And some say that he waits in timeless Avalon until France the fair is in danger, and some say he sleeps beneath Kronborg Castle and rises in the hour of Denmark’s need, but none remember that he is and has always been only a man, with the humble needs and loves of a man; to all, he is merely the Defender, and they think not that he has longings of his own.

  He rode out on the wold, and it was as if dawn rode with him.

  I had a letter from Holger Carlsen right after the war, just to say he’d come through it alive, but after that I didn’t hear from him for two years. Then one day, without warning, he showed up in my office.

  I thought he’d changed a lot, grown quieter and much older-looking, but put it down to whatever experiences he had had as an undergrounder. After the usual talk, catching up on all the lost years, he explained that he’d gotten a job over here. “Just a money earner,” he said. “What I really want to do is haunt your bookstores. I’ve picked up things in London and Paris and Rome, but it isn’t enough yet. I don’t have all I need.”

  “What on earth are you up to?” I asked.

  He laughed, rather harshly. “Some other time,” he answered.

  The other time wasn’t long about coming, though. I imagine he wanted a sympathetic ear pretty badly. In spite of having joined the Catholic Church with its confessional, he needed to tell the whole thing, as it had been for him. “Not that I expect you to believe a word of it,” he said, over beer and sandwiches one midnight in my apartment.

  He finished in the darkness before morning, when the streets were empty and hollow beneath us and the city’s lights were muted enough for us to see the stars. Then he poured himself more beer and stared at it for a long while before drinking.

  “And how did you get back?” I asked, quietly so as not to jar him. He looked like a sleepwalker.

  “Suddenly I was back,” he said. “I rode out and scattered the hosts of Chaos, driving them before me, and somehow it seemed as if I were also fighting on that beach, in another night and another world. And then I was. There I stood in armor, with bullets yelping around me and Cortana still in my hand. And I rushed forward and killed the Germans. When I had finished, the sword was gone, slipped back to its own world; but I was still here.”

  He smiled at something I couldn’t see. “Those two worlds—and many more, for all I know—are in some way the same. The same fight was being waged: here it was the Nazis and there it was the Middle World, but it was Chaos against Law, something old and wild and blind against man and the works of man. And in both worlds it was the time of need for Denmark and France, so Ogier came forth in both of them.

  “I don’t know just why that man in the boat was so important. Maybe it was his knowledge, maybe it was something he could do. I only know he had to escape. And Holger Danske rose to see that he did. I was—weeks—gone in that Carolingian world, and came back to the same minute in this. Time is a funny thing.”

  “And then what happened?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “Devil a time I had explaining how I came to be wearing armor. But we were in too much of a hurry for explanations, and went our separate ways. Since then I’ve been plain Holger Carlsen, no superhuman powers, no great destiny, just the memory of a life which began in Carl’s day.” He shrugged. “As I said, the spell laid on Holger Danske the Defender drew me back here, but once the job was done, the crisis past in both worlds, there was no special reason for me to be in one rather than the other. So that great impersonal power which preserves the balance of the universes simply left me here.”

  He looked wearily at me. “Of course,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking. Systematic delusions. But thanks for listening.”

  “I’m not quite sure what to think,” I answered. “But tell me, why are you hunting books?”

  “Old books,” he said. “Grimoires. Treatises on magic. And new books. The latest mathematical speculations on chance and randomness and alternate possibilities. Morgan sent me here once and—” His fist crashed down on the table. “—and I’ll find the way to get back!”

  I haven’t seen or heard from him for a long time now. Sometimes I wonder if he did return to his Alianora—I hope he did.

  But meanwhile new storms are rising. It may be that we shall need Holger Danske again.

  The Snows of Ganymede

  -1-

  Three dead men walked across the face of hell. Their feet groped past frozen rock, now and then they stumbled in the wan light, and always they heard the thin, bitter mumble of wind and felt the cold gnawing at their flesh. Around them there was death, naked stone reaching for a cruel sky of stars, a lean, poisonous whirl of snow which was not snow, that whipped about them and then lay still to crunch under their tread. Jupiter was low in the south, a great shield which glowed amber.

