a single explosive horrible light, which hung high and steady in the sky without ever going off. He found himself cringing for the explosion, but he could tell, from the posture of the doctor next to him, that the doctor was not in the least afraid of that chronic hydrogen bomb, whatever it might turn out to be. Keeping his voice level and trying not to sound like a boy he said, "What's that?"

"The sun."

"Don't cook my book, mate. Give me the straight truth. Everybody calls his star a sun. What's this one?"

"The sun. The original sun. The sun of Old Earth Itself. Just as this is plain Mars. Not even Old Mars. Certainly not New Mars. This Earth's neighbor."

"That thing never goes off, goes up—boom!—or goes down?"

"The sun, you mean?" said doctor Vomact. "No, I should think not. I suppose it looked that way to your ancestors and mine half a million years ago, when we were all running around naked on Earth." The doctor busied himself as he talked. He chopped the air with a strange-looking little key, and the tapes fell loose. The mittens dropped off Rod's hands. Rod looked at his own hands in the intense light and saw that they seemed strange. They looked smooth and naked and clean, like the doctor's own hands. Weird memories began to come back to him, but his handicap about spieking and hiering telepathically had made him cautious and sensitive, so he did not give himself away.

"If this is Old Mars, what are you doing, talking the Old North Australian language to me? I thought my people were the only ones in the universe who still spoke Ancient Inglish." He shifted proudly but clumsily over to the Old Common Tongue: "You see, the Appointed Ones of my family taught me this language as well. I've never been offworld before."

"I speak your language," said the doctor, "because I learned it. I learned it because you paid me, very generously, to learn it. In the months that we have been reassembling you, it's come in handy. We just let down the portal of memory and identity today, but I've talked to you for hundreds of hours already."

Rod tried to speak.

He could not utter a word. His throat was dry and he was afraid that he might throw up his food—if he had eaten any.

The doctor put a friendly hand on his arm. "Easy, Mister and Owner McBan, easy now. We all do that when we come out."

Rod croaked, "I've been dead? Dead. Me?"

"Not exactly dead," said the doctor, "but close to it."

"The box—that little box!" cried Rod.

"What little box?"

"Please, Doctor—the one I came in?"

"That box wasn't so little," said Doctor Vomact. He squared his hands in the air and made a shape about the size of the little ladies' bonnet-box which Rod had seen in the Lord Redlady's private operating room. "It was this big. Your head was full natural size. That's why it's been so easy and so successful to bring you back to normality in such a hurry."

"And Eleanor?"

"Your companion? She made it, too. Nobody intercepted the ship."

"You mean the rest is true, too. I'm still the richest man in the universe?

And I'm gone, gone from home?" Rod would have liked to beat the bedspread, but did not.

"I am glad," said Doctor Vomact, "to see you express so much feeling about your situation. You showed a great deal when you were under the sedatives and hypnotics, but I was beginning to wonder how we could help you realize your true position when you came back, as you have, to normal life. Forgive me for talking this way. I sound like a medical journal. It's hard to be friends with a patient, even when one really likes him…"

Vomact was a small man, a full head shorter than Rod himself, but so gracefully proportioned that he did not look stunted or little. His face was thin, with a mop of ungovernable black hair which fell in all directions. Among Norstrilians, this fashion would have been deemed eccentric; to judge by the fact that other Earthmen let their hair grow wild and long, it must have been an Earth fashion. Rod found it foolish but not repulsive. It was not Vomact's appearance which caused the impression. It was the personality which tingled out of every pore. Vomact could become calm when he knew, from his medical wisdom, that kindness and tranquility were in order, but these qualities were not usual to him. He was vivacious, moody, lively, talkative to an extreme, but he was sensitive enough to the person to whom he was talking: he never became a bore. Even among Norstrilian women, Rod had never seen a person who expressed so much so fluently. When Vomact talked, his hands were in constant motion—outlining, describing, clarifying the points which he described. When he talked he smiled, scowled, raised his eyebrows in questioning, stared with amazement, looked aside in wonder. Rod was used to the sight of two Norstrilians having a long telepathic conversation, spieking and hiering one another as their bodies reposed, comfortable and immobile, while their minds worked directly on one another. To do all this with the speaking voice—that, to a Norstrilian, was a marvel to hear and behold. There was something graceful and pleasant about the animation of this Earth doctor which stood in complete contrast to the quick dangerous decisiveness of the Lord Redlady. Rod began to think that if Earth were full of people, all of them like Vomact, it must be a delightful but confusing place. Vomact once hinted that his family was unusual, so that even in the long weary years of perfection, when everyone else had numbers, they kept their family name secret but remembered.

One afternoon Vomact suggested that they walk across the Martian plain a few kilometers to the ruins of the first human settlement on Mars. "We have to talk," said he, "but it is easy enough to talk through these soft helmets. The exercise will do you good. You're young and you will take a lot of conditioning."

Rod agreed.

Friends they became in the ensuing days.

Rod found that the doctor was by no means as young as he looked, just ten years or so older than himself. The doctor was a hundred and ten years old, and had gone through his first rejuvenation just ten years before. He had two more and then death, at the age of four hundred, if the present schedule were kept for Mars.

"You may think, Mister McBan, that you are an upset, wild type yourself. I can promise you, young bucko, that Old Earth is such a happy mess these days that they will never notice you. Haven't you heard about the Rediscovery of Man?" Rod hesitated. He had paid no attention to the news himself, but he did not want to discredit his home planet by making it seem more ignorant than it really was. "Something about language, wasn't it? And length of life, too? I never paid much attention to offplanet news, unless it was technical inventions or big battles. I think some people in Old North Australia have a keen interest in Old Earth Itself. What was it, anyhow?"

"The Instrumentality finally took on a big plan. Earth had no dangers, no hopes, no rewards, no future except endlessness. Everybody stood a thousand-to-one chance of living the four hundred years which was allotted for persons who earned the full period by keeping busy—"

"Why didn't everybody do it?" interrupted Rod. "The Instrumentality took care of the shorties in a very fair way. It offered them wonderfully delicious and exciting vices when they got to be about seventy. Things that combined electronics, drugs and sex in the subjective mind. Anybody who didn't have a lot of work to do ended up getting 'the blissfuls' and eventually died of sheer fun. Who wants to take time for mere hundred-years' renewals when they can have five or six thousand years of orgies and adventures every single night?"

"Sounds horrible to me," said Rod. "We have our Giggle Rooms, but people die in them right away. They don't mess around, dying among their neighbors. Think of the awful interaction you must get with the normals." Doctor Vomact's face clouded over with anger and grief. He turned away and looked over the endless Martian plains. Dear blue Earth hung friendlily in the sky. He looked up at the star of Earth as though he hated it and he said to Rod, his face still turned away:

"You may have a point there, Mister McBan. My mother was a shortie and after she gave up, my father went too. And I'm a normal. I don't suppose I'll get over what it did to me. They weren't my real parents, of course—there was nothing that dirty in my family—but they were my final adopters. I've always thought that you Old North Australians were crazy, rich barbarians for killing off your teenagers if they didn't jump enough or something crude like that, but I'll admit that you're clean barbarians. You don't make yourselves live with the sweet sick stink of death inside your own apartments…"

"What's an apartment?"

"What we live in."

"You mean a house," said Rod.

"No, an apartment is a part of a house. Two hundred thousand of them sometimes make up one big house."

"You mean," said Rod, "there are two hundred thousand families all in one enormous living room? The room must be kilometers long!"

