26

Burton said, Sit down, Kazz. make yourself comfortable. You sit there for a minute. I'm leaving. Monat will be coming in, and he will talk to you."

"I understand."

Burton walked out of the hut and stood for a minute. He should have posed as Monat when he first started the session. That might have overcome Kazz's resistance more quickly, and Burton would not have had to resort to the trickery of the bear and Besst.

He re-entered, and said, "Hello, Kazz. How are you?"

"I'm fine, Monat. How are you?"

"Great! Very well, Kazz. I'll take over from where your friend, Burton, left off. We'll go back to that first time I talked to you, just after you had noticed that Frigate and I had no marks on our foreheads. You now remember that time, Kazz, because I, Monat, tell you to do so.

"You will go back to the second after you had told Monat. Are you there?"

"Yes, I am there."

"Where are you, Monat, and Frigate?"

"We are near a grailstone."

"What day, or night, is that?"

"I do not understand."

"I mean, how many days was it after Resurrection Day?"

"Three days."

"Tell me what happened after you spoke to them about the lack of the mark."

Kazz, speaking in a monotone, described the events immediately after. Monat had said that he and Frigate wanted to speak to him privately. They had walked across the plain and gone into the hills. There, behind a giant irontree, Monat had fixed his eyes upon Kazz's. Without the use of any mechanical devices, without even informing Kazz what he was doing, Monat had hypnotized him.

"It was as if something dark flowed from him to me, something dark and overpowering."

Burton nodded. He had seen Monat demonstrate this power, this "animal magnetism" as it was known in Burton's time. He was a stronger mesmerist than Burton, which was one reason why Burton had never permitted the Arcturan to attempt hypnotizing him. In fact, Burton had taken precautions against getting caught unawares by Monat. In an elaborate self-hypnosis, he had told himself that he must never allow himself to be mesmerized by Monat. However, Monat could be powerful enough to break down that command, so Burton had been extremely cautious about being alone with him.

That forearming had been based on the fear that Monat might stumble across the time when he had been visited by the Ethical. That was Burton's secret, one he wanted no one to know. He had had no idea then, of course, that Monat was one of Them.

He wondered if Frigate was also an expert hypnotizer. The fellow had never given any indication that he was. However, he had refused to let Burton try mesmerism on him. His plea had been that he could not endure the thought of losing his self-control.

Kazz remembered that, during the course of the session, Monat had remarked to Frigate about the Neanderthal's ability to see the symbols.

" ' We never knew about that. We'll have to tell HQ as soon as we get a chance.'"

So, Burton thought, Monat and Frigate were in communication from time to time with the Ethicals. How did they manage that? Were prearranged landings of the flying machines, which Burton had once glimpsed, one method of communicating? Those machines which flickered into and out of visibility as they flew along?

Those two must have been watching him closely. That was one of the reasons the Mysterious Stranger had visited him at night during a storm. The Ethical must have known that Monat and Frigate were in Burton's party. But he had never mentioned them, had not put him on his guard.

Perhaps he had meant to do so, but he had been hurried. He'd said that the Ethicals were coming soon in their flying machines. And he had left abruptly. Even so, he surely would have mentioned so grave a matter. A few words would have warned him. Why had he not done so? Was it possible that he did not know that Monat and Frigate were with him? And Ruach, too. He must not forget Ruach.

Why had three agents been assigned to him? Wouldn't one have been enough? Also, why was one so conspicuous as the Arcturan given the job?

Whatever the reasons for this, the matter of the lack of signs on the heads of the three agents was more pressing. Evidently, Ethicals, first-order or second-order, did not have such marks. Now that they were aware that Neanderthals could observe this, they had made sure that Kazz would not say anything about it.

Moreover, Monat had then told Kazz that from that moment on he would see the marks on the foreheads of himself and his two colleagues.

Why had he not then installed a command that Kazz would see these signs on everybody who did not have them?

Perhaps he thought that it would not be necessary. The chances of running across other Neanderthals, never a numerous people, were slight. Still, it would have eliminated any exposures of agents from then on.

The explanation might be simple. Monat would have had to describe the marks of every agent in the valley. Inasmuch as there might be hundreds, or thousands, for all Burton knew, that would have been impossible.

Monat had not been too wrong in thinking that encounters with Neanderthals would be rare. In fact, Burton had never seen more than a hundred. All of these except Kazz and Besst had been passed by swiftly and at a distance during the day.

Yet, they had come across Besst.

He tried to recollect the exact circumstances under which she had been met. It was three years ago that they had come ashore at evening. This was an area populated largely by fourteenth-century A.D. Chinese and ancient Slavs. Besst was living with a Chinese, but she had made it evident from the first that she wished to go on the boat wifh Kazz. It was dark, so she would not have noticed anything unusual about Frigate and Monat-aside from the latter's being nonhuman, of course.

The two had gotten together and talked until late that night. When her hutmate had ordered her to come with him, she had refused. There was a tense moment when it looked as if the Chinese were going to attack Kazz. Discretion won. He realized that, though he was bigger than the Neanderthal, he was also much weaker. Though very short, Kazz's massive bones and muscles made him stronger than any but the most powerful of modern men. In addition, his brutal face was enough to scare anybody.

The two had gone aboard to spend the night together. Yet they must have gone to sleep before dawn. Could Monat have gotten to her then? Probably. Burton did not know how he had done it. But Besst had never said anything about Frigate's and Monat's marks.

Kazz finished his account of the session. It was short and what Burton had expected.

He sent Kazz after Besst, telling him to be very quiet. In a few minutes he was back with her. Burton told her he would satisfy her curiosity later. For the time being, would she let him hypnotize her ? Sleepily, she agreed, and she sat down on the chair Kazz had occupied.

After telling her he was Monat, he took her back to the mesmerizing by Monat. As he had thought, it had been done after she and Kazz had gone to sleep. Monat had simply described tp her the marks which he had hypnotized her mate into seeing on the three agents' foreheads. Then he had ordered her to see the same marks. The whole process would have been done very quietly and quickly.

Monat and his colleague had been lucky. Before Kazz had encountered Spruce, he had seen two other people without the marks. However, the first time had been on Resurrection Day. He had called out to the man, asking him why he had no mark. The man had fled, probably not because he understood what Kazz was saying but because he had misunderstood the Neanderthal's intentions.

Later, after meeting Burton, Kazz had tried to tell him what he had seen, but neither could speak the other's language yet. And Kazz had simply forgotten about it in the days following, when they were all busy trying to survive.

The. second person he'd seen lacking a mark was a woman, a Mongolian. This had happened at high noon, and the woman had just come out of The River, where she was bathing. Kazz had tried to talk to her, but her hutmate, who did have a mark on his head, had taken the woman away. Evidently, he was jealous. Once more, Kazz's intentions were misunderstood.

At that time, Burton and the others had been talking to the local headman in the council house. Kazz had stayed behind to watch their boat. After the woman had gone, Kazz was offered some drinks of lichen-alcohol by several people who wanted to talk to him. These had never seen a Neanderthal before, and the liquor was an inducement to get him to talk. Kazz, easily induced and seduced by free booze, was half-drunk by the time his crewmates returned. Burton had reproached him so harshly that Kazz had never again drunk while on guard duty.

He also forgot about the woman.

After bringing Besst out of the trance, Burton sat for a while in thought. Besst and Kazz shifted uneasily and gave each other wondering looks. Finally, he made a decision. There was no longer any use keeping them in the dark. Nor would he exclude Alice from now on. He owed the Stranger nothing, and the fact that he had not reappeared again could mean that he, Burton, had no reason to keep silent. Besides, though he was naturally secretive, he longed now to share his experiences.

Though he gave only a bare outline, he took over an hour. Both Besst and Kazz were amazed, and they had many questions. He held up his hand for silence.

"Later! Later! As of now, we must question them. The Arcturan's a much tougher customer, so we'll tackle Frigate first."

He told them what they must do. Kazz said, "But wouldn't it be best to knock out Monat and tie him up? What if he wakes up while we're getting Frigate?"

"I don't want to make any more noise than we have to. If Loghu and Alice hear us, we'll have a brouhaha."

"A what?"

"An uproar. Let's go."

The three of them made their way through the fog. Burton thought of some more questions he would ask Frigate. For instance, Monat, Frigate, and Ruach must have known that Spruce was an agent. There had been plenty of opportunity for them to talk to him while they had been grail slaves. And Monat had had opportunities after the revolt to hypnotize Kazz so he would see a mark on Spruce. Why had he not done that?

If Monat had not been able to get to Kazz after the revolt, he should then have told Spruce to leave the area at once. Or, at least, to wear a cloth around his head when conditions were favorable for seeing the mark.

Could Spruce not have known that they were his fellow agents? They might be so numerous that each was familiar only with a few others. But surely all would know of Monat.

He stopped, and drew in his breath.

The Mysterious Stranger had never said anything about having his own agents. Yet, he was a renegade, and he might have enlisted a few highly trusted people. Could Spruce have been one? And could Monat somehow have found this out? And so gotten rid of him by not telling him about Kazz's visual abilities?

That did not seem probable. If Monat had found out that Spruce was on the Stranger's side-and how would he ever be able to do that?-would he not then have hypnotized Spruce? That would enable him to identify the Stranger, supposing, of course, that Spruce knew who he was.

There was another possibility. Monat knew of Spruce's ability to kill himself by means of the sphere on his forebrain. Thus, he was not worried that Spruce would be forced to divulge any information at all.

Also, he may have used Spruce as a messenger. He would have given him some information to pass on when Spruce was resurrected at HQ-if HQ meant headquarters.

Monat had taken part in Spruce's inquisition. How amused he must have been at that. Also, it was Monat who had given Spruce some leading questions.

Had Spruce been prepared by Monat to give the answers he had made? Were they all lies?

If so, why should he lie? Why were all resurrectees kept in the dark?

It was quite possible that Spruce, acting on Monat's orders, had deliberately ensured that Kazz would notice him.

By then, the three had boarded the Snark. The Neanderthals stayed above. Burton felt his way to the cabin, down the companion way, and, counting the compartment doors, stopped outside Frigate's and Loghu's. He opened the door slowly and stepped inside. It was a very small space, just large enough to hold two bunks against the bulkhead and room to climb down from them. The bunk-chambers were the only places where any privacy was available. Even defecation was done in them, in the bamboo chamber pots which were stored in a rack to one side.

Frigate usually slept in the top bunk. Burton moved forward, his hand outstretched. He would wake him gently, whisper that it was his watch, and then he would follow him to the deck. There Kazz would knock him out, and he would be carried to the hut.

Since it would be impossible to keep him from killing himself once he was fully conscious, Burton had decided to try to mesmerize him as he was regaining his wits. It would be a chancy procedure, but he would have to try it. Frigate, unlike Spruce, might not be so willing to commit suicide now that there were no more resurrections.

However, Burton was not sure that the Ethicals' agents were not resurrected.

His fingertips felt the smooth sideboard of the bunk. They moved up onto the cloths that served as a mattress. They stopped.

Frigate was not in his bunk.

Burton felt along the cloths though he knew that nobody was on the bunk. They were warm. Then he stood for a minute. Had Frigate gone above to relieve himself because he did not want to awake Loghu? Or had he awakened early and decided to talk to his captain a few minutes before going on guard duty?

Or had he . . . ? Burton felt furious. Had he sneaked out of bed and now was with Alice?

Feeling ashamed of himself, he rejected that idea. Alice was honest. She would never betray him. If she wanted another lover, she would have said so. She would have told him and then left him. Nor did he believe that Frigate would ever do anything like that to him, though he may have contemplated it in his mind.

He bent down and reached out until he touched cloth. His fingers moved along, traced a curve-Loghu's breast under the cloth-and he backed out and closed the door.

Silently, his heart thudding so fast he could almost believe that it could be heard throughout the cabin, he moved to Monat's partition. His ear against the door, he listened. Silence. He straightened, opened the door, and felt into the upper bunk. Monat was not there, but he could be sleeping in the lower bunk. If so, his breathing was not audible.

His hand slid over unoccupied cloths.

Cursing softly, he groped back to the deck.

Kazz stepped out of the fog with his fist raised.

"Wallah! What's the matter?"

"They're both gone," Burton said.

"But. . . how could that be?"

"I don't know. Maybe Monat knew that something was wrong. He's the most sensitive person I've ever met; he can read your slightest expression, detect the feeblest nuance in your voice. Or perhaps he heard you wake up Besst, investigated, and guessed the truth. For all I know, he may have been listening to us outside the door of the hut."

"Neither Besst or me made any noise. We was as silent as a weasel sneaking up on a rabbit."

"I know. Look, around. See if our launch is missing."

He met Kazz coining around the other way.

"The boats're all here."

27

Burton roused Lochu and Alice. While they drank hot coffee, he outlined everything that had happened to him in connection with the Ethicals. They were stunned, but they kept silent until he had finished. Questions hailstormed him then, but he said that he would answer them later. It would be dawn shortly, which meant that they had to put their grails on the stone for breakfast.

Alice was the only one who had not said anything. It was evident from her narrowed eyes and tight lips that she was furious.

"I am sorry that I had to keep all this from you," Burton said. "But surely you can see how necessary it was? What if I told you everything and then the Ethicals grabbed you, as they did me? They could have read your mind and discovered that they had erred in thinking they had erased relevant portions of my memory."

