QuasarDragon Presents "Around Infinity" by Oliver E. Saari

"Around Infinity" by Oliver E. Saari, from Wonder Story Annual 1952 Edition, originally published in Captain Future (Winter 1940). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

AROUND INFINITY

By OLIVER E. SAARI

THROUGH the three quartz windows showed darkness, far deeper than the black of interstellar space. It made one feel totally alone, forever removed from the familiar things of Earth.

The ship's single room was small and the three men made it crowded. The insistent hum of the engine gave some feeling of reality but one had to keep his eyes away from those windows. For utter emptiness was a thing no man could stand.

Dr. Leslie Chapman was hunched over the controls, guiding the ship on its strange flight. Over his stooped shoulder peered tall dark-haired Ivar Augustus.

And Ivar was watching with something more than interest. Ever since the ship had left familiar space and plunged into this mysterious inter-dimensional continuum Ivar had kept his eyes on the controls.

Behind his saturnine countenance Ivar was thinking dark thoughts which the white-haired doctor and his assistant could not guess. He masked his feelings well.

He knew why the white-haired . man had invited him on this trial flight—to gloat over him, to bask in the success of his supreme invention. It would make Dr. Leslie Chapman the greatest scientist in the world.

Ivar knew he could never surpass this machine. The knowledge of his failing prowess in science had been thrust upon him too often. There was something that made the thought of his failing almost unbearable. It was a boast made long ago, when he and Chapman had been vying for top honors in the same college. He knew he could not fulfill it.

Besides, Dr. Chapman's invention would net him well over a half million dollars in the numerous scientific awards it was sure to bring. Ivar knew of some very good uses for that much money.

He fondled the little smooth-handled object in his pocket—a little invention of his own that might have brought him much. Perhaps it would yet help bring him more. Anything could happen in another universe!

Suddenly Dr. Chapman cried out. "We've done it! Supraluna pulls—"

A SUBTLE force wrenched the ship, twisting the very atoms. It was like a long fall coming to a sudden stop—against nothing. And it had brought them to a new universe.

Ivar had seen the last of Dr. Chapman's manipulations. Now he closed his eyes for a moment, then turned his attention to the view in the ports. A green light appeared in one of the windows.

It was a colossal disc of pale luminescence in a background of starless space—a huge bloated world of purest jade. It must have measured all of ten degrees from edge to edge. Its light was soft and soothing but curiously mottled, an interplay of dark and glowing areas.

"A planet," Dr. Chapman whispered. "A great sunless planet!"

But Dave Manning, the doctor's young assistant, pointed to the control board. "The indicator shows that it has no mass, no gravity. Look! The needle's pointing in the other direction!"

They all turned and saw a disc of light exactly like the other but smaller. "That is a planet." said Dr. Chapman. "A little smaller, than the Earth to judge from our indicators."

"Let us approach this world," said Ivar. "That is, if your machine can propel itself through space."

Dr. Chapman smiled, moved a lever. A slight acceleration tugged at them. The ship was moving through the alien void.

"Rockets." he explained. "I had an inkling we might materialize here in the middle of space so I installed them."

Their objective soon grew into a world of appreciable proportions. It was like a huge ball splotched with radium paint. This strange sunless world furnished its own light.. Dr. Chapman remained at the controls and the dark-haired man still watched. Ivar wanted to learn every operation of this ship. He might have to fly it soon.

Finally a grinding of metal on rock told them the ship had landed. Dr. Chapman's machine had brought them to a planet more remote from Earth than the farthest galaxies!

The ship rested on a level plain that curved away on all sides to a nearby horizon. In the heavens were no stars, no sun. The great disc of green light they had first seen was still visible but a strange thing had happened to it. The ship had gone in a direction away from it but its apparent size hadn't grown smaller with distance. Instead it now seemed many times its former size, covering nearly all the sky with its pale light.

Ivar was the first to notice the phenomenon. "Look," he said, gesturing. "What kind of a universe is this your machine has brought us to?" Dr. Chapman and his assistant were gazing upward, puzzlement showing on their faces.

Like a mammoth lid the light hung over the world, spreading to within a few degrees of the horizon. There it faded away, leaving a narrow band of space to meet the eye.

"I think I'm beginning to understand," said Dr. Chapman. "I've told you the theory on which I based my ship—the idea that there are many three-dimensional universes, having movements and orbits of their own in a four-dimensional space—just like a planetary system.

"They are simply 'planets' or spheres of curved space. Our own universe is a huge three-dimensional space-world. It has its satellites, smaller universes, circling it.

"What we have done is to travel to one of these satellites—this one. I call it Supraluna. But that light in the sky is explained by the fact that this is a smaller universe. Its curve is finite, here, is near at hand. That patch of light in the sky is this same planet on which we stand and which we see around the universe.

"When we neared the planet we decreased the number of possible lines of vision that did not intersect with this world. Therefore the image grew in apparent size. Probably this is the only world in the entire cosmos, for there is room for no other!"

Ivar, who had been listening to the theories with apparent lack of enthusiasm, interrupted the doctor. "These are all very well in the way of abstract explanations. But what are we to do now?"

The gray-haired scientist smiled. "Dave, unpack the space-suits," he said to his assistant, who had just tested a sample of atmosphere.

Dave Manning obediently pulled open a trap door at one side of the floor and took out three bundles.

"Oxygen suits," he explained. "The air here is not very breathable!"

The suits, when unrolled, turned out to be one-piece affairs, made of thick fabric and topped by rigid helmets. Goggles of reenforced glass permitted vision.

In a few minutes the men were attired, ready to emerge. Manning went out first, through a cramped airlock. Soon afterward his bulging figure appeared in one of the ports. Ivar bowed to Dr. Chapman. "After you, Doctor," he said.

WHEN the doctor had climbed through, Ivar picked up the object he had lifted from his pocket. It was a small hollow tube with a metal handle and an enclosed mechanism at one end. He was glad he had brought it along—that athletic looking assistant might prove troublesome.

The terrain was hard beneath their feet and full of little prismatic glitters, as though it were composed of pulverized diamond. But here and there were softer places, where the ground was porous.

All around them were the luminous areas, where the mineral glowed with a vivid green radiance. At close range these could be seen to consist of tiny threads of light pulsing with alien living energy.

"Life!" whispered Dr. Chapman.

The others heard him through ether-wave units in their helmets.

"What do you mean?" asked Ivar.

"Life," repeated the scientist. "The simplicity of this universe forbids more complex forms. Life here is simply a radiation, feeding on pure matter."

"This is a strange planet," said Ivar slowly. "Unbelievably removed, inhospitable. What a place to die!"

He felt the tide of resolution rising within him. Now was his chance. No one on earth knew of this trip. He, Ivar, could go back alone and eventually announce the dimension-rotor as his own discovery.

Dave Manning had caught his cryptic mention of death. "What do you mean—die?" he asked, rising.

Ivar was edging toward the ship. He turned, the tube in his hand.

"This is an act of self-preservation on my part," he said coolly. "I have no other alternative."

Dr. Chapman looked up at him, his bewildered face shining through his goggles. "Why—" he began but Ivar broke in with a laugh.

"My meaning is simple enough," he said. "This dimension-rotor of yours is a wonderful machine—one whieh might add credit to my genius as well as yours." He waved the tube.

"Besides," Ivar went on, "I have long felt that I could follow my scientific pursuits better if Dr. Leslie Chapman were not around to anticipate my discoveries. Do you see? This Supraluna is a wonderful place in which to disappear."

"You wouldn't—"

Ivar's icy laugh came through the earphones.

"I'd advise you both not to try to follow me to the ship. This little device in my hand projects a beam of high-frequency radiations, enough to kill any living creature. A little invention of my own, almost as wonderful as yours, Dr. Chapman."

Slowly Ivar stepped backward toward the ship, watching the others.

Dr. Chapman was pale. He seemed overcome.

It was only the assistant, Manning, Ivar had to fear. He could see they were afraid of the tube in his hand and well they might be. Ivar could almost read the thoughts of his victims. He could see Manning preparing for a leap and brought his weapon to bear.

And when Manning; suddenly lurched aside Ivar grimly pulled the trigger. A thin beam of ionization leapt from the weapon's muzzle. It sliced through the space Manning had occupied a split second before. A continuous beam—so much more efficient than a bullet, Ivar reflected with cool pride. He started to flick the ray across the moving man. And that was the last thing he knew.

Ivar Augustus was standing there outlined against the rim of black space. From this blackness, from an infinite distance, a bright beam of light lanced down. Only for a moment did it touch Ivar's broad back.

The weapon went dark. The tall figure swayed, toppled loosely to the ground. Manning rushed ahead and bent over the still form.

"Dead," he said softly.

Later, as the single world of Supraluna diminished beneath their spheroid, the white-haired man said to his assistant, "I am still wondering if we did right to leave the body of Dr. Augustus back there."

"It might have been hard to account for," Manning pointed out.

"You know, of course, how he died?" Dr. Chapman asked.

"Of course. Ivar's weapon projected parallel rays. He forgot, when he fired it, that the rays would follow the curvature of this space, all the way around infinity, and back to the point from which they issued. "When it missed me the ray curved, followed its course around this universe! Only Ivar happened to be in the way of the returning beam. Ivar Augustus died by his own hand!"

End

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Audrey's Moon and Code of the Fang

QuasarDragon Presents a pair of stories from 1955. "Audrey's Moon," an SF story about a pair of telepaths in need of some serious anger management and "Code of the Fang" an animal adventure/fantasy along the lines of Watership Down. Neither is the story planned for last week, that one if forever abandoned due to the unenlightened attitude and racist language within the story. I don't believe in censorship at all, but I won't be the one to post anything quite that offensive.

And a note on the editing of the second story. The bracketed passage in the story is word for word the same as the original. The editor or typesetter at Adam clearly messed up.

She Loved Him Until She Read His Mind

Audrey's Moon

By THOMAS KERSH

Illustration by HUNTER BARKER

SHE WAS crying and breaking things again. A door slammed, and I heard glass crash in our sleeping quarters. I had stopped trying to understand Audrey three weeks ago. In fact, I also stopped talking to her. We couldn't pass the time of day without breaking into a fight, and if I beat her again, I might kill her. Then when the guard ship came to relieve us, I'd be courtmartialed and kicked out of the Service. I had to keep my temper under control.

However, this wasn't easy—especially every time I touched the gap in my front teeth with my tongue. The gum was still sore, and the first-aid kit had no tooth seeds. Audrey had seen to that.

When she saw she'd knocked out my two front teeth with the oxygen bottle, she ran straight to the first-aid kit, rifled it, and ground the tooth seeds underfoot. I wouldn't be able to grow new teeth until the guard ship came, and chewing was uncomfortable as hell. I blacked both her eyes for that one.

