Home.

  We had signaled other units of the navy. Some would come along to pick us up soon and guide us to the secret base on Mercury, and there the fight would go on. But now, just now in this eternal instant we were home.

  I felt weariness like an ache in my bones. I wanted to crawl bear-like into some cave by a murmuring river, under the dear tall trees of Earth, and sleep till spring woke up the world again. But as I stood there with the thin winter wind like a cleansing bath around me, the tiredness dropped off. My body responded to the world which two billion years of evolution had shaped it for, and I laughed aloud with the joy of it.

  We couldn’t fail. We were the freemen of Terra fighting for our own hearthfires and the deep ancient strength of the planet was in us. Victory and the stars lay in our hands, even now, even now.

  I turned and saw Kathryn coming down the airlock gangway. My heart stumbled and then began to race. It had been so long, so terribly long. We’d had so little time but now we were home, and she was singing.

  Her face was grave as she approached me. There was something remote about her and a strange blending of pain with the joy that must be in her too. The frost crackled in her dark unbound hair, and when she took my hands her own were cold.

  “Kathryn, we’re home,” I whispered. “We’re home, and free, and alive. O Kathryn, I love you!”

  She said nothing, but stood looking at me forever and forever until Manuel Argos came to join us. The little stocky man seemed embarrassed—the first and only time I ever saw him quail, even faintly.

  “John,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “It’ll keep,” I answered. “You’re the captain of the ship. You have authority to perform marriages. I want you to marry Kathryn and me, here, now, on Earth.”

  She looked at me unwaveringly, but her eyes were blind with tears. “That’s it, John,” she said, so low I could barely hear her. “It won’t be. I’m going to marry Manuel.”

  I stood there, not saying anything, not even feeling it yet.

  “It happened on the voyage,” she said, tonelessly. “I tried to fight myself, I couldn’t. I love him, John. I love him even more than I love you, and I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “She will be the mother of kings,” said Manuel, but his arrogant words were almost defensive. “I couldn’t have made a better choice.”

  “Do you love her too,” I asked slowly, “or do you consider her good breeding stock?” Then: “Never mind. Your answer would only be the most expedient. We’ll never know the truth.”

  It was instinct, I thought with a great resurgence of weariness. A strong and vital woman would pick the most suitable mate. She couldn’t help herself. It was the race within her and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Bless you, my children,” I said.

  They walked away after awhile, hand in hand under the high trees that glittered with ice and sun. I stood watching them until they were out of sight. Even then, with a long and desperate struggle yet to come, I think I knew that those were the parents of the Empire and the glorious Argolid dynasty, that they carried the future within them.

  And I didn’t give a damn.

  Un-Man

  -1-

  They were gone, their boat whispering into the sky with all six of them aboard. Donner had watched them from his balcony—he had chosen the apartment carefully with a view to such features—as they walked out on the landing flange and entered the shell. Now their place was vacant and it was time for him to get busy.

  For a moment hesitation was in him. He had waited many days for this chance, but a man does not willingly enter a potential trap. His eyes strayed to the picture on his desk. The darkly beautiful young woman and the children in her arms seemed to be looking at him, her lips were parted as if she were about to speak. He wanted to press the button that animated the film, but didn’t quite dare. Gently, his fingers stroked the glass over her cheek.

  “Jeanne,” he whispered. “Jeanne, honey.”

  He got to work. His colorful lounging pajamas were exchanged for a gray outfit that would be inconspicuous against the walls of the building. An ordinary featureless mask, its sheen carefully dulled to non-reflection, covered his face. He clipped a flat box of tools to his belt and painted his fingertips with collodion. Picking up a reel of cord in one hand, he returned to the balcony.

  From here, two hundred and thirty-four stories up, he had a wide view of the Illinois plain. As far as he could see, the land rolled green with corn, hazing into a far horizon out of which the great sky lifted. Here and there, a clump of trees had been planted, and the white streak of an old highway crossed the field, but otherwise it was one immensity of growth. The holdings of Midwest Agricultural reached beyond sight.