"They didn't do so," she said. "Why should they have even thought of that?"

"How do you know they didn't?" he said. "You wouldn't remember it if they had done it."

That gave her another shock. Nevertheless, she did not speak again until after breakfast.

This took place in unusual weather. Normally, the sun quickly burned off the fog. The sky was clear the rest of the day in the tropical zone or until midaftemoon in the temperate zones. In the latter, clouds quickly gathered, rain fell for fifteen minutes or so, and then the clouds disappeared.

This morning, however, black masses rolled between sun and earth. Lightning flickered as if chips of the bright sky above the clouds were falling through. Thunder was the muttering of a giant behind the mountains. A pale light spread over the land, staining it brownish-yellow. The faces around the grailstone looked as if a blight had settled upon them.

Kazz and Besst hunched down uneasily over their food and looked around as if they expected an unwelcome visitor. He muttered in his native tongue, "The-Bear-Who-Collects-The-Bad is walking."

Besst almost whined. "We must find a hut to hide in. It is not good to be near the water when he walks."

The others looked as if they were going to seek shelter, too. Burton stood up and said loudly, "One moment, please! I'm interested in finding out if any of you are missing a boat!"

A man said, "Why?"

"Two of my crew deserted last night, and it's possible that they stole a boat to get away."

Forgetting about the coming storm, the party scattered to look along the bank. Within a minute, a man reported that his dugout was gone.

"They're far away by now," Kazz said. "But did they go up or down The River?"

"If there was a signal system in this area, we could find out quickly enough," Burton said. "Unless, of course, they beached their boat and went into the hills to hide."

Alice said, "What do we do now, Dick? If we stay here to look for them, we'll not be able to get on the Rex."

Burton stifled the impulse to tell her not to point out the obvious to him. She was still simmering; no sense in making her boil again.

"Monat and Frigate can hole up today and sneak out tonight and steal another boat. It would be futile to try to catch them. No, we'll try to get aboard the paddle wheeler. But those two will come along some day, and when they do . . ."

"We'll tear them apart?" Kazz said.

Burton shrugged and spread his palms upward.

"I don't know. They've got the advantage. They can either drop dead on us or lie to us. Until we get to the tower ..."

Alice spoke then, her eyes dark with accustomed reverie:

"If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly

I did turn as he pointed; neither pride

Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,

So much as gladness that some end might be.

"For, what with my world-wide wandering. What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope

With that obstreperous joy success would bring-

I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

"There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my, lips I set And blew, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.' "

Burton grinned savagely. "Browning would have thought ... must think . .. that this world is even stranger than the setting of his outre poem. I appreciate your sentiment, even if he said it first, Alice. Very well, we will go to the Dark Tower."

"I don't know what Alice was talking about," Kazz said. "Anyway, just how're we going to get on that boat?"

"If King John has room for us, I'll offer him our treasure trove, our free-grails. That should appeal even to the ungreediest heart.''

"And if he doesn't have room?"

He was silent for a moment. That tickle in the back of his brain, that feeling that he had overlooked some linkage between agents, had returned while Alice was speaking. And now he saw, or thought he saw, the means for scratching the itch, the kind of chain binding the agents together.

How did they recognize each other? Monat was no problem; he did not need identification. But what kind of secret signal would the human agents use to identify each other?

If they possessed a Neanderthal's ability, they could see the negative signal, lack of a sign, in their colleagues' foreheads. Suppose, though, they did not have this ability? Spruce had been surprised when he found out about Kazz's optical talent. Though he had not said so, his manner had indicated that he had never heard of such a thing. Evidently, machines were used to detect and translate the symbols into whatever meaning they had. That would probably be done in the PR bubble or whatever HQ was.

If, then, they could not see the symbols with the naked eye, they would have another means of identification.

Suppose, just suppose, that there was a cutoff date. A period of time at which no more people from Earth were resurrected, not, at least, on this planet. According to Monat, Frigate, Ruach, and Spruce, that cutoff date had been 2008 A.D.

What if that was not the true date? What if it were earlier than 2008 A.D.?

He had no idea what the true date would be, though he had never met anyone, except the agents, who claimed to have lived past 1983 A.D. From now on, he would question every late-twentieth-centurian he met. And if 1983 was the latest at which anybody had died, then he would be fairly certain that that was the cutoff point.

So ... perhaps the Ethicals had contrived a fiction which would enable them to identify each other instantly. That was that they had lived during 2008 A.D. And, of course, there would be a fixed story about events from 1983, or whatever date it was, to 2008.

Which meant that perhaps it was untrue that the Arcturans had killed most of humanity in that year. The terrible slaugher might never have happened. In fact, anything he had heard about the years 1983-2008 might be a lie. Yet, there was Monat. He was not a Terrestrial. There was no reason to believe that he had not come from a planet of the Bear Watcher.

For the present, there was no way to explain his presence on The Riverworld.

Meanwhile, Burton had two means for catching ah Ethical. Kazz was one; the 2008 story was another.

However-humanity lived not only in an as-if world, it was a but-if world, too-however, just possibly the agents had been recruited from a time past 1983. So, their stories could be true.

There were so many possibilities. For instance, how did he know that Monat, Frigate, and Ruach had told him the truth about what had happened to them when they were away from him? There was that incident when Frigate had claimed he had met the publisher who had cheated him on Earth. Frigate said he had gotten a long-delayed revenge by punching him on the nose.

There were bruises on Frigate, supposedly gotten during the fight with Sharkko and his gang. Those could have come from conflict with others, though. Frigate's nature was such that he dreaded violence, physical or verbal. He might fantasize revenge, but he would never carry it out.

Suppose, just suppose, that the agents adopted disguises based on real life Terrestrials. What if there was an actual Peter Jairus Frigate somewhere on this planet? The pseudo-Frigate could be pretending to be the man who had had such an intense interest in Burton's life. That would be one means of getting close to Burton, of making sure that Burton would let him attach himself to Burton. After all, it would be hard for any man to be indifferent to his biographer, to a person who seemed to worship him.

Yet, why would it be necessary for an agent to adopt such a disguise? Why not make up one from whole cloth?

Perhaps it was not necessary, it was just easier, more convenient. As for an agent encountering the person he was pretending to be, that was highly unlikely.

There were so many potentialities, so many questions to be answered.

Alice said, "Dick! What's the matter?"

He came out of his reverie with a start. Everybody except his crew and the man whose boat had been stolen had fled. The man looked as if he would like to ask for reparations but was hesitating because he had no one to back him up.

A wind was whipping the waves of The River and ruffling the thatches of the huts. The Snark thumped against the bumpers of its dock. The light had gone from brownish-yellow to pale grey, making the faces around him even more ghastly. Across the water lightning flashed its fiery tooth, and thunder bellowed like a bear in a cave. Kazz and Besst were obviously longing for him to give the word to look for shelter. The others were only somewhat less nervous.

"I was thinking," he said. "You asked what we'd do if King John doesn't have room for us? Well, monarchs have means for making room if they wish to do so. And if he refuses, I'll find some way to get aboard. I'm not going to be stopped by anything or anybody!"

Lightning struck nearby, cracking as if the back of the world had broken. Kazz and Besst led the headlong flight for the nearest building.

Burton, standing in the heavy rain that had immediately followed the bolt, laughed at them.

He shouted, "On to the Dark Tower!"

28

In the dream, Peter Jairus Frigate was groping through a fog. He was naked; somebody had stolen his clothes. He had to get home before the sun rose and burned the fog off and exposed him to the derision of the world.

The grass was wet and scratchy. After a while he got tired of walking on the shoulder of the road, and he stepped onto the asphalt pavement. Now and then, as he trudged along, the fog would thin a little, and he could see the trees to his right.

Somehow, he knew that he was far out in the country. Home was a long way off. But if he walked fast enough, he could make it before dawn. Then he'd have to get into the house without waking his parents. The doors and windows would be locked, which meant that he'd have to throw pebbles against the second-story window in the back. The rattle might wake his brother, Roosevelt.

But his brother, though only eighteen, was already a heavy drinker, a skirt chaser, roaring around on his motorcycle with his sideburned, leather-jacketed dese-and-dem pals from the Hiram Walker Distillery. This was Sunday morning, and so he'd be snoring away, filling the small attic bedroom he shared with Peter with stinking whiskey fumes.

Roosevelt was named after Theodore, not Franklin Delano, whom his father hated. James Frigate abominated "the man in the White House" and loved The Chicago Tribune, which was delivered on the doorstep every Sunday. His oldest son loathed the editorials, the whole tone of the paper, except for the comics. Ever since he had learned to read, he'd eagerly awaited every Sunday morning, right after the cocoa, pancakes, bacon, and eggs, for the adventures of Chester Gump and his pals in quest of the city of gold; Moon Mullins; Little Orphan Annie and her big Daddy Warbucks and his pals, the colossal magician Punjab and the sinister The Asp, and Mr. Am, who looked like Santa Claus, was as old as the Earth, and could travel in time. And then there was Barney Google and Smilin' Jack and Terry and the Pirates. Delightful!

And what was he doing thinking about those great comic-strip characters while walking naked along a country road in dark, wet-with-evil clouds? It wasn't difficult to figure out why. They brought a sense of warmth and security, happiness even, his belly filled with his mother's good cooking, the radio turned on low, his father sitting in the best chair reading the opinions of "Colonel Blimp." Peter would be sprawling on the living room floor with the comics page spread out before him, his mother bustling around in the kitchen feeding his two younger brothers and his infant sister. Little Jeannette, whom he loved so much and who would grow up and go through three husbands and innumerable lovers and a thousand fifths of whiskey, the curse of the Frigates.

All that was ahead, fading now from his mind, absorbed by the fog. Now he was dwelling in the front room, happy . . . no, it too faded away ... he was outside the house, in the backyard, naked and shivering with the cold and the terror of being caught without his clothes and no way of explaining why it happened. He was throwing pebbles against the window, hoping their rattle wouldn't wake up his little brothers and sister sleeping in the tiny bedroom below and to one side of the attic bedroom.

The house had once been a one-room country schoolhouse outside the mid-Illinois town of Peoria. But the town had grown, houses sprang up all around it, and now the city limits were a half a mile to the north. A second story and indoor plumbing had been added sometime during the growth of this area. This was the first house he had lived in in which there had been an indoor toilet. Somehow, this once-country house became the farmhouse near Mexico, Missouri. Here he, at the age of four, had lived with his mother, father, and younger brother and the family of the farmer who'd rented out two rooms to the Frigates.

His father, a civil and electrical engineer (one year in Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, and a diploma from the International Correspondence School) had worked for a year at the generating plant in Mexico. It was in the farmyard behind the farmhouse that Peter had been horrified on realizing that chickens ate animals and he ate chickens that ate animals. That had been the first revelation that this world was founded on cannibalism.

That was not right, he thought. A cannibal was a creature that ate its own kind. He turned over and passed back into sleep, vaguely aware that he had been half-waking between segments of this dream and mulling over each before passing on to the next. Or he had been redreaming the entire dream each time. In one night he would have the same dream several times. Or a dream would recur a number of times over several years.

The series was his specialty in dreams or in fiction. At one time, during his writing career, he had twenty-one series going. He'd completed ten of them. The others were still waiting, cliff-hangers all, when that great editor in the skies arbitrarily canceled all of them.

As in life, so in death. He could never-never? Well, hardly ever-finish anything. Hie great uncompleted. He'd first become aware of that when, a troubled youth, he had poured out his torments and anxieties onto his college freshman advisor, who also happened to be his psychology teacher.

The professor, what was his name? O'Brien? He was a short, slim youth with a fiery manner and even fierier red hair. And he always wore a bow tie.

And now Peter Jairus Frigate was walking along in the fog and there was no sound except for the hooting of a distant owl. Suddenly, a motor was roaring, two lights shone faintly ahead of him, then brightly, and the motor screamed as he screamed. He dived to one side, floating, slowly floating, while the black bulk of the automobile sped slowly toward him. As he inched through the air, his arms flailing, he turned his head toward it. Now he could see, beyond the glare of its lights, that it was a Duesenberg, the long low, classy roadster driven by Gary Grant in the movie he's seen last week, Topper. A shapeless mass sat behind the wheel, its only visible features its eyes. They were the pale-blue eyes of his German grandmother, his mother's mother, Wilhelmina Kaiser.

Then he was screaming because the car had swerved and headed directly toward him and there was no way he could escape being hit.

He woke up moaning. Eve said,sleepily, "Did you have a bad . . . ?" and she subsided into mumbles and a gentle snoring.

Peter got out of bed, a short-legged structure with a bamboo frame and rope supports for a mattress made of cloths magnetically attached around treated leaves. The earthen floor was covered with attached cloths. The windows were paned with the ising-glasslike intestinal membrane of the hormfish. Their squares shone faintly with the reflected light from the night sky.

He stumbled to the door, opened it, walked outside, and urinated. Rain still dripped from the thatched roof. Through a pass in the hills, he could see a fire blazing under the roof of a sentinel tower. It outlined the form of a guard leaning on the railing and looking down The River. The flames also shone on the masts and rigging of a boat he had never seen before. The other guard wasn't on the tower, which meant that he would be down by the boat. He'd be questioning the boat's skipper. It must be all right, since there were no alarm drums beating.

