"I'm glad you get fun out of now," van Rijn grumbled. "Next funeral I attend, I want you along for doing a buck and wing while you sing hey nonny nonny. So what we got here?"

  "A sun not only massive, but of unusual composition, extremely rich in metals. Probably it condensed in the neighborhood of a recent supernova. Besides the normal main-sequence evolution, a number of other fusion chains, some of which terminate in fission, go on during its life. This naturally influences interior phenomena, which in turn determine the output. Consider it an irregularly variable star. It isn't really, but the pattern is so complex that it does not repeat within epochs. If I interpret my findings correctly, it is at present receding from a high peak which occurred—zanh-h-h, several thousand years ago, I would guess."

  "But did not wipe out life on Dathyna?"

  "Obviously not. The luminosity will never become that great, until the sun leaves the main sequence altogether. Nevertheless, there must have been considerable biological effect, especially since the charged-particle emission did reach an extreme."

  Van Rijn grunted, settled deeper in his chair, and reached for his churchwarden. He usually smoked it when he wanted to think hard.

  The flotilla approached Dathyna. The computer of the captive ship kept all sensors open as instructed, and reported much activity in surrounding space—ships in orbit, ships coming and going, ships under construction. Adzel took readings on the globe itself.

  It was the fourth one out from its sun, completing a period of 2.14 standard years at a mean distance of two a.u. In mass it likewise resembled Mars: 0.433 Terrestrial, the diameter only 7950 kilometers at the equator. Despite this, and a third again the heat and light which Earth receives, Dathyna had an extensive oxynitrogen atmosphere. Pressure dropped off rapidly with altitude, but at sea level was slightly greater than Terrestrial. Such an amount of gas was surely due to the planetary composition, an abundance of heavy elements conferring an overall specific gravity of 9.4 and thus a surface acceleration of 1057 cm/sec2. The metal-rich core must have produced enormous outgassing through vulcanism in the world's youth. Today, in combination with the fairly rapid spin—once around in seventeen and a quarter hours—it generated a strong magnetic field which screened off most of the solar particles that might otherwise have kicked air molecules free. The fact was also helpful that Dathyna had no moons.

  Visually, swelling upon blackness and stars, the planet was equally strange. It had far less hydrosphere than Earth; quanta from the ultraviolet-spendthrift sun had split many a water molecule. But because mountains and continental masses were less well defined, the surface flatter on the average, water covered about half. Shallow, virtually tideless, those seas were blanketed with algae-like organisms, a red-brown-yellow mat that was sometimes ripped apart to show waves, sometimes clotted into floating islands.

  With slight axial tilt and comparatively small edge effect, the polar regions did not differ spectacularly from the equatorial. But with a steep air pressure gradient, the uplands were altogether unlike the valleys beneath—were glacier and naked rock. Some lowlands, especially along the oceans, appeared to be fertile. The brownish-gold native vegetation colored them; forests, meadows, croplands showed in the magniscreen. But enormous regions lay desert, where dust storms scoured red rock. And their barrenness was geologically new—probably not historically too old—because one could identify the towers and half-buried walls of many great dead cities, the grid of highways and power pylons that a large population once required.

  "Did the sun burn the lands up when it peaked?" For once, van Rijn almost whispered a question.

  "No," Adzel said. "Nothing that simple, I think."

  "Why not?"

  "Well, increased temperature would cause more evaporation, more clouds, higher albedo, and thus tend to control itself. Furthermore, while it might damage some zones, it would benefit others. Life should migrate poleward and upward. But you can see that the high latitudes and high altitudes have suffered as badly as anyplace. . . . Then too, a prosperous, energetic machine culture ought to have found ways of dealing with a mere change in climate—a change which did not come about overnight, remember."

  "Maybe they held a war what got rough?"

  "I see no signs of large-scale misuse of nuclear energies. And would any plausible biological or chemical agents wreck the entire ecology of an entire planet, right down to the humble equivalents of grass? I think," said Adzel grimly, "that the catastrophe had a much larger cause and much deeper effects."

