NECROMANCER

Copyright © 1962 by Gordon R. Dickson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

An Ace Book ISBN: 0-441-56852-1

First Ace hinting: April 1981 This Printing: August

Published simultaneously in Canada

Manufactured in the United States of America

Ace Books, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York

CONTENTS

Book One: ISOLATE

Book Two: SET

Book Three: PATTERN

Book One: ISOLATE

And now, through double glass, I see

My brother's image, darklingly.

Now, aid us, Thor, who prisoners be.

Come—hammer, Lord! And set us free.

The Enchanted Tower

Chapter 1

The mine, generally speaking, was automatic. It consisted of some hundred and eighty million dollars' worth of equipment, spread out through three and a half cubic miles of gold-ore-bearing rock—granite and quartz—all controlled by the single console where the shift engineer on duty sat.

Like some ponderous, many-purposed organism, the mine walked in the layered rock. On various levels it gnawed out the gold-bearing ore, ground it up to pebble-sized chunks, and sent it by the carload up six hundred feet or more to the open air and the equipment above. As the mine machinery moved, it created and abandoned surface shafts, elevator tubes, new exploratory levels and stopes; and extended the vast central cavern through which the heavier machinery and its controlling console slid with the work in progress, laying down rails before and taking them up behind.

The single engineer on shift at the time controlled all this. And a touch of megalomania did him no harm on the job. He was seated before the control panels of the console like the identity before the brain. His job was the job of ultimate control. Logical decision, and the facts on which to base decision were supplied by the computer element in the equipment. The logically optimum answer was available at the touch of a button. But it had been discovered that, like the process of living itself, there was more to modern mining than logic.

The best engineers had feel. It was a sensitivity born of experience, of talent, and even of something like love, with which they commanded, not only the mountains, but the machine they rode and directed.

Now this too was added to the list of man's endeavors for which some special talent was needed. Less than ten per cent of the young mining engineers graduating every year turned out to have the necessary extra ability to become one with the titan they directed. Even in the twenty-first century's overcrowded employment marts, mines were continually on the hunt for more shift engineers. Even four hours at a time, and even for the talented ten per cent, was a long time to be the faultless god in the machine. And the machinery never rested.

Six hundred feet overhead of the man at the console, Paul Formain, on his first morning at Malabar Mine, stepped from his small individual quarters of white bubble plastic, and saw the mountains.

And suddenly, there it was again, as it had been time and again since his boating accident of five years before, and had been more recently, lately.

But it was not now the open sea that he saw. Or even the dreamlike image of a strange, shadowy figure in some sort of cape and a high-peaked hat, who had seemed to bring him back to life after he had died in the boat, and returned him to the boat to be finally found and rescued by the coast guard.

This time, it was the mountains.

Suddenly, turning from the white, plastic door, he stopped and saw them. Around him was a steep slope with the other white buildings of the Malabar Mine. Above him the fragile blue of a spring sky spoke to the dark blue of the deep lake below, which filled this cleft in the mountain rock. About him in every direction were the Canadian Rockies, stretching thirty miles in one direc-tion to the British Columbia city of Kamloops, in the other to the Coast Range and the stony beaches touching the salt Pacific Ocean surf. Unexpectedly, he felt them.

Like kings they stood up around him, the mountains. The surf sounded in his blood, and abruptly he was growing, striding to meet them. He was mountain-size with the mountains. With them, he felt the eternal movement of the earth. For a moment he was naked but unshaken to the winds of understanding. And they blew to him one word:

Fear.

Do not go down into the mine.

...You will get over this, this sort of thing, the psychiatrist in San Diego had assured him, five years before, after the accident. Now that you've worked it out for yourself and understand it.

Yes, said Paul.

It had made sense then, the way he had explained it to himself under the psychiatrist's guidance. He was an orphan, since the time of his parents' simultaneous deaths in a transportation accident, when he was nine. He had been assigned to good foster parents, but they were not the same. He had always been solitary.

He had lacked what the San Diego psychiatrist called protective selfishness. He had the knack of understanding people without the usual small urge to turn this understanding to his own advantage. It had embarrassed those who might have been his friends, once they understood this capability in him. They had an instinctive urge to put a protective distance between himself and them. Underneath, they feared his knowledge and did not trust his restraint. As a boy he felt their withdrawal without understanding the reasons behind it. And this, said the psychiatrist, gave him a false picture of his own situation.

...After all, said the psychiatrist, this lack of a desire to take advantage of a capability, amounted to a disability. But no worse than any other disability, such as blindness or loss of a limb. There was no need to feel that you could not live with it.

But that was the way, it seemed, that unconsciously he had felt. And that feeling had culminated in an unconscious attempt at suicide.

...There's no doubt, said the psychiatrist, that you got the bad-weather, small-craft warning put out by the coast guard. Or that you knew you were dangerously far offshore for any weather, in such a light sailboat.

So the storm had driven him out to sea and lost him. He had been adrift, and in the still days following, death had come like some heavy gray bird to sit perched on the idle mast, waiting.

...You were in a condition for hallucination, said the psychiatrist. It was natural to imagine you had already died. Then, when afterward you were rescued, you automatically searched for some justification of the fact that you were still alive. Your unconscious provided this fantasy of having been brought back to life by a father-like figure, tall and mysterious, and wrapped in the garments that denote magical ability. But when you had fully recovered, your conscious mind could not help finding this story somewhat thin.

No, thought Paul, it couldn't help thinking so. He remembered, in the San Diego hospital, lying there and doubting the whole memory.

So to bolster it, you produced these moments of extreme, almost painful sensitivity. Which filled two needs. They provided support for your delirium fantasy of having been raised from the dead, and they acted as an excuse for what had caused the death-wish in the first place. Unconsciously you were telling yourself that you were not crippled, but 'different.'

Yes, Paul had said at that point. I see.

Now that you've dug out the true situation for yourself, the need for justification should diminish. The fan-tasy should fade and the sensitivity moments grow less frequent, until they disappear.

That's good to hear, said Paul.

Only, in the past five years the moments had not dwindled and disappeared. They had stayed with him, as the original dream had stuck stubbornly in the back of his mind. He thought of seeing another psychiatrist, but then the thought would come that the first had done him no good at all. So what was there to expect from a second?

Instead, in order to live with his problem, he had anchored himself to something that he had discovered in himself since the accident. Deep within him now, something invincible stood four-square to the frequent gusts from the winds of feeling. Somehow he thought of it as being connected to, but independent of, the dream magician in the tall hat. So when, as now, the winds blew warnings, he felt them without being driven by them.

Fear: said the mountains. Do not go dawn into the mine.

That's foolish, said Paul's conscious mind. It reminded him that he was at last hired for the work to which all his education had pointed him. To a job that in the present overcrowded world was the dream of many and the achievement of few. He reached for that which stood unconquerable in the back of his mind.

Fear, it replied, is merely one more in the multitude of factors to be taken into account in moving from point A to point B.

Paul shook himself free from the winds of feeling, back to the ordinary existence of the world. The buildings of the Malabar Mine were all around him. A little distance down the slope from where he stood the wife of the company auditor came out on her back step and called something across a small white fence to the wife of the surface engineer in the yard adjoining. It was Paul's first day on the job and already he was close to being overdue on the job underground. He turned his gaze from the mountains and the buildings, to the near concrete walk leading to the main shaft head of the mine. And headed toward it, and the waiting skip.

Chapter 2

The skip slid Paul down some six hundred steeply slanting feet through mountain stone. For all the romanticism of its old-fashioned name, it was nothing more in fact than a magnetic tube elevator. Through the transparent walls of the tube, granite and rose quartz flickered at him as he descended. They spoke to him as the mountains had, but in smaller voices, fine, thin, crystalline voices with no yield, no kindness to them, and no mercy. Between them and himself, Paul's own faint image in the tube wall kept pace with his descent—it was the image of a square-shouldered young man of twenty-three, already past any look of boyishness or youth.

He was large-boned and tall, strong-featured, round-headed, and athletic-looking. A football-player type, but not one of the game's commoner varieties. He was not bulky enough for a lineman, not tense enough for the backfield. End—that was the sort of position he fitted. And, strongly calm, with long-fingered capable hands to catch the ball, he remembered playing it well. That had been on the first team at Colorado Institute of Mines, where he had taken his undergraduate work.

His eyes were curiously deep, and a warm, gray color. His mouth was thin-lipped, but a little wide and altogether friendly. His light, straight brown hair was already receding at the temples. He wore it clipped short, and he would be nearly bald before his thirties were out, but since he was not the sort of man to whom good looks are necessary, this would make little difference.

He looked instinctively in command of things. Strongly male, intelligent, physically large and strong, with a knack for doing things right the first time around. And he was all these things. It was only when people got to know him intimately that they saw past to the more complex inner part of him, the part where his own very different image of himself was kept. There were moments like this, as he suddenly caught sight of his outer self mirrored somewhere, when Paul was as startled as if he had come face to face with some stranger.

The skip stopped at Dig Level.

Paul stepped out into a bright, huge cavern filled to its lofty ceiling with the bright metal of equipment mounted ponderously on rails. The acid-damp air of below-ground struck coolly into his lungs, and the atmosphere of the mine seemed to flow into and through him as he walked down alongside the crusher to the small cleared space that surrounded the console. There, seated upon the rails, was the console itself. And at itâ”at the keys and stops that resembled nothing so much as the keyboard of some huge electronic organ, with the exception of the several small viewing tanks in the console's very center—a small, round-bodied, black-haired man in his forties sat winding up the duties of the shift he was just ending.

Paul came up to the edge of the platform on which the console and its operator sat.

Hi, he said.

The other man glanced down.

I'm the new man—Paul Formain, said Paul. Ready for relief?

The departing engineer made several quick motions about the console, his short, thick fingers active. He leaned back in the control seat, then stretched. He stood up to turn a tough, friendly face toward Paul.

Paul? he asked. What was the last name?

Formain. Paul Formain.

Right. Pat Teasely. He held out a small, square hand with a good deal of strength in its grip.

They shook. Teasely's accent was Australian—that particular accent which Australians are continually infuriated to have called cockney by inexperienced North Americans. He gave forth a personality that was as plain and straightforward as common earth. It touched soothingly against Paul, after the violence of the mountains.

Looks like a nice clear dig for your first shift, Teasely said. Judging by the cores.

Sounds good, replied Paul.

Right. No large faults in sight and the vein drift's less than eight degrees off the vertical. Watch for crowding on the ore trains going up Number One surface shaft, though.

Oh? said Paul. Bug in the works?

Not really. They've been jackknifing and getting jammed just above Number Eight hatch, about sixty feet short of exit. The shaft's cut a little small; but no point in widening it when we'll be driving a new one in about a hundred and fifty hours. I've been up twice this last shift, though, to kick a car back on the tracks.

All right, said Paul. Thanks. He stepped past Teasely and sat down at the console. He looked up at the smaller man. See you topside at the bar this evening, perhaps?

Might. Teasely lingered. His blunt face looked down, uncompromising, individualistic, and congenial. You out of one of the American colleges?

Colorado.

Wife and family along?

Paul shook his head. His fingers were already moving about, becoming acquainted with the console.

No, he said. I'm a bachelor—and an orphan.

Come have dinner at our place then, sometime, said Teasely. I've got the sort of wife likes to cook for guests.

Thanks, said Paul. I'll do that.

See you.

Paul heard Teasely's footsteps crunch away in the loose rubble of the cavern floor. He went back to the controls, and ran through his take-over check list. It took him about six minutes. When that was done he knew the position of every piece of equipment and how it was behaving. Then he turned to the programming section and ran a four-hour estimate and forecast.

It checked with Teasely's estimate. A routine, easy shift. For a moment he laid his fingers on the gross control tabs of the computer override and sought for the individual qualities of the machine through the little working vibrations that reached him through his finger tips. A sensation of blind, purposeful, and irresistible force at work was returned to him; like, but not identical with, the feel of all other mine controls he had touched before. He took his hands away.

For the moment, he had nothing to do. He leaned back in his bucket seat at the console and thought about leaving things here for a look at the surface shaft where Teasely had reported the ore cars had occasionally been getting stuck. He decided against it. It was best to stick close to the console until he had built up a familiarity with this new mine.

The little lights and gauges and small viewing screens showed their flickers of color and movement normally before him. He reached over and switched a Vancouver news broadcast onto the screen of his central viewing tank.

Abruptly, he looked down as if from a window onto the plaza entrance to the Koh-i-Nor Hotel, at Chicago Complex. He recognized the location—it was a hotel he had stayed at once or twice himself when he was in the Chicago area. As he looked down on it now, he saw a small knot of people carrying the cameras and equipment of reporters, gathered around three people. The view zoomed in for a shot from an apparent distance of only a few feet and Paul had a second's close-up glimpse of two of the three, who were standing a little back from the third. The two were a flat-bodied, crop-haired man of middle age, and a tall, slim girl of Paul's age, whose appearance jerked suddenly at Paul's attention before the camera moved away from her, and left him frowning over what could have seemed so remarkable about her. He had never seen either her or the flat-bodied man before.

But then he forgot about her. For the third member of the group was filling the screen. And there was something about him that would have held any viewer's attention.

Me was a gaunt giant of an old man in the formal black-and-white of evening clothes. Very stark and somber in these, he bent his head a little to avoid the low edge of a candy-striped beach umbrella overhead. And, although straight enough for the years he seemed to own, he leaned heavily on the carved handle of a thick cane in his right hand. The motion spread his wide shoulders, so that he seemed to stoop above the crowd of reporters. Dark glasses obscured the expression around his eyes —but even without these, his face was an enigma. Though it stood clear and sharp on the screen before him, Paul could not seem to grasp its image as a whole. It was a collection of features, but there was no totality to it. Paul found himself staring at the straight lips and the deep parentheses of creases around the corners of the mouth as the man spoke.

...robes? one of the newspeople was just finishing asking.

The lips smiled.

You wouldn't expect a mechanic to go out to dinner in his working clothes, now would you? The voice from the lips was deep and pleasantly sardonic. If you people want to see me in my official robes, you'll have to make an appointment to meet me during my office hours.

Do they have office hours in the Chantry Guild, Mr. Guildmaster? asked another reporter. There was laugh-ter, but not disrespectful laughter. The lips smiled with them.

Come and find out, said the lips. Paul frowned. A small closed pocket in his memory had opened up. He had heard of the Chantry Guild—or Société Chanterie. Come to think of it, he had heard of them now and again—quite often, in fact. They were a cult group—devil-worshipers, or some such. He had always dismissed them as a group of crackpots. But this man—this Guild-master—was nothing so simple as a crackpot. He was...

Frustrated, Paul put his fingers instinctively out to the image of the man before him. But the cold glassy surface of the screen baffled his finger tips. The reporters were still asking questions.

What about Operation Springboard, Mr. Guildmaster?

