62

Three twenty-four-hour periods had passed.

The dead had been buried at sea, their cloth-wrapped bodies resembling Egyptian mummies as they were tilted outward through an aperture. As Jill stood in the klieg-lit fog and watched the corpses slide, one by one, through the arch at the base of the wall, she calculated the time of their fall. It was not callousness which made her indulge in the mental exercise. It was habit, and it was also a barrier against the horror of death.

Death was for real now; the hope of resurrection in this world was gone. Death seemed even more all-present and always threatening in this place with its cold, wet winds and dark, swirling clouds. She only had to walk a few paces into the mists, and she would be out of sight and sound of all living beings and their works. She could not see her feet or the metal on which she walked.

If she went to an aperture and stuck her head out, she could not even hear the cold, dead sea crashing against the tower. It was too far away. Everything was too far away, even if it was only a few meters distant.

It was truly a wasteland. She would be glad when she could leave it.

So far, Piscator had not come back. She did not think it likely that he would. Under no circumstances would he willingly have stayed so long in the tower. Either he was dead, hurt badly, or held prisoner. In any event, those on the outside could do nothing for him, and the proposed seven-day wait now seemed far too long. Therefore, Jill had announced to the crew that the airship would leave at the end of a five-day period.

They received the news with evident relief. Like her, their nerves were pulled tightly, overtightly, on a rack. So much so that she had been forced to change the four hours of guard duty at the dome to two. Some of the guards were hallucinating, seeing ghostly forms in the fog, hearing voices coming from the corridor. One man had even fired at what he thought was a huge form running at him from the mists.

The first search of the ship had found no bombs or transmitters. Fearing that the crew might not have covered every square centimeter, and also wanting to keep them busy, she ordered another search. This one was extended to the outside surface of the dirigible, too. Men went to the top and prowled the walkway, shining their lamps alongside it. Others swept their lights across the exteriors of the tail structures.

No bombs were located.

Jill was not relieved. If Thorn had planned from the beginning to hide explosives, he could have placed some inside a gas cell. If he had, he had thwarted them, since there was no way they could get into the cells without releasing the irreplaceable hydrogen. It was true he'd need a transmitter, but that was a small object. It could even be disguised as something else.

This thought set off a third search in which every small mechanical or electrical device aboard was inspected to make sure that it was indeed what it appeared to be. All were what they were supposed to be, but the idea that there could be a disguised transmitter added to the general nervousness.

Of course, as long as Thorn was kept inside the sick bay, he could not get to a hidden transmitter. A lock had been installed on the door to sick bay, and there were always two guards on the inside and two outside.

Jill talked to Cyrano about another problem.

"Sam's going to be bloody furious when he hears that he can't do anything if he ever does get here. There's no way he can get to the top of the tower from the surface of the sea. And if he did achieve the impossible, he still could do nothing to get in.

"It's possible that one or more of his crew might be able to enter the tower, if he could get to the top. But even then, what guarantee is there what happened to Piscator wouldn't happen to them?"

"Whatever that is," Cyrano said gloomily. He had been almost as fond of the Japanese as he was of Firebrass.

"Did Firebrass tell you, too, about the laser hidden on the Mark Twain?"

Cyrano came alive. "Aha! What a stupid man I am! The laser! Yes, Firebrass told me about it, of course. Would he tell you and not me? I should hope to kiss a pig under its tail he would not!"

"Well, it's possible that this metal might resist even a laser beam. But we won't know unless we try it, will we?"

The Frenchman swiftly lapsed into gloom.

"But what do we do about the fuel situation? We cannot fly to Clemens' boat and get the laser and return here and then get back to Parolando or the boat. We do not have enough oil for that."

"We'll get the laser from Sam and then go to Parolando and make some more oil and then come back here."

"That will take much time. But it is the only thing to do. However, what if that hardheaded Clemens does not let us use the laser?"

"I don't see how he could refuse us," Jill said slowly. "That is the only means we have for getting into the tower."

"Ah, yes, true: But you are saying that logic will sway Clemens. He is human, which means that he is by no means always logical. But we will see."

Jill was so on fire with this idea that she saw no reason in waiting for Piscator any longer. If he were hurt or held prisoner by some mechanical device or by living beings, he wasn't going to be gotten free without the laser.

First, though, Thorn had to be questioned. After ordering Cop-pename to wait until she had returned, she walked down to sick bay with Cyrano. Thorn was sitting up in bed. His right leg was enclosed by a shackle attached to a chain, the other end of which was locked to the frame of the bed.

He said nothing as they entered, and Jill was also silent for a moment as she studied him. His thick jaw was locked; his chin, even more outthrust; his dark-blue eyes, half-lidded. He looked as stubborn as Lucifer himself.

She said, "Do you want to tell us what this is all about?"

Thorn did not reply.

She had made sure that he was to be left ignorant of the crash of the helicopter until she told him.

"We know that you set off that bomb. You murdered Firebrass and Obrenova, everybody on the chopper."

Thorn's eyes opened fully, but his expression did not change. Or was that a slight smile at the corners of his lips?

"You're guilty of premeditated murder. I can have you shot, and I may do it Unless you tell me everything."

She waited. He glared steadily at her.

"We know about the little spheres on the forebrains of Firebrass and Obrenova."

That had pierced him, had struck something sensitive. His skin paled, and he grimaced.

"Is there a sphere on your brain?"

He groaned, and he said, "I was X-rayed. Do you think Firebrass would have taken me along if there had been one?"

"I don't know," Jill said. "He accepted Obrenova. Why would he have accepted her and rejected you?"

Thorn merely shook his head.

"Look. If it's necessary, I'll order that Graves remove the top of your skull and take a look at your brain."

"That would be a waste of time,'' he said. "I don't have any such thing inside me."

"I think you're lying. What is the purpose of that sphere?"

Silence.

"You do know, don't you?"

Cyrano said, "Where were you headed for when you stole the helicopter?"

Thorn bit his lip, then said, "I presume that you didn't get into the tower?"

Jill hesitated. Should she tell him about Piscator? Would that give him some sort of advantage? She could not imagine what it could be, but then she did not know the location of any piece in this jigsaw puzzle.

She said, "One man did get into it."

Thorn quivered, and he became even paler.

"One? Who was that?"

"I'll tell you if you'll tell me what this is all about."

Thorn's deep chest rose, and he let out air slowly.

"I won't say another word about this until we get to the Mark Twain. I'll talk to Sam Clemens. Until then, not a word. You can open my skull, if you will. But that would be cruel, and it might kill me, and it would be totally unnecessary."

Jill motioned to Cyrano to come with her into the next room. When they were out of Thorn's sight, she said, "Is there an X-ray machine aboard the Mark Twain?"

Cyrano shrugged and said, "I do not remember. But we can determine that as soon as we ge 'into radio contact with the boat.''

They returned to the foot of Thorn's bed. He stared at them for a minute. A struggle was obviously taking place in him. Finally, as if he hated himself for having to ask, he said, "Did that man come back?"

"What does that mean to you?"

Thorn looked as if he'd like to say something. Instead, he smiled.

"Very well," Jill said. "We are going to the boat. I'll talk to you when we get there, unless you change your mind before then."

The checkout tests of the equipment consumed an hour. The ropes were cast off and drawn into the dirigible. The guards and the rope handlers came aboard. With Cyrano in the pilot's seat, the Parseval rose, its propellers swiveled upward to give it additional lift. Water ballast was discharged to compensate for the loss of the valved-off hydrogen. The updraft around the tower lifted the ship higher than was desired, and so Cyrano sent it back down, headed toward the great hold through which they entered.

Jill stood at the windscreen and stared into the fog. "So long, Piscator," she murmured. "We'll be back."

The wind hurled the vessel through the hole, spitting it out, as Cyrano said, as if it were a rotten piece of meat from the mouth of a giant. Or, he added, as if it were a baby overeager to be born, shot out from the womb of a mother who couldn't wait to get rid of her nine-months' burden.

The Frenchman sometimes overstrained his metaphors and similes.

The clear air and the bright sun and the green vegetation made them feel like bursting into song. Cyrano, grinning, said, "If I were not on duty, I would dance! I do not contemplate returning to that dismal place with any pleasure."

Aukuso had begun transmitting the ship's call letters as soon as it had gained a high altitude. Not until an hour had passed, however, did he report that he had made contact with the Mark Twain.

Jill started to report to Sam Clemens, but he interrupted her with a furious description of de Greystock's treacherous attack. She was shocked, but she became impatient with his overlong, overdetailed narrative. His boat was not badly damaged; her account was the important thing.

Finally, he ran down.

"I've discharged most of my bile, for the moment, anyway. Say, why are you talking to me? Where's Firebrass?"

"I didn't have a chance to say more than two words," she said. And she described in detail the events from the moment the airship had entered the hole in the mountain.

It was his turn to be shocked. Except, however, for some explosive curses, he did not comment until she had finished.

"So Firebrass is dead, and you think he was one of Them? Maybe he wasn't, Jill. Did it occur to you that the black sphere might have been implanted in a small number of us for some scientific purpose? That perhaps only one in a thousand or ten thousand has it? I don't know what its purpose could be. Maybe it transmits brain waves which They record for use in some sort of scientific experiment. Or it could be used by Them to keep tabs on certain preselected subjects."

"I hadn't thought of that," she said. "I'd like to think that you're right, because I hate to think that Firebrass could be one of Them.''

"Me, too. However, the important thing just now is that a ground expedition is useless. I built those two boats for nothing. Well, not actually for nothing. There's something to be said for life on the boat. It affords luxuries you can't get elsewhere-except on the Rex-and it's the fastest way to travel, although I really have no definite place to go to anymore. But I haven't forgotten King John. I'm going to catch up with him and fix him for what he did to me."

"You're wrong about one thing, Sam," she said. "I think we can get into the tower. All I need is the laser."

It sounded to her as if Clemens was strangling.

"You mean that.. . that Firebrass told you about it? Why, that unjudicious, ungrateful, unprincipled . . . garrh! I told him not to say a word! He knew how important it was to keep it a secret! Now everybody in the wheelhouse knows it. They've heard every word you said. I'll have to get them to swear not to reveal it, and just how much chance is there they'll not let it slip? If Firebrass were here, I'd choke him with one hand and stick my cigar up his ass with the other!"

Sam went on, "Besides, you should have waited until you got here before you said anything. For all I know, John's radiomen have been listening in to us for years! They might have figured out how our scramblers work and be taking in every word now, pleased as a hog that's just found a fresh pile of cow flop!"

"I'm sorry about that," she said. "But it was necessary to mention it. We have to make arrangements for picking the laser up without landing."

Jill added, "I need the laser. It's the only means we have of getting into the tower. Without it all our long labors and the deaths of several people have been in vain."

"And I need it to slice up John and his boat. It's a surefire thing, double-guaranteed to get a quick victory."

Trying to keep the anger out of her voice, she said,' "Think on it, Sam. Which is more important, revenge on King John or solving the mystery of this world, finding out why we're here and who did this?

"Besides, there's no reason you can't have both. We'll return the laser to you after we use it."

"Both be damned to hell and back! How do I know you will come back? The next time you may get caught by those people. They can sit inside, smug as mice behind a wall laughing at the cat, if you can't get to them. But when you start cutting with that laser, you think they'll just sit on their hands and allow you to waltz on in?

"They'll grab you, just as they did Piscator. And then what? Besides, for all you know, the metal of the tower could be resistant to a laser beam."

"Too right. But we have to try. That's the only way we can find out."

"All right, all right! You've got logic and right on your side, as if that ever won an argument! But I'm a reasonable man. So, you can have the laser!

"But, and this is a big but, as the queen of Spain said to Dan Sickles, you've got to get Rotten John for me first!"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean that I want you to make a raid on the Rex. Send in a party in the chopper at night and grab John. I'd rather see him here alive, but if you can't get him alive and kicking, kill him!"

"That's stupid and vicious!" Jill said. "We could lose the chopper and all the raiding party in a useless, vainglorious venture. Not to mention risking lives, we can't afford to lose the chopper. It's the only one we have."

Sam had been breathing heavily, but he waited until he had regained his wind. Now he spoke smoothly, icily.

"It's you that's being stupid now. If John is gotten rid of, I won't have any reason to pit my boat against the Rex. Think of the lives that'll be saved. For all I care, his second-in-command, whoever he is, can take over and I'll wish him good luck. All I want is that John doesn't get away with all the crimes he committed and that he doesn't get to keep the beautiful boat I toiled and sweated and plotted and suffered agonies for. And don't forget that he tried to sink this boat, too!

"I want that miserable excuse for a human being standing in front of me so I can tell him exactly what he is. That's all. I promise I won't kill him or mistreat him, if that's bothering you. Thunderation! Why should it?

"And when I'm done chewing him out, the most glorious verbal reaming ever given anybody since the dawn of time-it'll make Jeremiah look tongue-tied-then I'll put him ashore and steam away. Of course, I may maroon him among cannibals or grail slavers.

"I promise you that, Jill."

"What if he has to be killed?"

"I'll just have to endure my disappointment."

"But I can't order my men to go on such a dangerous mission.''

"I won't ask you to. Just ask for volunteers. If you can't get enough, too bad. You can't have the laser. However, I don't anticipate any dearth of heroes. If there's one thing I know, Jill, it's human nature."

Cyrano shouted, "I will be honored to enlist, Sam!"

"Is that you, Cyrano? Well, I have to admit you've not been one of my dearest friends. But if you do go, I wish you good luck. I mean it."

Jill was so surprised she could not speak for a moment.

Here was the man who'd said he regarded Mars, the deity of war, as the most stupid of gods.

When she regained her voice, she said, "Why are you doing this, Cyrano?"

"Why? But you forget that I, too, was on the Not For Hire when John and his pirates seized it. I was almost killed. I would like to have my revenge, to see the expression on his face when he realizes that the trap is sprung on the trapper, the pirate pirated.

"This is not your vast, impersonal war initiated by greedy, glory-mad imbeciles who do not care how many thousands are slaughtered, mutilated, driven insane, frozen, starved, dying of disease; how many children and woman blown up; how many women raped or left husbandless or sonless.

"No, this is personal. I know the man whom I would make my small, wholly justified war upon. So does Clemens, who abhors war as much as myself."

Jill did not argue with him. At that moment, he seemed like a little child to her. An idiot child. He still wanted to play at war, yet he had seen its miseries and horrors.

There was nothing for her to do but go along with Sam's proposal . She did not have to obey him, since he had no way of enforcing his orders. But if she wanted the laser, and she did, she could only carry out the raid.

Her last hope that there would not be enough volunteers died as soon as she called for them. There were enough to get into three helicopters if they had been available.

Perhaps, she thought, they had been so frustrated at the tower that they wanted violent action against a foe who could be seen, who would fight. But she did not really believe that.

Clemens was right. He did know human nature. Male nature, anyway. No, that wasn't fair. The nature of some males.

An hour's discussion followed. During this Cyrano said that he could draw accurate sketches of the layout of the Rex. Clemens finally signed off, but not before making sure that he would be notified of the results of the raid the moment the helicopter returned.