I kept hoping she would commit suicide. But I knew that if she killed herself, she'd make it look as if I'd killed her, and I would be punished for her murder without the pleasure of committing it. Sometimes I suspected that she was even trying to goad me into murdering her, just out of spite. Probably the only thing that kept her from it was that she wouldn't be on hand to see me get a dishonorable discharge.

I didn't see how we could stand three more months of it before the guard ship came. I'm a mild tempered guy, and I never had trouble with a space mate until I was assigned to duty with Audrey. Perhaps because the others agreed to a sensible sleeping arrangement without expecting to fall in love.

POOR little Audrey. She came into space service full of poetry, with stars in her eyes, and a heart so soft that I couldn't help pitying her. She had dreams of living glory, of the vast and infinite beauty of the universe. It was almost a religion with her, and it's a wonder that they didn't catch her tendency at the Service Academy. Still, the Academy makes mistakes.

Audrey wasn't a bad kid, but we should never have been put together under a plastic dome on a black rock in the middle of an ocean as large as Earth, fifty light years from the nearest occupied planet.

Samm, she was thinking, you utter bum.

I started to block my mind to keep her thoughts out, but I had to reply first. I shot back an image of myself holding her upside down by the ankles and banging her lovely blond head on the floor. She started a telepathic shriek, but I blanked it out and enjoyed the silence.

I glanced at the universal time clock in the center of the dome, hanging just underneath our small artificial sun. It was time to check the psi-scopes that guarded the station out to a depth of one light year. I had to trace the circuits mentally and make sure that everything was in working order.

The worst thing of all was not Audrey's disillusionment, but the fact that we were both telepaths. That's where the Service really slipped up. However, the disillusionment was real. Audrey hadn't seen a single star or a square inch of deep space since she got here, but she might have survived her disappointment. She'd be serving at better stations in her future tours of duty, stations where the isolation was not so complete.

Here, the planet was blanketed with a layer of clouds 40 miles thick. Unbreathable chlorine clouds, at that.

It wasn't actually a planet, but a moon, known officially as K-6347-4-1: the largest satellite of the fourth planet of a sun listed as K-6347. It was a medium-sized red sun, and I had seen it only once—on the guard ship, when we approached the system. The planet was the real reason we were there, and it made the red sun look dull by comparison.

It glowed in the sky like a huge ball of pure phosphorescence, which it practically was. Pitchblende Planet, they called it in the Service, and it was one of the most valuable prizes in the galaxy. A survey team spotted it over a century ago, and the Academy engineers still hadn't figured a way of mining it on an economical basis.

It was like having a closet full of money that you couldn't reach because the doorknob was too hot to touch. Nobody had ever been within 5,000 miles of the surface, and the spy rockets that were sent down hadn't shown too much before the radiation knocked out their electronics and drove them haywire. Consequently, no one yet knew exactly why the whole planet didn't go up in smoke, instead of merely glowing a pale luminescent green.

This was our baby, our job. The first month Audrey and I slept together, we called the planet her Moon. We couldn't see it, of course, but we knew it was there, filling a quarter of the Sky above our station on the planet's main satellite. We didn't want to kill each other then, but that was over three years ago. She was so young and so full of happiness that her dreams made me forget myself, and I was making love to her like a mad poet, promising to bring her the biggest moon in the universe, to strew her path with stars, to travel to the end of time for her, and to do other things which would have astonished the high command in the Service. Come to think of it, she seemed to like it, no matter how ridiculous it sounded. Anyhow, that was when we renamed Pitchblende Planet Audrey's Moon.

But there's a limit to such flights of imagination, and nothing could hide the fact—finally—that we were stuck together on a drab little station for four years.

WHEN the Service was founded and crews had to spend long periods alone in space, one of the first rules was that crew members should be man and wife. It seemed the only practical answer to the problem of isolation for years at a stretch, living at close quarters and never seeing anyone else.

It seemed the logical answer, but it didn't work. Man-wife teams had little more luck than all-male or all-female space crews. The final solution was to use a man and woman together but to forbid marriage between them.

The way it worked in the guard section—which Audrey and I and 5,000,000 others belonged to—was a four-year tour of duty starting at the age of fifteen, with a member of the opposite sex. This was followed by a year's leave, and another four-year tour of duty with another space mate. Since you were reasonably sure you'd never see each other after your four years together, it wasn't hard to make allowances and live together in peace. Usually it was a pleasant relationship, and when a man retired at the age of thirty-five after four tours, he'd have some fine memories.

In spite of Audrey's emotional childishness, which I shared for a while, we might have had a smooth four years if we weren't telepaths. The Service's strictest rule, aside from the ban on marriage, was that telepaths couldn't serve together. The danger, of course, is that two telepaths will not be able to stand the intimacy that their ability forces on them.

You can shield your mind at any time, but it's an effort, a strain. It's like holding your arms over your head all day long. A person just can't take it.
I just can't take it, Samm, you bum. Audrey's thought probed through to me. It was getting harder to keep her out.

"Samm!" She had opened the door behind me. I pushed three buttons on the psi-scope panel to keep it automatic, then turned around to face her.

The two black eyes I had given her were no longer puffy, but the discoloration was satisfying to see.

"What can't you take, honey?" I said, sending a couple of obscene images.

Audrey turned pale, and a sick look came over her face. I was almost sorry for her, but I raised a blank in my mind to keep her from knowing.

She covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shivered as if she had a chill. The thin fabric of her blouse shimmered in the dome's light, and her arms were tan. I could see where the tan was fading under her blouse, now that we weren't taking all-over sunbaths any more.
I'm sorry, I thought to her. I might as well try to make it easier, and she seemed defenseless. It's not our fault that we're telepaths.

Tears ran between her fingers, but she suddenly drew her hands away from her face and glared at me. "It's your fault you won't marry me," she cried.

"Who wants to marry?" I said. "Or have a baby ? I like the Service. I want to stay in it." Anyhow, why marry? You hate me already. What would it be like after a few more years? I was using telepathy because I wanted to edge back into her mind and find out what was really going on.

I could never probe to the bottom of her motives, but I caught glimpses of a secret pleasure at the thought of breaking the Service regulations. Marriage with a baby wasn't an end in itself for Audrey, but a means of defeating the system around us. She wanted to tell the Service to go jump off the edge of the galaxy.

I caught only little pieces of this feeling, and I'm not sure she recognized it herself, but Audrey was a rebel who wanted her own little civilization. She even wanted to make everybody telepathic. I'd rather jump into a pit full of monsters than live among telepaths. Can you imagine knowing everybody's innermost secrets? Or, even worse, hearing the million drab, everyday thoughts that occupy most minds most of the time? It would be like having to listen to a mediocre radio program twenty-four hours a day.

Non-telepaths are convenient. They're like radios with the power shut off, and it's almost impossible to get into their thoughts. That's why it's always safe to have a telepath and a non-telepath as spacemates : they can have a normal relationship, without the friction that arises when two people are thrust too close together. The telepath can take care of the psi-scope, and the other partner can look after the remaining duties of the dome. There's always enough to do to keep a healthy-minded couple from each other's throats.

I could never forget my first tour of duty with Evie. I was fifteen and she was twenty-five, and I learned everything she had to teach me—which was a lot. So gentle, so understanding that she was practically a psychoanalyst.

Evie. You want to marry her. The thought was so strong inside my head that I jumped. Audrey had overheard me again. I shielded my mind at once.

Now she was angry. The tears were gone, as well as her appearance of helplessness. "So that's why you won't marry me She picked up the first-aid kit, which happened to be on the wall near her hand, and started advancing toward me. I edged back.

She raised her arm to throw, and as I tried to dodge, I stumbled on the one-step dais below the psi-scope. The metal-cased kit sailed over my head and crashed into the glass screen of the psi-scope. It punched a ragged hole in the screen, and I ducked to avoid the flying shards, falling heavily on the dais.

Oh no, Audrey thought, looking past my shoulder. Then, after a moment, Well, I'm glad you did. Now we'll be apart.

What did she mean?

I started to brush off the pieces of glass and get up when I suddenly realized that my shoulder was pressing against the warning release under the psi-scope. I eased away with a feeling of horror. The warning would bring a guard cruiser to the station within twenty-four hours, and if we didn't have a good reason for the warning, we'd be courtmartialed.

Economy was a deadly serious matter to the Service. It worked on a strict budget, and a cruiser call might cost as much as 100,000 credits. Cruisers couldn't come running any time a person on one of the 2,500,000 guard stations happened to be lonely. The cost of the Service was so huge already that transportation was kept to a minimum. One call every four years was all a station could expect.

The Service couldn't justify itself by pointing to a clear and present danger, and therefore had trouble every time its budget came up for passage in the Federal Assembly. There were occasional rumors about an alien civilization in another region of the galaxy, but so far nobody had ever seen an "alien" above the pollywog level. There were also stories about whole guard stations vanishing, but I took these tales with a grain of salt.

One thing I knew for sure : the smashed psi-scope and the warning button meant the end of the line in the Service. Halfway to my retirement—no, over halfway—and she had to try bouncing a first-aid kit off my head. With a single motion I rose and lunged for her. "Audrey !" Audrey! I went after her with both hands, visualizing death tortures. I opened my mind to let her see the murder in it.

She whimpered and ran for the sleeping quarters and locked the door.

AUDREY didn't come out again until the ship arrived. The cruiser couldn't land, but a two-man launch came down through the chlorinated mist. I had given up trying to think of a good reason for the warning and was resigned to being merely dignified in defeat.

I was surprised by the quick arrival of the ship, which took only twelve hours instead of twenty-four to answer our call. When I heard the dome's pressure lock click into operation, I let Audrey know.

You might as well come out now. They're here. Straighten the sleeping quarters. And try to look human for a change.

The guards came in, their space suits still wet from the automatic spray that washed off the chlorine. I helped them take off their helmets. The older man, heavy set and bristle-headed, introduced himself.

"I'm Captain Jayten." He motioned to his companion. "Lieutenant Gorman." Both had a friendly, impartial look, and I took a deep breath.

"What's the trouble ?" Jayten asked.

I told it to him straight, including the fact that Audrey and I were both telepaths, stationed together by mistake because some idiot in Assignments had dropped a digit. As I talked, Jayten's slab jaws tightened, and his eyes grew cold and distant. The smile on his face was unpleasant to see. When I was through, he had only a few words to say. He didn't mention courtmartial, but it was written all over his face. He ordered Gorman to take charge of the dome until replacements were sent, and I broke out the space suits Audrey and I would have to wear while walking from the dome to the launch.