Back in bed, he considered the dream. Its chronology was mixed up, which was par for dreams. For one thing, in 1937, brother Roosevelt had been only sixteen. The motorcycle, the distillery job, and the peroxided blondes were still two years away. The family wasn't even living in that house anymore. It had moved to a newer, larger house a few blocks away.

There was that amorphous, sinister dark mass in the car, the thing with his grandmother's eyes. What did that mean? It wasn't the first time he had been horrified by a black hooded thing with Grandma Kaiser's almost colorless blue eyes. Nor the first time he'd tried to figure out why she appeared in such horrendous guise.

He knew that she had come from Galena, Kansas to Terre Haute to help his mother take care of him just after he'd been born. His mother had told him that his grandmother had also taken care of him when he was five. He didn't remember, however, ever seeing her before the age of twelve, when she had come to this house for a visit. But he was convinced that she had done something awful to him when he was an infant. Or it was something which had seemed awful. Yet she was a kindly old lady, though inclined to get hysterical. Nor did she have any control at all over her daughter's children when they were left in her care.

Where was she now? She'd died at about seventy-seven after a long and painful siege of stomach cancer. But he'd seen photographs of her when she was twenty. A petite blonde whose eyes looked a lively blue, not the washed-out red-veined things he remembered. The mouth was thin and tight, but all the adults in her family were grim lipped. Those brown-toned photogravures displayed faces that looked as if they 'd had a very tough time but would never break under the strain.

The Victorians, judging by their photographs, were a hard-nosed, stiff-spined lot. His German grandma's family had been made of the same stern stuff. Persecuted by their Lutheran neighbors and the authorities because they had converted to the Baptist church, they left Oberellen, Thuringia for the land of promise. (Peter's family on both sides had always opted for the religion of the minority, usually a somewhat crank religion. Maybe they were trouble seekers.)

After years of moving from one place to another, never finding a single street paved with gold, after backbreaking labor, soul-searing poverty, and the deaths of many children and finally of parents and grandparents, the Kaisers had made it. They had become well-to-do fanners near, or owners of machine shops in, Kansas City.

Was it worth it? The survivors said that it was.

Wilhelmina had been a pretty, blue-eyed blonde of ten when she had come to America. At eighteen she had married a Kansan twenty years older than she, probably to escape poverty. It was said that old Bill Griffiths was part-Cherokee and that he had been one of Quantrill's guerrillas, but there was a lot of malarkey in Peter's family on both sides. They were always trying to make themselves look better, or worse, than they really were. Whatever old Bill's past, Peter's mother never wanted to talk about it. Maybe he was just a horse thief.

Where was Wilhelmina now? She'd no longer be the wrinkled, bent old women he'd known. She'd be a good-looking, shapely wench, though still with the vacuous blue eyes and still speaking English with a heavy German accent. If he should run across.her, would he recognize her? Not likely. And if he did, what could he find out from her about the traumas she'd inflicted on her infant grandson? Nothing. She wouldn't remember what would have been minor incidents to her. Or, if she did, she surely wasn't going to admit that she had ever mistreated him. If indeed the dark deed had ever been done.

During a brief stint of psychoanalysis, Peter had tried to break through the thick shadows of repressed memory to the primal drama in which his grandmother played such an important role. The effort had failed. More extended attempts in dianetics and scientology had resulted in zilch also. He had kept on sliding past the traumatic episodes, like a monkey on a greased pole, on past his birth and into previous lives.

After being a woman giving birth in a medieval castle, a dinosaur, a prevertebrate in the postprimal ocean, and an eighteenth-century passenger in a stage coach going through the Black Forest, Peter had abandoned scientology.

The fantasies were interesting, and they revealed something of his character. But his grandmother evaded him.

Here, on The Riverworld, he had tried dreamgum as a weapon to pierce the thick shadows. Under the guidance of a guru, he had chewed half a stick, a heavy load, and dived after the pearl hidden in the depths of his unconscious. When he woke from some horrible visions, he found his guru, battered and bloody, unconscious on the floor of the hut. There was no mystery about who had done this deed.

Peter had left the area after making sure that his guide would live without serious aftereffects. He could not stay in the area nor could he feel anything but guilt and shame whenever he saw his guru. The fellow had been very forgiving, had, in fact, been willing to continue the sessions-if Peter was tied up during them.

He could not face the violence that he felt dwelt deep within him. It was this fear of violence in himself that made him so afraid of violence in others.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in our lousy genes. Or in failure of one's conquest of one's self. The fault, dear Brutus, is in our fear of knowing our self. The next, almost inevitable, scene in this drama of recollection was the seduction of Wilhelmina. How easy to think of this fantasy as potentially real, since it was possible that he would meet her. After some mutual questioning, they would discover that they were grandmother and grandson. Then the long talk with her telling what had happened to her daughter and her husband (Peter's father) and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-greatgrandchildren. Would she be horrified when she found that a great-granddaughter had married a Jew? Undoubtedly. Anyone of rural stock born in 1880 was bound to be deeply prejudiced. Or what if he told her that his sister had married a Japanese? Or that a brother and a first cousin had married Catholics? Or that a great-granddaughter had converted to Catholicism? Or that a great-grandson had become a Buddhist?

On the other hand, The Riverworld might have changed her attitudes, as it had done to so many. However, many more were as psychologically fossilized as when they had lived on Earth.

To get on to the fantasy.

After a few drinks and long talk, bed?

Rationally, one could not object to incest here. There would be no children.

But when did people ever think rationally in such situations?

No, the thing to do would be to say nothing about their relationship until after they'd been to bed.

The construction crumbled then. To reveal that would make her grievously ashamed. It would be cruel. And no matter how much he wanted revenge, he could not do that to her. To anyone. Besides, it would be revenge for some act that he only thought might have been committed. Even if it had occurred, it might have been something only a child would have thought terrible. Or something misinterpreted in his infant mind. Or something that she, being aproduct of her times, would have thought only natural.

It was exciting to think about laying your grandmother. But, in reality, it just wouldn't happen. He was sexually drawn only to intelligent women, and his grandmother had been an ignorant peasant. Vulgar, too, though not in an obscene or irreligious way. He remembered when she was eating with the family on a Thanksgiving holiday. She'd sneezed, the snot had landed on her blouse, and she had wiped it off with her hand and deposited it on her skirt. His father had laughed, his mother had looked stricken, and he had lost his appetite.

There went the whole fantasy, dissolved in disgust.

Still, she might have changed.

To hell with it, he told himself, and he turned on his side and went to sleep.

29

Drums beat, and wooden trumpets blew. Peter Frigate woke up in the midst of another dream. It was three months after Pearl Harbor, and he was an air cadet at Randolph Field being chewed out by his flight instructor.

The lieutenant, a tall young man with a thin moustache and big feet, was almost as hysterical as Grandma Kaiser.

' "The next time you turn left when I tell you to turm right, Frigate, I'm bringing us in right now, cutting the goddamn flight, and I'm refusing to go up with you! You can get an instructor who doesn't give a shit if his dumb student kills him or not! Jesus Christ, Frigate, we coulda been killed! Didn't you see that plane on your left! Are you suicidal! That's all right with me, but don't take me and two others with you! And do it on your own time, off the field, and not with government property! What the hell is the matter with you, Frigate! Do you hate me!"

"I coudn't hear you, sir," Peter said. Though he was sweating in the heavy flight clothes in the warm room, he was shivering and he felt a painful urge to urinate. "I just can't seem to hear through those tubes."

"There's nothing wrong with the tubes! I could hear you all right! And there's nothing wrong with your ears! You had a medical checkup only two weeks ago, didn't you? All you pissy-assed cadets are examined when you transfer here! Aren't you?"

Peter nodded and said, "Yes sir, just like you were."

The lieutenant, his face red, eyes bugging, said, "What do you mean by that? Are you saying I was a pissy-assed cadet?"

"No, sir," Peter said, feeling the sweat pour out from his arrjipits. "I would never say 'pissy-assed' in reference to you, sir."

"What would you say?" the lieutenant said, almost screaming.

Peter looked from the corners of his eyes at the other cadets and instructors. Most of them were paying no attention or pretending not to. Some were grinning.

"I would never mention you," Peter said.

"What? Because I'm not worth mentioning, is that it? Frigate, you try me! I don't like your attitude on the ground or in the air. But to get back to the subject despite all your efforts to avoid it! Why in hell can't you hear me when I can hear you? Is it because you don't want to hear me?

"Well, that's dangerous, Frigate! It's frightening, too. You scare the hell out of me! Do you know how many of those stubby-winged BT-12's spin in every week? Those sons of bitches have got a builtin spin, cadet. Even when an instructor tells his ape-brained student to spin it deliberately, and he's got his hand on the stick, ready to take over, the sons of bitches sometimes still keep on spinning!

"So I sure as hell don't want to tell you to turn right and have you think I'm telling you to spin her and catch me off guard. You could have us twenty feet deep in the ground before I could take to the chute! Okay, what is the matter with your ears?"

"I don't know," Peter said miserably. "Maybe it's wax. Wax builds up in my ears. It's a family trait, sir. I have to have the wax blown out every six months."

"I'll blow out more than wax out of another place than your ears, mister! Didn't the doctor check out your ears? Sure he did! So don't tell me it's wax! You just don't want to hear me! And why? God knows why! Or maybe you hate me so much you don't care if you die just so you take me with you? Is that it?"

Peter would not have been surprised to see the lieutenant foaming at the mouth.

"No, sir."

"No, sir, what?"

"No, sir, to any of that."

"You mean you're denying everything? You did turn left when I said turn right, didn't you? Don't tell me I'm a liar!"

"No, sir."

The lieutenant paused, then said, "Why are you smiling, Frigate?"

"I didn't know I was," Peter said. That was true. He was really in mental and physical distress. So why had he smiled?

"You're crazy, Frigate!" the lieutenant shouted. A captain, standing behind him, frowned. But he made no move to interfere.

"I don't want to see you again, Frigate, until you have a written testimonial from a doctor that your ears are okay. Do you hear that?"

Peter nodded. "

"Yes, sir, I hear you."

"You're grounded until I get that report. But I want it at flight time, tomorrow, when I take you up again, God help me!"

"Yes, sir," Peter said and almost saluted. That would have been another excuse for the instructor to ream him out. Saluting was not done in the flight room.

He looked back as he checked in his parachute. The captain and the lieutenant were talking earnestly. What were they saying about him? That he ought to be washed out?

Maybe he should be. He really couldn't hear his instructor. Only half of the lieutenant's frenzied gabble came through intelligibly on the tubes. It wasn't because of wax. Or the high altitude. Or anything physically wrong with his hearing.

It would be years later before he knew that he just did not want to hear the lieutenant.

"He was right," Peter said.

"Who was right?" Eve said. She was sitting up in bed, leaning on one arm, looking down at him. Her body was covered with thick varicolored towels tabbed together, and the hood still shrouded her face.

Peter sat up and stretched. The inside of the hut was dark; the drums and bugles along the bank sounded faintly. Nearby, a neighbor was banging on his fish-skin-and-bamboo drum as if he were trying to wake up the whole world. "Nothing."

"You were groaning and mumbling." "Earth is always with us," he said, and he left her to figure that out for herself. With him he took the thunder mug to the neighborhood deposit hut which was about a hundred paces away. There he greeted a score of men and women, all on the same task. They dumped the contents of the pots into a large bamboo wagon. After breakfast, this would be hauled out of the building by a team of men into the foothills to the base of a mountain. There the excrement would be treated to make potassium for black gunpowder. Frigate worked two days a month there and four days on the sentinel towers. A grailstone was just on the other side of the hill on which their hut stood. Usually, he and Eve took their grails to it. This morning, however, he wanted to talk to the crew of the boat that had arrived during the night. Eve would not object if he went by himself, since she had to finish stringing necklaces of hornfish vertebrae, varicolored helical bones in demand as ornaments. She and Frigate traded them for tobacco and liquor and flints. Frigate also made boomerangs and, occasionally, dugouts and canoes.

Frigate carried his grail with his left hand and his yew-wood flint-tipped spear in the other. A fish-skin belt around his waist held a sheath containing a chert axe. A quiver of arrows, flint tipped and fletched with thin, carved bones, was slung over one shoulder. A bow of yew, wrapped in bamboo paper, was strapped to the quiver to protect it from the early-morning moisture.

The little state of which he was a citizen, Ruritania, was not at war or under threat of war. The law requiring that all have their weapons handy was a hangover from the old days of turbulence. Obsolete laws had almost as hard a time dying here as on Earth.

Social inertia was everywhere, though its resistance to change varied from state to state.

Frigate walked among the huts spread out over the plain. Hundreds, covered like him from foot to head against the chill, joined him. About a half-hour after the sun rose, they began to shed their cloths. While eating breakfast, Frigate looked for new faces. There were fifteen, all from the newly arrived schooner, the Razzle Dazzle. They sat in a group, eating and talking to those interested in the newcomers. Peter sat down by them to watch and listen.

The captain, Martin Fairington, also known as the Frisco Kid, was a muscular man of medium height. His handsome face looked Irish. His hair was reddish-bronze and curly; his eyes, large and deep blue; his chin, strong. He talked energetically, smiling often, cracking jokes. His Esperanto was fluent but not perfect, and it was evident that he preferred English.

The first mate, Tom Rider, also known as Tex, stood about 5.08 centimeters or 2 inches shorter than Frigate's 1.8 meter or 6 feet.

