Thus he did not notice how Olga was waning. Enherrian was mending, somewhat, under her care. She did her jobs, which were comparatively light, and would have been ashamed to complain of headaches, giddiness, diarrhea, and nausea. Doubtless she imagined she suffered merely from reaction to disaster, plus a sketchy and ill-balanced diet, plus heat and brilliant sun and—she’d cope.

  The days were too short for work, the nights too short for sleep. Pete’s terror was that he would see a flitter pass and vanish over the horizon before the Ythrians could hail it. Then they might try sending Rusa for help. But that was a long, tricky flight; and the gulf coast camp was due to be struck rather soon anyway.

  Sometimes he wondered dimly how he and Olga might do if marooned on Gray. He kept enough wits to dismiss his fantasy for what it was. Take the simple fact that native life appeared to lack certain vitamins—

  Then one darkness, perhaps a terrestrial week after the shipwreck, he was roused by her crying his name. He struggled to wakefulness. She lay beside him. Gray’s moon was up, nearly full, swifter and brighter than Luna. Its glow drowned most of the stars, frosted the encroaching bushes, fell without pity to show him her fallen cheeks and rolling eyes. She shuddered in his arms; he heard her teeth clapping. “I’m cold, darling, I’m cold,” she said in the subtropical summer night. She vomited over him, and presently she was delirious.

  The Ythrians gave what help they could, he what medicines he could. By sunrise (an outrageousness of rose and gold and silver-blue, crossed by the jubilant wings of waterfowl) he knew she was dying.

  He examined his own physical state, using a robot he discovered he had in his skull: yes, his wretchedness was due to more than overwork, he saw that now; he too had had the upset stomach and the occasional shivers, nothing like the disintegration which possessed Olga, nevertheless the same kind of thing. Yet the Ythrians stayed healthy. Did a local germ attack humans while finding the other race undevourable?

  The rescuers, who came on the island two Gray days later, already had the answer. That genus of bushes is widespread on the planet. A party elsewhere, after getting sick and getting into safety suits, analyzed its vapors. They are a cumulative poison to man; they scarcely harm an Ythrian. The analysts named it the hell shrub.

  Unfortunately, their report wasn’t broadcast until after the boat left. Meanwhile Pete had been out in the field every day, while Olga spent her whole time in the hollow, over which the sun regularly created an inversion layer.

  Whell and Rusa went grimly back to work. Pete had to get away. He wasn’t sure of the reason, but he had to be alone when he screamed at heaven, “Why did You do this to her, why did You do it?” Enherrian could look after Olga, who had brought him back to a life he no longer wanted. Pete had stopped her babblings, writhings, and saw-toothed sounds of pain with a shot. She ought to sleep peacefully into that death which the monitor instruments said was, in the absence of hospital facilities, ineluctable.

  He stumbled off to the heights. The sea reached calm, in a thousand hues of azure and green, around the living island, beneath the gentle sky. He knelt in all that emptiness and put his question.

  After an hour he could say, “Your will be done” and return to camp.

  Olga lay awake. “Pete, Pete!” she cried. Anguish distorted her voice till he couldn’t recognize it; nor could he really see her in the yellowed sweating skin and lank hair drawn over a skeleton, or find her in the stench and the nails which flayed him as they clutched. “Where were you, hold me close, it hurts, how it hurts—”

  He gave her a second injection, to small effect.

  He knelt again, beside her. He has not told me what he said, or how. At last she grew quiet, gripped him hard and waited for the pain to end.

  When she died, he says, it was like seeing a light blown out.

  He laid her down, closed eyes and jaw, folded her hands. On mechanical feet he went to the pup tent which had been rigged for Enherrian. The cripple calmly awaited him. “She is fallen?” he asked.

  Pete nodded.

  “That is well,” Enherrian said.

  “It is not,” Pete heard himself reply, harsh and remote. “She shouldn’t have aroused. The drug should’ve—did you give her a stim shot? Did you bring her back to suffer?”

  “What else?” said Enherrian, though he was unarmed and a blaster lay nearby for Pete to seize. Not that I’ll ease him out of his fate! went through the man in a spasm. “I saw that you, distraught, had misgauged. You were gone and I unable to follow you. She might well die before your return.”

