“Pure genius strains kept right on evolving, more rapidly indeed than can be explained on any other basis than the existence of an orthogenetic factor in evolution. Super genius—give it a different name, call it transcendence, since it is a different quality—has capabilities which the ordinary mind can no more than comprehend than pure instinct can comprehend logic.

  “Your spectacular god-revelations were not forgotten, they were treated discreetly. Later, when a theory of evolution was developed, it seemed strange that man, though obviously an animal, should have no apparent phylogenesis. The stories of the ‘gods,’ the theories of evolution and astronomy—we began to suspect the truth. With that suspicion, it was not hard for a transcendent to spot your masquerading psychologists. Kidnapping, questioning under drugs developed by psychiatry, and release of the prisoner with memory of his experience removed told us the rest. Later, disguised as other prisoners, with their knowledge, and his own intelligence to fill the gaps, one transcendent after another made his way to the observation asteroid—thence out into the Galaxy, where a little spying was sufficient to reveal the principles of the interstellar drive and the other mechanisms of the Empire.”

  Heym murmured: “The whole planet has been—acting?”

  “Yes.” Goram chuckled. “Rather fun for all concerned. You’d be surprised at the installations we have, out of spy-machine range. As soon as they are old enough to carry out the deception, our children are told the truth. It has actually made little difference to our lives except for those few million who are out in the Galaxy taking it over.”

  “Taking…it…over?” Heym’s mind seemed to be turning over slowly, infinitely slowly and wearily.

  “Of course.” A strange blend of sternness and sympathy overlay Goram’s harsh features. “One planet obviously cannot fight the Galaxy, nor do we wish to. Yet we cannot permit it to menace us. The only answer is—annexation.”

  “And…then?”

  “I’m sorry.” Goram’s voice came slowly, implacably, “but I’m afraid you overrated the good intentions of the pure genius strain. After all, Homo intelligens can no more be expected to serve Homo sapiens than early man to serve the apes.

  “We’re taking over barbarians and Empire alike. After that, the Galaxy will do as we wish. Oh, we won’t be hard masters. Man may never know that he is being ruled from outside, and he will enter a period of peace and contentment such as he has never imagined.

  “As for you—”

  Heym realized with vague shock that he had not even wondered or cared what was to become of him personally.

  “You are sympathetic to us—but your loyalty is to the Empire. You have thought of us only in relation to our usefulness to the Imperium. Perhaps we could trust you to keep our secret, perhaps not. We can’t take the risk. You might even release the truth inadvertently. Nor can we erase your memory of this—it would leave traces that an expert psychiatrist could detect, and all high officials undergo regular psychoanalytic checkups.

  “I’ll just have to report you as accidentally killed on the planet.” Goram smiled. “I don’t think you’ll find life exile on this world, out of sight of the observers, uncongenial. And we might as well see about making your successor one of our men. It was about ready for that.”

  He added thoughtfully: “In fact, the Galaxy may be ready for a new Solarian Emperor.”

  There Will Be Other Times

  There will be other times, my comrades, there will be

  A day of trumpets. This we must believe.

  Now when all flags guide corpses to the sea

  And ships lie hollow on a smoking shore,

  Broken of bone, and windy shadows weave

  A dark about tall windows turning whore

  To feed gashed children, I must say that more

  Days shall remain then hobnailed victors thieve.

  And if our iron’s broken, there’s still ore—

  Stones of our sharded cities lying free

  To sharpen it; and if you should perceive

  Rust and the dimness in us, do it silently.

  The Live Coward

  The fugitive ship was pursued for ten light-years. Then, snapping in and out of subspace drive with a reckless disregard of nearby suns and tracer-blocking dust clouds, it shook the Patrol cruiser.

  The search that followed was not so frantic as the danger might seem to warrant. Haste would have done no good; there are a million planetary systems affiliated with the League, and their territory includes several million more too backward for membership. Even a small planet is such a wilderness of mountains, valleys, plains, forests, oceans, icefields, cities, and loneliness—much of it often quite unexplored—that it was hopeless to ransack them meter by meter for a single man. The Patrol knew that Varris’ boat had a range of three hundred parsecs, and in the course of months and man-years of investigation it was pretty well established that he had not refueled at any registered depot. But a sphere two thousand light-years across can hold a lot of stars.

