“…can’t do that here,” Kyle heard him say, as Kyle came up. The Prince struck out like a panther—like a trained boxer—with three quick lefts in succession into the face of the busboy, the Prince’s shoulder bobbing, the weight of his body in behind each blow. The busboy went down. Kyle, reaching the Prince, herded him away through a side gap in the railing. The young man’s face was white with rage. People were swarming onto the dance floor.

  “Who was that? What’s his name?” demanded the Prince, between his teeth. “He put his hand on me! Did you see that? He put his hand on me!”

  “You knocked him out,” said Kyle. “What more do you want?”

  “He manhandled me—me!” snapped the Prince. “I want to find out who he is!” He caught hold of the bar to which the horses were tied, refusing to be pushed farther. “He’ll learn to lay hands on a future Emperor!”

  “No one will tell you his name,” said Kyle. And the cold note in his voice finally seemed to reach through to the Prince and sober him. He stared at Kyle.

  “Including you?” he demanded at last.

  “Including me, Lord,” said Kyle.

  The Prince stared a moment longer, then swung away. He turned, jerked loose the reins of the gelding, and swung into the saddle. He rode off. Kyle mounted and followed.

  They rode in silence into the forest. After a while, the Prince spoke without turning his head.

  “And you call yourself a bodyguard,” he said, finally.

  “Your life is in my hands, Lord,” said Kyle. The Prince turned a grim face to look at him.

  “Only my life?” said the Prince. “As long as they don’t kill me, they can do what they want? Is that what you mean?”

  Kyle met his gaze steadily.

  “Pretty much so, Lord,” he said.

  The Prince spoke with an ugly note in his voice.

  “I don’t think I like you, after all, Kyle,” he said. “I don’t think I like you at all.”

  “I’m not here with you to be liked, Lord,” said Kyle.

  “Perhaps not,” said the Prince, thickly. “But I know your name!”

  They rode on in continued silence for perhaps another half hour. But then gradually the angry hunch went out of the young man’s shoulders and the tightness out of his jaw. After a while he began to sing to himself, a song in a language Kyle did not know; and as he sang, his cheerfulness seemed to return. Shortly, he spoke to Kyle, as if there had never been anything but pleasant moments between them.

  Mammoth Cave was close and the Prince asked to visit it. They went there and spent some time going through the cave. After that they rode their horses up along the left bank of the Green River. The Prince seemed to have forgotten all about the incident at the beer garden and was out to charm everyone they met. As the sun was at last westering toward the dinner hour, they came finally to a small hamlet back from the river, with a roadside inn mirrored in an artificial lake beside it, and guarded by oak and pine trees behind.

  “This looks good,” said the Prince. “We’ll stay overnight here, Kyle.”

  “If you wish, Lord,” said Kyle.

  They halted, and Kyle took the horses around to the stable, then entered the inn to find the Prince already in the small bar off the dining room, drinking beer and charming the waitress. This waitress was younger than the one at the beer garden had been; a little girl with soft loose hair and round brown eyes that showed their delight in the attention of the tall, good-looking young man.

  “Yes,” said the Prince to Kyle, looking out of corners of the Imperial blue eyes at him, after the waitress had gone to get Kyle his coffee. “This is the very place.”

  “The very place?” said Kyle.

  “For me to get to know the people better—what did you think, good Kyle?” said the Prince and laughed at him. “I’ll observe the people here and you can explain them—won’t that be good?”

  Kyle gazed at him, thoughtfully.

  “I’ll tell you whatever I can, Lord,” he said.

  They drank—the Prince his beer, and Kyle his coffee—and went in a little later to the dining room for dinner. The Prince, as he had promised at the bar, was full of questions about what he saw—and what he did not see.

  “…But why go on living in the past, all of you here?” he asked Kyle. “A museum world is one thing. But a museum people—” He broke off to smile and speak to the little, soft-haired waitress, who had somehow been diverted from the bar to wait upon their dining-room table.