  They had been walking for a long time now, it seemed like forever, and ahead of them was nothing but another endlessness of walking. Speech had died within them. Their feet were numbed clods which rose and struck the ground and rose again. There was so little awareness left that they did not feel the small jarring of their boots against rock and snow. It was very quiet.

  Hall Davenant wondered dimly if he had not always been walking from nothing to nowhere, across the snows of Ganymede, with Jupiter enormous on the horizon and the stars cold overhead. He wondered if he had not dreamed all his past, if Earth and Luna and mankind were not the fleeting vision of the only life in the world as it stumbled mad through desolation.

  Yamagata spoke. After so long a silence, it was a shock to hear his remote, toneless voice. “We’re not going to make it.”

  There was another stillness while Kruse found words. Then: “Doesn’t look like it. But there’s no point in sitting and waiting.”

  Pick-up-your-right-foot—glide—down! Pick-up-your-left-foot—glide—down!

  “Not the way were going, we won’t,” said Yamagata. One gauntleted hand jerked toward the gauges on his shoulder. “Look. Oxygen for barely two hours more. Juice for maybe three, but it’s no use staying warm if you can’t breathe.”

  “Oh, well,” said Kruse. “We weren’t going anywhere anyway.”

  Pick-up-your-right-foot—glide—down!

  There was a time, several thousand years ago it seemed, when Davenant could not have listened to them talking thus without a shiver in his guts. But cold and hunger and weariness had dragged at him so long that it didn’t make any difference now.

  His companions looked blocky and inhuman in their helmeted suits. It was into darkness. But it didn’t matter now.

  Dreamily, Davenant considered all the hope and strength which had once laid within him. He had meant to be a soldier in man’s finest war, the fight of all men against a blind and indifferent nature which had brought their kind forth without caring. But she was too strong, he thought vaguely; one casual giant shrug of a planet’s shoulders, and her parricide children were tumbled into ruin.

  No, this wasn’t the way an Engineer ought to be thinking, he told himself. Even at the gates of death, there should still be pride. Ganymede had stripped it from him, until he was nothing but a lurching blindness.

  Yamagata continued, almost absent-mindedly: “We might be headed in more-or-less the correct direction. We might get a decent reception, if and when we arrive.”

  “Or we might get shot down,” said Kruse. “Forget it.”

  “They may be just beyond the next hill,” said Yamagata. “Or they may be—shall we say—three hours off. And we have oxygen for two hours.”

  Pick-up-your-left-foot—glide—down!

  “Now, our information is a good deal more important than any one of us,” went on Yamagata. “The Abbey has got to know. All right, I have an idea.”

  Kruse slipped on a sheet of ice. He caught himself wearily, his falling was slow, and he got up without bothering to curse.

  “Torvald, you have people at home, don’t you?” asked Yamagata.

  “Yeh,” said Kruse. “Parents, a couple of sisters. And there was a girl who—never mind.”

  “How about you, Hall?”

  “Not to speak of,” said Davenant mechanically.

  “Nor I. And you’re younger. Wait a minute.” Yamagata stopped. The others went on for several long low-gravity paces before their slowed brains brought them around again.

  Yamagata’s face was like wrinkled yellow cloth in the pouring Jupiter light. It had a little smile as he peered through his face-plate. “They’ll stick my name in Heros’ Hall or some such foolishness,” he said. “What I wish you’d do, if you live, is drink a beer for me at the Beacon in Luna City.”

  “Wait a minute—” Kruse took a step toward him, but was too late. Yamagata had already turned off his oxygen valves. Now, quite simply, he fumbled at some screws and lifted his helmet.

  Moist air within rushed out in a freezing cloud. Blood bubbled on his lips, ran from his nose and ears as pressure dropped, and congealed. He swayed for a long time before toppling.