I tried to get into Jayten's mind but could catch no more than the usual glimmerings of thought that escape from the consciousness of a non-telepath.

Audrey still hadn't appeared. Audrey, I thought, don't bother powdering your nose. Let's go get courtmartialed.
It's not my nose, she said. It's my eyes. The ones you gave me.

She did a remarkable job on them, all right. At a distance, her skin Was fair and undiscolored, and she smiled shyly at the craggy Captain Jayten. For some reason it made me want to slug her again and restore my original handiwork.

THE launch took less than half an hour to bring us up to the cruiser's orbit. The moon's surface underneath us was a roiling blue-green mass, like a vast, puffy cushion. The planet, much larger, glowed above us like a pale sun, and at first I didn't see the cruiser because of the bright light behind it.

It swung in an orbit a thousand miles above the satellite, and when we got nearer I could make out its number, N-2. It was an old-model six-man ship, but in perfect condition. Space ships always looked bright and new if they never came into contact with a planet's atmosphere.

Audrey sat on my lap in the two-man launch, the seat strap around us both. When the acceleration pressed her against me it was like meeting her all over again. I had forgotten how warm and soft she could be, and I remembered the first days when we were together.

The captain's unfriendliness made me feel a little closer to Audrey, and we opened our minds to each other more than we had for six weeks. The captain said nothing more than was necessary to make contact with the cruiser, and his silence worried Audrey as much as anything. She seemed more troubled by the situation than I'd thought she would be, but it was hard for me to pin her down. Her telepathic powers are different from and better than mine.

I could never get into her mind when she was asleep, for instance, but she could head my dreams any time. That's how our biggest fight started. She caught me in the middle of fine dream about Evie and promptly tried to stuff an oxygen bottle down my throat.

What do you suppose they'll do to us? she asked as we came on board the cruiser and saw the other four guards looking as grim as robots with run-down batteries.

They won't do anything, I said as they showed us to a room the size of a coffin, except take us back to headquarters. There we'll be disciplined. Kicked out of the service probably. Maybe we can get into communications. We won't starve, but we won't skim the cream.
Is that all? she said.

The door had shut behind us and we were alone. The room was six by three by six, barely big enough for a double bunk with food and relief tubes. We wouldn't need to undress.

"No, that's not all," I said. "They'll suspend marriage and procreation privileges for five or ten years. Not that I'm in a hurry to marry anybody, but it might make a difference to you."

It did. She went pale and I thought she was going to cry.

"But they can't," she whispered, her eyes filling up with tears. "I didn't think they'd do that."

In the Academy she probably memorized poetry when she should have been reading the 'Articles of War. Sometimes I think she passed her exams by clairvoyance.

Samm, she said. I've got to do something. I can't go back. We didn't call the cruiser on purpose.

It might be better if we had, I said.

She closed her eyes and her face turned up as if she were trying to hear something a light year away. What—I started to say.

She waved her hand and said, "Shhh. I'm trying to get the electronic system." I went into her mind and tried to follow her, but it was too complex. She was trying the other crew members, digging below the conscious level, which was practically silent, to the mass of informational data underneath. She didn't get much, but it was enough.

She came to life and opened her eyes, yanked a hairpin out of her hair, and slid back the door into the narrow corridor.

"Get a pair of space suits," she said, and disappeared. What was she doing? I followed to see.

The corridor was too narrow for running, but I sidled after her as fast as I could. I saw her squeeze around a corner that I estimated was in the middle of the ship, and when I got to the corner I saw her reaching for the ceiling. She had jabbed the hairpin in a crack and was pounding it with the heel of her slipper.

I grabbed her collar and jerked her back just as a muffled "Poof !" came from the ceiling. A three-inch circle of metal melted away, and a dazzling blue-white ball of flame swelled out of the ceiling panel.

By this time the N-2 was gaining acceleration for the dimensional jump that would last almost a whole day and bring us out near the Service headquarters planet. A sudden surge brought Audrey down upon me, and we both tumbled in the corridor. I got my feet under me and scrambled away from the slowly swelling fire.
The ship's on fire, she thought happily. Now we won't have to go back.

I pulled her along the corridor to our quarters. Where could I give the alarm? I didn't want to be roasted in space, and I gave her a couple of images of What it would be like to fry and freeze at the same time.
Don't worry, she said. The fire set off the alarm, too. They know about it. They'll have to stop, then we can take over.

Take over what? I said. A cruiser blazing like a sky rocket?
BUT she was right. Acceleration suddenly stopped, and we were coasting in free fall. Someone clattered down the corridor, and Jayten appeared in the doorway, his hair burned off and his eyebrows singed.

He was wearing a space suit with the helmet back and dragging two other suits.

"Here," he said, "put these on and follow me. We're going outside."

I started to slug him and run for the two-man launch, but his free hand was too close to his gun. We had to play along for a while. Perhaps if we helped —and if they never found that Audrey started the fire—the courtmartial would give us an easier time of it.

I followed him, pushing the suits ahead of me in the corridor. Just by the escape hatch we had enough room to put them on, and Audrey and I struggled into the suits while Jayten went outside. Another crew member was breaking out fire extinguishers, and he strapped one on each of us.

"Is the fire outside ?" I yelled.

"Started inside," he said, "under one of the vanes. But it caught the emergency fuel line and burned out through the hull." He gave the strap on my extinguisher another jerk and said, "We've stopped it in the fuel lines but one corner of the uranium pile is exposed."

The extinguisher on my back would spray a metal skin over the hull and the uranium pile so that they could patch up the ship and get their power plant shielded again.

I went first out of the escape hatch. I jumped off into the blackness of space but misjudged the push I needed and spun away from the ship. For a moment I lost my bearings. The radiant planet was directly ahead of me, and I twisted back toward the N-2, which hung motionless against the stars. Fire had broken through the hull at the base of a vane, and a large section of the metal skin was red. Two figures in space suits were already spraying the fire.

I could see the satellite much further below now, and its misty softness had changed in the distance to a blue opaque shell. The two space-suited figures were being driven back from the fire by the extinguishers' reaction, and they had to keep jockeying into position again.

I grabbed the oxygen nozzle and pointed it behind me. One squirt was enough to send me scooting back toward the N-2. Three others were tumbling out of the hatch, and I knew Audrey was one of them. I heard he voice in my head.
Save some of the metal in your extinguisher, she said. I have a plan.

Fine. I didn't, so I could tag along—and stop her before she did something drastic.

I maneuvered into place beside the others fighting the fire, and it didn't take long to skin over the hull and get the power pile under wraps again. I didn't empty my extinguisher, and Audrey didn't explain.

But when we were through, Audrey drifted to my side. She raised the nozzle of her extinguisher and pointed it toward the four men in space suits, now examining the repaired hull.

Spray them! she said.

I pointed my extinguisher and let them have it. They were standing in a group, and one of them started to turn in surprise, but he never had a chance. We froze them in place like metal statues. The' liquid metal solidified the joints in their suits and welded them to the cruiser's hull.

Now what? I said to Audrey.

There's one more, she said. Inside.

We started for the hatch, and I wished I had a gun. The extinguisher felt useless now. As I grabbed the edge of the hatch, the voice came.

Not inside. I stopped, because, the voice didn't come from Audrey. Behind you.

I turned and saw the fifth man, pointing a gun at us. It was Jayten, and I'd lost track of him. He could slice us in two with a single shot.

That was a neat trick, he said. But don't make me kill you. I couldn't get over the fact that he was a telepath, but I was thinking more about the fact that the courtmartial would throw the book at us now. A mutiny charge perhaps. Maybe I could put Jayten out of action long enough for Audrey to get away . .
It's time we told them, another voice said, and I knew it must be one of the other crewmen. Another telepath! I didn't have time to think, because I was already diving at Jayten. He leveled the gun at me and a white-hot wave washed over my brain. I heard a gabble of telepathic voices and then blacked out, dropping slowly down into a deep well of unconsciousness.

SOFT hands were stroking my hair, and my head was pressed against something warm and soft. Audrey's voice came in.
You're awake! I tried to move, but my arms and legs were heavy and full of sleep, and my head swam dizzily.

"Where are we?" My voice was rusty, and I had to clear my throat. From the artificial gravity, I could tell the ship was in motion again. I opened my eyes to the narrow cabin.

For answer, Audrey touched a button on the wall, and a viewscreen at the foot of the bunk lit up. It showed the vast radiant surface of the planet, and we were plunging downward. Pitchblende Planet—Audrey's Moon—where the radiation stopped all the scout rockets that were ever sent down.

"It's simple," Audrey said. "They explained it to me while you were asleep."

"While I was asleep." That reminded me. "Why didn't I die ?" I said.

"Jayten didn't shoot you. They're all. telepaths, and they can hook up in a cir-cuit to paralyze anybody they like."

That figured. "But why couldn't we tell they were telepaths before ? We couldn't get more than a whisper from them."

Audrey patted me on the cheek like she owned me and said, "They've got something we could've used. Automatic mind shields. You don't have to be on guard all the time." She held up a small plastic object the size of a bean.

"Just slip it in your ear."

This I would have paid a year's salary for when we were fighting and getting on each other's nerves. But I still didn't understand why we were heading for Audrey's Moon. "Why—" I started to say, when Jayten appeared in the doorway.

Because we're not Service guards, he said. You might call us a new civilization. He looked friendlier now, and the harshness had gone away from his face. He sat down on the edge of the bunk. "There are fifty thousand of us," he said.

HE EXPLAINED that a group of telepaths, mostly persons tired of the restrictions and discipline of the Service, had been building up for the last hundred years. They lived on Pitchblende Planet, which glowed as if it were dangerously radioactive, but this was only an atmospheric effect. Other telepaths in the Service had been careful to doctor the spectroanalysis reports to make sure that nobody discovered there wasn't an ounce of pitchblende per square mile.

They took care of all scout rockets themselves.

Audrey broke in. "They were watching us for years. They heard everything we said or thought."

I sat bolt upright in the bunk and bumped my head sharply.

"You mean to say they heard me every time I . . ." She blushed, and I looked toward Jayten. He was trying not to grin.

He nodded and said, "Right. Not me, of course, because I don't go in for that kind of thing. Mostly it was the women. They even started calling the planet Audrey's Moon."

"Darling, they thought you were wonderful," Audrey said. "You were pretty good at first, you know."

Jayten stopped trying not to grin, and I felt myself getting hot in the face. "Matter of fact," Jayten said, "all the women were in love with you. The men didn't like it and almost voted to keep you off the planet."

This would bear looking into, I decided. I faced Jayten again. "But why didn't you come out in the open before? Why the Service guard act?"