  “Not a museum people, Lord,” said Kyle. “A living people. The only way to keep a race and a culture preserved is to keep it alive. So we go on in our own way, here on Earth, as a living example for the Younger Worlds to check themselves against.”

  “Fascinating…” murmured the Prince; but his eyes had wandered off to follow the waitress, who was glowing and looking back at him from across the now-busy dining room.

  “Not fascinating. Necessary, Lord,” said Kyle. But he did not believe the younger man had heard him.

  After dinner, they moved back to the bar. And the Prince, after questioning Kyle a little longer, moved up to continue his researches among the other people standing at the bar. Kyle watched for a little while. Then, feeling it was safe to do so, he slipped out to have another look at the horses and to ask the innkeeper to arrange a saddle lunch put up for them the next day.

  When he returned, the Prince was not to be seen.

  Kyle sat down at a table to wait; but the Prince did not return. A cold, hard knot of uneasiness began to grow below Kyle’s breastbone. A sudden pang of alarm sent him swiftly back out to check the horses. But they were cropping peacefully in their stalls. The stallion whickered, low voiced, as Kyle looked in on him, and turned his white head to look back at Kyle.

  “Easy, boy,” said Kyle and returned to the inn to find the innkeeper.

  But the innkeeper had no idea where the Prince might have gone.

  “…If the horses aren’t taken, he’s not far,” the innkeeper said. “There’s no trouble he can get into around here. Maybe he went for a walk in the woods. I’ll leave word for the night staff to keep an eye out for him when he comes in. Where’ll you be?”

  “In the bar until it closes—then, my room,” said Kyle.

  He went back to the bar to wait, and took a booth near an open window. Time went by and gradually the number of other customers began to dwindle. Above the ranked bottles, the bar clock showed nearly midnight. Suddenly, through the window, Kyle heard a distant scream of equine fury from the stables.

  He got up and went out quickly. In the darkness outside, he ran to the stables and burst in. There in the feeble illumination of the stable’s night lighting, he saw the Prince, palefaced, clumsily saddling the gelding in the center aisle between the stalls. The door to the stallion’s stall was open. The Prince looked away as Kyle came in.

  Kyle took three swift steps to the open door and looked in. The stallion was still tied, but his ears were back, his eyes rolling, and a saddle lay tumbled and dropped on the stable floor beside him.

  “Saddle up,” said the Prince thickly from the aisle. “We’re leaving.” Kyle turned to look at him.

  “We’ve got rooms at the inn here,” he said.

  “Never mind. We’re riding. I need to clear my head.” The young man got the gelding’s cinch tight, dropped the stirrups and swung heavily up into the saddle. Without waiting for Kyle, he rode out of the stable into the night.

  “So, boy…” said Kyle soothingly to the stallion. Hastily he untied the big white horse, saddled him, and set out after the Prince. In the darkness there was no way of ground-tracking the gelding; but he leaned forward and blew into the ear of the stallion. The surprised horse neighed in protest and the whinny of the gelding came back from the darkness of the slope up ahead and over to Kyle’s right. He rode in that direction.

  He caught the Prince on the crown of the hill. The young man was walking the gelding, reins loose, and singing under his breath—the same song in an unknown language he had sung earlier. But now, as he saw Kyle, he grinned loosely and began to sing with more emphasis. For the first time Kyle caught the overtones of something mocking and lusty about the incomprehensible words. Understanding broke suddenly in him.

  “The girl!” he said. “The little waitress. Where is she?”

  The grin vanished from the Prince’s face, then came slowly back again. The grin laughed at Kyle.

  “Why, where d’you think?” The words slurred on the Prince’s tongue and Kyle, riding close, smelled the beer heavy on the young man’s breath. “In her room, sleeping and happy. Honored… though she doesn’t know it… by an Emperor’s son. And expecting to find me there in the morning. But I won’t be. Will we, good Kyle?”

  “Why did you do it, Lord?” asked Kyle, quietly.

  “Why?” The Prince peered at him, a little drunkenly in the moonlight. “Kyle, my father has four sons. I’ve got three younger brothers. But I’m the one who’s going to be Emperor; and Emperors don’t answer questions.”