  He got no chance to elaborate then, for the ship was ordered into atmosphere. A pair of destroyers accompanied. Moath and Thea directed the robots from a tender. The group landed near the Shenn's ancestral castle. An armed swarm ran forth to meet them.

  In the next three days, van Rijn and Adzel were given a look around. Thea guided them. "My lord permits this on my recommendation, while he is away at the Grand Council that's been called," she said. "By giving you a better comprehension of our society, we make you better able to help us with information." Pleadingly, not meeting their eyes: "You will help, won't you? You can't do anything else, except die. My lord will treat you well if you serve him well."

  "So let's see what it's like where we got to pass our lives," van Rijn said.

  The party was heavily guarded, by young males—the sons, nephews, and retainers who comprised Moath's fighting cadre—and robot blastguns that floated along on gravity platforms. Adzel's size inspired caution, though he acted meek enough. Youngsters and idle servants trailed after. Females and workers goggled as the outworlders passed by. The Shenn race was not absolutely devoid of curiosity; no vertebrate is, on any known planet. They simply lacked the intensity of it that characterizes species like Homo or Dracocentaurus sapiens. They were quite analogous in their love of novelty.

  "Castle" was a misleading word for the establishment. Once there had been an interlinked set of buildings, an enormous block, five or six kilometers on a side, a full tenth as high—yet for all that mass, graceful, many-colored, with columns of crystal that were nonfunctional but a joy to the eye, with towers that soared so far above the walls that their petal-shaped spires nearly vanished in heaven. It had been a place where millions lived and worked, a community which was an engineered unit, automated, nuclear-powered, integrated through traffic and communication with the whole planet.

  Now half of it was a ruin. Pillars were fallen, roofs gaped to the sky, machines had corroded away, creatures like birds nested in the turrets and creatures like rats scuttered through the apartments. Though destruction had passed the rest by, and the patient self-maintaining robots kept it in repair, the echoing hollowness of too many corridors, the plundered bareness of too many rooms and plazas and terraces, were more oppressive than the broken sections.

  Thea refused to say what had happened, centuries past. "Are you forbidden to tell us?" Adzel asked.

  She bit her lip. "No," she said in a sad little voice, "not exactly. But I don't want to." After a moment: "You wouldn't understand. You'd get the wrong idea. Later, when you know our lords the Shenna better—"

  About half of the functional half of the complex was occupied today. The dwellers were not haunted by the past. They seemed to regard its overwhelming shell as part of their landscape. The ruins were quarried—that was one reason they were in poor condition—and the remainder would be taken over as population grew. A busy, lusty, brawling life surged between the walls and across the countryside. While robots did most of the essential work, Moath's folk had plenty of tasks left to do, from technical supervision to their crude arts and crafts, from agriculture and forestry to prospecting and hunting, from education for one's state in a hierarchical society to training for war. Aircraft bore passengers and cargo from other domains. Gravships shuttled between the planets of this system; hyperships trafficked with colonies newly planted among the nearer stars, or prowled farther in exploration and imperialism. Even the peaceful routines of Dathyna had that thunderous vigor which is the Minotaur's.

  Nonetheless, here was a life-impoverished world—metal-rich but life-impoverished. The crops grew thin in dusty fields. A perpetual faint stench hung in the air, blown from the nearby ocean, where the vast sea-plant blanket was dying and rotting faster than it replenished itself. The eastern hills were wooded, but with scrubby trees growing among the traces of fallen giants. At night, a hunter's trumpet sounded from them lonelier than would have been the howl of the last wolf alive.

  Adzel was astounded to learn that the Shenna hunted and, in fact, kept meat animals. "But you said they are herbivorous," he protested.

  "Yes, they are," Thea replied. "This sunlight causes plants to form high-energy compounds which will support a more active, hence intelligent, animal than on the world of a Sol-type star."

  "I know," Adzel said. "I am native to an F5 system myself—though on Zatlakh, Woden, animals generally spend the extra energy on growing large, and we sophonts are omnivorous. I suppose the Shenna must process meat before they can digest it?"