  The face, under its sudden mask of ice, was pulled and distorted beyond humanness. Kruse stooped over. Even through the bulky suit, he could be seen to shake.

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” he mumbled. “He shouldn’t have done it.” The wind slipped under his voice, a ghostly whistle.

  Davenant felt ill. But his training rose within him. This was part of what it meant to be an Engineer. At the very least, Yamagata had returned that knowledge to him.

  “He gave us each an hour’s oxygen,” he said.

  “Yes. I wish he hadn’t.”

  “Somebody has to make it, if that’s possible at all.” Davenant felt tears on his cheeks. “We’re wasting time standing here.”

  “I—suppose so, kid.”

  Kruse turned the body around and unclipped the bottles and accumulators. Then he laid Yamagata out—the arms were not yet too rigid for him to fold the hands across the breast, but he couldn’t close the bulged-out eyes. There was nothing else to do. Rising, he helped Davenant fasten on the new equipment.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They went around a high dark bluff, and the body was lost to sight.

  After a while, Davenant said: “I wonder if we shouldn’t do the same. One survivor is better than none. We could match for it.”

  “No,” said Kruse. “That’s cutting our number too low. Come on.”

  Davenant shook his head, as if he had been struck. But the shock had given him back his manhood. As he walked, he could even remember and he tried to sort out how it had begun. Take it from the beginning, back at the Abbey—

  Pick-up-your-right-foot—glide—down! Pick-up-your-left-foot—glide—down!

  -2-

  Seen from outside, in the harsh bright flare of sunlight or the deep soft blue which poured from Earth, the Abbey was a fantastic witches’ castle, perched on the cruel heights of Archimedes Crater like the nest of some inhuman robber baron. It was built of native stone, great rough-hewn blocks forming towers and walls of immense thickness. All of it had a purpose, aimed at the future—spires for observation and testing, walls and roofs to shut out raw vacuum. But in appearance it was still archaic. It looked as if it had always been on the Moon.

  There was a road winding up to it, and a landing field for local rockets; further back was a spaceport, where the shining ships were like spears poised at heaven. There were also guns and arsenals and launching racks for guided missiles, but they were hidden, and nothing was said about them. They had been stocked against a day of trouble which might or might not come.

  Inside, there was an endlessness of rooms and passages, burrowing deep into the ground or climbing to the highest towers. Some of these were for maintenance—food, water, air, power. In case of need, the place could be made self-sufficient. Others were storerooms; still others were laboratories where testing and research never ended; the rest were sleeping chambers, refectories, assembly and recreation centers.

  There was always sound here—the whisper of ventilators and engines, footfalls, talk, and music.

  This was Archimedes Academy headquarters and training school of the Order of Planetary Engineers. Few called it anything but the Abbey.

  Hall Davenant walked down a corridor. It was of dressed stone, high and vaulted, the tapestries and murals and fluorotubes never quite lifting its cool gloom. He walked fast and crisply, his boots slamming in pride on the flagging, his gray tunic and trousers forced into a painful neatness. That was the dress uniform of Field Service.

  His shoulders bore the silver comets of Tech-Two rank, and on his breast was the helium-atom insignia which said his speciality was nucleonics. He was a young man, with a young man’s openness in his rather long face, blue eyes, yellow hair, close cropped in the approved Engineer style.

  He passed a couple of cadets, teen-aged boys who saluted him with bone-cracking smartness. He responded, thinking that cadets were a nuisance, always going through the rituals. For, of course, seniors had to conform before them. That was part of the training. It did not occur to him that he had graduated only three years previously.

  Further on, he met an elderly lab-man in the loose robe and short beard affected by that service. This one had the gaunt, deep-burned features of a man who had been in Field in his younger days and retired to the Abbey—for teaching, research, and administration—when his body could no longer take deep space. He stopped Davenant, who knew him slightly. “Hear you’re going to Jupiter,” he said.