  The Patrol offered a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of Samel Varris, human, from the planet Caldon (No. so-and-so in the Pilots’ Manual), wanted for the crime of inciting to war. It circulated its appeal as widely as possible. It warned all agents to keep an eye or a feeler or a telepathic organ out for a man potentially still capable of exploding a billion living entities into radioactive gas. Then it waited.

  A year went by.

  Captain Jakor Thymal of the trading ship Ganash, operating out of Sireen in the primitive Spiral Cluster area, brought the news. He had seen Varris, even spoken to the fellow. There was no doubt of it. Only one hitch: Varris had taken refuge with the king of Thunsba, a barbarous state in the southern hemisphere of a world known to the Galactics—such few as had ever heard of it—as Rylin’s Planet. He had gotten citizenship and taken the oath of service as a royal guardsman. Loyalty between master and man was a powerful element in Thunsban morality. The king would not give up Varris without a fight.

  Of course, axes and arrows were of small use against flamers. Perhaps Varris could be taken alive, but the patrol would kill him without whiffing very many Thunsban. Captain Thymal settled complacently back to wait for confirmation of his report and the blood money. Nothing ever occurred to him but that the elimination of Varris would be the simplest of routine operations.

  Like hell!

  * * *

  Wing Alak eased his flitter close to the planet. It hung in cloudy splendor against a curtain of hard, needle-shape spatial stars, the Cluster sky. He sat gloomily listening to the click and mutter of instruments as Drogs checked surface conditions.

  “Quite terrestroid,” said the Galmathian. His antennae lifted in puzzlement above the round, snouted face and the small black eyes. “Why did you bother testing? It’s listed in the Manual.”

  “I have a nasty suspicious mind,” said Alak. “Also an unhappy one.” He was a thin, medium-tall human with the very white skin that often goes with flaming red hair. His Patrol uniform was as dandified as regulations allowed.

  Drogs hitched three meters of green, eight-legged body across the cabin. His burly arms reached out to pick up the maps in three-fingered hands “Yes…here’s the Thunsba kingdom and the capital city…what’s it called? …Wainabog. I suppose our quarry is still there; Thymal swore he didn’t alarm him.” He sighed. “Now I have to spend an hour at the telescope and identify which place is what. And you can sit like my wife on an egg thinking beautiful thoughts!”

  “The only beautiful concept I have right now is that all of a sudden the Prime Directive was repealed.”

  “No chance of that, I’m afraid…not till a less bloodthirsty race than yours gets the leadership of the League.”

  “Less? You mean more, don’t you? ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever may the Patrol or any unit thereof kill any intelligent being.’ If you do—” Alak made a rather horrible gesture. “Is that blood-thirsty?”

  “Quite. Only a race with as gory a past as the Terrans would go to such extremes of reaction. And only as naturally ferocious a species could think of making such a commandment the Patrol’s great top secret…and bluffing with threats of planetwide slaughter, or using any kind of chicanery to achieve its ends. Now a Galmathian will run down a farstak in his native woods and jump on its back and make a nice lunch while it’s still running…but he wouldn’t be able to imagine cold-bloodedly sterilizing an entire world, so he doesn’t have to ban himself from honest killing even in self-defense.” Drogs’ caterpillar body hunched itself over the telescope.

  “Get thee behind me, Satan…and don’t push!” Alak returned murkily to his thoughts. His brain was hypnotically stuffed with all the information three generations of traders had gathered about Thunsba. None of it looked hopeful.

  The king was—well, if not an absolute monarch, pretty close to being one, simply because the law had set him over the commons. Like many warlike barbarians, the Thunsbans had a quasi-religious reverence for the letter of the law, if not always for its spirit. The Patrol had run head-on into two items of the code: (a) the king would not yield up a loyal guardsman to an enemy, but would fight to the death instead; (b) if the king fought, so would the whole male population, unmoved by threats to themselves or their mates and cubs. Death before dishonor! Their religion, which they seemed quite fervent about, promised a roisterous heaven to all who fell in a good cause, and suitably gruesome hell for oath-breakers.