He was what the pulp magazine writers of Frigate's youth called "ruggedly handsome." Not as muscular as the captain, he moved quickly though gracefully with a confidence that Frigate envied. His dark hair was straight and if his tanned skin had been two shades browner, he could have passed for an Onondaga Indian. His Esperanto was perfect, but, like Farrington, he was pleased to find some English-speakers in the crowd. His voice was a pleasant baritone which combined a Southwestern drawl with a Midwestern pronunciation.

Frigate learned much about the crew just by listening to their uninhibited account of themselves. They were the usual motley collection met on the larger boats that wandered up and down The River. The captain's woman was a nineteenth-century South American Caucasian; the first mate's, a citizen of the Roman city of Aphrodita of the second century a.d. Frigate remembered that its ruins had been discovered by archaeologists in Turkey sometime around the 1970's.

Two of the crew were Arabs. One was Nur el-Musafir (The Traveler). The other had been the wife of a captain of a South Arabian ship which had traded with the southwest African empire of Monomotapa in the twelfth century a.d.

The Chinese crewman had ended his Earthly life by drowning when Kubla Khan's invasion fleet was destroyed by a storm enroute to Japan.

There were two eighteenth-centurians, Edmund Tresillian, a Cornishman who lost a leg-in 1759 during the capture of Hood's Vestal of the French Bellona off Cape Finisterre. Pensionless, and with a wife and seven children, he was reduced to begging. Caught stealing a purse, he died in prison of a fever while waiting for his trial. The second man, "Red" Cozens, had been a midshipman on the Wager, a rebuilt Indiaman merchant accompanying Admiral Anson' s flotilla on its voyage around the world. It had been wrecked off the coast of Patagonia. After innumerable sufferings and hardships, part of its crew had gotten to civilization, where the Spanish government of Chile imprisoned them for a while. However, poor Cozens had been shot and killed by a Captain Cheap a few days after the wreck in the mistaken belief that he was a mutineer.

John Byron, the poet's grandfather, also a midshipman then, had criticized Cheap for this in The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (Commodore in a Late EXPEDITION round the WORLD) Containing An Account of the Great Distresses Suffered by Himself and His Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, from the Year 1740, till their Arrival in England, 1746, etc., London, 1768.

Frigate had owned a first edition of this book, in which he had found a description of an animal encountered by Byron which had to be a giant sloth.

He would have liked to have run across Byron. The little man had to have been incredibly tough to survive his experiences. Later, he had become an admiral, nicknamed "Foul Weather Jack" by his sailors. Just about every time he put out to sea, his fleet was hit by a bad storm.

Other interesting crew members were a late-twentieth-century Rhode Island millionaire and yachtsman; an eighteenth-century Turk, a bos'n's mate who had died of syphilis, a common sailor's disease then; and Abigail Rice, Earthly wife of an early-nineteenth-century second mate on a New Bedford whaler. Binns, the yachtsman, and Mustafa, the Turk, were obviously in love with each other.

As Peter would find out later, Cozens, Tresillian, and Chang shared Abigail Rice. This made Frigate wonder what she had been doing while her husband was spending two to three years chasing whales. Perhaps nothing she shouldn't have been doing. Perhaps she had been so sexually starved on Earth that she had exploded here.

And then there was Umslopogaas. Pogaas for short. He was a Swazi, son of a king of that South African nation which had been enemies of the great Zulu people. He had lived during the expansion of the British and the Boers and the conquests of the bloody military genius, Shaka. On Earth, he had killed twelve warriors in duels; here, at least fifty.

He would have been unnoticed by history, despite his fighting prowess, if he had not happened to be attached in his old age to the mission of Sir Theophilus Shepstone. With Shepstone was a young man, H. Rider Haggard, who had been much attracted by the stately figure and the tall stories of the old Swazi. Haggard was to immortalize Umslopogaas in three novels, Nada the Lily, She and Allen, and Allan Quatermain. However, he made the Swazi a Zulu, which must have disturbed his model.

Now Pogaas lounged near the ship, leaning on a long-handled war-axe of flint. He was tall and slim and his legs were extraordinarily long. His features were not Negroid but Hamitic, thin lipped, hawk nosed, and high cheek boned. He seemed friendly enough, but there was something about his bearing that told all but the most insensitive that he was not to be trifled with. He was also the only person on the crew who did not help handle the ship. His specialty was fighting.

Frigate was tinkled pink, when he discovered the identity of this man. Imagine that! Umslopogaas!

After talking to various crew members, Frigate went back to a spot near the two officers. From what he heard, they were in no hurry to get to any particular place. The captain did, however, comment that he would like to get to the headwaters of The River some day. Which was, to say, in a hundred years or so.

Frigate finally spoke up, asking the captain and Rider about their Terrestrial origins. Farrington said he'd been born in California, but he gave no birthdate or place. Rider said he'd been born in Pennsylvania in 1880. Yes, he had spent a lot of time, most of his life, in fact, in the West.

Frigate swore softly. He had thought the two looked familiar. However, they wore their hair longer than on Earth and the lack of Terrestrial clothes gave them a different appearance. What Rider needed was a big white ten-gallon hat and a flashy pseudo-Western coat and breeches and a pair of ornamented cowboy's boots. And a horse to sit upon.

As a child, Frigate had seen him in just such garments and on a horse. That had been during a parade preceding a circus-Sells and Floto? Never mind. Frigate had stood with his father on Adams Street, just south of the courthouse, and waited eagerly for his favorite Western film hero to ride by. And so the hero had, but, being drunk, he had fallen off his horse. Unhurt, he had swung into the saddle again, riding off to the mingled laughter and cheers of the crowd. He must have sobered up after that, for he gave a great demonstration of riding and roping in the Wild West Show following the main events.

At that time, Frigate regarded drunkards as moral lepers and thus should have been completely disillusioned about Rider. But his worship of Rider was so intense that he was willing to forgive him. What a little prig he'd been!

Frigate was well acquainted with Farrington's portrait since he'd seen it so many times in biographies and on the back of dust jackets. Frigate had begun reading his works at the age of ten, and when he was fifty-seven he had contributed a foreword to a collection of Farrington's fantasies and science fiction,

For some reason, both his heroes were traveling under false names. He, Peter Frigate, was not going to expose them-not unless he had to. No, he wouldn't do it even then, but if he were forced to threaten them with exposure, he would do so. He'd do almost anything to get aboard the Razlle Dazzle.

After a while, the Frisco Kid announced that he and Tex would now interview anyone who'd like to sign on as a deckhand. Two folding chairs were set up on the end of the dock, and the "employment" line formed in front of the seated officers. Frigate immediately got into the line. Three men and a woman were ahead of him. This gave him a chance to listen to the questioning and to decide what he would tell his prospective employers.

30

The Frisco Kid, sitting on a folding bamboo chair and smoking a cigarette, ran his eyes up and down Frigate.

"Peter Jairus Frigate, heh? American. Midwest. Right? You look strong enough, but what's-your nautical experience?"

"Not much on Earth," Peter said. "I used to sail a small boat on the Illinois River. But I've done a lot here. I sailed on a large single-masted catamaran for three years and I put in a year on a two-masted-schooner like yours."

That was a lie. He'd only shipped on the two-master for three months. But that was enough for him to know, literally, the ropes.

"Hm. Did these ships make short local trips or were they on long voyages?"

"Long ones," Frigate said. He was glad he hadn't referred to the vessels as boats. Some sailors were very touchy about the distinction between "boats" and "ships." For Frigate, anything on a river was a boat. But Farrington was a seafaring man, even if there were no more seas.

"In those areas," he added, "the wind was usually from up-River. So we were sailing close-hauled most of the time."

"Yeah, anybody can sail with the wind," Martin Farrington said.

" Why do you want to sign up?" Rider asked suddenly.

"Why? I'm fed up with life here. Rather, I'm dissatisfied with doing the same old thing day after day. I ..."

"You know how it is on a ship," Farrington said. "It's cramped, and you spend most of your time with just a few people. And it's pretty much the same old thing day after day."

"I know that, of course," Frigate said. "Well, I'd like to travel to the end of The River, for one thing. The catamaran I was on was going there, but it got burned during an attack by slavers. The schooner was sunk by a dragonfish while we were helping some locals fish for it. It was Moby Dick and the Pequod all over again."

"You were Ishmael?" Rider said.

Frigate looked at him. Rider was supposed to have been able to quote great chunks of Shakespeare, to be well read indeed. But that could have been Hollywood publicity crap.

"You mean, was I the lone survivor? No, six of us got to shore. It was scary, though."

"Was . . . ?"

Farrington stopped, cleared his throat, and looked at Rider. Rider raised thick, dark eyebrows. Farrington was evidently considering how to rephrase the question.

"Who were the captains of these two crafts?"

"The catamaran captain was a Frenchman named DeGrasse. The schooner captain was a rough son-of-a-bitch named Larsen. A Norwegian of Danish birth. He'd been captain of a sealer, I believe."

Nothing he said about Larsen was true. But Peter couldn't resist testing Farrington's reaction.

The captain's eyes narrowed, then he smiled. He said slowly, "Was Larsen nicknamed Wolf?"

Peter kept his face blank. He wasn't falling for that trap. If Farrington thought that he was trying to tell him circuitously that he recognized him, Farrington would not take him on.

"No. If he had a nickname, it was 'Bastard.' He was about six and a half feet tall and very dark for a Scandinavian. His eyes were as black as an Arab's. Did you know him?"

Farrington relaxed. He dubbed out his cigarette on a baked-clay ashtray, and lit up another. Rider said, "How good are you with that bow?"

"I've been practicing for thirty years. I'm no Robin Hood, but I can shoot six arrows in twenty seconds with reasonable accuracy. I' ve studied the martial arts for twenty years. I never look for a fight and I avoid one if it's possible. But I've been in about forty major actions and a lot of minor ones. I've been badly wounded four times."

Rider said, "When were you born?"

"In 1918."

Martin Farrington looked at Rider, then said, " I suppose you saw a lot of movies when you were a kid?"

"Didn't everybody?"

"And what about your education?"

"I got a B. A. in English literature with a minor in philosophy and I was a compulsive reader. Lord, how I miss reading!"

"Me, too," Farrington said.

There was a pause. Rider said, "Well, our memories of Earth get dimmer every day."

Which meant that if Frigate had seen Rider in the films and Farrington on the dust jackets of books, he did not remember them. The captain's question about his education might, however, have a double interest. He would want a crewman who could talk intelligently about many matters. On Earth, Farrington's forecastle companions had been brutal and illiterate, not exactly his soulmates. So, for that matter, had been most of the people he knew until he had gone to college.

"We seem to have about ten in all to interview,'' Farrington said. "We'll make our choice after we've talked to everybody. We'll let you know before noon."

Peter wanted desperately to be chosen, but he was afraid that too much eagerness might put them off. Since they we're, for some reason, traveling under pseudonyms, they might be wary of someone who was trying too hard to sign on. Why, he did not know.

"One thing we forgot," Rider said. "We don't have room for more than one hand. You can't take your woman along. Is that okay?"

"No problem."

"You can take turns with Abigail," Rider said. "If you don't mind sharing with three others. And if she likes you, of course. But she hasn't shown many antipathies so far."

"She's a luscious woman," Peter said. "But that sort of thing doesn't appeal to me."

"Mustafa kind of likes you," Farrington said, grinning. "He's been eyeing you."

Frigate looked at the Turk, who winked, and he blushed.

"That appeals even less."

"Just make that plain, and you won't be bothered by him or Binns," Farrington said. "I'm no homo, but I saw a lot of buggery. Any man who sails under the mast has; every ship, naval or commercial, has been a viper's nest of sodomy since Noah. Those two are real he-men, aside from their lack of interest in the fair sex. And they're damn good sailors. So just tell them to back off. If, that is, we accept you. But I don't want any bitching about being hard up. You can catch up when we go ashore, and if we lose a man you can get a woman for your bunkmate. She has to be a good sailor, though. Everyone pulls his weight on this ship."

"Abigail's looking more appealing by the second," Frigate said.

Farrington and.Rider laughed, and Frigate moved on.

For a while, he stood by the dock area. This was a shallow bay which had been hacked with much labor out of the bank. Stone cut from the base of the mountains had been carried down here and used to line the shore. Wooden docks had been extended from the bank, but these held mainly small catboats, lugboats, and catamarans. Two giant rafts with masts were tied up here, too. These were used for dragonfishing. A number of warcanoes, capable of holding forty men each, were beached near the rafts. Canoes and rowboats were putting out now for fishing. By noon, The River would be heavily salted with small and large boats.

The Razzle Dazzle was too large to fit within the piers. It was anchored near the mouth of the bay behind a breakwater of large black rocks. It was a beautiful ship, long and low, built of oak and pine. There wasn't a nail in it, and the pegs had been cut with flint. The sails were made of treated outer skin of the dragonfish, so thin they were translucent. The oaken figurehead was a full-busted mermaid holding a torch.

The ship was a wonder, and the wonder was how its crew had managed to avoid having it taken from them. Many had been murdered for much lesser craft.

Feeling anxious, he walked past Farrlngton and Rider. The interviews were by no means over. Word had gotten around, and now there were about twenty men and ten women waiting in line. If this continued, the questioning might take all day. There was nothing he could do about it, so he shrugged and went back home. Eve was gone, which was just as well. There was no need to tell her what he was doing until he found out if he was leaving. If he was turned down, he'd say nothing to her.

