She grimaced. “But not as much as your psycho-drama has, right?”

  “Hey, you must think I’m obsessed with the game. I’m not. It’s fun and—oh, maybe ‘fun’ is too weak a word—but anyhow, it’s just little bunches of people getting together fairly regularly to play. Like my fencing, or a chess club, or, or anything.”

  She squared her shoulders. “Well, then,” she asked, “will you cancel the date you’ve made and spend your holiday with me?”

  “I, uh, I can’t do that. Not at this stage. Kendrick isn’t off on the periphery of current events, he’s closely involved with everybody else. If I didn’t show, it’d spoil things for the rest.”

  Her glance steadied upon him. “Very well. A promise is a promise, or so I imagined. But afterward—Don’t be afraid. I’m not trying to trap you. That would be no good, would it? However, if I maintain this liaison of ours, will you phase out of your game?”

  “I can’t—” Anger seized him. “No, God damn it!” he roared.

  “Then goodbye, Colin,” she said, and departed. He stared for minutes at the door she had shut behind her.

  Unlike the large Titan and Saturn-vicinity explorers, landers on the airless moons were simply modified Luna-to-space shuttles, reliable but with limited capabilities. When the blocky shape had dropped below the horizon, Garcilaso said into his radio: “We’ve lost sight of the boat, Mark. I must say it improves the view.” One of the relay micro-satellites which had been sown in orbit passed his words on.

  “Better start blazing your trail, then,” Danzig reminded. “My, my, you are a fussbudget, aren’t you?”

  Nevertheless Garcilaso unholstered the squirt gun at his hip and splashed a vividly fluorescent circle of paint on the ground. He would do it at eyeball intervals until his party reached the glacier. Except where dust lay thick over the regolith, footprints were faint, under the feeble gravity, and absent when a walker crossed continuous rock.

  Walker? No, leaper. The three bounded exultant, little hindered by space suits, life support units, tool and ration packs. The naked land fled from their haste, and even higher, ever more clear and glorious to see, loomed the ice ahead of them.

  There was no describing it, not really. You could speak of lower slopes and palisades above, to a mean height of perhaps a hundred meters, with spires towering farther still. You could speak of gracefully curved tiers going up those braes, of lacy parapets and fluted crags and arched openings to caves filled with wonders, of mysterious blues in the depths and greens where light streamed through translucencies, of gem-sparkle across whiteness where radiance and shadow wove mandalas—and none of it would convey anything more than Scobie’s earlier, altogether inadequate comparison to the Grand Canyon.

  “Stop,” he said for the dozenth time. “I want to take a few pictures.”

  “Will anybody understand them who hasn’t been here?” whispered Broberg.

  “Probably not,” said Garcilaso in the same hushed tone. “Maybe no one but us ever will.”

  “What do you mean by that?” demanded Danzig’s voice.

  “Never mind,” snapped Scobie.

  “I…think…I…know,” the chemist said. “Yes, it is a great piece of scenery, but you’re letting it hypnotize you.”

  “If you don’t cut out that drivel,” Scobie warned, “we’ll cut you out of the circuit. Damn it, we’ve got work to do. Get off our backs.”

  Danzig gusted a sigh. “Sorry. Uh, are you finding any clues to the nature of that—that thing?”

  Scobie focused his camera. “Well,” he said, partly mollified, “the different shades and textures, and no doubt the different shapes, seem to confirm what the reflection spectra from the flyby suggested. The composition is a mixture, or a jumble, or both, of several materials, and varies from place to place. Water ice is obvious, but I feel sure of carbon dioxide too, and I’d bet on ammonia, methane, and presumably lesser amounts of other stuff.”

  “Methane? Could they stay solid at ambient temperature, in a vacuum?”

  “We’ll have to find out for sure. However, I’d guess that most of the time it’s cold enough, at least for methane strata that occur down inside where there’s pressure on them.”

