Doubtless they’re thinking what lovely new specimens we can sell them for their zoo, reflected Torrance. He slapped Barklakh on the shell, patted Jukh’s fur, and left the bridge.

  A sponge bath of sorts and fresh garments took the edge off his weariness. He thought he’d better warn van Rijn, and knocked at the cabin which the merchant had curtained off as his own.

  “Come in,” boomed the bass voice. Torrance entered a cubicle blue with smoke. Van Rijn sat on an empty brandy case, one hand holding a cigar, the other holding Jeri, who was snuggled on his lap.

  “Well, sit down, sit down,” he roared cordially. “You find a bottle somewhere under those dirty clothes in the corner.”

  “I stopped by to tell you, sir, we’ll have to receive the captain of our escort when we’re in orbit around Freya, which’ll be soon. Professional courtesy, you know. He’s naturally anxious to meet the Eks—uh—the TogruKon-Tanakh.”

  “Hokay, pipe him aboard, lad.” Van Rijn scowled. “Only make him bring his own bottle, and not take too long. I want to land, me; I’m sick of space. I think I’ll run barefoot over the soft cool acres and acres of Freya, by damn!”

  “Maybe you’d like to change clothes?” hinted Torrance.

  “Ooh!” squeaked Jeri, and ran off to the cabin she sometimes occupied. Van Rijn leaned back against the wall, hitched up his sarong and crossed his shaggy legs as he said: “If that captain comes to meet the Eksers, let him meet the Eksers. I stay comfortable like I am. And I will not entertain him with how I figured out who they were. That I keep exclusive, for sale to what news syndicate bids highest. Understand?”

  His eyes grew unsettlingly sharp. Torrance gulped. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Now do sit down, boy. Help me put my story in order. I have not your fine education, I was a poor lonely hard-working old man from I was twelve, so I would need some help making my words as elegant as my logic.”

  “Logic?” echoed Torrance, puzzled. He tilted the flask, chiefly because the tobacco haze in here made his eyes smart. “I thought you guessed—”

  “What? You know me so little as that? No, no, by damn. Nicholas van Rijn never guesses. I knew.” He reached for the bottle, took a hefty swig, and added magnanimously, “That is, after Yamamura found the gorilloids alone could not be the peoples we wanted. Then I sat down and uncluttered my brains and thought it over.

  “See, it was simple eliminations. The elephantoid was out right away. Only one of him. Maybe, in emergency, one could pilot this ship through space—but not land it, and pick up wild animals, and care for them, and all else. Also, if somethings go wrong, he is helpless.”

  Torrance nodded. “I did consider it from the spaceman’s angle,” he said. “I was inclined to rule out the elephantoid on that ground. But I admit I didn’t see the animal-collecting aspect made it altogether impossible that this could be a one-being expedition.”

  “He was pretty too big anyhow,” said van Rijn. “As for the tiger apes, like you, I never took them serious. Maybe their ancestors was smaller and more biped, but this species is reverting to quadruped again. Animals do not specialize in being everything. Not brains and size and carnivore teeth and cat claws, all to once.

  “The caterpiggles looked hokay till I remembered that time you accidental turned on the bestonkered emergency acceleration switch. Unless hooked in place, what such a switch would not be except in special cases, it fell rather easy. So easy that its own weight would make it drop open under three Earth gravities. Or at least there would always be serious danger of this. Also, that shelf you bumped into—they wouldn’t build shelves so light on high-gravity planets.”

  He puffed his cigar back to furnace heat. “Well, might be the tentacle centaurs,” he continued. “Which was bad for us, because hydrogen and oxygen explode. I checked hard through the reports on the ship, hoping I could find something that would eliminate them. And by damn, I did. For this I will give St. Dismas an altar cloth, not too expensive. You see, the Eksers is kind enough to use copper oxide rectifiers, exposed to the air. Copper oxide and hydrogen, at a not very high temperature such as would soon develop from strong electricking, they make water and pure copper. Poof, no more rectifier. Therefore ergo, this shop was not designed for hydrogen breathers.” He grinned. “You has had so much high scientific education you forgot your freshlyman chemistry.”