The lips quirked.

What about it?

Is the Guild against an attempt to reach the nearer stars?

Well now, ladies and gentlemen... The lips smiled. What did the Sumerian and Semite say in the days of the older gods? I believe they called the planets 'sheep that are far away.' Did they not? Shamash and Adad were the deities responsible for that statement, as you can find by checking your ancient histories. And if habitable worlds are like sheep, then surely there must be a great many strayed around farther stars which we can find again.

And the smile stayed on the lips.

Then the Guild is in favor of the station on Mercury? You don't object to work on methods for interstellar travel?

Such, said the lips, and the smile vanished, is not my concern, or the concern of the Guild. Man may play with the technical toys and sciences as he has in the past; he may play with space and the stars. But it will only sicken him further, as it has already sickened him almost to his end. There is only one thing that concerns us of the Guild and that's the destruction that will save Man from himself.

Mr. Guildmaster, said a voice, you can't mean total—

Total and absolute! The deep voice strengthened in the speaker. Complete. Destruction. The destruction of Man and all his works. The voice grew, sonorously near to chanting, on a note that sent a sudden wild surge of feeling through Paul, like a powerful shock from a vein-injected stimulant. There have been forces at work for eight hundred years that would save Man from his destruction. Woe to Man when that day comes, that he is safe and saved. Woe to Woman and children unborn, when the last strength to destroy himself is finally stolen from him. For by his own eternal life will he be doomed, and only by his destruction may he survive.

The buzzing of an alarm signaled the sudden jack-knifing and jamming of an ore train in surface tube A. Paul's hand went out automatically and slapped a fifteen-minute break on shaft power.

And so I charge you —the voice rolled like drums below a guillotine from the screen before him— that you look to the welfare of man and not to yourselves. That you turn your backs on the false promise of life and face the reality of death. That you charge yourselves with a duty. And that duty is complete—is utter—is total destruction. Destruction. Destruction! Destruction....

Paul blinked and sat up.

The mine was all around him. The console was before him and in its center screen the group on the plaza of the Koh-i-Nor was breaking up. The newspeople were dispersing. The old man and the girl and man with him were following a fourth man—a thin young man with black hair and a tense, driving walk—into the hotel. Paul stared. He felt that only a minute had gone by, but even that was startling. For one of the peculiar facts about him was that he was completely unresponsive to hypnosis. It was a trait that had complicated matters for the psychiatrist who had worked with him following the boating accident. How, then, could he have lost even a minute?

Sudden memory of the jackknifed cars in the surface tube broke him away from his personal puzzle. A more general power shutoff of equipment would be required unless he could solve that problem shortly. He left the console and took the chain lift alongside surface shaft Number One. The telltale on the console had spotted the jam-up at a hundred and forty-three feet below the shaft mouth. He reached Number Eight trouble hatch, turned on the lights in the shaft, and crawled through into the shaft himself. He saw the trouble, almost directly before him.

The Number One surface shaft, like the skip tube, approached the surface from the mine below at an angle of roughly sixty degrees. A single powered rail ran up the bottom center of the shaft, and the fat-bodied, open-topped ore cars, filled with pebble-sized rock from below, rolled their cogwheels up the cleated rail. The cleats themselves served Paul now as hand and footholds as he climbed up to where one of the cars sat off the rail, angled against the stony wall.

Still wondering about the familiar-looking girl and the extraordinary cultist who called himself the Guildmaster, Paul braced himself against the sharp-pointed wall of the shaft and the last car. He kicked at the hitch between the two cars. On the third kick, the hitch suddenly unbound the kink it had acquired when the car had jack-knifed. With a snap and a grunt from the stored power in the motorized base of each car, the train suddenly straightened out.

As it did, the lights in the shaft dimmed, then flashed up again without warning as all the motors in all the cars hummed steadily to life. The train jerked and moved up the shaft, and without thinking, instinctively, Paul leaped and clung to the final car of the train.

It burst on him then, brilliantly as mountains seen suddenly against a high spring sky, that in his preoccupation with the news broadcast he had only put a temporary fifteen-minute hold on power to the shaft. And afterward, following his little blackout, he had omitted to set the power controls for the shaft on manual.

Now he was being carried up the shaft by the last car in the train. A few inches below him, the powered rail promised instant electrocution if he touched it. And the high-sided cars, all but filling the shaft, would block any try he could make to open the emergency hatches yet between him and the surface, as the train passed them.

The walls and the roof were close.

The roof in particular pressed down near to him. Rough-chewed from the granite and quartz, it rose and dipped unevenly. At points along the shaft, Paul knew, ft would all but scrape the tops of the ore cars. If he could keep low, he might be able to ride the car he was holding to, to the surface. But, clinging to the back of it as he was, he felt his grip weakening.

He pulled himself upward, flat onto the bed of ore in the car. The roof under which he was passing scraped harshly against the back of his head as the ore train, leaving the lighted section where he had put it back on the track, plunged upward into darkness. His hands pawing at the small sharp rock in the car, Paul dug furiously, burrowing himself in. Swaying and rumbling, the train climbed on. In the blackness Paul did not even see ahead the low point of the roof that was approaching....

Out in the clear mountain morning the surface engineer on duty had been drawn to the mouth of the Number One shaft by the blinking of a white trouble light on his own console, and a later automatic signal that power to that shaft had been cut. He had come to the shaft mouth, only to be joined a few minutes later by the managing engineer, who had been keeping his eye on the telltales in his office, this day with a new man underground for the first time.

There it goes, said the surface engineer, a slight man named Diego and as young as Paul, as the hum of motors echoed once more up the natural speaking tube of the shaft. He got it fixed.

A little slow, said the Malabar mine manager. He frowned. Let's wait a minute here and see what the trouble was.

They waited. The humming and the clank of the cogwheels approached. The first car poked its front out into the sunlight and leveled off on the flat

What's that? asked the mine manager, suddenly. There was a shadowy outline visible in the gloom around the approaching final car.

The train trundled automatically on. The last car emerged into the sunlight and the bright illumination fell full on the shape of a man, half-buried and unmoving in the load of ore.

My God! said the mine manager. Stop those cars and help me get him off there!

But the young surface engineer was already being sick, turned away and leaning against the millhouse wall, in the early shadow of the mountains.

Chapter 3

The clerk working the afternoon division, day shift, on the room desk of the Koh-i-Nor Hotel in the downtown area of the Chicago Complex, was conscious of the fact that his aptitude tests had determined that he should find work in a particular class of job. The class was that of ornament—actually unnecessary from the point of view of modern hotel equipment. Accordingly he worked conscientiously at the primary virtue of a good ornament— being as hard to overlook as possible.

He did not look up when he heard footsteps approach his desk and stop before it. He continued to write in elegant longhand at the list of currently newsworthy guests he was making on a bulletin sheet laid down beside the guest register.

I have a reservation, said a man's voice. Paul For-main.

Very good, said the clerk, adding another name to his list without looking up. He paused to admire the smooth, flowing loops in the p's and l's of his penmanship.

Abruptly, he felt his hand caught and held by a fist considerably larger than his own. It checked his pen's movement. The strange grasp held his hand like an imprisoned fly—not crushingly, but with a hint of unyielding power in reserve. Startled, a little scared, the clerk looked up.

He found himself facing a tall young-old man with only one arm, the hand of which was holding him with such casual power.

Sir? said the clerk. His voice pitched itself a little higher than he would have preferred.

I said, said the tall man, patiently, I have a reservation. Paul Formain.

Yes sir. Of course. Once more the clerk made an effort to free his trapped hand. As if by an afterthought, the tall man let go. The clerk turned hurriedly to his desk register and punched out the name. The register lighted up with information. Yes sir. Here it is. An outside single. What decor?

Modern.

Of course, Mr. Formain. Room 1412. Elevators around the corner to your left. I'll see your luggage is delivered to you immediately it arrives. Thank you....

But the tall, one-armed man had already gone off toward the elevators. The clerk looked after him, and then down at his own right hand. He moved the fingers of it experimentally. It had never before occurred to him what wonderfully engineered things those fingers were.

Up in room 1412 Paul stripped and showered. By the tune he stepped out of the shower, his single suitcase had emerged from the luggage-delivery chute in the wall of the room. Half-dressed, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, which gave back his lean, flat-muscled image wearing the gray-green disposable slacks he had pressed for from the room dispenser after the shower. Above the waistband of the slacks, his chest and shoulders showed a healthy tan. The fine scars left by the plastic surgery had now faded almost to the point of invisibility. It was eight months since the accident in the mine, early in a new spring, with gray skies and a March wind blowing chilly off Lake Michigan.

The stub of his left arm looked shrunken. Not so much, it seemed, because it no longer had the rest of the limb to support, but in contrast to the right arm that remained to him.

The compensation development of the right arm had proceeded with unusual speed and to extremes, according to Paul's physicians. It hung now, reflected in the mirror's surface, like a great, living club of bone and muscle. The deltoid humped up like a rock over the point where clavicle toed into shoulder frame; and from the lower part of the deltoid, triceps and biceps humped like whale-backs down to the smaller, knot-like muscles above the elbow. Below the elbow, the flexors and the brachioradialis rose like low hills. The thenar group was a hard lump at the base of his thumb.

And it was as a club that he sometimes thought of it. No—nothing so clumsy as a club. Like some irresistible, battering-ram force made manifest in flesh and skeleton. In the three-quarters of a year since the mine accident, through the long process of hospitalization, operation, and recuperation, that invincible part of him which sat in the back of his mind seemed to have chosen the arm for itself. The arm was that part of Paul, the part that doubted nothing, and least of all itself. Nor had time to waste on the posing of a hotel clerk.

Obscurely, it bothered Paul. Like a man testing a sore tooth continually with a tongue, he found himself frequently trying the arm's strength on things, and being disturbed anew each tune by the result. Now, standing before the mirror, he reached out and closed his hand around the single ornament in the starkly modern hotel room—a tulip-shaped pewter vase about nine inches high, with a single red rose in it, that had been sitting on the dresser top. The vase fitted easily into his grasp, and he lifted it, slowly tightening the grip of his fingers.

For a moment it almost seemed that the thick metal walls would resist. Then slowly the vase crumpled inward, until the rose, pinched halfway up its stem, toppled to one side, and water, brimming up over the rim of the vase, ran down onto Paul's contracting hand. Paul relaxed his grasp, opened his hand, and looked down at the squeezed shape of the vase lying in it for a second. Then he tossed the ruin—vase, flower, and all—into the waste-basket by the dresser and flexed his fingers. They were not even cramped. With that much strength the arm should already be becoming muscle-bound and useless. It was not.

He finished dressing and went down to the subway entrance in the basement of the hotel. There was a two-seater among the empty cars waiting on the hotel switchback. He got in and dialed the standard 4441, which was the Directory address in all cities, centers, and Complexes over the fifty-thousand population figure. The little car moved out into the subway traffic and fifteen minutes later deposited him forty miles away at the Directory terminal.

He registered his credit card with Chicago Complex Bookkeeping, and a routing service directed him to a booth on the ninth level. He stepped onto the disk of a large elevator tube along with several other people and found Ms eye caught by a book a girl was carrying.

The book was in a small, hand-sized portable viewer, and the book's cover looked out at him from the viewer's screen. It gazed at him with the dark glasses and clever old mouth of the face he had been watching that day in the mine. It was the same face. Only, below the chin instead of the formal white collar and knotted scarf, there was the red and gold of some ceremonial robe.

Against this red and gold were stamped the black block letters of the book's title. DESTRUCT.

Glancing up from the book, for the first time he looked at the girl carrying it. She was staring at him with an expression of shock, and at the sight of her face he felt a soundless impact within himself. He found himself looking directly into the features of the girl who had stood beside and a little behind the Guildmaster in the viewing tank of the console at the mine.

Excuse me, she said. Excuse me.

She had turned, and pushing blindly past the other people on the disk stepped quickly off onto the level above that level on which Paul had entered.

Reflexively, he followed her. But she was already lost in the crowd. He found himself standing in the heart of the musical section of the Directory library. He stood, brushed against by passers-by, gazing vainly out over the heads of the crowd for the sight of her. He was only half a pace from a row of booths, and from the partly-open door of one of these came the thin thread of melody that was a woman's soprano singing to a chimed accompaniment in a slow, minor key.....

In apple comfort, long I waited thee

The music ran through him like a wind blowing from far off, and the pushing people about him became distant and unimportant as shadows. It was the voice of the girl in the elevator just now. He knew it, though he had only heard those few words from her. The music swelled and encompassed him, and ope of his moments of feeling moved in on him, on wings too strong for love and too wide for sadness.

And long I thee in apple comfort waited.

She was the music, and the music was a wind blowing across an endless snow field to a cavern where ice crystals chimed to the tendrils of the wind....

In lonely autumn and uncertain springtime
My apple longing for thee was not sated....

Abruptly he wrenched himself free.

Something had been happening to him. He stared about him, once more conscious of the moving crowd. The music from the booth was once more only a thread under the shuffle of feet and the distant sea-roar of conversations.

He turned around and saw nothing on every side but the prosaic music section of a library floor in the directory. The magic was gone.

But so was the girl.

Paul went on up to the ninth level and found an open booth. He sat down, closed the door, and punched for a list of local psychiatrists, giving his now-registered credit number. As an afterthought, he added a stipulation that the list be restricted to those psychiatrists who had been interested or concerned with the problems of amputees in the past. The board before him flashed an acknowledgment of the request, and a statement that the answer would require about a ten- to fifteen-minute wait.

Paul sat back. On impulse he coded the title of the book the girl had been carrying with a purchase request, and a second later a copy in a commercial viewer was delivered to the desk in front of him from the delivery chute.

He picked it up. The face on the book's cover seemed to be staring at him with a sardonic expression, as if it amused itself with some secret it was keeping from him. The imaged face was not as he had seen it in the viewing tank at the mine, when the features had seemed to refuse to join in a clearly observed face. Now Paul saw the whole face, but something else was wrong. It was not so much a face but a wax mask. Something lifeless and without meaning. Paul punched the trip that would change the cover picture to the first page within.

On the white expanse of paper shown, the title leaped at him once again.

DESTRUCT, by Walter Blunt

Paul turned the page. He found himself looking at the first page of an introduction written by someone whose name he did not recognize. Paul skimmed through its half-dozen pages.

Walter Blunt, he read, was the son of rich parents. His family had owned a controlling interest in one of the great schools of bluefin tuna that followed the circle migratory route between North and South America and Japan. Blunt had grown up brilliant but undisciplined. He had lived the life of the wealthy who have nothing important to do, until one day when with thousands of other hunters he had been caught in an uncontrolled freak early-whiter blizzard, while out stalking deer in the Lake Superior Range.

