The Earthbred and their fates are Yours

In all their stations, Their multitudinous languages and many colors

Are Yours, and we whom from the many You made different, O Master of the Choice.

—ANCIENT EGYPTIAN HYMN

And hell is more than half of paradise.

—edwin arlington robinson, "luke havekgal”

When Moses struck the rock, he forgot to stand out of the way of the water and so barely escaped drowning.

—THE BOOK OF JASHAR

1

Loga had cracked like an egg.

At 10:02, his image had appeared on the wall-screens of the apartments of his eight fellow tenants. Their view was somewhat above him, and they could see him only from his naked navel to a point a few inches above his head. The sides of the desk almost met the edges of their field of vision, and some of the wall and floor behind him showed.

Loga looked like a red-haired, green-eyed Buddha who had lived for years in an ice cream factory and had been unable to resist its product. Though he had lost twenty pounds in the last three weeks, he was still very fat.

He was, however, a very happy Buddha. Smiling, his pumpkin face seeming to glow, he spoke in Esperanto. "I've made quite a discovery! It'll solve the problem of ...”

He glanced to his right.

"Sorry. Thought I heard something.”

"You and Frigate," Burton said. "You're getting paranoid. We've searched every one of the thirty-five thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three rooms in the tower, and ...”

The screens flickered. Loga's body and face shimmered, elongated, then dwarfed. The interruption lasted for perhaps five seconds.' Burton was surprised. This was the first time that any screen had displayed interference or malfunction.

The image steadied and became clear.

"Yaas?" Burton drawled. "What's so exciting?”

The electronic vision blinked into enigma.

Burton started, and he clamped his hands on the arms of his chair. They were a hold on reality. What he was seeing certainly seemed to be unreal.

Zigzag cracks had run from the corners of Loga's lips and curved up over his cheeks and into his hair. They were deep and seemed to go through his skin and the flesh to the mouth cavity and the bone.

Burton shot up from his chair.

"Loga! What is it?”

Cracks had now spread down across the Ethical's face, chest, bulging belly, arms and hands.

Blood spurted onto his crazing skin and the desk.

Still smiling, he fell apart like a shattered egg, and he toppled sideways to the right from the armless chair. Burton heard a sound as of glass breaking. Now all he could see of Loga was the upper part of an arm, the fragments stained as if they were pieces of a broken bottle of wine.

The flesh and the blood melted. Only bright pools were left.

Burton had become rigid, but, when he heard Loga cry out, he jumped.

"I tsab u!”

The cry was followed by a thump, as if a heavy body had struck the floor.

Burton voice-activated other viewers in Loga's room. There was no one there, unless the red puddles on the floor were Loga's remains.

Burton sucked in his breath.

Seven screens sprang into light on Burton's wall. Each held the image of a tenant. Alice's big dark eyes were larger than normal, and her face was pale.

"Dick? That couldn't have been Loga! But it sounded like him!”

"You saw him!" Burton said. "How could he have cried out? He was dead!”

The others spoke at once, so shaken that each had reverted to his or her native tongue. Even the unflappable Nur was speaking in Arabic.

"Quiet!" Burton shouted, raising his hands. Immediately thereafter, he realized that he had spoken in English. That did not matter; they understood him.

"I don't know what happened any more than you do. Some of it couldn't have happened, and so it didn't. I'll meet you all outside Loga's apartment. At once. Bring your arms!”

He removed from a cabinet two weapons that he had thought he would never need again. Each had a butt like a pistol's, a barrel three inches in diameter and a foot long, and at the firing end, a sphere the size of a large apple.

Alice's voice came from her screen.

"Will the horrors never stop?”

"They never do for long," he said. "In this life or that.”

Alice's triangular face and large dark eyes were set in that withdrawn expression he disliked so much.

He said harshly, "Snap out of it, Alice!”

"I'll be all right," Alice said. "You know that.”

"Nobody is ever all right.”

He walked swiftly toward the door. Its sensory device would recognize him but would not open until he had spoken the code phrase, "Open, O sesame!" in classical Arabic. Alice, in her apartment, would be saying in English, " 'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.”

The door closed behind him. In the corridor was a large chair made of gray metal and a soft scarlet-dyed material. Burton sat down on it. The seat and back flowed to fit the contour of his body. He pressed a finger on the black center of a white disc on the massive left arm of the chair. A long thin metal rod slid up out of the white disc on the right arm. Burton pulled the rod back, a white light spread out from under the chair, and it rose, stopping two feet above the floor when he eased the rod into the dead center position. He turned the rod; the chair rotated to face the opposite direction. Using the rod to control vertical movement, and pressing on the central black spot of the left disc to control speed, he moved the chair down the corridor.

Presently, floating swiftly past walls displaying animated murals, he joined the others. They hovered in their chairs until Burton had taken the lead, then followed him. Burton slowed the chair slightly when he entered a huge vertical shaft at the end of the corridor. With the ease of much practice, he curved the path of the chair up the shaft to the next level and out into another corridor. A hundred feet beyond the shaft, he halted the chair at the door to Loga's apartment. The chair sank down onto the floor, and Burton got out. The others were only a few seconds behind him. Babbling, though they were not easily upset, they got out of their chair-vehicles.

The wall extended for three hundred feet from the shaft to an intersecting corridor. Its entire surface displayed a moving picture in what seemed to be three dimensions. The sky was clear. Far away was a dark mountain range. In the foreground was a jungle clearing in which was a village of dried-mud huts. Dark Caucasians in the garments worn by Hindus circa 500 b.c. moved among the huts. A slim, dark young man clad only in a loincloth sat under a bo tree. Around him squatted a dozen men and women, all intently listening to him. He was the historical Buddha, and the scene was not a reconstruction. It had been filmed by a man or woman, an Ethical agent who had passed for one of them, and whose camera and sound equipment were concealed in a ring on a finger. At the moment, their conversation was a slight murmur, but a codeword from a viewer could make it audible. If the viewer did not understand Hindustani, he could use another codeword to switch the language to Ethical.

Another codeword would make the picture emit the odors abounding near the photographer, though the viewer was usually better off without these.

Directly in front of Burton was a treestump on which someone had painted a symbol, a green eye inside a pale yellow pyramid. This had not been in the original film; it marked the entrance to Loga's apartment.

"If he's got the door set for his codeword only, we're screwed," Frigate said. "We'll never get in.”

"Somebody got in," Burton said.

"Perhaps," Nur said.

Burton spoke loudly, too loudly, as if he could activate the opening mechanism by force of voice.

"Loga!”

A circular crack ten feet in diameter appeared in the wall. The section moved inward a trifle, then the section became a wheel and rolled into the wall recess. The scene on it did not fade out but turned with the surface.

"It was set for anyone who wanted to enter!" Alice said.

"Which was not the right thing to do," Burton said.

Nur, the little, dark, and big-nosed Moor, said, "The intruder may have overridden the codeword and then reset the mechanism.”

"How could he have done that?" Burton said. "And why?”

"How and why was any of this done?”

They went cautiously through the opening, Burton leading. The room was a forty-foot cube. The wall behind the desk was a pale green, but the others displayed moving scenes, one from that planet called the Gardenworld, one of a tropical island as seen from a great distance, and one, which Loga must have been facing, of a daytime thunderstorm at a high altitude. Dark angry clouds roiled, and lightning spat brightly but silently from cloud to cloud.

Incongruous in the clouds, the active screens hung glowing, still displaying the rooms of the tenants.

Red pools glistened on the desk and the hardwood floor.

"Get a sample of the liquid," Burton said to Frigate. "The computer over there can analyze it.”

Frigate grunted and went to a cabinet to look for something with which to take a specimen. Burton walked around the room but saw nothing that looked like a clue. It was too bad that the other viewers had not been on. However, whoever had done this must have made sure that they were not active.

Nur, Behn, and Turpin went to search nearby rooms. Burton activated the screens that would display these rooms. Doubtless, none but the three would be in them, but he wanted to keep an eye on them. If one person could be turned into a liquid, why not others?

He stooped and passed a finger through the wetness on the floor. When he straightened up, he held the tip of the finger a few inches from his eyes.

"You aren't going to taste it?" Alice said.

"I shouldn't. In some respects, Loga was rather poisonous. It'd be a strange form of cannibalism. Or of Christian communion.”

He licked the finger, made a face, and said, 'The mass of the Mass is inversely proportional to the faith of the square.”

Alice should not have been shocked, not after what she had gone through on this world. She did look repulsed, though whether it was by his act or his words he did not know.

"Tastes like blood, vintage human," he said.

Nur, Behn, and Li Po came into the room. "There is no one there," the Chinese said. "Not even his ghost.”

Aphra Behn said, "Dick, what did Loga say?”

"I don't think he could have said anything. You saw him crack and melt. How could he have spoken after that?”

"It was his voice," Behn said. "Whoever said it, what did it mean?”

"I tsab u. That's Ethical for 'Who are you?' “

"That's what the Caterpillar said," Alice murmured.

"And Alice in Wonderland couldn't tell him," Burton said. "The whole event is crazy.”

Frigate called them to the console in the corner.

"I put the specimen in the slot and asked for identification. There you are. You couldn't identify an individual by his blood in a.d. 1983, but now ...”

The console screen displayed, in English, as Frigate had requested: INDIVIDUAL IDENTIFIED: LOGA.

Beneath that was the analysis. The liquid was composed of those elements which made up the human body, and they were in the proper proportions. Flesh had indeed turned into liquid.

"Unless the Computer is lying," Nur said.

Burton swung around to face him. "What do you mean by that?”

"The Computer may have an override command. It could have been told to give this report.”

"By whom? Only Loga could do that!”

Nur shrugged thin, brown, and bony shoulders.

"Perhaps. An unknown could be in the tower. Remember what Pete thought he heard when we were celebrating our victory.”

"Footsteps in the corridor outside the room!" Burton said. "Frigate said he thought it was his imagination!”

"Ah, but was it?”

It was not necessary to use the console. Burton asked the Computer—as distinguished from the small auxiliary computers—a few questions. A circular section of the wall glowed, and words on it indicated that no unauthorized person had entered Loga's room. It denied that Loga's commands had been overridden.

"Which it would, I must admit, if this mysterious stranger had told it to do so," Burton said. "If that's happened ... well, by God, we are in trouble 1”

He asked for a rerun of the scene they had witnessed through their viewers. There was none. Loga had not directed the Computer to record it.

"I thought everything was going to be clear, unmysterious, straightforward from now on," Frigate said. "I should have known better. It never is.”

He paused, then said softly, "He cracked open like Humpty Dumpty, except that Humpty Dumpty broke after he fell, not before. And then he turned to water like the Wicked Witch of the West.”

Burton, who had died in 1890, did not understand the last reference. He made a mental note to ask the American about it when there was time.

Burton was going to ask the Computer to send in a robot to clean up the liquid. He decided, after some thought, to leave the room as it had been found. He would lock the door to the apartment with a codeword that only he knew. And then, if someone unlocked it ...

What could he do?

Nothing. But he would at least know that there was an intruder.

Nur said, "We've been assuming that what we thought we saw take place here actually did take place.”

"You think that what we saw was computer-simulation?" Frigate said.

"It's possible.”

"But what about the liquid?" Burton said. "That's not simulated.”

"It could be synthetic, a false clue. Loga's voice could have been reproduced to deceive and confuse us.”

Alice said, "Wouldn't it be more logical just to abduct Loga? We might have thought that Loga had just gone away for some reason or another.”

"Why in the world would he do that, Alice?" Burton said.

"We were to return to The Valley day after tomorrow," Li Po said. "If Loga wanted to get rid of us, he'd have it done in two days. No, that liquid ... the whole thing ... there's someone else in the tower.”

"That makes ten in the tower then," Nur said.

"Ten?" Burton said.

"The eight of us. Plus the unknown who did away with Loga, though more than one might have done that. Plus Fear. That makes at least ten.”

"In a sense, we're gods," Frigate said.

"Gods in a gaol," Burton said.

If they felt godlike, their faces did not show the vast assurance and happiness that must distinguish gods from humanity. The first area they had gone to from Loga's apartment was the highest story in the tower. Here, in a huge chamber, was the hangar of the Ethicals. There were two hundred aerial and spacecraft of various kinds there, in any of which they could have flown to any place in The Valley. However, the hangar hatches had to be opened, and that the Computer refused to do. Nor could they operate the hatch mechanisms manually.

The unknown who had liquefied Loga had inserted an override command in the Computer. Only he—or she—or they— had the power to raise the hangar hatches.

They stood close together in a corner of the immense room. The floor, walls, and ceilings were a monotonous, overpowering gray, the color of prison cells. Their means of escape, the saucer-shaped, sausage-shaped and insect-shaped machines, seemed to brood in the silence. They were waiting to be used. But by whom?

At the opposite wall, a thousand feet away, was a fat cigar-shaped vessel, the largest of the spaceships. It was five hundred feet long and had a maximum diameter of two hundred feet. This could be used to travel to the Gardenworld, wherever that planet was. Loga had said that it would take a hundred years, Earthtime, to arrive at its destination. Loga had also said that the ship was so computerized-automatic that a person of average intelligence and little knowledge of science could operate it.

Burton's voice broke the silence.

"We have some immediate pressing problems. We must find out who did that horrible thing to Loga. And we must find a way to cancel the override inhibits in the Computer.”

"True," Nur said. "But before we can do that, we must determine just how much control of the Computer we have. What our limits are. When you fight, you must know your strengths and your weaknesses as well as you know your face in the mirror. Only thus can we determine how to overcome the strengths and weaknesses of our enemy.”

"If he is our enemy," Frigate said.

The others looked at him with surprise.

"That's very good," Nur said. "Don't think in old categories. You're learning.”

"What else could he be?" Aphra Behn said.

"I don't know," Frigate said. "We've been so manipulated by Loga that I'm not one hundred percent convinced that he is on our side or that he is right in what he's done. This unknown ... he may be doing this for the right reason. Still ...”

"If Loga was his only obstacle, the unknown's removed it," Burton said. "Why doesn't he come forward now? What could we do to oppose him? We're like children, really. We don't know how to use all the powers available. We don't even know what they are.”

"Not yet," Nur said. "Pete has proposed another way of looking at events. But, for the time being, it's not useful. We have to assume that the unknown is our enemy until we find out otherwise. Does anyone disagree?”

It was evident that no one did.

Tom Turpin said, "What you say is OK. But I think that the very first thing we got to do is protect ourselves. We got to set up some kind of defense so what happened to Loga don't happen to us.”

"I agree," Burton said. "But if this unknown can override any of our commands ...”

"We should stick together!" Alice said. "Keep together, don't let anyone out of our sight!”

Burton said, "You may be right, and we should confer about that. First, though, I propose that we get out of this gloomy, oppressive place. Let's go back to my apartment.”

The interior door to the hangar opened, and they rode their chairs down the corridor to the nearest vertical shaft. The next level was five hundred feet down, which caused Burton to wonder what was between the hangar level and the second one. He would ask the Computer what it contained.

Inside his quarters, with the entrance door shut by his codeword, he began to act as host. A wall section slid back, revealing a very large table standing on end. This moved out from the recess, turned until the tabletop was horizontal, floated to the center of the room, extended its legs, which had been folded against the underside, and settled on the floor. The eight arranged chairs around it and sat down. By then they had gotten their drinks from the energy-matter converter cabinets along one wall. The table was round, and Burton sat in what would have been King Arthur's chair if the room had been Camelot.

He took a sip of black coffee and said, "Alice has a good idea. It means, however, that we must all live in one apartment. This one isn't quite large enough. I propose we move into one down the hall near the elevator shaft. It has ten bedrooms, a laboratory, a control room, and a large dining-sitting room. We can work together and keep an eye on each other.”

"And get on each other's nerves," Frigate said.

"I need a woman," Li Po said.

"So do all of us, except Marcelin, and maybe Nur," Turpin said. "Man, it's been a long, hard time!”

"What about Alice?" Aphra Behn said. "She needs a man.”

"Don't speak for me," Alice said sharply.

Burton slammed the tabletop with a fist. "First things first!" he bellowed. Then, more softly, "We must have a common front, band together, no matter what the inconvenience. We can work out the other matters, trifling, if I may say so, at this moment. We've been through a lot together, and we can cooperate. We make a good team, despite some differences that have caused some abrasion recently. We must work together, be together, or we may be cut down one at a time. Is there anyone who won't cooperate?”

Nur said, "If anyone insists on living apart, that one is under suspicion.”

There was an uproar then, stilled when Burton hit the table again.

"This bottling-up will be scratchsome, no doubt of that. But we've been ridden gallsore by worse things, and the better we work together, the sooner we'll be free to pursue our own interests.”

Alice was frowning, and he knew what she was thinking. Since their final breakup, she had avoided him as much as possible. Now ...

"If we're in jail, we're in the best one in two worlds," Frigate said.