"If it returns," she said.

63

The torpedoes seemed to be dead-on, but Sam ordered the boat swung away and full power applied. A minute later, an observer at the stem reported that the torpedoes had just missed. The dirigible loomed before him, coining swiftly, seeming about to collide with the pilothouse itself. Sam yelled an order to fire a second volley away. Before that order could be obeyed, the airship exploded.

Four bombs going off simultaneously should have blown in every port, should have caved in the hull of the boat. As it was, many ports were shattered or driven whole into the interior and people were knocked down. The boat, immense and heavy though it was, rocked. Sam was hurled to the deck along with everybody except the pilot, who was strapped in his chair. Byron was knocked unconscious as a windscreen slammed into his face.

Sam got to his feet as smoke roiled into the control room, blinding him, making him cough violently. An acrid stink surrounded him. He could not hear anything; he was totally deafened for a minute. He groped through the cloud and felt along the control panel. Knowing the location of every dial, gauge, and button, he ascertained that the ship was still on course-if the steering mechanism was still operating. Then he unstrapped Detweiller's bloody, unconscious form and eased him to the floor. By the time he had slipped into the chair, he could see again. The airship, or what was left of it, was in the water. Pieces were scattered over hundreds of square meters, burning. Smoke billowed out from them, but by then the boat was out of the clouds. He straightened her out and headed her up-River. After putting the automatic pilot on, and making sure that it still operated, he went to the starboard to survey the damage.

Joe was saying something, his mouth wide open and working furiously. Sam stabbed a finger at his ear, indicating that he couldn' t hear. Joe kept on yelling. His skin was cut in a hundred places.

Later, after everybody had calmed down, Sam decided that just one of the bombs must have gone off. The force of its explosion should have set off the other three, but it surely had not done so.

Nobody had been killed, but several score had been severely wounded. Luckily, the explosion had failed to set off the rockets aboard.

Detweiller was the worst casualty, but by the third day he was up and walking. The boat was still close to shore, anchored next to the stone that had provided breakfast. A wide gangplank was built so the crew could walk ashore. The damage was repaired, and the crew took turns on shore leave. Sam decided that now would be a good time to make more alcohol and gunpowder. Arrangements were made to trade tobacco and some of the whiskey and wine provided by the crew's grails for wood and lichen from the area.

Von Richthofen was dead. The only survivors of the Minerva were Samhradh and Hardy, Newton having drowned while still unconscious. Sam wept when the German's body, wrapped in a weighted bag, was dropped into The River. He had been very fond of the ebullient, happy-go-lucky fellow.

"I know why Greystock did this," Sam said. 'John Lackland made him an offer he couldn't resist. And the double-dealing swine almost did the job, too. I thought Greystock was a cruel man, like all of his kind, but I didn't think he'd be disloyal. Still, if you've read your history-you, Marc, not you, Joe-then you'll know that the medieval noblemen were notorious for treachery. Their god was Opportunity, no matter how many churches they built for the glory of Church and God. They all had the morals of a hyena."

"Not all of them," de Marbot said. "There was William Marshal of England. He never switched sides."

"Didn't he serve under King John?" Sam said. "He must've had a strong stomach to stick with him. Anyway, John has tried once and almost got away with it. What bothers me is, how many other saboteurs has he planted? You see now why I've insisted on double guards at every vulnerable point. And four outside the armory and ammunition hold.

"That's also why I've ordered that every man jack aboard, and jill, too, report any suspicious conduct they see. I know it's made some people jumpy. But I've had to be realistic."

"No vonder you got nightmareth. Me, I don't vorry about thuch thingth."

"That's why I'm captain and you're only a bodyguard. Say, don't you worry about protecting me?"

"I chutht do my duty and vorry only about the long time betveen mealth."

A few minutes later, the chief radio officer reported that she was in contact with the Parseval. By the time Sam was through talking to Gulbirra, he felt as if he were walking through a minefield. Treachery, lies, frustration, uncertainty, confusion, and misdirection were waiting to explode under his feet.

Smoking like a dragon though the cigar tasted bitter, he paced back and forth. So far, there were only two on the boat who shared the secret of X with him-Joe Miller and John Johnston. There were, or had been, eight who to his knowledge knew about the Stranger: Miller, Johnston, himself, Firebrass (now dead), de Bergerac, Odysseus (who'd disappeared long ago), von Richthofen (now dead), and Richard Francis Burton. The being whom Clemens called X or the Mysterious Stranger (when it wasn't son-of-a-bitch or bastard) had said he'd elected twelve to get to the polar tower. X was supposed to return in a few years and give Sam more information. So far he had not shown.

Perhaps the other Ethicals had finally caught him, and he was- where?

Sam had told Miller and von Richthofen about the Stranger. So that left six of those informed by X unknown to him. Though it was possible that they were all on this boat. Why had X not given each one a sign or a codeword of recognition? Maybe he meant to do so but had been delayed. X's schedule was about as uncertain as that of a Mexican railroad.

Cyrano had told him about Burton. Sam didn't know where Burton was, but he knew who he was. The newspapers had been full of his exploits during Sam's lifetime. And Sam had read his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah, First Footsteps in East Africa, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, and his translation of the Arabian Nights.

Also, Gwenafra had known him personally, and she had told Sam all she remembered about him. She had been only seven or thereabouts when she had first been resurrected. Richard Burton had taken her under his wing, and she had traveled with him on a boat up-River for a year. Then she had been drowned, but she had never forgotten the fierce, dark man.

Greystock had also been with them. But neither he nor Gwen were aware of the Stranger. Or way Greystock an agent?

That fellow Burton. On Earth he'd led an expedition to find the source of the Nile. Here, he was as passionately involved in getting to the headwaters of the Nile, though for a different reason. De Bergerac had said that the Ethical had told him that, if he found Burton, Burton would pretend to have lost his memory of anything related to the Ethicals. Clemens should tell him that he knew better, and Burton would then explain why he was pretending to have amnesia. Very curious.

Then there were Stern, Obrenova, and Thorn. And Firebrass. Their roles were as clandestine as those of X and his colleagues. On which side were they?

He needed help in untangling the warp and woof of this crazy tapestry. Time for a conference.

Within five minutes, he was closeted in his cabin with Joe and John Johnston. Johnston was a huge man, massively boned and muscled. His face was handsome though craggy; his eyes, a startling blue; his hair, bright red. Though he towered above other humans, he looked small beside the titanthrop.

Sam Clemens gave them the news. Johnston did not speak at first, but then the mountaineer was not one to talk unless there was extreme occasion to do so. Joe said, "Vhat doeth it all mean? I mean, the gateway through vich only Pithcator could pathth?"

"We'll find out from Thorn," Sam said. "For the time being, what worries me is Thorn and the rest of that filthy crew."

Johnston said, "Ye don't think Greystock was an agent for them Ethicals, do ye? I think the polecat was just one of King John's men."

"He could have been that and also an agent," Sam said.

"How?" Joe Miller rumbled.

"How do I know? Anyway, you mean why. That was really what the thief said to Jesus while he was being nailed to the cross. Why? That's what we should be asking. Why? Yes, I think Greystock could have been an agent. He just fell in with King John's purpose because it suited his own purpose."

"But them agents don't use violence," Johnston said. "At least, that's what ye told me X told ye. They not only hate violence, they don't even like to touch human beings."

"No, I didn't say that. I said violence was unethical for the Ethicals. At least, according to X. But I don't know that he wasn't lying. For all I know, he may be the Prince of Darkness, who was, if you remember your Bible, the Prince of Liars."

"Then what're we doing?" Johnston said. "Why're we following his orders?"

"Because I don't know he's lying. And his colleagues haven't had the courtesy or decency to speak to me. He' s all I have to go on. Also, I said that X seemed rather reluctant to have me get too close. Like the abolitionist who aired out his house after he'd had a black to dinner. But I didn't say that the agents were Brahmins, too. Thorn and Firebrass certainly weren't. I don't know. Anyway, Joe has a nose for X. He came into my hut once right after X had left. And he said he smelled somebody not human."

"Hith thtink vath different from Tham'th," Joe said, grinning. "I didn't thay that Tham thmelled any better, though."

"You're a thly one, ain't you?" Sam said. "Anyway, Joe has never smelled anyone else like that. So I presumed that the agents are of human origin."

"Tham thmoketh thigarth all the time," Joe said. "I couldn't thmell a thkunk around thothe weedth."

"That'll be enough of that, Joe," Sam said. "Or I'll run you back up the banana tree."

"I never thaw a banana in my life! Not until I came here and my grail gave me vone for breakfatht. Even then I vathn't thyure it vathn't poithon."

"Stick," Johnston said.

Sam's eyebrows curved like the backs of recoiling caterpillars.

"Stick what? I hope ..."

"To the point."

"Ah, yes. Anyway, I'm sure that there are agents around. The boat may be crawling with them. The question is, whose? X's or the others'? Or both?"

Johnston said, "They ain't seemed to interfere so far. Not with the boat, anyway. But when we get close to the headwaters ..."

"I don't know about interference. Even though he never said so, it's safe to assume that X bored that tunnel and left that rope for Joe and his Egyptian friends. But there's no evidence that the others are particularly against us mere Earthlings getting to the tower. They just don't want to make it easy for us. Again, why not?

"Also, what about Odysseus? He showed up in the nick of time and saved us when we were fighting von Radowitz. He told me he was one of the twelve picked by X. I assumed at first that it was X who'd sent him. But no, Odysseus said it was a female Ethical. So, is there another one of them in on this? Another renegade who's X's ally? I asked him about her, and he just laughed. He wouldn't tell me.

"But maybe the woman wasn't X's pal. Maybe she was an Ethical who'd gotten wind somehow of what was going on. And she sent Odysseus, who may have been an agent posing as the historic Odysseus.

"I say that because I've run into two Mycenaeans who were actually at the siege of Troy. At least, they claimed to have been. There are so many phonies on The River, you know. Both said that Troy wasn't where Odysseus said it was. He had told me that Troy was much further down in Asia Minor than the archaeologists said it was. The two Greeks said that it was where everybody had always said it was. Near Hissarlik, Turkey. Well, they didn't identify the town and country under those names, of course. Neither was in existence in their day.

"But they did say that Troy was near the Hellespont, where Hissarlik was later built. Now, how about that mess?"

"If that Greek feller was an agent," Johnston said, "why would he make up a lie like that?"

"Maybe to convince me that he was the real stuff. That he was the dyed-in-the-wool original. He wasn't likely to encounter anyone who could call him a bald-faced liar. For one thing, he didn't stick around long enough to be challenged.

"Here's another thing. The scholars of my time had all said that the wooden horse of Troy was a myth. The story was about as credible as a politician's campaign promises. But Odysseus said that there was a wooden horse, and he himself proposed it, just as Homer said he did, and it did get the Greek soldiers into the city.

"But then maybe it was a double-ply lie. By telling me that the scholars were all wrong, he made it sound as if he'd really been there. Anybody who could stand there and look you in the eye and tell you the scholars were full of sawdust and mouse droppings, because he had been there and they hadn't, would convince me. The scholars are always sailing out, looking for a textural Northwest Passage, trying to navigate with a sextant in a snowstorm, not sure whether the bowsprit is on the fore or the stem."

"At least, they tried," Johnston said.

"So did the eunuch in the sheik's harem. I wish I had some idea of what's going on. We are in deep waters, as Holmes said to Watson."

"Who're thothe guyth?" Joe said.

The giant mountaineer growled. Sam said, "Okay, John, sorry. I was hoping we could follow at least one thread through in this tangled warp and woof. Hell, we can't even find the end of one thread!"

"Maybe Gwenafra thyould be in thith," Joe said. "Thyee'th a voman, vhich you may have notithed, Tham. You thaid vomen can pertheive thingth men can't becauthe they got female intuithyon. Anyvay, thye doethn't like being left out in the cold. Thye ain't no dummy. Thye knowth there'th been thomething going on for a long time that you've been hiding from her. Right now, thye'th thulking in the main lounge. Thye hath the red athth every time you run her out tho ve can have a conferenthe about thith thubchect."

"I don't believe in women's intuition," Sam said. "They're just culturally conditioned to observe different patterns of action and speech, different gestures and inflections from those men observe. They're more sensitive to certain subtleties because of this conditioning."

"It'th the thame thing in the end," Joe said. "Vhat do ve care vhat ith'th called? I thay, ve been beating out our brainth on thith. It'th about time ve had a new dealer in on thith poker game."

"Squaws talk too much," Johnston said.

"According to you, everybody talks too much," Sam said. "Anyway, Gwen is as smart as anyone here, maybe smarter."

"It'll end up with the whole world knowing about it," Johnston said.

"Well, if you think on it," Sam said, "why shouldn't everybody know? Ain't it everybody's business?"

"The Stranger must have his reasons for wanting us to keep quiet."

"But are they good reasons?" Sam said. "On the other hand, if we did blabber about this there'd be a mob trying to get to the North Pole. The '49 Gold Rush couldn't hold a candle to it. There'd be hundreds of thousands wanting to get to the tower. And a million hanging around to exploit them."

"Let'th take a vote on Gven."

"You ever heard of a woman at a council of war? The first thing you know, she'll be wanting to run us. Them petticoats take an inch if ye give 'em a mile.''

"Women don't wear petticoats anymore," Sam said. "In fact, they don't wear much of anything, as you must've noticed."

The vote was two to one. Johnston said, "Okay. But you make her keep her legs crossed when she sits down, Sam."

"It's a strain just getting her to cover her breasts," Sam said. "She's a caution. But it ain't her fault. Anyway, just about everybody swims naked. So what's the difference if she is a little careless about how many square inches of flesh she exposes?"

"It ain't the flesh, it's the hair,'' Johnston said. "Don't it bother you none?"

"It used to. After all, I lived about the same time as you. But I didn't spend my life among the Rocky Mountain Indians. We've been here thirty-four years, John, on a planet where even Queen Victoria is traipsing around in an outfit that would've given her heart failure followed by diarrhoea if she'd seen it worn in front of Buckingham Palace. Now nudity seems as natural as sleeping in church."

64

Gwenafra, forewarned by Sam, was wearing a loincloth under her kilt. She sat in a chair and listened wide-eyed while Sam explained why she had been admitted to the council.

After she had heard Sam out, she sat silently for a while, sipping from a cup of tea. Then she said, "I knew more than you thought I did. You've talked a lot in your sleep. I knew you were keeping something very serious from me. That hurt me very much. In fact, I was going to tell you, Sam, that you must tell me what was going on. Otherwise, I was going to leave you."

"Why didn't you say so? I had no idea you felt that way."

"Because I supposed that you must have a very good reason for keeping it from me. But I was getting to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore. Haven't you noticed how cross I've been lately?"

"It hadn't escaped me. I thought you were just being moody. One of the mysteries of woman. But this is no place to discuss our personal affairs."