"You'd never have left the Service if you weren't in trouble," Jayten said. "Most people are like that. We wanted you to feel completely alienated to the Service, and then we would have rescued you, pulled you out of a jam. Anybody's glad to escape a courtmartial sentence."

I nodded, and he went on to explain that the station back on the satellite would be destroyed and submerged, as if an oceanquake had broken up the basalt island. The warning hadn't gone through to the Service, and it would be several months before the regular guard ship came to relieve us. It all added up, and when Jayten left us alone, Audrey's face was serene and smiling. I even under-stood now why the cruiser arrived twelve hours early, and why there had been rumors about "aliens." But I was puzzled still about how things stood between me and Audrey. "No more fights ?" I said, looking up at her face. She smiled and kissed me.

"No. We're getting married." I kept my mind a careful blank and took the bean-like thought shield from her hand and put it in my ear. Now I safe. "Why are we getting married?" I asked.

For the same reason I couldn't go back to be courtmartialed." She laughed: "For the same reason I started the fire. For the same reason I got angry when you dreamed about Evie. I've got a secret."

She glowed at me happily and picked the shield out of my left ear. "Listen," she said, and pulled my head against her abdomen. "Two months already."

At first I could hear nothing, but then I caught the faint sounds of an unborn mind drifting lazily in a kind of sleepy warmth.

I don't remember what I said, but it was something like "Darling-why-didn't-you-tell-me-this-before?"

Audrey wept happily and said she had tried, but I was such a beast. I agreed, and we hugged each other.

Then I happened to glance at my watch and saw it was bedtime. Audrey had a faraway look in her eyes and said, "We won't land on the planet for an-other hour . . ."

The bunk was narrow, but we didn't even know the difference.

WE'VE been here four months now, and it's not bad at all. With the mind shields we can have privacy whenever we need it, and when we want to be together as intimately as possible, we take off the shields and enjoy ourselves.

We're very happy that we're going to have a boy. How do I know it's a boy? I've talked to him, of course. He doesn't have a good vocabulary yet, but he's learning. In fact, only last night I argued with him for an hour to convince him that it's not so bad in the outside world and that he ought to be born. He's as stubborn as his mother.

The End.
[From Startling Stories (Winter 1955)]



Olak, the white wolf, could not know that these superstitious man-creatures regarded him with awe, and were his protectors in a sense.

Code of the Fang

By HAROLD CRUCCKSHANK

OLAK, the White Phantom wolf king, whirled to the aid of his black wolf mate, Mayek. His fangs dripping red blood on to the snow, Olak savagely attacked a member of an intruder pack which had come down to raid on his range. They were members of the pack of Usam, the big black timber-wolf, a bitter rival of Olak.

Mayek was down, two of Usam's fanged hellions at her throat; but she fought with valiance and with strength and speed that were amazing, considering her condition. Before long, she would retire to the den to bring forth the season's litter of younglings.

Four of Usam's pack-members had beset the black mate of Olak, while the White Phantom was absent hunting. He had heard his mate's faint cry of distress and lost no time getting to her aid; now, with all the savagery in his great fighting heart, he launched himself into attack.

A lean, barren she-wolf coiled and slashed at his beautiful white throat. Her fangs cut through his fur and skin, and now his handsome breast was stained a dirty brown.

Olak sneezed sharply, as if to rid his nostrils of the distasteful tang of his enemies. He bounded to one side as the she-wolf reached again for him but overshot. As swift as chain lightning, Olak coiled inside and struck. . .

It was the end for this gaunt-bellied old member of Usam's pack. Olak's blood had been fired by an instinctive sense of the wide code, when the creatures of his kind must respect the condition of such as Mayek.

As the intruder she-wolf lay kicking, Olak chopped stiffly about her, his bloodied fangs bared, his hackles up. Truly, he assumed proportions that were worthy of his kingship. Two of the raiders crept, wounded, off into the scrub . . . Two, including the slain she-wolf, would never again go bounding down the hunt-trails like wraiths in the starlit winter nights.

Shortly Olak minced to his favorite slab of rock, his look-out position. He raised his head, thrusting his muzzle high, to give out a long and powerful wail of victory and of warning. It was a cry which penetrated the frost-fog, to reach the ears of the man-creatures at the cabin by the springs . . .

Tuk Cramer, his wife Netan, and her strapling Indian brother, Tan, cocked their heads sharply. Tuk and Tan were dressing down the pelts of handsome foxes—foxes which young Tan raised in a compound between the cabin and the springs.

"Olak!" Tuk gasped. "It is like I tol' you, Tan; those four wolves of Usam's pack must have come close to the den of the great white one . . ."

Tan nodded, and resumed the flensing of a hide.

Netan stared wide-eyed at her husband. Her full bosom rose and fell sharply. The Cramers and Tan had been "neighbors" of the White Phantom and his mate and kindred for many reasons here in this grim and desolate Nahanni country.

When the White Phantom called, it was either for tangible good or bad. To these man-creatures, Olak was an unusual creature whom they respected and, in a sense, feared, because of his white coat. Despite their mission-school training, they could not rid their minds of the superstitions of their ancestors. To them—secretly, if not openly—Olak, the White Phantom, was favored of the gods of the wilderness; they had long since learned to identify his calls, and they heeded them.

"Had you better not go and see, brave one?" Netan asked her husband in her soft Cree Indian tongue.

Tuk slowly shook his head. "No. When Olak calls as he did, all is well," he answered. "Tomorrow, out on my traplines, I shall call in close to the den, and check. Ayaie! But it will be bad if Usam brings all his pack down. They will rob our traps, and—ayah! Mayek's young. . . . She and the white one will have to be careful."

A DOG FOX barked huskily from the compound. This started a wild cacophony of sounds. Tan was instantly alert. This was a delicate time of the year for his she-foxes; the vixens could not stand too much excitement.

Pulling on a parka, Tan moved out of doors and walked quickly in the sharp night to the compound.

He whistled softly, and a beautiful silver fox whipped about to point his sharp muzzle at Tan. Shortly there was quiet at the pens. Tan talked softly to his charges; there were some very valuable creatures here—types he had developed by long seasons of careful breeding and attention.

Tan was proud of his foxes; he knew that Corporal Dan Martin of the Mounted—his friend—would be very proud when next he called, on patrol. It was Martin who had helped young Tan get his first start in this business of fox-raising, for the corporal had brought in literature to study.

Suddenly Tan whirled. The silver dog-fox bounded to the roof of his pen and thrust his muzzle high, to bark in his rasping voice-tones. Out of the west there came a long and powerful wolf-call. "Usam!" Tan gasped. His eyes blazed in the starlight.

Game was in short supply. It was the low ebb of the cycle in the rabbit ranks. Deer and moose had gone to yards, forced there by extra heavy snows; a famine was on the range of Olak. . . Usam was a bold adventurer, a ruthless big-fanged black. Small wonder that Tan quivered with misgiving. More than once such creatures as Usam had invaded the compounds, to destroy valuable foxes, in famine-time.

Tan strode back to the cabin, where he gave out the information that Usam was close in. Tuk's almost-black eyes glinted as he tightened his mouth. "It might be bad for our traplines, brave one," he said. "Bad, too, for the foxes. You will have to watch closely. . . ."

Tan stayed up late, almost until the dawn light began to filter through the pall of the dense frost-fog. He shuddered at the compound as he heard the skeleton tamaracks in nearby swamps crack their frost-tortured "bones." But reassurance came when again he heard the long, high-pitched wail of Olak, the White Phantom; the great white wolf king was alert and Tan knew that, if hard pressed, Olak would call in his powerful son, San, and the pack.

With this comforting thought in mind, Tan moved back to the shack, and straightway to his bunk . . . while the thin light of dawn slowly struggled to nudge aside the gloom of lingering night. . . .

MAYEK brought seven younglings to the world. Olak scouted the entire home-range area diligently. He was hard pressed to find and kill enough food for his own needs and for Mayek's sustenance. His flanks leaned off and his belly grew hollow. Many times he cut the sign of his hated rival Usarn and the black's pack members; but alone, Olak wisely gave the tracks a wide berth.

He pushed swiftly into the heavily brushed draws, where he was successful, now and then, in snatching a ruffed grouse or fool hen-grouse. Faithful, he brought a whole, untouched bird back to Mayek, laying the warm, feathered one just inside the entrance to her den. Now and then he cocked his head at the den entrance and listened to the mumblings and mewlings of his and Mayek's new litter. His hackles rose and fell, rose and fell, and he gasped soft, muted sounds as he stretched himself close by to rest, before whisking away to resume his hunting and find some small titbit of game life for the appeasement of his own ravishing hunger.. . .

Olak was out at his hunting when the tang of fox struck his nostrils sharply. Ordinarily he would have curled his lip and moved on, but his empty belly was grumbling. He slid down into a draw, and followed on along the brush-studded depression. Suddenly he came to a sharp halt and his hackles rose, for now. blended with the fox-scent, was the tang of a stranger wolf.

Usam!

Olak peeled his lips back and rippled his strong muscles. He commenced to inch forward, the chill breeze favoring him, stabbing at his moist nose. Now he peered through a port in a dogwood bush and his eyes widened into a flaming glare as he glimpsed the huge black form of Usam. The big black wolf was down chewing on a fox.

Dawn had only been awakened an hour when all at once Olak froze. His ears pricked backward as faintly there came the crunch, crunch of snow caused by the treading snowshoes of a man-creature. Olak sensed that the man was closer to him than the sounds of his approach indicated, for the wind was against him.

The White Phantom was between Usam, his enemy, and the man at his backtrail. He poised uncertainly for a moment or two, then suddenly galvanized to action. He whipped to the right flat bank of the draw and leaped prodigiously to the topland.

Turning his head, he glimpsed the man-creature; then quickly he cut for the brush, in a run paralleling the draw, to point almost at right angles to Usam, still down at the fox.

As Olak turned he was forced to expose himself. Tuk Cramer, the trapper, gasped. He knew the wolf was in close to one of the fox sets, but never before had he known Olak to make a raid on a set. Tuk was swinging his Winchester around when he heard a stir ahead. He gasped as he saw the great form of Usam rise, half turn his head, and leap on along the draw.

Cramer threw down and pulled, but he swore bitterly as he saw his bullet kick up snow a rod behind the fleeing black wolf. Now Usam was gone, swallowed by covering bush.

Tuk hurried forward, his eyes wide as he glared at the mangled remains of what had been a handsome black dog-fox.

THE MAN now turned to the point at which he had glimpsed Olak. A slow smile toyed with Tuk's mouth-corners. There was a moment, formerly, when he might have charged the White Phantom with the raid on the trap-set. He was glad he had seen Usam, the black one.