"No jail's any good," Turpin said. "You ever been in the slammer, Pete?”

"Only the one that I made for myself all my life," Frigate said. "But it was portable.”

That was not true, Burton thought. Frigate has been a prisoner several times on the Riverworld, including being one of Hermann Goring's slaves. But he spoke metaphorically. A most metaphorical man, Frigate. Shifty, a verbal trickster, ambiguous, which he would cheerfully admit, quoting Emily Dickinson to justify himself.

"Success in circuit lies.”

Quoting himself, he would say, "The literal man litters reality”

"Well, Captain, what do we do next?" Frigate said.

The first priority was to go to their individual apartments and bring their few possessions to the large apartment down the hall. They went in a body, since it would not do to go alone, and then they picked out their bedrooms. Alice took one as far from Burton's as possible. Peter Frigate chose the apartment next to hers. Burton smiled ferociously on noting this. It was an acknowledged but mostly unspoken fact that the American was "in love" with Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves. He had been ever since, in 1964, he had seen the photographs of her at the ages of ten and eighteen in a biography of Lewis Carroll. He had written a mystery story, The Knave of Hearts, in which thirty-year-old Alice had played the amateur detective. In 1983, he had organized a public subscription drive to erect a monument to her on her unmarked grave in the Hargreaves family plot at Lyndhurst. Times were hard, however, and little money had been given. Then Frigate had died, and he still had not learned if his project had been completed. If it had, above Alice's body there was now a carved marble monument of Alice at the tea table with the March Hare, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat's head above and behind her.

Meeting her had not lessened his love for her, as a cynic might expect, but had heated it. The literary attractions had become fleshly. Yet he had never said a word to her or Burton about his passion. He loved, or had loved, Burton too much to make what he would have called a dishonorable move toward her. Alice had never shown the slightest sign of feeling toward him as he did toward her. That did not necessarily mean anything. Alice was a master at concealing her feelings in certain situations. There was the public Alice, and there was the private Alice. There might also be an Alice whom even Alice did not know. Whom she would not at all want to know.

4

Two hours before lunchtime, they were settled in, though still unsettled by the morning's events. Burton had chosen not to use the control console, which could be slid from a wall recess. Instead, he had asked the Computer to simulate the screen and the keyboard on the wall. This could have been reproduced in light on the ceiling or the floor if required. The floor, however, was covered with a thick rug, which the unlearned would have thought was a very expensive Persian. Its model had, in fact, been woven on the Gardenworld, a recording of it had been brought to the tower, and the Computer had reproduced the original by energy-mass conversion.

Burton stood before the wall, the simulation at head level. If he chose to walk back and forth, the simulation would keep pace with him.

Burton gave Loga's name and ID code and asked the Computer, in English, where Loga's living body was.

The reply was that it could not be located.

"He's dead then!" Alice murmured.

"Where is Loga's body-recording?" Burton said.

It took six seconds for the Computer to scan the thirty-five billion recordings deep under the tower.

"It cannot be located.”

"Oh, my God! Erased!" Frigate said.

"Not necessarily," Nur said. "There may be an override command to give such an answer.”

Burton knew that it would be useless to ask the Computer if such was the case. Nevertheless, he had to.

"Has anyone commanded you not to obey an override command?" Burton 'said quickly.

Nur laughed. Frigate said, "Oh, boy!”

NO.

"I command you to accept all my future commands as override commands," Burton said. "These supersede all previous override commands.”

RKJKCTKD. NOT FUNCTIONAL.

"Who has the authority to command overrides?" Burton said.

LOGA. KHK-12W-373-N.

"Loga is dead," Burton said.

There was no reply.

"Is Loga dead?" Burton said.

NOT IN IXJMAIN OF KNOWLKDGK.

"If Loga is dead, who commands you?”

The names of the eight, followed by their code-IDs, flashed on the screen. Below them, flashing: limitku authority.

"How limited?”

No reply.

Burton rephrased.

"Indicate the limits of authority of the eight operators you have just displayed.”

The screen went blank for about six seconds. Then it filled with a sequence of orders that the Computer would accept from them. The glowing letters lasted for a minute and were succeeded by another list. In another minute, a third list appeared. By the time that Number 89 had sprung into light at the bottom of the screen, Burton saw what was happening.

"It could go on for hours," he said. "It's giving us a detailed list of what we can do.”

He told the Computer to stop the display but to print off a complete list for each of the eight. "I don't dare ask it for a list of don'ts. The list would never end.”

Burton asked for a scan of the 35,793 rooms in the tower and got what he expected. All were empty of any living sentients. Or dead ones.

"But we know that Loga had some secret rooms even the Computer does not know about," Burton said. "Or at least it won't tell us where they are. We know where one is. Where are the others?”

"You think that the unknown might be in one of those?" Nur said.

"I don't know. It's possible. We must try to find them.”

"We could compare the tower dimensions with the circuitry," Frigate said. "But, my God, that would take us many months! And the rooms might still be so cleverly concealed that we would not find them.”

"That sounds as interesting as cleaning spittoons," Turpin said. He went to a grand piano, sat down, and began playing "Ragtime Nightmare.”

Burton followed him and stood by him.

"We'd all love to hear you play," he said—he wouldn't, he had no liking for music of any kind—"but we're in conference, a very important one, vital, you know, in the full sense of the word, and this is no time to divert or distract us. We need everyone's wits in this. Otherwise, we may all die because one didn't do his share.”

Smiling, his fingers running spiderlike on the keys, Turpin looked up at Burton. The long, exhausting and dangerous trip to the tower had thinned him to one hundred and seventy-five pounds. But since he had been in the tower, he had stuffed himself with food and liquor, and his face was waxing into full moonness. His large teeth were very white against his dark skin—not as dark as Burton's—and his dark brown hair was wavy, not kinky. He could have passed for white, but he had chosen to stay in the black world on Earth.

"Nigger is how you was raised, how you think," he would sometimes say. "As the Good Book says, it don't do no good to kick against the pricks." He would laugh softly then, not caring whether or not his hearer understood that by "pricks" he meant "whites.”

"I thought I'd give you thinkers some background music. I'm no good at this kind of thing.”

"You've a good mind," Burton said, "and we need it. Besides, we have to act as a team, as soldiers in a small army. If everybody does what he wants, ignores this crisis, we become just a disorganized mob.”

"And you's the captain, the man," Turpin said. "OK.”

He brought his hands down, the chords crashed, and he stood up.

"Lead on, MacDuff.”

Though he was furious, Burton showed no sign of it. He strode back to the table, Turpin following him too closely, and he stood by his chair. Turpin, still smiling, took his seat.

"I suggest that we wait until we have mastered the contents of those," Burton said, waving a hand at the mechanism that was piling, sorting, and collating the papers flying from a slot in the wall. "Once we thoroughly understand what we can and cannot do, we may make our plans.”

"That'll take some time," de Marbot said. "It'll be like reading a library, not one book.”

"It must be done.”

"You talk of limits," Nur said, "and that is necessary and good. But within what we call limits we have such power as the greatest kings on Earth never dreamed of. That power will be our strength, but it will also be our weakness. Rather, I should say, the power will tempt us to misuse it. I pray to God that we will be strong enough to overcome our weaknesses—if we have them.”

"We are, in a sense, gods," Burton said. "But humans with godlike power. Half-gods.”

"Half-assed gods," Frigate said.

Burton smiled and said, "We've been through much on The River. It's scourged us, winnowed out the chaff. I hope. We shall see.”

"The greatest enemy is not the unknown," Nur said. He did not need to explain what he meant.

An ancient Greek philosopher, Herakleitos, once said, "Character determines destiny.”

Burton was thinking of this as he paced back and forth in his bedroom. What Herakleitos said was only partly true. Everyone had a unique character. However, that character was influenced by environment. And every environment was unique. Every place was not exactly like every other place. In addition, a person's character was part of the environment he traveled in. How a person acted depended not only upon his character but also on the peculiar opportunities and constraints of the environment, which included the person's self. The self carried about in it all the environments that the person had lived in. These were, in a sense, ghosts, some of thicker ectoplasm than the others, and thus powerful haunters of the mobile home, the person.

Another ancient sage, Hebrew, not Greek, had said, "There is nothing new under the sun.”

The old Preacher had never heard of evolution and so did not know that new species, unfamiliar to the sun, emerged now and then. Moreover, he overlooked that every newborn baby was unique, therefore new, whether under the sun or under the moon. Like all sages, the Preacher spoke half-truths.

When he said that there was a time to act and a time not to act, he spoke the whole truth. That is, unless you were a Greek philosopher and pointed out that not acting is an act in itself. The difference in philosophy between the Greek and the Hebrew was in their attitudes toward the world. Herakleitos was interested in abstract ethics; the Preacher, in practical ethics. The former stressed the why, the latter, the how.

It was possible, Burton thought, to live in this world and only wonder about the how. But a complete human, one trying to realize all his potential, would also probe the why. This situation demanded the why and the how. Lacking the first, he could not function properly with the second.

Here he was with seven other Earthborns, in a tower set in the center of a sea at the north pole of this world. The sea had a diameter of sixty miles and was ringed by an unbroken range of mountains over twenty thousand feet high. In this sea The River gave up almost all of its warmth before it plunged from the other end and began picking up heat again. Thick mists like those from the gates of Hell hid a tower that rose ten miles from the sea surface. Below the waters and deep into the earth, the tower extended five miles or perhaps even deeper.

There was a shaft in the center of the tower that housed some billion of wathans at this moment. Wathans. The Ethical name for the artificial souls created by a species extinct for millions of years. Somewhere near the tower, deep under the earth, were immense chambers in which were kept records of the bodies of each of the thirty-five billion plus who had once lived on Earth from circa 100,000 b.c. through a.d. 1983.

When a person died on the Riverworld, the resurrector, using a mass-energy converter and the record, reproduced that body on a bank of The River. The wathan, the synthetic soul, the invisible entity that held all of what made that person sentient, flew at once to the body, attracted as iron by a magnet. And the man or woman, dead twenty-four hours before, was alive.

Of the thirty-five billion plus, Burton had experienced more of death than any. A man who had died 777 times could claim a record. Though he had been dead more often than anyone else, there were few who had lived as intensely on Earth and the Riverworld as he. His triumphs and sweet times had been few; his defeats and frustrations, many. Though he had once written that the bad and the good things of life tended to balance out, his own ledger had far more red ink than black. The Book of Burton showed a deficit, a heavy imbalance. Despite which, he had refused to take bankruptcy. Why he continued fighting, why he wanted so desperately to keep living, he did not know. Perhaps it was because he hoped to balance the books someday.

And then what?

He did not know about that, but it was the then-what? That fed his flame.

Here he was, trailing a horde of ghosts and placed by forces, which he had not understood and still did not understand, in this vast building at the top of the world. It had been erected for one purpose, to allow Terrestrials a chance for immortality. Not physical foreverness but a return, perhaps an absorption into, the Creator.

The Creator, if there was one, had not given Earthpeople, or indeed any sentients, souls. That entity which figured so largely in religions had been imaginary, a nonexistent desideratum. But that which sentients could imagine they might bring into actuality, and the might-be had become the is. What Burton and others objected to was the implied should-be. The Ethicals had not asked each resurrectee if he or she wished to be raised from the dead. They had been given no choice. Like it or not, they became lazari. And they had not been told how or why.

Loga had said that there just was not enough time to do that. Even if a thousand agents were assigned to asking a thousand people per hour whether or not they wished to be endowed with synthetic souls, the project would take thirty-five million hours. If fifty thousand agents conducted the interviews, it would take half a million hours. If the interviews could be con-j      ducted on a twenty-four-hour basis, and they couldn't, it would take somewhat over fifty-seven years to question every person. What would have been accomplished at the end of that time? Very little. Perhaps ten or twelve million might decide not to keep on living. Even a man like Sam Clemens, who insisted that he wanted the eternal peace and quiet of death, would opt for life if he was given a chance for it. He would at least want to try the life offered, one with conditions different from those on Earth. A hundred considerations would make him change his mind. The same would apply to those others who felt, for various reasons, that life on Earth had been miserable, wretched, painful and altogether not worthwhile.

"The resurrectees have to be dealt with en masse," Loga had said. "There is no other way to handle them. We have, however, made a few exceptions. You were one, because I secretly arranged to have you awaken in the resurrection area so many years ago. You became a special case. The Canadian, La Viro, was visited by one of us, and certain ideas were given him so that he would found the Church of the Second Chance. Their missionaries spread teachings that contained some of the truths about this situation. They stressed the ethical reasons for the lazari being here; they stressed that each person must advance himself ethically.”

"Why couldn't everybody have been told the truth at the outset?" Burton had said. And then, before Loga could reply, Burton had answered himself.

"I see. For the same reason that every person could not be asked if he wished to have another life and another chance at it.”

"Yes. And even if we Ethicals had appeared in The Valley and told the truth to all, only a certain percentage would have believed us. And our teachings would have been perverted, changed, and denied by many.

"Believe me, our way is the best, even if it has its disadvantages and limits. We know because of what our predecessors told us about their projects in resurrecting other sentients. Besides, when Earthpeople were all raised on that day, there were one hundred thousand languages spoken by them. We would not have been understood by many. All the people could not hear the message until the Church of the Second Chance had spread a common language, Esperanto, throughout the River-world.”

Burton had then said, "In the previous projects, uh, I'm almost afraid to ask, how many, what percentage, Passed On?”

"Three-quarters of those raised on the Gardenworlds did," Loga had said. "The remaining one-fourth ... their recordings were dissolved when they died after their grace period was up.”

"Died or were killed?" Burton had said.

"Most of them killed each other or committed suicide.”

"Most?”

Loga had ignored this.

"One-sixteenth of the people resurrected as adults or juveniles in previous projects passed the test, Went On. Each of these projects had at least two phases. Here, after the phase with those who died before or during a.d. 1983 is done, then those who died after that will be raised for the second stage. The final one.”

"But the first stage is going to take longer than planned because of your interference," Burton had said.

"Yes. I believe ... I know ... that the percentage of those Going On could have been higher, much higher, if the lazari had been given more time. I could not endure the thought of so many being doomed, so I became a renegade. I betrayed my fellow Ethicals. I ... I may have condemned myself to ... not Going On. But I don't believe that. I did it for my love of humanity.”

The Christians and the Muslims on Earth had believed in a physical resurrection. And so it had been. But the ultimate goal of the Ethicals was Buddhistic, absorption of the soul into the All-Being.

As if reading his mind, Loga had said, "Tell me, Dick, do you really believe, believe in the innermost and deepest part of your mind, where it counts, that you will Go On?”

Burton had stared at Loga for a moment. Then, slowly, he had said, "No. Not in the sense you mean. I just cannot believe it. There is no evidence that such a thing as Going On occurs.”

“Yes, there is! Our instruments cannot perceive the wathan, what you call the soul, when its owner has died after attaining a certain stage of ... let's call it goodness instead of ethical advancement.”

"Which only means that the instruments can't detect it," Burton had said. "You have no knowledge of what really happens to the wathan at that point.”

Loga had smiled and said, "In the end, we have to fall back on faith, don't we?”

"From what I've seen of its manifestations on Earth, I have no faith in faith," Burton had said. "How do you know but what the wathan, as you call it, has simply worn out? It's an artificial thing, but its life may end naturally, just as all synthetic things ... and natural, too ... end. The wathan is not a material entity, as we know material things, but that's the point. We don't really know if it's material or not. It may be a form of matter unknown to us. Or a thing of pure energy. If so, a form of energy unknown to us. But how do you know that it may not change into another form, which your instruments cannot detect?”

"It does! It does!" Loga had said. "Into the Undetectible! How else could you explain that the wathan only passes beyond the instrument range when the owner has reached a certain stage of ethical advancement? Those who don't reach this stage may die again and again, but always, always, the wathans return to their resurrected bodies!”

"There may be an explanation you haven't thought of.”

"Hundreds of thousands of minds greater than yours have tried to find another explanation, and they have failed.”

"But one may yet come along who won't fail.”

"You're depending upon faith now," Loga had said.

"No. Upon history, logic and probability.”

Loga had been upset, not because he was beginning to doubt his beliefs but because he feared that Burton would not Go On.

As it had turned out, Loga was not going to Go On. His body-record had been destroyed, and he would no longer have the opportunity to attain that final goal. Yet ... it was Loga's own fault that he did not have that chance now. If he had not set the project on a different course, he would still be alive, and his body-record would insure that he could keep striving for that mysterious event known as Going On.

Was the unknown who had committed Loga to oblivion an Ethical who had somehow survived Loga's mass slaughter of his fellows? If he was, why didn't he show himself? Was he afraid of the eight lazari? Was he biding his time until he could kill them and raise them in The Valley where they could no longer interfere with the original design?