"No, no, no!" said the doctor, laughing a little. "Each apartment has a separate living room with sleep sections that come out of the walls, an eating section, a washroom for yourself and your visitors that might come to have a bath with you, a garden room, a study room, and a personality room."

"What's a personality room?"

"That," said the doctor, "is a little room where we do things that we don't want our own families to watch."

"We call that a bathroom," said Rod.

The doctor stopped in their walk. "That's what makes it so hard to explain to you what Earth is doing. You're fossils, that's what you are. You've had the old language of Inglish, you keep your family system and your names, you've had unlimited life—"

"Not unlimited," said Rod, "just long. We have to work for it and pay for it with tests."

The doctor looked sorry. "I didn't mean to criticize you. You're different. Very different from what Earth has been. You would have found Earth inhuman. Those apartments we were talking about, for example. Two-thirds of them empty. Underpeople moving into the basements. Records lost; jobs forgotten. If we didn't make such good robots, everything would have fallen to pieces at the same time." He looked at Rod's face. "I can see you don't understand me. Let's take a practical case. Can you imagine killing me?"

"No," said Rod, "I like you."

"I don't mean that. Not the real us. Suppose you didn't know who I was and you found me intruding on your sheep or stealing your stroon."

"You couldn't steal my stroon. My government processes it for me and you couldn't get near it."

"All right, all right, not stroon. Just suppose I came from off your planet without a permit. How would you kill me?"

"I wouldn't kill you. I'd report it to the police."

"Suppose I drew a weapon on you?"

"Then," said Rod, "you'd get your neck broken. Or a knife in your heart. Or a minibomb somewhere near you."

"There!" said the doctor, with a broad grin.

"There what?" said Rod.

"You know how to kill people, should the need arise."

"All citizens know how," said Rod, "but that doesn't mean they do it. We're not bushwhacking each other all the time, the way I heard some Earthpeople thought we did."

"Precisely," said Vomact. "And that's what the Instrumentality is trying to do for all mankind today. To make life dangerous enough and interesting enough to be real again. We have diseases, dangers, fights, chances. It's been wonderful."

Rod looked back at the group of sheds they had left. "I don't see any signs of it here on Mars."

"This is a military establishment. It's been left out of the Rediscovery of Man until the effects have been studied better. We're still living perfect lives of four hundred years here on Mars. No danger, no change, no risk."

"How do you have a name, then?"

"My father gave it to me. He was an official Hero of the Frontier Worlds who came home and died a shortie. The Instrumentality let people like that have names before they gave the privilege to everybody."

"What are you doing here?"

"Working." The doctor started to resume their walk. Rod did not feel much awe of him. He was such a shamelessly talkative person, the way most Earthmen seemed to be, that it was hard not to be at ease with him. Rod took Vomact's arm, gently. "There's more to it—"

"You know it," said Vomact. "You have good perceptions. Should I tell you?"

"Why not?" said Rod.

"You're my patient. It might not be fair to you."

"Go ahead," said Rod, "you ought to know I'm tough."

"I'm a criminal," said the doctor.

"But you're alive," said Rod. "In my world we kill criminals or we send them offplanet."

"I'm offplanet," said Vomact. "This isn't my world. For most of us here on Mars, this is a prison, not a home."

"What did you do?"

"It's too awful…" said the Doctor. "I'm ashamed of it myself. They have sentenced me to conditional conditional."

Rod looked at him quickly. Momentarily he wondered whether he might be the victim of some outrageous deadpan joke. The doctor was serious; his face expressed bewilderment and grief.

"I revolted," said the doctor, "without knowing it. People can say anything they want on earth, and they can print up to twenty copies of anything they need to print, but beyond that it's mass communications. Against the law. When the Rediscovery of Man came, they gave me the Spanish language to work on. I used a lot of research to get out La Prensa, Jokes, dialogues, imaginary advertisements, reports of what had happened in the ancient world. But then I got a bright idea. I went down to Earthport and got the news from incoming ships. What was happening here. What was happening there. You have no idea, Rod, how interesting mankind is! And the things we do… so strange, so comical, so pitiable. The news even comes in on machines, all marked 'official use only." I disregarded that and I printed up one issue with nothing but truth in it—a real issue, all facts.

"I printed real news.

"Rod, the roof fell in. All persons who had been reconditioned for Spanish were given stability tests. I was asked, did I know the law? Certainly, said I, I knew the law. No mass communications except within government. News is the mother of opinion, opinion the cause of mass delusion, delusion the source of war. The law was plain and I thought it did not matter. I thought it was just an old law.

"I was wrong, Rod, wrong. They did not charge me with violating the news laws. They charged me with revolt— against the Instrumentality. They sentenced me to death, immediately. Then they made it conditional, conditional on my going off-planet and behaving well. When I got here, they made it double conditional. If my act has no bad results. But I can't find out. I can go back to Earth any time. That part is no trouble. If they think my misdeed still has effect, they will give me the dream punishments or send me off to that awful planet somewhere. If they think it doesn't matter, they will restore my citizenship with a laugh. But they don't know the worst of it. My underman learned Spanish and the underpeople are keeping the newspaper going very secretly. I can't even imagine what they will do to me if they ever find out what has gone wrong and know that it was me who started it all. Do you think I'm wrong, Rod?"

Rod stared at him. He was not used to judging adults, particularly not at their own request. In Old North Australia, people kept their distance. There were fitting ways for doing everything, and one of the most fitting things was to deal only with people of your own age group.

He tried to be fair, to think in an adult way, and he said, "Of course I think you're wrong, Mister and Doctor Vomact. But you're not very wrong. None of us should trifle with war."

Vomact seized Rod's arm. The gesture was hysterical, almost ugly. "Rod," he whispered, very urgently, "you're rich. You come from an important family. Could you get me into Old North Australia?"

"Why not?" said Rod. "I can pay for all the visitors I want."

"No, Rod, I don't mean that. As an immigrant." It was Rod's turn to become tense. "Immigrant?" he said. "The penalty for immigration is death. We're killing our own people right now, just to keep the population down. How do you think we could let outsiders settle with us? And the stroon. What about that?"

"Never mind, Rod," said Vomact. "I won't bother you again. I won't mention it again. It's a weary thing, to live many years with death ready to open the next door, ring the next bell, be on the next page of the message file. I haven't married. How could I?" With a whimsical turn of his vivacious mind and face, he was oft on a cheerful track. "I have a medicine, Rod, a medicine for doctors, even for rebels. Do you know what it is?"

"A tranquilizer?" Rod was still shocked at the indecency of anyone mentioning immigration to a Norstrilian. He could not think straight.

"Work," said the little doctor, "that's my medicine."

"Work is always good," said Rod, feeling pompous at the generalization. The magic had gone out of the afternoon.

The doctor felt it too. He sighed. "I'll show you the old sheds which men from Earth first built. And then I'll go to work. Do you know what my main work is?"

"No," said Rod, politely.

"You," said doctor Vomact, with one of his sad-gay mischievous smiles. "You're well, but I've got to make you more than well. I've got to make you kill-proof."

They had reached the sheds.

The ruins might be old, but they were not very impressive. They looked something like the homes on the more modest stations back on Norstrilia. On their way back Rod said, very casually, "What are you going to do to me, sir and doctor?"

"Anything you want," said Vomact lightly.

"Really, now. What?"

"Well," said Vomact, "the Lord Redlady sent along a whole cube of suggestions. Keep your personality. Keep your retinal and brain images. Change your appearance. Change your workwoman into a young man who looks just like your description."

"You can't do that to Eleanor. She's a citizen."

"Not here, not on Mars, she isn't. She's your baggage."

"But her legal rights!"