"What is the place, then? I know I would have said something if you'd been so irritable. Anyway, women are about as mysterious as a tin mine. All you have to do is carry a lantern into the dark places, and you see everything. But men like to think women are the eternally mysterious. That saves men the trouble of asking questions, taking a little time and effort."

"The eternally loquacious, then," Sam said. "You take as long to get to the point as a broken pencil." "You're both gabby," Johnston said, scowling.

"There are other extremes," she said, glaring at Johnston. "But you're right. Maybe 'there's one thing that you could consider as a key to the mystery of the tower. That is, what kind of a person was Piscator?"

"Ah, hmmm," Sam said. "I see what you mean. Why was he able to enter the tower while the others couldn't? Well, for one thing, he could have been an agent. But if agents can get through the barrier, why couldn't Thorn?

"Besides, why should Thorn have to Use the Parseval to get to the tower? The Ethicals and their agents have their own methods of transportation, some kind of flying machine."

"I don't know," Gwenafra said. "Let's concentrate on Piscator. How was he different from the others? It couldn't be a physical element-clothing, say-that was the key to entry. All tried to get in naked, yet only Piscator got in.

"Also, there was a difference in how far each was able to advance into the entrance. What were the elements in character that made some advance further than others?"

"We'd need a computer to figure that out," Sam said. "However, Gulbirra knows the men in the airship. She can describe them when she gets here. Anyway, to be scientific, the exact distance each person traveled would have to be known. And that would have to be compared to each person's character. Nobody was taking measurements there, so that's out."

"Just consider Piscator then."

"He was one of them samurai," Johnston said.

"I don't think race would have anything to do with it," Sam said. "So far we haven't uncovered any Mongolian agents, though I suppose there could be plenty. Consider this. Thorn did not want Firebrass and Obrenova to get into the tower. So he cold-bloodedly blew them up, not to mention the innocents with them. Maybe, though, Thorn didn't know Firebrass was an agent. If so, he got two for the price of one."

"Maybe there were more than two ..." Gwen said. "No, only two had those black balls in their heads."

"Jumping catfish! Don't make it more complicated than it is!"

Gwen said, "If those two could've entered, then we should compare their characters with Piscator's."

"I vath around Firebrathth a lot, and he thmelled chutht like any human. Thith Ethical left a thmell behind him when he vithited Tham. It vathn't human. Pithcater, he vath human, though he did thmell Chapanethe. I can dithtinguith different typeth of people becauthe of their diet."

"But you never met a person who smelled nonhuman," Sam said. "So we don' t know if the agents are nonhuman. They certainly look as if they are human."

"No, but they mutht've been around me," Joe said. "And thinthe I never thmelled anybody that didn't thmell human-though that ain't nothing to brag about-thmelling human, I mean, then the achentth mutht be human."

"That mought be," Johnston said. "It seems to this here child that if a non-Earthman cain look like a real person, then he cain smell like one."

Joe laughed and said, ''Vhy don't ve chutht potht a notithe in the main lounge? Any Ethicalth or achentth aboard pleathe report to Captain Clementh."

Gwenafra had been fidgeting about and frowning. She said.

"Why do all of you duck the question I brought up? What about Piscator?"

"Maybe we're like the circus midget who found the giant's shoes under his wife's bed," Sam said. "Afraid to ask.

"Very well. I wasn't too well acquainted with the gentleman from Cipango. He showed up about two months before the Mark Twain left. From all reports, he was a very quiet and likable person. Not withdrawn or aloof, just not aggressive. He seemed to get along with just about everybody. Which, in my book, makes him suspect. Yet he wasn't a yes-man. I remember he got into an argument with Firebrass about the size of the airship to be built. He thought that it would be better to build a smaller one. The end of the discussion was that Piscator said he still thought he was right. But since Firebrass, was the boss, he would do as he said."

"Did he have any peculiarities?" Gwenafra said.

"He was crazy about fishing, but I don't count that an eccentricity. Say, what're you asking me for? You knew him."

"I just wanted to get another viewpoint," she said. "When Gulbirra gets here, we'll ask her about him. She knew him better than we did."

"Don't forget Thyrano," Joe said. "He knew him."

"Joe loved Cyrano,'' Sam said. "The Frenchmen's got a bigger nose than his. Makes Joe feel right at home."

"That'th a crock of thyit. Ain't none of you pygmieth got a nothe to be proud of. I chutht like him even if you two get along like two male hyenath in mating theathon."

"I don't care for the simile," Sam said coolly. "Anyway, what do you think of Piscator, Gwen?"

"He radiated a sort of, what do you call it? Not animal magnetism, since there was nothing sexual about it. Just a warm attractiveness. You knew he liked you. Though, again, he wouldn't put up with fools. He'd go along with them, even when they were being stupid. But he got rid of them in a nice way.

"I don't think he was, what is the word? A fundamentalist or fanatic Moslem. He said the Koran was to be understood allegori-cally. He also said the Bible was not to be read literally. He could quote long passages of both, you know. I talked to him a number of times, and I was surprised when he told me that Jesus was the greatest prophet after Mohammed. He also said the Moslems believed that the first person to enter heaven will be Mary, the mother of Jesus. You told me Moslems hate Jesus, Sam."

"No, I said they hated Christians. And vice versa."

"No, you didn't. But that's not important. To sum it up, Piscator impressed me as a wise and good man. But there was more to him than that. I don't know how to describe it.

"Perhaps it was that he seemed to be in this world and yet not of it."

"I think you're saying this," Sam said. "He was somehow morally, or perhaps it's better to say spiritually, superior."

"He never said so or acted like he thought he was. But, yes, that might be it."

"I wish I'd known him better."

"You were too busy building your boat, Sam."

65

Frigate did not come into the hut until about an hour before suppertime. When asked by Nur where he had been, he said that he had waited all day to see Novak. Finally, Novak's secretary had said Frigate would have to come back tomorrow. Novak could spare a minute or so for him in the morning.

Frigate looked disgruntled. Waiting in line made him very impatient. That he had done so for such a long time meant that he was deeply determined. But he refused to say what he had in mind until he had talked to Novak.

"If he says yes, then I'll tell you."

Farrington, Rider, and Pogaas paid him little attention. They were too busy discussing means for getting the Razzle Dazzle back. When asked if he would help them, Frigate said he did not know yet. Nur only smiled and said he would wait until they had made up their own minds about the ethics of the deed.

Nur, as usual, knew more about what was going on than the others. It was he who told them, just before they left the hut to eat breakfast, that the discussion was only academic. The Razzle Dazzle had been loaded with artifacts for trade by its new owners and would sail down-River just after breakfast.

Martin exploded. "Why didn't you tell us about this before?"

"I was afraid you three would do something rash such as trying to seize the ship in daylight before hundreds of witnesses. You would never have gotten away with it."

"We're not that stupid!"

"No, but you're that impulsive. Which is a form of stupidity."

"Thanks a lot," Tom said. "Well, maybe it's just as well. I'd much rather go off on one of those patrol steamboats. But we'd have to get the old crew together first and find some people to replace the women. This is going to take time and lots of planning."

There were some delays, however. A man from the government office told them they had to go to work for the state or clear out. Frigate was absent when this happened. He returned grinning broadly and did not seem at all upset by the news.

"I talked Novak into it!"

"Into what?" Farrington said.

Frigate sat down in a bamboo chair and lit up a cigarette.

"Well, first I asked him if he would build another blimp for us. I didn't expect him to agree, and he didn't. He said he meant to build two more blimps-but not for us. These would be used for patrols and for warfare, if war should come."

"You want us to steal their blimp!" Farrington said. Though he had been angry when Podebrad had deserted them, he had later been relieved. He had denied this, but it was obvious that he was glad that he did not have to fly in the airship.

"No. Neither Nur nor I believe that you would steal anybody's property, even if you like to talk about it. You two fantasize a lot. Anyway, Nur and I won't have anything to do with stealing.

"After my first proposal was turned down, I put forth my second. Novak hemmed and hawed, and then said that he would do what I suggested. It wouldn't require near the materials nor time that the blimp did. He felt bad because we'd been cheated, and he thought that helping us would compensate us.

"Besides, Novak is interested in balloons. His son was a balloonist."

"Balloons!" Martin said. "Are you still pushing that crazy idea?"

Tom looked interested, but he said, "We don't know anything about the winds above the mountains. We could be blown south.''

"That's right. But we're a little north of the equator. If the upper winds are anything like they are on Earth, we could be driven north and east. Once past the horse latitudes it's a different matter. But I have in mind a type of balloon that could get us to the arctic zone.''

"Crazy! Crazy!" Martin said, shaking his head.

"You refuse to do this?"

"I didn't say that. I've always been a little touched in the head myself. Besides, I don't think the winds will be going the right way for us. We should get down to business and build us a ship."

Farrington was wrong and probably knew he was just expressing a wish. The air, at the altitude at which they would float, flowed northeast.

However, when the others heard what type of balloon Frigate proposed making, all objected vehemently.

"Yes, I know it's never been tried out, except on paper,'' Frigate said. "But here's our chance to try something unique."

"Yes," Martin said. "But you say Jules Veme proposed that idea in 1862. If it was such a hot idea, why didn't anyone ever try it?"

"I don't know. I would have done it on Earth if I'd had the money, Look. It's the only way we can get a considerable distance. If we use a conventional balloon, we'll be lucky to get four hundred and eighty kilometers. That still might eliminate a million kilometers of surface travel. But with the Jules Verne, and a lot of luck, we could get all the way to the polar mountains."

After much argument, the others finally agreed they should give his plan a try. But when the project began, Frigate became uneasy. As the time for lift-off neared, he became downright anxious. Several nightmares about balloons showed him just how deep his apprehension was. Nevertheless, he expressed only the greatest confidence in the project to the others.

Jules Verne had proposed in his novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, an idea which seemed feasible-though dangerous. It worked in his book, but Frigate knew that reality often failed to give diplomatic recognition to literature.

The balloon was made, and the crew took twelve practice flights. These, to everybody's amazement, especially Frigate's, suffered only minor mishaps. However, all the training runs were made at low altitudes which kept the aerostat below the top of the mountains walling the Valley. To rise above them was to be carried away from a reasonable distance of New Bohemia and so make it impossible to return before they were ready for the final flight.

The crew would have to get on-the-job training when they ventured into the stratosphere. ,

Doctor Fergusson, Verne's hero, had made a balloon based on the fact that hydrogen, when heated, expanded. This principle had been used in 1785 and 1810 with disastrous results. Veme's imaginary heating device was, however, much more scientific and powerful and worked-on paper. Frigate had available a more advanced technology than that in Verne's time, and he had made some modifications to the system. When the balloon was finished, he bragged that this was the first of its type in reality. They were making history.

Frisco said quite vehemently that nobody had tried Veme's concept because nobody had been crazy enough. Though he agreed with him, Frigate did not say so. This was the only type of aerostat that could go the immense distances to be traversed. He wasn't going to back out. Too many times, on both worlds, he had started something and then had failed to see it through. Even if this killed him, he was going all the way.

That it might also kill the others bothered him. However, they knew the dangers. No one was forcing them to go.

The final lift-off went according to schedule just before dawn. Arc lights and torches blazed on the immense crowd on the plain. The envelope of the balloon, painted with aluminum, floated like a wrinkled sausage skin hanging from an invisible hook.

The Jules Verne, at this stage of flight, did not correspond to the layman's idea of a balloon, a completely expanded sphere. But as it rose the bag would fill out from applied heat and decreasing air pressure around it.

The speeches had been made and the toasts drunk. Tom Rider noticed that Frisco was using a bumper twice as large as the others. He said something about "Dutch courage" but not loudly enough for Frisco to hear him. By the time Frisco entered the car, he was smiling and waving merrily to the onlookers.

Peter Frigate completed the weigh-off. Until now, this had always involved making sure that the weight-envelope, gas, net, cargo chute, load ring, car, ballast, equipment, supplies, aeronauts-was slightly less than the lift. The Jules Verne was the first aerostat in which the lift-off weight was slightly more than the upward pull of the gas.

The car hanging below the bag was pumpkin shaped, and its hull was a double-walled magnesium alloy. In the center of its deck was a vertical L-shape, the vemian. Two thin plastic pipes ran from the metal contraption holes in the overhead. These were tightly packed to prevent escape of air from the car.

From there, the plastic pipes extended upward and for some distance beyond the hermetically sealed neck of the envelope. Their ends were fitted to light alloy pipes which rose to varying heights inside. One was longer than the other; both were open-ended.

The crew had been talkative before boarding. Now they looked at Frigate.

"Close the main hatch," he said, and the lift-off ritual began.

Frigate checked a gauge and two stopcocks affixed to the vernian. He opened a little hatch on the side near the top of the L-shape. He adjusted another stopcock until he heard a slight hissing. This came from a narrow nozzle at the end of a steel pipe inside the highest compartment.

He stuck an energized electrical lighter at the end of an aluminum rod into the furnace. A tiny flame popped from the nozzle. He turned the stopcock to increase the flame, adjusted two more to regulate the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen feeding the torch. The flame began heating the base of the large platinum cone just above it.

The lower end of the longest pipe extending into the bag was fitted into the apex of the cone. As the heat was expanded in the cone, the hydrogen in it moved upward, flowing into the bag and causing it to expand. The cooler hydrogen in the lower half of the bag, aided by a suction effect, flowed into the open end of the shorter pipe inside the envelope. It went down this pipe into the side of the vemian and into the side of the cone. There it was heated and rose, completing the circuit.

One of the compartments at the base of the vernian was an electrical battery. This was far lighter and much more powerful than the battery used by Fergusson in Veme's novel. It broke water into its elements, hydrogen and oxygen. These flowed into separate compartments, and then went to a mixing chamber, where the oxyhydrogen was piped to the torch.

One of Frigate's modifications to Verne's system was a pipe that led from the hydrogen storage chamber to the shorter pipe. By opening two stopcocks, the pilot could allow hydrogen from the storage chamber to flow into the balloon. This was an emergency measure used only to replace hydrogen valved off from the bag. When this was done, the torch was turned off, since hydrogen was highly inflammable.

Fifteen minutes passed. Then, with no motion noticeable, the car lifted off the ground. Frigate shut off the torch several seconds later.

The shouts of the spectators became less audible, then died out. The huge hangar shrank to a toy house. By then the sun had cleared the mountain, and the stones alongside The River thundered like artillery.

"That's our thousand-gun salute," Frigate said.

No one moved or spoke for a while after that. The silence was as intense as that at the bottom of a deep cave. However, the alloy walls of the hull had no sound-absorbing qualities. When Frisco's stomach rumbled, it sounded like distant thunder.

A slight wind sprang up now, carrying the vessel southward, away from their goal. Pogaas stuck his head out of an open port. He felt no sensation of movement since the balloon traveled at the same speed as the wind. The air around the hull was as still as if he was in a sealed room. The flame of a candle set on top of the vernian would have burned straight upward.

Though he'd gone up in aerostats many times, Frigate was always gripped by ecstasy during the first minutes of lift-off. No other form of flight-even gliding-could thrill him so. He felt as if he was a disembodied spirit, free of the shackles of gravity, of the cares and worries of flesh and mind.