Anyone who knew how to input override commands in the computer should not be afraid of the eight. But then perhaps the unknown knew something that the eight did not know yet but might find out. If that were so, the unknown would try to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

However, it was possible that one—or more—of the eight might have made Loga vanish.

Burton was thinking of this when Nur's head appeared on a wall-screen. "I'd like to speak to you.”

Burton gave the codeword that allowed Nur to see him.

5

"What is it?”

Nur was wearing a green turban, indicating that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The choice of color was probably accidental, though, since the little Moor was not one to set store by such things. His long, straight black hair fell from under the cloth onto skinny brown shoulders. His narrow face was intense.

"The inhibit input against resurrecting Monat and all the Ethicals and their agents still holds. I expected that. But something even more momentous has occurred!”

He paused.

Burton said, "Well?”

"You know that Loga told us three weeks ago that he'd told the Computer to start resurrecting the eighteen billion in the records. We all assumed that it had been done. But it's not so! Apparently, Loga changed his mind for some reason. Perhaps he intended to wait until we were out of the tower. Anyway, not a single person has been resurrected since then.”

The shock silenced Burton for a moment.

When he recovered, he said, "How many bodies are on hold now?”

"As of now, eighteen billion, one million, three hundred and thirty-seven thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine. No. Now ... two hundred and seven.”

"I suppose you... ?" Burton said.

Nur, anticipating him, which he did with annoying frequency, said, "Yes. I ascertained that the Computer now has a reinforcing override from the unknown. The hold is still on.”

"Just think," Burton said, "only three weeks ago we thought that our long hard, struggle was over. That all the big issues were dissolved and our only problems from then on would be personal.”

Nur did not reply.

"Very well. What we must do first is to subject each of us to a truth test. We can't proceed on the assumption that there is an unknown until we've eliminated all of our group.”

"They won't like it," Nur said.

"But it's logical that we do it.”

"Humans don't like logic when it's inconvenient or dangerous for them," Nur said. "However, they'll submit to the test. They have to to avoid suspicion.”

If not telling a lie was the same as telling the truth, the results of the test were positive. If telling a lie could result in an indication that the truth was being told, the results were negative.

Whether the indications were true or not, the eight seemed to be innocent.

Each sat in turn inside a closed transparent cubicle and answered questions from Burton or Nur. The field generated inside the cubicle showed the wathan floating just above the head of the questionee and attached to it by a thread of bright scarlet light. The wathan was a sphere that swelled and shrank, whirled or seemed to whirl, and flashed a spectrum of glowing colors. This was the invisible thing that accompanied every person from the moment of conception and did not leave him or her until that person was dead. It contained all that was a person, duplicating the contents of the mind and nervous system and also giving him or her self-consciousness.

Burton had taken the first test, and Nur had asked him several questions to which he had to give an answer he believed to be true.

"Were you born in Torquay, England, on March 19, 1821?”

"Yes," Burton said, and the Computer photographed his wathan at that second.

"When and where did you die the first time?”

"On Sunday, October 19, 1890, in my house in Trieste, that part of Italy then belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

The Computer took another photograph and compared the two. It then compared these two to others that had been taken many years ago when Burton had been questioned by the Council of Twelve.

Nur looked at the flashing display on a screen and said, "The truth. As you know it.”

That was one of the deficiencies of the test. If a person believed that he was telling the truth, the wathan indicated that he was.

"That is the truth," Frigate said. "I read those dates many times when I was on Earth.”

"Have you ever lied?" Nur said.

Burton, grinning, said, "No.”

A narrow black zigzag shot over the surface of the wathan.

"The subject lies," Nur told the Computer.

On the screen appeared: previously verified.

"Have you ever lied?" Nur said again.

"Yes.”

The black lightning streak disappeared.

"Did you make Loga vanish?”

"No.”

"Were you implicated with anyone tion?”

"Not that I know of.”

"That's the truth, as far as you know it," Nur said after glancing at the screen. "Do you have any knowledge about anyone who might have made Loga vanish?”

"No.”

"Are you glad that Loga did vanish?”

Burton said, "What the hell?”

He could see the image of his wathan on a screen. It was glowing with orange overlaying the other shifting colors.

"You shouldn't have asked that!" Aphra Behn said.

"Yes, you devil, you had no right!" Burton said. "Nur, you're a scoundrel, like all Sufis!”

"You were glad," Nur said calmly. "I suspected so. I also suspect that most of us were. I was not, but I will allow the same question to be put to me. It may be that I, too, was glad, though deep in my animal mind.”

"The subconscious," Frigate murmured.

"Whatever it is called, it is the same. The animal mind.”

“Why should anyone be glad?" Alice said.

"Don't you really know?" Burton shouted.

Alice recoiled at the violence.

Having been cleared, for the moment, anyway, Burton left the cubicle and interrogated Nur. When the Moor appeared to be innocent, Alice seated herself. Burton forebore asking her if Loga's death had given her any joy. He doubted that it had. But when she had time to consider what she might do with the powers here, she might understand why some of the others had felt, to their shame, elated.

One by one, the others showed their innocence.

"But Loga could have passed the test while lying like a diplomat," Nur said. "It is possible that one of us has had access to his wathan distorter.”

"I don't think so," Turpin said. "Ain't none of us got the smarts to operate one of those. We ain't smart enough to override Loga's commands either. I think we're wasting time, besides insulting all of us.”

"If I interpret you correctly," Nur said, "you're saying that we're not intelligent enough. That's not true. We are. But we don't have the knowledge we need.”

"Yeah, that's what I meant. We just don't know enough.”

"Three weeks is long enough for a diligent person to get the knowledge from the Computer," Burton said.

"No. The Computer ain't going to tell anyone how to override Loga," Turpin said. "I just don't believe that that could be done.”

"We could do a memory-strip of the past three weeks," Frigate said. "It'll take time, but it might be worth it.”

"No!" Alice said vehemently. "No! I'd feel violated! It would be worse than rape! I won't do it!”

"I understand your feelings," Nur said. "But ...”

The Computer could unreel their memories back to conception and display them on a screen. The process had its limits, since it could not reproduce nonvisual and nonauditory thoughts except as electronic displays, the interpretation of which was still uncertain. It was capable of transmitting tactile, olfactory and pressure memories. But, memory was selective and apparently erased many events that the individual considered unimportant. However, it did show clearly what the subject had seen, heard and spoken. On demand, emotion-pain fields could be projected.

"I won't want you seeing me when 1 went to the toilet," Alice said.

"None of us want that, for you or for ourselves," Burton said, and he laughed. It sounded like a stone skipping across water. "All of us fart and belch and most have probably masturbated and picked our noses, and Marcelin and Aphra, I'm sure, would not care to have us see them in bed. But it's not necessary to show everything. The Computer can be ordered to be selective, to display only the events we're interested in. Everything else will be irrelevant and so will not be shown.”

"It's a waste of time," Frigate said. "Anyone clever enough to do what the unknown did wouldn't overlook the possibility of a memory-strip.”

"I agree with you," Burton said, "though I seldom do. But it is one of those routine things that have to be done. What if the guilty person—if there is one—had anticipated that we would think a memory-search was useless?”

"He wouldn't take such a chance," Li Po said.

"Nevertheless, I insist that we do it," Burton said. "If we don't, we'll all be wondering about one another.”

"We'll still be wondering when it's all done," Frigate said sourly. "But if it must be.”

The search could have been run simultaneously with each one in a separate cubicle, but who then would supervise each subject to make sure that he or she did not order the Computer to cancel the relevant events? Burton went first, and, after-three hours, the time it took the Computer to strip three weeks of -memory, he emerged. The screen had been blank during the entire strip.

It was, as expected, empty while the others underwent the search.

Twenty-five hours passed before the last one, Li Po, stepped out of the cubicle. Long before then, others had drifted off to bed one by one. Burton and Nur saw the work through from beginning to end. Some were getting up when the two decided they should sleep. First, though, Burton wanted to make sure that no one could enter the suite.

"The unknown could override the codeword locking the door.”

"How do you suggest that we block the door?" Frigate said, and he yawned. "Do we shove a bed against it? Pile more furniture on top of that?”

"The door swings inward, so that's not a bad idea. What I'm going to do, however, is to order the Computer to make a burglar alarm.”

Burton did just that. Five minutes later, he pulled out from an energy-matter converter cabinet a dozen pieces of equipment. He taped two boxes to the wall on each side of the door and secured several other boxes to these. Then he adjusted a dial on one of the large boxes.

"There," he said, stepping back to admire the set. "No one can enter without setting off a hell of a loud siren. I think. We'd best test it. Pete, will you go outside, close the door, then come back in?”

"Sure, but I hope I don't disappear while I'm standing in the hall.”

Burton turned a knob on the box. Frigate spoke the codeword, the door swung open, and he walked out. He turned, spoke the word, and the door shut. Burton reset the dial on the box. A few seconds later, the door began opening. A bright orange light flashed from the box, and an ear-pummeling whooping filled the room. Aphra Behn and de Marbot came running through the doorway. Turpin, who had been eating breakfast and not paying Burton much attention, leaped up from the table, his mouth spewing food. "Go-o-o-d damn!”

Burton turned the alarm off.

"The unknown could learn what the combination for the alarm is from the Computer. So I asked for one that I could set myself. There's no way the Computer can know which I chose, not as long as I blocked the line of sight from its screen with my body when I set the alarm.”

"Admirable," Frigate said. "But our bedrooms are soundproofed. How are we going to hear the alarm from there?”

The walls, floor and ceilings were several inches thick and packed with circuits and power lines, most of them unused. Burton could have ordered the Computer to set up a circuit that would set off alarms in all rooms when the door alarm went off. But the unknown could override these circuits.

Burton was thinking about what to do when Frigate spoke.

"We could have the Computer make mass detectors. These could be set inside the bedroom doors so that, even if we didn't hear the apartment door alarm, we'd hear anybody trying to get into our bedrooms. These should be activated and deactivated by some sort of hand signals. The unknown can eavesdrop on us ] through the Computer. He's probably doing it now. But, as far I as I know, he can't see us unless he turns on a screen. And we can see that.”

"You say, as far as we know," Burton said. "Isn't it possible that he could turn on a screen but make it invisible to us?"

"I suppose so. I don't really know enough about Ethical science to be sure of what can or can't be done."

"Then the unknown may be also watching us."

"Yes. What we should do is erect some sort of tent in this room and write communications to one another inside it. Or the Computer could make us a soundproof cubicle. Even the floor would be soundproof. The trouble with that is that its walls might contain detectors put in by the order of the unknown. We'd have no way of checking that. Come to think of it, a tent made of cloth could contain detectors, too.”

Burton became angry. "Is there nothing we can do?”

“We can do the best we can and hope that it'll be enough.”

“We'll keep the door alarm," Burton said. "I'll write the combination on paper. You'll memorize it, and I'll make sure that the papers are destroyed.”

"Destroy the papers with a beamer," Frigate said. "If you just burned them and crumbled the ashes before dropping them in a disposal hole, the Computer might be able to reconstruct the combination.”

Burton said that they would have to make hoods to put over them when they reset the combination. They could make sure that the hoods did not contain detectors by using their bed-sheets.

"We can't trust the mass detectors," he added. "The Computer will make them for us, but the unknown might hide turn-off devices in them.”

"True," Frigate said. "He may have installed a turn-off in your burglar alarm, too.”

"Then anything the Computer makes for us could betray us?”

"Sure. Including the food. The unknown could order poison put in it.”

"By God! There must be something we can do to fight this devil!”

Nur, who had been standing near them and smiling slightly, spoke.

"If the unknown had planned to kill us, he would have done it before now. I suggest that if the unknown can override even Loga's commands, then he or she must be an Ethical. If so, why hasn't he resurrected Monat and the others? That would be his first thought and his first duty, after he's immobilized us, of course. Which, I don't have to point out, he's accomplished. The only thing is ...”

He hesitated so long that Burton said, "Yes? What is it?”

"Would any Ethical erase Loga's body-recording? I think not. So ... the unknown can't be an Ethical. Unless ...”

"Unless what?”

"Patience, my friend. We are not on schedule. Unless ... it is Loga who's behind all this.”

Burton exploded. "We've been through that line of reasoning! Why would he do this?”

Nur shrugged skinny shoulders and raised the palms of his long hands.

"I don't know. I doubt that it is Loga. Would Loga erase his own body-recording? Of course not.”

"But he could have a secret resurrection chamber some place in the tower," Frigate said.

"Just what I was going to say," Nur said. "We still don't have an explanation for sudh irrational conduct. But I keep thinking of the footfalls Frigate heard, or thought he heard, in the corridor outside the room where we were celebrating our victory over the malfunctioning Computer. Loga was disturbed when Pete told him about it. He ran out into the corridor and down to the intersecting hall, and he looked up and down the lift shaft. Then he asked the Computer some questions, but these were in his language, and he talked so fast we did not understand them.”

"I asked him what he was so upset about," Burton said. "He replied that he wasn't any more and that Pete's experiences had made Pete so paranoiac that he was hearing sounds that did not exist. Pete's suspicions were infectious. So Loga said.”

"That's like throwing a stone through your own window!" Frigate said. "There was nobody more paranoiac than Loga!”

"If he was, then we've been on the wrong side," Nur said calmly. "Those who follow a crazy man are as crazy as he. However, talking about that is useless. What do we do now?”

Frigate's sarcastic suggestion that they pile furniture by the door was, realistically, the best offered. It was an inconvenient arrangement if they were to use the door much, but, at the moment, they planned to stay within the suite.

Moreover, there now seemed little chance that the unknown could poison their food and water. Frigate and Nur got simplified schematics of the e-m converters and studied them. The unknown could cut off the power to the converters and so starve them. But the food was produced by e-m conversion via preprogrammed circuits that the unknown could not change. He had no way of introducing poison into them. But their drinking and bath water came through pipes, and the unknown could put toxic substances into them.

Frigate and Nur made arrangements whereby the water would be produced from the converters in the rooms. The Computer did not balk at producing the necessary plumbing for them to connect the water outlets to the converters. The eight had a plumbing job to do, but their inexperience was overcome by instruction books and tools furnished by the Computer. Meanwhile, the eight would get their water in bowls and pails from the converters.

"This seems useless and stupid," Li Po said. "There are so many other ways the unknown could get at us.”

"Nevertheless, we must do what we can to avoid his tricks," I Nur said. "That is, if he has any up his sleeve. And if he does indeed exist.”

"I'm going to bed," Burton said.

"I'll eat first," Nur said.

The little Moor looked as fresh as if he had just had eight hours of very good sleep. By then, everybody but de Marbot and Behn was in the big room. Burton left it to Nur to explain the door blockade, and he walked down the hall a few steps and entered his apartment within an apartment. It consisted of three rooms: a living room twenty-four feet square, luxuriously furnished yet usable as a workroom, a bedroom and a bath. Burton unbuckled the belt holding the holster, which encased the beamer, and he shed his single garment, a scarlet kilt decorated by bright yellow male lion-shapes. The floor was covered with a thick carpet like that in the big community entrance room. The inwoven figures were different, each consisting of three interlocking circles. The walls were pale cream, but a word from Burton to the Computer could change the color to whatever he wished. He could also order any shape or symbol, anything, imposed on the basic color. Here and there were paintings that looked like oil originals but had been reproduced by the Computer. No art specialist could have distinguished the original from the copy, since the two were exactly alike down to the molecular level.

Burton crawled into bed and was asleep at once. He awoke feeling drugged and with a vague memory of a nightmare. A hyena twice as tall as he had threatened him with fangs that were curving steel swords. He remembered parrying the scimitar-like teeth with a fencing foil and the hyena laughing at him. The cachinnations had been remarkably like his.

6

"I've been called, quite unjustifiably, a human hyena," he murmured, and he rolled out of bed. He would have to make the bed himself, though androids—protein robots—were available to do it. For the time being, no androids would be admitted into the suite. They were a potential danger because the Unknown might have ordered them to attack the eight.

Burton exercised vigorously for an hour, then ordered breakfast from the Computer. The coffee was the best that had ever been produced on Earth; the shirred eggs, the best; the brown bread toast, exquisitely heated and covered with the best butter Earth had ever known. There was also a jam to send the palate into ecstasy, and a fruit unknown to Earth but tasting somewhat of muskmelon.

He brushed his teeth and took a medium-warm shower despite the possibility that the water could be poisoned. As Frigate had said, if the unknown had intended to kill them off, he could have done it by now.

He selected a dark green kilt and a long flowing robe of green decorated with a design of yellow birds of an unknown species. Then he activated a wall-screen to see what was going on in the main room. Li Po, Nur, Behn, and Turpin were sitting in chairs and reading the lists of control limits. The furniture was still stacked in front of the door.

Burton went into the main room, greeted them, and said, "Have the others reported in?”