Four others in Blunt's party had died of exposure. Blunt, equally city-bred and unprepared, had in a wry moment conceived of the Alternate Forces of existence, and offered to trade them his life's service for the protection of his life itself. Following this, he had walked unerringly out of the woods to safety and arrived warm and unexhausted at shelter, in spite of the sleeting wind, the dropping temperature, and the fact that he was wearing only the lightest of hunting clothes.

Following this experience, he had dedicated himself to the Alternate Forces. Over a lifetime he had created and organized the Chantry Guild, or Société Chanterie, composed of students of, and graduate workers with, the Alternate Forces. The aim of the Chantry Guild was universal acceptance of the positive principle of destruction. Only by destruction could mankind signify its adherence to the alternate Laws, and only the Alternate Laws remained strong enough to save mankind from the technical civilization that was now on the verge of trapping mankind like a fly in amber.

The delicate chime of a response counter drew Paul's attention to the screen before him. He looked at a double list of names, addresses, and call numbers. He turned his attention to the typewriter-like keyboard below the screen and tapped out a message to all the names on the list

My left arm was amputated slightly over seven months ago. My body has to date rejected three attempts to graft on a replacement. No reason for the intolerance can be discovered in the ordinary physiological processes. My physicians have recommended that I explore the possibility of a psychological factor being involved in the causes of the intolerance, and have suggested that I try my case among psychiatrists of this area, where a large amount of work with amputees has been done. Would you be interested in accepting me as a patient? Paul Allen Formain. File No. 432 36 47865 2551 OG3 K122b, Room 1412, Koh-i-Nor Hotel, Chicago Complex.

Paul got up, took the book he had just purchased, and headed back toward the hotel. On the way back and after he had returned to his room, he read on into Blunt's writing. Sprawled out on his hotel-room bed he read a collection of wild nonsense mixed with sober fact, and an urgent appeal to the reader to enlist himself as a student under the instruction of some graduate Chantry Guild member. The reward promised for successfully completing the course of instruction was apparently to be a power encompassing all wild dreams of magical ability that had ever been conceived.

It was too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

Paul frowned.

He found himself holding the book gingerly. It did not stir in a physical sense, but a vibration came from it that seemed to quiver deep in the marrow of Paul's bones. A singing silence began to swell in the room. One of his moments was coming on him. He held himself still as a wolf come suddenly upon a trap. About him the walls of the room breathed in and out. The silence sang louder. The place and moment spoke to him:

DANGER.

Put the book down.

Louder sang the silence, blinding the ears of his sensing....

Danger, said the invincible part of him, is a word invented by children, and is essentially meaningless to the adult.

He pressed the button to turn the page. A new chapter heading looked up at him.

ALTERNATE FORCES AND REGROWTH. THE REPLACEMENT OF MISSING LIMBS, OR EVEN OF THE BODY ENTIRE.

The reparative regeneration of parts of the human body by epimorphosis, or regrowth beginning from a regeneration bud or blastema formed at the wound surface, is a property capable of stimulation by the Alternate Forces. It has its justification and instigation in the intended action of self-destruct. Like all use and manipulation of the Alternate Forces, the mechanism is simple once the underlying principles are grasped. In this case, they are the Non-Evolutionary (blocking to the Natural Forces) and the Regressive (actively in reversal of the Natural Forces). These principles are not merely statically negative, but dynamically negative, so that from the fact of their dynamism derives the energy necessary for the process of regeneration....

The call note on Paul's room telephone chimed, breaking the spell. The room fled back to naturalness and the book sagged in Ms hand. From the bed he saw the screen of the phone light up.

A Directory report on your query, sir, said a canned voice from the lighted screen.

The screen dissolved into a list of names with medical and mental science degrees after them. One by one the names winked out until only one was left Paul read it from the bed.

DR. ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

A moment later the word accept was printed beside it. Paul put the book aside where it could be picked up later.

Chapter

...How do you feel?

It was a woman's voice. Paul opened his eyes. Dr. Elizabeth Williams was standing over the chair in which he sat. She put the hypodermic spray gun down on the desk beside him, and walked around to take her seat behind the desk.

Did I say anything? Paul sat up straighter in his chair.

If you mean, did you reply to my questions? no. Dr. Williams looked across the desk at him. She was a small, square-shouldered woman with brown hair and an unremarkable face. How long have you known about this strong resistance of yours to hypnosis?

Is it resistance? asked Paul. I'm trying to co-operate.

How long have you known about it?

Since the sailing accident. Five years. Paul looked at her. What did I say?

Dr. Williams looked at him.

You told me I was a foolish woman, she said.

Paul blinked at her.

Is that all? he asked. I didn't say anything but that.

That's all. She looked at him across the desk. He felt curiosity and a sort of loneliness emanating from her.

Paul, can you think of anything in particular that you're afraid of?

Afraid? he asked, and frowned. Afraid . . . ? Not really. No.

Worried?

He thought for a long moment

No—not worried, actually, he said. There's nothing you could say was actually worrying me.

Unhappy?

He smiled. Then frowned, suddenly.

No, he said, and hesitated. That is, I don't think so.

Then why did you come to see me?

He looked at her in some surprise.

Why, about my arm, he said.

Not about the fact that you were orphaned at an early age? Not that you've always led a solitary life, with no close friends? Not that you tried to kill yourself in a sailboat five years ago, and tried again in a mine, less than a year ago?

Wait a minute! said Paul. She looked at him politely, inquiringly.

Do you think I arranged those accidents to try and kill myself?

Shouldn't I think so?

Why, no, said Paul.

Why not?

Because ... A sudden perfect moment of understanding broke through to Paul. He saw her sitting there in complete blindness. He stared at her, and before his eyes, looking back at him, she seemed to grow shrunken and a little older. He got to his feet. It doesn't matter, he said.

You should think about it, Paul.

I will. I want to think over this whole business.

Good, she said. She had not moved out of her chair, and in spite of the assurance of her tone, she did not seem quite herself since he bad looked at her. My receptionist will set up your next time in.

Thanks, he said. Good-by.

Good afternoon, Paul.

He went out. In the outer office the receptionist looked up from a filing machine as he passed.

Mr. Formain? She leaned forward over the machine. Don't you want to make your next appointment now?

No, said Paul. I don't think so. He went out.

He went down a number of levels from Dr. Williams' office to the terminal in the base of the building. There were public communications booths nearby. He stepped into one and closed the door. He felt both naked and relieved. He dialed for a listing of the Chantry Guild members in the area. The screen lighted up.

Walter Blunt, Guildmaster (no listed phone number) Jason Warren, Necromancer, Chantry Guild Secretary, phone number 66 433 35246 Kantele Maki (no listed phone number) Morton Brown, 66 433 67420 Warra, Mage,

(The above list contains only the names of those requesting listing under the Chantry Guild heading.)

Paul punched 66 433 35246. The screen lighted up whitely, but it was half a minute before it cleared to show the face of one of the people Paul remembered from the television broadcast in the mine a year before, the face of a thin, black-haired young man with deep-set, un-moving eyes.

My name is Paul Formain, said Paul. I'd like to talk to Jason Warren.

I'm Jason Warren. What about?

I've just read a book by Walter Blunt that says the Alternate Forces can grow back limbs that are missing.

Paul moved so that the stub of his left arm was visible to the other.

I see. Warren looked at him with the movelessness of his dark eyes. What about it?

I'd like to talk to you about it.

I suppose that can be arranged. When would you like to talk to me?

Now, said Paul.

The black eyebrows in the screen went up a fraction.

Now?

I was planning on it, said Paul.

Oh, you were?

Paul waited.

All right, come ahead. Abruptly the screen went blank, but leaving Paul's vision filled with the after-image of the dark face that had been in it looking at him with a curious interest and intent. He rose, breathing out a little with relief. He had moved without thinking from the second of perception that had come to him in Elizabeth Williams' office. Suddenly he had realized that her education and training had made her blind to understanding in his case. She had not understood. That much had been explosively obvious. She had been trying to reconcile the speed of light with the clumsy mechanism of the stop watch she believed in. And if she had made that error, then the psychiatrist at San Diego, after the boating accident, had been wrong in the same way, as well.

Paul had reacted without thinking, but, strongly now, his instinct told him he was right. He had labored under the handicap of a belief in stop watches. Somewhere, he told himself now, there was a deeper understanding. It was a relief to go searching for it at last with an unfettered mind—a mind awake.

Chapter

As Paul entered through the automatically-opening front door of Jason Warren's apartment, he saw three people already in the room—a sort of combination office-lounge—he found himself stepping into.

Two of the three were just going out through a rear door. Paul got only a glimpse of them—one, a girl who with a start Paul recognized as the girl with the book he had encountered earlier at Chicago Directory. The other was a flat-bodied man in middle age with an air of quiet competence about him. He, too, had been with the girl and Blunt on the broadcast Paul had witnessed in the mine a year before. Paul wondered briefly if Blunt, also, was nearby. Then the thought passed from his mind. He found himself looking down, slightly, into the dark, mercurial face of Jason Warren.

Paul Formain, said Paul. I phoned———

Sit down. Warren waved Paul into a chair and took a facing one himself. He looked at Paul with something of the direct, uninhibited stare of a child. What can I do for you?

Paul considered him. Warren sat loosely, almost sprawled, but with his thin body held in the balance of a dancer or a highly trained athlete, so that a single movement might have brought him back to his feet.

I want to grow a new arm, said Paul.

Yes, said Warren. He flicked a forefinger toward the phone. I punched information for your public file after you called, he said. You're an engineer.

I was, said Paul, and was a little surprised to hear himself say it, now, with such a small amount of bitterness.

You believe in the Alternate Laws?

No, said Paul. Truthfully—no.

But you think they might give you an arm back?

It's a chance.

Yes, said Warren. An engineer. Hard-headed, practical—doesn't care what makes it work as long as it works.

Not exactly, said Paul.

Why bother with the Alternate Laws? Why not just have a new arm out of the culture banks grafted on?

I've tried that, said Paul. It doesn't take.

Warren sat perfectly still for a couple of seconds. There was no change in his face or attitude, but Paul got an impression as if something like a delicately sensitive instrument in the other man had suddenly gone click and begun to register.

Tell me, said Warren, slowly and carefully, the whole story.

Paul told it. As he talked, Warren sat still and listened. During the fifteen minutes or so it took for Paul to tell it all, the other man did not move or react. And with no warning, even as Paul was talking, it came to Paul where he had seen that same sort of concentration before. It was in a bird dog he had seen once, holding its point, one paw lifted, nose straight and tail in line with the body, as still as painted Death.

When Paul stopped, Warren did not speak at once. Instead, without moving a muscle otherwise, he lifted his right hand into the air between them and extended his forefinger toward Paul. The movement bad all the remote inevitability of a movement by a machine, or the slow leaning of the top of a chopped tree as it begins its fall.

Look, Warren said slowly, at my finger. Look at the tip of my finger. Look closely. Right there at the end of the nail, under the nail, you can see a spot of red. It's a drop of blood coming out from under the nail. See it swelling there. It's getting larger. In a moment it'll drop off. But it's getting larger, larger———

No, said Paul. There's no drop of blood there at all. You're wasting your time—and mine.

Warren dropped his hand.

Interesting, he said. Interesting.

Is it? asked Paul.

Graduate members of the Chantry Guild, said Warren, can't be hypnotized, either. But you say you don't believe in the Alternate Laws.

I seem to be a sort of free-lance, then, said Paul.

Warren rose suddenly from his chair with the single motion Paul had expected. He walked lightly and easily across the room, turned, and came back.

In order to resist hypnosis, he said, standing over Paul, you must make use of the Alternate Laws, whether you recognize them as such or not. The keystone of the use of the Alternate Laws is complete independence of the individual—independence from any force, physical or otherwise.

And vice versa? asked Paul, smiling.

And vice versa. Warren did not smile. He stood looking down at Paul. I'll ask you again, he said. What do you expect me to do for you?

I want an arm, said Paul.

I can't give you an arm, said Warren. I can't do anything for you. The use of the Alternate Laws is for those who would do things for themselves.

Show me how, then.

Warren sighed slightly. It was a sigh that sounded to Paul not only weary, but a little angry.

You don't know what the hell you're asking, said Warren. To train whatever aptitude you have for use of the Alternate Laws, I'd have to take you on as my apprentice in necromancy.

Blunt's book gave me to understand the Guild was eager for people.

Why, we are, said Warren. We have an urgent need right now for someone comparable to Leonardo da Vinci. We'd be very glad to get someone with the qualifications of Milton or Einstein. Of course, what we really need is someone with a talent no one has conceived of yet—a sort of X-Genius. So we advertise.

Then you don't want people.

I didn't say that, said Warren. He turned and paced the room and came back. You're serious about joining the Guild?

If it'll get me my arm.

It won't get you your arm. I tell you, no one can put that arm back but you. There's a relation between the Alternate Laws and the work of the Guild, but it isn't what you think.

Perhaps I'd better be enlightened, said Paul.

All right, said Warren. He put his hands in his pockets and stood with shoulders hunched slightly, looking down at Paul. Try this on for size. This is an ill world we live in, Formain. A world sick from a surfeit of too many technical luxuries. An overburdened world, swarming with people close to the end of their ropes. His deep-set eyes were steady on Paul. People today are like a man who thought that if he made his success in the world, everything else that makes life good would come automatically. Now they've made their success—the perfection of a technological civilization in which no one lacks anything in the way of a physical comfort—and they find themselves in a false paradise. Like an electric motor without a load upon it, the human spirit without the weight of the need to achieve and progress is beginning to rev up toward dissolution. Faster and faster, until they'll fly apart and destroy this world they've made.

He stopped.

What do you say to that? he asked.

It might be the case, said Paul. I don't really believe that's the situation we're in, myself, but it might be the case.

All right, said Warren. Now try this: In a climate of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the enemy is to tell him the plain truth. And the Guildmaster has stated the plain truth plainly in his book. The Chantry Guild is not interested in propagating the use of the Alternate Laws. It only wants to train and make use of those who can already use the Laws, to its own end. And that end's to hurry the end that is inevitably coming, to bring about the destruction of present civilization.

Warren stopped. He seemed to wait for Paul to say something. But Paul also waited.

We, said Warren, are a small but powerful revolutionary body with the aim of driving this sick world into complete insanity and collapse. The Alternate Laws are real, but most of our structure is completely fake. If you come in as my apprentice, you'll be committed to the job of destroying the world.

And that's my only way to a use of the Alternate Forces? asked Paul.

For you to accept the Guild's philosophy and aim, yes, said Warren. Otherwise, no.

I don't believe that, said Paul. If your Alternate Forces exist, they'll work for me as well as all the Chantry Guild put together.

Warren dropped into a chair and stared at Paul for a long moment.

Arrogant, he said. Completely arrogant. Let's see. . . . He rose lightly to his feet, crossed the room, and touched a spot on one of the walls.