This was a delusion, of course, since gravity had the balloon in its paws, was playing with it, and was likely to bat it around at any moment. Nor was there much respite from worries and cares. There was often work for both body and brain.

Frigate shook himself like a dog coming out of water, and he got down to the work that keeps a balloon pilot busy during much of the flight. He checked the altimeter. One thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine meters. A little over 6000 feet. The verimeter, or statoscope, indicated that the rate of ascent was increasing as the sun warmed the gas in the bag. After checking the O and H storage chambers were full, he disengaged the battery from the water. For the present, he had nothing to do except keep an eye on the altimeter and verimeter.

The Valley narrowed. The blue-black mountains, splotched with vast patches of grey-green and blue-green lichen, sank. The mists that ribboned the stream and the plains were disappearing as swiftly as mice that had gotten word a cat was in the neighborhood.

They were being carried southward increasingly swifter. "We're losing ground," Frisco muttered. However, he spoke only to release nervous tension. Test balloons had shown that the stratospheric wind would carry them northeast.

Frigate said, "Last chance for a cigarette." Everybody except Nur lit up. Though smoking had been forbidden on all hydrogen balloons previous to the Jules Verne, it was permitted on it at lower altitudes. There was no sense in worrying about burning tobacco while an operating torch was present.

Now the balloon had risen above the Valley, and they thrilled at the sight of more than one at a time. There they were, row on row. To their left were the valleys-broad, deep canyons actually- which they had passed in the Razzle Dazzle. And as they soared higher, the horizon rushed outward as if in a panic. Frigate and Rider had seen this phenomenon on Earth, but the others gazed in awe. Pogaas said something in Swazi. Nur murmured, "It's as if God were spreading out the world like a tablecloth."

Frigate had all the ports closed, and he turned on the oxygen supply and a little fan which sucked carbon dioxide into an absorbent material. At 16 kilometers or almost 10 miles altitude, the Jules Verne entered the tropopause, the boundary between troposphere and stratosphere. The temperature outside the cabin was - 73 C.

Now the contrary wind seized the aerostat and in so doing slightly spun it. From then on, unless they encountered an opposing wind, they would have the view of a rider on a lazy merry-go-round.

Nur took over the pilot's post. Pogaas got the next, and Rider had the third watch. When Farrington became the pilot, he lost his nervousness. He was in control, and that made all the difference. Frigate was reminded of how Farrington had described in a book his fierce exultation when, at the age of seventeen, he'd been allowed to steer a sealing schooner in rough weather. After watching him for a few minutes at the wheel, the captain had gone below. Farrington was the only one above decks, the safety of the ship and its crew in his hands. It had been an ecstatic experience never surpassed in a life filled with perilous adventures.

However, as soon as Frigate relieved him, he lost his smile, and he looked as uneasy as before.

The sun continued to rise and with it the Jules Verne. The envelope was near its pressure height now, which meant that the joy ride was over. Since its neck was sealed, instead of being open as in most manned aerostats, it would keep rising until overexpanded. At this point the bag would rupture, and down would come everybody posthaste with a postmortem afterward. But provisions had been made for this.

Frigate checked the altimeter and then rotated a metal drum set in the overhead. This was attached by a rope to a wooden valve in the neck of the bag. It opened, releasing some gas. The balloon sank. It would shortly begin rising again, though, which meant more gas would have to be valved off. This called for operation of the torch at intervals, and also for shutting off the torch and feeding hydrogen into the balloon.

It required cool and accurate judgment to know just how much gas to valve and how much to replace. Too much valved off meant a too fast fall. Too much new gas meant that the craft could ascend beyond the pressure height. A safety valve on top of the bag would automatically release gas to prevent bursting of the bag-if the valve hadn't frozen-but the balloon would then become, possibly, too heavy.

In addition, the pilot had to watch out for unexpectedly warm layers of air. These could lift the Jules Verne too swiftly and carry it above the pressure height. A sudden cooling off could precipitate the craft downward.

The pilot could in the latter situation order ballast thrown out, but this might result in a yoyo morion. And if he lost all his ballast, he was in trouble. The only way to lose altitude quickly was to release more gas. Which meant that the burner might not be able to expand the hydrogen quickly enough.

Nobody Knows the Troubles I've Seen would be his swansong. However, the day passed without any nerve-wracking emergencies. The sun sank, and the Jules Verne, its hydrogen cooling, did likewise. The pilot had to run the burner just enough to raise it now and then and keep the vessel above the tropopause. Those off-duty snuggled under heavy cloths and slept according to their natures. Being the only one awake at night was eerie. The illumination was feeble. The starlight poured into the ports, but this, with some small lights above the gauges and dials, was not enough for comfort. The alloy hull amplified every noise: the impact of a hand on the deck as somebody turned over and flung out an arm; Pogaas muttering Swazi; Frisco grinding his teeth; Rider softly whinnying horselike; the fan whirring.

When Frigate ignited the torch, the sudden explosion and succeeding roar startled everybody from sleep. Then it was his turn to burrow under the cloths, to sleep, to be roused momentarily by the torch or a nightmare of falling.

Dawn came. The crewmen got up at different times, used the chemical toilet, drank hot instant coffee or tea, and ate food saved from the grails, supplemented by acorn bread and dried fish. The wastes from the toilet were not jettisoned. Opening a hatch at this altitude meant a possibly fatal drop in air pressure, and any weight loss increased the lift.

The Frisco Kid, whose eye was best at estimating ground speed, though they were clipping along at 50 knots.

Before noon, the vessel was gripped by a wind that took them backward for several hours before it curved the craft around northeast again. After three hours they were going southward again.

"If this keeps up we'll whirl around here forever," Frigate said gloomily. "I don't understand this."

Late that afternoon they were back on the proper course. Frigate said that they should descend to the surface winds and try their luck there. They were far enough north to be where the winds generally flowed toward the northeast.

By letting the burner stay off, the gas slowly cooled. The Jules Verne sank at a minuscule rate at first, then began dropping swiftly. Nur turned the burner on for a few minutes to check its descent. At 13 kilometers altitude, the wind lessened. It picked up again and in an opposite direction, the wrong one for them. It also gave the craft a counterspin. Nur allowed it to sink until it was about 2000 meters above the mountaintops. Now they moved at an angle across the valleys, which were running straight north and south in this area.

"We're going northeast again!" Frigate said happily.

At high noon of the third day they were sailing along at an estimated 25 kmph or more than 15 mph. Only the Jules Verne could have gotten this far. Any other type of balloon would not have been able to ascend to the stratosphere or descend to the surface winds without losing too much gas to go on.

They opened the ports to let the thin but fresh air in. The up- and downdrafts caused them some discomfort, chiefly from the change in air pressure. They had to keep swallowing and yawning to ease their eardrums. As dusk approached, the drafts became less violent.

The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, they were surprised by a thunderstorm. Farrington was pilot when the black clouds beneath suddenly welled upward. At one moment, the storm seemed to be safely below them. But tendrils reached upward like the tentacles of an octopus. The next moment, the body of the octopus seemed to shoot toward them, and they were enveloped in darkness laced with lightning. At the same time, they whirled like fleas on a spinning top.

"We're dropping like a brick," Frisco said calmly. He ordered that some ballast be dropped", but the craft kept on falling. Lightning cracking nearby flooded the car with a light in which their faces looked green. Thunder bellowed in the echo chamber of the hull, and their ears hurt. Rain shot into the open ports and covered the deck, adding to the weight.

"Close the ports! Tom and Nur, throw out a Number Three ballast bag!"

They leaped to obey him. Their bodies felt light, as if the car was dropping so quickly it would leave them floating.

Another nearby bolt cast light and fear. All saw a black rock below, the flat top of a mountain rushing at them.

"Two Number One bags!"

Nur, looking out a port, said loudly but calmly, "The bags're not falling much faster than we are."

"Two more Number Ones!"

Another fiery streak wrenched the air nearby.

"We ain't going to make it!" Frisco cried. "Two more Number Ones! Stand by to get rid of all ballast!"

The edge of the hull struck the edge of the mountaintop. The car bounced, throwing the entire crew to the deck. As the momentarily loosened net ropes tautened again, the crew, which had half-gotten to a standing position, were hurled down again. Fortunately, the savage strain had not snapped the ropes.

Ignoring their injuries, they got up and stared through the deck port. Darkness except for a small interior lights. Another bolt. They were too near the side of the mountain, and the downdraft was still gripping the balloon. The pointed tops of giant irontrees were coming at them like hurled javelins.

It was too late to turn the burner on. Its effect would be negligible in the little time left before impact. Besides, the collision with the mountain top might have loosened the junctions of the pipes. If that were so, one spark would turn the interior of the hull into a furnace.

"All the ballast!" Frisco shouted.

Suddenly they were out of the clouds, but the blackness was now a dark grey. They could see well enough to discern the treetops spinning just below them.

Frisco left his post to help the others throw the bags and the water containers out. Before anything could be cast overboard, before Nur could punch a button to release the ironshoi ballast, the car crashed into the upper branches of an irontree. Again, they were knocked down. Helpless, they heard crashing noises. But the branches bent, then straightened out, hurling the car upward and into the envelope.

The car fell back, was caught once more by the almost unbreakable branches. Its occupants were rattled around as if they were dice shaken in a cup.

Frigate was battered, bruised, and stunned. Even so, he had wits enough left to envision the punishment the plastic pipes were taking. They were being violently bent between car and bag.

If ... oh, God, make it not so! ... if the pipes were torn loose from the bag ... if the points of the branches gutted the bag ... the car would fall to the ground. . . unless it was held among the branches or the net was tangled among them.

No. Now the car was rising.

But would the balloon go straight up? Outward toward The River? Or would it be hurled against the side of the mountain and the envelope ruptured against outcroppings?

66

While the rainstorm was at its height, the airship came over the mountain from the north. Lightning, the only illumination, tore the skies. The radar swept over the Valley, over the treetops, across the spires of rock, across the River, and zeroed in on the great boat. The passive radar detector indicated that the boat's own radars were not operating. After all, the boat was at anchor, and why use the radar when no enemy was expected?

The huge hatches in the belly of the ship opened. The helicopter, sitting on a platform, began rotating its vanes. Inside were thirty-one men, Boynton at the controls, de Bergerac by his side. Arms and boxes of plastic explosive were stacked in the rear.

As soon as the motors were warmed up, Boynton gave the high sign. Szentes, the C.P.O. in charge, listened to the phone on the bulkhead, getting the last-minute report on the wind. Then he whipped a little flag up and down. Go!

The copter lifted within the huge bay, moved sidewise off the platform, hovered over the opening, the bay lights glancing off its windshield and the tips of the whirling vanes. Then it dropped as a stone, and de Bergerac, looking up through the windshield, saw the colossal ship merge into the black clouds and disappear.

Cyrano knew that the two-man glider would be launched from it within a minute. Bob Winkelmeyer would be piloting it; James McParlan would be his passenger. Winkelmeyer was a West Point graduate, a flier who had been shot down by a Zero during a scouting flight over an island north of Australia. McParlan had been rather famous in the 1870's. A Pinkerton detective, he had infiltrated into the Mollie Maguires, a secret terrorist organization of Irish coalminers in Pennsylvania. Under the name of James McKenna, he had penetrated deep into the gang, narrowly escaping detection and death a number of times. As a result, the Maguires were arrested, nineteen of them were hung, and the mine owners continued to exploit their employees.

Winkelmeyer and McParlan would land in The River and there sink their glider. Later, if they got a chance, they would enlist aboard the Rex. There would be vacancies, since it was doubtful that the raiding party could pull off a coup without killing some of the crew of the Rex.

As Sam Clemens had said to the two, "Rotten John doesn't have a monopoly on double agents. Suck up to him, boys, get him in your confidence. That is, if the raid fails, do it. Maybe you won't have to. But I know that slippery character. He's the greased pole the monkey couldn't climb.

"So, if he gets out of it, you'll join his crew. And then, when Armageddon comes, you'll blow up his boat. It'll be as if Gabriel had planted two angels in the guise of devils in Hell."

The helicopter plunged into the clouds. Lightning cracked open the world, slicing like a flaming sword between earth and heaven. Thunder roared. Rain pelted the windscreens, dimming vision. The craft's radar, however, saw the boat, and, within two minutes, the lights of their target shone weakly.

Boynton took the chopper at a forty-five degree slant toward the boat, then dropped it until it was close to The River. At full speed, while lightning tore the fabric of the night, it sped a meter above the surface. Now the lights from the wheelhouse and along the decks grew bigger and brighter.

Abruptly, the copter lifted, shot over the edge of the flight deck, stopped, poised, and sank. Its wheels struck the surface, and it bounced a little. But it settled down, the vanes chirruped as they slowed, and its hatches burst open.

By the time de Bergerac was on the deck, the motors had been turned off. Boynton was helping men out on his side; Cyrano was ordering a man in the craft to hand out the boxes of bombs.

Cyrano glanced at the top deck of the pilothouse. So far, no one was looking out of its stern window, no alarms had been raised. Their luck was even better than they had expected. Incredibly, there were no sentinels. Or, if there were, they had noticed nothing untoward. Perhaps they felt very safe in this area. A large part of the crew might even be on shore leave. And the sentinels might be goofing off, sleeping, drinking, or making love.

De Bergerac took out the Mark IV pistol and patted the hilt of his epee. "Follow me!" Five men raced after him. Two other groups took off on their appointed duty. Boynton stayed in the copter, ready to start the motor at the necessary time.

The flight deck was an extension of the overhead of the Texas. The Frenchman ran down it toward the pilothouse, the feet of his men thudding on its oaken surface. Arriving at the entrance to the second deck of the pilothouse, he paused. Now someone was shouting from the open port of the wheelhouse above him. Cyrano ignored him and plunged through the doorway. The others followed him up the steep ladder. Before the last man had gotten through, a shot sounded. Cyrano looked back down. "Anybody hit?" he shouted.

The man behind him, Cogswell, said, "He missed me!"

Alarms were ringing above, and from a distance came the whooping of a siren. Within seconds, other sirens joined it.

The second deck was a brightly illuminated corridor lined by cabins in which the chief officers and their women would be quartered. Hopefully, John Lackland would be in the cabin on the left, just below the ladder leading up to the bridge or wheelhouse. Clemens had planned to use that cabin, since it was the largest, and it was not probable that John would take a smaller one. There were four doors on each side of the passageway. One of these opened as de Bergerac plunged in. A man stuck his head out. De Bergerac aimed the pistol at him, and the man slammed the door shut.

Quickly, working as planned, each of the six pulled a device from his belt. These had been delivered from the machinist's shop only an hour before, and two men carried an extra. They were short bars of duraluminum with long, heavy steel nails in each end. Fitted over the side of the door and the bulkhead, they were driven by heavy hammers into the oak. A determined person in the cabin could batter them out in time, but by then, if all went as planned, John and his abductors would be gone.