  Hm-m-m…there was a powerful ecclesiastical organization, and piety had not stopped a good deal of conflict between church and throne. Maybe he could work through the priesthood somehow.

  * * *

  The outworld traders who came to swap various manufactured articles for the furs and spices of Ryfin’s Planet had not influenced the local cultures much. Perhaps they had inspired a few wars and heresies, but on the whole the autochthones were content to live in the ways of their fathers. The main effect of trading had been a loss of superstitious awe—the strangers were mighty, but they were known to be mortal. Alak doubted that even the whole Patrol fleet could bullyrag them into yielding on so touchy a point as Varris’ surrender.

  “What I can’t understand,” said Drogs, “is why we don’t just swoop down and give the city a blanket of sleep-gas.” This mission had been ordered in such tearing haste that he had been given only the most nominal briefing; and on the way here, he had followed his racial practice of somnolence—his body could actually “store” many days’ worth of sleep.

  His free hand gestured around the flitter. It was not a large boat, but it was well equipped, not only with weapons—for bluffing—but with its own machine shop and laboratory.

  “Metabolic difference,” said Alak. “Every anaesthetic known to us is poisonous to them, and their own knockout chemicals would kill Varris. Stun beams are just as bad—supersonics will scramble a Ryfinnian’s brain like an egg. I imagine Varris picked this world for a bolthole just on that account.”

  “But he didn’t know we wouldn’t simply come down and shoot up the den.”

  “He could make a pretty shrewd guess. It’s a secret that we never kill, but no secret that we’re reluctant to hurt innocent bystanders.” Alak scowled. “There are still a hundred million people on Caldon who’d rise—bloodily—against the new government if he came back to them. Whether he succeeded or not, it’d be a genocidal affair and a big loss of face to the Patrol.”

  “Hm-m-m…he can’t get far from this world without more fuel; his tanks must be nearly dry. So why don’t we blockade this planet and make sure he never has a chance to buy fuel?”

  “Blockades aren’t that reliable,” said Alak. Drogs had never been involved in naval operation, only in surface work. “We could destroy his own boat easily enough, but word that he’s alive is bound to leak back to Caldon now. There’d be attempt after attempt to run the blockade, and get him out. Sooner or later, one would succeed. We’re badly handicapped by not being allowed to shoot to hit. No, damn it, we’ve got to lift him, and fast!”

  His eyes traveled wistfully to the biochemical shelves. There was a potent drug included, a nembutal derivative, hypnite. A small intramuscular injection could knock Varris out; he would awaken into a confused, passive state, and remain thus for hours, following any lead he was given. Much useful information about his conspiracy could be extracted. Later, this drug and other techniques would be used to rehabilitate his twisted psyche, but that was a job for the specialists at Main Base.

  Alak felt more handcuffed than ever before in his pragmatist life. The blaster at his waist could incinerate a squad of  Thunsban knights—but their anachronistic weapons weren’t so ridiculous when he wasn’t allowed to use the blaster.

  “Hurry it up,” he said on a harsh note. “Let’s get moving—and don’t ask me where!”

  * * *

  A landing field had been made for the traders just outside the walls of Wainabog. Those bulked thick and gray, studded with turrets and men-at-arms, over a blue landscape of rolling fields and distant hills. Here and there Alak saw thatch-roofed hamlets; two kilometers from the town was a smaller community, also fortified, a single great tower in its middle crowned with a golden X. It must be the place mentioned in the trader narratives. Grimmoch Abbey, was that the name?

  It was not too bad a mistranslation to speak of abbeys, monks, knights, and kings. Culturally and technologically, Thunsba was fairly close to medieval Europe.

  Several peasants and townsfolk stood gaping at the flitter as Alak emerged. Others were on their way. He swept his gaze around the field and saw another spaceboat some distance off—must be Varris’, yes, he remembered the description now. A dozen liveried halberdiers guarded it.