Part of his duty as a Ruritanian citizen was to assist in alcohol-making. He might as well work off a half-day today. The labor would help keep him from worrying. He walked through the passes between the hills until these gave out. There were four more hills to climb, each increasingly higher. The trees were thicker here; the huts, fewer. Presently he was on top of the highest hill, which was at the base of the mountain. Its smooth stone ran straight up for an estimated 1228 meters or about 6000 feet. A waterfall thundered about 91 meters or 100 yards away, spilling thousands of liters a minute into a pool. From this, the water ran in a broad channel which would thread a course through the hills to The River.

Frigate passed by the fires, the wooden, glass, and stone equipment , and the odor of alcohol. He climbed up a bamboo ladder until he was on a platform placed against an area of stone from which lichen had not yet been removed. He reported to a foreman, who gave him a chert scraper. The foreman took from a rack a pine stick with Frigate's initials cut into it. It bore alternating horizontal and vertical lines, the former indicating the days he'd worked, the latter the number of months.

"Next year you'll be using a stick to scrape off the stuff," the foremen said. "We'll be saving the chert and flint for weapons."

Peter nodded and went to work.

In time, the supply of flint would be exhausted. Technology on The Riverworld would go backward. Instead of progressing from a wooden to a stone age, humanity would reverse the procedure.

Frigate wondered how he was going to get his flint-tipped weapons out of the state. If he sailed on Farrington' s craft he would, according to the law, have to leave his precious stones behind.

The time put in by Frigate on this work was estimated by the foreman. Except for the sun, there were few clocks of any type. The little glass available was used in the alcohol-making process, so there were not even hourglasses. For that matter, the sand used to make the glass had been imported from a state 800 kilometers down-River. That had cost Rumania several boatloads of tobacco and booze and piles of dragonfish and hornfish skins and bones. The tobacco and alcohol had been contributed by the citizens from their grails. Frigate had given up smoking and drinking for two months during this time of sacrifice. When it was over, he continued his abstinence from smoking, trading his cigarettes and cigars for whiskey. But, as had happened on Earth and here, he had slipped back into the arms of Demon Nicotine.

He worked hard, scraping off the thick green-blue plant growth from the black rock and stuffing it into the bamboo buckets. Others lowered the buckets on ropes to the ground, where their contents were dumped into vats.

Shortly before noon, he knocked off for the lunch hour. Before going down the ladders, he looked out over the hills. Far below, the white hull of the RazzleDazzle shone in the bright sun. Somehow, he was going to be on it when it up-anchored.

Peter walked back to the hut, noted that Eve wasn't there, and went on down to the plain. The line of interviewers did not look any shorter. He passed along the edge of the plain where its short grass abruptly stopped and the long grass of the hills began. What made for the line of demarcation? Were there chemicals in the hill soil that halted the encroachment of plain grass? Or was it vice versa? Or both? And why?

The archery range was about half a kilometer south of the dock area. He practiced shooting at a target of grass on a bamboo tripod for about thirty minutes. Then he went to the gymnasium area and ran sprints and made long jumps and engaged in judo, karate, and spear-fighting for two hours. At the end of the time, he was sweating and tired. But he was bursting with joy. It was wonderful to have a twenty-five-year-old body, the tiredness and feebleness of middle and old age gone, the aches and pains, the fat, the hernia, the ulcer, the headaches, the long-sightedness, all no more. Replacing it, the ability to run or swim swiftly and far, to feel sexual desire every night (and a good part of the day).

The worst thing he had done on Earth was to get a desk job as a technical writer at the age of thirty-eight and then at fifty-one, to become a fulltime fiction writer. He should have stayed in the steel mill. It was monotonous work, but while his body was handling the hot, heavy work, his mind-was busy dreaming up stories. At night he would read or write.

It was when he had started to sit on his butt all day that he had begun drinking so heavily. And his reading had diminished, too. It was too easy after working on a typewriter eight hours a day to sit in front of the TV all evening and swill Bourbon or Scotch. TV, the worst thing that had happened to the twentieth century. After the atom bomb and overpopulation, of course.

No, he told himself, that wasn't fair. He didn't have to be a boob before the tube. He could have used the self-discipline which enabled him to write to turn the set off except at highly selected times. But the lotus-eater syndrome had gotten him. Besides, there were programs on TV which were really excellent, both entertaining and educational.

Still, this world was good in that there were no TV's or automobiles or atom bombs or gross national production or paychecks or mortgages or medical bills. Or air or water pollution and almost no dust. And nobody gave a damn about communism or socialism or capitalism, because they didn't exist. Well, that was not quite true. Most states did have a sort of primitive communism.

31

He walked to the river and plunged in, cleaning off the sweat. Then he trotted along the bank (no huts allowed within 30 meters of it) to the dock area. He hung around until dinnertime, talking to friends. In between, he watched the two from the Razzle Dazzle. They were still interviewing, though lubricating their throats with frequent drinks. Wasn't that line ever going to end?

Just before it was suppertime, Farrington stood up and announced in a loud voice that he was taking no more applications. Those still in the line protested, but he said that he'd had enough.

By then the head of Ruritania, "Baron" Thomas Bullitt, had appeared with his councillors. Bullitt had had some small claim to fame in his day. In 1775 he had explored the Ohio River falls by the area which would become Louisville, Kentucky. Commissioned by the William and Mary College of Virginia, he surveyed the area. And thereafter disappeared from history. His aide-de-camp, Paulus Buys, a sixteenth-century Dutchman, was with him. Both invited the crew of the Razzle Dazzle to a parry in their honor that night. The main reason for the invitation was to hear the adventures of the crew. River-dwellers loved gossip and exciting tales, since their fields of entertainment were limited.

Farrington accepted, but said that six of the crew would have to stay on the ship as guards. Frigate followed the crowd to a large roofed-over area, the Town Hall. Torches and bonfires drove back the darkness, and an orchestra played while the local variety of square-dancing began. Frisco and Tex stood around for a while, talking to the chief statesmen and their wives and close friends. Frigate, as one of the hoi polloi, was not admitted to the sacred circle. He knew, however, that the event would become much less formal later on. While he was standing in line to get the free liter of pure alcohol allowed per person at such functions, he was joined by his hutmate.

Eve Bellington waved at him and then got into line twelve persons behind him. She was tall, full figured, black haired, blue. eyed, a Georgia peach. Born 1850, died two days before her one hundred first birthday. Her father was a wealthy cotton planter with a distinguished record as a major in the Confederate cavalry. The Bellington plantation was burned down during Sherman's march through Georgia, and the Bellingtons had become penniless. Her father had then gone to California and found enough gold to buy a partnership in a shipping firm.

Eve had loved being wealthy again, but she still had not forgiven him for leaving her mother and herself to struggle through the occupation and the early years of Reconstruction.

During her father's absence, Eve and her mother had lived with her father's brother, a handsome man only ten years older than Eve. He had raped her (without too much resistance, Eve admitted) when she was fifteen. When her mother had found that her daughter was pregnant, she had shot the uncle in the legs and the genitals. He survived a few years as a crippled eunuch in prison.

Mrs. Bellington then moved to Richmond, Virginia, where her husband joined them. Eve's son by the uncle grew up to be tall and handsome, dearly beloved by his mother. After a furious quarrel with his uncle-grandfather, he left to seek his fortune in the West. A letter from Silver City, Colorado, was the last Eve ever heard from him. He'd disappeared somewhere in the Rockies, according to a . report sent by a detective.

Her mother had died in a fire, and her father had died of a heart attack while trying to rescue her mother. Eve's first husband died of cholera shortly thereafter, and before she was fifty she had lost two more husbands and six of her ten children.

Her life was that of a heroine of a novel on which Margaret Mitchell and Tennessee Williams might have collaborated. She didn't think it was very funny when Peter had told her that.

After thirty-plus years on The Riverworld, Eve had gotten over her prejudice against niggers and her hatred of bluebellies. She had even fallen in love with a Yankee. Peter had never told her that his great grandfather had been with an Indiana regiment on that "infamous" march with Sherman. He hadn't wanted to strain her affection.

Peter moved on up the line and received the alcohol in his soapstone mug. He mixed one part of alcohol with three parts of water in a bamboo bucket and walked back to talk to Eve, who was still in line. He asked her where she had been all day. She replied that she had been wandering around, thinking.

He didn't ask her what her thoughts had been. He knew. She was trying to think of a way to break off their relationship without pain. They'd been drifting apart for some months, their love suddenly and unaccountably cooled. Peter had done some thinking on this subject himself. But each was waiting for the other to take the initiative.

Peter said he would see her later, and he pushed through the noisy crowd toward Farrington. Rider was on the dance floor, whooping and whirling with Bullitt's woman. Peter waited until the captain was through telling about his adventures in the 1899 Yukon gold rash. Farrington's tale, which involved losing some of his teeth from scurvy, somehow became a hilarious experience.

Peter said, "Mr. Fairington, have you made up your mind yet?"

Farrington paused, his mouth open to launch on another story. His reddened eyes blinked. He said, "Oh, yes! You're . . . ah ... um ... named Frigate, right? Peter Frigate. The one who's read a lot. Yes, Tom and I've made up our minds. We'll announce our choice some time during the party."

"I hope it's me," Peter said. "I really want to go with you."

"Enthusiasm counts for a great deal,'' Farrington said. "Experience counts for even more. Put the two together, and you have a fine jack-tar."

Peter breathed deeply and took the plunge.

"This uncertainty is getting me down. Could you at least tell me if I've been eliminated? If I have been, I can drown my sorrow."

Farrington smiled. "It really means that much to you? Why?"

"Well, I do want to get to the end of The River."

Farrington cocked his eyebrows. "Yeah? Do you expect to find the answers to all your questions there?"

"I don't want millions, I want answers to my questions," Peter said. "That's a quotation from a character in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov."

Farrington's face lit up.

"That's great! I'd heard of Dostoyevsky but I never had a chance to read him. I don't think there was an English translation of his books in my time. At least, I never ran across any."

"Nietzsche admitted that he'd learned a lot about psychology just from reading the Russian's novels," Peter said.

"Nietzsche, hen? You know him well?"

"I've read him in both English and German. He was a great poet, the only German philosopher who could write in anything but waterlogged prose. Well, that's not fair, Schopenhauer could write stuff that wouldn't put you to sleep or give you a nervous breakdown while you were waiting for the sentence to end. I don't go along with Nietzsche's conception of the Ubermensch, though. Man is a rope across an abyss between animal and superman. That may not be the exact quotation; it's been a hell of a long time since I read Thus Spake Zarathustra.

"Anyway, I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I'm thinking of isn't Nietzsche's. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and.psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.

"Now, you take the Nietzschean concept of the superman as embodied in Jack London's novel The Sea Wolf."

Peter paused, then said, "Have you read it?"

Farrington grinned. "Many times. What about Wolf Larsen?"

"I think he was more London's superman than Nietzsche's. He was London's idea of what the superman ought to be. Nietzsche would have been appalled by Larsen's brutality. However, London did kill him off with a brain tumor. And I suppose that London meant to show by this that there was something inherently rotten about Larsen as superman. Maybe he meant to tell the reader that. If he did, it went over the heads of most of the literary critics. They never got the significance of Larsen's manner of death. Then, too, I think London was also showing that man, even superman, has his roots in his animal nature. He's part of Nature, and no matter what his mental attainments, no matter how much he defies Nature, he can't escape the physical facts. He is an animal, and so he's subject to disease, such as brain tumors. How are the mighty fallen. ,

"But I think that Wolf Larsen was also, in some respects, what Jack London would have liked to be. London lived in a brutal world, and he thought that he had to be a superbrute to survive. Yet, London had empathy; he knew what it was to be one of the people of the abyss. He thought that the masses could find relief from their sufferings, and realize their human potential, through socialism. He fought for it all his life. At the same time, he was a strong individualist. This conflicted with his socialism, and when it did, his socialist beliefs lost out. He wasn't any Emma Goldman.

"In fact, his daughter Joan criticized him for that in her study of his life."

"I didn't know that,'' Farrington said. "She must have written it after I died. Did you know much about her, what happened to her after London died, how she died?"

"I knew a London scholar who knew her well," Peter said.

Actually, the scholar had only corresponded with her a little and had met her briefly. Peter didn't mind exaggerating if it would get him a berth on the ship.

"She was a very active Socialist. She died in 1971, I think. Her book about her father was very objective, especially considering that he had divorced her mother for a younger woman.

"Anyway, I think that London wanted to be a Wolf Larsen because that would have made him insensitive to the world's woes. A man who doesn't feel for others can't be hurt himself. At least, he thinks he can't. Actually, he's hurting himself.

"London may have realized this and was, in fact, trying to put this idea across. At the same time, he wished to be a Larsen, even if this meant being frozen inside, that is, a superbrute. But writers have countercurrents in their psychic sea, as all humans do. That's why, when the critics have done with them, great writers are still enigmas. When skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man."

"I like that!" Farrington cried. "Who wrote that?"

"e.e. cummings. Another line of his that's a favorite of mine is: Listen! There's a hell of a good universe next door. . .Let's go!"

Peter thought that he might be pouring it on too thick. Farrington, however, seemed to be enjoying it.