The wall slid back, revealing an area which seemed half modern laboratory and half alchemist's den. On the table in its center were earthenware containers, some metal jars, and a large flask full of dark-red liquid.

Warren opened a drawer in the table, and took out something which his body hid from Paul's view. He closed the drawer, turned, and came back carrying a rather decrepit-looking conch shell, brown-stained and polished by handling and age.

He put the shell down on an occasional table a few feet from Paul's chair.

What does that do? Paul asked, looking at it curiously.

For me, said Warren, it does a lot of things. Which is no advantage to you except that we might say it's been sensitized to the action of the Alternate Laws. Let's see if this arrogance of yours can do anything with it.

Paul frowned. He stared at the shell. For a second the situation was merely ridiculous. And then it was as if a thread of brightness ran through him. There was a sudden weird sensation, as if a great, deep gong sounded, somewhere deep inside him. And then a rushing, back in the depths of his mind, as if a host of memories long forgotten ran and beat upon a locked door held shut to them since he could not exactly remember when.

The conch shell stirred. It rolled to a point of balance and hung there. The bright daylight lanced through a far window of the room and a faint wisp of some light music sounded from the apartment next door. A thin, reedy voice spoke faintly but clearly from the shell.

From greater dark into the little light. And then once more to greater dark he goes.

The beating on the locked door in Paul's mind dwindled away into silence. The shell lost its balance and fell over, still, on one side. Across from Paul, Warren drew a deep breath and picked up the shell.

You may be a natural, he said.

A natural? Paul looked up at him.

There are certain abilities in the province of the Alternate Powers which can be possessed by those who know nothing of the true nature of the Alternate Powers. Mind reading, for example. Or artistic inspiration.

Oh? said Paul. How do you tell the difference be-tween people with that, and your Alternate Power people?

Very simply, answered Warren. But the tone of his voice and the way he held the shell and continued to watch Paul did not imply simpleness. For such people their abilities work spasmodically and unreliably. For us, they always work.

For example, mind reading?

I'm a Necromancer, said Warren, shortly, not a seer. Besides, I used the common, recognizable term. I'm told minds aren't so much read as experienced.

When you go into someone else's mind, you lose your own point of view?

Yes, said Warren, you must be a natural. He took the conch shell back across to the cabinet and put it away. He turned around and spoke from where he was.

You've got something, he said. It may be a valuable aptitude, and it may not. But I'm willing to take you on as a probationary apprentice. If I think you have promise after a while, you'll be taken fully into the Guild on an apprenticeship basis. If that happens, you'll be required to assign everything you own and all future personal income to the Guild. But if it reaches that point, you needn't worry about material things. Warren's lips twisted slightly. The Guild will take care of you. Study and learn, and you'll be able to grow your arm back one day.

Paul stood up.

You guarantee me an arm? he said.

Of course, said Warren. He did not move from where he stood, watching Paul across the widths of laboratory and apartment room with unmoving gaze.

Chapter

Shuttling through the many-leveled maze of the Chicago Complex's streets and buildings in a one-man subway car, Paul leaned his head back against the cushions of the seat and closed his eyes.

He was exhausted, and exhaustion, he now suspected, had its roots in something besides the physical efforts he had been put to today. Something almost physical had taken place in him following his recognition of the ridiculousness of the psychiatric approach to his situation. And the business with the shell had also drained him.

But the exhaustion was something that rest could cure. More important were two other things. The first of these was a clear recognition that too many things were happening around him and to him for them all to be accidents. And accidents, once the notion that he was subconsciously bent on self-destruction had been discarded, had been the obvious alternative answer.

The second was the fact that the Necromancer, Warren, had called him arrogant.

Disturbed by this, Paul for the first time faced the fact that such disturbance was unusual with him. Now that he stopped to consider the fact, in spite of all that had happened to him it had never before occurred to him that he might be at the mercy of any other force than that of his own will. Perhaps, he thought, this was arrogance, but the idea did not ring true. Above all else, he trusted his own feelings, and he did not feel arrogant. All that came to him when he reached back into himself for reasons was a calm feeling of certainty. It was that invincible element in him which took all things calmly.

For, thought Paul, leaning back with his eyes closed, above all he must not be arrogant. He was like a man peering through the glass-clearness of still water into the secret life of a tide pool on an ocean beach. Wonderful things were happening just a little before him, and would continue to happen as long as the pool was not disturbed. But a touch of wind or a dabbled finger, a ripple across the water's surface, and the life going on under his nose would no longer be isolated, pure, and complete. Gentleness was the watchword. Gentleness and extreme care. Already he had begun to separate and identify elements: by a hint of movement, a change of color, an emerging shape....

Leaning back with his eyes closed, Paul lost himself in a half-doze and a dream of things half-seen.

Sudden deceleration of his small car pulled him upright in his seat. The car jerked to a stop. He opened his eyes and looked out through the unopaqued bubble of the car's top.

He was at a mid-level intersection of streets. Above and below him were residential and business layers of the great three-dimensional community that was Chicago Complex. On his own level his car had halted part-way out into an intersection the four corners of which were occupied by small shops and offices, beyond which was a large recreation area, parklike with trees. But no people were visible. The shops were empty. The park was empty. The streets were clear and still.

Paul once more leaned forward and pressed for the terminal at the Koh-i-Nor Hotel. The car did not move. He punched for the transportation control center, malfunction division.

The communications tank above the car's dashboard lighted up.

Sir? said a woman's canned voice. Can I help you?

I'm in a one-man car that won't move, said Paul. It's stopped at the intersection of— he glanced at a street-corner sign— N Level 2432 and AANB.

Checking, said the canned voice. There was a moment's wait and the voice spoke again. Sir? Are you certain of your location. The area you report yourself in has been closed to traffic. Your car could not have entered it in the last half hour.

It seems to have anyway. Paul broke off suddenly. He seemed to have heard something odd. He got out of the car and stood up alongside it. The sound came thinly but more clearly to his ears. It was the noise of people chanting, and the noise was approaching.

The area you report yourself in, the tank in the car was saying, has been cleared to allow for a public demonstration. Would you please check your location again? If it is the location you have already reported, please leave your car at once and ascend one level immediately to find another. Repeat, leave your car immediately.

Paul swung away from the car. Across the street from him was an escalator spiral ramp. He reached it and let himself be borne upward. It swung up and out over the street he had just left. The chanting now came clearly to his ears. It was not words, but sounds without meaning.

Hey, hey! Hey, hey! Hey, hey!...

Puzzled, he stepped off the upward-moving surface of the ramp and looked out over the chest-high siding. Down around a curve of the cross street to the one on which his car had stalled he saw people pouring toward him in a sort of orderly mob, twenty abreast, and filling the street solidly from curb to curb.

They came quickly. They were at jog trot. Young men and women for the most part wearing blue slacks, white shirts, and green-colored, odd, cocked hats. They ran with arms interlinked, in step with the rhythm of their chanting.

Abruptly, Paul identified them. They represented, evi-dently, one of the so-called marching societies. Such groups gathered together for no other purpose than to run through the streets perhaps once or twice a month. It was a sort of controlled and channeled hysteria, or so Paul remembered reading. Such exercises blew off a lot of emotional steam safely, said the societies' advocates. For unless the group ran directly into some obstacle, they did no harm and were not harmed.

They came on now and Paul could see their eyes, which were all fixed straight ahead. But their gazes were not glassy, as of people drunk or drugged. Rather, they were clear, but fixed, as with people undergoing a moment of exaltation or frenzy. They were almost below Paul, now. Almost to the intersection.

Suddenly, Paul realized that his one-man car, stalled where it was, would be in their way. They were practically upon it now. The cadenced slapping of their river of feet was shaking the ramp on which he stood. It was making, it seemed, the whole structure of the city Complex, level on level, vibrate to a high, almost supersonic singing. A wave of heat struck up to them from their onrushing bodies, and the louder, ever-louder yelping of their chant rocked on his ears like the unnatural amplification of sounds heard in a fever. Whirlpooled about by noise and heat, Paul saw their first ranks run into his empty car and, without halting, like a stampede of mindless cattle, tumble it, rolling, over and over until it bounced at last to a railing overhanging the level below. Paul watched it mount the railing and drop from sight, the ultimate noise of its impact below lost in the encompassing noise of the running crowd.

He looked back along the road, in the direction from which they had come. The river of people was unended, still passing out of sight around the curve. But now, as he watched, the final ranks began to thin and quieten, and over the other sounds he heard the thin wail of ambulance sirens following slowly after.

Paul went on up to the level above, found a two-man car that was empty on a siding, and returned to the hotel.

When he got to his room, the door was open. A small gray man in a business suit rose smoothly from a chair as Paul entered, and offered an opened wallet cardcase for Paul's inspection.

Hotel security, Mr. Formain, said the small man. My name's James Butler.

Yes? said Paul. He felt his tiredness like a cloak around him.

A routine matter, Mr. Formain. Maintenance discovered a vase in your room that had been rather bent out of shape.

Put it on my bill, said Paul. Now, if you don't mind———

The vase isn't important, Mr. Formain. But we understand you have been seeing a psychiatrist?

A Dr. Elizabeth Williams. Today. Why?

As a routine matter, this hotel asks for and is notified if any of its guests are currently under psychiatric care. The Chicago Complex Public Health Unit permits us to refuse occupancy to guests who might disturb the hotel. Of course, no such refusal is anticipated in your case, Mr. Formain.

I'm checking out in the morning, said Paul.

Oh? I'm sorry to hear that, said James Butler evenly. I assure you there was no intention to offend you. It's just one of the management rules that we inform our guests that we have been notified about them.

I was leaving anyway, said Paul. He looked at the man's unchanging face and motionless body, and James Butler's personality came clearly through to him. Butler was a dangerous little man. An efficient little machine of suspicion and control. Underneath, though, was something repressed, something guarded by an inner fear. Right now, I want to turn in. So if you don't mind ...

Butler inclined his head slightly.

Unless, of course, he said, there's something more.

Nothing.

Thank you. Butler turned and walked smoothly to the door. Feel free to call on hotel services at any time, he said, and went out, closing the door behind him.

Paul frowned. But weariness was like a great load on him. He undressed and dropped into the bed. And sleep closed down about him like great, gray wings, enfolding.

He dreamed that he walked a cobbled road, in darkness under the stars, alone. And the cobbles grew as he went until they were great boulders to be climbed. And then that dream vanished and he dreamed that he was paralyzed, drifting upright through the nighttime streets of the Chicago Complex. He drifted along without touching the ground and after a while he came on an arc light on its pole that had been changed into a monstrous candy cane. And just beyond it a store front had been turned from plastic to ice, and was melting.

In the morning he woke feeling as if he had slept fourteen years, rather than fourteen hours, packed, and went down to the main lobby to pay his bill.

He cut through one of the hotel bars on his way down to the basement terminal. At this early hour it was all but deserted except for a plump middle-aged man who sat alone at a table with a small tulip-shaped glass of some purplish liquid before him. For a moment, passing, Paul thought that the man was drunk. And then he caught the scent of cinnamon from the glass and saw the man's eyes had pinpoint pupils. And looking behind this, he caught sight of Butler, seated in the darkness of a corner, watching. Paul went over to the hotel security man.

Are you notified about drug addicts, too? Paul asked.

Our bars stock the non-habit-forming synthetics, said Butler. It's quite legal.

You didn't answer my question,'' said Paul.

The hotel, said Butler, feels a certain responsibility to certain guests. He glanced up at Paul. That's legal, too. And any extra charges are quite reasonable. If you hadn't already planned to leave, Mr. Formain, I could have told you what services we had available.

Paul turned and went on. He found a one-man car at the terminal, and, getting in, punched for Warren's apartment. The first demand the Necromancer had made of his probationary apprentice was that Paul should move into the apartment, where Warren could have him under constant observation.

He found Warren waiting for him. The Necromancer turned over one of the bedrooms in the apartment to him, and then to all intents and purposes left Paul to his own devices. For the rest of the week Paul hardly saw the intense young man.

It was five days later that Paul, thoroughly bored with the apartment by this time, happened to be going through the music Warren had listed in his apartment player. Abruptly, he came across a title which caught his attention.

IN APPLE COMFORT ... vocal. Sung by Kantele

Kantele. Suddenly the mental connection was made. It had been there in the list of local members of the Chantry Guild. Kantele Maki. And he remembered now, there was a girl who sang professionally under the single name Kantele. She was the girl with the book that he had first seen on the news broadcast, and after that at the Directory. He pressed the small black button alongside the initial letter of the song tide.

There was the barest second of a pause, and then the chimed music rose softly ringing from the player, interspersed by the cool, shifting silver of the voice he recognized.

In apple comfort, long I waited thee And long I thee in apple comfort waited. In lonely autumn and uncertain———

A sudden gasp from behind him made Paul shut off the player abruptly and turn about. He found himself facing the girl herself.

She stood a little to one side of a bookcase of old-fashioned volumes. But the bookcase, to Paul's surprise, was swung out from its usual place, revealing not a wall behind it, but an entrance to a small room furnished and equipped like an office. Seeing his gaze go to it, Kantele broke suddenly out of the rigidity that had been holding her, and, putting out a hand, pushed the bookcase back into position, closing the entrance. They stood, looking across the room at each other.

I didn't know ... she said. I forgot you were living here now.

He watched her, curiously. She was noticeably pale.

Did you think I was someone else? he asked.

Yes. I mean —she said— I thought you were Jase.

She was one of the kind who lie defiantly. He felt her untruthfulness across all the distance separating them.

You've got a fine voice, he said. I was playing that song of yours——

Yes. I heard you, she interrupted. I—I'd rather you wouldn't play it, if you don't mind.

Would you? asked Paul.

It has associations for me. If you don't mind...

I won't play it if you don't want me to, of course, said Paul. He walked toward her and then stopped suddenly, seeing her reflexively take the one step back from him that the wall behind her allowed.

Jase... she said. Jase will be here at any minute.

Paul watched her, frowning a bit. He felt puzzled and a little exasperated by her, but also oddly touched, as he might be by anyone or anything defenseless that did not realize he meant it no harm. And that was odd too, be-cause Kantele did not give the impression generally of de-fenselessness, but of wire-like courage. Paul was reaching to approach this problem in words when the sound of the opening front door of the apartment brought both their heads around in its direction.

Warren and the flat-bodied, crop-haired man Paul had seen in the news broadcast, and again leaving the apartment with Kantele the first time he had come to see Warren, had just come in. They headed straight for Paul and Kantele.

Chapter

, You didn't answer the door, said Warren, stopping before them and looking at Kantele.

You didn't ring, said Paul.

He means me—my apartment, next door, said Kan-tele, but without looking away from Warren to Paul. I forgot he was here, Jase. I heard noise and I knew you were out. I stepped in from the office.

Yes, said Warren. His thin, dark, bright face looked from her to Paul without smiling. Well, you'd have met anyway. You know each other now? This is Paul For-main, Kantele. Paul, Kantele Maki.