Nur said that they had. Burton went to an auxiliary computer and activated the screens in the bedrooms of those absent. He could not see them, but he could hear their voices as they said that they would be right out. A few minutes later, Alice, Frigate and de Marbot appeared. Alice was wearing a loose Chinese-looking robe, scarlet with green dragons, and brocade slippers with turned-up toes. Her short dark straight hair shone as if it had been brushed many times. Her only makeup was a light-red lipstick. She could have used some powder to cover the dark smudges under her eyes.

"I didn't sleep well at all," she said as she sat down in a chair. "I couldn't get it out of my mind that someone might be watching me.”

"If we could trust the androids, we could have them paper over the bedrooms," Frigate said. "That'd block out the screens.”

"If ... if," Burton growled. "I'm getting sick of these almighty ifs. I'm fed up with being in a cage. As soon as we find out what we can and can't do, we'll conduct a manhunt. It'll be dangerous, but I, for one, will not keep on hiding like a rabbit in its burrow. We're not rabbits. We're human. And human beings are not meant to be cooped up like pigeons.”

"Rabbits and pigeons," Frigate muttered.

Burton swung around to face him. "What the devil do you mean by that?”

"The rabbits and the pigeons don't have the slightest idea why they're caged. They don't know they're being fattened up to be eaten. But we, we don't know why Loga was done away with or what's planned for us. We're worse off than the rabbits and pigeons. They, at least, are dumb but happy. We're dumb but unhappy.”

"Speak for yourself," Nur said. "I would like to point out to those who may not have thought of it that this list may be incomplete. The unknown may have kept certain powers from the list. Even if he has not done so, he can eliminate almost any of those he wishes to eliminate.”

There was a long silence. The Chinese rose, went to a converter, and ordered a huge goblet of rye whiskey. Burton grimaced but said nothing to him. It would have been useless, and Li Po's defiance would lessen Burton's authority.

Li Po sipped the rye, belched to indicate his appreciation, and went back to his chair. He said, "I need a woman!”

Burton had thought that Alice was past blushing, but the Victorian in her was a long time dying.

"You'll just have to keep jacking off," Burton said. "We have enough problems without resurrecting a woman just so she can drain off your lust.”

Alice's face became redder. Aphra Behn laughed.

"It's unnatural," Li Po said. "My yang needs its yin.”

Burton laughed because "yang" meant "human excrement" in a West African language. Po asked him why he was laughing. When Burton explained, the Chinese laughed uproariously.

"Well, if I can't have a woman, I'll work out my desire with exercise. What say we fence for an hour or so, rapiers or sabers?”

"I need it, too," Burton said, "but you're drunk. You'd be no match.”

Li Po protested loudly and shrilly that he could have drunk twice as much and still beat Burton with any weapon Burton cared to choose. Burton turned away from him, and the Chinese staggered to his chair, fell into it, and began snoring. Frigate and Turpin carried him to the bedroom door. This, however, was locked with Po's codeword, which his bearers did not know. They placed him on the hall floor and returned to the big room.

"We'll all be behaving like Po if we have to stay here," Turpin said. He went to a converter and ordered a tall glass of gin with a lemon twist. Aphra, who had a glass of the same, raised it and said, "A toast to craziness! This may be a gaol, but it beats Newgate.”

She knew what she was talking about; she had twice been in debtors' prison.

She could also afford her cavalier attitude, though it was not realistic. She had a lover, de Marbot, with whom she was happy, and she had every luxury she'd ever had on Earth and many more. Except freedom. That, however, did not bother this adaptable and cheery woman just now.

What was keeping some of them from studying their peril was the vast potentialities of the list. Where they should have been examining what limited them, they were considering what gratifications it offered. Though Burton could understand their excitement over this, he was disturbed by their lack of concern for the dangers that were—as it were—just around the corner.

Judging from their facial expressions, Nur was the only one thinking of the unknown enemy. Burton felt like kicking the others. Instead, he slapped his hands together sharply, jolting them from their dreams.

"That's enough of nonsense," Burton said. "The situation is serious. Deadly. There's no time to think of anything but how we're going to fight the enemy. If we defeat him, you may play all you want. Till then ... The unknown has a great advantage over us in that he can use the Computer better than we. But if we can learn how to use it against him, it becomes our ally. Let me remind you that the Computer is not just that huge protein electroneural mass at the bottom of the central shaft. The Computer is also the tower, this vast building in which we reside. The brain is the central protein organ, the clearinghouse. But the majority of circuits are in the floors, the walls and the ceilings of the tower. We're in the heart, the nerves of the enemy. And we can find ways to strike at that heart, those nerves. Or perhaps I should say, ways to seize them and use them as weapons.”

"If you're thinking of belling the cat," Alice said, "we don't even know where the cat is.”

"It may be another mouse who's buffaloed us into thinking it's a cat," Nur said.

"If ... if ... may be," Burton said. "No more speculations on ifs. We abandon speculation; we act.”

"Fine. But how?" Nur said. "Everything we're saying now or will say may be, probably is, overheard. And perhaps seen.”

"I said, 'No more if’s and maybe’s!' " Burton thundered.

Frigate laughed and said, "We can't help that, we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad. We must be, or we wouldn't have come here.”

"What are you talking about?" Burton said.

"He's paraphrasing the conversation between the Cheshire Cat and Alice in Wonderland," Alice said.

"The mention of the cat reminded me of the Cheshire Cat," Frigate said. "In a way, the unknown is the grin without a cat.”

Burton threw his hands up.

"I wish I had all of you in the army!" he cried.

There was silence, but Burton knew that it would not last long. Not in this group.

"That," Frigate said, "may be just what we need.”

"What?”

"An army. We can have the Computer make us an army of robots and androids. We'll set it up so that the unknown, the Snark, let's call him, can't override our commands to the robots. We can set them to looking for the Snark and guarding us. We'll also order them to seize or kill anyone who is not us. Non-us is the enemy. The robots and androids can do in a short time what would take us years.”

Burton stared at the American, then said, "You wrote that— what do you call it?—science fiction too long. It's rotted your brain.”

"It's within the capabilities of the tower," Frigate said. "If we're going to win, we have to think big. I know it sounds crazy, but we need an army, and we can get it. I'd  say, oh, a force of about one hundred thousand.”

Some burst out laughing. Frigate grinned, but he said, "I'm serious." He went to a console and punched out some numbers and an operation. Simple multiplication. The screen showed: 107,379.

"Three automaton soldiers to a room makes one hundred seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-nine. We could have a whole army in several days. The soldiers could watch every known room and keep an eye out for a stranger and also probe for hidden rooms.”

Nur, smiling, said, "I admire your creativity but not your lack of restraint or your contempt for realities.”

"What do you mean?" Frigate said. "Restraint is good only in situations that call for it. This doesn't. As for realities, the army could be easily realized.”

Nur admitted that twice the number proposed could easily be raised. However, androids were not self-conscious and were not at all intelligent. Their actions had to be programmed. The army would have to be separated into small groups acting on their own. This required command levels of noncoms and officers, androids who could act on their own initiative when situations not in their programming arose. The leaders simply would not know what to do. For that matter, they would not even know that they had to do anything.

"Moreover," Burton said, "there's still that nagging worry. Can the unknown install in the robots and androids some sort of channel whereby he can override our commands?”

"He's probably thinking about that right now," Alice said. "If he's watching us, he can anticipate anything we do.”

She shuddered.

"My answer to your objection," Frigate said to Burton, "is that we could make some modifications in the neural systems of the androids. We could make them partly mechanical. By that, I mean that we could install mechanical devices in them. Say, something like a locker or safe combination that would set our commands mechanically but that would then transmit them electrically.

"We would set the combinations after we'd received the basic device from the Computer. That way, neither the Computer nor the Snark could control what we did. And ... oh, hell! The Snark could still put a neuron complex in the android that would tell it to override the combination command by radio or whatever.”

"The hard facts," Nur said, "are that we are in the power of this Snark. He does not have to attack us. All he has to do is shut off our power, and we'll starve to death. If he intended to do that, he could have done so. He has not done so, therefore, we can assume that he isn't going to. He has set certain limits to our use of the Computer but allowed us considerable powers. There are certain things he doesn't want us to have. Otherwise, he just doesn't care. He's ignoring us.”

"The question, one of the questions, is why?”

"We can't answer that. He'll have to, if he ever does," Frigate said.

"Right," Nur said. "Now, while you were all sleeping, I had the Computer locate the secret entrance that Loga arranged long ago. The entrance we used to get into the tower after we'd crossed the mountains and taken that boat to the base of the tower. I tried to get the Computer to open that. It seemed to me that perhaps the unknown might be wanting us to leave the tower and return to The Valley. He did not wish us to use the aircraft for obvious reasons.

"But the secret door would not open when I asked the Computer to do it for me. 

"Therefore, the unknown does not wish us to leave the tower.

"There may come a time when he'll wish us to go, and, if so, he'll open an exit for us. Until then, we're prisoners. But this prison is vast and has, in a sense, more treasures to offer than the Earth we lived on or the Rivervalley. The treasures are physical and mental, moral and spiritual. I suggest that we find out what these are and use them. We might as well. We can't stay caged in this suite.

"Meanwhile, of course, we'll be trying to think of ways to override the unknown's overrides. What one person sets up, another may knock down. The unknown is not a god.”

"What you're suggesting is that we move back into our apartments and live as if there were no unknown?" Burton said.

"I say that we should leave this particular area, which is a small prison, and go out into the larger prison. After all, Earth was a prison. So was the Rivervalley. But if you're in a large enough space to give you the illusion of freedom, then you don't think of yourself as a prisoner. The half-free man is one who thinks he is free. The really free man is one who fully knows what he can do in prison and does it.”

"A Sufi's wisdom," Burton said, smiling but with a sneer in his voice. "We do look rather ridiculous, don't we? We run into a hole and then ask ourselves why we ran and decide that we didn't have to.”

"We were following instinct," Nur said. "It was wrong to do so. We had to find a place where we could be safe. At least, think we were. Then we had the relative peace of mind to evaluate our situation.”

"Which turned out to be no peace of mind. Well, I do feel better, I won't feel as much a prisoner. And that pile of furniture irks me. Let's tear it down.”

Frigate said, "Before we do, I have something to tell you.”

Burton, who had started for the door, stopped and turned around.

"Nur wasn't the only one who did a little independent investigating," Frigate said. "As you know, Monat can't be resurrected because of Loga's command, which the Snark reaffirmed. Monat's body-record is still on file. But I asked the Computer to locate his wathan in the shaft, and the Computer said that it had been there but was now gone. You know what that means. Monat has Gone On.”

Tears welled from Burton, and with the grief was mixed surprise that he should feel such grief. He had not known until that moment how he really felt about Monat. One of the first people he had encountered during his first resurrection had been the strange-looking, obviously non-Terrestrial Monat. Monat had accompanied him for a long time in The Valley and had impressed Burton with his compassion and wisdom. He had seemed warm. Thoroughly human despite his appearance, that is, what humans ideally should be.

Somehow, Burton had come to regard Monat as a father, a being stronger and wiser than he, a teacher, a pointer-out of right paths. And now Monat was gone forever.

Why should he shed tears and be choked up? He should be happy, gloriously happy because Monat had arrived at the stage where he no longer had to suffer the encumbering flesh.

Was it because he suffered a sense of loss? Had he thought, deep, in the dark unconscious, that Monat would somehow free himself from Loga's lock on him and be, in short, a savior? Had he felt that Monat would come up out of the records like Jesus from the tomb or Arthur from the lake or Charlemagne from his cave and rescue the defeated and the besieged?

It was strange to be thinking such thoughts. They must have been circulating somewhere in him, waiting for the right moment to break out.

His own father had not been a real father, not what a son wanted as a father. So, in some manner, Burton had taken Monat as one, perhaps because he could never accept another Earthman as one. Monat was from another world, therefore not, what was the word ... tainted? That was a curious word to leap to his mind.

In any event, Monat was forever out of reach of anybody in this world, Gone On. To what?

To conceal the tears, Burton strode to the furniture and began dragging it away from the door. By the time the others had joined him, his eyes were dry.

He opened the door and breathed deeply. The air was no fresher than that in the suite. But it offered liberation.

Near their apartments was a room containing a swimming pool sixty meters long and thirty meters wide. When no one was in the room it was dark, but the heat detectors would turn the light on if a single person entered it. The light was a simulated sun at zenith in a cloudless blue sky. The walls displayed a forest surrounding the pool and snow-capped mountains far in the distance. Even if a person stood within an inch of the wall, the trees seemed to be real. As real-looking as the trees, birds flew among the branches or lit on them, and their songs cried out pleasantly. Occasionally, the swimmers could see a rabbit or fox among the trees and, rarely, a panther-like beast or bear moving silently in the twilight under the branches.

The water was fresh and about 68 °F and had a depth of twelve meters at the deep end. Here the eight tenants usually gathered for an hour or so of swimming in midmorning.

Burton had been studying the list of operational limits until 11:00 a.m. He entered the huge echoing chamber noisy with cries and splashes and stood for a moment. All were there except Nur. The men were in scanty trunks and the women in bikinis. They did not seem to have a care nor had they posted a guard. Beamers, however, lay along the edge of the pool, and he saw several at the bottom outlined against the red, black and green mural.

Burton dived in and swam the length of the pool seven times. Then he hauled himself out and waited until de Marbot swam by. He called out to him; the Frenchman turned, came to the edge, and looked up. Burton considered his merry blue eyes, slick black hair, round face and snub nose.

Burton squatted down and said, "I'm going to make a flying trip, an exploratory one, through the tower. Do you want to come along?”

"That sounds like fun," de Marbot said. He narrowed his eyes and grinned. "Do you hope to surprise the Snark?”

"There's little chance of that," Burton said. "But... well... we might entice him to take some action. We'll be human decoys.”

"I'm your man," the Frenchman said, and he pulled himself out. He was only five feet five inches tall and shared with Nur the distinction of being the smallest man in the group. Burton had chosen him as his companion, however, because he was utterly courageous and had more experience in martial action than any of them. Serving under Napoleon, he had been in most of the conqueror's great battles, had been wounded seventeen times, had fought in hundreds of small engagements, and had led so adventurous a life that A. Conan Doyle had written a series of stories based on his exploits. He was an excellent swordsman and a deadly shot and had an unsurpassed coolness under fire.

They dried themselves off in an anteroom, changed into dry clothes, sleeveless shirts and shorts, put their beamers in holsters, and walked along the pool. Burton paused for a minute to tell Turpin that they were going exploring.

"What time you coming back?" Turpin said through a mouthful of baked Montana grouse fed on huckleberries.

"About six p.m.," Burton said, glancing at his wristwatch.

"Maybe you should report in every hour on the hour.”

"I don't think so," Burton said in a low voice, looking at the wall as if it had ears. Which it did. "I'm not going to make it easy for the unknown to find us.”

Turpin smiled. "Yeah, that's right. Hope I see you again." He laughed, spewing out bits of meat and bread.

Burton was worried about Turpin. The man had lost much weight during the trying and dangerous passage over the mountains to the north polar sea. Now he seemed to be intent on becoming as fat as he had been on Earth, close to three hundred pounds. He was always eating, and he was not far behind Li Po in drinking.

Burton said, "We'll be flying around at random. I don't have the slightest idea where we'll be.”

"Good luck," Turpin said.

Burton started to walk away but became aware that the Frenchman was not with him. Looking around, he saw him talking to Aphra. Evidently, he was explaining to her why he would be absent for a while. De Marbot was envied because he had a bedmate, but there were disadvantages to that. He had to account for his time to her, and, judging by their expressions and gestures, they were probably arguing over why she could not come along. Burton had no strong objections to taking her along at another time; she was tough and cool and skilled. Just now, he did not want more than one companion.

De Marbot, looking a little angry, returned to Burton.

"I have never heard that English expression, 'Take a flying fuck at a galloping goose,' " he said. Then, with that mercurial swiftness distinguishing him, he laughed, and he said, "How droll! How indeed could one do that?”

"It's a matter of synchronization," Burton said, grinning.

They left the pool and the door closed behind them. The noise was cut off; the corridor was huge and silent. It was easy to imagine someone—some thing—waiting around the corner for them, crouching, ready to spring.

Burton pointed out to de Marbot that he had filled the pockets on the sides of both chairs with power boxes for the beamers. They got into their chairs and caused them to raise into the air. Burton in front, de Marbot about twelve feet behind him, they sped toward the vertical shaft at the end of the hall. With a skill learned during the past three weeks, Burton curved the flight path so that he entered the shaft with only a slight decrease in speed, and he shot upwards.

He came out of the shaft at the next level at such velocity that his head was a few inches from the ceiling. He sent the chair down until his feet were twelve inches from the floor, and he hurtled along the muraled walls until he reached the end of the corridor. Then he stopped, pivoted the chair, and said, "You lead for a while.”

