And now he had it, his highest ambition lay in his hands for him to do with as he would. But men were walking across the snows of Pluto while he sat here.

  Some day the Solar System wouldn’t be big enough for them. Briefly, he looked out to the cold challenge of the stars. Then he returned to his work.

  Territory

  Joyce Davisson awoke as if she had been stabbed.

  The whistle came again, strong enough to penetrate mortar and metal and insulation, on into her eardrums. She sat up in the dark with a gasp of recognition. When last she heard that wildcat wail, it was in the Chabanda, and it meant that two bands were hunting each other. But then she had been safely aloft in a flitter, armed men on either side of her and a grave Ancient for guide. What she saw and heard came to her amplified by instruments that scanned the ice desert glittering beneath. Those tiger-striped warriors who slew and died were only figures on a screen. She had felt sorry for them, yet somehow they were not quite real: individuals only, whom she had never met, atoms that perished because their world was perishing. Her concern was with the whole.

  Now the whistle was against her station.

  It couldn’t be!

  An explosion went crump. She heard small things rattle on her desktop and felt her bed shaken. Suddenly the glissandi were louder in her head, and a snarl of drumtaps accompanied them, a banging on metal and crashing as objects were knocked off shelves. The attackers must have blown down the door of the machine section and swarmed through. Only where could they have gotten the gunpowder?

  Where but in Kusulongo the City?

  That meant the Ancients had decided the humans were better killed. The fear of death went through Joyce in a wave. It passed on, leaving bewilderment and pain, as if she were a child struck for no reason. Why had they done this to her, who came for nothing but to help them?

  Feet pounded in the hall just outside the terrestrialized section of the dome. The mission’s native staff had roused and were coming out of their quarters with weapons to hand. She heard savage yells. Then, further off among the machines, combat broke loose. Swords clattered, tomahawks cracked on bone, the pistol she had given Uulobu spoke with an angry snap. But her gang couldn’t hold out long. The attackers had to be Shanga, from the camp in the oasis just under Kusulongo the Mountain. No other clan was near, and the Ancients themselves never fought aggressively. But there were hundreds of male Shanga in the oasis, while the mission had scarcely two dozen trustworthy t’Kelans.

  Heavily armored against exterior conditions, the human area would not be entered as easily as the outside door of the machine section had been gotten down. But once the walls were cracked—

  Joyce bounded to her feet. One hand passed by the main switchplate on its way to her gear rack, and the lights came on. The narrow, cluttered room, study as well as sleeping place, looked somehow distorted in that white glow. Because I’m scared, she realized. I’m caught in a living nightmare. Nerve and muscle carried on without her mind. She leaped into the formfitting Long John and the heavy fabricord suit. Drawing the skin-thin gloves over her hands, she connected their wiring to the electric net woven into the main outfit. Now: kerofoam-soled boots; air renewal tank and powerpack on the back; pistol and bandolier; pouched belt of iron rations; minicom in breast pocket; vitryl helmet snugged down on the shoulders but face plate left open for the time being.

  Check all fasteners, air system, heat system, everything. The outdoors is lethal on t’Kela. The temperature, on this summer night in the middle latitudes, is about sixty below zero Celsius. The partial pressure of nitrogen will induce narcosis, the ammonia will burn out your lungs. There is no water vapor that your senses can detect; the air will suck you dry. None of these factors differ enough from Earth to kill you instantly—no, aided by an oxygen content barely sufficient to maintain your life, you will savor the process for minutes before you even lose consciousness.

  And the Shanga out there, now busily killing your native assistants, have gunpowder to break down these walls.

  Joyce whirled about. The others! There was no intercom; two dozen people in one dome didn’t need any. She snatched at the door of the room adjoining hers. Nothing happened. “Open up, you idiot!” she heard herself scream above the noise outside. “Come along! We’ve got to get away—”

  A hoarse basso answered through the panels: “What you mean, open up? You locked yourself in, by damn!”

  Of course, of course, Joyce’s mind fumbled. Her pulse and the swelling racket of battle nearly drowned thought. She’d fastened this door on her own side. During her time with the mission alone, there had never been any reason to do so. But then Nicholas van Rijn landed, and got himself quartered next to her, and she had enough trouble by day fending off his ursine advances— She pushed the switch.