How do you do? said Paul to her, and smiled. She gave a little spasm of a smile back.

And this is Burton McLeod.

McCloud? echoed Paul, shaking hands with the flat-bodied man.

Spelled McLeod, pronounced McCloud, said McLeod. His voice was mild and a little husky. His handgrip was dry and firm. His brown eyes were the lonely, sad, and savage eyes of a hawk on leash and perch. A week before, the hotel security man, Butler, had impressed Paul as dangerous. McLeod radiated dangerous-ness of a different order. If Butler was like a stiletto, needle-pointed and polished, then this man was scarred and heavy as some ancient broadsword.

While Paul and McLeod had been shaking hands,

Warren and Kantele had held each other's eyes for a long second. Now, suddenly, Warren turned away from her with a quickness that was almost like a shrug and took a small box from his pocket. He opened it in front of Paul.

Paul saw neat rows of white gelatin capsules within. Warren took one out and handing the box aside to McLeod, broke it and poured a white powder from it into his palm.

Taste, said Warren. Paul frowned.

It's quite harmless, said Warren. He dipped a finger in the powder himself, and put it to his tongue. Paul hesitated a second and then followed suit. He tasted sweetness.

Sugar? said Paul, looking at Warren.

That's right. The Necromancer dusted off his hands over a nearby ash tray. But to the man you'll be giving it to it'll be cocaine. I said — Warren stared at Paul tightly— it'll be cocaine. The minute you let the box into anyone's hands but your own. I mention this so that you'll realize you're legally in the clear in delivering it, as long as you keep it in your pocket until the last moment.

You want me to deliver it? asked Paul. Who to?

You know how the Koh-i-Nor's laid out. I want you to take this box to suite 2309. Don't ask directions from the desk clerk or anyone else. Give it to the man you find there. If you run into any trouble . . . Warren hesitated and glanced for a second at Kantele. I don't expect you will. But if you do, there's a chess tournament going on on the sixtieth level in the banquet rooms there. Go up there and look for Kantele. She'll get you out.

He stopped talking. There was a moment of silence in the room.

If it was cocaine, said Paul, of course I wouldn't take it.

You'll be carrying sugar, said Warren. His thin face seemed to flash for a second like a drawn blade in the brightness of the sunlight coming through the far windows of the room. It'll be transmuted into the drug only after you deliver it. You can believe or not believe, go or part company with me, just as you like.

I'll take it, said Paul. He held out his hand. McLeod gave him the box. Twenty-three-o-nine?

Twenty-three-o-nine, said Warren. The eyes of all three followed him, Paul could feel in the muscles of his back, as he took the box and left the apartment.

The desk clerk he passed at the Koh-i-Nor was a stranger and did not look up as Paul went by. Paul took the elevator tube to the twenty-third level.

It turned out to be a level of modern-décor, semi-VIP suites. The type of establishments that would require income in excess of forty thousand a year to be supported without strain by their occupants. Paul walked down the wide, tiled hallway, coolly lighted by the high, blue-curtained windows at each end of it, until he came to a door marked with the numerals 2309. Below it in small letters were the two words service entrance.

Paul touched the door. It was not only unlocked but ajar. It swung noiselessly back into its wall recess at his touch. He stepped into the kitchen of the suite.

Voices broke on his ear from elsewhere in the suite. He stopped dead, and with a faint noise the door slid closed again behind him. One of the voices was an incisive, middle-aged tenor, sharp with emotion. The other was thick and deeper in tone, stumbling, sullen.

... pull yourself together! the tenor voice was saying. The deeper voice muttered something unintelligible.

You know better than that! said the tenor. You don't want to be cured, that's what it is. The substitutes were bad enough. But your monkeying around with real drugs makes you a danger to the whole Department, if not the whole Division. Why didn't you take psychiatric leave when I offered it to you last March?

The heavy voice muttered something, it seemed to Paul, about the soup, or super.

Get that out of your head! said the tenor. You've let the statistics on mental health get you to seeing ghosts in the woodwork. Electronic equipment is electronic equipment. No more. No less. Don't you think that if there was anything more there, I'd know it?

Unless . . . muttered the heavy voice, got you already.

For your own sake —the tenor was disgusted— see your physician. Get yourself committed. I won't investigate your Department for the next four days. That'll give you time to get safely into a hospital room where you can decently refuse to answer questions. That's it, now. It's up to you. There was the sound of footsteps walking across hard flooring and a door button snapped to unlatch. Four days. I won't give you an hour more.

A wind of sudden suspicion blew coolly through Paul, chilling him. He turned quickly himself, stepped silently back through the door he had just entered, and out into the hall. There was a small alcove in the wall about six feet to his left. He stepped to it and pressed himself, back to its wall, deep in its shadow, looking along the hall to 2309's main entrance.

It opened immediately. A small, sparely erect man with thin gray hair came out, closed the door behind him, and went away from Paul toward the far set of elevator tubes at the other end of the hall. For a second as he turned to the elevators, Paul saw a sparrow-like profile against the blue illumination from the curtain windows, and recognized the man. In the suite the tenor voice had sounded vaguely familiar, and Paul had thought it might be the security man, Butler, speaking. But he saw now that there was another reason he had half-recognized the voice.

The man by the elevators was Kirk Tyne, World Complex Engineer. He was the executive head of the theoretical machinery that correlated the activities of the interlocking Complexes of technological devices that made modern life possible about the planet. In theory he and his Division of Engineers performed the functions of a sort of super-computing element, since sooner or later mechanical decisions had to find their ultimate authority and review in human ones. He reached out his hand now to open the elevator tube.

He had not quite touched it when a fair portion of the blue illumination from the window was suddenly occulted by the dark, wide-shouldered body of a tall man who stepped off the downshaft alongside the one toward which Tyne was reaching.

Well, Kirk, said the tall man. Didn't expect to see you here.

His voice struck and reverberated on Paul's listening ear like the little echoes chasing each other, on and on, from the sound of a gong struck in some deep and stony cave. It was the voice of Walter Blunt. Almost involuntarily, Paul stepped forward to the edge of his recess to get a better look at this head of the Chantry Guild. But Blunt was standing just so slightly turned that his face was shadowed and averted from Paul.

Got off here by mistake, replied Tyne, sharply and smoothly. I was headed for the chess matches upstairs. How about you, Walt?

Why, Blunt leaned on his heavy cane, and his voice had a humorous note in it, I saw you and stepped out to say hello. Headed for the lobby myself for a moment, to meet someone. You look good, Kirk. He laid aside his cane, leaning it against the wall of a tube, and offered his hand. Tyne shook it.

Thank you, Walter, said Tyne, shaking hands. He added, drily, I imagine we'll both live a while, yet.

Why, no, Kirk, said Blunt. The instrument of Armageddon is already at work. I intend to survive the conflict when it comes, but I don't expect you will.

Tyne shook his head.

You amaze me, Walt, he said. You know very well I'm the one man who knows all about your little sect— right down to the fact that it numbers only a little more than sixty thousand members, scattered all over the globe.

Yet you keep on insisting to my face that you're about to take over the world. And what would you do with it, once you'd taken it over? You can't run things without the very Complex technologies you claim you intend to destroy.

Well, now, said Blunt, there're a lot of different versions of this world of ours, Kirk. You've got one, with your Complexes of equipment—a nice steady-ticking world. The only pity is, it won't stop growing and complicating itself. Then, there's the world of the fanatics, the people who go in for dangerous sports, wild cults, and marching societies. And then again, there's a vague, gauzy world of the spiritually inclined, and the world of the asymbolic pioneers, artist and scientist. There's the world of those to whom tradition and an anchored existence are the only worthwhile basis for life. There's even the world of the psychotics, the neurotically crippled.

You talk, said Tyne, as if these other . . . attitudes, had an equal value with normal civilized society.

But they have, Kirk, they have, said Blunt, looming over the smaller man. Ask anyone who belongs to one of them. Don't look at me, man. This is your world—the world you boys made out of the industrial revolution three hundred years ago. To put it somewhat crudely, if this here's heaven, how come we still got stomachaches?

We got stomach-aches, said Tyne, stepping a little aside toward his elevator tubes. But we also got doctors to physic 'em. Which we didn't always have before. If you'll excuse me, Walt, I want to get upstairs to the chess matches. Are you coming back up?

Right away, said Blunt. Tyne stepped onto a disk floating up the tube beside him, with one foot. The disk checked itself. And how's Mrs. Tyne been? asked Blunt.

Excellent, said Tyne. He stepped completely onto the disk and was borne upward out of sight.

Blunt turned, stepped through the open door of the down tube onto a descending disk, and disappeared himself.

Paul came out from the shadow, still looking toward the elevators where the two men had stood. They were gone now, but Blunt's stick was still leaning where he had placed it before shaking hands with Tyne. Paul remembered abruptly how Blunt had stood, half-turned away from the alcove. It came to Paul that he had never got a square look at the head of the Chantry Guild. Before, this had been only a minor omission in the back of his mind. But suddenly it moved to the forefront.

Paul was suddenly conscious of something that most of the time he merely took for granted. That for him to meet someone was automatically to gain a great deal of insight into them. And Blunt was an enigma. But an enigma with whom Paul's life had become considerably entangled. With Blunt, as with the Guild itself, there seemed to be considerably more going on than met the eye. Deciding, Paul strode out from his alcove, down to the elevators, and picked up the stick. Blunt could hardly avoid facing the man who returned his walking stick to him in person.

Paul came back to suite 2309, the main entrance this time, the one through which he had seen Tyne leave. He pressed the door button. It was unlocked and opened at his touch. He stepped inside, closing the door behind him, and found himself in the sitting room of the suite, and facing the man he had seen drugged and under watch by Butler in the hotel bar, the morning of his leaving.

The sound of the closing door brought the man's head around. He had been half-turned away, blowing his nose on a tissue. At the click of the door's latching, he jerked about to face Paul. And then he went backward across the room, mouthing and stumbling like a creature scared out of all common, ordinary sense, until the high, wide window of the room stopped him.

He stood, trapped and staring, blinking, shivering, pushing against the window as if he could shove himself through it into the twenty-three levels of unblocked air that separated him from the ground level before the hotel.

Paul checked instinctively. And the wave of sick fear emanating from the man crested and broke over Paul like solid ocean surf. Paul stood, momentarily and in spite of himself, stunned. He had never thought a thinking being could go so bad.

The man's eyes flicked and bored into Paul. The eyes themselves were watering, and the nose sniffled uncontrollably. The man's face was gray and rigid. Something mangled whimpered within him.

It's all right, said Paul. All right ... He came gently toward the man, Blunt's stick tucked under his right arm and the box of capsules in his single hand outstretched. Here... I'm just bringing you these....

The man continued to stare and sniffle spasmodically. Paul, now within arm's length of him, laid the box down on a table. As an afterthought, he opened it with two fingers and took out one of the white capsules.

See? he said. Here . . . He held it out to the man, but the other, either jerkily reaching for it, or jerkily pushing it away, knocked it from Paul's fingers. Automatically, Paul bent to pick it up.

His head was still down when warning rang loud within him. He straightened up suddenly to see the drug addict facing him now, a small handgun black and deadly in one trembling hand. The pinhole of its muzzle wavered at Paul's chest.

Easy, said Paul. Easy...

His voice seemed not even to reach the ears of the other man. The drug addict stepped forward and Paul automatically stepped back.

It sent you, said the man, hoarsely. It sent you.

Nothing sent me, said Paul. I came to bring you that box on the table. There it is. He nodded toward it.

The man did not look at it. Moving out into the room, he began to circle Paul, while keeping gun and eyes aimed at Paul.

I'm going to kill you, he said. You think I won't kill you, but I will.

Why? asked Paul. And that monosyllable, he thought, should at least have made the other pause, but again it seemed the drug addict did not even hear him.

It sent you to kill me, said the man. It can't kill. It isn't built to allow itself to kill. But it can fix things so some other factor does the duty work.

I don't want to hurt you, said Paul.

It's no use, said the man. Paul could sense the will to pull the trigger accumulating in the mind opposite him. The man's back began to straighten with something like pride. I understand, you see. I know all about it.

The man was almost between Paul and the room's entrance, now. He was at a distance of about eight feet, out of arm's reach. Paul made a move to step toward him and the tiny muzzle of the gun came up sharply.

No, no! said the man. No!

Paul stopped. He became conscious suddenly of the hard roundness of Blunt's walking stick under his arm. It was a good three feet in length. Paul began to let the stick slip down into his hand.

Just a little, said the man. Just a moment more ... It thought you'd find me alone here. It didn't know I had a gun. When you steal something, there's no way for it to know. No record—what're you doing?

The last three words came out in a scream, as the man noticed the end of the walking stick slide into Paul's hand. The pinhole muzzle leaped up and forward. Paul jumped aside and forward. There was no time to throw the stick as he had planned. He saw the man swinging to bring the gun's aim upon him. The other was close.

Now! screamed the man. The walking stick leaped in Paul's grasp and he felt it connect solidly. The man fell away from him.

The man fell and rolled over on his back on the carpet The small gun tumbled foolishly out of his hand. He lay, looking in terrified accusation at the ceiling.

Still holding the walking stick, Paul stepped forward. He stared down at the drug addict. The man lay still. His bloodshot eyes did not focus upon Paul. Paul lifted the stick in his hand and stared at it. The dark wood was dented and splintered a little but in no way broken or weakened. Paul looked back down at the man on the floor, letting the heavy weight of his unnaturally muscled right arm, holding the stick, drop limply at his side.

Among the sparse black hair on the man's skull, the blood was beginning to flow, slowly and darkly. Paul felt emptiness inside him, as if he had deeply inhaled on nothingness. The broken skull looked as if it had been stricken almost in two by some heavy sword.

Chapter

The man's dead, thought Paul. He took a deep, shuddering breath, but the emptiness inside him did not go away. Why don't I feel anything more than this?

Once he would have expected an answer from the unconquerable element back in the depths of his mind. But with the overgrowth of his right arm, and the decision in the psychiatrist's office, that part of him seemed to have melted into the rest of his consciousness. He was all of one piece now. Still, he could almost imagine he heard the ghost of a whisper replying to his thought

Death, it whispered, is a factor also.

The stick was still poised in his hand. Paul opened his hand about it and a small object fell onto the carpet. He bent and picked it up. It was the capsule he had offered the dead man, flattened and bent now from being between his palm and the walking stick. He put it in his pocket. Swiftly he turned and went out of the suite.

He closed the door behind him and was halfway to the same elevator tubes which Tyne and Blunt had taken, when his mind started working sensibly again. He stopped dead.

Why should he run, he asked himself? He had only acted in self-defense on being attacked by what amounted to an insane man waving a gun. Paul went back into 2309 and used the phone there to call the hotel's security office.