The Frenchman led him through every passageway on that floor. The doors of every room were closed. For all Burton knew, their enemy was behind one. He did not believe this, however. Surely the Snark would have been notified by the Computer of the detection of heat from the two men. He would have told the Computer to warn him if the two were on an approach that would take them anywhere near him. He also might have activated the wall-screens, so that he could be watching them.

When they had passed through every corridor, de Marbot stopped his chair by a shaft. "This is fun," he said, "the wind on your face, your hair blowing, the scenery, such as it is, whistling by. It is not as good as riding a horse, but it will do. And, certainly, no horse would jump off into the shaft.”

Burton took the lead now and rose up the shaft until he came to the top level. Down the corridor would be the entrance to the hangar, visited several days before. They entered the very wide entrance into the vast area with its brooding craft. Burton counted them and found that there were the same number as before. The unknown was still in the tower. That is, unless he had a ship secreted somewhere else. There was always an unless.

"I suppose we could remove the navigational tapes," he said, "and that would keep the Snark from using the spacecraft. But I'm sure that they'll be recorded. All he'd have to do would be to have the Computer run off new ones.”

"Why would he want to use a spaceship?”

"I don't know. But I'd like to throw a monkey wrench in his plans, upset him somehow.”

"The bite of the mosquito.”

"That, I'm afraid, is all it would be. However, a mosquito may kill a man if it gives him malaria.”

He was not expressing pure bravado. He believed that there must be a weakness, a hole, however small, somewhere in the Snark's defenses.

They sped on their chairs to the centrally located shaft and dropped to the level just below the top one. They entered a circular area with a 150-foot diameter and 500-foot-high walls. Twelve square metal doors were set equidistantly in the walls. Each, according to the Computer diagrams, gave entrance to a triangular chamber, pie-slice-shaped, which was 5.4 miles long and 401 feet high. The tip of each was blunted somewhat, ending in the walls of the central circle.

When Burton had viewed the diagrams, he had meant to ask the Computer about the contents of the vast chambers. An urgent matter had interrupted him before he could do so, and he had forgotten to return to his question. Now, while here, he would see for himself what they held.

Each door bore on its center a gold symbol indicating the identity of the member of the Ethical Council of Twelve whose property was beyond the door. The symbol directly in front of Burton was two horizontal bars crossed by two longer vertical bars. This was Loga's symbol. It could, Burton thought, be called a doublecross.

Burton gave the codeword that identified him, and a glowing screen formed above the bars.

"I wish to enter the room behind this door," Burton said. "Do I need a codeword to open the door?”

The screen displayed: yes.

"What is the codeword needed to activate the door?" Burton said.

He had expected that the Computer would reply that that information was unavailable to him. It flashed, however, in Ethical characters: loga says.

"That, it is simple enough," de Marbot murmured.

Burton, hoping that the words were not keyed to Loga's voice-print, pronounced perfectly the Ethical phrase.

The door opened outward, revealing a small, bare well-lit room. At the farther wall was a staircase to a small platform. The two went up it, and Burton pushed in on the conventional oblong door. The area beyond was bright, the light having come on just as the door was opened. They stood blinking for a while before they grasped what they were seeing.

Though they must be standing next to the outcurving walls, they were under the illusion that the walls stretched for miles to right and left. The horizon seemed very far away.

The distance ahead of them was no illusion, however. This vast room was 5.4 miles long.

"It's a little world," de Marbot said softly.

"Not so little.”

Most of it seemed to be a great well-kept park with many trees and clipped grass. Ahead, seemingly about two and a half miles away, was a sloping hill on top of which was a building gleaming in the noon sun. The villa was probably real; the sun was undoubtedly simulated.

"It looks rather Roman," Burton said. "I'd wager, though, that if we got close, we'd see a difference in the details.”

Their chairs would have gone through the doors, but Burton decided not to explore. They returned to the central area and asked the Computer for the codeword to the chamber next to Loga's. This had been the property of Loga's wife and had the same kind of anteroom. But it opened to a vista that bewildered them. The entire Brobdingnagian area was a labyrinth of small and large mirrors in a complex arrangement that they could not figure out. Their images were caught by near mirrors and reflected inward for as far as they could see. The source of the light was not apparent; it seemed to come from everywhere. Far off, dimly seen, was a circle of pillars. These, too, were reflected, but the arrangement was such that they saw their own tiny figures standing inside the pillars.

"What is the purpose of this?" de Marbot said.

Burton shrugged and said, "We'll have to find out. Not just now, though.”

The next chamber admitted them into what seemed to be an Arabian desert. Under a hot sun was an expanse of sand and rock, mostly a plain but with hills here and there. The air was much drier than that in the first two places. About three miles distant was what looked like a large oasis. Tall palm trees grew from grass, and the moving waters of a lake in the midst of the trees gleamed in the midmorning sunlight.

Near them were the skeletons of three animals. Burton picked up a skull and said, "Lion.”

"C'est remarquable," de Marbot muttered, reverting in his wonder to his native tongue. Then, in English, "Three different worlds. Lilliputian, yes. Yet large enough for all practical purposes, though I do not know about the practicality.”

"I'd venture that these are ... were ... retreats for the Council," Burton said. "Sort of, ah, vacation areas. Each made his world according to his wishes, his own temperamental inclinations, and retired here now and then for spiritual and, of course, physical satisfaction.”

De Marbot wished to look into all of the vast rooms, but Burton said that they had plenty of time for that later. They should continue their patrol.

The Frenchman opened his mouth to say something. Burton said, "Yes, I know. But what I'd like to do is see all that we can as swiftly as we can. It's better than having the Computer show us everything while we're lolling about in our rooms. Besides, how do we know that the Computer is showing us everything? It can delete as the Snark wishes it to, and we can't be sure that it's not doing so. We have to make a be-there visit. We'll make a flying patrol, be birds, get an overall view of everything. Then we can take our time and get the details.”

"You mistake me," de Marbot said. "I was merely going to comment on the state of my stomach. It is complaining of its emptiness.”

They took their chairs through the tube in the center of the floor to the next level, went down a corridor to the nearest door, opened it, and walked inside. It was a suite unfurnished except for a converter against a wall. De Marbot selected for lunch escargots bourguignonne with a French bread and a glass of white wine. Thirty seconds later, he removed the dishes and silverware and glass and napkin. His blue eyes were big with admiration as he sniffed the delicate aroma. "Sacree merde! Never on Earth could I get such perfection, such ecstasy! Yet surely the Ethicals must have gotten the original from some Parisian chef and copied it! What could be that genius' name? I would like to resurrect him, if only to thank him!”

"Some day, I'll order a deliberately badly cooked meal just for the sake of variety," Burton said. "Don't you find all this exquisiteness, this perfection, tiring? Every meal is a gustatory triumph.”

"Never!" de Marbot said. He rolled his eyes on seeing Burton's eclectic choice, buttermilk biscuits and squabs marinated in cream and a schooner of dark beer.

"Barbaric! And I thought that you did not like beer?”

"I do when I eat ham or squabs.”

"De gustibus non disputandum. Whoever said that was an idiot.”

A section of wall folded out to make a table, and they ate.

"Delicieux!" De Marbot cried, and he smacked his lips loudly.

Until three weeks ago, he had been whip-thin. Now his face was becoming moonlike, and a slight roll was entrenching itself around his waist.

"There is a glace de viande I must try," de Marbot said.

"Now?”

"No. I am no pig. Later. Tonight.”

For dessert the Frenchman had a fig souffle and a glass of red wine.

"Superb!”

They washed up in the bathroom and returned to the chairs. "We should be walking this off," Burton said.

"We'll work it off with saber play before supper.”

7

The illuminated halls they passed through had been dark a few seconds before they got to them. Heat detectors in the walls reacted to their bodies and activated switches that turned the lighting on ahead of them and off behind them. Because of this, the unknown probably knew exactly where they were. All he had to do was to command the Computer to give him images of every lit area. However, he could not spend all his time just watching the screens; he would have to sleep. If, however, by some means the tenants managed to get on his track, he could be awakened by the Computer.

The two came down a vertical shaft and came out into a hall. Halfway down this, they stopped their chairs and got out of them. A transparent outward-leaning wall enclosed a vast well glowing brightly from a source below them. The upper part of the enclosure was empty, but a few hundred feet below them was the illumination: a shifting dancing whirling mass of what seemed to be tiny suns. De Marbot got two pairs of dark spectacles from a box on a ledge and handed one pair to Burton. Burton put them on and looked for the twelfth time at the most gorgeous display he had ever seen, more than eighteen billion souls collected and made visible in one place. The Ethicals called them wathans, a word more precise than the English soul. These were the entities of artificial origin, each of which had been attached to an Earth-person the moment that the sperm and the egg united to form the zygote of that person. These remained attached to the head of each individual until he or she died, and it was these that gave Homo sapiens its self-consciousness and held its immortal part.

Each was invisible unless seen with a special device, in this situation the polarized material of the wellwall. They were glowing spheres of many colors and hues, with tentacles that shot out and contracted as the spheres whirled. Seemed to whirl, rather. Burton and de Marbot were not seeing the reality, the whole; they were seeing what their brains could grasp, a reshaping formed by their nervous systems.

The wathans, the souls, danced or seemed to dance, whirling, glowing, changing colors, passing through one another, occasionally seeming to coalesce and form a superwathan, which broke up into the original spheres after a few seconds.

Were they, when free of the human bodies, their hosts, conscious? Did they think when in this free state? No one knew. None of those who had been dead remembered anything of their existence when they were resurrected and the wathan was united again with the physical body.

The two stood rapt for a while before the awesome wonder surely unsurpassed in the universe.

"To think," Burton murmured, "that I have been part of that spectacle, that glory, many times.”

"And to think," de Marbot said, "that if the Ethicals had not made these, our bodies would have been dust for thousands of years and would have stayed dust until even dust had died.”

Far below, seen dimly through the coruscating nebula, was a great gray mass. It seemed to be shapeless, but Loga had assured them that it was not.

"That is the top of the titanic mass of organized protein that is the central part of the Computer," he had said. "It is the living but unselfconscious brain, the body of which is the tower and the grailstones and the resurrection chamber.”

The "brain" was not, however, shaped like the human brain when within the skull.

"It resembles, more than anything, one of your great Gothic cathedrals with its flying buttresses and spires and gargoyle-decorated exterior and doors and windows. It is enveloped in water holding sugar in suspension. The brain would collapse and become a gray ooze if the liquid were removed. It is a lovely thing to see, and you must do so sometime.”

It must be vast indeed to be visible from where they stood, and through the glowing wathans. It was three miles below them, and they could see only a part of the top as a gray cloud.

The rest of it occupied an expanded part of the well, a dome.

So far, the tenants had not ventured to the level where they could view the brain in its entirety. Nor did Burton plan on going there now. Instead, he returned to his chair and led his companion to the other side of the tower and down a shaft. Burton counted the levels passed—he had counted them during his first ascent from the level that was his destination—until he came to the one containing Loga's hidden room.

Before reaching the room, Burton stopped his chair. The Frenchman pulled up alongside him and said, "What is it?”

Burton shook his head and put a finger to his lips. He could see no mobile wall-screen, but the unknown might have other ways to monitor them. Even if he was not watching them now, it was probable that the Computer was recording their actions for later viewing.

They entered a big laboratory containing equipment whose functions Burton did not know—except for four huge gray metal cabinets. These were energy-matter converters. Their walls held all the needed circuits. In fact, the walls were the circuitry. Their power came through orange circles on the floor, which were matched to the orange circles in the center of the cabinet bottoms. Two cabinets were permanently attached to the floor, but the others could be taken from the room. Not, however, by the muscle power of two men alone.

Burton turned his chair, and, followed by de Marbot, flew out of the room and through the corridor past the wall behind which was Loga's hidden room. De Marbot must have wondered why Burton did not stop there, but he refrained from comment. By the time that they had returned to their suite level, after speeding up and down shafts and along corridors chosen at random, he no longer looked puzzled. He looked bored. But when they were in the hall, he pulled a notebook from the pocket on the outside of the chair and wrote on a sheet.

Burton took the note and held it close to his chest, his left hand partly covering it. He read: How long must I wait before you tell me your plans?

Burton wrote with a pen taken from the container on the side of his chair.

Some time this evening.

De Marbot read it and smiled. "I will have something to look forward to," he murmured.

He tore the note into tiny pieces, placed them on the floor, and ignited them with his beamer ray. He ground the ashes with the toe of his sandal and blew them away.

They waited, and presently a recess in the wall opened and a wheeled, jointed, cylindrical machine rolled out. It headed for the ashes, a scoop-like extension sliding out from its front. It sprayed the dirty area with a liquid that quickly dried into many tiny balls and then sucked the spheres onto the scoop and into an opening. A minute later, it had retreated into the cavity from which it had come, and the recess closed.

De Marbot spat on the floor just to see the robot in action again. As it rolled back to its lair after its cleanup job, the Frenchman kicked it. Unperturbed, the machine disappeared into the cavity.

"Really, I prefer the protein-and-bone robots, the androids," de Marbot said. "These mechanical things, they give me the shivers.”

"It's the flesh-and-blood ones that disturb me," Burton said.

"Ah, yes, if one kicks them, not out of a desire to hurt, you comprehend, but a desire to evoke an emotion, one knows that, since they're of flesh and blood, they do hurt. But they do not resent the insult or the injury, and that makes them nonhuman. Still, one does not have to pay them wages, and one knows that they will not go on strike.”

"It's their eyes I don't like," Burton said.

De Marbot laughed.

"They look no deader than the eyes of my Hussars at the end of a long campaign. You are reading into them a lack of life that does not exist. The lack, I mean. You know that they are brainless, rather, to be exact, use only a tiny portion of their brains. But one can say that of certain humans we have met.”

"One could say a lot," Burton said. "Shall we join the others?”

De Marbot glanced at his wristwatch. "An hour until supper. Perhaps I may be able to make Aphra jolly again. There is nothing that upsets one's digestion like a sullen companion at the table.”

"Tell her that she'll be in on the next phase of the project," Burton said. "She'll brighten up then. But don't tell her what we did unless you use this.”

He indicated the notebook.

De Marbot grimaced and said, "That one, the watcher, must be wondering what we're up to. How can we hide anything from him? One can't fart without his knowing about it.”

Burton grinned and said, "Perhaps we'll make him fill his pants. In a manner of speaking.”

The eight had agreed that each would take turns hosting the others. Tonight was Alice's, and she greeted them wearing a long, very lowcut, Lincoln-green evening gown of the style of 1890. Burton doubted that she was also wearing the numerous undergarments of that period. She was too accustomed to the comfortable cool clothes of the Rivervalley, a towel serving as a short skirt and a thin, light cloth serving as a bra. She did have elegant green high-heeled shoes on, and silk stockings, though the latter probably did not reach to her knees. Her jewelry, provided by an e-m converter, was an emerald set in a gold ring, small gold earrings, each with a single large emerald, and a string of pearls.

"You look lovely," he said as he bowed and kissed her hand. "Eighteen-ninety, heh? The year of my death. Are you trying to tell me in a subtle manner that you are celebrating that occasion?”

"If I am, I am doing so unconsciously," she said. "Let's not have any wisecracks, right?”

"Wisecrack. Nineteen thirty-four word," Frigate said to Alice. "The year of your first death.”

"The only one, thank God," she said. "Must we speak of the Grim Reaper?”

Frigate bowed and kissed her extended hand.

"You are absolutely devastating. Say the word, and I'm all yours. No, you don't have to say it. I'm yours anyway.”

"You're very gallant," she said. "Also, very pushy.”

Burton snorted and said, "That's one thing he's not. Except when he's been drinking. Dutch courage.”

"In bourbono veritas," the American said. "But you're wrong. Not even then. Am I, Alice?”

"Alice is a well-garrisoned castle on a steep hill surrounded by a wide moat," Burton said. "Don't try to mine her. Take her by storm.”

The American flushed. Alice did not lose her smile, but she said, "Please, Dick. Let's not be unpleasant.”

"I promise," Burton said. He turned, and started. "My God! Who're ... ?”

Two men in servant's livery were standing near the dinner table. No. Not men. They were androids. One had the face of Gladstone; the other, of Disraeli.

"No one else has ever had two prime ministers of Great Britain wait on them," Alice said.

Burton spun toward her, his face red and scowling.

"Alice! We talked about the danger! The Snark could program them to attack us!”

She met his fury calmly.

"Yes, we did. But you, or somebody, also said that the Snark has a thousand ways of getting at us. He hasn't done anything yet, and if he were going to, he'd have done it. Two androids, a thousand, won't make any difference.”

"Agreed!" Li Po said in his loud shrill voice. "Bravo, Alice, for taking the first step! I myself have some plans for androids! I may put them into effect tonight! Ah, tonight! You will suffer no more, Li Po!”