  Out of his void, Pete gaped into those eyes. “You mean,” rattled from him, “you mean…she…mustn’t?”

  Enherrian crawled forth—he could only crawl, on his single wing—to take Pete’s hands. “My friend,” he said, his tone immeasurably compassionate, “I honored you both too much to deny her her deathpride.”

  Pete’s chief awareness was of the cool sharp talons.

  “Have I misunderstood?” asked Enherrian anxiously. “Did you not wish her to give God a battle?”

  Even on Lucifer, the nights finally end. Dawn blazed on the tors when Pete finished his story.

  I emptied the last few ccs into our glasses. We’d get no work done today. “Yeh,” I said. “Cross-cultural semantics. Given the best will in the universe, two beings from different planets—or just different countries, often—take for granted they think alike; and the outcome can be tragic.”

  “I assumed that at first,” Pete said. “I didn’t need to forgive Enherrian—how could he know? For his part, he was puzzled when I buried my darling. On Ythri they cast them from a great height into wilderness. But neither race wants to watch the rotting of what was loved, so he did his lame best to help me.”

  He drank, looked as near the cruel bluish sun as he was able, and mumbled: “What I couldn’t do was forgive God.”

  “The problem of evil,” I said.

  “Oh, no. I’ve studied these matters, these past years: read theology, argued with priests, the whole route. Why does God, if He is a loving and personal God, allow evil? Well, there’s a perfectly good Christian answer to that. Man—intelligence everywhere—must have free will. Otherwise we’re puppets and have no reason to exist. Free will necessarily includes the capability of doing wrong. We’re here, in this cosmos during our lives, to learn how to be good of our unforced choice.”

  “I spoke illiterately,” I apologized. “All that brandy. No, sure, your logic is right, regardless of whether I accept your premises or not. What I meant was: the problem of pain. Why does a merciful God permit undeserved agony? If He’s omnipotent, He isn’t compelled to.

  “I’m not talking about the sensation which warns you to take your hand from the fire, anything useful like that. No, the random accident which wipes out a life…or a mind—” I drank. “What happened to Arrach, yes, and to Enherrian, and Olga, and you, and Whell. What happens when a disease hits, or those catastrophes we label acts of God. Or the slow decay of us if we grow very old. Every such horror. Never mind if science has licked some of them; we have enough left, and then there were our ancestors who endured them all.

  “Why? What possible end is served? It’s not adequate to declare we’ll receive an unbounded reward after we die and therefore it makes no difference whether a life was gusty or grisly. That’s no explanation.

  “Is this the problem you’re grappling with, Pete?”

  “In a way.” He nodded, cautiously, as if he were already his father’s age. “At least, it’s the start of the problem.

  “You see, there I was, isolated among Ythrians. My fellow humans sympathized, but they had nothing to say that I didn’t know already. The New Faith, however…Mind you, I wasn’t about to convert. What I did hope for was an insight, a freshness, that’d help me make Christian sense of our losses. Enherrian was so sure, so learned, in his beliefs—

  “We talked, and talked, and talked, while I was regaining my strength. He was as caught as me. Not that he couldn’t fit our troubles into his scheme of things. That was easy. But it turned out that the New Faith has no satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. It says God allows wickedness so we may win honor by fighting for the right. Really, when you stop to think, that’s weak, especially in carnivore Ythrian terms. Don’t you agree?”

  “You know them, I don’t,” I sighed. “You imply they have a better answer to the riddle of pain than your own religion does.”

  “It seems better.” Desperation edged his slightly blurred tone:

  “They’re hunters, or were until lately. They see God like that, as the Hunter. Not the Torturer—you absolutely must understand this point—no, He rejoices in our happiness the way we might rejoice to see a game animal gamboling. Yet at last He comes after us. Our noblest moment is when we, knowing He is irresistible, give Him a good chase, a good fight.

  “Then He wins honor. And some infinite end is furthered. (The same one as when my God is given praise? How can I tell?) We’re dead, struck down, lingering at most a few years in the memories of those who escaped this time. And that’s what we’re here for. That’s why God created the universe.”