The office answered without lighting up the vision tank. A voice spoke to him from out of blank grayness.

Who is calling, please?

Suite 2309. But I'm not a guest of the hotel. I want to report———

One minute, please.

There was a moment of silence. The tank still did not light up. Then suddenly it cleared and Paul found himself looking into the neat, expressionless features of James Butler.

Mr. Formain, said Butler. I was informed twenty-eight minutes ago that you had entered the hotel by the plaza entrance.

I was bringing something———

So we assumed, said Butler. As a matter of routine, our hall monitor cameras are lighted to follow nonguests under conditions when we haven't been notified of their visit in advance. Is the occupant of suite 2309 with you now, Mr. Formain?

Yes, said Paul. But I'm afraid there's been an accident here.

Accident? Butler's voice and expression stayed invariable.

The man I met here threatened me with a gun. Paul hesitated. He's dead.

Dead? asked Butler. For a second he merely looked at Paul. You must be mistaken about the gun, Mr. Formain. We have a complete file and check on the occupant of 2309. He did not own a gun.

No. He told me he stole it.

I don't mean to argue with you, Mr. Formain. But I must inform you that in accordance with police regulations this conversation is being irreversibly recorded.

Recorded! Paul stared into the tank.

Yes, Mr. Formain. You see, we happen to know that it would have been impossible for the resident in 2309 to steal any kind of weapon. He has been under constant surveillance by our staff.

Well, your staff slipped up!

I'm afraid that's impossible, too. The only way a gun could have entered the suite where you are now would have been if you had carried it in yourself.

Just a minute. Paul leaned down toward the tank. Mr. Kirk Tyne, the World Complex Engineer, was here just before I came.

Mr. Tyne, said Butler, left the North Tower lobby at 14:09 by up tube on the elevators and arrived at the chess tournament on the Sixtieth level at 14:10. Our hall monitors show no one entering 2309 in the past six hours but you. Accordingly...

The barest flicker of Butler's eyes to the side woke Paul suddenly to the nearness of the trap into which he was sliding. The hotel security agent was no mean hypnotist himself. The dead monotony of his voice, the expressionless face that classed all things with the dull unimportance of a lost hotel key or misdirected luggage, would have been lethal against anyone who lacked Paul's inherent immunity.

Without waiting even to shut off the phone Paul moved, letting his reflexes take over. He was at the door and through it into the hall before Butler had time to stop talking. The hall outside was empty.

Moving swiftly, Paul turned from the elevators and raced down the hall to a heavy fire door. He pulled it open and passed through into the concrete shaft of a stairway. He found himself on a small landing with steps leading up from one end and down from another. The edge of another fire door recessed in its slot in the wall stood level with the first step of the down flight of steps.

Paul ran down the stairs. He was quiet about it, but the stair shaft itself was as silent as something that had been sealed for eternity. He made four floors without a hint of danger. Then, when he reached the landing of the fifth level below where he had started, he saw the staircase fire door closed, barring further progress.

He turned to the door leading out into the hallway of that level and went through it, onto soft carpeting.

Mr. Formain? asked a polite voice in his ear. If you'll just come...

A security agent, a young man by his voice, had been standing back by the side of the door where the latch was, his back to the wall alongside and waiting for Paul to come out. As Paul stepped through, the agent spoke and stepped forward to take hold of him. Paul felt the left hand of the other man expertly seeking the twin nerves just above his elbow and the man's right reaching out to catch his thumb and bend it back wrist-ward in that unobtrusive hold long familiar to police people, known as the comealong.

The searching hands of the security man failed of their mark, for no fault of the man himself, but for two reasons he could not have expected. The first was that his pinching left hand missed its mark completely, the seeking thumb and middle finger not finding the nerve-points they sought since they were hidden under the greatly overdeveloped muscles of Paul's arm, just above the elbow. The second was that Paul was no longer thinking his reactions out in conscious terms, but in this emergency abandoning himself to that invulnerable part of him that had earlier claimed his overdeveloped arm as its own. So, what actually happened was that even as the security man reached out to take him prisoner, even as he felt the man's hands upon him, Paul was already in movement.

At the other's touch, all in a split second, he checked, balanced, moved a fraction of an inch to the right, and drove the point of his elbow backward with all the natural strength of his arm.

It was a move executed with a hesitationless smoothness and accuracy that would have made it lethal against a trained fighter. It was aimed to be lethal. The elbow-point was fired with impossible accuracy into the unprotected area just below the man's breastbone, and driving upward.

It would have torn lungs, crushed arteries, and possibly burst the heart. The only reason it did not do so, and did not kill, was that at the last split second Paul realized what was about to happen and managed to slightly deflect the aim.

Still, it lifted the man and slammed him back against the hallway wall, from which he fell forward and lay on his side, eyes half showing under fallen lids, legs a little drawn up and twitching with little spasmodic movements. Even as it was, he had been severely damaged.

And so almost, it seemed, had Paul.

It was nearly as if the blow he bad just struck had recoiled on him with most of its original force. He doubled up as if he had been the target. A washback of emotion shuddered through his whole body, and he staggered blindly down the hall, dizzy, nauseated, half-blinded, and bent over. Still moving, however, he got himself under control. Somehow he sought for and found the control in him that was necessary, and it was like pushing a button. So swiftly that it almost seemed he had never felt it, the reaction vanished from him and he straightened up.

He found himself now at the end of the hall, by more tall, curtained windows. The elevator tubes were close and there was no place else to go. He remembered that in case of trouble he was to seek out Kantele on the sixtieth level, and he stepped onto a disk floating up the up tube.

It carried him up with it. Over his head the bottom of the immediately superior disk closed him off into a little tube-shaped enclosure of which the bottom was his own disk, with him filling the tube. For the moment he was safe. Looking out through the transparent wall of the tube, he saw the various levels dropping past him, but though he saw occasional figures in the halls and standing by the tubes, none of them seemed to pay any special attention to him.

If the hotel security men were waiting for him any-where, he thought, it would be at the roof-garden top of the hotel where the small-craft landing pad was. But that was thirty levels above the floor where he intended to get off.

He was at the fifty-eighth level now. He moved forward to the edge of the disk, and as the sixtieth level approached, he stepped off.

He stepped almost immediately into a hallway crowd of people coming and going, and standing around in small, talkative groups. He pushed his way through them and stepped into the first entrance to a banquet room he found. Within were tables at which chess matches were going on, here and there with a few watchers clustered around some special pair of players. Kantele was not in view. He left the room and went on.

In the third room he visited he found Kantele. She was with several other people who were watching an individual match across the room from the entrance, and not too far from the French windows which indicated an outside balcony or terrace beyond the banquet room. She was standing behind the chair of a man who, with a sudden quickening of his pulse, Paul recognized to be Blunt. Blunt sat leaning forward, absorbed in the condition of the board he was observing, and Kantele stood with one hand on his wide shoulder.

It occurred to Paul that he was going to have the chance of facing Blunt sooner than he had expected. He started toward the table where Blunt and Kantele watched, and abruptly stopped.

He no longer had the walking stick.

Paul stood still, and for a second the hum and movement of the room faded almost out of his consciousness. His hand was empty. But he could not remember either dropping the stick or laying it aside. All that occurred to him was that he must have let go of it in the reaction that followed his elbow-jabbing of the security man. Well, if that was the case, Blunt might have something to explain to the police—and then he might not. It might be that, as in the case of Tyne's visit to 2309, hotel security would, on finding the stick, politely cover up for him.

At any rate, Paul intended to face the Chantry Guild head now. Paul went forward again.

But he was already too late. Kantele, he found, had already looked up and seen him. Her face unnaturally expressionless, she shook her head at his advance and then gestured with a nod at the French windows. Paul hesitated for a second, then turned and obeyed.

He passed the tables and stepped through one of the French windows, closing it behind him. He found himself, as he had expected, on a long and fairly narrow terrace with a waist-high parapet of ornamental stone around it. Beyond the parapet he could see the rooftops of lower surrounding buildings, and beyond them the farther levels of Chicago Complex. The afternoon had turned out to be almost cloudless, and the bright sun lanced warmly across the white, round tables and translucent, single-legged chairs on the terrace. He walked to the parapet and looked over.

Below him the side of the Koh-i-Nor's North Tower fell sheer in an unbroken pattern of alternate window glass and marbled tile to the top level of commuter traffic, sixty stories below. Postage-stamp-size directly underneath him was the main concourse in front of the tower, and, a narrow two hundred yards away across it, some sort of office building with a single aircar on its landing pad, and the highly-polished surface of the building's construction tile reflecting the utter blue of the sky.

He turned back from the parapet. On the white table top nearly beside him was a brightly-illustrated throw-away magazine left by some earlier visitor to the terrace. The breeze across the terrace ruffled and tried to turn its pages. He glanced at the titles in colorful type on its cover. The lead one jumped at him.

WAS GANDHI'S WAY RIGHT? And under this, in slightly less bold print:

The Psychotics of Our Overcrowded Cities

The author of this later article, he noticed with interest, was the same Dr. Elizabeth Williams, psychiatrist, he had encountered only the week before.

He reached for the magazine to turn to the article.

Formain, said a voice. He looked up and turned.

Facing him from about fifteen feet away, his hand on the half-open French door through which he must just have stepped out onto the terrace, was Butler. The small hotel security man stood with one hand thrust into the right pocket of his barrel-cut jacket His face was as polite as ever.

You better come along quietly with me, Formain, he said.

Paul let go of the magazine. The fingers of his single hand flexed reflexively. He took a casual step in Butler's direction.

Stop there, said Butler. He took his hand out of his pocket, revealing a small finger gun. Paul stopped.

Don't be foolish, said Paul.

Butler looked at him with the closest approach to a flicker of emotion in his face that Paul had yet seen.

I think that's my line, Butler said. Don't be foolish, Formain. Come along quietly.

Paul looked across the short distance separating them. His first impulse, as it had been with the agent in the hallway, had been to go into action. He had checked that And now a part of him waited critically to see what the other part of him might do. He looked at Butler, trying to narrow down his mental field of vision. Trying to see the man as something individual, unique, limited by the forces that tied him into his environment, by the very elements that made him dangerous.

Anyone can be understood, Paul told himself. Anyone.

For a second, Butler's image seemed to swim in Paul's retina with the effort Paul was making, like a figure seen through the bottom of a drinking glass. Then the image cleared.

I don't intend to be foolish, said Paul. He sat down on the edge of the table beside him. I'm not going with you.

Yes, said Butler. He held the finger gun steady.

No, said Paul. If you take me in, in tell the police that you were the source of supply for the drugs of the man in 2309. Ill tell them you used to be a drug addict yourself.

Butler gave a small, tired sigh.

Come along, Formain, he said.

No, said Paul. To take me, you'll have to shoot me first. If you kill me, there's bound to be the kind of investigation you don't want. If you do less than kill me, I'll tell them what I just told you I'd say.

There was a moment's silence on the terrace. While it lasted, they could both hear the leaves of the magazine rustling in the breeze.

I am not a drug addict, said Butler.

No, said Paul. But you were until some fanaticism, some particular blind faith gave you the strength to kick the habit. You're not afraid of the fact being found out so much as the fact that an investigation into the fact would cause you to be cut off from this source of strength. If I mention it, the police will have to investigate the matter. So, you're going to let me go.

Butler regarded him. The security man's expression was as unreadable as ever, but the finger gun jerked for a second as his hand trembled momentarily. He hid the hand back in the pocket of his jacket.

Who told you? he asked.

You did, said Paul. Being the sort of man you are, the rest had to follow.

Butler watched him for a second more, then turned toward the French door behind him.

Someday I'll make you tell me who told you, he said, and went back into the banquet rooms where the chessmen were at war.

The French door had barely closed behind him when one of the other doors opened and Kantele stepped through, quickly closing the door behind her. She came quickly over to Paul, her fine-cut features pale and her lips a little compressed above the square blue shoulders of her tailored jacket and the tooled-leather strap of the heavy handbag cutting into one of them.

How did you—no, don't tell me, she corrected herself as she met him. There isn't time. There are a dozen more hotel men going through the banquet rooms. Here...

She lifted her large handbag onto one of the tables and pressed it at certain points. It opened out like a slow-motion jack-in-the-box. It was a one-man parachute copter, of the emergency type used by aircraft and fire departments. She unbuckled the straps that would fit around his shoulders and helped him into it.

As long as the air-traffic police don't spot you, you'll be all right, she said, tightening the straps upon him. Head for the rooftop of that building opposite.

The sound of one of the French doors opening made them both turn. It flew open, smashing against one of the tables, and two men catapulted onto the terrace, drawing guns from their jackets.

Paul did not hesitate. With one sweep of his powerful arm he snatched up the table alongside and threw it, as if it had been a balsawood mock-up of itself, at the two charging men.

They dodged, but not quickly enough. They went down before it. And Paul, sweeping Kantele up in his grasp, took one long step to the top of the parapet, and another off into sixty levels of emptiness.

Chapter

They fell like a stone, while Paul's hand, restricted by the fact that his arm must keep its hold on Kantele, fumbled with the controls of the parachute copter. He located them finally and switched them on, and suddenly it was like a heavy brake being applied against the force of gravity as the spinning blades blurred into action to break their fall.

I'm sorry, he said to Kantele. But they'd seen you with me. I couldn't leave you behind to face the music.

She did not answer. Her head lay back and sideways against his shoulder and her eyes were closed. Her face was like the face of someone who has surrendered completely to some superior force.

Paul turned his attention to guiding the copter toward the building across the concourse from the hotel. He was only partially successful. The copter, powerful enough to handle a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound individual, was fighting a losing battle in trying to uphold the combined weights of a man and woman both wen above the average in size. They were drifting off and down at a long slant, the way the winged seed of a maple tree flutters to earth in fall winds.

The rooftop, you said? asked Paul. Her eyes remained closed. He joggled her a little. Kantele!

She opened her eyes, slowly.

Yes, she said. What's that noise?

There were faint, piping noises around them. Looking back over his shoulder, Paul saw the two men he had bowled over with the table, leaning on the parapet with their forearms, almost casually. But the fists of both held dark objects. They were shooting at Paul and Kantele.

The anesthetic slivers of metal which were the missiles of their weapons could not be too accurate at the present and steadily increasing range. Air police were the greater danger. Paul fingered the controls and they rotated slowly through a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle.

To the north of them and about five hundred feet up, were two specks approaching rapidly. Kantele saw them as Paul did, but she said nothing.

And after we land on the roof, what? asked Paul. He looked down into her face. She had closed her eyes again.

Jase is waiting, on the floor below. She answered almost dreamily, and her head was back against his shoulder again.

The floor below? Paul was puzzled and nearly provoked by her. She seemed to have given the matter completely over into his hands. We haven't time for the roof. I'll try for a window.

If he has it open, she said dreamily, without opening her eyes.