Burton had to admit, to himself, anyway, that she was right. She should not, however, have done this without getting the consent of the others. At the very least, she should have consulted him about it.

Perhaps, if the leader of this group had been someone other than him, she would have. It seemed to him that she took every opportunity to defy him now. Under that quiet soft demeanor, behind those large soft dark eyes, was a stubborn woman.

De Marbot and Behn arrived somewhat flushed and perspiring, as if they had just gotten out of bed or were in the midst of a quarrel. If the latter was the case, they were covering it up well. They smiled and joked and seemed perfectly at ease.

Burton greeted them and strode to a side table loaded with bottles and goblets and a huge bucket of ice. He waved away the android with Gladstone's face, which had approached him and asked if he could pour him a drink. Alice had done a very good job if she had reconstructed the prime minister's features from memory. She could have done so, since the man had dined a number of times at her house when her parents had been alive. More probably, though, she has asked the Computer to locate Gladstone's photograph in the files and it had done so. Then she had given the Computer her specifications, and it had reproduced this living but mindless being.

"By the Lord," he murmured, "it even has his voice!”

He sipped on the rye whiskey, smoother than any he had tasted on Earth, though it must be reproduced from some Terrestrial brand, and he went to talk with Nur. The little Iberian Moor was holding a glass of some pale yellow wine, which would last him for the evening.

"The Prophet did not forbid any alcoholic beverage except wine made from dates," he had once told Burton, who already knew it. "His excessively zealous disciples later extended the ban to all liquor. Though I felt that I did not have to obey the dictates of those ignoramus fundamentalists, I just did not care for strong waters. However, 1 have acquired a taste for this Chinese wine. Besides, even if I were a drunkard, what would Allah do to me that I had not done to myself? As for Mahomet, where is he?”

Burton and Nur talked of Mecca for a while, and then the android who looked like Disraeli announced that dinner was served. Since each guest had told Alice in the morning what he or she would like, the menus were in the Computer's memory. It took one microsecond for the food to appear inside a giant e-m converter; the servants took longer putting the appetizers on the table. Burton had ordered a salad with devil's-rain dressing followed by sturgeon fume a la muscovite and for dessert two tarts with rhubarb filling. The appropriate wine was served with each course.

Burton, Behn, Frigate and Li Po had cigars of the finest Cuban tobacco. Nur smoked his after-dinner cigarette, the only nicotine he allowed himself.

Burton approached the Frenchman, who backed away. "Spare my precious lungs that vile poison!" he cried.

"A man could die happy breathing this," Burton said. "However, as you said, non disputandum de gustibus. Did you inform Aphra that she might join us in our next venture if she wished?”

"That, yes, I did," de Marbot said. "Unfortunately, I could not tell her just what that venture was.”

Burton handed him a note. De Marbot read it and looked up. "What...?”

He came close to the Englishman and stood on his tiptoes to talk into Burton's ear. Burton still had to lean over.

"We will, I will, anyway, be ready. But ... you can give me no indication, no clue, as to what you have in mind?”

"It's best not to.”

"Ah, how intriguing," de Marbot said. "May the realization come up to my expectation. Danger, romance, skullduggery, an open charge upon the enemy or a silent stealth, apprehension, uncertainty, a task demanding all of one's courage and a straining of one's steel nerves.”

"All of those," Burton said. "Perhaps.”

8

A few minutes after one in the morning, Burton parked his chair outside de Marbot's and Behn's apartment. The door, as he had required, was open. He went into the big living room, the shad-owless illumination coming on just as he passed through the doorway. He went down the hall and knocked on the bedroom door. Sleepily, de Marbot called, "Quelle?”

"C'est mot, naturellement," Burton said.

A moment later, the Englishwoman and the Frenchman stumbled through the doorway, rubbing their eyes.

"You owe me six hours of sleep," the Frenchman said. "How does one repay such a debt?”

"With six hours' loss on my part," Burton said. "But this is for your benefit, also, so I owe you nothing.”

De Marbot had put on a towel-kilt, and Aphra was wearing a delicate black lace bra and black panties.

De Marbot said, "Hey, my cabbage, is that all you care to don?”

"It's what I always wear for midnight assignations," she said.

De Marbot laughed, hugged her, and kissed her cheek.

"My wild English rose. Always the unexpected, the delightful.”

She was, however, deceiving him. She went back into the bedroom and reappeared clad in a thin blouse, a short skirt, and ankle-length boots. By then Burton had ordered three large mugs of Brazilian coffee from the converter. They sipped while he told them that he would explain just what they would do when they got to their destination.

"Sealed orders," de Marbot said. "But the enemy, he is watching and listening to us. We are like the cat with a bell around his neck.”

"By the time we get through, he won't be able to see or hear us," Burton said.

De Marbot's eyebrows rose, and he smiled.

"Ah! I anticipate, I quiver, I revolve inside myself with excitement.”

"There's a lot of work involved," Burton said. "You'll be tired before we're done.”

"Not 1.1 am a man of iron, and Aphra, she is hard as platinum and twice the worth of that worthy metal in her weight.”

“Which is increasing," she said, patting her hip. Burton gestured impatiently, and they followed him to the corridor. They were armed with two beamers and knives, though they had no reason to expect to use them. They got into their chairs, and Burton flew in the lead. He steered the chair down the shaft to the level even with the surface of the cold dark sea surrounding the tower.

When Burton stopped the chair, de Marbot said, "This is not far from Loga's secret room.”

Burton nodded and indicated that they should go into the nearest room, the laboratory that he had visited the day before. Aphra looked around it and said, softly, "He must be wondering what we're up to. He's no more puzzled than I.”

"Richard is the general," de Marbot said, "and he tells us common soldiers as little as possible. It is an ancient tradition." Burton ignored their remarks. He went to the largest converter and ordered parts of stepladders, five hundred spray cans filled with black paint, a dozen powerful lamps, and a small nuclear-powered air generator.

"Man Dieu!" de Marbot said. "We are to be house painters! And what else?”

Burton began removing the equipment, emptying the converter when the first consignment appeared, closing the door of the converter, waiting a few seconds until the second consignment had filled the cabinet, and then removing this. When this was done, he told the two to take out the spray cans while he put the sections of the stepladders together.

De Marbot looked at Aphra with raised eyebrows as if to say, "What next?" She shrugged and, sweating, bent to her work. De Marbot, now sweating also, said, "Heh, my little cabbage. We must pay for all that divine food and exquisite wine, isn't it?”

"You pay for everything," she said.

Breathing hard, Aphra straightened up and looked at the wall in front of her. "The watcher is like God," she said. "He knows everything we are doing-1 only hope that, like God, he is indifferent to what we do.”

"Unlike God, the Snark sleeps," Burton said. "And he is limited by his body, like all us mortals. And his intelligence, though it may be great, is also limited.”

"Perhaps, like God, he does not exist," de Marbot said.

"That's a possibility," Burton said. "There! The stepladders are done.”

"Could we not have some androids to help us?" de Marbot said, "perhaps to do all the labor? We shall be the supervisors who loll around, taking our ease while the helots sweat for us.”

"I don't want to risk using them," Burton said. "To the task. Each of you start at a corner at the far end.”

He had asked the Computer for an estimate of the number of cans needed to spray the area. Now he asked for two wheelbarrows, took them from the converter, and piled one high with cans. While the others stood near the tops of the stepladders and covered the ceiling corners with the paint, he wheeled the cans not needed in the room into the corridor. After four trips, he told the Computer to furnish him with twelve cans of quick-drying spray cement. Having gotten these, he took them out into the corridor. Then he ordered the number of bricks he needed, also estimated by the Computer.

De Marbot, watching him, said, "There is nothing like using the enemy to fight him.”

There was one thing that Burton had to make sure of before he continued, though whether or not the door to Loga's room still opened he would complete the first part of his project. He knocked on the wall, said, "Ah Qaaq!" and watched as the entrance wheel rolled into the recess. He had not been sure that the Snark had not inhibited the operation since Burton's first visit. Now he stuck a chair in the opening to assure that the door could not close if the Snark changed his mind and decided to shut it permanently.

Burton had done many things on Earth. Brick-laying was not one of them, but he had often observed Arab workmen building adobe brick walls. In any event, the erection was simple. He laid a row from one wall to another a few feet from the doorway to Loga's room. He sprayed the top of the row and set another layer on top of that. By the time he had laid the last brick of that row, the cement—it was really a glue—had dried.

Pausing only to drink water twice, he sealed in that area of corridor from side to side, top to bottom.

He went to the other side of the entrance to the laboratory and began laying bricks there. Aphra stuck her head out of the door and said, "We're almost finished with the walls." Sweat ran from down her face and soaked her garments.

He went into the room and looked around. "Inspect what you've done," he said. "Make sure that every square inch is covered. Then spray the floor. When you're done, tell me.”

Groaning in mock-agony, de Marbot moved his stepladder to where he had begun spraying and climbed up it. Burton returned to his brick-laying. Working quickly and efficiently, he blocked off that part of the corridor. By the time he was done, de Marbot came to him.

"It's finished. Not a bit of wall, ceiling or floor is uncovered. The Snark may put all the screens he wishes on them. He'll be as blind as I am ignorant of your ultimate intentions.”

Burton went to the laboratory and said, "Now spray the windows in the doors of the converters. And move any furniture that can be moved, and spray the bare spots where they were.”

De Marbot gestured at the two mobile coverters. "Under them, too?”

"Yes.”

"How do you move them? We have been working like Samson at Gaza, but we are not as strong as he.”

"Use your flying chairs to slide them from the bare spots.”

De Marbot struck his forehead with the heel of his palm. "Of course! How stupid of me! It is that I am not used to menial labor! It has dredged my intelligence from me!”

"Don't carry on so," Burton said. "You would have thought of it!”

"It is not military work," the Frenchman said, as if that explained it.

Aphra went into the corridor with Burton. "How do we get out now?”

"The bricks are ordinary ones, made of clay.”

Behn pointed at his beamer and looked at him. Burton nodded.

"Then how will that keep him ... the Snark ... out?”

"It won't.”

He looked at his wristwatch. "We've much to do yet.”

Aphra shook her head and said, "I just don't know what you have in mind.”

"You'll see. In time.”

He took a stepladder, set it up by the corner of the brick wall and began spraying. When he had worked down to the door of the laboratory, having painted ceiling, walls and floor of the corridor, he looked inside. The power cables connected to the bases of the two mobile converters had been disconnected, and the cabinets had been shoved onto the painted floor. The bare areas beneath were sprayed, and his co-workers were leaning against a wall and drinking water. Aphra Behn was also smoking a cigar.

"As soon as you're rested," Burton said, "come help me paint the corridor.”

When de Marbot came out, he stopped, his eyes widening.

"Sacred blue! You have painted the brick wall!”

"Yes," Burton said. "The bricks seem to be just clay. I broke one open to examine it. But it's possible that the Snark inserted some conductive material in it. I want to make sure that he can't see us through it.”

"Not very likely," de Marbot said.

"We take no chances.”

"Ah, you bloody British! No wonder that we lost the war.”

De Marbot was not sincere. He maintained, furiously and with great conviction and many facts, that it was the mistakes and errors of Napoleon's marshals—and a few by the Corsican—that had caused the downfall of the empire. If his brave countrymen had been led by men who always made the right decisions, they would have been unbeatable.

Burton, so far, had refrained from pointing out that the same might be said for any army.

By the time that they had spray-painted the corridor and Loga's room, it was 5:00 a.m.

The light and air from the wall material and vents had been cut off, but the lamps and air generator replaced these.

De Marbot said, "Voild! C'est fini! I think.”

"You think incorrectly," Burton said. "Now we move the largest converter into the secret room.”

This was done by shoving the cabinet with a flying chair, Burton standing by the chair and operating the controls. The task took ten minutes, and the top and sides of the converter scraped against the round entrance. Having, the day before, measured the dimensions of the cabinet and of the doorway, Burton knew that it would be a tight but workable fit. When he had maneuvered the cabinet from the laboratory and into the secret room, he connected the cable to the power inlet of the cabinet.

Aphra Behn said, "You've covered the area that detects the entrance codeword. What do you plan to do if you want to get in again? Or will you leave the door open?”

"The paint can be easily scraped away over the area if it's necessary," Burton said.

The Frenchman gestured at the walls. "Everything is impenetrable. The Snark can no longer see or hear us. May we be permitted to know what you intend to do now?”

The light from the lamps on the floor drew heavy shadows on their faces and made them look like masks. The masks of tired and desperate people. The blue eyes of de Marbot and Behn, however, seemed to shine with an unflagging light. Their wills were not weary.

"The power line to the converter is tapped in to the main power line," Burton said. "But it is not in the Computer's schematic files, and any power through it is not recorded by the Computer. Not, that is, unless the Snark has changed things. We can make whatever we wish, and the Snark won't have the slightest idea of what we're doing. He'll know we're up to something, and he'll be concerned about it. But he can't find out what it is unless he comes down here. He'll have to investigate personally.”

"That ain't so," Aphra said. "He could send androids.”

"If he's sentient, that is, human, he'll be as curious as a monkey. He'll want to look into this himself.”

"Perhaps.”

"Did you tell the others anything?" de Marbot said.

"No. I didn't feel it was necessary.”

The Frenchman looked at his wristwatch.

"In about two and a half hours, some of our companions will be meeting for breakfast. You're always there. Won't they look for you?”

"Probably. And they won't find me. Eventually, they'll know that you two have disappeared, too.”

"They'll think the Snark took us!" Aphra said. "They'll be very worried.”

"It'll shake them from their lethargy," Burton said. "They won't be bored, at least.”

"That's a little cruel," Aphra said.

"And they'll come looking for us," de Marbot said.

"There's not much chance they'll find us," Burton said. "Not when they have thirty-five thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three rooms to search.”

"But they can use the Computer, it'll scan for them. And when it reports ...”

He stopped, smiled, and said, "Ah, I see. The Snark may, probably will, prevent the Computer from telling them where we are.”

"They'll be searching for us, and the Snark will have to keep tabs on them," Burton said. "I hope they'll provide some distraction for him.”

"Yes, but," Aphra said, "they could have done the same thing if you told them to do so, and they wouldn't be upset about our being missing.”

"The fewer know about us, the better. If they truly believe we're missing, they won't be acting. I'm not sure that the Snark wouldn't detect their insincerity. After all, he can read their voices for emotion and scan their wathans. He could tell if they're pretending.”

"It's like fighting God," Aphra said.

"You said that," Burton said. "And I told you that the Snark is not God. Even if he was, I'd give him a run for his money.”

"Morbleu," de Marbot said. "What if he doesn't come? What if he just lets us sit here like rats in a self-made trap? What then?”

"You can see a rat in a trap. He can't see us.”

They were silent for a while. They had painted themselves into a dark corner, but they had all they needed to wait there for as long as they could endure it. There was a toilet in Loga's room and several in the laboratory. They could use the converter in .Loga's hideaway to make food or whatever they wished. The converter was now tied in with a small auxiliary computer unconnected to the main one.

Seven o'clock came. Their conversation was infrequent and uninspired. The silence, the lighting, which seemed strange and' unnatural after the shadowless illumination, and the waiting for something to happen wore on them. At seven-thirty, Burton suggested to the other two that they eat breakfast. They could sleep on the big bed while he stood guard.

At eight o'clock, the two decided that they would eat and then rest. Breakfast was provided by the converter in Loga's room. Burton ate lightly; he did not want to be sluggish if quick action was required. De Marbot and Behn got into the bed, but the Frenchman said, "I do not feel right sleeping. You might need me.”

"It's all right," Burton said. "You're a light sleeper. Besides, I don't really expect the Snark to do anything for a long while.”

"But you do not know.”

"Right.”

Burton went back to his station by the entrance to the secret room. Sleepy, afraid that he might nod off, he began pacing back and forth close to the doorway. He did not know if anything would happen but, if it did, it would be to his advantage. Whatever did come, it would probably be unexpected.

Perhaps he was acting senselessly, stupidly. Still, it was better than doing nothing at all. If he were the unknown, would he be able to just let the unobserved three stay behind the walls? Would he not wonder what they were doing? Would he not try to think of everything they could possibly do? Wouldn't he even ask the Computer to run off a list of everything that could be done?

No. He wouldn't do that. The Computer was not sentient; it had no imagination. Its output never exceeded its input. In that, it was unlike and inferior to human beings. Some human beings.

You're too cynical, he told himself. But am I? Aren't millions, billions, of people protein robots? They differ only in that they can feel sorrow, grief, disappointment, love, ambition, despair, frustration, irritation, amusement, rage, sympathy, empathy ... well, not many could feel that... imagination ... some of them ... Vive la difference!

Frigate had once said that most people were persons and a minority were human beings. "What the Ethicals are trying to do is to turn the many persons into human beings. I wish them success, but I don't have high expectations. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm not as yet a human being.”