  Kyle said nothing. The Prince peered at him. They rode on together for several minutes in silence.

  “All right, I’ll tell you why,” said the Prince, more loudly, after a while as if the pause had been only momentary. “It’s because you’re not my bodyguard, Kyle. You see, I’ve seen through you. I know whose bodyguard you are. You’re theirs!”

  Kyle’s jaw tightened. But the darkness hid his reaction.

  “All right—” The Prince gestured loosely, disturbing his balance in the saddle. “That’s all right. Have it your way. I don’t mind. So, we’ll play points. There was that lout at the beer garden, who puts his hands on me. But no one would tell me his name, you said. All right, you managed to bodyguard him. One point for you. But you didn’t manage to bodyguard the girl at the inn back there. One point for me. Who’s going to win, good Kyle?”

  Kyle took a deep breath.

  “Lord,” he said, “someday it’ll be your duty to marry a woman from Earth—”

  The Prince interrupted him with a laugh, and this time there was an ugly note in it.

  “You flatter yourselves,” he said. His voice thickened. “That’s the trouble with you—all you Earth people—you flatter yourselves.”

  They rode on in silence. Kyle said nothing more, but kept the head of the stallion close to the shoulder of the gelding, watching the young man closely. For a little while the Prince seemed to doze. His head sank on his chest and he let the gelding wander. Then, after a while, his head began to come up again, his automatic horseman’s fingers tightened on the reins, and he lifted his head to stare around in the moonlight.

  “I want a drink,” he said. His voice was no longer thick, but it was flat and uncheerful. “Take me where we can get some beer, Kyle.”

  Kyle took a deep breath.

  “Yes, Lord,” he said.

  He turned the stallion’s head to the right and the gelding followed. They went up over a hill and down to the edge of a lake. The dark water sparkled in the moonlight and the farther shore was lost in the night. Lights shone through the trees around the curve of the shore.

  “There, Lord,” said Kyle. “It’s a fishing resort, with a bar.”

  They rode around the shore to it. It was a low, casual building, angled to face the shore; a dock ran out from it, to which fishing boats were tethered, bobbing slightly on the black water. Light gleamed through the windows as they hitched their horses and went to the door.

  The barroom they stepped into was wide and bare. A long bar faced them with several planked fish on the wall behind it. Below the fish were three bartenders—the one in the center, middle-aged, and wearing an air of authority with his apron. The other two were young and muscular. The customers, mostly men, scattered at the square tables and standing at the bar wore rough working clothes, or equally casual vacationers’ garb.

  The Prince sat down at a table back from the bar and Kyle sat down with him. When the waitress came they ordered beer and coffee, and the Prince half-emptied his stein the moment it was brought to him. As soon as it was completely empty, he signaled the waitress again.

  “Another,” he said. This time, he smiled at the waitress when she brought his stein back. But she was a woman in her thirties, pleased but not overwhelmed by his attention. She smiled lightly back and moved off to return to the bar where she had been talking to two men her own age, one fairly tall, the other shorter, bullet-headed, and fleshy.

  The Prince drank. As he put his stein down, he seemed to become aware of Kyle, and turned to look at him.

  “I suppose,” said the Prince, “you think I’m drunk?”

  “Not yet,” said Kyle.

  “No,” said the Prince, “that’s right. Not yet. But perhaps I’m going to be. And if I decide I am, who’s going to stop me?”

  “No one, Lord.”

  “That’s right,” the young man said. “That’s right.” He drank deliberately from his stein until it was empty, and then signaled the waitress for another. A spot of color was beginning to show over each of his high cheekbones. “When you’re on a miserable little world with miserable little people… hello, Bright Eyes!” he interrupted himself as the waitress brought his beer. She laughed and went back to her friends. “…you have to amuse yourself any way you can,” he wound up. He laughed to himself.

  “When I think how my father, and Monty—everybody—used to talk this planet up to me—” He glanced aside at Kyle. “Do you know at one time I was actually scared—well, not scared exactly, nothing scares me… say concerned—about maybe having to come here, some day?” He laughed again. “Concerned that I wouldn’t measure up to you Earth people! Kyle, have you ever been to any of the Younger Worlds?”