  The merchant rolled through. Like most Esperancians, Joyce was tall, but she did not come up to his neck. His shoulders filled the doorway and his pot belly strained the fabricord suit that had been issued him. Hung about with survival equipment, he looked still more monstrous than he had done when snorting his way around the dome in snuff-stained finery of lace and ruffles. The great hook nose jutted from an open helmet, snuffing the air as if for a scent of blood.

  “Hah!” he bawled. Greasy black hair, carefully ringleted to shoulder length, swirled as he looked from side to side; the waxed mustache and goatee threatened every corner like horns. “What in the name of ten times to the tenth damned souls on a logarithmic spiral to hell is going on here for fumblydiddies? I thought, me, you had anyhows the trust of those natives!”

  “The others,” Joyce choked. “Come on, let’s get together with them.”

  Van Rijn nodded curtly, so that his several chins quivered, and let her take the lead. Personal rooms in the human section faced the same corridor, each with a door opening on that as well as on its two neighbors. Joyce’s room happened to be at the end of the row, with the machine storage section on its farther side. Unmarried and fond of privacy, she had chosen that arrangement when she first came here. The clubroom was at the hall’s other terminus, around the curve of the dome. As she emerged from her quarters, Joyce saw door after door gaping open. The only ones still closed belonged to chambers which nobody occupied, extras built in the anticipation of outside visitors like van Rijn’s party. So everyone else had already gotten into their suits and down to the clubroom, the fixed emergency rendezvous. She broke into a run. Van Rijn’s ponderous dogtrot made a small earthquake behind her. Gravity on t’kela was the same as on Earth or Esperance.

  The only thing that’s the same, Joyce thought wildly. For an instant the recollection of her home on the green planet of the star called Pax—a field billowing with grain, remote blue mountains, the flag of the sovereign world flying red and gold against a fleecy sky, and that brave dream which had built the Commonality—nearly blinded her.

  It roared at her back. The floor heaved underfoot. As she fell, the boom came again, and yet again. The third explosion pierced through. A hammerblow of concussion followed.

  Striking the floor, she rolled over. Her head rattled from side to side of her helmet. The taste of blood mixed with smoke in her mouth. She looked back down the corridor through ragged darknesses that came and went before her eyes. The wall at the end, next to her own room, was split and broken. Wild shadowy figures moved in the gloom beyond the twisted structural members.

  “They blew it open,” she said stupidly.

  “Close your helmet,” van Rijn barked. He had already clasped his own face plate. The amplifier brought her his gravelly tones, but a dullness would not let them through her brain.

  “They blew it open,” she repeated. The thing seemed too strange to be real.

  A native leaped into the breach. He could stand Terrestrial air and temperature for a while if he held his breath. And t’Kelan atmosphere, driven by a higher pressure, was already streaming past him. The stocky, striped figure poised in a tension like that of the strung bow he aimed. Huge slit-pupilled eyes glared in the light from the flouros.

  An Esperancian technician came running around the bend of the corridor. “Joyce!” he cried. “Freeman van Rijn! Where—” The bow twanged. A barbed arrowhead ripped his suit. An instant afterwards the air seemed full of arrows, darts, spears, hurled from the murk. Van Rijn threw himself across Joyce. The technician spun on his heels and fled.

  Van Rijn’s well-worn personal blaster jumped into his fist. He fired from his prone position. The furry shape in the breach tumbled backward. The shadows behind withdrew from sight. But the yell and clatter went on out there.

  A first ammoniacal whiff stung Joyce’s nostrils. “Pox and pestilence,” van Rijn growled. “You like maybe to breathe that dragon belch?” He rose to his knees and closed her face plate. His little black close-set eyes regarded her narrowly. “So, stunned, makes that the way of it? Well, hokay, you is a pretty girl with a nice figure and stuff even if you should not cut your hair so short. Waste not, want not. I rescue you, ha?”