"This is Mars, Rod, but it's Earth territory. Under Earth law. Under the direct control of the Instrumentality. We can do these things all right. The hard thing is this. Would you consent to passing for an underman?"

"I never saw one. How would I know?" said Rod.

"Could you stand the shame of it?"

Rod laughed, by way of an answer.

Vomact sighed. "You're funny people, you Norstrilians. I'd rather die than be mistaken for an underman. The disgrace of it, the contempt! But the Lord Redlady said that you could walk into Earth as free as a breeze if we made you pass for a cat-man. I might as well tell you, Rod. Your wife is already here." Rod stopped walking. "My wife? I have no wife."

"Your cat-wife," said the doctor. "Of course it isn't real marriage. Underpeople aren't allowed to have it. But they have a companion which looks something like marriage and we sometimes slip and call them husband and wife. The Instrumentality has already sent a cat-girl out to be your 'wife.' She'll travel back to Earth with you from Mars, You'll just be a pair of lucky cats who've been doing dances and acrobatics for the bored station personnel here."

"And Eleanor?"

"I suppose somebody will kill her, thinking it's you. That's what you brought her for, isn't it? Aren't you rich enough?"

"No, no, no," said Rod, "nobody is that rich. We have to think of something else."

They spent the entire walk back making new plans which would protect Eleanor and Rod both.

As they entered the shedport and took off their helmets, Rod said, "This wife of mine, when can I see her?"

"You won't overlook her," said Vomact. "She's as wild as fire and twice as beautiful."

"Does she have a name?"

"Of course she does," said the doctor. "They all do."

"What is it, then?"

"C'mell."

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Hospitality and Entrapment

People waited, here and there. If there had been world-wide news coverage, the population would have converged on Earthport with curiosity, passion, or greed. But news had been forbidden long before", people could know only know the things which concerned them personally; the centers of Earth remained undisturbed. Here and there, as Rod made his trip from Mars to Earth, there were anticipations of the event. Over-all, the world of Old Old Earth remained quiet, except for the perennial bubble of its inward problems. On Earth, the day of Rod's flight, within Earthport itself

"They shut me out of the meeting this morning, when I'm in charge of visitors. That means that something is in the air," said Commissioner Teadrinker to his underman, B'dank.

B'dank, expecting a dull day, had been chewing his cud while sitting on his stool in the corner. He knew far more about the case than did his master, and he had learned his additional information from the secret sources of the under-people, but he was resolved to betray nothing, to express nothing. Hastily he swallowed his cud and said, in his reassuring, calm bull voice:

"There might be some other reason, sir and master. If they were considering a promotion for you, they would leave you out of the meeting. You certainly deserve a promotion, sir and master."

"Are the spiders ready?" asked Teadrinker crossly.

"Who can tell the mind of a giant spider?" said B'dank calmly. "I talked to the foreman-spider for three hours yesterday with sign language. He wants twelve cases of beer. I told him I would give him more—he could have ten. The poor devil can't count, though he thinks he can, so he was pleased at having out-bargained me. They will take the person you designate to the steeple of Earthport and they will hide that person so that the human being cannot be found for many hours. When I appear with the cases of beer, they will give me the person. I will then jump out of a window, holding the person in my arms. There are so few people who go down the outside of Earthport that they may not notice me at all. I will take the person to the ruined palace directly under Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, the one which you showed me, sir and master, and there I will keep the person in good order until you come and do the things which you have to do."

Teadrinker looked across the room. The big, florid, handsome face was so exasperatingly calm that it annoyed him. Teadrinker had heard that bull-men, because of their cattle origin, were sometimes subject to fits of uncontrollable frantic rage, but he had never seen the least sign of any such phenomenon in B'dank.

He snapped, "Aren't you worried?"

"Why should I worry, sir and master? You are doing the worrying for both of us."

"Go fry yourself!"

"That is not an operational instruction," said B'dank. "I suggest that the master eat something. That will calm his nerves. Nothing at all may happen today, and it is very hard for true men to wait for nothing at all. I have seen many of them get upset."

Teadrinker gritted his teeth at this extreme reasonableness. Nevertheless, he took a dehydrated banana out of his desk drawer and began chewing on it. He looked sharply across at B'dank. "Do you want one of these things?" B'dank slid off his chair with surprisingly smooth agility; he was at the desk, his enormous ham-sized hand held out, before he said, "Yes, indeed, sir. I love bananas."

Teadrinker gave him one and then said, fretfully, "Are you sure of the fact you never met the Lord Redlady?"

"Sure as any underman can be," said B'dank, munching the banana. "We never really know what has been put into our original conditioning, or who put it there. We're inferior and we're not supposed to know. It is forbidden even to inquire."

"So you admit that you might be a spy or agent of the Lord Redlady?"

"I might be, sir, but I do not feel like it."

"Do you know who Redlady is?"

"You have told me, sir, that he is the most dangerous human being in the whole galaxy."

"That's right," said Teadrinker, "and if I am running into something which the Lord Redlady has set up, I might as well cut up my throat before I start."

"It would be simpler, sir," said B'dank, "not to kidnap this Rod McBan at all. That is the only element of danger. If you did nothing, things would go on as they always have gone on—quietly, calmly."

"That's the horror and anxiety of it! They do always go on. Don't you think I want to get out of here, to taste power and freedom again?"

"You may so, sir," said B'dank, hoping that Teadrinker would offer him one more of those delicious dried bananas.

Teadrinker, distracted, did not.

He just walked up and down his room, desperate with the torment of hope, danger and delay.

Antechamber of the Bell and Bank

The Lady Johanna Gnade was there first. She was clean, well-dressed, alert. The Lord Jestocost, who followed her in, wondered if she had any personal life at all. It was bad manners, among the Chiefs of the Instrumentality, to inquire into another Chiefs personal affairs, even though the complete personal histories of each of them, kept up to the day and minute, was recorded in the computer cabinet in the corner. Jestocost knew, because he had peeped at his own record, using another Chiefs name, just so that he could see whether several minor illegalities of his had been recorded; they had been, all except for the biggest one—his deal with the cat-girl C'mell—which he had successfully kept off the recording screens. (The record simply showed him having a nap at the time.) If the Lady Johanna had any secrets, she kept them well.

"My sir and colleague," said she, "I suspect you of sheer inquisitiveness—a vice most commonly attributed to women."

"When we get as old as this, my lady, the differences in character between men and women become imperceptible. If, indeed, they ever existed in the first place. You and I are bright people and we each have a good nose for danger or disturbance. Isn't it likely we would both look up somebody with the impossible name of Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan to the hundred-and-fifty-first generation. See—I memorized all of it! Don't you think that was rather clever of me?"

"Rather," said she, in a tone which implied she didn't.

"I'm expecting him this morning."

"You are?" she asked, on a rising note which implied that there was something improper about his knowledge. "There's nothing about it in the messages."

"That's it," said the Lord Jestocost, smiling, "I arranged for Mars solar radiation to be carried two extra decimals until he left. This morning it's back down to three decimals. That means he's coming. Clever of me, isn't it?"

"Too clever," she said. "Why ask me?" I never thought you valued my opinion. Anyhow, why are you taking all these pains with the case? Why don't you just ship him out so far that it would take him a long lifetime, even with stroon, to get back here again?"

He looked at her evenly until she flushed. He said nothing.

"My—my comment was improper, I suppose." she stammered. "You and your sense of justice. You're always putting the rest of us in the wrong."

"I didn't mean to," he said mildly, "because I am just thinking of Earth. Did you know he owns this tower?"

"Earthport?" she cried. "Impossible."