There were shouts and screams coming from inside the cabin. One man tried to push a door open while Cogswell was hammering. He dropped the hammer and fired through the narrow opening, not attempting to shoot the man. The door closed, and he quickly finished his work.

By now, John would have been informed via intercom that the boat was under attack. But the noise in the corridor would have been enough to inform him that the invaders were there. He did not need the explosion of the pistol to tell him that.

Three men should also have rounded the pilothouse and be going up its fore ladder. However... ah, yes, here came one of the wheelhouse watch. He stuck a pale face around the corner of the entrance at the top of the ladder leading to the corridor. Now he was stepping out from it, a heavy .69-caliber pistol in two hands. He wore no armor.

"Peste!"

Though Cyrano hated to harm the man, whom he had never seen before, he aimed and fired.

"Quelle merde!"

Cyrano had missed, the plastic bullet shattering against the bulkhead beside the man. Some fragments must have struck him, for he screamed and staggered back, dropping his pistol and clutching his face.

Cyrano was not an excellent shot. This was just as well, he told himself. If the bullet removed the man without greatly harming him, instead of killing him, its effect was even more desirable. Shots and yells came from the wheelhouse. That would mean that the three had gone up the aft ladder and were now keeping the watch busy.

He strode to the door of the cabin in which John must be. There was no use asking its occupant to come out with hands up. Whatever the ex monarch of England and half of France was, he was not a coward.

Of course, it was possible that he was not aboard tonight. He might be on shore, roistering and wenching.

Cyrano smiled as, reaching out from the side of the bulkhead, he tried the knob. The door was locked. So, the captain of the Rex was at home, though not receiving.

A man's voice cried out in Esperanto. ''What is happening?"

Cyrano grinned. It was King John's baritone.

"Captain, we're being attacked!" Cyrano shouted.

He waited. Perhaps John would fall for this trick, thinking it was the voice of one of his men, and open the door.

An explosion sounded, followed by a bullet which would have hit him if he had been standing in front of the door. It was not one of your plastic missiles which would shatter against the oak. It was of the precious lead and made a respectably sized hole.

He gestured at one of his men, and the fellow removed a package of plastic explosive from a small box. Cyrano stood to one side while his colleague, Sheehan, crouching low, pressed the explosive around the lock and over the hinges.

Crafty John sent another bullet crashing through the wood. This was low, catching Sheehan in the skull just above his eyes. He fell back and lay staring, mouth open.

"Quel dommage!"

Sheehan had been a fine fellow. It was a pity that his funeral sermon was confined to, "What a pity!"

On the other hand, he should not have been so careless as to put himself in the line of fire.

Cogs well ran up to the corpse, retrieved the electrical line and battery, and walked swiftly backward, unreeling the line. Fortunately, Sheehan had inserted the fuse in the plastic, thus saving a few seconds. Everything was a matter of utmost speed, and seconds might mean the difference between success or failure.

Cyrano retreated to the corner, flattened himself against the bulkhead, turned his head away, and stuck his fingers in his ears, opening his mouth at the same time.

Though he could not see him, he could imagine Cogswell securing one end of the wire to a terminal of the battery, then touching the other with the other end of the wire.

The explosion rocked and half-deafened him. Clouds of acrid smoke filled the corridor. Coughing, he felt his way along the bulkhead, touched the now open doorframe, dimly saw the blasted door lying over Sheehan's body, and then he was inside the stateroom.

He had dived in and then rolled side wise, a maneuver made clumsy by the sheathed sword attached to his belt.

Now he was up against something that felt like the legs of a bed. Almost directly above him, a woman was screaming. But where was John Lackland?

A pistol boomed. Cyrano saw its flash through the smoke and was up and flying across the corner of the bed. His arms enfolded a thick and naked waist, and the tackled man went over sideways. There was a grunt, a flailing arm that struck Cyrano's head without hurting him, and then the man went limp.

Cyrano had his dagger out and against the man's throat. "Make one move, and I'll cut your throat!"

There was no response. Was the fellow frozen with terror or was he faking?

Cyrano's other hand felt along the shoulder, up the neck, and along the head. The man did not move. Ah! A stickiness! John, if it was John, had struck his head and was indeed unconscious.

Cyrano got up, groped along the bulkhead, and found the switch. The light showed a large room, luxuriously decorated and furnished by Riverworld standards. The smoke was clearing away now, revealing a very pretty and quite naked woman on her knees in the center of the bed. She had stopped screaming and was staring at him with huge blue eyes.

"Get under the covers and stay there, and you won't be hurt, mademoiselle. De Bergerac does not make war upon women. Unless they try to kill him."

The man sprawled on the deck was short and muscularly built and tawny haired. His blue eyes were open, and he was mumbling something. In a few seconds, he would be recovering his wits.

Cyrano turned and saw why John had fired his pistol. Hoijes lay on his back on the floor, his chest torn open.

"Mordioux!"

He must have run in immediately after he had seen his colleague dive through the doorway. And John, seeing him outlined against the light from the corridor, had shot him. Doubtless, he, Cyrano, had not been fired at because the smoke was still too thick for him to be seen.

Two of his men were dead so far. Perhaps there were others elsewhere. They would be left there, since it had been agreed that carrying off bodies would slow the getaway.

Where were the others? Why had they not come in after him?

Ah, here were Cogswell and Propp!

Something hard struck him, lifted him up and backward, hurling him into a bulkhead. He fell down on his face, and lay there, while his ears rang and his head seemed to expand and collapse, expand and collapse, like an accordion. More heavy clouds of smoke filled the room, stinging his eyes and making him cough violently.

It was some time before he could get onto his knees and more time before he managed to stand. By then he understood that a bomb had gone off in the corridor. Had it been thrown down from the wheelhouse?

Whoever had done it, he had killed Cogswell and Propp. And he had come close to killing Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac.

John was on his knees now, swaying, staring ahead of him while he coughed. A pistol lay within reach of his hand, but he did not seem aware of it.

Ah, now the vile fellow had extended his hand to grasp its butt!

Having neither gun nor dagger, Cyrano unsheathed his epee. He stepped forward and brought its triangular blade down like a club against the back of John's head. John fell forward on his face and lay motionless.

The woman was on her face on the bed, her hands covering her ears and her shoulders shaking.

Cyrano staggered through the smoke, almost stumbling over Propp's body. He stopped when he reached the doorway. His sense of hearing was coming back, but the firing in the corridor sounded faint. He got down on his knees and dared to stick his head out. The smoke was being carried away by the draft from the doorway at the top of the ladder. A body lay at the foot of the ladder. Evidently someone from the wheelhouse, perhaps the bomb thrower. Down at the end of the corridor two men crouched, firing out through the entrance. They were raiders, Sturtevant and Velkas.

Now two men, smoke-grimed, were coming down the ladder. Reagan and Singh. They must have cleaned out the wheelhouse and were coming to help the abduction party. Their aid was indeed needed.

Cyrano got up and gestured at them. They said something, but he could not hear it. That bomb must have been a rather large one. It had certainly made a mess of the corridor.

Reagan and Singh entered the cabin and picked up the limp body of John. Cyrano followed them after sheathing his sword and reloading his pistols. The woman continued to hide her face in the mattress and to keep her hands over her ears. See no evil, hear no evil.

On stepping out of the cabin, he saw that Sturtevant and Velkas had left. So-whoever they had been shooting at had been eliminated. Reagan and the giant Sikh, dragging John, his head lolling, his feet trailing, were almost to the door. Velkas reappeared, running by the three men, shouting something at them. They kept on while Velkas sped to Cyrano.

By putting his mouth against Cyrano's ear and yelling, Velkas made himself understood. Some of John's crew had gotten to a steam machine gun. But their backs would be exposed to fire from John's cabin.

They ran into the cabin and looked out a port. To the right was a platform which extended over the edge of the flight deck. On it was mounted the thick barrel of a steam gun. Two men were behind its shield, swinging the weapon around to bear on the helicopter.

To his left, below him, were Sturtevant and the two carrying John. They would also be in the line of fire of the gun.

Cyrano opened the wide, square port, braced his pistol on its ledge, and fired. A second later, Velkas' gun boomed in his ear, deafening him even more.

They emptied their pistols. At this distance accuracy was impossible. The Mark IV pistols were using precious lead bullets, but the charges required to propel .69-caliber missiles caused a powerful recoil. Moreover, the wind, though slight, had to be compensated for.

The first two volleys missed. Then the gunner fell sidewise and the other man, taking over, dropped a few seconds later. Neither may have been struck by a direct hit. The shield could have made the bullets ricochet. It did not matter. The effect was the same.

By then, Sturtevant and the man dragging John were halfway across the deck. The chopper's vanes were whirling, but Cyrano could not hear them. Even if his hearing had been regained, the alarm sirens would have drowned out their noise.

Cyrano grabbed Velkas' arm and pulled him close. Shouting in his ear, he told him to get to the machine gun and hold off anybody who tried to attack. He gestured at the armed men who had just emerged from a hatch at the far end of the deck.

Velkas nodded and ran out the door.

Cyrano looked again through the porthole. The parties sent to blow up the paddlewheel motors and the ammunition supply were not in sight. Either they were still working or they were cornered and trying to shoot their way out.

He ran up the ladder and into the wheelhouse. Bodies lay on the deck. One of his men, two of John's. The lights shone on their blue-grey faces, staring eyes, and open mouths.

He turned off the alarm sirens and looked out the front screens. There was no one on the fore decks except a body at the foot of the ladder leading down from the fore part of the pilothouse and several bodies near the prow.

The boat was alongside a well-lit dock far longer and more massive than those usually found along The River. Perhaps the crew of the Rex had built it, their captain having decided to give everybody a long liberty. Or perhaps extensive repairs were needed.

It did not matter. What did was that the raiders had had the luck to find the boat manned only by guards and a few officers. John had decided to spend the night aboard, another item of luck, though not for him.

However, the uproar had awakened those on shore. They were streaming out from the huts on the plain and the stockaded fortresses. The lights from the boat showed the forefront of the mob racing toward the dock. Many of these were crew members, since they carried metal weapons.

It had not been in the plan to move the boat from the dock, but it should have been. Cyrano, knowing that the boat would be invaded in overwhelming numbers within a minute or so, took action. He sat down in the pilot's seat, pressed the motor power switches, and grinned as he saw the ON lights illuminated. Until now, he had not been sure that the motor power was available. After all, to make sure that the vessel was not stolen, John could have had the switches disconnected.

He prayed that just now would not be the moment for the motors to be blown up. If they were, the boat would be immobilized, and he and his fellows might not get to the chopper in time.

There was no time to untie the mooring lines. Too bad, but the power of the great electrical motors was immense.

He pulled back on the long, knobbed metal rods, one on each side of him, and the paddlewheels began turning backward. They moved slowly at first, too slowly to tear the lines. He pulled the sticks as far back as they would go, thus, causing the wheels to rotate at full speed.

The giant mooring ropes were stretched. But, instead of snapping, they pulled the ends of the vertical beams alongside the dock after the boat.

For a moment, the fastenings of the piles held. The people on the dock either threw themselves down or leaped across the space between dock and boat. With a rending noise that could be heard even above their shouts and the firing aft, the piles came loose.

Its supports removed, the near side of the dock tilted, precipitating most of those on it into the water. Only one man managed to jump onto the boat without falling in.

The Rex backed swiftly away, dragging the beams alongside it at the ends of the massive ropes. Cyrano, laughing, stabbed a panel button, and the steam whistles hooted derisively at those left ashore or in the water.

"How do you like that, John!" he yelled. "Not only you but your boat is stolen! It's only just!"

Now he pushed the starboard stick forward, and the great boat turned down-River. He steered it to the middle of the stream and set the automatic pilot on. Its sonars estimating the depth and the distance from both banks, it would now hold a course exactly in the middle unless it was on a collision course with a large object. Then it would turn to avoid it.

The man who had jumped onto the boat ran across the deck and disappeared from view. A half-minute later, he came up the ladder to the next deck. Evidently he was headed from the pilothouse.

At that moment, the rain ceased.

Cyrano leaned out of the door and emptied his pistol at the man as he ran across the deck. The man dived beneath an overhang, then stuck his head out and shot back at Cyrano. The only bullet that came near smashed itself halfway up the ladder.

Cyrano looked out the aft screen. The helicopter was still sitting on the flight deck. John and his three captors were now inside it. Four men were running across the deck toward the texas. He lowered the screen and leaned out, gesturing to them that it was he who had moved the boat. They stopped and waved at him, grinning, and then turned and ran to the copter.

At the far end of the deck some men were still shooting at the copter from a hatch. But their large-caliber plastic bullets were going against the wind, and most of them were falling on the deck or being blown over the deck. Cyrano could not determine how many were firing, but it seemed to him that there could not be more than three or four.

Of course, there might be others in the boiler deck fighting with the demolition men.

And then the boat shook and a great cloud of smoke rose from the deck near the port wheelhousing.

The blast was followed by another almost immediately. This one was from the starboard side, a much more powerful explosion than the other. Pieces of flight deck soared up through the smoke, falling on the deck, some being propelled near the helicopter. The clouds were quickly dissipated, however, revealing a great hole just beside the starboard wheel.

The lights went off, then burned again as the emergency system took over. The motors having stopped, the boat began to turn slowly, its nose moving toward the right bank. It would be drifting now, though it might be many kilometers before it rammed the bank.

Sturtevant was back out of the chopper and waving at Cyrano to hurry.

Four men appeared on the starboard side of the flight deck. Two came up from the ladder on the port.

Cyrano cursed. Were these the only survivors of the explosives crews?

Now little clouds of smoke rose from the hatch where the defenders had been firing at the chopper. One of his men dropped. The others gave protective fire while two of them picked up the fallen man and began to carry him between them toward the copter. One of them fell and could not get back up. He was picked up by two men. The other wounded man was hoisted up onto the shoulders of a comrade, and that one carried him though he staggered under the burden.

Cyrano ran back to the other side of the wheelhouse. That damnable fellow who had gotten aboard appeared for a moment, running across the deck just below. He was not carrying his pistol, which meant that he must have discarded it after emptying it. He carried an epee in his right hand.

His eye caught the movement near the foot of the ladder leading from the wheelhouse to the deck below. One of the men whom he had thought dead was living. And he was motioning for help. He must have seen the face of his chief at the screen.

Cyrano did not hesitate. The orders were to leave the dead behind, but nothing had been said about abandoning the wounded. In any case, he would have disregarded such a command. There seemed to be no immediate grave danger to the chopper. The few defenders could not cross the flight deck without exposing themselves to the fire of those in the chopper. Of course, they could take another route, come up a ladder near the machine. But he, Cyrano, could get this poor wounded fellow to the copter before John's men got there.

He went down the ladder as swiftly as he could, skipping steps, sliding his hands along the railings. By then Tsoukas had gotten on his hands and knees. His head hung low, and he was shaking it.

Cyrano knelt by him. "Do not worry, my friend. I am here."

Tsoukas groaned and pitched forward into a puddle of blood.

"Mordioux!"