  "Correct. Of course, I am sure you know better than I how vague the line is between 'carnivore' and 'herbivore.' I have read, for instance, that on Earth, ungulates habitually eat their own placentas after bringing forth young, whereas cats and dogs often eat grass. Here on Dathyna, a further possibility exists. Certain fruit juices make meat nourishing for any normally vegetarian creature, through enzyme action. The treatment process is simple. It was discovered in—in early times, by the primitive ancestors of today's Shenna. Or perhaps even earlier."

  "And on a planet which has suffered ecological disaster like this one, every food source must be utilized. I see." Adzel was satisfied.

  Until van Rijn said, "But the Shenna goes hunting, tally-hoo, for fun. I'm sure they does. I watched that young buck ride home yesterday wearing the horns off his kill. He'd used a bow, too, when he got a perfect good gun. That was sport."

  Thea arched her brow. "And why not?" she challenged. "I'm told most intelligent species enjoy hunting. And combat. Including your own."

  "Ja, ja. I don't say is bad, unless they start chasing me. But where do we get the instinct that makes us feel good when we catch and kill? Maybe just catch a photograph . . . though very few people what would never kill a deer do not get happy to swat a fly. How come?" Van Rijn wagged a finger. "I tell you. You and me is descended from hunters. Preman in Africa was a killer ape. Those what was not natural-born killers, they did not live to pass on their squeamery. But ancestors of Shenna was browsers and grazers! Maybe they had fights at mating season, but they did not hunt down other animals. Yet Shenna now, they do. How come that?"

  Thea changed the subject. It was easy to do, with so much to talk about, the infinite facets of a planet and a civilization. One must admit the Shenna were civilized in the technical sense of the word. They had machines, literacy, a worldwide culture which was becoming more than worldwide. To be sure, they were inheritors of what the earlier society had created. But they had made a comeback from its destruction, restored part of what it had been, added a few innovations.

  And their patriarchs aimed to go farther. Elsewhere on Dathyna, they met in stormy debate to decide—what? Van Rijn shivered in a gathering dusk. The nights of this semi-desert were cold. It would be good to enter the warmth and soft light of his ship.

  He had won that concession after the first night, which he and Adzel spent locked in a room of the castle. The next morning he had been at the top of his form, cursing, coughing, wheezing, weeping, swearing by every human and nonhuman saint in or out of the catalogue that one more bedtime without respite from the temperatures, the radiation, the dust, the pollen, the heavy metals whose omnipresence not only forced outworlders to take chelating pills lest they be poisoned but made the very air taste bad, the noises, the stinks, the everything of this planet whose existence was a potent argument for the Manichaean heresy because he could not imagine why a benevolent God would wish it on the universe: another night must surely stretch his poor old corpse out stiff and pitiful—Finally Thea grew alarmed and took it upon herself to change their quarters. A couple of engineer officers with robot assistance disconnected the drive units of the League vessel. It was a thorough job. Without parts and tools, the captives had no possibility of lifting that hull again. They might as well sleep aboard. A guard or two with a blastcannon could watch outside.

  Late on the third day, Moath returned.

  Van Rijn and Adzel observed the uproar from a distance, as his folk boiled around the overlord. He addressed them from an upper airlock chamber in his personal spaceflitter. His voice rolled like surf and earthquake. Hurricane answered from the ground. The young Shenna roared, capered, danced in rings, hammered on the boat's side till it rang, lifted archaic swords and fired today's energy weapons into the air. From the highest remaining tower, a banner was raised, the color of new blood.

  "What's he say?" van Rijn asked. Thea stood moveless, eyes unfocused, stunned as if by a blow to the head. He seized her arm and shook her. "Tell me what he said!" A guard tried to intervene. Adzel put his bulk between long enough for van Rijn to trumpet loud as Moath himself, "Tell me what is happening! I order you!"

  Automatically in her shock, she obeyed the Minotaur.