"Not at all," said Jestocost. "I myself sold it to his agent ten days ago. For forty megacredits FOE money. That's more than we happen to have on Earth right now. When he deposited it, we began paying him 3-percent-a-year interest. And that wasn't all he bought from me. I sold him that ocean too, right there, the one the ancients called Atlantic. And I sold him three hundred thousand attractive under-women trained in various tasks, together with the dower rights of seven hundred human women of appropriate ages."

"You mean you did all this to save the Earth treasury three megacredits a year?"

"Wouldn't you? Remember, this is FOE money." She pursed her lips. Then she burst into a smile. "I never saw anyone else like you, my Lord Jestocost. You're the fairest man I ever knew and yet you never forget a little bit more in the way of earnings!"

"That's not the end of it," said he with a very crafty, pleased smile. "Did you read Amended (Reversionary) Schedule seven hundred and eleven—nineteen—thirteen P which you yourself voted for eleven days ago?"

"I looked at it," she said defensively. "We all did. It was something to do with Earth funds and Instrumentality funds. The Earth representative didn't complain. We all passed it because we trusted you."

"Do you know what it means?"

"Frankly, not at all. Does it have anything to do with this rich old man, McBan?"

"Don't be sure," said the Lord Jestocost, "that he's old. He might be young. Anyhow, the tax schedule raises taxes on kilocredits very slightly. Megacredit taxes are divided evenly between Earth and the Instrumentality, provided that the owner is not personally operating the property. It comes to one per cent a month. That's the very small type in the footnote at the bottom of the seventh page of rates."

"You—you mean—" she gasped with laughter, "that by selling the poor man the Earth you are not only cutting him out of three percent interest a year, but you're charging him twelve percent taxes. Blessed rockets, man, you're weird. I love you. You're the cleverest, most ridiculous person we ever had as a Chief of the Instrumentality!" From the Lady Johanna Gnade, this was lurid language indeed. Jestocost did not know whether to be offended or pleased. Since she was in a rare good humor, he dared to mention his half-secret project to her:

"Do you think, my lady, that if we have all this unexpected credit, we could waste a little of our stroon imports?"

Her laugh stopped. "On what?" she said sharply.

"On the underpeople. For the best of them."

"Oh, no. Oh, no! Not for the animals, while there are still people who suffer. You're mad to think of it, my lord."

"I'm mad," he said. "I'm mad all right. Mad—for justice. And this strikes me as simple justice. I'm not asking for equal rights. Merely for a little more justice for them."

"They're underpeople," she said blankly. "They're animals"—as though this comment settled the matter altogether.

"You never heard, did you, my Lady, of the dog named Joan?" His question held a wealth of allusion.

She saw no depth to it, said flatly "No," and went back to studying the agenda for the day.

Ten kilometers below the surface of the Earth

The old engines turned like tides. The smell of hot oil was on them. Down here there were no luxuries. Life and flesh were cheaper than transistors; besides, they had much less radiation to be detected. In the groaning depths, the hidden and forgotten underpeople lived. They thought their chief, the E-telekeli, to be magical. Sometimes he thought so himself. His white handsome face staring like a marble bust of immortality, his crumpled wings hugged close to him in fatigue, he called to his first-egg child, the girl E-lamelanie:

"He comes, my darling."

"That one, father? The promised one."

"The rich one."

Her eyes widened. She was his daughter, but she did not always understand his powers. "How do you know, father?"

"If I tell you the truth, will you agree to let me erase it from your mind right away, so there will be no danger of betrayal?"

"Of course, father."

"No," said the marble-faced bird-man, "you must say the right words… "

"I promise, father, that if you fill my heart with the truth, and if my joy at the truth is full, that I will yield to you my mind, my whole mind without fear, hope, or reservation, and that I will ask you to take from my mind whatever truth or parts of the truth might hurt our kind of people, in the name of the First Forgotten One, in the Name of the Second Forgotten One, in the Name of the Third Forgotten One, and for the sake of D'joan whom we all love and remember!"

He stood. He was a tall man. His legs ended in the enormous feet of a bird, with white talons shimmering like mother of pearl. His humanoid hands stood forth from the joints of his wings; with them he extended the prehistoric gesture of blessing over her head, while he chanted the truth in a ringing hypnotic voice:

"Let the truth be yours, my daughter, that you may be whole and happy with the truth. Knowing the truth, my daughter, know freedom and the right to forget!

"The child, my child, who was your brother, the little boy you loved…"

"Yeekasoose!" she said, her voice trance-like and childish.

"E'ikasus, whom you remember, was changed by me, his father, into the form of a small ape-man, so that the true people mistook him for an animal, not an underperson. They trained him as a surgeon and sent him to the Lord Redlady. He came with this young man McBan to Mars, where he met C'mell, whom I recommended to the Lord Jestocost for confidential errands. They are coming back with this man today. He has already bought the Earth, or most of it. Perhaps he will do us good. Do you know what you should know, my daughter?"

"Tell me, father, tell me. How do you know?"

"Remember the truth, girl, and then lose it! The messages come from Mars. We cannot touch the Big Blink or the message-coding machines, but each recorder has his own style. By a shift in the pace of his work, a friend can relay moods, emotions, ideas, and sometimes names. They have sent me words like

'riches, monkey, small, cat, girl, everything, good' by the pitch and speed of their recording. The human messages carry ours and no cryptographer in world can find them.

"Now you know, and you will now now now now forget!" He raised his hands again.

E-lamelanie looked at him normally with a happy smile: "It's so sweet and funny, daddy, but I know I've just forgotten something good and wonderful!" Ceremonially he said, "Do not forget Joan."

Formally she responded, "I shall never forget Joan." CHAPTER TWELVE: The High Sky Flying

Rod walked to the edge of the little park. This was utterly unlike any ship he had ever seen or heard about in Norstrilia. There was no noise, no cramping, no sign of weapons —just a pretty little cabin which housed the controls, the Go-Captain, the Pinlighters, and the Stop-Captain, and then a stretch of incredible green grass. He had walked on this grass from the dusty ground of Mars. There was a purr and a whisper. A false blue sky, very beautiful, covered him like a canopy.

He felt strange. He had whiskers like a cat, forty centimeters long, growing out of his upper lip, about twelve whiskers to each side. The doctor had colored his eyes with bright green irises. His ears reached up to a point. He looked like a cat-man and he wore the professional clothing of an acrobat; C'mell did too.

He had not gotten over C'mell.

She made every woman in Old North Australia look like a sack of lard. She was lean, limber, smooth, menacing and beautiful; she was soft to the touch, hard in her motions, quick, alert, and cuddlesome. Her red hair blazed with the silkiness of animal fire. She spoke with a soprano which tinkled like wild bells. Her ancestors and ancestresses had been bred to produce the most seductive girl on Earth. The task had succeeded. Even in repose, she was voluptuous. Her wide hips and sharp eyes invited the masculine passions. Her cat-like dangerousness challenged every man whom she met. The true men who looked at her knew that she was a cat, and still could not keep their eyes off her. Human women treated her as though she were something disgraceful. She traveled as an acrobat, but she had already told Rod McBan confidentially that she was by profession a "girlygirl," a female animal, shaped and trained like a person to serve as hostess to off-world visitors, required by law and custom to invite their love, while promised the penalty of death if she accepted it. Rod liked her, though he had been painfully shy with her at first. There was no side to her, no posh, no swank. Once she got down to business, her incredible body faded partway into the background, though with the sides of his eyes he could never quite forget it, and it was her mind, her intelligence, her humor and good humor, which carried them across the hours and days they spent together. He found himself trying to impress her that he was a grown man, only to discover that in the spontaneous, sincere affections of her quick cat-heart, she did not care in the least what his status was. He was simply her partner and they had work to do together. It was his job to stay alive and it was her job to keep him alive.