He felt Tsoukas' pulse.

"Merde!"

The fellow was dead.

But perhaps the other two were still alive.

A swift examination dispelled his hope.

He rose, and whirled, his hand going to the butt of his bolstered pistol. Here came that lone man, a brave person but a nuisance. Why had he not fallen into the water and so saved Cyrano the trouble of killing him and himself the irreparable harm of being killed?

"Ayyy!"

The pistol was empty; he had forgotten to load it. And there was no time to pick up one from the deck, to use the gun dropped by a dead man. Indeed, there was scarcely time to unsheath his sword and so prevent this audacious fellow from running him through. Boynton would have to wait for him a few seconds longer. That surely would be sufficient to dispose of this obstacle.

"En garde!"

The man was a trifle shorter than himself. But, whereas Cyrano was as thin as a rapier, this foolish person was as sturdy as the shaft of a war axe. His shoulders were broad, his chest was deep, and his arms were thick. He had a dark, Arabic-looking face of imposing structure, though his lips were too thick, and his blazing black eyes and white grin made him look like a pirate. He wore only a cloth fastened around the waist.

With those wrists, Cyrano thought, his antagonist would make an excellent saberman-if he had the skill to match his muscle.

But with a rapier, where speed, not strength, was most important, ah, that was a different matter.

After the first few seconds, Cyrano knew that, whatever the man's aptitude with the saber was, he had never crossed blades with the likes of such before.

Cyrano's parries, attacks, advances and retreats, lunges and recoveries were equally matched. Fortunately, the devil did not so far have the slightest superiority in quickness. If he had, he would have run his opponent through.

He must know, however, that he was fighting another master. Even so, he was still smiling, seemingly undaunted, but behind his savage mask must be a realization that he would die if he became a fraction of a second slower in reflex and judgment.

Time was on the side of the dark man. He had no place to go, nothing to do but fight, and Cyrano had to get to the machine soon. Boynton must know that Cyrano was still alive, since Sturtevant had seen him in the wheelhouse. He would be wondering what was keeping him.

Would he wait a few minutes longer, and then, his chief not showing, think that he was dead for some unaccountable reason? Would he then take off? Or would he send someone to investigate?

There was not time to think about such matters. This devil was countering every maneuver, just as Cyrano was countering his. It was a stalemate, though there was certainly nothing stale about this. The attacking and the defending blades flashed almost in rhythm with each other.

Ah! Knowing this, the fellow had broken the rhythm. Once the rhythm was well established a fencer had a tendency to continue the sequence of motion. This almost unparalleled swordsman had hesitated slightly, hoping that Cyrano would follow the rhythm himself and so be spitted.

He had underestimated his man. Cyrano adjusted in the split second needed and so saved himself from a bad wound. But the point did penetrate his upper right arm slightly.

Cyrano came out of the retreat with a lunge which was parried. Not quite well enough. The man's arm also bore a slight wound.

''You have the honor of the first blood,'' Cyrano said in Esperanto. "And that is indeed an honor. No other man has ever succeeded in doing that."

It was foolish to waste desperately needed breath in conversation. Cyrano, however, was as curious as the alley cat he resembled.

"What is your name?"

The man said nothing, though it could be stated that his blade spoke for him. Its point was quicker than the tongue of a fishwife.

"I am one whom you may have heard of. Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac!"

The dark man only smiled more ferociously, and he pressed Cyrano even more. This fellow was not one to be shaken by a name, no matter how impressive. Nor did he intend to expend energy in talking. Of course, it was barely possible that he did not know the name of de Bergerac.

Someone shouted. It could have been this distraction or perhaps it was after all the shock of finding out whom he faced. Whatever the reason, the man's reaction was not quite what it should have been. Using the thrust invented by Jamac, Cyrano drove his blade through the man's thigh.

Even so, his point went deep into Cyrano's right arm. His epee clattered on the deck.

The man fell then, but he tried to get up on one knee to defend himself. Blood flowed swiftly down his leg.

Cyrano, hearing the slap of feet, looked around. Here came Sturtevant and Cabell, pistols in their hands.

"Do not shoot him!" Cyrano cried.

The two halted, their weapons aimed at the dark man.

Cyrano picked up his sword with his left hand. His right arm hurt abominably; the blood was running like wine from a freshly broached cask.

Cyrano said, "Perhaps this match might have ended in another fashion if we had not been interrupted."

The fellow must be in great pain, but he was not showing it. Those black eyes burned as if they were those of Satan himself.

"Throw down your sword, sir, and I will bind your wound."

"Go to hell!"

"Very well, sir. But I wish you a speedy recovery."

"Come on, Cyrano," Cabell said;

For the first time, Cyrano heard the shots. They were coming from the port side, which meant that the defenders had worked their way around to a closer position to the helicopter.

Cabell continued, "The chopper's been hit several times. And we'll have to run through their fire to get to it."

"Very well, Richard," Cyrano said. He pointed at the walkie-talkie fastened to Sturtevant's belt.

"My dear fellow, why don't you summon Boynton to this side? Then we can board in comparative safety."

"Yeah. I should have thought of that."

Cabell bound a cloth ripped from a corpse around the wound in the Frenchman's arm. The dark man's skin was greyish, and his eyes had lost their fire. As the helicopter settled down near them, Cyrano stepped forward and, using his epee, knocked the other's from his grasp. He said nothing; he did not resist as Cyrano tied a cloth around the wound in his thigh.

"Your comrades can give you more than first aid when they arrive," Cyrano said.

He ran to the machine and climbed in. Boynton took it up before the door was closed, sending it at an angle up-River. John, still completely naked, was slumped in a seat in the second row. Cyrano, looking at him, said, "Get some cloths on him. Then tie his hands and his feet."

He looked down. There were about twenty men on the flight deck. Where had the others come from? They were shooting away, their guns flashing like sex-crazed fireflies. But they had no chance of hitting their target. Did they not know that their captain was aboard, that they might hit him? Apparently not.

Something hit him in the back of his head. He was floating somewhere in a dark greyness while faraway voices said peculiar things. The ugly face of his childhood schoolteacher, the village cure, loomed before him. The brutal fellow had often beaten his student, rapping him savagely with a stick on the body and on the head. At the age of twelve, Cyrano, desperate, mad with rage, had attacked the parish priest, knocked him down, kicked him, and beaten him with his own stick.

Now the apish features, growing ever larger, swept through him. And he began to regain his senses.

Boynton was yelling, "I can't believe it! He got away!"

Cabell was saying, "He rammed his elbow into my ribs, and he kicked Cyrano in the head!"

The chopper was tilted so that he could look down through the still unclosed door. A searchlight from the boat briefly caught the king's naked body. His arms were flailing in an effort to keep himself upright. Then John had disappeared into the darkness.

"He couldn't survive!" Boynton said. "It's at least a thirty-meter fall!"

They would not be able to go back down and make sure. Not only were some shooting at the chopper, others were running now to a rocket battery. Though there was no chance the pistol shots could hit the chopper, the heat-seeking rockets would be .unavoidable unless Boynton got the machine to a safe distance.

However, Boynton was not the man to be so easily frightened. And he was undoubtedly infuriated that their prisoner had escaped.

Now he was flying the copter, not away, but toward the boat. He was bringing it to a point about 90 meters opposite the rockets. There went the four rockets the machine carried, flames spurting from their tails.

And there went the battery in a huge ball of flame and a cloud of smoke, bodies and pieces of deck and metal flying on all sides.

"That'll stop them!" Boynton said.

Sturtevant said, "How about strafing them?"

Cyrano was startled. "What? Oh, use the machine gun? No, let us depart with speed. If there's one survivor, he could get to another rocket battery, and we'd be done for. We have failed our mission and lost too many brave fellows to risk more casualties."

"I don't see how we've failed,'' Boynton said. "Sure, we didn't bring John back, but he is dead. And it'll be a long, long time before the boat is ready to operate."

"You think John is dead, eh?" Cyrano said. "I would like to believe that. But I will not say for certain that he is dead until I see his corpse."

67

Groaning with pain, the crew of the Jules Verne quickly checked themselves for injuries. Three had ribs that hurt so badly they were not sure they were not cracked or broken. Frigate thought that his neck muscles were either torn or severely strained. Tex and Frisco had bloody noses, and the latter's knee was paining him. Pogaas' forehead was skinned and bleeding. Only Nur was unhurt.

There was little time to worry about themselves. The balloon was now rising but was drifting away from the mountain. The storm clouds were disappearing as swiftly as burglars who hear a police siren. Fortunately, the light system was still working. Frisco could see the flight instruments. Nur got a flashlight, and he and Frisco applied a thin liquid to the pipe connections. Nur, examining these through a magnifying glass, reported that he could see no bubbles. Apparently, no hydrogen was escaping.

Nur opened the top hatch, and he and Pogaas climbed out onto the load ring. While the Swazi directed the beam of the flashlight, Nur went up the ropes like a monkey. He could not get close enough to the neck of the bag to apply a paste. But he did report that the envelope seemed to be tight around the entrance of the pipes.

Frisco heard this with skepticism. "Yeah, they seem to be O.K. But we can't really tell unless we land and deflate the bag."

Frigate said, "As long as we have positive buoyancy, we'll stay aloft. I don't think we should land until we come up against the polar winds. That ought to be tomorrow if we've estimated our travel distance correctly. If we touch down, we might lose the balloon. For one thing, we don't know how the locals will react to it. In the early days of Terrestrial ballooning, a number were destroyed by ignorant and superstitious peasants when the aeronauts landed in rural areas. The peasants believed the balloon to be the devil's work or the vehicle of evil magicians. We might run into such people."

Frigate admitted that it made him very uneasy to be without ballast. However, if they must, they could always unbolt the chemical toilet and throw it out. Of course, the situation might be such that there wouldn't be time to do this.

The Jules Verne lifted above the Valley, and the wind sent it spanking along northeasterly. After an hour it lost much of its strength, but the craft was still moving in the right direction. It was also steadily ascending. Frigate took over the pilot's post at 4877 meters or a little over 16,000 feet of altitude. To stop further ascension, he valved off hydrogen in driblets. When it began to sink, he turned the burner on. From then on, the pilot would be busy trying to maintain the vessel within a 2000-meter zone while losing as little gas as possible and running the burner at a minimum.

Frigate's neck and shoulder pained him very much. He would be glad when he was relieved and could get under the cloths and stretch out. One drink of booze wouldn't hurt him and it might ease the agony.

So far the voyage had been mostly hard and fast work, some stomach-squeezing danger, and much boredom. He'd be happy when the final landing was made. Then the events of the trip would start to take on the patina of amusing adventure. As time passed, it would gain a golden glow, and it would all seem wonderful. The crew would tell exaggerated stories, making their perils seem even more hairbreadth than they had actually been.

Imagination was the great cozener of the past.

Standing by the vernian, the only illumination the cold starlight and the instrument bulbs, all but himself asleep, Frigate felt lonely. Tempering the loneliness, however, was pride. The Jules Verne had broken the record for nonstop balloon flights. From lift-off to this point, it had floated approximately 4824 kilometers or 3000 miles. And it would cover much more distance-if all went well- before it was forced to land.

And it had been done by five amateurs. Except for himself, none had ever been in a balloon on Earth. His forty hours in hot-air balloons and thirty in gas balloons did not make him a veteran aeronaut. He'd logged more time on this flight than all his hours on Earth.

The crew had gone on a voyage which would have made history if it had been on the native planet. Their faces would have been on TV screens worldwide, they'd have been feted and banqueted, they could have written books which would become movies, the royalties would have rolled in.

Here, only a few would ever know what they had done. Even a smaller number would refuse to believe them. Not even a few would know if the voyage ended in the deaths of the crew.

He looked out a port. The world was bright starlight and dark shadows, the valleys like snakes crawling, serpents in march order. The stars were silent, the valleys were silent. As quiet as the mouths of the dead.

That was a gloomy simile.

As silent as the wings of a butterfly. It recalled the summers of Earth in his childhood and youth, the many-colored flowers of the backyard garden, especially the sunflowers, ah, the tall yellow sunflowers, the songs of birds, the savory odors of his mother's cooking drifting to his nose, roast beef, cherry pies, his father playing the piano ...

He remembered one of his father's favorite songs, one of his own favorites. He'd often sung it softly while on night watch on the schooner. When he did so, he saw in his mind a small glow far ahead of him, a glow like a star, a light that seemed to travel before him, guiding him toward some unnamed but nevertheless desirable goal.

"Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer, Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer.

Lead us, lest too far we wander. Love's sweet voice is calling yonder.

"Shine, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer, Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer.

Light the path below, above. And lead us on to love!"

Suddenly, he was weeping. The tears were for the good things that had been or might have been, for the bad things that had been but should not have been.

Drying his tears, he made a final check and roused the little Moor for his watch. He crawled under the cloths, but his neck and shoulders drove sleep away. After trying vainly to sink into blessed oblivion, he got out to talk to Nur. They continued a conversation that had gone on, day and night, for many years.

68

"In several respects," Nur said, "the Church of the Second Chance and the Sufis agree. The Chancers, however, have somewhat different technical terms which might lead you to think that each refers to different things.

"The final goal of the Chancers and the Sufis is the same. Ignoring the difference in terms, both claim that the individual self must be absorbed by the universal self. That is, by Allah, God, the Creator, the Rel, call Him what you will."

"And this means that the individual being is annihilated?"

"No. Absorbed. Annihilation is destruction. In absorption the individual soul, ka, or brahman, becomes part of'the universal self."

"And that means that the individual loses his self-consciousness, his individuality? He is no longer aware of himself?"

"Yes, but he is part of the Great Self. What is the loss of self-consciousness as an individual compared to the gain of self-consciousness as God?"

' "That strikes me with horror. You might as well be dead. Once you're no longer self-conscious, you are dead. No, I can't understand why the Chancers of Buddhists or Hindus or Sufis think this state desirable.

"Without self-consciousness, the individual is indeed dead."

"If you'd experienced that ecstasy which Sufis experience in one stage of development, the passing-away, you'd understand. Can a person blind from birth be filled with ecstasy while those with sight are looking at a glorious sunset?"

"That's just it," Frigate said. "I have had mystical experiences. Three.

"One was when I was twenty-six years old. I was working in a steel mill. In the soaking pits. There cranes strip large ingots from the molds into which molten steel was poured in the open hearths. After the stripping, the cooling ingots are lowered into gas-burning pits which reheat them. From there they' re taken to the rolling mill.

"When I worked in the pits, I fancied that the ingots were souls. Lost souls in the flames of purgatory. They'd be soaked in the flames for a while, then carried off to the place where they'd be pressed down into shape for heaven. Just as the big rolls in the mill squeezed down on ingots, shaping them, pressing the impurities to the ends of the ingots, which were then chopped off, so the souls would be shaped and purified.

"However, this has little to do with the subject of conversation. Or does it?

"Anyway, one day I was standing at the huge open door of the soaking-pits building, resting a moment. I was looking out along the yards at the open hearth. I don't remember what I was thinking then. Probably that I was tired of working in this extremely hot place at hard labor for such low pay. I was also probably wondering if I was ever going to become a successful writer.