Frigate talked much about proper philosophical principles but did little to act them out. Nur was also a philosopher, but he acted out his philosophy. And you, Burton? What about you?

He had explored continents and minds, those of the legion of devils known as Burtonia excepted.

"There is only one great adventure," Frigate had said, "and that is the descent into oneself." He was quoting or paraphrasing some twentieth-century writer, Henry Miller, whom the American greatly admired at the same time that he despised some of his attitudes.

"The darkest Africa, the highest Everest, the deepest Pacific Abyss is your own mind. So why do so few set out to conquer it?”

"Because it's like a fish trying to find out the nature of water," Burton had said.

Talk, talk, talk. Parrots. Language was the plumage of human beings.

How did one burst through the self-erected barriers?

At that moment, something did break through. There was a crash and a roar. Burton leaped into the air and whirled toward the noise, his heart beating almost loud enough to drown out the uproar.

When he looked around the doorway, he saw that the corridor was dark except for the lamplight coming from inside Loga's room and through the half-opened door of the laboratory. No. There was also light shining through a huge hole in the brick wall. It dimly revealed a monstrous thing, a horizontal cylinder with a conical nose, a dark mass that rolled on wheels toward him.

Burton jumped inside the doorway, turned, and stuck his head out far enough to see the thing. It was moving slowly, though it must have been traveling Very swiftly to breach the wall, the bricks of which were held together by cement far stronger than anything on Earth in his time. The light from the corridor walls beyond the big hole showed that the monster was traveling on ten wheels.

Burton pointed his beamer at a spot behind the nose. The end of the scarlet rod-shaped ray struck, but though it could burn through twelve inches of nickel-steel in five seconds, it made no visible impression on the gray metallic-looking surface. He pulled back into the doorway and hurled himself backward and to one side as a violet-colored ray from the side of the machine leaped over his shoulder. Other rays followed; then the conical end of the monster was passing him. Daring to look around the doorway again, he saw that its large beamers were projecting the rays at various angles from both sides and many places.

When it was within a few feet of the other wall blocking the corridor, it stopped and began moving back. The beams were still going off and on at intervals of a few seconds. Moreover, the angles of fire were changing. Where they had struck were bare spots. The paint had been burned off.

Burton backed up behind the wall. A ray streaked through the doorway and burned off the paint on the far wall. Another, at a higher angle, destroyed more paint.

De Marbot called, "Dick, are you all right?”

"I'm not hurt!" Burton yelled. "Don't expose yourself!”

"I am not stupid!" the Frenchman screamed back.

But he was stupid; at least, from Burton's viewpoint, he was. De Marbot ran past him and out into the corridor toward the machine. Burton cried out after him to stop. The Frenchman did not hesitate but leaped upon the back of the juggernaut and grabbed a rung near the top. Burton had expected him to be cut through by a ray, but the beams had stopped the moment de Marbot had run into the corridor. Later, Burton wondered if the rays that had been shot at him had only been to discourage him from getting close to it or following it when it left.

Now the machine rolled backward and past the opening to Loga's room. De Marbot, clinging with one hand and smiling, waved at Burton.

"Get off it!" Burton shouted. "You can't do anything to it! Get off before it kills you!”

"Where it goes, I go!" de Marbot yelled.

He lost his bravado then, because the machine, having halted, suddenly sped forward, its tires screaming as they burned on the floor. All the beams had been turned off, but now one sprang from the nose. The violet lance struck the brick wall and pierced it, and then the beam widened into a cone, the base of which melted the bricks within its area and made an opening just large enough for the machine to pass through.

De Marbot, screaming, had, however, loosed his grip before he was hit by the bricks at the edge of the breach. He lay face down, silent.

"That crazy frog!" Burton said. The machine was whipping around a distant corner, revealing that it was not solid but had articulations that permitted it to turn corners, though just barely. De Marbot was sitting up by then and was holding his head.

Burton ran to him, beating Aphra by a few steps.

"Are you hurt?”

De Marbot sat up, grimaced, then smiled.

"Only my pride. I became frightened. I screamed with fear.”

Assisted by Burton, he got to his feet. "I do have a few scratches, bruises, and contusions. I have taken worse spills many times from a horse while fighting for my glorious emperor. But never, never, have I had such a short ride!”

Aphra wrapped her arms around him and snuggled her face into his chest. "You stupid son of a bitch! You scared me to death!”

"You are most lively and reproachful for a corpse," he said, hugging her. "Oh, my poor arm and shoulder! I cannot embrace you, little cabbage, with all my huge and accustomed strength and love!”

She freed herself and wiped her tears away with her fingers.

"Your little cabbage, hell! I am not a vegetable, I'm a woman! A woman who's very angry with you and your heroics!”

"A rose with thorns, perhaps, is it not?”

Burton looked up and down the corridor. No one in sight.

"Why did you jump on it?" he said. "What did you expect to accomplish?”

"I was going to ride it to its lair, where I might find its master, the Snark, awaiting it. And then I would surprise him and take him prisoner or kill him if I had to. But I forgot, in the heat of combat, that the thing would only make a hole large enough for it to pass through.”

"You were lucky that your brains, such as they are, weren't dashed out," Burton said. He shared some of Aphra's anger; he was very fond of the Frenchman. "It was magnificent, but it was not good soldiership.”

"Ah, you are just jealous because you did not think of doing it.”

Burton laughed and said, "Perhaps you're right.”

He indicated the areas where the paint had been burned off.

"The Snark now sees and hears us.”

"Odsblood!" Aphra said. "He just showed us how weak and helpless we are. We can't even hide from him!”

"But we did force him to act," Burton said. "He had to find out what we were doing here. He did not disdain us enough to ignore us.”

"And so I have worked like a helot with spraying paint, sweated like a slave for nothing," de Marbot said.

"You did get an unusual ride out of it.”

De Marbot's teeth shone.

"Yes. It was worth it!”

Burton was not sure. They had not done well. Moreover, the machine probably had cameras that had shown the Snark the open door to Loga's secret room.

"What do we do now?" Aphra said. "Slink back to our apartments like bad little puppies who've been whipped?”

Burton did not answer because of a shout from the right. A flying chair was suspended near the intersection of the corridor, and the voice had come from the opened curtain in an enclosure on the chair. It had been fitted with a frame over which transparent plastic had been arranged. The man in the chair was sitting with his legs drawn up in front of him on the seat.

"Who's that?" de Marbot said.

"Frigate," Aphra said, having recognized his voice.

The chair shot forward and settled on the floor, and Frigate pulled the enclosure, a sort of tiny cabin, from the chair. He got out, looked around, and said, "What happened?”

Burton explained. Then the American had to tell de Marbot and Behn why he was here and what the purpose of the enclosure was.

"Dick arranged with me to come here eight hours after you three had left. The contraption—the enclosure—is to prevent my body heat being detected by the Computer.”

De Marbot looked reproachfully at Burton.

"You said that you'd enlisted just us.”

"I don't tell the truth if it's useful not to do so," Burton said. "I thought that it would be best if I had two follow us but didn't tell you. I didn't want you and Aphra to be saying anything to each other about this.”

"Two?" de Marbot said. "Where is the other?”

"Nur is supposed to come down the corridors on the other side," Burton said, pointing in the direction in which the machine had gone.

"Why?" de Marbot said. Then, "You think that perhaps Nur might have tracked the machine to its lair?”

"We won't know until later.”

Burton turned to Frigate.

"I assume, since you've reported nothing, you saw nothing.”

"Right.”

"The machine could have gone in any direction in this maze. We'll wait until Nur gets here.”

"If the Snark didn't catch him," Frigate said.

"You're so optimistic," Aphra said.

"I just like to consider every possibility," Frigate said somewhat heatedly. "It's not my fault that negative possibilities always outnumber the positive.”

"They don't. You just see the dark chances easier than you see the bright ones.”

Burton looked at his wristwatch. Five minutes had passed since the machine had broken through. He would wait a total of thirty. If Nur did not show by then, they would go back to their apartments. There they might have to wait for a while until Turpin, Alice and Li Po returned from searching for them. If, that is, they had indeed gone out to look for them. Logic might tell them to stay together in one apartment for defense.

A voice startled them. It was Nur's, speaking from just outside the nearest brick wall.

"Don't shoot. It's I. Nur. I have good news.”

"Come in," Burton said.

The little man entered. He stripped off some plastic material from his face and removed his gloves and jacket.

"Hot.”

Burton stepped outside the doorway. Nur's chair, equipped with an enclosure like Frigate's, was parked by the wall. Burton went inside. Nur was smiling, as well he might.

"I caught the Snark outside her secret room. I came speeding out of the dark part of the corridor and yelled at her to surrender. She refused; she started to take her beamer from her holster. So I shot her.”

"Her?" Burton said.

"Yes. We knew that the unknown could be of either sex, but we spoke of her as him so much that we'd fallen into the habit of thinking that she must be a he. The rest of you did, anyway. I did not.”

Nur said that it would be best if he took them to the scene of the discovery and then explained what had happened. They followed him in their chairs through the breach in the wall, went down one corridor, turned, and stopped a hundred feet from the corner. The unknown lay on her back, eyes and mouth open, a thin cauterized wound on her throat showing where Nur's beam had pierced it from front to back. She was short and slim and clothed in scarlet shirt, sky-blue slacks and yellow sandals. A beamer lay near one open hand on the floor.

"She's Mongolian," Nur said. That he would point out the obvious showed that he was not as calm as he seemed. "I don't know if she's Chinese, Japanese, or of some other Mongolian nationality. Li Po might be able to tell us. But it's irrelevant.”

There was a large circular opening in the wall, the doorwheel having rolled within the wall recess. Beyond would be her apartment, where she had hidden while keeping herself well informed of the movements of the eight. Wall-screens showed all the rooms in their apartments. The beds of Alice, Tom Turpin and Li Po were empty; another screen displayed them at a table, playing cards in Turpin's apartment. If they were alarmed, they did not show it. Apparently, they had decided that their colleagues had disappeared because Burton was carrying out one of his secret plans, or they had stayed together for safety. As it turned out, they had elected to hole up for both reasons.

Burton would, however, have to endure their reproaches when he returned to the apartment. He could bear them easily because he came with victory in his pocket.

The night before, Peter Frigate and Nur el-Musafir had gone to their bedrooms. They had hoped that the Snark would be sleeping and that the Computer would awaken the Snark only if it detected someone leaving the suite to enter the corridor. The only detectors on, they hoped, would be the heat devices. They were praying that no video screen would be on the corridor wall facing the suite door.

The two ordered from their converters a pair of suits and helmets for them and enclosures for the chairs. This could have been reported to the Snark, but they were gambling that the Computer—if it had recorded these actions—would not submit them to the Snark until the Snark awoke.

Clad in the heat-retaining outfits, carrying the enclosures, Frigate and Nur had left the suite. And the wall sensors had not been activated by them. The unknown, not having made provisions for such deceptions, had slept on. Unlike the Computer, she could have imagined these, but she had not done so.

"We were very lucky," Burton said. "Events turned out to favor us, and they could just as easily not have done so. In fact, the probabilities that we would succeed were not very high.”

"You think that we were too lucky," Nur said. Burton waited for him to elaborate, but Nur said, "The first thing I thought of when I killed her ... I only meant to wound her ... was that she would have arranged for an automatic and immediate resurrection.”

They followed the Moor into the room. At one corner was a converter, and a few feet near it, sprawled face down, was another body of the woman. The auxiliary computer console had been destroyed by beamer fire.

"I came into this room as soon as I'd killed her," Nur said. "Her body had just formed, and she was running to get a beamer on a table. I told her to stop. She ignored me, and so I shot her. I immediately rayed the computer and so prevented a third resurrection. Unfortunately, the ray also destroyed her body-recording.”

He led Burton to the ruin and pointed at a section that had been cut off. Inside was a blackish, half-melted, cranberry-sized object that had held everything needed to duplicate the body down to the submolecular level.

"I would be devastated with remorse and grief if I thought I had forever eliminated her chance of being resurrected again. But I'm sure that she must have another recording in the Computer file. I doubt that we can reach it, though. She would have inhibited the Computer from enabling us to find it.”

"We'll see," Burton said. "You're probably right, though.”

"Who the hell was she?" Frigate said. "What was she doing here? Loga said that all the Ethicals and their Agents were dead. If he was right, then she wasn't one of them. But what else could she be?”

"One of Loga's enemies, otherwise she wouldn't have eliminated him," Nur said. "But if she wasn't an Ethical or Agent, what reason would she have to do away with him? If she just wanted complete power, why didn't she kill us?”

Aphra said, slowly, "Perhaps Monat the Operator was more far-seeing than Loga expected. Perhaps Monat made arrangements for an Agent, this woman, to be resurrected if certain events happened. Certain events in general, I mean. Monat could not have anticipated all events in particular.”

Burton requested the Computer to identify the dead woman. It replied that the data was unavailable, and it would not or could not say why.

Burton asked it if the dead woman's body-recording was in its files.

The Computer said that it was unavailable.

"One more mystery," said Frigate, and he groaned.

Burton asked the Computer for the location of the machine that had broken through the barricade walls. As he had expected, he was told that that information was also unavailable.

"I've seen all the robots the tower contains," Burton said. "I had the Computer show them on a screen. That machine was not among them.”

The woman might have had it made for her by the Computer just to break down the walls.

Nur and Frigate dragged the body from the corridor and laid it down by the body near the cabinet. Stretched out, face up, they looked like identical twins.

"Shall we have them disintegrated in the converter?" Nur said.

"One of them," Burton said. "I want the Computer to examine the other.”

"So you can see if she has a black ball in her brain?”

Burton grimaced. Nur always seemed to be able to read his mind.

"Yes.”

The two dumped one body into a cabinet and ordered the Computer to get rid of it. White light filled the cabinet, and, when they looked through the window in the door, the cabinet-was empty. There were not even ashes in it.

The other corpse was placed on a table above which was a huge dome-shaped device. Though there was no display of energy, the interior of the body was shown on a screen in a series of images. Burton had the Computer run the images back to the one he wanted. There was a tiny black sphere on the forebrain. This had been surgically implanted and, acting at a subvocalized codeword, would release a poison into the bearer's body, killing it instantly.

"So ... she was an Agent.”

"But we still don't know when she came here or what her ultimate intentions were," Frigate said.

"For the moment," Burton said, "we don't have to. It's enough that we've gotten rid of the Snark. Now we're on our own, free.”

They were, however, free only in some senses. Burton asked the Computer if the overrides installed by the woman were now removed. It replied that they were not.

"When would they be released?”

The Computer did not know.

"We're stymied," Frigate said.

"Not forever," Burton replied. He was not as confident as he sounded.

10

On that perhaps forever-lost Earth, so far in distance and time, in a.d. 1880 in the city of London, England, appeared a privately printed book. It was titled The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, A Lay of the Higher Law. Translated and annotated by His Friend and Pupil F. B. The initials stood for Frank Baker, a nom-de-plume of Captain Richard Francis Burton. "Frank" was from his middle name; "Baker" was his mother's maiden surname. Not until after his death would his true name be appended to a reprint.

The poem, set in distichs imitating the classical Arab form, was supposed to be the work of a Persian Sufi, Haji Abdu of the city of Yezdi in Persia. Haji was a title borne by any Moslem who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton himself, having made the pilgrimage, disguised as a Moslem, could call himself a Haji. In this poem, Burton poured out his wisdom, pessimism, vast knowledge, and agnosticism, the Burtonian World-View and World-Pain. As Frank Baker, he had annotated the poem by "Abdu" and written an afterword that expressed a somewhat cynical and laughing view of himself. The laughter was, however, sad.

The preface summed up his philosophy, formed after fifty-nine years of wandering over the only planet he would ever know—or so he thought at the time.

TO THE READER The Translator has ventured to entitle a "Lay of the Higher Law" the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the "Higher Culture!" The principles which justify the name are as follows: The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.

(Frigate's comment on this statement was that it could be valid. But if Burton meant that individuals got an equal share of happiness and misery, he was wrong. Some people staggered along under a great burden of misery and had little happiness to lighten their load. Others had far more than their share of happiness. Anyway, Burton had not defined what he meant by happiness and misery. Though, of course, he didn't have to do that for misery. Everybody knew what that was. Happiness, however, what was that? A mere freedom from pain and trouble? Or a positive quality? Was contentment happiness? Or did you have to be joyous to be happy?)

 He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.

(What about your children? Alice had said. You have to cultivate them more than you do yourself so that they'll be better, happier, and more adjusted than yourself. Every generation should be an improvement on the previous. I'll admit, however, that it seldom happens. Perhaps you're right in that you can't properly cultivate your children if you have not properly cultivated yourself. But you didn't have any children, did you?)