The doctor Vomact had told him not to speak to the other passengers, not to say anything to each other, and to call for silence if any of them spoke. There were ten other passengers who stared at one another in uncomfortable amazement. Ten in number, they were. All ten of them were Rod McBan. Ten identified Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBans to-the-one-hundred-and-fifty-first, all exactly alike. Apart from C'mell herself and the little monkey-doctor, A'gentur, the only person on the ship who was not Rod McBan was Rod McBan himself. He had become the cat-man. The others seemed, each by himself, to be persuaded that he alone was Rod McBan and that the other nine were parodies. They watched each other with a mixture of gloom and suspicion mixed with amusement, just as the real Rod McBan would have done, had he been in their place. "One of them," said Doctor Vomact in parting, "is your companion Eleanor from Norstrilia. The other nine are mouse-powered robots. They're all copied from you. Good, eh?" He could not conceal his professional satisfaction.

And now they were all about to see Earth together.

C'mell took Rod to the edge of the little world and said gently, "I want to sing The Tower Song' to you, just before we shut down on the top of Earthport." And in her wonderful voice she sang the little old song: And oh! my love, for you.

High birds crying, and a

High sky flying, and a

High wind driving, and a

High heart striving, and a

High brave place for you!

Rod felt a little funny, standing there, looking at nothing, but he also felt pleasant with the girl's head against his shoulder and his arm enfolding her. She seemed not only to need him, but to trust him very deeply. She did not feel adult—not self-important and full of unexplained business. She was merely a girl, and for the time his girl. It was pleasant and it gave him a strange foretaste of the future.

The day might come when he would have a permanent girl of his own, facing not a day, but life, not a danger, but destiny. He hoped that he could be as relaxed and fond with that future girl as he was with C'mell. C'mell squeezed his hand, as though in warning.

He turned to look at her, but she stared ahead and nodded with her chin.

"Keep watching," she said, "straight ahead. Earth." He looked back at the blank artificial sky of the ship's force-field. It was a monotonous but pleasant blue, conveying depths which were not really there. The change was so fast that he wondered whether he had really seen it. In one moment the clear flat blue.

Then the false sky splashed apart as though it had literally been slashed into enormous ribbons, ribbons in their turn becoming blue spots and disappearing. Another blue sky was there—Earth's.

Manhome.

Rod breathed deeply. It was hard to believe. The sky itself was not so different from the false "sky" which had surrounded the ship on its trip from Mars, but there was an aliveness and wetness to it, unlike any other sky he had ever heard about.

It was not the sight of the Earth which surprised him— it was the smell. He suddenly realized that Old North Australia must smell dull, flat, dusty to Earthmen. This Earth air smelled alive. There were the odors of plants, of water, of things which he could not even guess. The air was coded with a million years of memory. In this air his people had swum to manhood, before they conquered the stars. The wetness was not the cherished damp of one of his covered canals. It was wild free moisture which came laden with the indications of things living, dying, sprawling, squirming, loving with an abundance which no Norstrilian could understand. No wonder the descriptions of Earth had always seemed fierce and exaggerated! What was stroon that men would pay water for it—water, the giver and carrier of life. This was his home, no matter how many generations his people had lived in the twisted hells of Paradise VII or among the dry treasures of Old North Australia. He took a deep breath, feeling the plasma of earth pour into him, the quick effluvium which had made man. He smelled Earth again—it would take a long lifetime, even with stroon, before a man could understand all these odors which came all the way up to the ship, which hovered, as planoforming ships usually did not, twenty-odd kilometers above the surface of the planet.

There was something strange in this air, something sweet-clear to the nostrils, refreshing to the spirit. One great beautiful odor overrode all the others. What could it be?

He sniffed and then said, very clearly, to himself, "Salt!" C'mell reminded him that he was beside her.

"Do you like it, C'rod?"

"Yes, yes, it's better than—" Words failed him. He looked at her. Her eager, pretty, comradely smile made him feel that she was sharing every milligram of his delight. "But why," he asked, "do you waste salt on the air? What good does it do?"

"Salt?"

"Yes—in the air. So rich, so wet, so salty. Is it to clean the ship some way that I do not understand?"

"Ship? We're not on the ship, C'rod. This is the landing roof of Earthport." He gasped.

No ship? There was not a mountain on Old North Australia more than six kilometers above MGL—mean ground level—and these mountains were all smooth, worn, old, folded by immense eons of wind into a gentle blanketing that covered his whole home world.

He looked around.

The platform was about two hundred meters long by one hundred wide. The ten "Rod McBans" were talking to some men in uniform. Far at the other side a steeple rose into eye-catching height—perhaps a whole half-kilometer. He looked down.

There it was—Old Old Earth.

The treasure of water reached before his very eyes—water by the millions of tons, enough to feed a galaxy of sheep, to wash an infinity of men. The water was broken by a few islands on the far horizon to the right.

"Hesperides," said C'mell, following the direction of his gaze. "They came up from the sea when the Daimoni built this for us. For people, I mean. I shouldn't say 'us'."

He did not notice the correction. He stared at the sea. Little specks were moving in it, very slowly.

He pointed at one of them with his finger and asked C'mell, "Are those wethouses?"

"What did you call them?"

"Houses which are wet. Houses which sit on water. Are those some of them?"

"Ships," she said, not spoiling his fun with a direct contradiction. "Yes, those are ships."

"Ships?" he cried. "You'd never get one of those into space. Why call them ships then?"

Very gently C'mell explained, "People had ships for water before they had ships for space. I think the Old Common Tongue takes the word for space vessel from the things you are looking at."

"I want to see a city," said Rod, "Show me a city."

"It won't look like much from here. We're too high up. Nothing looks like much from the top of Earthport. But I can show you, anyhow. Come over here, dear." When they walked away from the edge, Rod realized that the little monkey was still with them. "What are you doing here with us?" asked Rod, not unkindly. The monkey's preposterous little face wrinkled into a knowing smile. The face was the same as it had been before, but the expression was different—more assured, more clear, more purposive than ever before. There was even humor and cordiality in the monkey's voice.

"We animals are waiting for the people to finish their entrance." We animals? thought Rod. He remembered his furry head, his pointed ears, his cat-whiskers. No wonder he felt at ease with this girl and she with him. The ten Rod McBans were walking down a ramp, so that the floor seemed to be swallowing them slowly from the feet up. They were walking in single file, so that the head of the leading one seemed to sit bodiless on the floor, while the last one in line had lost nothing more than his feet. It was odd indeed. Rod looked at C'mell and A'gentur and asked them frankly, "When people have such a wide, wet, beautiful world, all full of life, why should they kill me?" A'gentur shook his monkey head sadly, as though he knew full well, but found the telling of it inexpressibly wearisome and sad.

C'mell answered, "You are who you are. You hold immense power. Do you know that this tower is yours?"

"Mine!" he cried.

"You've bought it, or somebody bought it for you. Most of that water is yours, too. When you have things that big, people ask you for things. Or they take them from you. Earth is a beautiful place, but I think it is a dangerous place, too, for offworlders like you who are used to just one way of life. You have not caused all the crime and meanness in the world, but it's been sleeping and now wakes up for you."

"Why for me?"

"Because," said A'gentur, "you're the richest person who has ever touched this planet. You own most of it already. Millions of human lives depend on your thoughts and your decisions."

