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"At two seventy-five in the morning," said the Administrator to Casher O'Neill, "you will kill this girl with a knife. At two seventy-seven, a fast groundcar will pick you up and bring you back here. Then the power cruiser will be yours. Is that a deal?"
He held out his hand as if he wanted Casher O'Neill to shake it then and there, making some kind of an oath or bargain.
Casher did not slight the man, so he picked up his glass and said, "Let's drink to the deal first!"
The Administrator's quick, restless, darting eyes looked Casher up and down very suspiciously. The warm sea-wet air blew through the room. The Administrator seemed wary, suspicious, alert, but underneath his slight hostility there was another emotion, of which Casher could perceive just the edge. Fatigue with its roots in bottomless despair: despair set deep in irrecoverable fatigue?
That other emotion, which Casher could barely discern, was very strange indeed. On all his voyages back and forth through the inhabited worlds, Casher had met many odd types of men and women. He had never seen anything like this Administrator before—brilliant, erratic, boastful. His title was "Mr. Commissioner" and he was an ex-Lord of the Instrumentality on this planet of Henriada, where the population had dropped from six hundred million persons down to some forty thousand. Indeed, local government had disappeared into limbo, and this odd man, with the tide of Administrator, was the only law and civil audiority which the planet knew.
Nevertheless, he had a surplus power cruiser and Casher O'Neill was determined to get that cruiser as a part of his long plot to return to his home planet of Mizzer and to unseat the usurper, Colonel Wedder.
The Administrator stared sharply, wearily at Casher and then he too lifted his glass. The green twilight colored his liquor and made it seem like some strange poison. It was only Earth byegarr, though a little on the strong side.
With a sip, only a sip, the older man relaxed a little. "You may be out to trick me, young man. You may think that I am an old fool running an abandoned planet. You may even be thinking that killing this girl is some kind of a crime. It is not a crirne at all. I am the Administrator of Henriada and I have ordered that girl killed every year for the last eighty years. She isn't even a girl, to start with. Just an underperson. Some kind of an animal turned into a domestic servant. I can even appoint you a deputy sheriff. Or chief of detectives. That might be better. I haven't had a chief of detectives for a hundred years and more. You are my chief of detectives. Go in tomorrow. The house is not hard to find. It's the biggest and best house left on this planet. Go in tomorrow morning. Ask for her master and be sure that you use the correct title: The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. The robots will tell you to keep out. If you persist, she will come to the door. That's when you will stab her through the heart, right there in the doorway. My groundcar will race up one metric minute later. You jump in and come back here. We've been through this before. Why don't you agree? Don't you know who I am?"
"I know perfectly well"—Casher O'Neill smiled—"who you are, Mr. Commissioner and Administrator. You are the honorable Ran-kin Meiklejohn, once of Earth Two. After all, the Instrumentality itself gave me a permit to land on this planet on private business. They knew who / was too, and what I wanted. There's something funny about all this. Why should you give me a power cruiser—the best ship, you yourself say, in your whole fleet—just for killing one modified animal which looks and talks like a girl? Why me? Why the visitor? Why the man from off-world? Why should you care whether this particular underperson is killed or not? If you've given the order for her death eighty times in eighty years, why hasn't it been carried out long ago? Mind you, Mr. Administrator, I'm not saying no. I want that cruiser. I want it very much indeed. But what's the deal? What's the trick? Is it the house you want?" "Beauregard? No, I don't want Beauregard. Old Madigan can rot in it for all that I care. It's between Ambiloxi and Mottile, on the Gulf of Esperanza. You can't miss it. The road is good. You could drive yourself there."
"What is it, then?" Casher's voice had an edge of persistence to it.
The Administrator's response was singular indeed. He filled his huge inhaler glass with the potent byegarr. He stared over the full glass at Casher O'Neill as if he were an enemy. He drained the glass. Casher knew that that much liquor, taken suddenly, could kill the normal human being.
The Administrator did not fall over dead.
He did not even become noticeably more drunk.
His face turned red and his eyes almost popped out, as the harsh 160-proof liquor took effect, but he still did not say anything. He just stared at Casher. Casher, who had learned in his long exile to play many games, just stared back.
The Administrator broke first.
He leaned forward and burst into a birdlike shriek of laughter. The laughter went on and on until it seemed that the man had hogged all the merriment in the galaxy. Casher snorted a little laugh along with the man, more out of nervous reflex than anything else, but he waited for the Administrator to stop laughing.
The Administrator finally got control of himself. With a broad grin and a wink at Casher, he poured himself four fingers more of the byegarr into his glass, drank it down as if he had had a sip of cream, and then—only very slightly unsteady—stood up, came over and patted Casher on the shoulder.
"You're a smart boy, my lad. I'm cheating you. I don't care whether the power cruiser is there or not. I'm giving you something which has no value at all to me. Who's ever going to take a power cruiser off this planet? It's ruined. It's abandoned. And so am I. Go ahead. You can have the cruiser. For nothing. Just take it. Free. Unconditionally."
This time it was Casher who leaped to his feet and stared down into the face of the feverish, wanton little man.
"Thank you, Mr. Administrator!" he cried, trying to catch the hand of the administrator so as to seal the deal.
Rankin Meiklejohn looked awfully sober for a man with that much liquor in him. He held his right hand behind his back and would not shake.