"Ayaie!" he gasped. "But it is bad! My catch will be light for the rest of the winter. . . ."

He freed the fox-paw from the trap, hurled the remains of the carcass out into the brush, then reset the trap; but he shrugged as he straightened. Once the wolves began their plundering, there was little man could do to stop them, save by the use of strychnine poison baits; and Tuk had promised his friend Corporal Dan Martin never to use poison.

For the rest of his run along the line, he found only one small cross fox, and the remains of another, whose fine fur was torn.

On his return to his home again, he moved in close to the den of Mayek. He stood long moments watching the almost-screened mouth of the den. but he heard no sounds, saw no sign. Yet he smiled, for he knew that Mayek had her younglings down deep beneath the scrub and rock-reinforced clay.

Back at his cabin. Tuk found Tan, and told him of his experience. "Usam has started to take my foxes, brave one," Tuk said mournfully. "Soon he comes down to the compound here. We must watch closely, or—"

"O-o-o-u-u-u-u-u-u-"

Both men spun at the high-pitched wail of Olak, the White Phantom.

"He is warning his kindred, Tan; it is bad!"

Tuk shrugged and moved on to the cabin to thaw out his lone catch and later pelt it. Many times famine had lanced the grim wild wastes of the Nahanni country. Tuk and Tan and Netan had come through many such a crisis, yet they shuddered now. In such a state, the isolated wilderness was indeed haunted by the grim specter of doubt, and threat and uncertainty. . . .

IT WAS such creatures as Olak and his kind which suffered most in famine-times. And the lynx, which depended almost wholly on the rabbits and grouse.

As the winter waned, Olak came across more than one wasted, starved, frozen form of a lynx, a creature which could provide him with no food-supply. In many cases the great horned and snowy owls had already torn what flesh remained on the lynx bodies, for the big owls, too, had been hard pressed to find adequate food. . . .

With the coming of the spring break-up, Olak hunted wider range. When the ice was gone from the creek, close to his home range, he stood in the cold water of the riffles, his head cocked. He had already tanged the first of the running pike, but it was some time before at last he was able to snap his jaws on a big fish.

He carried this back to Mayek, but she curled her nose, snarling; fish-bones were dangerous. Fish did not form part of the wolves' diet . . . only in extremity did they eat them.

Today, as a warm sun flooded the stirring wilderness, Olak loped on to a farther creek, where beavers had recently begun new activities.

He wrinkled his nose to catch the various scents Wafting on the warm breeze. He was searching for danger sign, for every now and then he had come across Usam's scent—scent planted, as was the habit of the wolf-kind, on hummocks and rocks, or against stumps. . . . But there was no fresh sign here at the beaver flat, no scent that overlay that tantalising musky scent of beaver.

Olak cocked his head. A creature was stirring off his right front. He slowly turned his head, and his lips drew back to expose his fangs in a sharp grimace as he glimpsed a big beaver at work on a fallen poplar near the big lodge.

Bark was being stripped by the strong incisors of the fat beaver. Head down, belly down, Olak began to steal forward. He licked his chops from time to time as he swung wide, left. Now he lay flat behind a clump of poplar saplings which grew right through the domed roof of the big lodge, which was connected to the stream proper by a skilfully cut channel.

With infinite patience, the 'White Phantom watched Ahrnisk, the beaver, at his feeding. Now the big male beaver turned and blinked his small black eyes as he stretched himself and, seated, his flat tail bracing him, began to paw his whiskers and, with his claws, comb out his coat.

Still Olak made no move. He quivered within himself as he waited, waited.

Now old Ahmisk dropped to all fours. There was a sudden resounding clap from the creek, where another adult beaver had been swimming. The warning slap of a broad tail on the water startled both Olak and Ahmisk.

Ahmisk at once coiled and started to scurry on toward the protective stream, but had to pass within half a rod of the crouched White Phantom. .. . Olak stretched and struck.

He was rocked on to his haunches as, like lightning, old Ahmisk slashed his nose with those terrible beaver incisors. Gasping, Olak again rushed, and this time Ahmisk had no time to turn and strike. Olak's fangs had struck him sharply, powerfully, in the nape of the neck.

It was a sharp and terrible killing; but, in his desperation, Olak could not pass up this opportunity. Ahmisk was big and fat; Mayek, at her den, was wasting for food, as her younglings exacted their heavy toll. Olak flattened and began to rip the heavy furry hide from the beaver-flesh. He belched repeatedly as he gulped the well-flavored, fatty meat. Nor did he cease until his gnawing, grumbling belly had ceased to complain. . . .

Olak was instinctively aware of his responsibility for the welfare of his mate at this early spring season. He licked his chops, fastened a strong fang-hold in the heavy remains of the beaver carcass, and turned to move along his home trail. He had gone no farther than half a mile when all at once he dropped the kill, and spun, to bristle his hackles as he saw the two members of Usam's pack trailing him.

THE DARK gray wolves were young dog-wolves with no responsibilities—hungry creatures at large. They had not the wisdom nor the fighting experience of the great White Phantom wolf king; yet they represented a great threat, because they outnumbered Olak two to one. He was crossed by two desires: there was his instinctive sense of faithfulness to his mate; there was his fighting desire to join battle for the retention of his kill.

He bared his fangs and minced a pace or two toward the intruders. His tail was high at the base, and kinked like a dog-fox's. His hackles raised and his breast coat fluffed out, Olak assumed proportions far greater than his natural size.

One of the dark greys suddenly swung, to go tearing in around Olak. He had the beaver carcass in his jaws when the White Phantom whirled and charged.

The fight was on!

Olak wasted no time feinting or bobbing; he sensed that this must be a short, speedy encounter. As the wolf with the beaver remains in his jaws whirled, to make a break, Olak spun and struck. His fangs cut through hide and flesh and ripped sidewise with a powerful jerk of the white one's neck muscles.

Blood spouted. The heavy beaver carcass dropped to the snow. Again Olak drove. There were fangs sinking into one of his rear thigh muscles before he finally severed the first wolf's jugular.

Now he whirled, spinning the second marauder from him. His off-side rear limb buckled under him. Its muscle was cut. Before he could recover and thrust, the dark grey had whipped away to the cover of the brush.... He sat there, at a discreet distance, watching Olak, the white one, coil in an endeavour to lick his wound.

Now Olak shuffled his wounded limb deep into a small patch of cold snow, until he was satisfied that the bleeding had ceased.

He minced about the dead wolf a time or two before moving to a knoll, an old beaver-dam, there to cock his muzzle high and pour out a long, high-pitched wail. It was a call that reached the ears of Mayek at her den. . . . It was a call heard by other wilderness creatures. . . .

Nearby, in the brush, his tongue lolling and his chops drooling, the grey wolf watched with baleful stare. He would have food, but not the succulent beaver. His feast would be cannibalistic, for he would rip and tear at his brother's carcass as the White Phantom moved on, carrying the beaver on to the den of his mate. . . .

As he neared the den, Olak whipped to the cover of scrub brush. He had glimpsed the man-creature. . . .

[Tuk Cramer shuffled on to the Beaver were in close season to all he reached the beaver-dam and the lodge, and saw the sign of a big beaver kill, he shook his head. Beaver were in close season to all trappers.]

"Ayaie!" Tuk gasped. He had protected Ahmisk and his kind for many seasons, watching them multiply. Tuk looked forward to taking a few pelts again when the season opened, but sadly he stared down at the torn fur and hide of old Ahmisk.

"Usam! Mucha Satan!" he swore in the Cree tongue.

It was well he charged Usam with the kill, for it would have been doubly saddening had he known that Olak, the White Phantom, had been responsible. . . .

BACK AT his mate's den, Olak dropped the beaver and thrust his nose deep into the den entrance. Shortly, her hackles up, her fangs bared, Mayek snarled as she approached the feast. Olak grunted and limped away, to settle himself to rest. His nose quivered as from time to time the fragrant, musky odor of the beaver touched his nostrils as Mayek savagely tore the flesh from the bones.

Now Olak's eyes began to blink. Ears cocked, he settled to rest, to nap, while the sun strengthened and the soft sou'-westerly breeze honeycombed remaining snow-patches.

High overhead, the whirr of wings faintly sounded. The first of migratory birds were in full flight north. Soon would come the honking of the wild geese and the cries of the whistler swans, with now and then the more resounding calls of the few remaining trumpeter swans.

Olak shuffled his body into a position of greater comfort, yawned prodigiously, and lay over, to rest while, seated on her haunches at the den entrance, her belly now well filled, Mayek, the beautiful big black, sat on guard.. . .

THE TRUE spring burst on the wilds with amazing suddenness. Songbirds had returned; sap-filled trees were blowing up their buds, and the first green grass-shoots were pushing aside the dead, dry grass of last year.

Hot sun flooded the desolate wastes, laying salve upon the hurts wrought by the grim winter. But as time went on, Olak, the White Phantom, became more restless. He started every time a gust of night wind caused a sinister, sibilant hissing of the dry grasses.

This evening, following many hot days, thunder grumbled. A flash of lightning to westward dazzled him. Throughout the night he sat and watched the play of sheet and fork lightning along the crest of the westerly hills.

There was no dew with daybreak—an ominous sign.

Came a close-in crash of thunder! Mayek had pushed her younglings to the outside. She joined them, her muzzle high. There was no sign of rain.

Another dazzling flash of lightning cut through a single mass of low cloud stratum to the north-west. The flash was attended by a smashing volley of thunder which sent the whelplings scurrying to their mother's sides.

Suddenly Olak sprang to all fours, and raced to a rise of land. He flung his head high, and his nose quivered. Mayek swung on her stern, to watch her mate; and then, over all the wild range, rang the long-drawn wail of the White Phantom. It was a warning. Smoke had touched his nostrils with its dread, acrid tang.

A freak, rainless electric storm had rolled around the hills all night. Its lightning had ripped into the tinder-dry punk of deadfalls at the edge of a tamarack swamp, and now, almost before Mayek could join her mate, smoke was visible. . . .

Several times Olak and his mate had experienced the mad ravages of spring or autumn bush fires, their most deadly enemy, the most deadly enemy of all creatures of the wilderness. The White Phantom did not panic. He turned his head, with muzzle cocked, to sniff sharply as if determining the true wind-direction. Now he spun, ran his muzzle along Mayek's flank; then, wheeling, he raced on toward the north-west.

Does had not yet dropped their fawns. A mule deer doe flashed by Olak, her nostrils flared red. She was in no condition for this sharp run; she had lots of time to make her way to the safety of the lake, to eastward, but, in her condition, she was panicked.