They had reached the opposite side of the top platform. Here, on the land side, the rivers were all leaking badly. Most of the land was covered with steam-clouds, such as they saw on Norstrilia when a covered canal burst out of its covering. These clouds represented incalculable treasures of rain. He saw that they parted at the foot of the tower.

"Weather machines," said C'mell. "The cities are all covered with weather machines. Don't you have weather machines in Old North Australia?"

"Of course we do," said Rod, "but we don't waste water by letting it float around in the open air like that. It's pretty, though. I guess the extravagance of it makes me feel critical. Don't you earth people have anything better to do with your water than to leave it lying on the ground or having it float over open land?"

"We're not Earth people," said C'mell. "We're under-people. I'm a cat-person and he's made from apes. Don't call us people. It's not decent."

"Fudge!" said Rod. "I was just asking a question about Earth, not pestering your feelings when—"

He stopped short.

They all three spun around.

Out of the ramp there came something like a mowing machine. A human voice, a man's voice, screamed from within it, expressing rage and fear. Rod started to move forward.

C'mell started to move forward.

C'mell held his arm, dragging back with all her weight.

"No! Rod, no! No!"

A'gentur slowed him down better by jumping into his face, so that Rod suddenly saw nothing but a universe of brown belly-fur and felt tiny hands gripping his hair and pulling it. He stopped and reached for the monkey. A'gentur anticipated him and dropped to the ground before Rod could hit him. The machine was racing up the outside of the steeple and almost disappearing into the sky above. The voice had become thin.

Rod looked at C'mell, "All right. What was it? What's happening?"

"That's a spider, a giant spider. It's kidnaping or killing Rod McBan."

"Me?" keened Rod. "It'd better not touch me. I'll tear it apart."

"Sh-h-h!" said C'mell.

"Quiet!" said the monkey.

"Don't 'sh-h-h' me and don't 'quiet' me," said Rod. "I'm not going to let that poor blighter suffer on my account. Tell that thing to come down. What is it, anyhow, this spider? A robot?"

"No," said C'mell, "an insect."

Rod was narrowing his eyes, watching the mowing machine which hung on the outside of the tower. He could barely see the man within its grip. When C'mell said "insect," it triggered something in his mind. Hate. Revulsion. Resistance to dirt. Insects on Old North Australia were small, serially numbered and licensed. Even at that, he felt them to be his hereditary enemies. (Somebody had told him that Earth insects had done terrible things to the Norstrilians when they lived on Paradise VII.)

Rod yelled at the spider, making his voice as loud as possible,

"You—come—down!"

The filthy thing on the tower quivered with sheer smugness and seemed to bring its machine-like legs closer together, settling down to be comfortable. Rod forgot he was supposed to be a cat. He gasped for air. Earth air was wet, but thin. He closed his eyes for a moment or two. He thought hate, hate, hate for the insect. Then he shrieked telepathically, louder than he had ever shrieked at home:

hate-spit-spit-vomit!

dirt, dirt, dirt,

explode!

crush:

ruin:

stink, collapse, putrefy, disappear!

hate-hate-hate!

The fierce red roar of his inarticulate spieking hurt even him. He saw the little monkey fall to the ground in a dead faint. C'mell was pale and looked as though she might throw up her food.

He looked away from them and up at the "spider." Had he reached it? He had. Slowly, slowly, the long legs moved out in spasm, releasing the man, whose body flashed downward. Rod's eyes followed the movement of "Rod McBan" and he cringed when a wet crunch let him know that the duplicate of his own body had been splashed all over the hard deck of the tower, a hundred meters away. He glanced back up at the "spider." It scrambled for purchase on the tower and then cartwheeled downward. It too hit the deck hard and lay there dying, its legs twitching as its personality slipped into its private, everlasting night. Rod gasped. "Eleanor. Oh, maybe that's Eleanor!" His voice wailed. He started to run to the facsimile of his human body, forgetting that he was a cat-man. C'mell's voice was as sharp as a howl, though low in tone. "Shut up! Shut up!

Stand still! Close your mind! Shut up! We're dead if you don't shut up!" He stopped, stared at her stupidly. Then he saw she was in mortal earnest. He complied. He stopped moving. He did not try to talk. He capped his mind, closing himself against telepathy until his brainbox began to ache. The little monkey, A'gentur, was crawling up off the floor, looking shaken and sick. C'mell was still pale.

Men came running up the ramp, saw them and headed toward them. There was the beat of wings in the air.

An enormous bird—no, it was an ornithopter—landed with its claws scratching the deck. A uniformed man jumped out and cried, "Where is he?"

"He jumped over!" C'mell shouted.

The man started to follow the direction of her gesture and then cut sharply back to her,

"Fool!" he said. "People can't jump off here. The barrier would hold ships in place. What did you see?"

C'mell was a good actress. She pretended to be getting over shock and gasping for words. The uniformed man looked at her haughtily.

"Cats," he said, "and a monkey. What are you doing here? Who are you?"

"Name C'mell, profession, girlygirl, Earthport staff, commanded by Commissioner Teadrinker. This—boyfriend, no status, name C'roderick, cashier in night bank down below. Him?" She nodded at A'gentur. "I don't know much about him."

"Name A'gentur. Profession, supplementary surgeon. Status, animal. I'm not an underperson. Just an animal. I came in on the ship from Mars with the dead man there and some other true men who looked like him, and they went down first—"

"Shut up," said the uniformed man. He turned to the approaching men and said,

"Honored subchief, Sergeant 587 reporting. The user of the telepathic weapon has disappeared. The only things here are these two cat-people, not very bright, and a small monkey. They can talk. The girl says she saw somebody get off the tower."

The subchief was a tall redhead with a uniform even handsomer than the sergeant's. He snapped at C'mell, "How did he do it?" Rod knew C'mell well enough by now to recognize the artfulness of her becoming confused, feminine and incoherent—in appearance. Actually, she was in full control of the situation. Said she, babbling:

"He jumped, I think. I don't know how."

"That's impossible," said the subchief. "Did you see where he went?" he barked at Rod McBan.

Rod gasped at the suddenness of the question—besides, C'mell had told him to keep quiet. Between these two peremptories, he said, "Er—ah—oh—you see—" The little monkey-surgeon interrupted drily, "Sir and master subchief, that cat-man is not very bright. I do not think you will get much out of him. Handsome, but stupid. Strictly breeding stock—"

Rod gagged and turned a little red at these remarks, but he could tell from the hooded quick glare which C'mell shot him that she wanted him to go on being quiet.

She cut in. "I did notice one thing, master. It might matter."

"By the Bell and Bank, animal! Tell me," cried the sub-chief. "Stop deciding what I ought to know!"

"The strange man's skin was lightly tinged with blue." The subchief took a step back. His soldiers and the sergeant stared at him. In a serious, direct way he said to C'mell, "Are you sure?"

"No, my master. I just thought so."

"You saw just one?" barked the subchief.

Rod, overacting the stupidity, held up four fingers.

"That idiot," cried the subchief, "thinks he saw four of them. Can he count?" he asked C'mell.