  Within the vitryl globe of her helmet, Broberg’s features showed delight. “Wait!” she cried. “I have an idea—about what happened to the probe that landed.” She drew breath. “It came down almost at the foot of the glacier, you recall. Our view of the site from space seemed to indicate that an avalanche buried it, but we couldn’t understand how that might have been triggered. Well, suppose a methane layer at exactly the wrong location melted. Heat radiation from the jets may have warmed it, and later the radar beam used to map contours added the last few degrees necessary. The stratum flowed, and down came everything that had rested on top of it.”

  “Plausible,” Scobie said. “Congratulations, Jean.”

  “Nobody thought of the possibility in advance?” Garcilaso scoffed. “What kind of scientists have we got along?”

  “The kind who were being overwhelmed by work after we reached Saturn, and still more by data input,” Scobie answered. “The universe is bigger than you or anybody can realize, hotshot.”

  “Oh. Sure. No offense.” Garcilaso’s glance returned to the ice. “Yes, we’ll never run out of mysteries, will we?”

  “Never.” Broberg’s eyes glowed enormous. “At the heart of things will always be magic. The Elf King rules—”

  Scobie returned his camera to its pouch. “Stow the gab and move on,” he ordered curtly.

  His gaze locked for an instant with Broberg’s. In the weird, mingled light, it could be seen that she went pale, then red, before she sprang off beside him.

  Ricia had gone alone into Moonwood on Midsummer Eve. The King found her there and took her unto him as she had hoped. Ecstasy became terror when he afterward bore her off; yet her captivity in the City of Ice brought her many more such hours, and beauties and marvels unknown among mortals. Alvarlan, her mentor, sent his spirit in quest of her, and was himself beguiled by what he found. It was an effort of will for him to tell Sir Kendrick of the Isles where she was, albeit he pledged his help in freeing her.

  N’Kuma the Lionslayer, Bela of Eastmarch, Karina of the Far West, Lady Aurelia, Olav Harp-master had none of them been present when this happened.

  The glacier (a wrong name for something that might have no counterpart in the Solar System) lifted off the plain abruptly as a wall. Standing there, the three could no longer see the heights. They could, though, see that the slope which curved steeply upward to a filigree-topped edge was not smooth. Shadows lay blue in countless small craters. The sun had climbed just sufficiently high to beget them; a Iapetan day is more than seventy-nine of Earth’s.

  Danzig’s question crackled in earphones; “Now are you satisfied? Will you come back before a fresh landslide catches you?”

  “It won’t,” Scobie replied. “We aren’t a vehicle, and the local configuration has clearly been stable for centuries or better. Besides, what’s the point of a manned expedition if nobody investigates anything?”

  “I’ll see if I can climb,” Garcilaso offered.

  “No, wait,” Scobie commanded. “I’ve had experience with mountains and snowpacks, for whatever that may be worth. Let me study out a route for us first.”

  “You’re going onto that stuff, the whole gaggle of you?” exploded Danzig. “Have you completely lost your minds?”

  Scobie’s brow and lips tightened. “Mark, I warn you again, if you don’t get your emotions under control we’ll cut you off. We’ll hike on a ways if I decide it’s safe.”

  He paced, in floating low-weight fashion, back and forth while he surveyed the jokull. Layers and blocks of distinct substances were plain to see, like separate ashlars laid by an elvish mason…where they were not so huge that a giant must have been at work…The craterlets might be sentry posts on this lowest embankment of the City’s defenses…

  Garcilaso, most vivacious of men, stood motionless and let his vision lose itself in the sight. Broberg knelt down to examine the ground, but her own gaze kept wandering aloft.

  Finally she beckoned. “Colin, come over here, please,” she said. “I believe I’ve made a discovery.”

  Scobie joined her. As she rose, she scooped a handful of fine black particles off the shards on which she stood and let it trickle from her glove. “I suspect this is the reason the boundary of the ice is sharp,” she told him.

  “What is?” Danzig inquired from afar. He got no answer.

  “I noticed more and more dust as we went along,” Broberg continued. “If it fell on patches and lumps of frozen stuff, isolated from the main mass, and covered them, it would absorb solar heat till they melted or, likelier, sublimed. Even water molecules would escape to space, in this weak gravity. The main mass was too big for that; square-cube law. Dust grains there would simply melt their way down a short distance, then be covered as surrounding material collapsed on them, and the process would stop.”