  Carefully ignoring the drab-clad commons, Alak waited for the official greeters. Those came out in a rattle of plate armor, mounted on yellow-furred animals with horns and shoulder humps. A band of crossbowmen trotted in their wake and a herald wearing a scarlet robe blew his trumpet in their van. They pulled up with streaming banners and thunderous hoofs; lances dipped courteously, but eyes had a watchful stare behind the snouted visors of their helmets.

  The herald rode forth and looked down at Alak, who was clad in his brightest dress uniform. “Greeting to you, stranger, from our lord Morlach, King of all Thunsba and Defender of the West. Our lord Morlach bids you come sup and sleep with him.” The herald drew a sword and extended it hilt first. Alak ran hastily through his lessons and rubbed his forehead against the handle.

  They were quite humanoid on Ryfin’s Planet—disturbingly so, if you hadn’t seen as many species as Alak. It was not the pale-blue skin or the violet hair or the short tails which made the difference: always, in a case like this, the effect was of a subtler wrongness. Noses a shade too long, faces a trifle too square, knees and elbows held at a peculiar angle—they looked like cartoon figures brought to life. And they had a scent of their own, a sharp mustardy odor. Alak didn’t mind, knowing full well that he looked and smelled as odd to them, but he had seen young recruits get weird neuroses after a few months on a planet of “humanoids to six points of classification.”

  He replied gravely in the Thunsban tongue: “My lord Morlach has my thanks and duty. I hight Wing Alak, and am not a trader but an envoy of the traders’ king, sent hither on a mission most delicate. I pray the right to see my lord Morlach as soon as he grant.”

  There was more ceremony, and a number of slaves were fetched to carry Alak’s impressive burden of gifts. Then he was offered a mount, but declined—the traders had warned him of this little joke, where you put an outworlder on a beast that goes frantic at alien smells. With proper haughtiness he demanded a sedan chair, which was an uncomfortable and seasick thing to ride but had more dignity. The knights of Wainabog enclosed him and he was borne through the gates and the cobbled avenues to the fortresslike palace.

  Inside, he did not find the rude splendor he had expected, but a more subtle magnificence, really beautiful furnishings. Thunsba might throw its garbage out in the streets, but had excellent artistic taste. There were a hundred nobles in the royal audience chamber, a rainbow of robes, moving about and talking with boisterous gestures. Servants scurried around offering trays of food and liquor. A small orchestra was playing: the saw-toothed music hurt Alak’s ears. A number of monks, in gray robes and with hoods across their faces, stood unspeaking along the walls, near the motionless men-at-arms.

  Alak advanced under gleaming pikes and knelt before the king. Morlach was burly, middle-aged, and long-bearded, wearing a coronet and holding a naked sword on his lap. At his left, the place of honor—most of this species were left-handed—sat an older “man,” clean-shaven, hook-nosed, bleakfaced, in yellow robe and a tall bejeweled hat marked with a golden X.

  “My duty to you, puissant lord Morlach. Far have I, unworthy Wing Alak of Terra, come to behold your majesty before whom the nations tremble. From my king unto you, I bear a message and these poor gifts.”

  The poor gifts made quite a heap, all the way from clothes and ornaments of lustrous synthetic to flashlights and swords of manganese steel. Ryfin’s Planet couldn’t legally be given modern tools and weapons—not at their present social stage of war and feudalism—but there was no ban on lesser conveniences which they couldn’t reproduce anyhow.

  “Well met, Sir Wing Alak. Come, be seated at my right. Morlach’s voice rose, and the buzzing voices, already lowered in curiosity, stopped at once. “Be it known to all men, Sir Wing Alak is in truth my guest, most holy and inviolable, and all injuries to him, save in lawful duel, are harms to me and my house which the Allshaper bids me avenge.”

  The nobles crowded closer. It was not a very formal court, as such things go. One of them came to the front as Alak mounted the high seat. The Patrolman felt a tingle along his back and a primitive stirring in his scalp.