(Self-cultivation is a major and vital principle, Nur had said. We Sufis stress it, keeping in mind that it demands self-discipline, compassion and intelligence. But most people carry it to the extreme and make self-cultivation self-centeredness. This is not surprising. Mankind always does things to excess. Most people do, that is.)

He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the "divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments.

(A pinch of pity adds savor to the soup of life, Nur said. Too much spoils it. Pity may lead to sentimentality and maudlin-ism.)

(Pity breeds a sense of superiority, Frigate had said. It also leads to self-pity. Not that I'm decrying that. There's an exquisite joy in self-pity, if it's indulged in now and then, here and there, and you end up laughing at yourself.)

(You forgot to include sex, Aphra Behn had said. Though I suppose that sex is part of the affections and sympathies.)

(Creating something, a painting, a poem, music, a book, a statue, a piece of furniture, childbirth, raising a child properly, these are man's—and woman's—highest enjoyments, Frigate had added. Though there's much to be said for creating pristine sparkling bullshit, too.)

He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions.”

(But there comes a time when you must judge, Nur had said. First, though, you must be sure that you are qualified to judge. Who knows that?)

(One person's facts are another's superstition, Frigate had said. What does that mean, by the way?)

(You can believe only in what you see, Li Po had said. And even then you can't be sure. Perhaps you can really believe only in what you have not seen, what you've imagined. Dragons and fairies exist because I believe in them. A rock is a fact, and so is my imagination.)

Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.

(Man is the only animal who thinks of the should-be rather than the what-is, Nur had said. Which is why man is the only animal who consciously changes the environment to suit himself. And usually spoils it because of his stupidity and excess. There are exceptions to this rule, of course.)

(A fine statement, Alice had said. But Dick Burton has always been self-destructive. When, if ever, will he stop destroying himself?)

For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume. Vienna, Nov., 1880 f. B.

 (Has it occurred to you, Nur had said, that you are nearing the end of that book you call Richard Francis Burton? It's been published in two volumes, Earth-Burton and Riverworld-Burton. This tower may be The End.)

(It's always been an excellent philosophy to live as if you're going to die in the next hour, Frigate had said. Everybody agrees on that, but the only people who live it are those who know they're going to die soon. And not even then.)

(That's why I like to go to bed whenever possible, Aphra had said. Marcelin, are you in the mood?)

(Even the most ardent soldier needs to go to a rest camp now and then, de Marbot said. At the moment, I am an old, weary and saddle-sore veteran.)

11

Burton also felt like a weary, saddle-sore veteran. He had been riding himself—and others—too hard for top long. Now that he had crossed the last of hundreds of obstacles that had had to be dealt with at once, he needed rest and recreation. The problems to be solved, those presented by the Computer, could be tackled later.

Yet, he thought, as he looked into a mirror, I do not look as if I had lived for sixty-nine years on Earth and sixty-seven years here. My face is not that of a 136-year-old man. It is the face I had when I was a youth of twenty-five. Minus the long Satan-black drooping moustache, a hairy crescent moon. The Ethicals had arranged that the resurrected males lack facial hair, an arrangement that Burton had always resented. It was true that men did not have to shave, but what about the feelings—the rights—of those who desired moustaches and beards?

Now that I am in the tower, he thought, why not change those despotic arrangements? Surely there must be a way to start the hair growing again on my face.

On Earth, he had been afflicted—perhaps afflicted was too strong a word—marked with a slight strabismus. He had a "wandering eye." In more senses than one. This small fault had been corrected by the Computer when he had been raised from the dead in the Rivervalley.

So, loss of beard weighed against correction of focus. But now, why could he not have both?

He made a note to look into that question.

"Brow of a god, jaw of a devil" some impressionable biographer had written of him. An accurate description, however. And one that described the two personae within him, the one who lusted for success and the one who lusted for defeat.

If, that is, the books written about him were correct in their judgments.

Some of them were on the table now. He had requested a few of the titles suggested, by Frigate, and the Computer had printed and bound them for him and deposited their reproductions in a converter. The best, so Frigate said, was The Devil Drives, written by an American woman, Fawn M. Brodie, first published in 1967.

"I gave up my intention to write a biography of you when that came out," Frigate had said. "But its excellence and wide inclusiveness did not keep others from writing biographies of you after hers. They lacked good judgment. However, you may not like The Devil Drives. Brodie couldn't keep from analyzing you in Freudian terms. On the other hand, perhaps you can tell me if she was right or not. But then, you'd be the last person to know, wouldn't you?”

Burton had not read the text yet, but he had looked at the reproductions of photographs. There was one of him at the age of fifty-one, painted by the famous artist Sir Frederick Leighton, and displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He did look fierce, Elizabethan, buccaneerish. Leighton had posed him at such an angle as to catch the high forehead, the swelling supraorbital ridges, the thick eyebrows, the driven hungry expression of his eyes, the thrusting chin, the high cheekbones. The scar left from a Somali spear was prominent; Leighton had insisted on showing that, and Burton had not objected. A scar, if honorably gotten, was a form of medal, and he, who should have been covered with real medals, had been slighted.

"Partly your own fault," Frigate had said. "I can understand and sympathize with that. I, too, was, am, self-defeating.”

"My family motto was 'Honour, not Honours.' “

Opposite the Leighton portrait was a photograph of his wife, Isabel, made in 1869, when she was thirty-eight. She looked buxom, regal, and handsome. Like a kindly but domineering mother, he thought. A few pages back was a portrait of her done by the French artist Louis Desanges in 1861, when she had married Burton. She looked young, loving and optimistic. Beneath her was the Desanges painting of Burton done at the same time. She was thirty; he, forty. His moustache dropped almost to his shoulder-bones, and he certainly looked dark and fierce.

And how thick his lips were. Which had suggested to certain biographers, and others, an overly sensual nature. How thin and prim and pursed were Isabel's lips. A flaw in an otherwise perfectly beautiful face. Thin lips. Thick lips. Love, tenderness and cheerfulness versus fierceness, ambitiousness and pessimism.

Isabel, blonde; he, dark.

He turned the pages to a photograph of him at sixty-nine in 1890 and another of himself and Isabel in the same year, same place, Trieste. It had been taken by Doctor Baker, his personal physician, under a tree in the backyard. Burton sat on a chair, not visible in the photograph, one hand on the knob of his iron cane, the other draped over his right wrist. The fingers looked skeletal: Death's own hand. He wore a tall gray plug hat, a stiff white collar, and a gray morning coat. The eyes in the gaunt face looked like those of a dying prisoner. Which, in a sense, he was. Little of the fierceness evident in the earlier pictures was there.

By his side, looking down at him, one white hand held up, a finger extended as if she were chiding him, was Lady Isabel. Fat, fat, fat. While he shriveled, she expanded. Yet, according to Frigate, though she knew that he was dying, she bore in herself the seeds of death, a cancer. She had not said a word to him about it; she had not wanted to upset him.

In her black dress and hood, she looked like a nun, a nurse nun. Kindly but firm. No nonsense.

He contrasted the youthful face in the mirror with that in the photograph. Those old old eyes. Sunken, despairing, lost. Those of a prisoner who had no hope of bail or pardon. Moons in eclipse.

He remembered how at Trieste in September, the last month of his life, he had purchased caged birds in the market, taken them home, and set them free. And how, one day, he had stopped before a monkey in a cage. "What crime did you commit in some other world, Jocko, that you are now caged and tormented and going through your purgatory?" And, shaking his head, walking away, he had muttered, "I wonder what he did? I wonder what he did?”

This world, the Riverworld, was a purgatory, if what the Ethicals said was true. Purgatory was the hardest of the three afterworlds, heaven, purgatory and hell. In heaven you were free and ecstatic and knew that the future would always be good. In hell, though you suffered, you knew for once and all what your future would be. You did not have to strive for freedom; you knew that you would never attain it. But in purgatory you knew that you were going either to hell or to heaven, and it was up to you where you went. With the joys and freedom of heaven as a carrot, you strove like hell in purgatory. You knew the theory of how to get a ticket to heaven. But the practice ... ah, the practice ... that eluded you. You snatched it away from yourself.

Earth had bristled with carrots of many kinds: physical, mental, spiritual, economic, political. Of these, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, was sex.

Frigate had once written a story in which God had made all animals, hence humans, unisex. Every species lacked males; only females existed. Women impregnated themselves by eating fruit from sperm trees. Cross-fertilization was a very intricate procedure in the story, the women shedding genes with their excretion and the trees picking these up through their roots. Thus, males were unnecessary and not included in the parallel world Frigate had imagined.

Every three years, women were afflicted with arboreal frenzy and compulsively devoured the fruit until they became pregnant. In the meantime, women fell in love with one another, lived amicably or passionately or angrily with one another, were jealous, committed adultery, and, of course, often practiced erotic deviations. One of which, not uncommon, was falling in love with a certain tree and eating fruit out of season.

The main plot of the story was about the insane jealousy of a woman who, thinking that she had been cuckolded by her lover's tree, chopped it down. Grief-stricken, the lover went into a nunnery.

A subplot of the story concerned a science-fiction writer who had imagined another world in which there were no sperm trees. Instead, women had mates who were their counterparts physically except that they had no mammaries and were equipped with a rodlike organ that shot seeds into the uteruses of their lovers.

This method, according to the science-fiction writer in Frigate's story, was a much better method and also eliminated the competition for trees. The mates with the rods were much like the trees in that their vegetable nature made them subservient to the females. But, unlike the trees, they were useful for something besides reproduction. They did the housework and field-work and took care of the babies while women played bridge or attended political meetings.

In the end, however, the rod-creatures, being more human than vegetable and more muscular than the females, rebelled and made the women their servants.

Burton, hearing Frigate's story, had suggested that a better idea would have been to make the humans of one sex, the male, and have them impregnate the trees. The males would also get most of their food from the fruit of the trees. However, being human, the males would want power, and they would war among themselves for the trees. The victors would be rewarded with vast arboreal harems. The defeated would either be killed or driven into the woods to satisfy themselves with an inferior species of vegetation, a bush which could be screwed but which could not bear children.

"A good idea," Frigate had said, "but who would take care of the infants? Trees can't. Besides, the victorious male, the owner of the harem, or grove, would be so busy guarding his trees from other males that he would neglect the infants. Most of them would die. And if he were overcome by another male, his infants would be left to die or perhaps be killed by the conqueror. The victor would not want to raise the other man's children.”

"There doesn't seem to be any perfect means for reproduction and caretaking of the infant, does there?" Frigate had said. "Perhaps God knew what He was doing when He made us male and female.”

"Perhaps He was limited in His choices and took the best one. Perhaps perfection is not possible in this universe. Or, if it is, perfection rules out progress. The amoeba is perfect, but it can't evolve into something different. Or, if it does, it ceases to be an amoeba and must give up perfection for certain advantages, balanced or imbalanced with certain disadvantages.”

And so the splitting of Homo sapiens into two species in the real world and the vagaries of Fate brought together Lieutenant General Joseph Netterville Burton and Martha Baker, the prig and hypochondriac father and the child-spoiling and seductive but moralistic mother. They had gotten married after a short courtship, possibly because the retired officer on half-pay had been induced by Martha's fortune to marry her. He had once had money, but he could not hang onto it. Though he despised gamblers, he did not think that speculation in the market was un-Christian.

On a night circa June 19, 1820, the lieutenant general had launched millions of spermatozoa into the heiress' womb, and one wriggler had beaten the others to the egg waiting in its lair. The chance combination of genes had resulted in Richard Francis Burton, eldest of three siblings, born March 19, 1821, in Torquay, Devonshire, England. Richard's mother had been lucky in not being infected by puerperal fever, which killed so many women giving birth in those days. Richard was also lucky in that he caught only one of the childhood diseases that put so many in the graveyard then. Measles laid him low, but he survived unharmed.,.

His mother's father was so delighted when his daughter bore a red-headed and blue-eyed son that he considered changing his will and giving the bulk of his estate to Richard instead of Martha's half-brother. Mrs. Burton fought against this, an act for which Richard never really forgave his mother. Finally, the grandfather decided that he would ignore his daughter's arguments and arrange for his beloved grandson to inherit. Unfortunately, Mr. Baker died of a heart attack as he started to get into the carriage that was to take him to his solicitor. The son got the money, was cheated out of it by a sharpster, and died in poverty. A short time later, Richard's red hair turned to jet black and his blue eyes to a deep brown. This was the first of his many disguises, though not, in this case, the first deliberately assumed.

It was his mother's infatuation with her brother that had caused the first of Burton's many misfortunes. Or so Burton had always thought. If he had been independently wealthy, he, a thoroughly undisciplined and argumentative man, would not have had to endure military life so long in order to support himself. He would not have been deprived of the money needed to make his African explorations thoroughly successful.

And his father's decision to go to the Continent, where life was cheaper and where he might find a cure for his more-or-less imaginary ills, had cut off the father's connections with old school friends who might have advanced his son's career. It also made Burton a wanderer, rootless, one who never felt at home in England. Though it was true, as Frigate pointed out, that he had never felt at home anywhere.

He could not abide to stay in one place more than a week. After that, his restlessness drove him on. Or, if circumstances forced him to stay, he suffered.

Which meant that he was indeed suffering here.

"You could move from one apartment to another," Nur had said to him. "I doubt that that would satisfy you. This is a small world, and you can take only small trips. Anyway, why move? You can change your apartment so that it looks like another world. And when you're tired of that, change it again. You may travel from Africa to America without taking a step.”

"You were a Pisces," Frigate had said. "The fish. Ruled by Neptune and Jupiter and associated with the twelfth house. The principle of Neptune is idealism and that of Jupiter is expansion. Pisces harmonizes. Pisces' positive qualities make you intuitive, sympathetic and artistic. Its negative qualities tend to make you a martyr, indecisive, and melancholy. The characteristics and activities of the twelfth house are the unconscious mind, institutions, banks, prisons, universities, libraries, hospitals, hidden enemies, intuition, inspiration, solitary pursuits, dream arid sleep patterns, and your pets are large.”

"Sheer jobbernowlry, darkest superstition," Burton had said.

"Yes. But you have always been a fish out of water. Idealistic, though cynical. Expansive, certainly. You've tried to be everything. You have tried to harmonize many fields, synthesize them. You are intuitive, sympathetic and artistic. Certainly, you've made a martyr of yourself. You have often been indecisive. And melancholy! Read your own books.

"As for the unconscious or subconscious, you were more than an explorer of unknown lands. You also explored the darkest Africas of the human mind. You had many hidden enemies, though you also had many open enemies. You did depend on intuitions, hunches, quite often. You loved the solitary pursuits: scholarship and writing. As for institutions, you did not like to work in them, but you studied and analyzed them. As for dream and sleep patterns, you were fascinated by them, and you became a skilled hypnotist.

"Large pets. That seems not to be true. Yours were mostly bull terriers and gamecocks and monkeys. But you did love horses.”

"I could take any one of the other zodiacal signs or all of them," Burton had said, sneering, "and I could show you how each and all would apply most appropriately to me. Or to you. Or any of us.”

"Probably," Frigate had said. "But it's fun to dabble in astrology, if only to demonstrate that it doesn't work. However ...”

Nur and Frigate were convinced that the universe was one cosmic spiderweb, and a fly landing on one strand sent shivers through the entire web. Someone sneezing on a planet of Mizrab somehow might cause a Chinese peasant to stub his toe on a rock.

"Environment is as important as genes, but the environment is much vaster than most people think.”

"Everything is," Burton had replied.

He was thinking of this when the wall before him began glowing. He straightened up and leaned back. This was going to be a much larger screen than usual. When it ceased growing it was ten feet across.

"Well?" he said as the expected face, one of the seven, did not appear. Instead, the light dimmed until it was a blackness on the gray of the wall. Faint noises came from it.

He told the Computer to amplify them and leaned forward. The sounds were as faint as before. He repeated his command; the Computer failed to comply.

Suddenly, light made a ragged hole in the center of the screen, and the sounds loudened, though they were still unintelligible. The hole expanded, and he was looking at something white and streaked with blood. Something wet with other than blood.

"Here comes the little devil," someone said.

Burton shot from the chair.

"Good God!”

He was seeing through someone's eyes. The white thing was a sheet; the water, that which burst before birth; the red streaks, blood. The voice was unfamiliar. But the scream that drowned it out was, he did not know how he knew but he knew, his mother's.

Suddenly, the screen showed him more, though it was a dim vision. Around him was a room containing giants. The screen was blanked out as something passed across it. And then the room rotated, and he glimpsed giant arms, bare from the elbow's^ down, rolled shirt sleeves above. A big bed was turning also, and in it was his mother, sweaty, her hair dank. His mother was young. A giant hand was pulling a sheet over the bare stomach and legs and the bloody hairy home from which he had been pulled.

Now he was upside down. A sharp slap. A thin wailing. His first blow.

"Lusty little devil, isn't he?" a man's voice said.

Burton was witnessing his own birth.