Olak stood a moment or so and watched her until the brush closed behind her. Now he glimpsed an old bull moose standing at full height, head turned toward the scene of the lightning's damage. Soon Moosewa might be gaitin, at full stride toward the lake, but for the time being he was glaring at the coiling smoke.

Now Olak watched a tongue of flame break from the smoke. A wind gusted, whipping the tongue out flat, stirring up the red embers of the punk, scattering them over the dry grass of a ridge. . . .

Then, quickly, the fire flamed out and the fickle wind steadied. . . . Olak sat on his haunches, his lips working sharply in strange grimaces.

A buck deer came bounding up out of a shallow draw, snorting as he pounded along in full flight Suddenly there was a terrific roar as the heated air caused a local eddy of powerful wind, whirled the fire a point to westward. It was then Olak spun and drove back to his den zone.

The seven younglings were without understanding. As Olak and their mother began to muzzle them forward, they tumbled and coiled, to paw and play. Olak seized a husky little dog whelp in his jaws and trotted off with him, setting him down a couple of hundred yards nearer the two-miles-distant lake. He returned for another. Progress was slow, but the progress of the fire was swift now. The sun was blotted out and the wilderness, so recently adorned in the first sign of spring glory, reverted to a sere place of desolation and despair.

Animals of every species moved by. A black bear and tumbling twin cubs came into sight. The old she halted, to turn her head and snarl gutturally at the wolf family. Olak paid her no heed.

All at once he froze in his tracks, a whelp in his jaws, as he heard the sound of footbeats to his right rear. Now he spun, to glimpse man-creatures. He quivered in every nerve-fibre, but no harm came to him. . . .

TUK CRAMER and Tan were out, scouting. They were looking for a suitable area at which to commence back-firing.

Tuk halted, catching at Tan's arm. "Ayah! But look, brave one! Him, the white one, an his family. . . . Cre nom d'un chien! It is sad We cannot help them with those young ones. . . ."

Olak moved on, watched by the men. He flashed past them again, on his way back for another whelp. Then suddenly Tan called to Tub. "Lookl To the right, north. Usam, the black, an'--ayaie!"

Tan pointed to five wolves of the stranger pack.

Tuk straightened his shoulders. In spite of the gravity of the situation, he would have shot Usam and his followers, but Tub was armed only with an axe.

"He is the evil one, Tan!" Tuk whispered huskily. "I am afraid for the white one an'—"

A terrific roar from the gathering forces of the fire cut Tub short. "We begin the backfire, great one?" Tan asked.

Tuk hesitated. "We begin, but, Tan, Olak, Hayek an' the rest of the young . . . We must find out where they are, or—tonnerre! we could encircle them. I go. Be ready!"

Tuk found Mayek nudging along three whelps. She whirled and bared her fangs as he came within a few rods of her. The tang of the smoke in her nostrils had made it impossible for her to catch his scent.

Tuk backed away. Now as he turned to rejoin Tan he gasped as a wall of flame rose like a high tide of red death. Powered by a sudden blast of wind, it rose, surging, to smash against a belt of mixed evergreen and deciduous timber. . . .

Tuk shuddered and spun, to hurry back to Tan. "We move quickly toward the west, Tan. There is no more time. Come!"

Shortly they were touching off dry matted grass, healing out flame, forcing the backfire to creep against the wind, in a widening circle, as they struggled against the smoke fumes to save their home area. . . They must get a backfire line around to join the creek to the south of their home yard; but they realized that their struggles could, in a single puff of wind, be all in vain. . . .

AT THE threat of encirclement by the backfire, Mayek was forced to seize a whelp and rush to find OIak. She was obliged to leave two of the whelps behind. Now she and Olak whipped back together. . . . But as they neared the young ones a dark form flashed to the brush. It was the great form of Usam . . . Usain, the code-breaker. A small whelpling lay stretched out in death.

Together, Mayek and Olak raised hackles and bared their terrible fangs.

Mayek now darted in, snuffling smoke-tang from her nostrils, and seized the last of the whelps, to start nosing them along as fast as their immature legs would carry them. There was no chance now of her gaining the safety of the lake. She was turning her brood on toward the creek, to the south. . . .

Olak had not rejoined her. He was swinging around a belt of brush, and now he poised himself at his' full height, to glare at a slinking black wolf-shape. This was Usam. As the fire demons roared and crackled at his back, Olak raised his muzzle and gave out a husky wail. The black wolf-chieftain spun.

Usam whipped agilely to one side at the White Phantom's thrust. He spun and slashed with his terrible fangs, which caught Olak in the throat.

Smeared with blood, the white one rushed again. He snapped and whipped back. Usam rocked back.

Gutturing deep throat-sounds, the White Phantom hurled himself in. His gaping jaws drove, and his fangs buried themselves in Usam's throat.

The big black wolf was strong. He put all his muscular strength to service now as he wrenched his neck from side to side. He suddenly fell, taking Olak with him. The throat-hold was lost, and for a few seconds Olak was hard pressed.

He caught the black by a forepaw and exerted all his strength in a sharp twist of his head. A bone snapped like the crack of a fire-tortured tamarac.

Usam buckled. He was stumbling forward when Olak whirled and cut his hamstrings. . . .

Olak seized a youngling straggler and whirled, to skirt a flaming patch of scrub brush, then on to the creek flat, where he laid the cub. . . .

As the grim red tide bore ruthlessly down, to reach its climax in the heavy matted dry grasses of the creek flat, Mayek and her brood cowered in the shallows of the creek, as wind roared flame over their backs.

Olak swam back and forth in a pool upstream. Now he returned to his family, and muzzled first one whelpling after another. Above the roar of the fire there came sudden, sharp crashes. The entrapped storm to westward had broken free.

Olak whimpered softly as he raised his head to catch the beat of raindrops. . . . Now he carried the whelps to the far bank, to soft haven in cover of heavy willows, where Mayek joined them.

Olak took himself off to a knoll, where he stood and listened to the hiss of rain into the fire, and watched the clouds of steam replace the black smoke.

Now he thrust up his head and poured out a long wail which declared his victory—victory not only over the fire gods, but over his hated enemy Usam, the code-breaker, whose scorched body lay in the smoke-obscured brush to northward.

The End.
[From Adam (Aug. 1955)]

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyrights on these publications were renewed.

Delirium on Deneb By Rolf Martell

From Thrilling Wonder Stories Vol. XLII No. 1. (April 1953). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

He almost reached the hatch opening when there was a gust of wind.

Delirium on Deneb

By Rolf Martell

"Horga learned the secret of the deadly dust—but he had no knowledge of how it would hit him"

JON HORGA, big, bulky and space-tanned, sat alone in the spaceport bar, nursing the last drink he could buy. He savagely ground out his blue Venusian cigar and felt the single orange credit note in his jacket pocket. Tomorrow, he knew, a space patrol blacklist would be thrown at him for suspected wrecking, and he'd be grounded for good. Horga, though he burned with anger, was not badly worried. Flush with credits or broke, he'd always landed on his feet, because he'd always been a little harder and more ruthless than his enemies. And everyone —man or humanoid—he considered his potential enemy.

He gave little attention to the bargirls in their short, provocative skirts, the crew members or the rocket mechanics who wandered past his table. But his cold blue eyes narrowed as he saw the old spaceman stagger towards him. Horga judged he was a prospector just back from a long star trip. He had the look of money—a stake that Horga needed badly right now.

Horga shoved out the chair on the opposite side of his table and gestured toward it. The old man, his eyes a little vacant, smiled and dropped into the chair .

"Just blasted in?" Horga asked.

"Yeah—burned it in at 1800—and as glad as I've ever been to get back to a world with a drink. Three months out and back to Deneb ain't a picnic, ever, but this time if it wasn't for luck it would've been my last run, just like it was for my partner." In answer to the old man's gesture, the waitress appeared with drinks—Alkursch. His hand trembled a bit as he downed his drink in a gulp.

Horga extended his big, radiation-burned hand across the table. "I'm Jon Horga," he said, "just off the Arcturan Queen. Blaster's Mate First. Sounds to me like you got quite a yarn."

The old man's bleary eyes focused slowly. There was a hint of suspicion in them, but the desire for companionship after lonely weeks in space was stronger. He shoved out his hand. "Mine's Barnabus," he said. "Whatever the rest of it was, guess I left it behind, a few million light-years back."

The old man gestured for more drinks, paying off with a bill pealed from a fat roll. "It's a yarn, all right—one of the kind, son, that they say you gotta give out to the space patrol boys if you want to keep your star papers. And I figure that's where I'd better be headed now, while I still got half a synapse working." The old man started to get up, but Horga laid a friendly hand on his arm.

"Barnabus, old boy, I know the patrol has listened to a lot of wild tales—some of them true—but they have a way of discounting about ninety percent what starboys like us say when we wander in with a jetload of Alkursch—and they're just as likely as not to slap a detain on you with an h.t.s. ticket—hold till sober."

Barnabus slumped back in his chair. For a moment he stared at Horga, the Alkursch showing in his eyes. Finally, he shook himself and muttered, "Son, I guess you got a point. Very same thing happened to me once out on Vega IV—very same thing you just said. Guess what I need is some coffee."

Barnabus twisted in his chair and familiarly patted the hip of a passing waitress. "Coffee for me and my friend," he said in fluent, ungrammatical Aldeberan, "and a double order of toasted pultischtoz."

AS THE waitress flashed her standard smile and left to fill the order, Horga leaned forward and began to talk rapidly to Barnabus, telling him of the day-long battle he once had with aliens—pirates in the Magellenics. While he talked, his hands were busy under the table. His right hand slipped along the links of his life-bracelet, past the life-radio, past the sustenance link, with food and water substitute for a month; past the antibody link, the location that automatically gave star coordinates—past these and three similar links to his own special link. He worked the three tiny buttons and the knob in proper sequence and rhythm and the cover of the link sprang open. Carefully, the index finger of his right hand slipped into the cavity and he caught a tiny capsule under his fingernail.

All this time, he continued with his. story. ". . . and, then, when we were disabled, they began to board us. As a last resort, we'd let them think we were all dead. But when they burned their way in, at the stern quarter, we were waiting. I had the trigger-box of the Easton, and I'll always remember the first one that came in through the smoking hole they'd made. He looked—well—if you take a look at that picture behind you, over the bar, you'll get some idea . . ."

As old Barnabus glanced behind him at the picture, Horga's right hand shot out over the coffee, and the tension in his finger relaxed just enough to let the capsule drop into the cup. . .