  On either hand, the apartment building lifted sheer from the trees and gardens of its park. Two miles long, a city in its own right, a mountain of walls and windows, the unit dominated the plain, sweeping heavenward in a magnificent arrogance that ended sixty-six stories above Donner’s flat. Through the light prairie wind that fluttered his garments, the man could hear a low unending hum, muted pulsing of machines and life—the building—itself like a giant organism.

  There were no other humans in sight. The balconies were so designed as to screen the users from view of neighbors on the same level, and anyone in the park would find his upward glance blocked by trees. A few brilliant points of light in the sky were airboats, but that didn’t matter.

  Donner fastened his reel to the edge of the balcony and took the end of the cord in his fingers. For still another moment he stood, letting the sunlight and wind pour over him, filling his eyes with the reaching plains and the high, white-clouded heaven.

  He was a tall man, his apparent height reduced by the width of shoulders and chest, a curious rippling grace in his movements. His naturally yellow hair had been dyed brown and contact lenses made his blue eyes dark, but otherwise there hadn’t been much done to his face—the broad forehead, high cheekbones, square jaw, and jutting nose were the same. He smiled wryly behind the blank mask, took a deep breath, and swung himself over the balcony rail.

  The cord unwound noiselessly, bearing him down past level after level. There was a risk involved in this daylight burglary—someone might happen to glance around the side wall of a balcony and spot him, and even the custom of privacy would hardly keep them from notifying the unit police. But the six he was after didn’t time their simultaneous departures for his convenience.

  The looming facade slid past, blurred a little by the speed of his descent. One, two, three— He counted as he went by, and at the eighth story down tugged the cord with his free hand. The reel braked and he hung in midair.

  A long and empty way down— He grinned and began to swing himself back and forth, increasing the amplitude of each arc until his soles were touching the unit face. On the way back, he grasped the balcony rail, just beyond the screening side wall, with his free hand. His body jerked to a stop, the impact like a blow in his muscles.

  Still clinging to the cord, he pulled himself one-armed past the screen, over the rail, and onto the balcony floor. Under the gray tunic and the sweating skin, his sinews felt as if they were about to crack. He grunted with relief when he stood freely, tied the cord to the rail, and unclipped his tool case.

  The needle of his electronic detector flickered. So there was an alarm hooked to the door leading in from the balcony. Donner traced it with care, located a wire, and cut it. Pulling a small torch from his kit, he approached the door. Beyond its transparent plastic, the rooms lay quiet—a conventional arrangement of furniture, but with a waiting quality over it.

  Imagination, thought Donner impatiently, and cut the lock from the door. As he entered, the auto-cleaner sensed his presence and its dust-sucking wind whined to silence.

  The man forced the lock of a desk and riffled through the papers within. One or two in code he slipped into his pocket, the rest were uninteresting. There must be more, though. Curse it, this was their regional headquarters!

  His metal detector helped him about the apartment, looking for hidden safes. When he found a large mass buried in a wall, he didn’t trouble with searching for the button to open it, but cut the plastic facing away. The gang would know their place had been raided, and would want to move. If they took another flat in the same building, Donner’s arrangement with the superintendent would come into effect; they’d get a vacancy which had been thoughtfully provided with all the spy apparatus he could install. The man grinned again.

  Steel gleamed at him through the scorched and melted wall. It was a good safe, and he hadn’t time to diddle with it. He plugged in his electric drill, and the diamond head gnawed a small hole in the lock. With a hypodermic he inserted a few cubic centimeters of levinite, and touched it off by a UHF beam. The lock jangled to ruin, and Donner opened the door.

  He had only time to see the stet-gun within, and grasp the terrible fact of its existence. Then it spat three needles into his chest, and he whirled down into darkness.