Once Frigate was on the ship, he could bring up subjects which might anger and would certainly irritate Farrington. For instance, the man's knowledge of Nietzsche had been gotten mostly from dialogs with a friend, Strawn-Hamilton. He had apparently made some attempt to read the philosopher in English. But he had been so taken by the poetic phrases and the slogans that he had not taken in the full philosophy. He had picked what he liked from Nietzsche and ignored the rest-as Hitler had done. Not that Farrington was any Hitler.

What was it his daughter had said? " "The glad perishers, "the Superman, "live dangerously!-these were more potent than wine.' "

As for Farrington's knowledge of socialism, he had not read anything of Marx's except The Communist Manifesto. But, as his daughter had said, ignoring Marx was a common practice among American Socialists then.

There were many other things to discuss-and contemn. London had wanted socialism only for the benefit of the Germanic peoples. He firmly believed that men were superior to women. Might made right. And he was not, in one sense of the word, a true artist. He wrote only for money, and if he had enough money would have quit writing. At least he had claimed he would. Frigate doubted this. Once a writer, always a writer.

"Well," Peter said, "whatever else can be said against London, Fred Lewis Patton probably had the final word. He said it was easy to criticize him, easy to deplore him, but impossible to avoid him.''

Farrington liked that even more. But he said, "Enough of London , though I would like to meet him some day. Listen. Your idea of the superman sounds a lot like the ideal man of the Church of the Second Chance. It sounds even more like that of one of my crew, you know, the little Arab, though he isn't really an Arab. He's a Spanish Moor, born in the twelfth century a.d. He's not a Chancer, though."

He pointed to a man Frigate had seen among the crew of the Razzle Dazzle. He was standing in the center of a circle of Ruritanians, holding a drink and a cigarette. His speech seemed to be amusing; at least those around him were laughing. He was about 163 centimeters or a little less than 5 feet 5 inches tall, thin but with a suggestion of wiry strength, very dark, and big nosed. He looked like a young Jimmy Durante.

"Nur-ed-din el-Musafir," Farrington said. "Nur for short."

Frigate said, "In Arabic that means Light-of-the-Faith the-Traveler."

"You know Arabic?" Farrington said. "I never could get the hang of any foreign language except Esperanto."

"I picked up a lot of words from Burton's Arabian Nights."

He paused. "Well, what about it? Am I eliminated?"

Farrington said, "Yes and no." He laughed at Frigate's puzzled expression, and he clapped him on the shoulder.

"Can you keep your mouth shut?"

"Like a Trappist monk."

"Well, I'll tell you, Pete. Tom and I had picked out that big Kanaka there." He pointed at Mauf, a giant Marquesan, looking very Polynesian in a white cloth around his waist and a big dark-red bloom in his thick, black, curly hair.

"He was top's'l man in a whaler and then a harpooner for thirty years. He looks like he'd be a hellcat in a fight. Tom and I agreed that he was easily the best qualified. But he doesn't know anything about books, and I need educated people around me. That may sound snobbish, but so what?

"I'll tell you now. I just changed my mind. You're signed up-as far as I'm concerned. No, wait a minute! Don't look so happy. I have to talk to Tom about this. You wait. I'll be right back."

He plunged among the dancers, caught Rider by the hand, and dragged him off protesting to one side. Peter watched them talking. Rider looked at him several times but did not seem to be arguing.

Peter was glad that he had not had to play his trump card. If he hadn't been chosen, he would have told the two that he knew their true identities. What would have happened then, he couldn't guess. The two had some good reason to go under fake names. Perhaps they would have rushed off, leaving him behind if he had threatened to expose them. Or perhaps they would have taken him along, just to keep his mouth shut, and then thrown him overboard far up The River.

Possibly Farrington had caught on to what he was doing. He must have wondered why a man so familiar with London's works would not recognize him. In which case, Farrington would have decided that Frigate was playing some kind of game. He would go along with it until they were well up The River and then find out just what he was up to.

However, Peter did not think he was in any danger of being killed. Neither Farrington nor Rider were murderers. Still, if some changed for the better on this world, others changed for the worse. And he had no idea how deep and desperate this game was.

Rider came over, shook his hand, and told him he was welcome aboard. A few minutes later, Farrington stopped the music and announced his choice of the new deckhand. By then, Peter had taken Eve outside and given her the news.

Eve was quiet for a while. Then she said," Yes, I knew you were trying to get on that ship. It's not easy to keep a secret here, Peter. I do feel bad, though mostly because you hadn't told me you were going to go away."

"I tried to get hold of you," he said. "But you had gone off without telling me where."

Eve began to cry. Peter's eyes were moist. But she wiped the tears, sniffled, and said, "I'm not grieved because you're leaving me, Pete. I'm full of sorrow because our love died. I once thought that it would last forever. I should have known better, though."

"I'm still fond of you."

"But not fond enough, is that it? Of course it is. I'm not blaming you, Peter. I feel the same way. It's just that... I wish we could have gone on feeling like we first did."

"You'll find someone else. At least, we didn't part with hatred.''

"It would have been better that way. It's bad enough when you love each other but can't get along. But to have love just die out, cold! I can't stand indifference."

"You've stood a lot more than that," he said. "If we'd still been in love, I would've stayed here or I would've tried to get them to take us both."

"And then you would've resented me. No, this may not be the best way, but it's the only way."

He pulled her to him to kiss her, but she gave him her cheek.

"Goodbye, Peter."

"I won't forget you."

"A lot of good that'll do us," she said, and she walked away.

Peter went back under the roof. People crowded around to congratulate him. He didn't feel happy. Eve had upset him, and he felt uncomfortable when he was the focus of public attention. Then Bullitt was shaking his hand.

"We'll be sorry to see you go, Frigate," he said. "You've been a model citizen. However, there is one thing."

He turned to the sergeant-at-arms next to him and said, "Mr. Armstrong, please confiscate Mr. Frigate's weapons."

Peter did not protest, since he had sworn to give them up if he quit Ruritania. However, he had not given his word not to steal them back. Early that morning, while it was still dark, he did just that.

He told himself that he had put in too much labor making the weapons to give them up. Besides, he had been wounded once in the service of this state. Ruritania owed him those weapons.

He had not gotten more than a kilometer up The River when he felt like going back and surrendering the weapons. That fit of honesty lasted for a day, and then he was cured.

Or he thought that he was! The recurring dream came back again. This time it progressed past the point where he was standing naked outside the house. He threw pebbles against the window of the bedroom but repeated casts failed to wake Roosevelt. He went around trying the doors and windows, and when he got to the front door, he found it unlocked. He crept in through the front room, into the small kitchen, and he took the two steps needed to get to the door opposite the bathroom. This led up a steep stairway to the attic, a section of which had been made into a tiny bedroom. He would have to go slowly, walking on the ends of the steps. They squeaked abominably if he stepped in their middle.

It was then that he saw that the doors to his parents' bedroom and the younger children's were open. Moonlight came in. (Never mind that it had been dawn just as he opened the front door. This was a dream.) By its bright light he saw that his parents' big old-fashioned brass bed was empty. And so was his little sister's. He looked around the corner and saw that the bunkbeds of Mungo and James, Junior were also deserted.

Nor was Roosevelt in his bed.

In a panic, he looked out the back window. The doghouse in the backyard was empty.

Everybody, even the dog, had gone off without a word.

What nameless crime had he committed?

32

"The training blimp will be completed within a month," Firebrass said. "Jill Gulbirra is the most experienced aeronaut by far, so she'll take charge of the training. In fact, I'm making her captain of the trainer. How about that, Jill? If you can't be commander of the big ship, you will be unchallenged chief honcho of the little one. Don't ever say I never did anything for you."

The other men offered her their congratulations, though some did so sourly. Cyrano seemed genuinely delighted, and if he had not been aware of her dislike for being touched, would doubtless have embraced her tightly and kissed her. On impulse, Jill pulled him to her and gave him a quick hug. After all, he was trying to make up for his offensive behavior on the Riverbank.

Twenty minutes later, she, Firebrass, Messnet, Piscator, and ten engineers began working on the blueprints for the big airship. The specifications had been determined during three weeks of hard work, usually twelve to fourteen hours a day. Instead of drawing lines on paper, however, they made blueprints on the cathode-ray tube of a computer. This was much faster, mistakes or alterations were erased quickly, and the computer itself double-checked the proportions. Of course, the computer had to be programmed first, and Jill participated in this. She loved this sort of work. It was creative and gave her a chance to play with mathematical relations.

Nevertheless, it did cause nervous tension. To relieve this and to stay in good physical shape, Jill fenced for two hours almost every day. Sword exercise here was not what it had been on Earth. The light, supple foil was discarded for the heavier, stiffer rapier. Moreover, every point of the body was a target, requiring that the fencers wear padded garments on their legs.

"We are not playing now," Cyrano told her. "You will be learning to fence for more than just points. The time may come when you will be striving in deadly earnest to keep your opponent from running you through while you try to pierce him from front to back."

She had been an excellent fencer. A great teacher, an Olympic champion, had told her that she could become a top contender in world competition if she would devote enough time to training. That had been impossible since her job required too much time away from the fencing courts. But when she had a chance to practice, she had taken it. She loved fencing; it was in some respects a very physical form of chess, which she also loved.

It was a joy to take a blade in hand again and to relearn all the long-unused, but not quite forgotten, skill. It was an even greater joy to find that she could beat most of her male opponents. Though she looked awkward, once she had gripped the handle of the rapier, she became all grace and liquid speed.

There were two men she could not master. One was Radaelli, the Italian master, author of Istruzione per la schema di spada a di sciabola, published in 1885. The other, the indisputable champion, was Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.

Jill was surprised at this. For one thing, fencing in his time had not yet developed into a fine art. It was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that the art neared its apex of technique. Cyrano had died in the middle of the seventeenth century before the foil had been invented, when men fought, often to the death, with techniques somewhat primitive, if spectacular. The Italians had put together the basic structure of modern swordplay by the early seventeenth century, but not until the beginning of the nineteenth century had the techniques reached the ultimate.

Thus Cyrano had established a reputation as the greatest swordsman of all times without having to compete with the more sophisticated fencers of a later age. Jill had believed that his reputation had been wildly exaggerated. After all, no one knew if the famous incident of the Porte de Nesle was true or not. No one except the Frenchman himself, and he would not talk about it.

However, he had learned all later refinements from Radaelli and Borsody. Within four months of starting his education, he was steadily out scoring his mentors. In five months, he was unbeatable. So far, at least.

Though rusty at first, Jill soon gained polish and began to give him a better battle. Never once, however, did she win more than one point of the total five within the six-minute limit of a match. And he always made four points before she got one. This led her to believe that he was giving her the one point to soften the defeat. Once, after a match in which she became furious because of her frustration, she accused him of patronizing her.

"Even if I were in love with you and desired very much to keep from hurting your feelings," he said, "I would not do that! It would be dishonest, and while it is said that all is fair in love and war, it is not so for me. No, you have gotten your points fairly because of your quickness and skill."

"But if we were playing for keeps," she said, "with unblunted points, you would have killed me every time. You always strike first."

He raised his mask and wiped his forehead. "True. But surely you are not thinking about challenging me to a duel? You are still not angry with me are you?"

"About that incident on the bank? No. Not about that."

"About what, then, if I may be so bold to ask?"

She would say nothing then, and he would raise his eyebrows and shrug his shoulders in a completely Gallic manner.

Cyrano was better than she. No matter how much she practiced, no matter how hard her determination to best him, because he was a man, because she did not like to lose to anybody, male or female, she always lost. Once, when she had jeered at his ignorance and superstitions and so had made him furious (she had done it on purpose), he had attacked her with such vigor that he had touched her five times in one and a half minutes. Instead of losing his head, he had become even more a being of cold fire, moving with certitude and swiftness, doing everything exactly right, one hundred percent anticipatory of her every movement.

It was she who was humiliated.

Rightfully so, she told herself, and she apologized, though it was a double humiliation to do so.

"I was terribly wrong to sneer at your lack of knowledge of science and at your mistaken beliefs,'' she said. "It is not your fault that you were born in 1619, and I should not have taunted you with that. I did so just to make you so mad I'd get an edge on you. It was a rotten thing to do. I promise not to do it again, and I most abjectly beg your pardon. I did not really mean it."

' "Then you said those nasty vicious things merely as a trick?'' he said. "A verbal device to gain points? There was nothing personal in those so-cutting remarks?"

She hesitated a moment, then said, "I have to be honest. My main purpose was to make you lose your head. But I was not so cool myself. At the moment, I did feel that you were an ignorant simpleton, a living fossil. But that was my own anger speaking out in me.

"Actually, you were far ahead of your time. You rejected the superstitions and the barbarisms of your time, as far as anybody is able to reject his culture. You were an exceptional man, and I honor you for being that. And you'll never hear such words from me again.''

She hesitated again, then said, "But is it true that you repented on your deathbed?"

The Frenchman's face became red. He grimaced and said, "But yes, Ms. Gulbirra, I did indeed say that I was sorry for my blasphemies and my unbelief and I asked the good God for His pardon. I, who had been a violent atheist since the age of thirteen! I, who hated the fat, smug, oily, stinking, ignorant, hypocritical, parasitical priests! And their unfeeling, merciless, cruel God!

"But you do not know, you who lived in a freer and more permissive age, you do not know the horrors of hellfire, of eternal damnation! You cannot know what it was to have the fear of hell soaking you, drowning you! It was taught us from earliest childhood, ground into our flesh, our bones, our deepest mind!