  “H’m.” Scobie raised a hand to stroke his chin, encountered his helmet, and sketched a grin at himself. “Sounds reasonable. But where did so much dust come from—and the ice, for that matter?”

  “I think—” Her voice dropped until he could barely hear, and her look went the way of Garcilaso’s. His remained upon her face, profiled against stars. “I think this bears out your comet hypothesis, Colin. A comet struck Iapetus. It came from the direction it did because of getting so near Saturn that it was forced to swing in a hairpin bend around the planet. It was enormous; the ice of it covered almost a hemisphere, in spite of much more being vaporized and lost. The dust is partly from it, partly generated by the impact.”

  He clasped her armored shoulder. “Your theory. Jean. I was not the first to propose a comet, but you’re the first to corroborate with details.”

  She didn’t appear to notice, except that she murmured further: “Dust can account for the erosion that made those lovely formations, too. It caused differential melting and sublimation on the surface, according to the patterns it happened to fall in and the mixes of ices it clung to, until it was washed away or encysted. The craters, these small ones and the major ones we’ve observed from above, they have a separate but similar origin. Meteorites—”

  “Whoa, there,” he objected. “Any sizeable meteorite would release enough energy to steam off most of the entire field.”

  “I know. Which shows the comet collision was recent, less than a thousand years ago, or we wouldn’t be seeing this miracle today. Nothing big has since happened to strike, yet. I’m thinking of little stones, cosmic sand, in prograde orbits around Saturn so that they hit with low relative speed. Most simply make dimples in the ice. Lying there, however, they collect solar heat because of being dark, and re-radiate it to melt away their surroundings, till they sink beneath. The concavities they leave reflect incident radiation from side to side, and thus continue to grow. The pothole effect. And again, because the different ices have different properties, you don’t get perfectly smooth craters, but those fantastic bowls we saw before we landed.”

  “By God!” Scobie hugged her. “You’re a genius.”

  Helmet against helmet, she smiled and said, “No. It’s obvious, once you’ve seen for yourself.” She was quiet for a bit while still they held each other. “Scientific intuition is a funny thing, I admit,” she went on at last. “Considering the problem, I was hardly aware of my logical mind. What I thought was—the City of Ice, made with starstones out of that which a god called down from heaven—”

  “Jesus Maria!” Garcilaso spun about to stare at them. Scobie released the woman. “We’ll go after confirmation,” he said unsteadily. “To the large crater you’ll remember we spotted a few klicks inward. The surface appears quite safe to walk on.”

  “I called that crater the Elf King’s Dance Hall,” Broberg mused, as if a dream were coming back to her.

  “Have a care.” Garcilaso’s laugh rattled. “Heap big medicine yonder. The King is only an inheritor; it was giants who built these walls, for the gods.”

  “Well, I’ve got to find a way in, don’t I?” Scobie responded.

  “Indeed,” Alvarlan says. “I cannot guide you from this point. My spirit can only see through mortal eyes. I can but lend you my counsel, until we have neared the gates,”

  “Are you sleepwalking in that fairytale of yours?” Danzig yelled. “Come back before you get yourselves killed!”

  “Will you dry up?” Scobie snarled. “It’s nothing but a style of talk we’ve got between us. If you can’t understand that, you’ve got less use of your brain than we do.”

  “Listen, won’t you? I didn’t say you’re crazy. You don’t have delusions or anything like that. I do say you’ve steered your fantasies toward this kind of place, and now the reality has reinforced them till you’re under a compulsion you don’t recognize. Would you go ahead so recklessly anywhere else in the universe? Think!”

  “That does it. We’ll resume contact after you’ve had time to improve your manners.” Scobie snapped off his main radio switch. The circuits that stayed active served for close-by communication but had no power to reach an orbital relay. His companions did likewise.

  The three faced the awesomeness before them. “You can help me find the Princess when we are inside, Alvarlan,” Kendrick says.