  -2-

  Once or twice he had begun to waken, stirring dimly toward light, and the jab of a needle had thrust him back. Now, as his head slowly cleared, they let him alone. And that was worse.

  Donner retched and tried to move. His body sagged against straps that held him fast in his chair. Vision blurred in a huge nauseous ache; the six who stood watching him were a ripple of fever-dream against an unquiet shadow.

  “He’s coming around,” said the thin man unnecessarily. The heavy-set, gray-haired man in the conservative blue tunic glanced at his timepiece. “Pretty fast, considering how he was dosed. Healthy specimen.”

  Donner mumbled. The taste of vomit was bitter in his mouth. “Give him some water,” said the bearded man.

  “Like hell!” The thin man’s voice was a snarl. His face was dead white against the shifting, blurring darkness of the room, and there was a fever in his eyes, “He doesn’t rate it,” he snarled. “The—Un-man!”

  “Get him some water,” said the gray-haired one quietly. The skeletal younger man slouched sulkily over to a chipped basin with an old-fashioned tap and drew a glassful.

  Donner swallowed it greedily, letting it quench some of the dry fire in his throat and belly. The bearded man approached with a hypo.

  “Stimulant,” he explained. “Bring you around faster.” It bit into Donner’s arm and he felt his heartbeat quicken. His head was still a keen pulsing pain, but his eyes steadied and he looked at the others with returning clarity.

  “We weren’t altogether careless,” said the heavy-set man. “That stet-gun was set to needle anybody who opened the safe without pressing the right button first. And, of course, a radio signal was emitted which brought us back in a hurry. We’ve kept you unconscious till now.”

  Donner looked around him. The room was bare, thick with the dust and cobwebs of many years, a few pieces of old-style wooden furniture crouched in ugliness against the cracked plaster walls. There was a single window, its broken glass panes stuffed with rags, dirt so thick on it that he could not be sure if there was daylight outside. But the hour was probably after dark. The only illumination within was from a single fluoro in a stand on the table.

  He must be in Chicago, Donner decided through a wave of sickness. One of the vast moldering regions that encompassed the inhabited parts of the dying city—deserted, not worth destroying as yet, the lair of rats and decay. Sooner or later, some agricultural outfit would buy up the nominal title from the government which had condemned the place and raze what had been spared by fire and rot. But it hadn’t happened yet, and the empty slum was a good hideaway for anybody.

  Donner thought of those miles of ruinous buildings, wrapped in night, looming hollow against a vacant sky—dulled echoes in the cracked and grass-grown streets, the weary creak of a joist, the swift patter of feet and glare of eyes from the thick dark, menace and loneliness for further than he could run.

  Alone, alone. He was more alone here than in the outermost reaches of space, alone in darkness with his enemies ringing him in and death waiting behind the shadows. They were going to kill him. He knew starkly that he was going to die, and the thought was a surging pain.

  Jeanne, O Jeanne, my darling.

  “You were registered at the unit as Mark Roberts,” said the woman crisply. She was thin, almost as thin as the bitter-eyed young man beside her. The face was sharp and hungry, the hair close cropped, the voice harsh with purpose. “But your ID tattoo is a fake—it’s a dye that comes off with acid. We got your thumbprint and that number on a check and called the bank central like in an ordinary verification, and the robofile said yes, that was Mark Roberts and the account was all right.” She leaned forward, her face straining against the blur of night, and spat it at him. “Who are you really? Only a secret service man could get by with that kind of fake. Whose service are you in?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” snapped the thin man. “He’s not American Security. We know that. So he must be an Un-man.”

  The way he said the last word made it an ugly, inhuman sound. “The Un-man!” he repeated.

  “Our great enemy,” said the heavy-set one thoughtfully. “The Un-man—not just an ordinary operative, with human limitations, but the great and secret one who’s made so much trouble for us.”

  He cocked his gray head and stared at Donner. “It fits what fragmentary descriptions we have,” he went on. “But then, the U.N. boys can do a lot with surgery and cosmetics, can’t they? And the Un-man has been killed several times. An operator was bagged in Hong Kong only last month which the killer swore must be our enemy­—he said nobody else could have led them such a chase.”