  He dragged her across one shoulder, got up, and backed wheezily along the hall, his blaster covering the direction of the hole. “Ugh, ugh,” he muttered, “this is not a job for a poor old fat man who should be at home in his nice office on Earth with a cigar and maybe a wee glass Genever. The more so when those misbegotten snouthearts he must use for help will rob him blind, ja, unscrew his eyeballs they will, so soon as he isn’t looking. But all the factors at all the trading posts are such gruntbrains that poor Nicholas van Rijn must come out his own selfs, a hundred lightyears in the direction of Orion’s bellybutton he must come, and look for new trading possibilities. Else the wolves-with-rabies competition tears his Solar Spice & Liquors Company in shreds and leaves him prostitute in his old age…Ah, here we is. Downsy-daisy.”

  Joyce shook her head as he eased her to the floor. Full awareness had come back, and her knees didn’t wobble much. The clubroom door was in front of her. She pushed the switch. The barrier didn’t move. “Locked,” she said.

  Van Rijn pounded till it shivered. “Open up!” he bellowed. “Thunder and thighbones, what is this farce? Open up!”

  A native raced around the curve of the hall. Van Rijn turned. Joyce shoved his blaster aside. “No, that’s Uulobu.” The t’Kelan must have exhausted his pistol and thrown it away, for a tomahawk now dripped in his hand. Three other autochthones bounded after him, swords and hatchets aloft. Their kilts were decorated with the circle-and-square insignia of the Shanga clan. “Get them!”

  Van Rijn’s blaster spat fire. One of the invaders flopped over. The others whirled to escape. Uulobu yowled and threw his tomahawk. The keen obsidian edge struck a Shanga and knocked him down, bleeding. Uulobu yanked the cord that ran between his weapon and wrist, retrieved the ax, and threw it again to finish the job.

  Van Rijn returned to the door. “You termite-bitten cowards, let us in!” As his language got bluer, Joyce realized what must have happened. She pounded his back with her fists, much as he was pounding the door, until he stopped and looked around.

  “They wouldn’t abandon us,” Joyce said. “But they must think we’ve been killed. When Carlos saw us, back there in the hall, we were both lying on the floor, and there were so many missiles— They aren’t in the clubroom any longer. They locked the door to delay the enemy while they took a different way to the spaceships.”

  “Ah, ja, ja, must be. But what do we do now? Blast through the door to follow?”

  Uulobu spoke in the guttural language of the Kusulongo region. “All of us are slain or fled, sky-female. No more battle. The noise you hear now is the Shanga plundering. If they find us, they will fill us with arrows. Two guns cannot stop that. But I think if we go back among the iron-that-moves, we can slip out that way and around the dome.”

  “What’s he besputtering about?” van Rijn asked.

  Joyce translated. “I think he’s right,” she added. “Our best chance is to leave through the machine section. It seems deserted for the time being. But we’d better hurry.”

  “So. Let this pussycat fellow go ahead, then. You stay by me and cover my back, nie ?”

  They trotted the way they had come. Hoarfrost whitened the walls and made the floor slippery, as water vapor condensed in the t’Kelan cold. The breach into the unlighted machine section gaped like a black mouth. Remotely through walls, Joyce heard ripping, smashing, exultant shouts. The work of years was going to pieces around her. Why? she asked in pain, and got no answer.

  Uulobu’s eyes, more adaptable to dark than any human’s, probed among bulky shapes as they entered the storage area. Vehicles were parked here: four ground-cars and as many flitters. In addition, this long chamber housed the specialized equipment of the studies the Esperancians had made, seeking a way to save the planet. Most lay in wreckage on the floor.

  An oblong of dim light, up ahead, was the doorway to outside. Joyce groped forward. Her boot struck something, a fallen instrument. It clanked against something else.

  There came a yammer of challenge. The entrance filled with a dozen shapes. They whipped through and lost themselves among shadows and machines before van Rijn could fire. Uulobu hefted his tomahawk and drew his knife. “Now we must fight for our passage,” he said unregretfully.

  “Cha-a-a-arge!” Van Rijn led the way at a run. Several t’Kelans closed in on him. Metal and polished stone whirled in the murk. The Earthman’s blaster flared. A native screamed. Another native got hold of the gun arm and dragged it downward. Van Rijn tried to shake him loose. The being hung on, though the human clubbed him back and forth against his fellows.