"All of my stories had been rejected, though I'd had a few encouraging notes from editors. Whit Burnett, for instance, the editor of a high-prestige if low-paying magazine, Story, twice came close to buying my stories, but both times his wife disagreed with him, and he bounced them.

"Anyway, there I was, staring at the mill's ugliness, not at all conducive to pleasant thoughts and especially not to a mystical state.

"I was in low spirits, very low. And the train tracks that filled the yard, the grey metal dust that covered the mud and every object on the yard, the huge, hideous sheet-iron building that housed the open hearths, the smoke that the wind brought down low to the ground, the acrid stink of the smoke, all made for a very depressing mood.

"And then suddenly, unaccountably, it all seemed to change. In a flash. I don't mean that the ugliness became beautiful. It was just as grey and unpleasant as before.

"But, somehow, I suddenly felt that the universe was right. And all was and would be well. There was a subtle shift in my perspective. Let me put it this way. It was as if the universe was composed of an infinity of glass bricks. These bricks were almost, but not quite, invisible. I could see their edges, though these were ghostly.

"The bricks had been piled so that their faces were not quite even. As if God was a drunken mason. But now, in this subtle shift, the bricks moved, and their faces were even. Order had been restored. Divine order and beauty. The cosmic building was no longer an ill-built structure, fit only to be condemned by the cosmic zoning inspectors.

"I felt exalted. For a moment, I was looking into the basic structure of the world. Past the plaster that has been smeared on to make the walls look smooth and even.

"I knew, I knew, that the universe was right. And that I was right. That is, my place in the world was right. I fitted. Though I was a living being, yet I was one of those bricks, and I'd been aligned in the proper place.

"Rather, I'd suddenly become aware that I had been aligned all along. Until that moment I had thought that I was out of place, not quite on a level with the other pieces. But how could I be? All the pieces, the bricks, were misaligned.

"That was my mistake. Everything was in its place. It was my eyesight, my comprehension, rather, that had been twisted. Aberrated, call it what you will."

Nur said, "And how long did that state last?"

"A few seconds. But I felt very good, even happy, afterward. The next day, though, I remembered the ... revelation ... but its effect was gone. I went on living as before. The universe was again a structure built by an incompetent or drunken builder. Or perhaps by a malicious, cheating contractor.

"Still, there were moments ..."

"The other experiences?"

"The second should be thrown out. It came from marijuana, not from myself. You see, I've smoked perhaps half a dozen marijuana cigarettes in my life. This was during one year, 1955, some time before the younger generation took up drugs. At that time, marijuana and hash were mostly confined to bohemian groups in the big cities. And to the blacks and Mexicans of the ghetto.

"This particular incident took place, of all places, in Peoria, Illinois. My wife and I had met a couple from New York, Greenwich Village types . . . I'll explain what this means later . . . and they talked us into trying marijuana. It made me pretty uncomfortable, downright uneasy, to have the stuff around. I had visions of narcotics agents bursting in, arresting us, being in jail, the trial, the conviction, the penitentiary. The disgrace. And what would happen to our children?

"But alcohol had dissolved my inhibitions, and I tried a joint, as it was called, among other things.

"I had trouble getting the smoke into my lungs and holding it, since I had never even smoked tobacco though I was thirty-seven years old. But I did it, and nothing happened.

"Later that evening, I picked up what was left of the joint and finished it. And this time I suddenly felt that the universe was composed of crystals dissolved in a solution.

"But now I perceived a subtle shift. Suddenly, the crystals in the supersaturated solution were precipitated. And they were all in some kind of beautiful order, rank on rank, like angels drawn up in a parade.

"However, there was no accompanying sense, as on that other occasion, that the universe was right, that I had a place in it, and that the place was right. That it could be no other way."

"The third time?" Nur said.

"I was fifty-seven then, the sole passenger in a hot-air balloon soaring over the cornfields of Eureka, Illinois. The pilot had just turned off the burner, and so there was no noise except from a flock of pheasants the roar of the burner had disturbed in a field.

"The sun was setting. The bright summerlight was turning grey. I was floating as if on a magic carpet in a light breeze which I couldn't feel. You can light a candle in the open car in a strong wind, you know, and the flame will burn as steadily as if in an unventilated room.

"And suddenly, without warning, I felt as if the sun had come back up over the horizon. Everything was bathed in a bright light in which I should have had to squint my eyes to see anything.

"But I didn't. The light was coming from within. I was the flame, and the universe was receiving my light and my warmth.

"In a second, maybe longer, the light disappeared. It did not fade away. It just vanished. But for another second the feeling that the world was right, that no matter what happened, to me or to anybody or to the universe, it would be good, that feeling lasted for a second.

"The pilot noticed nothing. Apparently, I wasn't showing my feelings. And that was the last time I had any experience like that.''

Nur said, "Apparently these mystical states had no influence on your behavior or your outlook?"

"Did I become better because of them? No."

Nur said, "The states you describe are akin to what we call tajalli. But your tajalli is a counterfeit. If it had resulted in a permanent state, by self-development in the right path, then it would have been a true tajalli. There are several forms of false or wasteful tajalli. You experienced one of these."

"Does that mean," Frigate said, "that I am incapable of experiencing the true form?"

"No. At least you felt some form of it."

They fell silent for a while. Frisco, hidden under a pile of cloths, muttered something in his sleep.

Suddenly, Frigate said, "Nur, for some time I've been wondering if you'd accept me as your disciple."

"And why didn't you ask me?"

"I was afraid of being rejected."

There was another silence. Nur checked the altimeter and turned on the vernian for a minute. Pogaas shook aside his blankets and stood up. He lit a cigarette, the glow of his lighter throwing strange lights and shadows on his face. It looked like the head of a sacred hawk cut from black diorite by ancient Egyptians.

"Well?" Frigate said.

"You've always thought of yourself as a seeker after truth, haven't you?" Nur said.

"Not a steady seeker. I've drifted too much, floated along like a balloon. Most of the time I've taken life as it was or seemed to be. Occasionally, I've made determined efforts to investigate and even practice this and that philosophy, discipline, or religion. But my enthusiasms would subside, and I'd forget about them. Well, not entirely. Sometimes an old enthusiasm would flare up, and I'd drive myself again toward the desired goal. Mostly, though, it's just been floating with the winds of laziness and indifference."

"You become detached?"

"I tried to be intellectually detached even when my emotions fired me up."

"To achieve true detachment, you must be free from both emotion and intellect. It's evident that, though you pride yourself on a lack of preconceptions, you have them. If I did take you as a disciple, you'd have to put yourself absolutely under my control. No matter what I ask, You must do it at once. Wholeheartedly."

Nur paused. "If I asked you to jump out of this car, would you do so?"

"Hell, no!"

"Nor would I do so. But what if I ask you to do something which is the intellectual or emotional equivalent of jumping out of the car? Something which you'd regard as intellectual or emotional suicide?"

"I won't know until you ask me."

"I wouldn't ask you until I thought you were ready. If indeed you ever will be."

Pogaas had been looking out of a port. He grunted and then said, "There's a light out there! It's moving!"

Frigate and el-Musafir joined him. Tex and Frisco, aroused by their excited voices, got up and stared sleepily out another port.

A long shape, at about the same altitude as the balloon, was silhouetted against a bright stellar cloud.

Frigate said, "It's a dirigible!",

Of all the things they'd seen on The Riverworld, this was the strangest and most unexpected.

"There're lights near its prow," Rider said.

"It can't be from New Bohemia," Frigate said.

"Then there is another place where metals have been found," Nur said.

"Unless it's one They built!'' Farrington said. ,"It may not be an airship, it's just built like one."

One of the lights near the nose of the vessel began blinking. After looking at it for a minute, Frigate said, "It's Morse code!"

"What's it saying?" Rider said.

"I don't know Morse code."

"Then how do you know it's Morse?"

"By the length of the pulses. Long and short."

Nur left the port to return to the vernian. He shut it off, and now the only sound was the heavy breathing of the crew. They watched the great, sinister-looking shape turn and move directly toward them. The light continued blinking. Nur ignited the torch for about twenty seconds. When he turned it off, he started toward the port again. But he stopped suddenly, and he said sharply, "Don't anybody make a noise!"

They turned to stare at him. He took a few steps and turned off the fan which sucked in carbon dioxide.

Frisco said, "What're you doing that for?"

Nur went swiftly to the vernian, saying, "I thought I heard a hissing!"

He looked at Pogaas. "Put that cigarette out!"

Nur bent down to place his ear against the connection of the inlet pipe to the cone inside the case.

Pogaas dropped the cigarette and raised his foot to stamp it out.

69

Jill Gulbirra heard the report on the raid from Cyrano before the helicopter arrived in the hangar bay. She was appalled at the casualties and furious because the mission had even been considered. Part of her anger was at herself. Why hadn't she argued more firmly with Clemens?

Yet. . . what could she have.done? The laser was the only means possible to get into the tower. Clemens would not release it unless the raid was carried out.

After the copter landed, she ordered the airship taken up out of the Valley. It turned its nose southwest, heading for the Mark Twain. Cyrano went to sick bay to have his wounds bandaged, then reported to the control room. Jill got a more complete report from him, after which she radioed the boat.

Clemens was not as happy as she had expected him to be.

"So you think Rotten John is dead? But you're not one hundred percent sure?

"Yes, I'm afraid so. But we did everything you asked, so I assume you'll give us the LB."

LB was the code name for the laser.

''You can have the LB. The chopper can pick it up from the flight deck."

The radar officer said, "UFO portside, sir. At approximately our altitude."

Clemens must have heard her, since he said, "What's that? A UFO?"

Jill ignored the voice. For a moment she thought the radar-scope was showing two objects. Then recognition came.

"It's a balloon!"

Clemens said "A balloon? Then it's not Them!"

Cyrano said softly, "Perhaps it is another expedition to the tower. Our unknown colleagues?"

Jill gave orders to turn a searchlight toward it and use it as a Morse code transmitter.

"This is the airship Parseval. This is the airship Parseval. Identify yourself. Identify yourself."

She had also told the radio operator to send the same message. There was no reply by wireless or light.

She spoke to Nikitin. "Head directly for the balloon. We'll try to get a look at it close up."

"Jes, kapitano."

The Russian, however, started, and he pointed at a blinking red light on the control panel.

"The hangar-bay hatch! It's opening!"

The first officer sprang to the intercom. "Hangar bay! Hangar bay! Coppename here! Why are you opening the hatch?"

There was no answer.

Jill pressed the general-alarm button. Sirens began whooping throughout the ship.

"This is the captain! This is the captain! Central crew's quarters! Central crew's quarters!"

The voice of Katamura, an electronics officer, said, "Yes, Captain! I read you!"

"Get men down to the hangar bay fast. I think Officer Thorn has escaped!"

Cyrano said, "Do you really think it's he?"

"I don't know, but it seems likely. Unless... someone else ..."

She called sick bay. No answer.

"It's Thorn! Damn! Why didn't I install a belly-hatch override switch?"

In rapid sequence, she ordered two groups to run to the hangar bay and one to the ship's hospital.

"But, Jill," Cyrano said, "how could he escape? He has not recovered from his wounds, he is guarded by four men, he is shackled to the bed, the door is locked, and the two men inside don't have the key!"

"He's no ordinary man! I should have chained his hands, too! But it seemed unnecessarily cruel!"

"Perhaps the helicopter was not refueled?"

"If it wasn't, Szentes was neglecting his duty. No chance of that!"

"The hatch is full-open now," Nikitin said.

Graves' voice came over the intercom. "Jill! Thorn ..."

"How'd he get out?" Jill snapped.

"I'm not sure of the details. I was sitting in my office, sampling some of the medical alcohol. All of a sudden I heard a hell of a brouhaha. Shouts, somebody crashing into something. I got up, but there was Thorn at the door. A length of broken chain was trailing from his ankle shackle. He must have broken the links with his bare hands!

"He charged on in, shoving me to one side so hard I was knocked against the wall. For a minute I was stunned, I couldn't even stand up. He ripped the intercom off the bulkhead with his hands! His bare hands! I tried to get up, but I couldn't. He tied my hands behind me and my ankles together with belts he'd taken from the two guards. He could have killed me easily enough, snapped my neck. Man, I still hurt where he grabbed me. But he left me alive, I'll say that for him.

"I finally got loose and staggered out to the ward. All four guards were on the floor. Two are still alive but badly hurt. The intercoms were all wrecked. The door was locked, and the pistols and knives of the outside guards were gone. I'd still be there if I wasn't so handy at picking locks and the lock wasn't pickable. Then I ran to the nearest bulkhead phone ..."

"How long ago was it that he broke loose?"

"Twenty-five minutes ago."

"Twenty-five?"

She was dismayed. What had Thorn been doing in all that time?

"Take care of those men," she said and switched him off.

"He must have had a transmitter hidden somehow, somewhere,'' she said to Cyrano.

"But how do you know that?"

"I can't be sure. What else would take so much of his time? Nikitin, take her down to ground level! As fast as possible!"

Katamura's voice came over the intercom.

"Captain, the chopper's gone."

Cyrano swore in French.

Nikitin flipped on the general address and informed the crew that the ship would be going into dangerous maneuver. All personnel should make themselves secure.

"Forty-five degrees, Nikitin," Jill said. "Full speed."

The radar operator reported that the helicopter was on his scope. It was going south and downward at a maximum velocity at a forty-five degree angle to the horizontal.

By then, the deck of the control room was tilted downward. The others hastened to strap themselves into chairs bolted to the deck. Jill took a seat by Nikitin. She would like to have taken over the pilot's chair, but even now protocol forbade that. However, it did not matter that she was not at the controls. The wild Russian would get the dirigible down as swiftly as she could. Her job would be to make sure that he did not overdo it.

"If Thorn has a transmitter," Cyrano said, "he can use it now. We'll never make it."

Though he was pale and wide-eyed, he smiled at her.

Jill looked from Cyrano to the control panel indicators. The ship was parallel to the Valley, so there was no problem about clearing the mountain tops. The Valley looked narrow, but it was rapidly broadening. There were some lights down there, bonfires around which would be sentinels or late-night revellers. The rain clouds had dissipated swiftly, as they almost always did. The star-packed skies cast a pale light into the space between the two mountains. Was anybody down there looking up at them? If so, they must wonder what this huge object was and why it was coming down so swiftly.

Not that it was going fast enough to suit her.

Cyrano was right. If Thorn did intend to set off a bomb, he would be doing it now. Unless . . . unless he would be willing to wait until the ship had landed. After all, he had spared Graves, and he could have killed the other two guards.

Keeping an eye on the panel radar-scopes, she called the hangar bay.

Szentes answered.

"We were all in our quarters, "he said. "There's no guard posted in the bay."

"I know," she said. "Just tell me ... quickly .. . what happened?"