  Torrance snapped his fingers and swore at himself. “By eliminating, we had the helmet beasts,” said van Rijn. “Only they could not possible be the builders. True, they could handle certain tools and controls, like that buried key, but never all of it. And they are too slow and small. How could they ever stayed alive long enough to invent spaceships? Also, animals that little don’t get room for real brains. And neither armored animals nor parasites ever get much. Nor do they get good eyes. And yet the helmet beasts seemed to have very good eyes, as near as we could tell. They looked like human eyes, anyhows.

  “I remembered there was both big and little cubbyholes in these cabins. Maybe bunks for two kinds of sleeper? And I thought, is the human brain a turtle just because it is armored in bone? A parasite just because it lives off blood from other places? Well, maybe some people I could name but won’t, like Juan Harleman of the Venusian Tea & Coffee Growers, Inc., has parasite turtles for brains. But not me. So there I was. Q.,” said van Rijn smugly, “E.D.”

  Hoarse from talking, he picked up the bottle. Torrance sat a few minutes more, but as the other seemed disinclined to conversation, he got up to go.

  Jeri met him in the doorway. In a slit and topless blue gown which fitted like a coat of lacquer, she was a fourth-order stunblast. Torrance stopped in his tracks. Her gaze slid slowly across him, as if reluctant to depart.

  “Mutant sea-otter coats,” murmured van Rijn dreamily. “Martian firegems. An apartment in the Stellar Towers.”

  She scampered to him and ran her fingers through his hair. “Are you comfortable, Nicky, darling?” she purred. “Can’t I do something for you?”

  Van Rijn winked at Torrance. “Your technique, that time on the bridge—I watched and it was lousy,” he said to the captain. “Also, you are not old and fat and lonesome; you have a happy family for yourself.”

  “Uh—yes,” said Torrance. “I do.” He let the curtain drop and returned to the bridge.

  A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS

  -1-

  Once in ancient days, the then-King of England told Sir Christopher Wren, whose name is yet remembered, that the new Cathedral of St. Paul which he had designed was “awful, pompous and artificial.” Kings have seldom been noted for perspicacity.

  Later ages wove a myth about Roan Tom. He became their archetype of those star rovers who fared forth while the Long Night prevailed. As such, he was made to fit the preconceptions and prejudices of whoever happened to mention him. To many scholars, he was a monster, a murderer and thief, bandit and vandal, skulking like some carrion animal through the ruins of the Terran Empire. Others called him a hero, a gallant and romantic leader of fresh young peoples destined to sweep out of time the remnants of a failed civilization and build something better.

  He would have been equally surprised, and amused, by either legend.

  “Look,” one can imagine his ghost drawling, “we had to eat. For which purpose, it’s sort o’ helpful to keep your throat uncut, no? That was a spiny-tail period. Society’d fallen. And havin’ so far to fall, it hit bottom almighty hard. The ee-conomic basis for things like buildin’ spaceships wasn’t there any more. That meant little trade between planets. Which meant trouble on most of ’em. You let such go on for a century or two, snowballin’, and what’ve you got? A kettle o’ short-lived dwarf nations, that’s what—one-planet, one-continent, one-island nations; all of ’em one-lung for sure—where they haven’t collapsed even further. No more information-collatin’ services, so nobody can keep track o’ what’s happenin’ amongst those millions o’ suns. What few spaceships are left in workin’ order are naturally the most valuable objects in sight. So they naturally get acquired by the toughest men around, who, bein’ what they are, are apt to use the ships for conquerin’ or plunderin’…and complicate matters still worse.

  “Well,” and he pauses to stuff a pipe with Earth-grown tobacco, which is available in his particular Valhalla, “like everybody else, I just made the best o’ things as I found ’em. Fought? Sure. Grew up fightin’. I was born on a spaceship. My dad was from Lochlann, but outlawed after a family feud went sour. He hadn’t much choice but to turn pirate. One day I was in a landin’ party which got bushwhacked. Next I heard, I’d been sold into slavery. Had to take it from there. Got some lucky breaks after a while and worked ’em hard. Didn’t do too badly, by and large.