  “Well—yes. Survey only this trip.”

  “I know. Just wanted to ask you to pick me up some samples of green callistite. I’ve used up all we had, and want to run some more tests on it. Damnedest stuff I ever saw.”

  “Different geology, different minerals, within limits,” Davenant said tritely.

  “I know. And you tell me how we’re going to sink shafts fifty kilometers deep without knowing the properties of the strata. I lost two months’ work on Mars once, because we didn’t know just how friable the sandstone around Thor was. For God’s sake, spend a little time with a sonic probe before drawing up your specs!”

  “Certainly.”

  Davenant got away as fast as he decently could. After seven years of training, he thought, and three of Field Service—Venus and the Belt—he ought to know the elements of his trade!

  Still space was big, and other planets could be unearthly in startling and deadly ways. You were never sure. An Engineer always walked with his life in his hands. The labs were there to give him as firm a grip as possible, but even so the tablets in Heros’ Hall were getting overly numerous.

  He came to the office he wanted and pushed the scanner button. The man inside, Lyell, saw his face and punched to open the door for him. He entered, came to attention, and saluted. Lyell was his new captain, and some of them stood on ceremony even among seniors.

  The lean gray man waved him negligently to a chair. The office was furnished as austerely as most of the Academy. That had a definite purpose, like everything else; it kept the men used to discomfort, of which deep space had plenty. Field men did not marry if they wanted to stay in that branch. They lived at the Abbey, and their sprees when on leave were carried out incog. Eventually, of course, most who survived would acquire wives. Then they got apartments in the underground village at the foot of the castle, became lab-men or technies, perhaps at last made the Council.

  Lyell was old to be a spacer.

  Few Engineers ever left the Order. Their seven years as cadets included mind training under some of the most skilled psychotechnicians in the Solar System, and when they were through, the Order and its esprit de corps were part of them.

  Davenant looked around. Everybody else seemed to be there. Akihito Yamagata, small and quiet: geologist. Torvald Kruse, big and red-haired and cheerful, the son of a rancher on Venus: heavy construction. René Falkenhorst from Mars, tall and slender and dark: mechanical engineer. Yuan Li, a trifle on the portly side, always smiling just a bit: biological engineer. Davenant himself, was atomics expert. And Arthur Lyell, stiff and gray, with enough all-around experience to qualify him for chief.

  The men sat before the captain’s desk, not speaking. Spacers learned to conserve talk, lest they exhaust the supply on a long tour of duty. There was a haze of smoke in the air from cigarettes and pipes.

  “I wanted to have a short conference with you,” said Lyell. His eyes went around their circle. “You’ll be in centrifuge and so forth from now on until we leave, and once in space we’ll be busy enough studying up technical details. As you know, we’re off to the Jovian System on preliminary survey. The Jovians want us to terraform Ganymede and Callisto—a big job since the survey alone may well take a year. Not many comforts of home out there. I suppose you’re all willing to go?”

  “Of course,” said Davenant, and felt rather juvenile for having spoken.

  “Not much is known about the Jovian System or its settlers,” Lyell went on. “I’m having the library stat copies of what books and articles we have. The moons seem to be poor in natural resources, so one thing we’ll have to keep an eye out for is means of payment.”

  He must have noticed Davenant’s faint shock, for he smiled and explained, “Yes, I know that sounds contrary to the spirit of the Charter. The Planetary Engineers exist to make space available for all men, regardless of race, creed, or political affiliations. Nevertheless, ever since the Order broke away from being a branch of the Union government and became an independent organization, it’s had to pay its own way.

  “So far, it’s done well. We’re by far the wealthiest and most influential private organization in the System. But a whole job of planetary transformation is so costly that we can’t go into the red. The Jovians are poor in fissionables, and will probably be unwilling to part with any, so we’ll look for other resources. In fact, we may have to set up some industries for them to make things we can use to pay the Order. Bear that in mind.”