  “No,” said Kyle.

  “I thought not. Let me tell you, good Kyle, the worst of the people there are bigger, and better looking, and smarter, and everything than anyone I’ve seen here. And I, Kyle, I—the Emperor-to-be—am better than any of them. So, guess how all you here look to me?” He stared at Kyle, waiting. “Well, answer me, good Kyle. Tell me the truth. That’s an order.”

  “It’s not up to you to judge, Lord,” said Kyle.

  “Not—? Not up to me?” The blue eyes blazed. “I’m going to be Emperor!”

  “It’s not up to any one man, Lord,” said Kyle. “Emperor or not. An Emperor’s needed, as the symbol that can hold a hundred worlds together. But the real need of the race is to survive. It took nearly a million years to evolve a survival-type intelligence here on Earth. And out on the newer worlds people are bound to change. If something gets lost out there, some necessary element lost out of the race, there needs to be a pool of original genetic material here to replace it.”

  The Prince’s lips grew wide in a savage grin.

  “Oh, good, Kyle—good!” he said. “Very good. Only, I’ve heard all that before. Only, I don’t believe it. You see—I’ve seen you people, now. And you don’t outclass us, out on the Younger Worlds. We outclass you. We’ve gone on and got better, while you stayed still. And you know it.”

  The young man laughed softly, almost in Kyle’s face.

  “All you’ve been afraid of is that we’d find out. And I have.” He laughed again. “I’ve had a look at you; and now I know. I’m bigger, better, and braver than any man in this room—and you know why? Not just because I’m the son of the Emperor, but because it’s born in me! Body, brains, and everything else! I can do what I want here, and no one on this planet is good enough to stop me. Watch.”

  He stood up, suddenly.

  “Now, I want that waitress to get drunk with me,” he said. “And this time I’m telling you in advance. Are you going to try and stop me?”

  Kyle looked up at him. Their eyes met.

  “No, Lord,” he said. “It’s not my job to stop you.”

  The Prince laughed.

  “I thought so,” he said. He swung away and walked between the tables toward the bar and the waitress, still in conversation with the two men. The Prince came up to the bar on the far side of the waitress and ordered a new stein of beer from the middle-aged bartender. When it was given to him, he took it, turned around, and rested his elbows on the bar, leaning back against it. He spoke to the waitress, interrupting the taller of the two men.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Kyle heard him say.

  The waitress, a little surprised, looked around at him. She smiled, recognizing him—a little flattered by the directness of his approach, a little appreciative of his clean good looks, a little tolerant of his youth.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” said the Prince, looking past her to the bigger of the two men, the one who had just been talking. The other stared back, and their eyes met without shifting for several seconds. Abruptly, angrily, the man shrugged, and turned about with his back hunched against them.

  “You see?” said the Prince, smiling back at the waitress. “He knows I’m the one you ought to be talking to, instead of—”

  “All right, sonny. Just a minute.”

  It was the shorter, bullet-headed man, interrupting. The Prince turned to look down at him with a fleeting expression of surprise. But the bullet-headed man was already turning to his taller friend and putting a hand on his arm.

  “Come on back, Ben,” the shorter man was saying. “The kid’s a little drunk, is all.” He turned back to the Prince. “You shove off now,” he said. “Clara’s with us.”

  The Prince stared at him blankly. The stare was so fixed that the shorter man had started to turn away, back to his friend and the waitress, when the Prince seemed to wake.

  “Just a minute—” he said, in his turn.

  He reached out a hand to one of the fleshy shoulders below the bullet head. The man turned back, knocking the hand calmly away. Then, just as calmly, he picked up the Prince’s full stein of beer from the bar and threw it in the young man’s face.

  “Get lost,” he said, unexcitedly.

  The Prince stood for a second, with the beer dripping from his face. Then, without even stopping to wipe his eyes clear, he threw the beautifully trained left hand he had demonstrated at the beer garden.