  Uulobu joined the ruckus, stabbing and hacking with carnivore glee. Joyce could not do less. She had her own pistol out, a slug-thrower. Something bumped into the muzzle. Fangs and eyes gleamed at her in what light there was. A short spear poised, fully able to pierce her suit. Even so, she had never done anything harder than to pull the trigger. The crack of the gun resounded in her own skull.

  Then for a while it was jostling, scrabbling, firing, falling and wrestling lunacy. Now and again Joyce recognized Uulobu’s screech, the battle cry of his Avongo clan. Van Rijn’s voice trumpeted, “St. Dismas help us! Down with mangy dogs!” Suddenly it was over. The guns had been too much. She lay on the floor, struggling for breath, and heard the last few Shanga run out. Somewhere a wounded warrior groaned, until Uulobu cut his throat.

  “Up with you,” van Rijn ordered between puffs. “We got no time for making rings around the rosies.”

  Uulobu helped her rise. He was too short to lean on very well, but van Rijn offered her an arm. They staggered out the door, into the night.

  There was no compound here, only the dome and then t’Kela itself. Overhead glittered unfamiliar constellations. The larger moon was aloft, nearly full, throwing dim coppery light on the ground. West and south stretched a rolling plain, thinly begrown with shrubs not unlike Terrestrial sagebrush in appearance: low, wiry, silvery-leaved. Due north rose the sheer black wall of Kusulongo the Mountain, jagged against the Milky Way. The city carved from its top could only be seen as a glimpse of towers like teeth. Some kilometers eastward, at its foot, ran the sacred Mangivolo River. Joyce could see a red flash of moonlight on liquid ammonia. The trees of that oasis where the Shanga were camped made a blot of shadow. The hills that marched northward from Kusulongo gleamed with ice, an unreal sheen.

  “Hurry,” van Rijn grated. “If the other peoples think we are dead, they will raise ship more fast than they can.”

  His party rounded the dome at the reeling pace of exhaustion. Two tapered cylinders shimmered under the moon, the mission’s big cargo vessel and the luxury yacht which had brought van Rijn and his assistants from Earth. A couple of dead Shanga lay nearby. The night wind ruffled their fur. It had been a fight to reach safety here. Now the ramps were retracted and the airlocks shut. As van Rijn neared, the whine of engines shivered forth.

  “Hey!” he roared. “You clabberbrains, wait for me!”

  The yacht took off first, hitting the sky like a thunderbolt. The backwash of air bowled van Rijn over. Then the Esperancian craft got under weigh. The edge of her drive field caught van Rijn, picked him up and threw him several meters. He landed with a crash and lay quite still.

  Joyce hurried to him. “Are you all right?” she choked. He was a detestable old oaf, but the horror of being marooned altogether alone seized upon her.

  “Oo-oo-oo,” he groaned. “St. Dismas, I was going to put a new stained glass window in your chapel at home. Now I think I will kick in the ones you have got.”

  Joyce glanced upward. The spaceships flashed for an instant like rising stars, and vanished. “They didn’t see us,” she said numbly.

  “Tell me more,” van Rijn snorted.

  Uulobu joined them. “The Shanga will have heard,” he said. “They will come out here to make sure, and find us. We must escape.”

  Van Rijn didn’t need that translated. Shaking himself gingerly, as if afraid something would drop off, he crawled to his feet and lurched back toward the dome. “We get a flitter, nie?” he said.

  “The groundcars are stocked for a much longer period,” Joyce answered. “And we’ll have to survive until someone comes back here.”

  “With the pest-riddled planeteezers chasing us all the while,” van Rijn muttered. “Joy forever, unconfined!”

  “We go west, we find my people,” Uulobu said. “I do not know where the Avongo are, but other clans of the Rokulela Horde must surely be out between the Narrow Land and the Barrens.”

  They entered the machine section. Joyce stumbled on a body and shuddered. Had she killed that being herself?

  The groundcars were long and square-built; the rear four of the eight wheels ran on treads. The accumulators were fully charged, energy reserve enough to drive several thousand rough kilometers and maintain Earth-type conditions inside for a year. There were air recyclers and sufficient food to keep two humans going at least four months. Six bunks, cooking and sanitary facilities, maps, navigation equipment, a radio transceiver, spare parts for survival gear—everything was there. It had to be, when you traveled on a planet like this.