  “Mind you, though, I never belonged to one o’ those freaky cultures that’d taken to glorifyin’ combat for its own sake. In fact, once I’d gotten some power on Kraken, I was a lot more int’rested in startin’ trade again than in anything else. But neither did I mind the idea o’ fightin’, if we stood to gain by it, nor o’ collectin’ any loose piece o’ property that wasn’t too well defended. Also, willy-nilly, we were bound to get into brawls with other factions. Usually those happened a long ways from home. I saw to that. Better there than where I lived, no?

  “We didn’t always win, either. Sometimes we took a clobberin’. Like finally, what I’d reckon as about the worst time, I found myself skyhootin’ away from Sassania, in a damaged ship, alone except for a couple o’ wives. I shook pursuit in the Nebula. But when we came out on the other side, we were in a part o’ space that wasn’t known to us. Old Imperial territory still, o’ course, but that could mean anything. And we needed repairs. Once my ship’d been self-fixin’, as well as self-crewin’, self-pilotin’, self-navigatin’, aye-ya, even self-aware. But that computer was long gone, together with a lot of other gear. We had to find us a place with a smidgin of industrial capacity, or we were done for.”

  The image in the viewscreens flickered so badly that Tom donned armor and went out for a direct look at the system he had entered.

  He liked being free in space anyway. He had more esthetic sense than he publicly admitted. The men of Kraken were quick to praise the beauty of a weapon or a woman, but would have considered it strange to spill time admiring a view rather than examining the scene for pitfalls and possibilities. In the hush and dreamlike liberty of weightlessness, Tom found an inner peace; and from this he turned outward, becoming one with the grandeur around him.

  After he had flitted a kilometer from it, Firedrake’s lean hull did not cut off much vista. But reflections, where energy beams had scored through black camouflage coating to the steel beneath, hurt his eye…He looked away from ship and sun alike. It was a bright sun, intrinsic luminosity of two Sols, though the color was ruddy, like a gold and copper alloy. At a distance of one and a half astronomical units, it showed a disc thirty-four minutes wide; and no magnification, only a darkened faceplate, was necessary to see the flares that jetted from it. Corona and zodiacal light made a bronze cloud. That was not a typical main sequence star, Tom thought, though nothing in his background had equipped him to identify what the strangeness consisted of.

  Elsewhere glittered the remoter stars, multitudinous and many-colored in their high night. Tom’s gaze circled among them. Yes, yonder was Capella. Old Earth lay on the far side, a couple of hundred light-years from here. But he wanted home, to Kraken: much less of a trip, ten parsecs or so. He could have picked out its sun with the naked eye, as a minor member of that jewel-swarm, had the Nebula not stood between. The thundercloud mass reared gloomy and awesome athwart a quarter of heaven. And it might as well be a solid wall, if his vessel didn’t get fixed.

  That brought Tom’s attention back to the planet he was orbiting. It seemed enormous at this close remove, a thick crescent growing as the ship swung day-ward, as if it were toppling upon him. The tints were green, blue, brown, but with an underlying red in the land areas that wasn’t entirely due to the sunlight color. Clouds banded the brightness of many seas; there was no true ocean. The southern polar cap was extensive. Yet it couldn’t be very deep, because its northern counterpart had almost disappeared with summer, albeit the axial tilt was a mere ten degrees. Atmosphere rimmed the horizon with purple. A tiny disc was heaving into sight, the further of the two small moons.

  Impressive, yes. Habitable, probably according to the spectroscope, certainly according to the radio emissions on which he had homed. (They’d broken off several light-years away, but by then no doubt remained that this system was their origin, and this was the only possible world within the system.) Nonetheless—puzzling. In a way, daunting.

  The planet was actually a midget. Its equatorial diameter was 6810 kilometers, its mass 0.15 Terra. Nothing that size ought to have air and water enough for men.

  But there were men there. Or had been. Feeble and distorted though the broadcasts became, away off in space, Tom had caught Anglic words spoken with human mouths.

  He shrugged. One way to find out. Activating his impellers, he flitted back. His boots struck hull and clung. He free-walked to the forward manlock and so inboard.