  That was most likely Weinberger, thought Donner. An immense weariness settled on him. They were so few, so desperately few, and one by one the Brothers went down into darkness. He was next, and after him—

  “What I can’t understand,” said a fifth man—Donner recognized him as Colonel Samsey of the American Guard—“is why, if the U.N. Secret Services does have a corps of…uh…supermen, it should bother to disguise them to look all alike. So that we’ll think we’re dealing with an immortal?” He chuckled grimly. “Surely they don’t expect us to be rattled by that!”

  “Not superman,” said the gray-haired one. “Enormously able, yes, but the Un-men aren’t infallible—as witness this one.” He stood before Donner, his legs spread and his hands on his hips. “Suppose you start talking. Tell us about yourself.”

  “I can tell you about your own selves,” answered Donner. His tongue felt thick and dry, but the acceptance of death made him, all at once, immensely steady. “You are Roger Wade, president of Brain Tools, Incorporated, and a prominent supporter of the Americanist Party.” To the woman: “You are Marta Jennings, worker for the Party on a full-time basis. Your secretary, Mr. Wade—” his eyes roved to the gaunt young man—“is Rodney Borrow, Exogene Number—”

  “Don’t call me that!” Cursing, Borrow lunged at Donner. He clawed like a woman. When Samsey and the bearded man dragged him away, his face was death-white and he dribbled at the mouth.

  “And the experiment was a failure,” taunted Donner cruelly.

  “Enough!” Wade slapped the prisoner, a ringing open-handed buffet. “We want to know something new, and there isn’t much time. You are, of course, immunized against truth drugs—Dr. Lewin’s tests have already confirmed that—but I assume you can still feel pain.”

  After a moment, he added quietly. “We aren’t fiends. You know that we’re patriots.” Working with the nationalists of a dozen other countries! thought Donner. “We don’t want to hurt or kill unnecessarily.”

  “But first we want your real identity,” said the bearded man, Lewin. “Then your background of information about us, the future plans of your chief, and so on. However, it will be sufficient for now if you answer a few questions pertaining to yourself—residence and so on.”

  Oh, yes, thought Donner, the weariness like a weight on his soul. That’ll do. Because then they’ll find Jeanne and Jimmy, and bring them here, and—

  Lewin wheeled forth a lie detector. “Naturally, we don’t want our time wasted by false leads,” he said.

  “It won’t be,” replied Donner. “I’m not going to say anything.”

  Lewin nodded, unsurprised, and brought out another machine. “This one generates low-frequency, low-voltage current,” he remarked. “Quite painful. I don’t think your will can hold out very long. If it does, we can always try prefrontal lobotomy; you won’t have inhibitions then. But we’ll give you a chance with this first.”

  He adjusted the electrodes on Donner’s skin. Borrow licked his lips with a dreadful hunger.

  Donner tried to smile, but his mouth felt stiff. The sixth man, who looked like a foreigner somehow, went out of the room.

  There was a tiny receiver in Donner’s skull, behind the right mastoid. It could only pick up messages of a special wave form, but it had its silencing uses too. After all, electric torture is a common form of inquisition, and very hard to bear.

  He thought of Jeanne, and of Jimmy, and of the Brotherhood. He wished that the last air he was to breathe wasn’t stale and dusty.

  The current tore him with a convulsive anguish. His muscles jerked against the straps and he cried out. Then the sensitized communicator blew up, releasing a small puff of fluorine.

  The image Donner carried into death was that of Jeanne, smiling and bidding him welcome home.

  -3-

  Barney Rosenberg drove along a dim, rutted trail toward the sheer loom of the escarpment. Around its corner lay Drygulch. But he wasn’t hurrying. As he got closer, he eased the throttle of his sandcat and the engine’s purr became almost inaudible.