He understood what she meant. They were falling swiftly, even though at a slant. If Jason Warren did not see them coming and get the window open in time, they would most certainly smash themselves against the unbreakable glass, bending their copter blades and ending in an unchecked drop to the traffic level thirty or forty stories below. There would be no hope for them.

He'll have it open, said Paul. She did not disagree.

The police cars were swelling in size visibly with the swiftness of their approach. But the building before them was close now, too. Looking down, Paul suddenly saw one of the top level's larger windows slide back.

He angled the copter toward it.

For a moment he thought that he would be falling too rapidly to make it over the open sill. Then it leaped up before him. He jammed the controls on to full braking power, ready to bum the copter's small motor out now that it had served its purpose.

The last burst of effort from the device saved them. The copter shot them through the window, checked itself in the midst of its own suddenly enclosed hurricane, and froze its bearings with an ear-splitting screech. Paul and Kantele dropped less than three inches to land on their feet, upright upon an office floor.

The hurricane with its floating documents and light objects blew itself suddenly out, and the Necromancer came toward the two of them from a far corner of the room. Kantele opened her eyes and looked about her; then, suddenly stiffening, pushed herself almost violently away from Paul and, turning her back, walked several steps from him until a desk blocked her path. Paul looked after her, frowning.

Get that copter off, said Warren. But Paul was already shrugging out of the straps. The piece of ruined equipment fell heavily to the floor.

Well, Jase? asked Paul. The minute he had said it the name sounded oddly on his tongue. For the first tune he realized that he had always thought of the Necromancer in terms of his last name. That he had called him by the name everybody else who knew him used, was like cracking a barrier. He saw the other man glance at him for a moment, oddly.

We're located, now, said the man called Jase. We're probably surrounded already. We'll have to take another way out with you.

Why bother? asked Paul. Jase looked at him again, oddly.

We take care of our own people, of course, Jase said.

Am I one? asked Paul.

The Necromancer stopped dead and looked at him.

Don't you want to be? he asked. He nodded toward the door of the office. He added, dryly, If you want to walk out there, I won't stop you.

No, said Paul, and to his own surprise found himself smiling a little sadly, no, I'm one of you, all right.

Good. Jase turned briskly to a desk and swept it clean of papers, desk pad, and office instruments. Shut the window, he said, and Kantele went across the room to it. As the window closed, Jase lifted a brief case from— below the table and opened it.

He took from the brief case a large, hooded, black cloak which, when he put it on and pulled the hood over his head, covered him almost completely. In the shadow of the hood his face lost something of its identity. Kantele had come back to the table. He took also from the brief case what looked like three good-sized cones of incense, and lighted them. They immediately began to pour forth a dense, heavy smoke which quickly started to obscure the room. The smoke, to Paul's senses, had a sweet, almost cloying smell and evidently something narcotic about it, for he felt himself getting light-headed with the first few inhalations.

They were all standing close around the desk. The room was a fog of dark smoke now, in which Paul's drugged senses were already having difficulty focusing on nearby objects. Across the desk from him the Necromancer's voice came suddenly, deeper-toned than ordinary, measured, chanting....

This ae nighte, this ae nighte, everie night and alle...

Kantele's voice, from another quarter of the table, chimed in. And what had been pure doggerel recital from Jase's lips acquired a touch of music with the addition of her voice.

Fire and sleete and candlelight, destruction take thee alle.

The Necromancer produced one more item and put it on the desk. At the sight of it Paul's mind went suddenly white with an awareness of danger. He would have been a poor sort of mining engineer not to have recognized it. What Jase had just put on the table was a cotton block of blasting jelly two inches on a side, enough to reduce the office and everyone within it to uncollectable fragments. It was topped with no more than a ninety-second fuse, and as Paul peered through the gathering smoke, the Necromancer pinched the fuse and started it burning.

Jase chanted alone:

If from hence away thou'rt past

And Kantele's voice joined him in chorus:

Everie nighte and alle...

To Whinny-muir thou comest at last, Jase chanted alone.

Destruction take thee alle. Kantele joined again.

He should not have recognized what they were chanting, but it happened that Paul did. From where or how it came to him, he could not in that smoke-fogged moment remember. But it was a somewhat changed version of one of the old north-of-England corpse chants, sung at wakes with the corpse under the table and a dish of salt on its breast. It was a ritual with its roots going back beyond Christianity to the ancient Celts, to a time when small dark men crept together in the forests to sing their dead kinsman on his road of shadows, in the first nights after his departure. And the version Paul heard now had none of the solemn music of its seventeenth-century shape, but was nearly back to the harsh atonal chant of the original primitive, cold as winter stones and unsparing as the wind across them. On it went, with Jase speaking alone and then Kantele joining in the chorus. It was a lyke-wake dirge :

If ever thou gavest roof and flame, Everie nighte and alle... Pass thee by the standing stane, Destruction take thee alle.

The standing stane, when thou art past, Everie nighte and alle ... To empty airt thou comest fast, Destruction take thee alle.

If ever thou feddest fish or fowl, Everie nighte and ...

Distantly, through the chanting and the swirling smoke, came the sound of a loud-speaker from beyond the closed window.

Formain! Paul Formain! This is the police. We have you completely surrounded. If you do not come out within two minutes, and those with you, we will force an entrance. There was a momentary pause, and then the speaker once more rattled the window. Formain! Paul Formain. This is the police. We have you....

Meanwhile, in the office the smoke was now so thick that even the cotton block of blasting jelly and its rapidly diminishing fuse was hidden from Paul's eyes. He seemed to hear the chanting of Jase and Kantele mounting in volume:

From empty airt when thou'rt past Everie nighte and alle ... To Alleman's Ende thou comest at last, Destruction take thee alle.

Something was happening now. The fuse was shortening fast. A pressure was building up about the three of them and the desk between them. Paul felt a sudden deep-moving urge to join with Kantele in the chorus of the chant. He heard the fuse fizzing. A part of him shouted that in seconds he would be blown to pieces. But another part watched, detached and curious, and checked the chant in him before it reached his lips.

And if thou holdest to any thinge Everie nighte and alle...

The Ende thou canst not enter in, Destruction take thee alle.

Jase's and Kantele's voices were all around Paul now, like a loop of rope holding them all together and drawing tighter. The fuse must be all burned down now.

But if thou guardest nae thing at all, Everie nighte and alle... To Alleman's Ende thou'lt passe and falle And Destruction'll take thee alle!

Suddenly, Jase and Kantele were gone, and almost in the same fraction of a second the world lighted up around Paul and he felt the sudden slam of enormous pressure against him, as if he were a fly clapped between two giant hands. He was aware, for one tiny moment of perception, of the office flying to pieces around him as the blasting jelly exploded, and then he himself seemed to fly off into nothingness.

Book Two: SET

By stony staircase, hall, and pier, Those shadows mazed around me there, Wove doubt on doubt, and—fools!—broke out That part in me that feared no doubt.

The Enchanted Tower

Chapter

With the situation fully and correctly understood, it becomes entirely reasonable that the very small fraction of a second preceding a violent death could be a trigger to speculative thought.

Ninety-three years after Paul was caught by the explosion of the block of blasting jelly, the phenomenon of no-time—that is, of a state of existence in which time is lacking—was finally and fully explained. It had been made use of, of course, even by people preceding the Chantry Guild. On a hit-and-miss basis. But with the development of the phase-shift form of transportation that permitted the interstellar expansion of the human race, it became necessary to understand the a-time state which was basic to the phase shift. Briefly and crudely, the explanation was that there is a reciprocal relationship between time and position. And if time becomes nonexistent (perhaps nonoperative would be a better word) then the choice of position becomes infinite.

There are, of course, practical difficulties limiting the use of this, which arise when the problem of exactly calculating the desired position arises. But that has been explained in a different place.* Once more, in the future and again in a different place, the problem of no-time will be entered into once again when the philosophical

*DORSAI!—Commander-in-chief II

aspects of it become relevant But for now, to return once more to the historical moment of the exploding blasting-jelly cube, the important thing is that for vulgar practical purposes, no-time can be taken merely to mean sufficient, uncounted time.

No one—literally, no one—is immune to error. It had been an error for Paul to linger behind Jase and Kantele in their departure and be caught by the first edge of the explosion. Having been caught, there was only one way out He went instinctively into no-time to escape being destroyed, as lesser individuals have done before him. Nearly everyone has heard of the authenticated instance of the man who walked around the horses of his coach into nonexistence, and there are many others.

In no-time he remained conscious, and was triggered into a sudden awareness that since the original boating accident, at no time had he ever been without some element of awareness. Even his sleep had been given over either to periods of asymbolic thought on the subconscious level or to dreams. And his dreams, in fact, seemed a fine mill in the complex of his mental machinery. A mill which took the results of the crude data that had been mined from the solid substances of his daytime surroundings by the tools of his senses, then rough-crushed by the intellectual upper processes of his intelligence, and now were ground to fine powders and begun on the obscurer process that would separate out the pure valuable elements of comprehension.

Other than this he did not approach any letting go of his awareness. It had occurred to him that this might be the basic cause of his unyielding refusal to accept hypnosis. But this explanation failed to completely satisfy him in that area of his perception in which he was most sensitive—it did not feel like the complete answer. If the recognizable processes by which he attempted to understand and control his environment could be compared to the mechanical, this last could be best compared to something chemical. And this was so powerful and ef-fective a tool in its own way that for practical purposes it blinded him to the common channels of reasoning. It was extremely difficult for him to add two and two and get four. It was exceedingly simple and natural for him to contemplate two by itself, as an isolated element, and find four as an implied, characteristic possibility of it.

He looked out on all existence through a window that revealed only unique elements. He approached everything in terms of isolates. Isolates and their implied possibilities of characteristics. All time, for example, was implied in any single moment that he might choose to examine. But the moment itself was unique and unalterably separated from any other moment, even though the other moment also implied all of time.

It followed that it was almost impossible for him to be tricked or lied to. Any falsity palmed off on him almost immediately collapsed like fraudulently understrength construction under the natural weight of its own proliferating possibilities. It also followed, and this was not always an advantage, that he was almost impossible to surprise. Any turn of events, being implied in the moment preceding its taking place, seemed perfectly natural to him. As a result he did not question a great many things that he might normally have been expected to question.

He had not, therefore, questioned the abilities the Chantry members seemed to claim for themselves. It had seemed—to this part of him, at least—quite reasonable that Jase and Kantele should attempt to make their escape with him by means of narcotic smoke, archaic corpse chant, and a block of blasting jelly with a short fuse. He had, however, allowed himself to get so interested in what was going on that he found himself left behind and caught in the first microsecond of the explosion.

He was driven out to the very edges of his consciousness, but no farther. He was aware of himself moving very swiftly and at the same time being driven by the explosion away down into the impossibly tiny end of something like an enormous funnel. He flew through this into all but complete unconsciousness, fighting for survival. He was an infinity of fathoms deep in darkness, but somewhere above him was light and life.

He came up, fighting.

His mind was quicker to react to full consciousness again than his body. He woke to find himself plunging clear across some sort of small, bare room with a circular, raised stage in the center of it, and carrying four men along with him as they attempted to restrain him. He was headed for the door to the room.

He checked, understanding. And, after a second, the men holding on to him let go. As they cleared away from in front of him, Paul caught sight of himself in the mirror surface of a far wall. His clothes were torn, apparently by the explosion, and his nose was bleeding slightly. He got a handkerchief tissue from his pocket and wiped the blood away from his upper lip. The nose stopped bleeding. Jase and Kantele watched Mm from across the room.

I don't understand this, said one of the men who had been holding him, a small, brisk-looking man with a shock of brown hair over a sharp-featured face. He looked at Paul almost challengingly. How did you get here? If Jase brought you, why didn't you come with Jase?

Paul frowned.

I seem to have been a little slow, he said.

Never mind, spoke up Jase from across the room. If you're all right now, Paul, come on.

He led the way out of the room, Kantele following with a momentary, troubled glance in Paul's direction. Paul went after them.

He caught up with them in a hall outside the room. It was a blank wall without windows, and it led them up an incline until they stepped suddenly around a corner and emerged into open air. Paul looked curiously around himself. They had emerged onto a vast field spotted with the raised white concrete pads from which space-going vehicles fitted with their great collars of lifting equipment took off. Beyond were the snow-topped peaks of a mountain range Paul did not recognize.

It was no commercial field. The uniformity of the constructions about the field and the khaki coveralls of the personnel about spoke clearly to the effect that this was a government installation.

Where are we? asked Paul. But Jase was already striding away with Kantele to a pad occupied by the squat, almost bulbous shape of an outer-space vessel looking like an ancient artillery shell many times enlarged, and fitted with its spreading soup-plate collar of atmosphere engines, ducted fans in the outer ring, ramjets in toward the center. Paul caught up with Jase and Kantele.

Where are we? he asked again.

Tell you after we're aboard, said Jase economically. They walked along together, Jase staring straight ahead toward the ship, his face like a knife edge, Kantele with her wordless gaze down and ahead, so that she looked at the treated gravel surface of the field on which no green grew, just before her as she walked. Paul felt a sudden small rush of sorrow that human beings should be so locked away and separate in their body and mind, so bound to different wheels. And, with a sudden soundless shock, it occurred to him that out of all the real universe the one class of isolates who strove and threatened to burst the bounds of their separateness was people.

This realization, simple as it appeared in bald statement, exploded in Paul like a pan of flash powder set off before a man in a vast and complex city, standing lightless under the stars. It blinded, rather than illuminated, but its light left an afterimage printed on the retinas of the explorer in the dark, and would be permanently remembered. With his mind washed clean of other matters for the moment, Paul walked automatically into the base tunnel of the take-off pad, rode the elevator up through pad and collar, and paid little attention to anything until the whine of the outer ring of fans began to impinge on his consciousness. He came back to present awareness to see that he was seated in a convertible acceleration couch-chair, in a passenger compartment of the ship. In front of him he could see the black top of Jase's head just showing above the top cushion of the next couch-chair, and across the aisle from Jase, up against the rounded wall enclosing the elevator-tunnel running up the center of the ship, he saw the profile of Kantele.

The ship lifted. After a little the sound of the fans was drowned out in the beginning thunder of the jets, which mounted the ladder of volume into silence. A little after that, the viewing tank in the wall beside Paul lighted up, and, looking into this illusion of a window, he saw the lifting collar of atmosphere engines, their earth-bound clumsiness all left behind, fall away gracefully like some enormous soaring bird toward the cloud-laced earth far below.

Couchback, all passengers, announced a speaker system somewhere above Paul's head. All passengers, couchback now.

The chairs tilted and leveled into horizontal position. Deep cushioning buffers moved in about his body. There was a moment of silence and then the space engines fired, and their mighty thrust threw the blunt body of the ship, with Kantele, and Jase, and Paul, and all within it, out between the stars.