'' And so, when I knew for sure that I was dying from a combination of that filthy disease with the lovely bucolic name of syphilis and a blow on the head from that beam, fallen accidentally or dropped by an enemy of mine, and I who only wanted to love all mankind, and womankind, too ... where was I?

"Ah, yes, knowing for sure that I was to die, and with the terrors of the devils and of eternal tortures swarming around me, I gave in to my sister, the toothless bitch and withered nun, and my good, too good friend, Le Bret, and I said, yes, I repent, I will save my soul, and you may rejoice, dear sister, dear friend, I will probably go to purgatory, but you will pray me out of it, won't you?

"Why not? I was frightened as I had never been in all my life, and yet, and yet, 1 did not wholly believe that I was destined for damnation. I had some reservations, believe me. But then, it could not hurt to repent. If Christ was indeed available for salvation, not costing a centime, mind you, and there was a heaven and a hell, then I would be a fool not to save my worthless skin and invaluable soul.

"On the other hand, if all was emptiness, nothingness, once one had died, what had I to lose? I would make my sister and that superstitious but kind-hearted Le Bret happy."

''He wrote a glowing panegyric of you after you died," she said. "It was his preface to your Voyage to the Moon, which he edited two years after you died."

''Ah! I hope he did not make me out to be a saint!" Cyrano cried.

"No, but he did give you a fine character, a noble if not quite saintly one. However, other writers . . . well, you must have had many enemies."

"Who attempted to blacken my name and reputation after I was dead and couldn't defend myself, the cowards, the pigs!"

"I don't remember," she said. "And it doesn't actually matter now, does it? Besides, only scholars know the names of your detractors. Unfortunately, most people only know you as the romantic, bombastic, witty, pathetic, somewhat Don-Quixotish hero of a play by a Frenchman written in the late nineteenth century.

"There was a belief for a long time that you were insane by the time you had written The Voyage to the Moon and The Voyage to the Sun. That was because your books were so heavily censored. By the time the churchly Grundies had slashed your texts, much of it made no sense. But the text was eventually restored as much as possible, and by the time I was born, an unexpurgated text had been published in English."

"I am happy to hear that! I knew from what Clemens and others said that I had become a literary Olympian, if not a Zeus at least a Ganymede, a cupbearer in the ranks of the exalted. But your sneering remark that I was superstitious hurt me very much, mademoiselle. It is true, as you observed, that I believed that the waning moon did suck up the marrow from the bones of animals. Now you say that that is sheer rot. Very well, I accept that.And I was wrong, along with millions of others of my time and God knows how many before my time.

"But this was a minuscule, a harmless error. What did it matter, what injury did it do to anyone, to have this misconception? The superstition, the grave error, that really harmed people, many millions of human beings, I assure you, was the stupid, barbarous belief in sorcery, in the ability of human beings to wreak evil through spells, chants, black cats, and the enlistment of devils as allies. I wrote a letter against that ignorant and vicious belief, that social system, rather. I contended that the grotesque legal sentences and the savagely cruel tortures and executions inflicted upon insane or innocent people in the name of God and the battle against Evil were themselves the essence of evil.

"Now, it is true that this letter I speak of. Against Sorcerers, was not published while I was alive. With good reason. I would have been tortured and burned alive. It was, however, circulated among my friends. It did show that I was not as you made me out to be. I was ahead of my time in many respects, though I was not, of course, the only person in that unhappy situation."

"I know this," she said. ."And I apologized once. Would you have me do it again?"

"It is not necessary," he said. His broad smile made him look handsome, or at least attractive, despite his large nose.

Jill picked up her grail by its handle and said, "Just about dinnertime."

Jill knew something about the man called Odysseus, having heard occasional references. He had appeared without notice, seemingly from nowhere, when Clemens' and King John's forces were battling invaders who wanted to seize the meteorite ore. He had killed the enemy leader with a well-placed arrow, worked havoc among the other officers, and so had given the defenders the advantage they needed for victory.

Odysseus of Ithaca claimed to be the historical Odysseus on whom Homer's mythical character was based. He was one of the host who had fought before the walls of Troy, though he stated that the real Troy was not where the scholars said it was. Its location was elsewhere, much further south on the coast of Asia Minor.

Jill, first hearing about this, had not known whether to believe that the man was truly Odysseus or not. There were so many impostors on the Riverworld. But there was one thing that made her think that he might actually be the historical Ithacan. Why should he say that Troy Vila, which even the archaeologists and Hellenists of her day had said was the true Ilion, was not the genuine site? Why would he claim that the historical Troy was some place else?

Whatever the reason, he was no longer around. He had disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. Agents sent to track him down had failed. Firebrass had continued to search for him after Clemens left on the Mark Twain. One of the searchers, Jim Sorley, had finally found some trace of the Greek, though it showed only that he had not been murdered by John's men.

Jill had wondered several times why Odysseus had volunteered to fight for Clemens' side. Why would a stranger who had seemingly blundered onto the battle pick out one force and risk his life for it? What had he to gain, especially since it seemed that he had known none of the participants on either force? She had once asked Fire-brass about this, and he had said that he just did not know. Sam Clemens might be able to enlighten her, but he had never volunteered a word on the subject.

Firebrass had added, "However, Odysseus may have been here for the same reason that Cyrano and I were. We wanted to get on the paddlewheeler so we could get to the polar sea."

She thought it was strange that no one had thought of building a dirigible until shortly before the second riverboat was completed. Why take decades traveling to the arctic region on a surface vessel when an airship could get there in a few days?

Firebrass said, grinning, "Just one of those mysteries of life. Man, pardon me, humanity, sometimes can't see the nose on his own face. Then somebody comes along and holds up a mirror to him."

"If mankind had a nose like mine," Cyrano said, "he would never have that trouble."

In this case the person with the mirror had been August von Parseval. On Earth he had been a major in the German Army, and he had also designed airships for a German company. His type of dirigible was used by both the German and the British governments between 1906 and 1914.

Shortly before the Mark Twain was ready to leave Parolando, von Parseval had come along. He was amazed that no one had suggested that a Luftschiff would be a faster means of transportation than a boat.

After Firebrass bad mentally kicked himself for this oversight, he had hastened to Clemens, taking the German with him.

Surprisingly, Clemens said that he had long ago considered building a dirigible. After all, had he not written Tom Sawyer Abroad? Had not Tom, Jim, and Huckleberry traveled from Missouri to the Sahara in a balloon?

Amazed, Firebrass asked him why he had not mentioned this.

"Because I knew some all-fired fool would want to drop all the work on the boat faster than a burglar drops his tools when he sees a policeman! He'd want to abandon the Riverboat and put all work and materials into a flying machine!

"No, siree! This boat takes precedence over everything else, as Noah said when his Wife wanted to knock off work to go to a rain dance.

"By the blazing balls of the Bull of Bashan, there'll be no dirigible! It's a chancy thing, a dangerous device. Why, I wouldn't even be allowed to smoke a cigar on it, and if I can't do that, what's the use of living?"

Clemens gave additional objections, most of them more serious. Firebrass, however, perceived that Clemens was not going to voice his main reason. Getting to the tower was not genuinely important to Clemens. It was the voyage itself that mattered to him. To build the greatest Riverboat that had ever been built, to be its captain, its lord, to voyage for millions of kilometers in the splendid vessel, to be admired and adored and wondered at by billions, that was what Sam Clemens desired.

Moreover, he wanted revenge. He wanted to track and then to catch up with and destroy King John for having robbed him of his first boat, his first love, the Not For Hire.

It might take forty years to get from Parolando to the mountains that ringed the polar sea. Sam did not care. Not only would he be the revered owner and operator of the biggest and most beautiful River-boat mankind had ever seen, he would be going on the longest voyage any vessel, bar none, had ever taken. Forty years! Put that in your pipe, Columbus, Magellan, and smoke it!

Also, he would be seeing and talking to hundreds of thousands. This delighted Sam, who was as curious about human beings as a housewife was about new neighbors.

If he went in an airship he would have no strangers to talk to.

Though Firebrass was as gregarious as a flock of ducks, he did not understand this attitude. He himself was too eager to solve the mystery of the tower. The key to all that puzzled humanity might be there.

He did not point out to Clemens what he believed to be his real reason for his objections to the airship. It would do no good. Sam would look him straight in the eye and deny everything. However, Sam did know that he was in the wrong. And so, sixty days before the Mark Twain was to depart, he called Firebrass in.

"After I leave, you can build your highly inflammable folly, if you insist on it. Of course, that means you'll have to resign as chief engineer of the most magnificent creation of man. But you must use the dirigible for observation only, as a scout."

"Why?"

"Now how by the brass balls of burning Baal could it be used for anything else but that? It can't land on the tower or anyplace else, can it? According to Joe Miller, the mountains are sheer and there's no beach. And . . ."

"How would Joe know there's no beach? The sea was covered by fog. All he saw was the upper part of the tower."

Sam had puffed smoke that looked like angry dragons. "It stands to reason the people that made that sea wouldn't make a beach. Would they make a place from which invaders could launch a boat? Of course not.

"Anyway, what I want you to do is to find out the lay of the land. See if there's a passage through the mountains other than what Joe described. Find out if the tower can be entered otherwise than by the roof."

Firebrass had not argued. He would do what he wished to do when he got to the pole. Clemens would have no control of him then.

"I took off then, happy as a dog that's rid of his fleas. I told von Parseval about Sam's decision, and we had a big celebration. But two months later poor old August was swallowed by a dragonfish. I barely missed going down its gullet with him."

At this point in his story, Firebrass revealed a secret to Jill.

"You must swear by your honor not to tell anyone else. I wouldn't be telling you, except that the boat is long gone, and there's no way you could get the information to King John. Not that you would, of course."

"I promise to keep it to myself-whatever it is."

"Well.,. one of our engineers was a Californian scientist. He knew how to make a laser with a range of 404 meters. Within that distance, it could slice the Rex in two. And we had just enough materials to make one. So Sam had it done.

"It was a highly secret project, so secret that there are only six men on the Mark Twain who know of its existence. The laser is concealed in a compartment known only to these six, of whom Sam is one, of course. Even his buddy, Joe, doesn't know about it.

"When the Mark Twain catches up with the Rex, the laser will be brought out and mounted on a tripod. The battle ought to be short and sweet. Sweet for Sam, bitterly short for John. It'll also cut down the casualties tremendously for both sides.

"I was in on the secret because I was one of the engineers on the project. Before it was completed, I asked Sam if it could be left behind. I wanted to take it on the airship and use it to burn an entrance into the tower if we could not get in otherwise.

"But Sam flat out refused. He said that if anything happened to the airship, the laser would be lost. I wouldn't be able to return it to the Mark Twain. I argued like mad, but I lost. And Sam did have a strong point. There's no way of knowing what dangers we'll run into, meteorological or otherwise.

"However, it was very frustrating."

33

Jill was about to ask him if he had not sent scouts out to look for materials to make another laser. At that moment Firebrass' secretary knocked at the door. Would Mr. Firebrass see Piscator?

Firebrass said he would. The Japanese entered and, after inquiring about their health, said that he had good news. The engineers making the synthetic diesel-oil fuel would be able to deliver the first supply a week ahead of time.

"That's great!" Firebrass said. He grinned at Jill. "That means you can take the Minerva up tomorrow! Start the training seven days ahead of schedule! Fabulous!"

Jill felt even happier.

Firebrass proposed a drink to celebrate. The skull-bloom had no sooner been poured, however, than the secretary entered again.

Smiling broadly, she said, "I wouldn't interrupt if it weren't so important. I think we've got a new airshipman for you, one with much experience. He just got here a few minutes ago."

Jill's near-ecstasy whistled out of her, like gas from a ruptured cell. Her chest seemed to be caving in on her. So far, she had seemed to have the post of first mate secured. But here was a person who might have as much, or even more, experience than she. A male, of course. He might even be an officer of the Graf Zeppelin or the Hindenburg. A veteran of the large rigid dirigibles would have more clout, in Firebrass' estimation, than one with only blimp experience.

Her heart beating hard, she looked at the man who followed the secretary into the office. She did not recognize him, but that meant little. There were scores of airship personnel of her day and of the pre-Hindenburg era whose photographs she had not seen. Besides, those pictures had been of middle-aged men who wore civilian clothes or uniforms. And many of them had facial hair.

"Chief Firebrass," Agatha Rennick said. "Barry Thorn."

The newcomer wore fish-skin sandals, a bright red-, white-, and blue-striped kilt, and a long black cloth fastened at the throat. The handle of his grail was in one hand and the neck of a large fish-skin bag in the other.

He stood about 1.7 meter tall, and his shoulders seemed to be almost half that wide. His physique was massive, irresistibly evoking to Jill the image of a bull. Yet his legs, though thickly muscled, were long in proportion to his trunk. His chest and arms were gorillalike, but he had almost no pectoral hair.

Short, curly yellow hair framed on a broad face. The eyebrows were straw colored; the eyes, a dark blue. His nose was long and straight. The lips were full. Smiling, he revealed very white teeth. The jaw was thick, ending in a prominent rounded, deeply cleft chin. The ears were small and close to his head.

At Firebrass' invitation he put down the grail and bag. He flexed his fingers as if they had been carrying a load for a long time. Probably, though, he had been paddling a canoe for a long distance. Despite the broadness of his hands, the fingers were long and slim.