Barnabus wondered vaguely why the coffee and the pultischtoz didn't help. He kept talking and talking, feeling drunker all the time . . . he hadn't planned to go on this way, but he told how he and his partner had landed out on Deneb IV, hit a rich vein of Thoralite and loaded up. Then, almost by accident, they had stumbled across the meteorite caves with their lichens that no one, through all of space, had ever seen before. How his partner had attempted to analyze the lichens and the strange blue powder they exuded. And how, when his partner fused the powder in the spectroscope . . . .

"It was a nightmare," Barnabus went on. "After it hit him, he was convinced he was surrounded by girls—dozens of them, Earth girls, Venusians, Aldebarans—doing anything he wanted. He knew they were there. And I guess they were, to him. And money, liquor, food —anything and everything. The hallucinations went on for hours. Suddenly, they stopped. Then he just sat, eyes wide open, blank, staring.

I kept watching him for quite awhile and finally I said, 'Bill, why don't you come off it?' His face doesn't change expression at all. He'd been sitting on the hunk but then, more like a servo than a man, he stands up and . . . and . . . just waits! I still don't know.what's happening, y'understand—I think Bill's trying to give me the business. So I'm disgusted—remember, I ain't a space medic. So I said, disgusted-like, 'Look, Bill, it's time we blasted off. It's time you quit this routine. Fun's fun, and all that, but we got to leave.' So he just stands there, with the same fishy eyes, no expression at all. So finally—I'm getting mad now you see—I say, 'Bill, snap out of it or go take a flying leap for yourself.' "

OLD BARNABUS took a long drink of coffee and went on. "We had a K-72-Y—you know the kind of ship—there's a sixty foot drop from the main hatch to the ground. So, when I pulled that 'flying leap' line, Bill happened to be standing nearer to the open hatch than I was. Before I figured what was going on, he'd taken four big steps over to the hatch. Then he looked over at me, as if he wanted my approval. Before I had a chance to say a word, he faced back to the open hatch. I saw his knees bend, then suddenly straighten, and his body shot out. He was gone. There was nothing but sky showing in the hatch."

Barnabus shuddered and poured the rest of the coffee down his throat. "I dashed over to the hatch and looked down. Yeah—there was what was left of Bill—sixty feet. below. 'Smashed to a pulp on the rocks."

Barnabus wiped a thin hand across his mouth. "As I climbed down the ladder, I figured out, more or less, what had happened. Stupid of me not to have caught on sooner. The stuff he'd been testing—must have been a narcotic that we never heard of—set him off in dreams first, and then put him in a state so that he'd do anything I said. The flame in the spectroscope set it off—guess the stuff has to be in vapor form to take effect. But, to make sure, before I buried Bill, I took some blood samples. After I ran the Anderson test on them, I was sure. Turned out to be Anderson Rd-7: permanent addiction with no known counteragents. Rough stuff. Makes a man just about one hundred per cent suggestible to anybody, permanently."

Jon Horga's eyes glittered as he offered a cigar to the old man. Here was a stake—a stake bigger than he'd ever dreamed of having. With this drug—what was the old fool saying—the natives called it locada—he would have anything—anything—he wanted. First, he'd enslave a rich man, to give him the capital he would need at the beginning. Next, technicians and rocket men. Then, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more for every purpose, every whim. With locada he could be the absolute master of a planet, a whole system, finally, perhaps, the galaxy! His eyes were watchful as he regarded the old man. Already he could see that the little white capsule was taking effect. The old man was still babbling on, but his eyes were drooping. His head refused to stay erect. His speech was thicker. Horga watched and waited. Seconds later, in the middle of a sentence, the old man's head suddenly fell to the permacloth tabletop.

IT HAD been easy, Horga thought. A little pill, but a big dose. Then, with old Barnabus out on his feet, a matter of paying off the port fees with Barnabus' own credits, a small bribe to the driver of the port jeep who took them out to the ship, then the blast-off. Of course, he'd had to throw a paralyzer beam on the old fool, to keep him happy in hyperspace. And now, he thought, with Deneb bright in front of him, it was time to nick old Barney with a touch of Scop 7-0-8 to get the truth out of him on the position of the locada caverns.

He switched in the planet radar and picked up Deneb IV. Ignoring the rules of the space manual, he threw the ship into an FTL "shummer" and immediately slapped it back out. Zero time had passed and he was on the orbit of IV, tailing it a few thousand, Flicks of the rear jets, scherzo manipulations of the auxiliaries. Cancel out the anti-grav, pull the tape from the evaluator, feed masses and velocities into the Compumaster, sling the ship into an orbit, and that's that. Compumaster would take care of the next hour of spiraling in.

Jon Horga stepped out of the pilot seat, filled the Scop needle, and walked back to Barnabus, paralyzed on his couch. Barnabus glared up at him in helpless, frustrated anger as Horga shot the needle home. It was the most powerful truth drug known, though its average effect lasted for only four minutes twenty seconds. But time enough. In three minutes, Horga knew the landing area, azimuth and distance to the locada deposits. Plus: characteristics of the humanoid natives, flora, topography, atmosphere, this-and-that for survival.

Horga smiled with satisfaction and pushed his big bulk back into the pilot's compartment. He thought over the characteristics of the Tzenn, the humanoid natives old Barnabus had mentioned. Physically, he had said, they looked human, more or less, but their metabolism was silicon-based, rather than carbon-based, and among their organs was a special silicon-lined ductless gland, containing almost pure phosphorous, which their systems required in relatively large quantities in order to handle the very complex vitamin molecules found in their food supply.

These Tzenn should be easy to deal with, Horga decided. The old man had described them as docile, primitive folk, blue skinned, living almost naked in the tropical heat of their planet. They subsisted on the few simple crops they grew. Horga frowned as he recalled that old Barnabus had also said they had a religious taboo strictly prohibiting anyone from entering the locada caves. Then he smiled grimly. His needle gun had solved the problem of more than one religious taboo before, among savages.

As the ship spiraled in, Jon Horga set the co-ordinates that Barnabus had been forced to give him into the lat-lon dial. He watched as they passed over a turgid, algae-choked sea, countless miles of dense tropical jungle, and finally the foothills of enormous, rugged mountains. Horga took over from the Compumaster and brought the ship down on the same rock-strewn clearing where Barnabus had landed before. It was a good landing, with the nose of the ship pointed straight up, the three tail fins resting on rock in the center of the clearing.

After checking his needle gun, Horga started for the hatch. He grinned at Barnabus as he passed him. "Soon as I'm back with the locada dust, you'll have the honor of becoming the first slave in the empire of Horga I."

Old Barnabus glared in helpless rage as Horga opened the hatch and began to climb down the sixty feet to the surface.

Horga tramped through the hot, steaming jungle, watching for the landmarks he had forced Barnabus to give him. Flying reptiles whirred past overhead, and noises around him indicated that the jungle was full of other forms of life—and death. As the path turned abruptly, Horga suddenly stopped short and drew back.

At his feet, hungrily reaching for him with enormous claws, was a creature with a slug-like body, fully six feet long. It lay across a blue, rotten log in the path and sunlight sparkled, reflected from the compound eyes in its iridescent head. The claws shot out at Horga and snapped viciously again, this time rip-ping his coveralls and just missing his leg. For all its torpid aspect, the thing was amazingly fast and agile. Horga threw himself back, his needle gun flashing up out of its holster and into action. Instantly, the thing on the log was black, charred ash. Horga stepped over it and continued, a smile of satisfaction on his face.

He crossed a narrow, rapid stream, leaping from one stone to another, care-ful to avoid the orange, poisonous lance-fish flashing through the water beneath him. Then the jungle began to thin out as the path climbed into the foothills, and the ground became more rocky. Under the glaring rays of the young hot sun, Horga sweated as he doggedly pushed on, up the rugged path.

As he rounded an enormous boulder, he saw his first natives on the hillside ahead. There were two of the Tzenn, roughly humanoid, but taller and thinner than men, with glistening blue skins. Each carried a long, crudely fashioned hunting spear. As they saw him, they began chattering excitedly to each other in high, squeaking voices. Horga had his needle gun ready as he advanced toward them, but they retreated off the path into the brush at his approach. As he strode on across the rugged hillside, he heard the Tzenn scampering along behind him, squeaking in their strange, high-pitched language. Over his shoulder he could catch an occasional glimpse of them, loping through the brush or across the rocks, with sunlight glistening on their bare blue skins. Horga felt a vague annoyance and irritation at the Tzenn. Stupid creatures, he thought contemptuously, and apparently harmless, Of course, they might not be so harmless when he broke their taboo—he'd seen native races turned into murderous frenzy when their religion was offended—but the needle gun would take care of them, as it had before with others who had ben stupid enough to get in his way.

He came at last to the canyon opening that Barnabus had spoken of, with sheer cliffs rising at each side—almost the end of his journey. As he walked into the canyon, past the rock walls on either side, the thin squeaking of the Tzenn behind him seemed to grow more excited. Horga guessed that this must be the beginning of the forbidden country. He held his needle gun ready and turned it up to full intensity. If the stupid fools asked for trouble, he was ready to give it to them. He strode on. The canyon widened into a barren, rock-strewn floor, hundreds of feet in width, surrounded by sheer walls. At his approach a flying reptile stretched its leathery, green scaled wings and clumsily began to circle into the air.

The needle gun in Horga's hand crackled and the stricken creature seemed to hesitate in mid-air. Then, head downward, its useless wing broken and fluttering, it plunged back to the rocky canyon floor. It thudded among the razor-sharp rocks, trailing a thin plume of smoke. As Horga passed the dying bird, he kicked it with loathing and continued on.

NOW his steps quickened and he hurried forward eagerly, Ahead of him, at the-base of the canyon wall, he saw the locada caverns—the source of limitless power and wealth, the source of slaves to do his bidding, to supply all the things he would ever need or want. An empire of trapped minds! He scrambled over the sharp rocks, ignoring cuts and scratches. At last he clambered over the final tumbled heap of boulders and reached the mouth of the first cavern.

Bending his head, he stepped into the cavern mouth and switched on his light. The cavern at first was narrow, sloping gently downward, lined with wet bare rock. Abruptly, the path curved sharply and then suddenly ended. There was nothing under his feet.—a black pit!

Horga barely managed to avoid falling by catching a handhold on an outcropping of rock. He stepped back and pointed his light into the black pit. Twenty feet below him was the floor of a natural oval room. Drops of lime-soaked water glistened in the light of the torch along the walls of the chamber. Horga shivered in the damp canyon after the burning heat of the day outside. He shivered with cold, but he shivered with excitement too, because on every ledge, on every surface, blue, delicate lichens were growing. And on each of the growing surfaces, on the surrounding rock, on the floor of the cavern itself, there were heaps of blue dust — enough locada for hundreds of addicts, in this one cavern alone!