  The interior gee-field was operational. Weight thrust his armor down onto his neck and shoulders. Yasmin heard him clatter and came to help him unsuit. He waved her back. “Don’t you see the frost on me? I been in planet shadow. Your finger’d stick to the metal, kid.” Not wearing radio earplugs, she didn’t hear him, but she got the idea and stood aside. Gauntleted, he stripped down to coverall and mukluks and lockered the space equipment. At the same time, he admired her.

  She was slight and dark, but prettier than he had realized at first. That was an effect of personality, reasserting itself after what happened in Anushirvan. The city had been not only the most beautiful and civilized, but the gayest on all Sassania; and her father was Nadjaf Kuli, the deputy governor. Now he was dead and his palace sacked, and she had fled for her life with one of her Shah’s defeated barbarian allies. Yet she was getting back the ability to laugh. Good stock, Tom thought; she’d bear him good sons.

  “Did you see trace of humans?” she asked. He had believed her Anglic bore a charming accent—it was not native to her—until he discovered that she had been taught the classical language. Her gazelle eyes flickered from the telescope he carried in one fist on to his battered and weatherbeaten face.

  “Trace, yes,” he answered bluntly. “Stumps of a few towns. They’d been hit with nukes.”

  “Oh-h-h…”

  “Ease off, youngster.” He rumpled the flowing hair. “I couldn’t make out much, with nothin’ better’n these lenses. We’d already agreed the planet was likely raided, what time the broadcasts quit. Don’t mean they haven’t rebuilt a fair amount. I’d guess they have. The level o’, shall I say in two words, radio activity—” Tom paused. “You were supposed to smile at that,” he said in a wounded tone.

  “Well, may I smile at the second joke, instead?” she retorted impishly. They both chuckled. Her back grew straighter, in the drab one-piece garment that was all he had been able to give her, and somehow the strength of the curving nose dominated the tenderness of her mouth. “Please go on, my lord.”

  “Uh, you shouldn’t call me that. They’re free women on Kraken.”

  “So we were on Sassania. In fact, plural marriage—”

  “I know, I know. Let’s get on with business.” Tom started down the corridor. Yasmin accompanied him, less gracefully than she had moved at home. The field was set for Kraken weight, which was 1.25 standard. But she’d develop the muscles for it before long.

  -2-

  He had gone through a wedding ceremony with her, once they were in space, at Dagny’s insistence. “Who else will the poor child have for a protector but you, the rest of her life? Surely you won’t turn her loose on any random planet. At the same time, she is aristocratic born. It’d humiliate her to become a plain concubine.”

  “M-m-m…but the heirship problem—”

  “I like her myself, what little I’ve seen of her; and the Kuli barons always had an honorable name. I don’t think she’ll raise boys who’ll try to steal house rule from my sons.”

  As usual, Dagny was no doubt right.

  Anxious to swap findings with her, Tom hurried. The passage reached empty and echoing; air from the ventilators blew loud and chilled him; the stylized murals of gods and sea beasts had changed from bold to pathetic—now that only three people crewed this ship. But they were lucky to be alive—would not have been so, save for the primitive loyalty of his personal guardsmen, who died in their tracks while he ran through the burning city in search of Dagny—when the Pretender’s nonhuman mercenaries broke down the last defenses. He found his chief wife standing by the ship with a Mark IV thunderbolter, awaiting his return. She would not have left without him. Yasmin huddled at her feet. They managed to loose a few missiles as they lifted. But otherwise there was nothing to do but hope to fight another day. The damage that Firedrake sustained in running the enemy space fleet had made escape touch and go. The resulting absence of exterior force-fields and much interior homeostasis made the damage worse as they traveled. Either they found the wherewithal for repair here, or they stayed here.

  Tom said to Yasmin while he strode: “We couldn’t’ve picked up their radio so far out’s we did, less’n they’d had quite a lot, both talk and radar. That means they had a pretty broad industrial base. You don’t destroy that by scrubbin’ cities. Too many crossroads machine shops and so forth; too much skill spread through the population. I’d be surprised if this planet’s not on the way back up.”

  “But why haven’t they rebuilt any cities?”

  “Maybe they haven’t gotten that far yet. Been less’n ten years, you know. Or, ’course, they might’ve got knocked clear down to savagery. I’ve seen places where it happened. We’ll find out.”