  Soon afterward, the prisoners were herded into their ship. The lock valves hissed shut behind them. Viewscreens showed frosty stars above a land turned gray and shadowful, the castle ablaze with light and immense bonfires leaping outside. Sound pickups brought the distant wail of wind, the nearby bawling, bugling, clangor, and drum-thud of the Shenna.

  Van Rijn said to Adzel, "You do what you like for an hour. I will be with St. Dismas. Got to confess to somebody." He could not refrain from adding, "Ho, ho, I bet he never heard a hotter confession than he's going to!"

  "I shall relive certain memories and meditate upon certain principles," Adzel said, "and in one hour I will join you in the command bridge."

  That was where van Rijn had explained why he surrendered to the enemy, back in the system of the nameless sun.

  "But we could perhaps give them the slip," Adzel had protested. "Granted, the chance of our success is not good. At worst, though, they will overtake and destroy us. A quick, clean death, in freedom, almost an enviable death. Do you really prefer to become a slave on Dathyna?"

  "Look," van Rijn answered with rare seriousness, "is necessary, absolute necessary our people learn what these characters is up to, and as much as possible about what they is like. I got a hunch what smells like condemned Limburger, they may decide on war. Maybe they win, maybe they lose. But even one surprise attack on a heavy-populated planet, with nuclear weapons—millions dead? Billions? And burned, blind, crippled, mutated. . . . I am a sinful man, but not that sinful I wouldn't do what I could for trying to stop the thing."

  "Of course, of course," Adzel said; and he was unwontedly impatient. "But if we escape, we can convey an added warning, to emphasize what will be read when your papers are released on Earth. If we go to Dathyna, though—oh, granted, we probably will gather extremely valuable information. But what good will it do our people? We will surely not have access to spacecraft. The great problem of military intelligence has always been less its collection than its transmission home. This is a classic example."

  "Ah," said van Rijn. "You would ordinary be right. But you see, we will probable not be alone there."

  "Yarru!" Adzel said. That relieved him sufficiently that he sat down, curled his tail around his haunches, and waited for an explanation.

  "See you," van Rijn said around a glass of gin and a cigar, "this Gahood fellow was Hugh Latimer's owner. We know that from Thea. We know too Latimer's lost to him. And we know he brought news what has got eggbeaters going in everybody's guts here. That is all we know for sure. But we can deduce a snorky lot from it, I tell you.

  "Like from the timing. Dathyna got to be about one week from this star. We can assume a straight line Sol-here-there, and not be too far off. Beta Crucis is like two weeks from Sol. Do a little trigonometrizing, angle between Southern Cross and Compass—is very rough approximations, natural, but timing works out so close it makes sense, like follows.

  "Latimer would report straight to his boss, Gahood, on Dathyna. Gahood would go straight to Beta Crucis for a look—we seen how these Shenna is bulls in a china shop, and life is the china shop—and Latimer would go along. Takes them maybe two and a half weeks. So they arrive when Davy Falkayn and Chee Lan is still there. Our friends could not get decent data on the rogue in less time, two of them in one ship. Right away, though, Gahood returns to Dathyna. When he comes there, he learns about this meeting with you and me. He runs here and tells his chumsers about something. The timing is right for that land of Gahood-trek, and it fits the pattern for everything else."

  "Yes-s-s," Adzel breathed. His tailtip stirred. "Gahood arrives in great agitation, and without Latimer, who is gone."

  "Gone—where else but at Beta Crucis?" van Rijn said. "If he was lost anyplace else, nobody would care except maybe Gahood. Looks like Gahood tangled with our friends yonder. And he was the one got knotted. Because if he had won over them, he would hardly come out here to brag about it . . . and for sure the other Shenna would not react with anger and preturbation.

  "Also: it would not matter if Latimer got killed in a fight. Only another slave, nie? But if he got captured, now—ho-ho! That changes a whole picture. From him can be squeezed many kinds fine information, starting with where is Dathyna. No wondering that Gahood galloped straight out here! These Shenna got to be warned about a changed situation before they maybe make a deal with us. Not so?" Van Rijn swigged deep.