  “That I can and will,” the sorcerer vows.

  “I wait for you, most steadfast of my lovers,” Ricia croons.

  Alone in the spacecraft, Danzig well-nigh sobbed, “Oh, damn that game forever!” The sound fell away into emptiness.

  -3-

  To condemn psychodrama, even in its enhanced form, would be to condemn human nature.

  It begins in childhood. Play is necessary to an immature mammal, a means of learning to handle the body, the perceptions, and the outside world. The young human plays, must play, with its brain too. The more intelligent the child, the more its imagination needs exercise. There are degrees of activity, from the passive watching of a show on a screen, onward through reading, daydreaming, storytelling, and psychodrama…for which the child has no such fancy name.

  We cannot give this behavior any single description, for the shape and course it takes depend on endlessly many variables. Sex, age, culture, and companions are only the most obvious. For example, in pre-electronic North America little girls would often play “house” while little boys played “cowboys and Indians” or “cops and robbers,” whereas nowadays a mixed group of their descendants might play “dolphins” or “astronauts and aliens.” In essence, a small band forms; each individual makes up a character to portray, or borrows one from fiction; simple props may be employed, such as toy weapons, or any chance object such as a stick may be declared something else, such as a metal detector, or a thing may be quite imaginary, as the scenery almost always is. The children then act out a drama which they compose as they go along. When they cannot physically perform a certain action, they describe it. (“I jump real high, like you can do on Mars, an’ come out over the edge o’ that ol’ Valles Marineris, an’ take that bandit by surprise.”) A large cast of characters, especially villains, frequently comes into existence by fiat.

  The most imaginative member of the troupe dominates the game and the evolution of the story line, though in a rather subtle fashion, through offering the most vivid possibilities. The rest, however, are brighter than average; psychodrama in this highly developed form does not appeal to everybody.

  For those to whom it does, the effects are beneficial and lifelong. Besides increasing their creativity through use, it lets them try out a play version of different adult roles and experiences. Thereby they begin to acquire insight into adulthood.

  Such playacting ends when adolescence commences, if not earlier—but only in that form, and not necessarily forever in it. Grown-ups have many dream-games. This is plain to see in lodges, for example, with their titles, costumes, and ceremonies; but does it not likewise animate all pageantry, every ritual? To what extent are our heroisms, sacrifices, and self-aggrandizements the acting out of personae that we maintain? Some thinkers have attempted to trace this element through every aspect of society.

  Here, though, we are concerned with overt psychodrama among adults. In Western civilization it first appeared on a noticeable scale during the middle twentieth century. Psychiatrists found it a powerful diagnostic and therapeutic technique. Among ordinary folk, war and fantasy games, many of which involved identification with imaginary or historical characters, became increasingly popular. In part this was doubtless a retreat from the restrictions and menaces of that unhappy period, but likely in larger part it was a revolt of the mind against the inactive entertainment, notably television, which had come to dominate recreation.

  The Chaos ended those activities. Everybody knows about their revival in recent times—for healthier reasons, one hopes. By projecting three-dimensional scenes and appropriate sounds from a data bank—or, better yet, by having a computer produce them to order—players gained a sense of reality that intensified their mental and emotional commitment. Yet in those games that went on for episode after episode, year after real-time year, whenever two or more members of a group could get together to play, they found themselves less and less dependent on such appurtenances. It seemed that, through practice, they had regained the vivid imaginations of their childhoods, and could make anything, or airy nothing itself, into the objects and the worlds they desired.

  I have deemed it necessary thus to repeat the obvious in order that we may see it in perspective. The news beamed from Saturn has brought widespread revulsion. (Why? What buried fears have been touched? This is subject matter for potentially important research.) Overnight, adult psychodrama has become unpopular; it may become extinct. That would, in many ways, be a worse tragedy than what has occurred yonder. There is no reason to suppose that the game ever harmed any mentally sound person on Earth; on the contrary. Beyond doubt, it has helped astronauts stay sane and alert on long, difficult missions. If it has no more medical use, that is because psychotherapy has become a branch of applied biochemistry.