Mercury, Paul discovered, was a five-day run. The ship had four cross levels between the pilot room in the nose and the engines in the rear. The passengers were restricted to two of them. Evidently because it was government procedure, they were required to take mild sedatives during the actual flight. These made Kantele and three other passengers whom Paul did not know sleepy. They spent most of their time dozing with their couch-chairs in a reclining position. Jase had disappeared early up into the crew's section and Paul had not seen him after that for the first four days of the run. Since Kantele seemed to reinforce the effect of her sedatives with an obvious disinclination to have anything to do with Paul, once more that left Paul solitary.

To Paul's unusual set of mental and physical reactions, the sedatives brought a bodily lethargy, but an increase in mental speculation and introspection. Jase had escaped early before Paul could question him again, but a tall, stiff-backed man, in the seat behind Paul and across the aisle which with the two rows of seats circled the central elevator shaft, had replied to Paul's question.

Operation Springboard, he had said sharply. He stared almost fiercely at Paul out of middle-aged eyes above a neat white mustache that contrasted with the brown tan of his face. You know about the project to reach the Arcturian planets, don't you? Apprentice, are you?

Yes, said Paul.

Ask your master, boy! He'll answer you. Who is he? Necromancer Warren?

Secretly a little amused to be addressed as boy, a term he had not had used to him since he was fourteen, Paul nodded.

That's right, he said. Do you happen to be a Necromancer, too?

No, no, said the man. Sociologist—what they call 'untitled.' Don't have the patience for the rigmarole. But it's fine work for a younger man like yourself to get into. He grew fiercer, suddenly. The white mustache seemed to bristle. A good work!

Necromancy? asked Paul.

All of it. All of it. Think of our children ... and their children.

A man of about the same age as the white-mustached speaker leaned out of a couch-chair farther back on Paul's side of the circular aisle. Heber, he said. Yes, yes, said the white-mustached man, sinking back into his seat. You're right, Tom. Don't ask me questions, boy; ask your master. I've got to take my medication now, anyway. He reached into the little compartment in one arm of his chair, and Paul, giving up that avenue of information, turned and sat back in his own place.

He had plenty to occupy his mind. He let his attention go free among it.

It was a type of mental activity having its own element of actual built-in pleasure reward, a pleasure to which, he had lately come to realize, it would be quite possible to become addicted, if it were not for the fact that the basic drive to accomplish forbade too much loitering on the pathway from means to end. It was the sheer pleasure of turning the questioning spirit loose in the great dark city of all personal knowledge. For those who panicked easily in the dark, it was no occupation. But for those without fear and the true night-sight of understanding, there was no pleasure like that of wandering some strange and intricate part of that city, until out of shadow rose shapes, and out of shapes, plan, and out of plan—original purpose. Only then, at last with original purpose encompassed and understood, came— perhaps—the greater occupation of putting that knowledge to work in new building.

So for five days Paul all but lost himself in a new part of his city of knowledge. It was only shortly before landing on Mercury that he was abruptly called back from it, and the one who called him back was Kantele.

I wasn't going to ask you why, she said. He awoke to the fact that she was standing in the aisle before his seat, looking down at him. But I just can't. . . . Why did you do it? Why did you have to kill Malorn?

Kill who? asked Paul. For a second she and her question was still mixed La with the shapes of his thoughts. Then the shapes faded and he became aware that they were, at least as far as he could see on this side of the elevator shaft, alone on the level among the couch-chairs.

Kevin Malorn—the man at the hotel.

Kevin Malorn, echoed Paul. For a part of a second the only thing that was in his mind was a feeling of unutterable sadness that he should have been the instrument of the man's death and never until now known the name under which other people had known him alive.

You won't tell me, said Kantele, when he did not answer immediately. He looked up at her pale, set face.

Yes, he said. But you probably won't believe me. I didn't kill him. I don't know why he died.

She stared at him for a moment longer, then whirled about and walked off around the elevator tube. Following a little later, he discovered all the other passengers one level up in the lounge, watching in the large tank there the ascent of the landing collar, with chemical engines fueled by native Mercury products, that would carry them safely down to that planet's surface.

Chapter

It was a strange tumbled landscape through which they all walked the half mile from the ship to the reception dome of Station Springboard. The sky was white to the right and dark to the left, and cloudless. There was enough of an atmosphere here on the surface of Mercury's twilight zone to scatter the light in this direction. The resulting illumination seen through the face windows of Paul's protective suit was like the yellow glare before a thunderstorm back under the kinder sky of Earth. In this all-pervasive, unchanging light, the terrain appeared to be peopled with the split and damaged fragments of fantastic sculptures. It would be the temperature changes of alternating dark-side and light-side storms that had caused this, and the volcanic action along the line of weakness in Mercury's crust that the Twilight Zone represented. But still it looked like a country out of a dream of unreality, a garden out of a nightmare, set up and despoiled by witches.

They entered the dome and stepped through a lock into an elevator which sank for a quite noticeable distance. Paul guessed that he might now be in the neighborhood of forty to sixty levels underground, for the elevator had been a large mechanical, rather than magnetic, one, and the descent had been uncomfortably swift As the elevator halted, a further door opened and they passed into a desuiting room.

From the desuiting room they were herded into separate cubicles for what Jase informed Paul were purposes of decontamination. Paul found himself instructed by a wall speaker to strip, pass through a shower area, and a further door where new clothes for him would be waiting.

He did so and came out into another cubicle, this one not much more than an area hacked out of the solid granitic rock. On a concrete bench there a pile of clothing was waiting for him.

He set about putting it on and found it to be of a peculiar style. There were soft leather shoes, pointed at the toe, fawn-colored; what seemed to be long green stockings; shorts; a green smock with a loose belt to cinch it up, and a sort of half-sleeved leather jacket

It seemed likely to Paul that the Chantry Guild was given to dressing for dinner, so to speak, here on Mercury. He put the clothes on—the left arm of smock and jacket had been designed sleeveless and all the clothes were in his size—and stepped through the further door of the second cubicle.

He checked instinctively.

He had emerged into a single, low-ceilinged room, crudely hollowed out of the rock and lighted by two flaring torches in heavy wall brackets of some metal-like blackened iron. The floor itself was roughhewed of rock and pressed hard against the soles of his feet through the soft leather of his shoes. Beyond the torches was darkness and he could see no far wall.

He turned quickly, back the way he had come. And stopped. There was no door behind him, through where he had stepped a minute before. He faced more of the hewn-rock wall, only that He reached out and touched it with his hand. It felt as solid as judgment day.

He turned back to the light of the torches. Between them now, he saw standing the man called Heber, the torchlight sparkling on his white mustache. Unlike Paul, he was clothed in a single scarlet robe and hood. The hood threw a shadow across his forehead and the long sleeves of the robe fell together from his hands, which were joined together before him.

Come here, said Heber. His lips trembled a second after the last word, as if he could just barely restrain himself from adding boy! Paul walked up to him and stopped. Heber was looking past him, the older man's shadowed eyes seeming fantastically deep-socketed in the shadow of the hood.

I am here to sponsor this apprentice, announced Heber, to his initiation into the Société Chanterie. It is required that there be two sponsors, one visible and one invisible. Is the other sponsor here?

I am, said the voice of Jason Warren, startlingly at Paul's right ear. He turned and saw nothing but the walls of the room. But he could now feel the presence of Jase beside him.

Paul turned back to Heber. The white-mustached man, he saw, was now holding in one arm a heavy, leather-bound, archaic-looking book. In the other hand he held by the middle a snake about four feet in length, which twisted and writhed.

To the jurisdiction of the Alternate Laws you have come, said Heber. To the jurisdiction of the Alternate Laws are you now committed and sealed. And to the jurisdiction of the Alternate Laws will you be bound, for all time past or present, and beyond time until the Alternate Laws cease their effect.

I witness this, said the voice of Jason, at Paul's shoulder.

Take then your spear, said Heber. He held out the snake toward Paul's single hand. Paul reached for it, but at the first touch of his fingers around it, it ceased suddenly to move and live. He found himself holding, in fact, a tall wooden spear with a dully gleaming metal point

Take then your shield, said Heber, stepping forward with the book. But it was a kite-shaped metal shield, with leather grips riveted to a wooden frame, that he hung from Paul's armless left shoulder by a wide leather strap.

Now follow me, said Heber. He strode off into the darkness beyond the torches. And Paul, following after, found himself proceeding down slanted tunnels and around corners in the rock, until he came finally to a small, square, carved-out room where two more torches burned on either side of what looked like a stone altar, more long than wide. Along the top of the altar were laid out, from left to right, a small toy sailboat with the tiny figure of the toy sailor within it spilled out as the boat lay over on one side, a toy model of the console of a mine, a stained and weathered conch shell, and a three-dimensional snapshot of the head of Malorn, the dead drug addict, showing the broken skull.

Heber and Paul stopped before the altar.

Let the other sponsor now instruct the apprentice, he said. Jase's voice spoke from Paul's other side. He looked at empty air.

The apprentice is an apprentice in the art of Necromancy, his voice said. Therefore we have brought him to the root of the tree. Let the apprentice look.

Paul turned his attention back to the altar. A massive tree root now emerged from the rock and arched out over the objects on the altar, down to his feet and Heber's.

This, said the voice of Jase, is the well Hvergelmer, in the realm of death. The root is the first root of the ash, Yggdrasil, which is the tree of life, knowledge, fate, time, and space. During the period of his vigil here, it is the duty of the apprentice to defend it, and the parts of his life which are on the altar. It may be that the apprentice will not be attacked during his time of vigil. But it may be that the dragon Nidhug and his brood will come to gnaw at the root of the tree. If the tree and the parts of his life are attacked, the apprentice may call on the Alternate Forces or not, as he chooses; but if he does not conquer Nidhug, Nidhug will devour him.

Jase ceased speaking. Heber spoke, and Paul turned his head to the white-mustached man.

The tree, said Heber solemnly, is an illusion. Life is an illusion. Nidhug and his brood are an illusion, as is all the universe, eternity, and time. Only the Alternate Forces exist, and time, space, and all things within them are merely toys of the Alternate Forces. Know this and know yourself unconquerable.

You shall keep vigil, put in the sound of the Necromancer's voice, until the third sounding of the gong. With the third sounding of the gong, you will be freed from the realm of death, back to the world of light and life once more. Now I leave you, until the third ringing of the gong.

Paul felt a void suddenly beside him. He turned instinctively toward Heber. The white-mustached man was still standing beside him.

I leave now, too, said Heber. Until the gong rings for the third time. He stepped past Paul, back toward the entrance to the room; and as he did, Paul caught the ghost of a wink from the man's near eye, and a sotto voce mutter, Rigmarole.

Then Heber was gone.

Silence held the room.

It was the silence of the rock where the rock is igneous in nature and far below ground. Here there was no water dripping, only the still cold. Even the torches flared in silence. Paul's breath went out in a frosty plume in that red, dancing light, and vanished with each fresh inhalation.

But he began to become aware.

About him was stone, the mineral flesh of Mercury, in all directions. The rough, cut stone underfoot pressed sharply against his feet, the cold wrapped him like a chilly cloak. The minutes passed in solemn procession, all but identical one with the other. Time piled up in the quiet of the room, the strap of the shield cut into his shoulder and his fingers grew a little cramped around the wooden shaft of the spear. He held it with its butt on the floor, its point elevated, angled a little out from him like a Roman sentry. An hour went by, and then another. And then, perhaps, another....

The solemn, brassy note of a deep gong struck once, reverberated through the entrance to the room, and beat about his ears. It rang away into silence, leaving a memory behind it in the noiselessness of the room until that, too, was buried and smoothed over by the marching minutes.

Paul's mind drifted out to an unconscionable distance. He leaned on his spear, now, and the shield had swung forward with its own weight. He thought of mountains whose stony sides and slopes were constructed of empty space, and of the twinkling illuminations of distant habitations upon the mountain peaks, which were the lights of the farther stars, stars not seen from Earth. A bittersweet emotion of sorrow and desire stirred in him like faint smoke from burning incense. Love and hunger pulled against each other within him....

And then suddenly, distant in the back of his mind, came a chime of warning.

He came back to the stony room. It was as it had been before. The torches still flared upward and his breath smoked peacefully on the still air. But now there was something more. While he had daydreamed, the deep waters of some unseen danger had welled up to the very entrance of the room. It lapped now in the darkness just beyond the reach of his sight. And in those deep waters, there was something stirring.

It was Nidhug and his scaly brood.

They were not real. They were an illusion, as was the deep mass of waters making a beleaguered island of this room. Paul recognized this with a sure and certain swiftness. Those minds among the Chantry Guild who were capable of such tricks were flooding the solid (but to these productions of their minds, transparent) rock with the emanations of fear, pictured as heavy, secret waters. And through the fear, in the guise of a monstrous, scaly worm and its litter, they were now lifting the image of self-doubt. These things were fantasies, but nonetheless dangerous. Fear can be a deadly danger to the mind, and self-doubt can cause an organism to destroy itself, as Paul knew. Knowledge could be a shield and wisdom a weapon, but it took something uniquely human to use them.

He braced himself. The rising tide of fear was already flooding into the room. If he allowed his senses to yield to the fantasy, he could see it, like a gray, quicksilver tide, pushing its sullen rivulets into this and that small indentation in the rough floor. Nidhug and his children were very close.

The gong rang for a second time.

The waters crested suddenly, swirling into the room. They mounted up to his knees, surged to his waist, and in seconds eddied about his throat. They swelled over his head. And touched the ceiling. The room was drowned.

One massive body length below the unblocked opening of the room, Nidhug gave his final surge of approach. He lifted like a demon out of darkness, and a second later his hideous mask blocked the entrance to the room.

Leveling his spear, hunching his shoulder behind the shield, Paul went to meet him. As in a nightmare, the heavy waters of fear slowed his thrust to a dreamlike slowness. The point of his spear slid deliberately through the impending medium and glanced off the tortured dragon-face.

But the overdeveloped muscles of Paul's arm, like what they represented in Paul himself, were something more than ordinary strength. The spear point, glancing off, dug a deep furrow from the twisted jaw to the staring eyes, and a flood of deep, luminescent, reddish blood stained and clouded the atmosphere of the room.

In this murk the battle became obscure. It became drearily a matter of Paul's thrusting back what came at him again and again. Gradually there broke on him the understanding that this was a contest that he perpetuated by the very act of fighting in it. The way to victory here was to deny the enemy. He laughed.

He threw away both shield and spear.

Like an express train, Nidhug leaped upon him. Paul stood still. And the gaping jaws, monstrous before him, closed as if on the invisible substance of an inch-thick wall between them. And the creature vanished.

The waters began to slowly ebb from the room. Far away the first shivering sounds of the third striking of the gong reached out to Paul's ears.

And in that moment, that tiny piece of a second, with the dragon vanished and the waters failing, something real and deadly reached through and struck.