He seemed very much at ease despite being with strangers and facing an interview on his qualifications. In fact, he radiated a well-being and a magnetism that inevitably made Jill think of that much overused and often inappropriate word "charisma."

Later, she would find that he had a curious gift of being able to shut that off as if it were light from a lamp. Then, despite his obvious physical qualities, he seemed almost to become one with his background. A psychic chameleon.

Jill, glancing at Piscator, saw that he was intensely curious about the stranger. His black eyes were narrowed, and his head was cocked slightly to one side, as if he were listening to some soft, faraway sound.

Firebrass shook hands with Thorn.

"Wow! What a grip! Glad to have you aboard, sir, if you are what Agatha claims you are. Sit down, take a load off your feet. Have you traveled a long way? You have? Forty thousand stones? Would you care for food? Coffee? Tea? Booze or beer?"

Thorn declined everything except the chair. He spoke in a very pleasant baritone without the usual pauses, hesitations, and incomplete phrases that distinguished the speech of most people.

Finding that Thorn was a Canadian, Firebrass switched from Esperanto to English. In a few minutes of questioning, he got a capsule biography .of the newcomer.

Barry Thorn was born in 1920 on_his parents' farm outside Regina, Saskatchewan. After getting a degree in electromechanical engineering in 1938, he enlisted in the British Navy while in England. During the war, he was the commander of a naval blimp. He married an American girl and after the war went to the States to live because his wife, an Ohioan who wanted to be close to her parents, had insisted. Besides, the opportunities were better there for blimp pilots.

He picked up a commercial pilot's license also, intending to work for the American airlines. But after his divorce he quit Goodyear and became a bush pilot for several years in the Yukon. Then he had returned to Goodyear and married again. After his second wife died, he had gotten a job with a newly formed British-West German airship company. For some years he had captained a great blimp-tug which towed floating containers of natural gas from the Middle East to Europe.

Jill asked him a few questions in the hope that his answers would jog her memory. She had known a few airshipmen at Thorn's company, and some of these might have mentioned him. He replied that he remembered one of them-he thought. He wasn't sure because that had been so long ago.

He had died in 1983 while on leave in Friedrichshafen. He did not know the cause of his death. Heart failure, probably. He had gone to sleep one night and when he had awakened he was lying naked on a bank of The River-along with everybody else.

Since then he had been wandering up and down the Valley. One day, hearing a rumor that a giant dirigible was being built down-River, he had decided to find out for himself if the tale was true.

Firebrass, beaming, said, "This is luck! You're more than welcome, Barry. Agatha, will you make arrangements to house Mr. Thorn?"

Thorn shook hands with everybody and left. Firebrass almost danced with delight. "We're coming along famously."

Jill said, "Does this change my situation?"

Firebrass looked surprised. "No. I said you'd be the head instructor and captain of the Minerva. Firebrass always keeps his promises. Well, almost always.

"Now, I know what you're thinking. I made no promises about who'll be the first mate of the Parsevol. You're a strong contender for the post, Jill. But it's too early to decide on that. All I can say is, 'May the best man win. Or the best woman.' "

Piscator patted her hand. At another time, she would have resented the gesture. Now, she felt warmed.

Later, after they had left the office, Piscator said, "I am not certain that Thorn is telling the truth. Not all of it, anyway. His story may be true as far as it goes. But there's something that rings falsely in his voice. He could be concealing something."

"Sometimes you frighten me," she said.

"I could be wrong about him."

Jill got the impression that he did not believe that.

34

Each day, before dawn, the Minerva lifted for a training flight. Sometimes it stayed aloft until an hour after noon. Sometimes it cruised all day, landing at evening. For the first week, Jill was its only pilot. Then she let each of the trainee pilots and the control gondola officers handle the controls.

Barry Thorn did not enter the blimp until four weeks after aerial training started. Jill insisted that he attend ground school first. Though he was experienced, he had not been in an airship for thirty-two years and it could be presumed that he had forgotten much. Thorn did not object.

She watched him closely while he was in the pilot's seat. Whatever Piscator's suspicions of him, Thorn handled the ship as if he had been doing it steadily for years. Nor was he any less competent at navigation or at dealing with the simulated emergencies which were part of the training.

Jill felt disappointed. She had hoped that he was not all he claimed to be. Now she knew that he was the stuff from which captains could be made.

Thorn was, however, a strange man. He seemed at ease with everybody and he could appreciate a joke as much as anybody. Yet he never cracked one himself, and off duty he kept to himself. Though he was given a hut only 20 meters from Jill's, he never dropped in on her or invited her to visit him. In a way, this was a relief to Jill, since she did not have to worry about advances from him. Inasmuch as he made no effort to get a woman to move in with him, he could have been homosexual. But he also did not seem interested, sexually or otherwise, in either gender. He was a loner, though, when he wished, he could open up and be very charming. Then suddenly his personality would close like a fist, and he became pale neutral, almost a living statue.

The entire potential crew of the Parseval was under intense surveillance. Each had to undergo psychological tests for stability. Thorn passed both the observation and the tests as if he had made them up himself.

"Just because he's a little odd in his social life doesn't mean he isn't a first-class aeronaut," Firebrass said. "It's what a man does when he's aloft that counts."

Firebrass and de Bergerac proved to be natural dirigible pilots. This was not surprising in the American's case, since he had many thousands of hours in jetplanes, helicopters, and spacecraft. The Frenchman, however, came from a time when not even balloons had existed, though they had been envisioned. The most complicated mechanical device he had handled then were matchlock, wheel-lock, and flintlock pistols. He had been too poor to afford a watch, which, in any case, required the owner only to wind it.

Nevertheless, he quickly absorbed the instruction in ground school and aerial flight, nor did he have much trouble with the necessary mathematics.

Firebrass was very good, but de Bergerac was the best pilot of all. Jill reluctantly admitted that to herself. The Frenchman's reactions and judgment were almost computer-swift.

Another surprising candidate was John de Grey stock. This medieval baron had volunteered to be part of the crew that would man the semirigid Minerva when it attacked the Rex. Jill had been skeptical about his ability to adapt to aerial flight. But, after three months of flight, he was considered by both Firebrass and Gulbirra to be the best qualified to command the ship. He was combat wise, ruthless, and utterly courageous. And he hated King John. Having been wounded and thrown overboard by John's men when the Not For Hire was highjacked, he lusted for revenge.

Jill had come to Parolando near the end of the month called Dektria (Thirteenth in English). Parolando had adopted a thirteen-month calendar since this planet had neither season nor moon. There was no reason except sentiment to keep the year at 365 days, but sentiment was good enough. Each month was made of four seven-day weeks, twenty-eight days in all. Since twelve months only made 336 days, an extra month had been added. This left one day extra, which was generally termed New Year's Eve Day, Last Day, or Blow-Your-Top Day. Jill had landed three days before this in 31 a.r.d.

Now it was January of 33 a.r.d. , and though work on the big airship had started, it would be almost another year before it was ready for the polar flight. This was partly due to the inevitable unforseen difficulties and partly due to Firebrass' grandiose ideas. These had caused many revisions of the original plans.

As of now, the crew had been chosen, but the appointment of the officers had not been determined. As far as she was concerned, the list was fairly definite-except for the posts of first and second mate. One would go to Thorn and the other to herself. This had not caused her much anxiety-except in her dreams-since Thorn did not seem to care which position he got.

On this Wednesday of January or First-Month, she was happy. The work on the Parseval was going so well that she decided to quit early. She'd get her fishing pole and cast for some of the "chub" in the little lake near her hut. As she climbed the first of the hills, she saw Piscator. He was also carrying fishing tackle and a wickerwork basket.

She called to him, and he turned but did not give her his usual smile in greeting.

"You look as if you've got something on your mind," she said.

"I do, but it is not my problem, except that it concerns one whom I like to think is my friend."

"You don't have to tell me," she said.

"I think I do. It concerns you."

She stopped. "What's the matter?"

"I just learned from Firebrass that the psychological evaluation tests were not finished. There is one more to go, and every one of the flight crew will have to take it."

"Is that something I should worry about?"

He nodded. "The test involves deep hypnosis. It's designed to probe for any residue of instability which previous tests might have overlooked."

"Yes, but I . . ."

She paused again.

"I'm afraid that it might disclose these ... ah ... hallucinations that have disturbed you from time to time."

She felt faint. For a moment, the world around her seemed to dim. Piscator held her elbow and her arm to support her.

"I am sorry, but I thought it best that you be prepared."

She pulled away, saying, "I'm all right."

Then, "Godalmighty! I've had no trouble with those for eight months! I've had no dreamgum since that time you found me in the hut, and I'm sure that any residual effects are gone. Furthermore, I've never had those hallucinations except late at night when I was home. You don't really think that Firebrass would eliminate me, do you? He doesn't have enough reason to do so!"

"I don't know," Piscator said. "Perhaps the hypnosis might not uncover these attacks. In any event, if you will forgive me for trying to influence you, I think that you should go to Firebrass and tell him about your troubles. Do so before the tests are made."

"What good would that do?"

"If he finds out that you have been holding back on him, he probably would discharge you immediately. But if you are candid, confess before you get official word of the test, he might listen to your side of the case. I myself do not think that you are any danger to the welfare of the ship. But my opinion doesn't count."

"I won't beg!"

"That wouldn't influence him anyway-except negatively."

She breathed deeply and looked around, as if there might be an escape route to another world nearby. She had been so sure, so happy only a moment ago.

"Very well. There's no use putting it off."

"That's courageous," he said. "And commonsensical. I wish you luck."

"See you later," she said, and she strode off, her jaw set.

Nevertheless, by the time she had climbed the stairs to the second story, where Firebrass' apartment was, she was breathing hard, not from poor physical condition but from anxiety.

Firebrass' secretary had told her that he had gone to his suite. She was surprised at this but did not ask Agatha why he had quit work so early. Perhaps he, too, felt like relaxing.

The door to his apartment was halfway down the hall. Before it stood the bodyguard that usually accompanied him. Two assassination attempts in the last six months had made this necessary. The would-be killers had been slain themselves and thus could give no information.' No one knew for certain, but it was believed that a ruler of a hostile state down-River had sent the men. He had made no bones about his desire to get hold of Parolando's mineral wealth and rnarvelous machines and weapons. It was possible that he had hoped that, if he removed Firebrass, he might be able to invade Parolando. But this was all speculation by Firebrass.

Jill walked up to the ensign in command of four heavily armed men.

"I'd like to talk to the chief."

The ensign, Smithers said, "Sorry. He gave orders he wasn't to be disturbed."

"Why not?"

Smithers looked curiously at her. "I wouldn't know, sir."

Anger caused by her fear overcame her.

"I suppose he has a woman in there!"

The ensign said, "No, not that that is any of your business, sir."

He grinned maliciously and said. "He's got a visitor. A newcomer named Fritz Stern. He just got here an hour ago. He's a German, and, from what I heard, a hotshot Zeppelin man. I heard him tell the captain he was a commander for NDELAG, whatever that means. But he's got more flight time than you."

Jill had to restrain herself from hitting him in his teeth. She knew that Smithers had never liked her, and no doubt he enjoyed needling her.

"NDELAG," she said, hating herself because her voice was trembling. ' "That could be Neue Deutsche Luftschifffahrts-Aktien-Gesellschaft."

Now her voice seemed to be coming from far away, from someone else. "There was a Zeppelin line called DELAG in the days before World War I. It carried passengers and freight in Germany. But I never heard of an NDELAG."

"That would be because it was formed after you died,'' Smithers said. He grinned, enjoying her obvious distress. "I did hear him tell the captain that he graduated from the Friedrichshafen academy in 1984. He said he ended his career as commander of a super-Zeppelin named Viktoria."

She felt sick. First Thorn and now Stem.

There was no use staying here. She squared her shoulders and said, in a firm voice, "I'll see him later."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir," Smithers said, grinning.

Jill turned away to go back down the stairs.

She whirled around as a door banged and somebody shouted. A man had run out of Firebrass' apartment and slammed the door behind him.

He stood for several seconds, frozen, facing the guards. These were pulling their heavy pistols from their holsters. Smithers had his sword halfway from its sheath.

The man was as tall as she. He had a beautiful physique, broad shouldered, slim waisted, long legged. His face was handsome but rugged; his hair, wavy ash blond; his eyes, large and dark blue. But his skin was unhealthily pale and blood was flowing from a wound on the shoulder. He held a bloodied dagger in his left hand. Then the door opened, and Firebrass, a rapier in his hand, appeared. His face was twisted, and his forehead bled.

The ensign shouted, "Stern!"

Stern whirled and ran down the hall. There was no stairway at its end, only a tall window. Smithers cried, "Don't fire, men! He can't get away!"

"He can if he goes through the window!" Jill screamed.

At the end of the hall, Stern leaped with a shout, whirling so that his back would strike the plastic and holding an arm over his face.

The window refused to give way. Stem hit it with a thud and bounced back, falling flat with another thud on his face. He lay there while Firebrass, the ensign, and the guards behind him, ran toward Stern.

Jill followed them a second later.

Before the group could reach him, Stern got to his feet. He stared at the men racing toward him, looked at the dagger, which he had dropped on the floor when he had hit the window. Then he closed his eyes and crumpled to the floor.