C'mell looked at Rod as though he were a handsome beast with not a brain in his head. Rod looked back at her, deliberately letting himself feel stupid. This was something which he did very well, since by neither hiering nor spieking at home, he had had to sit through interminable hours of other people's conversation when he was little, never getting the faintest idea of what it was all about. He had discovered very early that if he sat still and looked stupid, people did not bother him by trying to bring him into the conversation, turning their voices on and braying at him as though he were deaf. He tried to simulate the familiar old posture and was rather pleased that he could make such a good showing with C'mell watching him. Even when she was serious, fighting for their freedom and playing girl all at once, her corona of blazing hair made her shine forth like the sun of Earth itself; among all these people on the platform, her beauty and her intelligence made her stand out—cat though she was. Rod was not at all surprised that he was overlooked, with such a vivid personality next to him; he just wished that he could be overlooked a little more, so that he could wander over idly and see whether the body was Eleanor's or one of the robot's. If Eleanor had already died for him, in her first few minutes of the big treat of seeing Earth, he felt that he would never forgive himself as long as he lived. The talk about the blue men amused him deeply. They existed in Norstrilian folklore, as a race of faraway magicians who, through science or hypnotism, could render themselves invisible to other men whenever they wished. Rod had never talked with an Old North Australian security officer about the problem of guarding the stroon treasure from attacks by invisible men, but he gathered, from the way people told stories of blue men, that they had either failed to show up in Norstrilia or that the Norstrilian authorities did not take them very seriously. He was amazed that the earth people did not bring in a couple of first-class telepaths and have them sweep the deck of the tower for every living thing, but to judge by the chatter of voices that was going on, and the peering with eyes which occurred, Earth people had fairly weak senses and did not get things done promptly and efficiently. The question about Eleanor was answered for him. One of the soldiers joined the group, waited after saluting, and was finally allowed to interrupt C'mell's and A'gentur's endless guessing as to how many blue men there might have been on the tower, if there had been any at all. The subchief nodded at the soldier, who said, "Beg to report, sir and subchief, the body is not a body. It is just a robot which looks like a person." The day brightened immeasurably within Rod's heart. Eleanor was safe, somewhere further down in this immense tower.

The comment seemed to decide the young officer. "Get a sweeping machine and a looking dog," he commanded the sergeant, "and see to it that this whole area is swept and looked down to the last square millimeter."

"It is done," said the soldier.

Rod thought this an odd remark, because nothing at all had been done yet. The subchief issued another command: "Turn on the kill-spotters before we go down the ramp. Any identity which is not perfectly clear must be killed automatically by the scanning device. Including us," he added to his men. "We don't want any blue men walking right down into the tower among us." C'mell suddenly and rather boldly stepped up to the officer and whispered in his ear. His eyes rolled as he listened, he blushed a little, and then he changed his orders: "Cancel the kill-spotters. I want this whole squad to stand body-to-body. I'm sorry, men, but you're going to have to touch these underpeople for several minutes. I want them to stand so close to us that we can be sure there is nobody extra sneaking into our group." (C'mell later told Rod that she had confessed to the young officer that she might be a mixed type, part human and part animal, and that she was the special girlygirl of two Off-earth magnates of the Instrumentality. She said she thought that she had a definite identity but was not sure, and that the kill-spotters might destroy her if she did not yield a correct image as she went past them. They would, she told Rod later, have caught any underman passing as a man, or any man passing as an underman, and would have killed the victim by intensifying the magnetic lay-out of his own organic body. These machines were dangerous things to pass, since they occasionally killed normal, legitimate people and underpeople who merely failed to provide a clear focus.) The officer took the left forward corner of the living rectangle of people and underpeople. They formed tight ranks. Rod felt the two soldiers next to him shudder as they came into contact with his "cat" body. They kept their faces averted from him as though he smelled bad for them. Rod said nothing; he just looked forward and kept his impression pleasantly stupid. What followed next was surprising. The men walked in a strange way, all of them moving their left legs in unison, and then their right legs. A'gentur could not possibly do this, so with a nod of the sergeant's approval, C'mell picked him up and carried him close to her bosom. Suddenly, weapons flared. These, thought Rod, must be cousins of the weapons which the Lord Redlady carried a few weeks ago, when he landed his ship on my property. (He remembered Hopper, his knife quivering like the head of a snake, threatening the life of the Lord Redlady; and he remembered the sudden silent burst, the black oily smoke, and the gloomy Bill looking at the chair where his pal had existed a moment ago.)

These weapons showed a little light, just a little, but their force was betrayed by the buzzing of the floor and the agitation of the dust.

"Close in, men! Right up to your own feet! Don't let a blue man through!" shouted the subchief.

The men complied.

The air began to smell funny and burned.

The ramp was clear of life except for their own.

When the ramp swung around a corner, Rod gasped.

This was the most enormous room he had ever seen. It covered the entire top of Earthport. He could not even begin to guess how many hectares it was, but a small farm could have been accommodated on it. There were few people there. The men broke ranks at a command of the subchief. The officer glared at the cat-man Rod, the cat-girl C'mell and the ape A'gentur:

"You stand right where you are till I come back!" They stood, saying nothing.

C'mell and A'gentur took the place for granted.

Rod stared as though he would drink up the world with his eyes. In this one enormous room, there was more antiquity and wealth than all Old North Australia possessed. Curtains of an incredibly rich material shimmered down from the thirty-meter ceiling; some of them seemed to be dirty and in bad repair, but a single one of them, after paying the 20,000,000% import duty, would cost more than any Old North Australian could afford to pay. There were chairs and tables here and there, some of them good enough to deserve a place in the Museum of Man on New Mars. Here they were merely used. The people did not seem any the happier for having all this wealth around them. For the first time, Rod got a glimpse of what spartan self-imposed poverty had done to make life worthwhile at home. His people did not have much, when they could have chartered endless argosies of treasure, inbound from all worlds to their own planet, in exchange for the life-prolonging stroon. But if they had been heaped with treasure they would have appreciated nothing and would have ended up possessing nothing. He thought of his own little collection of hidden antiquities. Here on Earth it would not have filled a dustbin, but in the Station of Doom it could afford him connoisseurship as long as he lived. The thought of his home made him wonder what Old Hot and Simple, the Hon. Sec., might be doing with his adversary on Earth. "It's a long, long way to reach herel" he thought to himself.

C'mell drew his attention by plucking at his arm.

"Hold me," commanded she, "because I am afraid I might fall down and Yeekasoose is not strong enough to hold me."

Rod wondered who Yeekasoose might be, when only the little monkey A'gentur was with them; he also wondered why C'mell should need to be held. Norstrilian discipline had taught him not to question orders in an emergency. He held her. She suddenly slumped as though she had fainted or had gone to sleep. He held her with one arm and with his free hand he tipped her head against his shoulder so that she would look as though she were weary and affectionate, not unconscious. It was pleasant to hold her little female body, which felt fragile and delicate beyond belief. Her hair, disarrayed and wind-blown, still carried the smell of the salty sea air which had so surprised him an hour ago. She herself, he thought, was the greatest treasure of Earth which he had yet seen. But suppose he did have her? What could he do with her in Old North Australia? Underpeople were completely forbidden, except for military uses under the exclusive control of the Commonwealth government. He could not imagine C'mell directing a mowing machine as she walked across a giant sheep, shearing it. The idea of her sitting up all night with a lonely or frightened sheep-monster was itself ridiculous. She was a playgirl, an ornament in human form; for such as her, there was no place under the comfortable gray skies of home. Her beauty would fade in the dry air; her intricate mind would turn sour with the weary endlessness of a farm culture: property, responsibility, defense, self-reliance, sobriety. New Melbourne would look like a collection of rude shacks to her.

He realized that his feet were getting cold. Up on the deck they had had sunlight to keep them warm, even though the chill salty wet air of Earth's marvelous "seas" was blowing against them. Here, inside, it was merely high and cold, while still wet; he had never encountered wet cold before, and it was a strangely uncomfortable experience.

C'mell came to and shook herself to wakefulness just as they saw the officer walking toward them from the other end of the immense room. (Later, she told him what she had experienced when she lapsed into unconsciousness.