Eyes glinting with anticipation, Jon Horga began to lower himself carefully to the floor of the cavern, finding footholds and handholds in water-seamed crevices. Reaching the solid footing of the canyon floor, he was careful to avoid disturbing any of the heaps of dust. Taking flexible containers from his pack, he began to gather the fine, talc-like dust.

He worked steadily, packing pound after pound into his expansible plasti-bag, oblivious to his surroundings and the passage of time. He had almost filled it when the sense of danger which had enabled him to survive in battles against desperate men and aliens in a hundred systems, brought him back to the immediate scene, all senses alert.

Horga whirled, causing little eddies of dust in the dank air. As his eyes went up, he first saw a pair of blue Tzenn legs, arms akimbo, at the mouth of the black passageway. Horga raised his eyes, looking at the Tzenn, who had a spear poised in his muscular right hand.

The Tzenn's head was encased in a grotesque reptilian mask, topped with bright plumage. Priest . . . medicine man . . . someone who can enter the for-bidden place . . . the ideas flashed automatically through Horga's mind as he raised the needle gun.

In the light of the torch, he saw the muscles tensing in the arm of the Tzenn. Horga squeezed the trigger and dropped flat on the canyon floor. Bright orange flashed through black space at the same instant that the Tzenn's spear flashed through the air. inches above Horga's head. Horga looked up. The Tzenn still stood, swaying in agony, his right arm burned to the bone. Grimly, with a slight smile, Horga aimed the needle gun at the sternum. Pressing the trigger, he methodically burned the Tzenn, cutting a deadly line of fire from his thorax to his groin. Still the masked Tzenn stood erect, as life left him. Then, with the tremble of a dead, dried-out leaf, he fell.

And as he fell, he flamed.

Jon Horga backed away in terror, scattering great clouds of dust as he stumbled through the lichen-heaps. The body continued to burn, great clouds of thick white smoke rising from it, filling the cavern. Suddenly Horga knew what must have happened—he had hit the Tzenn's phosphorous gland with his needle ray—and Horga knew that phosphorous would continue to burn fiercely until it was completely consumed. He had to get out—fast!

Horga stumbled through the thick smoke, coughing and almost blinded. He fell twice before he was able to reach the cavern wall and begin climbing. In his wild haste, he ignored the blood streaming from cuts on his face and hands. A fingernail ripped on a. sharp projection on the wall, but Horga did not stop for an instant as he clawed his way up the passageway. Anything, anything to get out!

At last, Horga's bleeding fingers felt the passageway opening over his head. Exerting all his remaining strength, he pulled himself up to the level passageway surface. Gasping for breath in the phosphorous poisoned atmosphere, he switched on his light. The light was worse than useless as a guide —it showed only the clouds of smoke that filled the cavern. Horga was about to throw it aside when he noticed that the smoke had changed. It had been the pure white of burning phosphorous—now it was definitely blue. The locada dust was vaporizing in the fierce flame of the burning phosphorous!

LOST completely to panic, Horga ran headlong up the dark, smoke-filled passage. His foot hit a projecting rock and he fell heavily. He scrambled to his feet, and half crouching, his eyes full of burning tears from the phosphorous, he dashed on toward the cavern mouth. Seconds later, he saw a bright shaft of sunlight pierce the smoke. He forced himself to a last mad burst of speed and then he was outside. He collapsed across the rocks near the cavern mouth, feeling the welcome heat of Deneb on his lacerated shoulders and hack, breathing in fresh air at last, instead of deadly smoke.

Minutes later, he forced himself to his feet. Painfully, he picked his way among the rocks and boulders, down to the canyon floor. As he walked across the canyon he wondered desperately if he had got out in time. Had the drug had time to take effect? At least, there were no addict's dreams, no hallucinations—yet.

He went on doggedly, across the hillside, back down toward the jungle and the ship. Off in the brush to the side of the path, he caught fleeting glimpses of the Tzenn—just a flash of movement, a hint of blue skin, and it would be gone. And, as the wind shifted, it brought to him the squeaking chatter of their high thin voices. Did they seem to be laughing at him? There seemed to be a different, mocking tone in their incessant talk. Or was it just the distortion of the wind—or his own imagination?

Angrily, he dismissed the idea and gripped his needle gun more tightly. This was only a temporary defeat. When he returned to the caves, he would know how to deal with the Tzenn. Kill them. Kill them in the open air, if they got in his way. And set a neutronic trap in the cavern mouths, to kill them before they could get inside. No, he wasn't defeated yet.

He smiled grimly and continued on toward the clearing. Already, through the tangled vines and matted jungle growths, he could begin to make out the straight clean lines of the ship ahead.

He broke into the clearing and ran to the ship. Painfully, lie began the sixty foot climb to the hatch, gingerly grasping the rungs with his torn fingers. He had almost reached the hatch opening when there was a sudden gust of wind. He froze to the rungs, swaying slightly. As the wind dropped, he started to reach for the next rung. But then it dissolved, before his eyes!

In sudden panic, he locked his fingers in a death grip on the rung he could no longer see. But there was an odd numbness in his lingers, his whole body. Only in a vague, unreal way could he feel the ship, next to his body. And as he looked, the ship's solid form melted, ran in liquid metal around him, swirled in clouds of gleaming vapor, boiled in a thick grey fevered chaos around him, and then . . .

Nothing.

Nothing at all. No space and no time. No extension or dimension. No form. No place and no sense. No tactile-auditory-visual-olfactory-gustatory. No repulsion or attraction. No desire.

Except:

In the dead emptiness that had been the ego, a perception of a loss. Whose perception? Don't know. And where? There is no where. No when, no what.

And then, from the void that had been his mind, the thin fabric of hallucination began to form. At first—only the hint of a vibration—a motion—a wave through nothing. And then, high and clear, a bell-like note that echoed across and through the synapses of his brain, and became color . . . an alien spectrum of a hundred brilliant hues that shifted, melted, mixed and blended before his eyes . . . and then burst into the light of a thousand suns! And it all came. Form and distance, personality, space, desire and time. A world for him to live in ... all false? Gasping with relief, he reached out for it . . .

A tall, golden skinned girl was at his side. With a serene quiet smile she handed him a tall glass, filled with something amber. He drank, and as he did a wave of desire for life overwhelmed him. Wonderingly, he ran his hands along the body of the girl, feeling the pulse of life beneath her firm skin . . . this false? Angrily rejecting the half-formed doubt, he rudely grasped the girl and pulled her to him, lusting for her, lusting for reality . . .

TIME lost all existence, blending into infinity. There were other girls—Earth girls, Centaurans, princesses from Arcturus, girls from planets he did not know, from worlds that had no name, There. were short, sharp nightmares, succeeded by the almost unbearable sensation of infinite power—omnipotence. Whole suns, whole galaxies were his, to bend and turn, stop and start, at any whim, and worlds that man would never see. But, as he tramped across his star-strewn universe, the hint of something off-key, something false, returned, stronger than before. Not real? False? He tried to reject the idea, to twist and turn away from it, but it returned and it was with him . .. false . . . false . . . FALSE!

With a tremendous Mental effort, he forced his twisted brain back to reality. The first thing he saw was his hand, caked with blood, numb from gripping the rail above his head. And then the smooth metal of the ship, inches from his eyes.

He looked down and felt a stomach-turning vertigo that almost made him lose his grip. How long had he hung there, lost in the narcotic dream? It must have been hours, for the long black shadows extending across the clearing indicated•that the long Deneb day was ending.

A wave of loathing overcame him. This could not be his world . . . this was the dream . . . the other world, the real world, his own world . . . he would return to it. With a feeling of infinite relief, he began to drift back. But some tenuous shred of sanity forced him to stop. I must climb, he thought dimly. Why did he have to climb? He did not know, could not remember. But a last spark of determination flamed momentarily into life and he raised one foot, leadenly. He almost lost his hold as his cramped arm reached for the next rung and missed. Then he was up, his head level with the open hatch. One more effort. Just one more. Gathering all his strength, he pushed himself upward and collapsed across the floor of the hatchway.

ACROSS the compartment, Barnabus waited and watched, his old body still held in the paralyzer beam. Through the interminable hours of the long Deneb day he had waited, at first patiently, then with growing anxiety, as he considered three factors. First, in the weeks of prospecting here before, he had come across a dying Tzenn, had watched the body burst into flame as the membrane of the phosphorous gland broke down. Next, he had been impressed by the psychological hold their taboos had for them. And finally, he knew Horga was the type to shoot, at the first hint of danger. Horga, a twisted man who basically hated all other men, all other living creatures. But, if it happened as Barnabus thought it might, would Horga be able to get back to the ship before the drug took effect? If not, Barnabus would remain locked in the unbreakable grip of the paralyzer, until hunger and thirst had killed him.

It was with great relief that Barnabus heard the ring of Horga's boots outside the ship, mounting toward the hatch. But then, almost at the top, they had stopped, and for hours there was no sound. What had happened? Had Horga fallen? Was he lost forever in locada fantasies? Barnabus had resigned himself to slow, lingering death when at last Horga's head appeared at the hatch.

His first feeling was enormous relief. Then other thoughts went through his mind as he regarded the unconscious figure of Horga. Jon Horga, now a mind with no control, a willing slave to any suggestion.

If he returned to the spaceports, was there any limit to the evil he would do? Suggest a murder, Horga would commit it, Without a single independent thought, without a trace of conscience. A robbery, a pirate attack—anything. And Barnabus knew that there were many, many men in the raw life of the space-towns, who would take advantage of just such an opportunity. And—a peril to the entire galaxy—one of them would be sure to pry from Horga the source of the deadly dust. A cure was now impossible. But if, some time in some way, a cure might be found? No, the risk was too great. And even if Horga might be cured, he was still, even when "normal," a dangerous man, the enemy of all other men, a killer many times over. Barnabus knew what he had to do.

"Get up!" he commanded. Horga painfully raised his head. His eyes were blank—empty of volition or individuality. The drug was master now.

"Turn off the paralyzer beam!"

Without expression, Horga got to his feet and hobbled to the banked controls. Autmatically, he flipped the switches off. Then he waited, motionless.

Freed. Barnabus stood up, rubbing circulation back into his numbed legs and arms.

"This is the last," he said, "that man-kind will ever see of locada." He looked up at the addict. "To make sure of that, Horga, I've got to say the same thing to you I said to my partner. It wasn't very funny then, and it sure isn't now. I didn't know what I was doing then—but I do now." He said softly, "Horga, go take a flying leap!"



[This story was transcribed form raw scans found in the bit torrent universe. The original scanner is unknown. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]