"Thorn stuck his head in the door. He pointed a pistol at us. Then he ripped off the intercom, and he told us that he was going to close the door. He said he had a bomb rigged to explode if the door was opened. Then he shut it. We didn't know if we should believe him, but no one was willing to find out if he was lying or not. Then Officer Katamura opened the door. There wasn't any bomb; Thorn had lied. I'm sorry, Captain."

"You did what you should have done."

She told the radio operator to transmit their situation to the Mark Twain.

At 915 meters, a little over 3000 feet, she ordered Nikitin to tilt the propellers to give the ship an upward thrust. Also, to raise the nose by three degrees. The inertia would keep them diving despite the braking effect of the propellers. In a minute she would order the nose raised by ten degrees. This would flatten out the dive even more.

What to do when the ship straightened out at about 915 meters or somewhat over 3000 feet? If it leveled at that altitude. She was really cutting it close, though she knew the capabilities of the Parseval almost as well as she knew hers.

Should she land the ship? There was no way to moor it, and the hydrogen would have to be valved off so that it would not rise as the crew abandoned it. Otherwise, some of the men would not get off in time, and they would be carried away.

But what if Thorn had no transmitter, what if there was no bomb? The airship would be lost for no reason.

"Too fast! Too fast!" Nikitin said.

Jill was already leaning forward to set the ballast switch for a discharge of 1000 kilograms of water. She punched the button, and a few seconds later the ship rose abruptly.

"Sorry, Nikitin," .she murmured. "There wasn't any time to waste."

Radar indicated that the helicopter was hovering north of them at 300 meters altitude. Was Thorn waiting to see what they would do? If so, he did not intend to set off the bomb if they crash-landed or abandoned the ship.

What was she to do? The thought of either alternative made her grind her teeth. She could not bear the idea of wrecking or losing this beauty. The last airship.

The safety of the crew, however, had to come first.

"One hundred and fifty-two meters altitude," Nikitin said.

The propellers were turned fully upward and biting into the air at full speed. The mountains loomed on both sides; The River sparkled in starlight on the port; the plains ran smoothly beneath them.

There were dwellings below, frail bamboo structures filled with people, most of whom would be sleeping. If the dirigible landed on the plain, it would crush hundreds. If it caught fire, it would burn many more.

Jill ordered Nikitin to steer it over The River.

What to do?

Of the people along The River who had to stay awake or who wanted to, a few had looked into the white-and-black-spangled sky. These saw two silhouetted objects, one much larger than the other. The smaller one was composed of two spheres, one below the other, the larger of the spheres above the other. The greater object was long and shaped like a fat cigar.

They were moving toward each other, the smaller emitting a faint light from the lower sphere, the other sending out bright beams. One of these beams began to go on and off in measured lengths of time.

Suddenly, the larger object dipped its nose, and it came down swiftly. As it neared the ground, it emitted a strange noise.

Many did not recognize the shape of either object. They had never seen a balloon or a dirigible. Some had lived when balloons were not unknown, though many of these had only seen illustrations or photographs of them. But most of this group had never seen or heard of an airship except in illustrations of what might be expected in the future.

A very small minority recognized the larger, now diving, object as a dirigible.

Whatever their knowledge, many ran to wake up their mates and friends or to sound a general alarm.

By then some had seen the helicopter, and this caused even more curiosity and apprehension.

Drums began to beat; people, to shout. Everybody was awake by then, and the dwellings were emptied. All looked up and wondered.

The questions and the shouts became one great cry as one of the flying objects burst into flame. They screamed as it plunged, bright orange fire trailing like the glory of a falling angel.

70

Tai-Peng wore only a garment of irontree leaves and vine blossoms. A cup of wine in his left hand, he paced back and forth, extemporizing poems with the ease of water flowing down a hill. A poem would tumble out in the court speech of the Tang dynasty, sounding to non-Chinese like dice clicking in a cup. Then he would translate it into the local Esperanto dialect.

Much of the sublety and reference were lost in the mutation, but enough was retained to move his listeners to laughter and tears.

Tai-Peng's woman, Wen-Chun, softly played on a bamboo flute. Though his voice was usually loud and screeching, it was subdued for the occasion. In Esperanto it was almost as melodious as the flute. He wore only a garment made for the occasion, red-green-striped leaves and red-white-blue-striped blossoms. These fluttered as he walked back and forth like a great cat in a cage.

He was tall for a man of his race and time, the eighth century a.d. , lithe yet broad shouldered and heavily muscled. His long hair shone in the late noon sun; it glittered like a dark jade mirror. His eyes were large and pale green, blazing, a hungry-but wounded- tiger's.

Though he was a descendant of an emperor by a concubine, he was nine generations removed. His immediate family had been thieves and murderers. Some of his grandparents were of the hill tribes, and it was these wild people who had bequeathed him the fierce green eyes.

He and his audience were on a high hill from which the plain, The River, and the land and the mountain wall beyond could be seen. His listeners, even drunker than he, though none had drunk so much, formed a crescent. This left an opening for him to stride into and out of. Tai-Peng did not like barriers of any kind. Walls made him uneasy; prison bars, frenzied.

Though half of the audience was Chinese of the sixteenth century a.d., the others were from here and there, now and then.

Now Tai-Peng stopped composing, and he recited a poem by Chen Tzu-Ang. First, he stated that Chen had died a few years before he, Tai-Peng, was born. Though Chen was wealthy, he had died in a prison at the age of forty-two. A magistrate had put him there so he could cheat him out of his father's inheritance.

"Men of affairs are proud of their cunning and skill, But in the Tao they still have much to learn. They are proud of their exploitations, But they do not know what happens to the body. Why do they not learn from the Master of Dark Truth, Who saw the whole world in a little jade bottle? Whose bright soul was free of Earth and Heaven, For riding on Change he entered into Freedom."

Tai-Peng paused to empty his cup and hold it out for a refill.

One of the group, a black man named Tom Turpin, said, "Ain't no more wine. What about some alky?"

"No more drink of the gods? I don't want your barbarians' juice! It stupifies where wine enlivens!"

He looked around, smiled like a tiger in mating season, and he lifted Wen-Chun and strode off to his hut with her in his arms.

"When the wine stops, it's time to begin with women!"

The brightly colored leaves and blossoms fluttered to the ground as Wen-Chun mock-struggled with him. He looked like a being from ancient myth, a plant man carrying off a human female.

The others laughed, and the group began to break up before Tai-Peng had shut the door of his hut. One of them walked around the hill to his own hut. After entering, he barred the door and drew down bamboo-and-skin blinds over the windows. In the twilight he sat down on a stool. He opened the lid of his grail and sat for a while staring at it.

A man and a woman passed near his door. They were talking of the mysterious event that had taken place less than a month ago down-River. A great noisy monster had flown from over the western mountain at night and had landed on The River. The braver, or more foolish, locals had boated out toward it. But it had sunk into the waters before they could get close to it, and it had not come up again.

Was it a dragon? Some people said there never had been any dragons. These, however, were skeptics from the degenerate nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anybody but a fool knew that dragons did exist. On the other hand, it could have been a flying machine of the beings who had made this world.

It was said that some had seen or thought they'd seen-a manlike figure swimming away from where the dragon had sunk.

The man in the hut smiled.

He thought of Tai-Peng. That was not his true name. Only Tai-Peng and a few others knew what it was. His adopted name meant "The Great Phoenix," a clue to his real name since he had often boasted in Terrestrial life that he was just such.

Tai-Peng had met him long ago, but he did not know this.

The man in the hut spoke a code word. Instantly, the exterior of the grail sprang into light. The light did not shine over the entire surface. Against the grey metal were two large circles, one on each side of the cylinder. Inside each circle, which represented a hemisphere of the planet, were thousands of very thin, glowing, twisted lines. These intersected many tiny flashing circles. All were empty except for one. This enclosed a flashing pentagram, a five-pointed star.

Each circle, except for that holding the star, emitted dots and dashes of light.

The display was a chart not made to scale. The lines were the valleys, and the circles indicated men and women. The pulse group of each was an identity code.

Clemens and Burton, among others, had been told by X that he had chosen only twelve to assist him. There were twelve times twelve symbols on the lines, not counting the circled star. One hundred and forty-four in all.

A number of circles were pulsing the same group. The man sighed, and he spoke a code phrase. Instantly, the symbols emitting dash-dash-dash-dots disappeared.

Another code phrase. Two glowing symbols appeared near the top of the grail.

Only seventy recruits were still alive. Less than half of the chosen.

How many would there be forty years from now?

Of these, how many would quit before then?

However, there were many nonrecruits who now knew about the tower. Some of these even knew about the person whom Clemens called the Mysterious Stranger or X. The secret was out, and some who'd learned it second-hand were as intensely motivated as the recruits.

Given the changed situation, it was inevitable that others would get in on the quest polarward. And it was possible that not one recruit would get to the tower whereas some nonrecruits might.

He spoke another code phrase. The circles were suddenly accompanied by other symbols. Triangles, an uncircled pentagram, and one hexagram, a six-pointed star. The triangles, which pulsed code groups, were the symbols of the second-order Ethicals, the agents.

The hexagram was the Operator's.

He spoke again. A square of light appeared in the center of the hemisphere facing him. Then the display outside the square faded away. Immediately, the square expanded. It was a blow-up of the area in which the three stars and a few circles were located.

Another phrase brought forth glowing digits above the square. So, the six-pointed star was down-River by many thousands of kilometers. The Operator had failed to board the Rex. But the second paddlewheeler would be coming along, though much later.

In the neighboring valley to the east was Richard Francis Burton. So near yet so far. Only a day's walk away-if flesh could pass like a ghost through stone.

Burton was undoubtedly on the Rex Grandissimus. His circle had moved too swiftly along his line for him to be traveling by sailboat.

The Operator . . . what action would the Operator take if he did get on the Mark Twain ? Reveal a part of the truth to Clemens? All of it? Or keep silent?

There was no telling what would happen. The situation had been changed too drastically. Even the computer at HQ would not have been able to indicate more than a small percentage of the probabilities.

So far, there was only one agent on a boat, the Rex. At least ten could be picked up by the Mark Twain, but it was improbable that more than one would be. If that.

Fifty were in the line between the Rex and Virolando.

Of the total of sixty, he could identify only ten. These were upper echelon, heads of their sections.

The chances were that he would encounter none of the sixty.

But. . . what if he failed to get aboard either boat?

He felt sick.

Somehow, he would do it. He must do it.

To be realistic, he had to admit that he could fail.

At one time he had believed that he could do anything humanly possible and some things which no other humans could do. But his faith in himself had been somewhat shaken.

Perhaps this was because he had lived among the Riverpeople too long.

There were so many journeying up-River, driven by one great desire. By now most of them would have heard Joe Miller's story, though it was at hundredth-hand. They'd be expecting to find the towel rope up which they could climb the precipice. They'd also expect the tunnel which would permit them to detour an almost unscalable mountain. They would expect the path along the face of the mountain.

These were no more.

Neither was the tunnel at the end of the path, at the base of the mountain. It had melted into lava.

He looked again at the unencircled star. Close. Far too close by. As the situation now was, it represented the greatest danger.

Who knew how the situation would change?

Now the loud voice of Tai-Peng entered the hut. He was outside, having tumbled his woman, and he was shouting something unintelligible at the world. What a noise the man made in this world! What a blur of action!

If I cannot shake the gods on high, I will at least make an uproar in Acheron.

Now Tai-Peng was closer, and his speech could be heard clearly.

"I eat like a tiger! I crap like an elephant! I can drink three hundred cups of wine at a sitting! I have married three wives, made love to a thousand women! I outplay anyone on the lute and the flute! I write immortal poems by the thousands, but I throw them into the stream as soon as they're finished and watch the water, the wind, and the spirits carry them off to destruction!

"Water and flowers! Water and flowers! These I love the most! "Change and impermanence! These wound, pain, torture me!

"Yet it is change and ephemerality that make for beauty! Without dy ng and death can there be beauty? Can there be perfection? "Beauty is beautiful because it is doomed to perish! "Or is it?

"I, Tai-Peng, once thought of myself as flowing water, as a blooming flower! As a dragon!

"Rowers and dragons! Dragons are flowers of the flesh! They live in beauty while generations of flowers bloom and die! Bloom and become dust! Yet even dragons die; they bloom and become dust! A white man, pale as a ghost, blue-eyed as a demon, once told me that dragons lived for eons! Eons, I say! For ages that make the mind turn upside down to think of them! Yet. . . they all perished millions of years ago, long before Nukua created men and women from yellow mud!

"In all their pride and beauty, they died!

"Water! Flowers! Dragons!"

Tai-Peng's voice became less loud as he went down the hill. But the man in the hut heard one especially clarion passage.

"What evil person brought us back to life and now wishes us to die forever again?.''

The man in the hut said, "Hah!"

Though Tai-Peng's poems spoke much of the shortness of life of men and women and of flowers, they never mentioned death. Nor had he ever before referred to death in his conversation. Yet now he was speaking boldly of it, raging at it.

Until now he had seemed to be as happy as a man could be. He'd lived for six years in this little state and apparently had no desire to leave it.

Was he ready now?

A man like Tai-Peng would be a good companion for the voyage up-River. He was aggressive, quick wined, and a great swordsman. If he could be subtly urged to resume the course he had forsaken... What was likely to happen in the decades to come? All he could predict-for now he too was one of the webs in the dark design, no longer a weaver-all he could predict was that some would get to Virolando and some would not.

The more astute would discover a message there. Some of these would surely decipher it. Among these would be both recruits and agents.

Who would get to the tower first?

He must be the one who did.

And he must survive the perils of the journey. Probably the greatest of these would be the inevitable battle between the two great boats. Clemens was determined to catch up with King John and kill or capture him. It was possible, highly possible, that both vessels and their crews would be destroyed.

Savagery! The idiocy of the tiger!

All because of this frenzied desire for vengeance which had seized Clemens. Clemens, who was otherwise the most pacifistic of men.

Could Clemens be talked out of this childish passion for revenge ?

Sometimes he agreed with what the Operator, in a depressed mood, had once said.

"Humankind sticks in the throat of God."

But. .. Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

And the Master of Dark Truth was riding on unpredictable Change.

"What...?"

The glowing lines and symbols had disappeared.

For a few seconds he stared, his mouth open. Then he uttered a string of code phrases. But the surface of the grail remained grey.

He clenched his fists and his teeth.

So ... what he had feared had at last happened.

Some element in the complex of the satellite had suddenly quit working. No wonder. After over a thousand years the circuits were due for a checking, but no one had been able to inspect them on schedule.

From now on, he would no longer know exactly where the other men and women were. Now he too was in the house of night, bounded by fog. The passing of the lights on the grail had left a deeper gloom behind. He felt like a tired and companionless pilgrim on a lonely shore, a shadow among shades.

What would go amiss next? What could? For one thing, no, surely not... But if it did, then he might not have all the time needed.

He stood up and straightened his shoulders. Time to go.

A shadow among the shades and running out of time. Like the recruits and the agents, like the Riverdwellers, like all sentient creatures, he would have to make his own light. So be it.