  “And this belief is old,” I said. “It doesn’t belong just to a few cranks. No, it’s been held for centuries by millions of sensitive, intelligent, educated beings. You can live by it, you can die by it. If it doesn’t solve every paradox, it solves some that your faith won’t, quite. This is your dilemma, true?”

  He nodded again. “The priests have told me to deny a false creed and to acknowledge a mystery. Neither instruction feels right. Or am I asking too much?”

  “I’m sorry, Pete,” I said, altogether honestly. It hurt. “But how should I know? I looked into the abyss once, and saw nothing, and haven’t looked since. You keep looking. Which of us is the braver?

  “Maybe you can find a text in Job. I don’t know, I tell you, I don’t know.”

  The sun lifted higher above the burning horizon.

  HOLMGANG

  -1-

  The most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men, but the rebellious philosopher, for he destroys worlds.

  Darkness and the chill glitter of stars, Bo Jonsson crouched on a whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill him.

  There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque bow-sprit.

  There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit. Otherwise…no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars.

  Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his murderer conducted through the ground.

  Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close, catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when gravity was feeble enough.

  The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends. Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the remote sun could understand. But they didn’t care, he saw that now. To them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he was gone into night.

  He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid with him, hunting him down.

  Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive, it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for fear he wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Let’s face it, he told himself. You’re scared. You’re scared sweatless. He wondered if he had spoken it aloud.

  There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could skulk around, hide…and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died. And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.

  He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into death. Not till men came and hunted each other.

  Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth’s October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.

  Bo Jonsson’s tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would command. But he couldn’t do that. Even if the other man let him do it, Which was doubtful, he couldn’t. Johnny Malone was dead.

  Maybe that was what had started it all—the death of Johnny Malone.

  There are numerous reasons for basing on the Trojan asteroids, but the main one can be given in a single word: stability. They stay put in Jupiter’s orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only minor oscillations; spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed to be. The trailing group is the jumping-off place for trans-Jovian planets, the leading group for the inner worlds—that way, their own revolution about the sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost, while minimizing the effects of Jupiter’s drag.

  Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners, so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a permanent boom town atmosphere. Even though a spaceship and equipment represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of genuinely private enterprise; the prospector, the mine owner, the rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to start out on his own—a race of individualists, rough and noisy and jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue.

  The Last Chance on Achilles has another name, which simply sticks an “r” in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar where Guardsmen come in trios. But Johnny Malone liked it, and talked Bo Jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and departure. “Nothing to compare,” he insisted. “Every place else is getting too fantangling civilized, except Venus, and I don’t enjoy Venus.”

  Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick nervous movements and clipped accent of that roaring commercial metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow he didn’t grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.

  They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched one of Archilles’ three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he’d never have gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant, with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider himself bright, and always wanted to learn.

  Johnny gulped his drink and winced. “Whiskey, they call it yet! Water, synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label whiskey and charge for!”

  “Everything’s expensive here,” said Bo mildly. “That’s why so few rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend it just as fast to stay alive.”

  “Yeh…yeh…wish they’d spend some of it on us.” Johnny grinned and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid forth a tray with a glass. “C’mon, drink up, man. It’s a long way home, and we’ve got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle, and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don’t think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability, and it’s close quarters aboard the Dog.”

  Bo kept on sipping slowly. “Johnny,” he said, raising his voice to cut through the din, “you’re an educated man, I never could figure out why you want to talk like a jumper.”

  “Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don’t you get over that inferiority complex of yours? A man can’t run a spaceship without knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled Mozart through a horn. So what?” Johnny’s head darted around, bird-like. “If we want some women we’d better make our reservations now.”

  “I don’t, Johnny,” said Bo. “I’ll just nurse a beer.” It wasn’t morals so much as fastidiousness; he’d wait till they hit Luna.

  “Suit yourself. If you don’t want to uphold the honor of the Sirius Transportation Company—”

  Bo chuckled. The Company consisted of (a) the Sirius; (b) her crew, himself and Johnny; (c) a warehouse, berth, and three other part owners back in Luna City. Not exactly a tramp ship, because you can’t normally stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere else; but she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved. Her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges, for a space trip is expensive; but in a few more years they’d be able to buy another ship or two, and eventually Fireball and Triplanetary would be getting some competition. Even the public lines might have to worry a little.