First, she had had a call which she could not explain. This had made her warn Rod. "Yeekasoose" was, of course E-ikasus, the real name of the "monkey" which he called A'gentur.

Then, as she felt herself swimming away into half-sleep with Rod's strong arm around her, she had heard trumpets playing, just two or three of them, playing different parts to the same intricate, lovely piece of music, sometimes in solos, sometimes together. If a human or robot telepath had peeped her mind while she listened to the music, the impression would have been that of a perceptive c'girl who had linked herself with one of the many telepathic entertainment channels which filled the space of Earth Itself. Last, there came the messages. They were not encoded in the music in any way whatever. The music caused the images to form in her mind because she was C'mell, herself, unique, individual. Particular fugues, or even individual notes reached into her memory and emotions, causing her mind to bring up old, half-forgotten associations. First she thought of "High birds flying…" as in the song which she had sung to Rod. Then she saw eyes, piercing eyes which blazed with knowledge while they stayed moist with humility. Then she smelled the strange odors of Downdeep-downdeep, the work-city where the underpeople maintained the civilization on the surface and where some illegal underpeople lurked, overlooked by the authority of man. Finally she saw Rod himself, striding off the deck with his loping Norstrilian walk. It added up simply. She was to bring Rod to the forgotten, forlorn, forbidden chambers of the Nameless One, and to do so promptly. The music in her head stopped, and she woke up.) The officer arrived.

He looked at them inquisitively and angrily. "This whole business is funny. The acting Commissioner does not believe that there are any blue men. We've all heard of them. And yet we know somebody set off a telepathic emotion-bomb. That rage! Half the people in this room fell down when it went off. Those weapons are completely prohibited for use inside the Earth's atmosphere." He cocked his head at them.

C'mell remained prudently silent, Rod practiced looking thoroughly stupid, and A'gentur looked like a bright, helpless little monkey.

"Funnier still," said the officer. "The Acting Commissioner got orders to let you go. He got them while he was chewing me out. How does anybody know that you underpeople are here? Who are you, anyhow?"

He looked at them with curiosity for a minute, but then the curiosity faded with the pressure of his lifelong habits.

He snapped, "Who cares? Get along. Get out. You're underpeople and you're not allowed to stand in this room, anyhow."

He turned his back on them and walked away.

"Where are we going?" whispered Rod, hoping C'mell would say that he could go down to the surface and see Old Earth Itself.

"Down to the bottom of the world, and then—" She bit her lip. "… and then, much further down. I have instructions."

"Can't I take an hour and look at Earth?" asked Rod. "You stay with me, of course."

"When death is jumping around us like wild sparks? Of course not. Come along, Rod. You'll get your freedom some time soon, if somebody doesn't kill you first. Yeekasoose, you lead the way!"

They walked only a few steps, then stopped short.

He stopped short.

They all three spun around.

A man faced them—a tall man, clad in formal garments, his face gleaming with intelligence, courage, wisdom and a very special kind of elegance.

"I am projecting," said he.

"You know me," he said to C'mell.

"My lord Jestocost!"

"You will sleep," he commanded A'gentur, and the little monkey crumpled into a heap of fur on the deck of the tower.

"I am the Lord Jestocost, one of the Instrumentality," said the strange man,

"and I am going to speak to you at very high speed. It will seem like many minutes, but it will only take seconds. It is necessary for you to know your fate."

"You mean my future?" said Rod McBan. "I thought that you, or somebody else, had it all arranged."

"We can dispose, but we cannot arrange. I have talked to the Lord Redlady. I have plans for you. Perhaps they will work out."

A slight frowning smile crossed the face of the distinguished man. With his left hand he warned C'mell to do nothing. The beautiful cat-girl started to step forward and then obeyed the imperious gesture, stopped, and merely watched.

The Lord Jestocost dropped to one knee. He bowed proudly and freely, with his head held high and his face tilted upward while he stared directly at Rod McBan.

Still kneeling, he said ceremoniously, "Some day, young man, you will understand what you are now seeing. The Lord Jestocost, which is myself, has bowed to no man or woman since the day of his initiation. That was more time ago than I like to remember. But I bow freely to the man who has bought Earth. I offer you my friendship and my help. I offer both of these without mental reservation. Now I stand up and I greet you as my younger comrade." He stood erect and reached for Rod's hand. Rod shook hands with him, still bewildered.

"You have seen the work of some of the people who want you dead. I have had a hand in getting you through that (and I might tell you that the man who sent the spider will regret very deeply and very long that he did it). Other people will try to hunt you down for what you have done or for what you are. I am willing for you to save some of your property and all of your life. You will have experiences which you will treasure—if you live through them.

"You have no chance at all without me. I'll correct that. You have one chance in ten thousand of coming out alive.

"With me, if you obey me through C'mell, your chances are very good indeed. More than one thousand to one in your favor. You will live—"

"But my money!" Rod spieked wildly without knowing that he did it.

"Your money is on Earth. It is Earth," smiled the wise, powerful old official.

"It is being taxed at enormous rates. This is your fate, young man. Remember it, and be ready to obey it. When I lift my hand, repeat after me. Do you understand?"

Rod nodded. He was not afraid, exactly, but some unknown core within him had begun to radiate animal terror. He was not afraid of what might happen to himself; he was afraid of the strange, wild fierceness of it all. He had never known that man or boy could be so utterly alone.

The loneliness of the open outback at home was physical. This loneliness had millions of people around him. He felt the past crowding up as though it were alive in its own right. The cat-girl beside him comforted him a little; he had met her through Doctor Vomact; to Vomact he had been sent by Redlady; and Redlady knew his own dear home. The linkage was there, though it was remote. In front of him there was no linkage at all.

He stood, in his own mind, on a precipice of the present, staring down at the complex inexplicable immensity of Earth's past. This was the place that all people were from. In those oceans they had crawled in the slime; from those salt, rich seas they had climbed to that land far below him; on that land they had changed from animals into men before they had seized the stars. This was home itself, the home of all men, and it could swallow him up. The word-thoughts came fast out of the Lord Jestocost's mind, directly into his own. It was as though Jestocost had found some way around his impediment and had then disregarded it.

"This is Old Earth Itself, from which you were bred and to which all men return in their thoughts if not in their bodies. This is still the richest of the worlds, though its wealth is measured in treasures and memories, not in stroon.

"Many men have tried to rule this world. A very few have done it for a little while."

Unexpectedly, the Lord Jestocost lifted his right hand. Without knowing why he did it, Rod repeated the last sentence.

"A very few men have governed the world for a little while."

"The Instrumentality has made that impossible." The right hand was still in the commanding "up" position, so Rod repeated,

"The Instrumentality has made that impossible."

"And now you, Rod McBan of Old North Australia, are the first to own it." The hand was still raised.

"And now I, Rod McBan, of Old North Australia, am the first to own it." The hand dropped, but the Lord spieked on.

"Go forward, then, with death around you.

"Go forward, then, to your heart's desire.

"Go forward, with the love you will win and lose.

"Go forward, to the world, and to that other world under the world.

"Go forward, to wild adventures and a safe return.

"Be watchful of C'mell. She will be my eyes upon you, my arm around your shoulders, my authority upon your person; but go.

"Go." Up went the hand.

"Go…" said Rod.

The Lord vanished.

C'mell plucked at his sleeve. "Your trip is over, my husband. Now we take Earth itself."

Softly and quickly they ran to the steps which went to unimaginable Earth below them.

Rod McBan had come to the fulfilment of his chance and his inheritance.