"You can have the cruiser, all right. No terms. No conditions. No deal. It's yours. But kill that girlfirstl Just as a favor to me. I've been a good host. I like you. I want to do you a favor. Do me one. Kill that girl. At two seventy-five in the morning. Tomorrow."
"Why?" asked Casher, his voice loud and cold, trying to wring some sense out of the chattering man.
"Just—just—just because I say so..." stammered the Administrator.
"Why?" asked Casher, cold and loud again.
The liquor suddenly took over inside the Administrator. He groped back for the arm of hjs chair, sat down suddenly and then looked up at Casher. He was very drunk indeed. The strange emotion, the elusive fatigue-despair, had vanished from his face. He spoke straightforwardly. Only the excessive care of his articulation would have shown a passerby that he was drunk.
"Because, you fool," said Meiklejohn, "those people, more than eighty in eighty years, that I have sent to Beauregard with orders to kill the girl... Those people—" he repeated, and stopped speaking, clamping his lips together.
"What happened to them?" asked Casher calmly and persuasively.
The Administrator grinned again and seemed to be on the edge of one of his wild laughs.
"What happened?" shouted Casher at him.
"I don't know," said the Administrator. "For the life of me, I don't know. Not one of them ever came back."
"What happened to them? Did she kill them?" cried Casher.
"How would I know?" said the drunken man, getting visibly more sleepy.
"Why didn't you report it?"
This seemed to rouse the Administrator. "Report that one little girl had stopped me, the planetary Administrator? Just one little girl, and not even a human being! They would have sent help, and laughed at me. By the Bell, young man, I've been laughed at enough! I need no help from outside. You're going in there tomorrow morning. At two seventy-five, with a knife. And a groundcar waiting."
He stared fixedly at Casher and then suddenly fell asleep in his chair. Casher called to the robots to show him to his room; they tended to the master as well.
The next morning at two seventy-five sharp, nothing happened. Casher walked down the baroque corridor, looking into beautiful barren rooms. All the doors were open.
Through one door he heard a sick deep bubbling snore.
It was the Administrator, sure enough. He lay twisted in his bed. A small nursing machine was beside him, her white-enameled body only slightly rusty. She held up a mechanical hand for silence and somehow managed to make the gesture seem light, delicate and pretty, even from a machine.
Casher walked lightly back to his own room, where he ordered hotcakes, bacon and coffee. He studied a tornado through the armored glass of his window, while the robots prepared his food. The elastic trees clung to the earth with a fury which matched the fury of the wind. The trunk of the tornado reached like the nose of a mad elephant down into the gardens, but the flora fought back. A few animals whipped upward and out of sight. The tornado then came straight for the house, but did not damage it outside of making a lot of noise.
"We have two or three hundred of those a day," said a butler robot. "That is why we store all spacecraft underground and have no weather machines. It would cost more, the people said, to make this planet livable than the planet could possibly yield. The radio and news are in the library, sir. I do not think that the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn will wake until evening, say seven-fifty or eight o'clock."
"Can I go out?"
"Why not, sir? You are a true man. You do what you wish."
"I mean is it safe for me to go out?"
"Oh, no, sir! The wind would tear you apart or carry you away."
"Don't people ever go out?"
"Yes, sir. With groundcars or with automatic body armor. I have been told that if it weighs fifty tons or better, the person inside is safe. I would not know, sir. As you see, I am a robot. I was made here, though my brain was formed on Earth Two, and I have never been outside this house."
Casher looked at the robot. This one seemed unusually talkative. He chanced the opportunity of getting some more information.
"Have you ever heard tif Beauregard?"
"Yes, sir. It is the best house on this planet. I have heard people say that it is the most solid building on Henriada. It belongs to the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. He is an Old North Australian, a renunciant who left his home planet and came here when Henri-ada was a busy world. He brought all his wealth with him. The underpeople and robots say that it is a wonderful place on the inside."
"Have you seen it?"
"Oh, no, sir. I have never left this building."
"Does the man Madigan ever come here?"
The robot seemed to be trying to laugh, but did not succeed. He answered, very unevenly, "Oh, no, sir. He never goes anywhere."
"Can you tell me anything about the female who lives with him?"
"No sir," said the robot.
"Do you know anything about her?"
"Sir, it is not that. I know a great deal about her."
"Why can't you talk about her, then?"
"I have been commanded not to, sir."
"I am," said Casher O'Neill, "a true human being. I herewith countermand those orders. Tell me about her."
The robot's voice became formal and cold. "The orders cannot be countermanded, sir."
"Why not?" snapped Casher. "Are they the Administrator's?"
"No, sir."
"Whose, then?"
"Hers," said the robot softly, and left the room.
Casher O'Neill spent the rest of the day trying to get information; he obtained very little.
The Deputy Administrator was a young man who hated his chief. When Casher, who dined with him—the two of them having a poorly cooked state luncheon in a dining room which would have seated five hundred people—tried to come to the point by asking bluntly, "What do you know about Murray Madigan?" he got an answer which was blunt to the point of incivility. "Nothing."
"You never heard of him?" cried Casher.
"Keep your troubles to yourself, mister visitor," said the Deputy Administrator. "I've got to stay on this planet long enough to get promoted off. You can leave. You shouldn't have come."
"I have," said Casher, "an all-world pass from the Instrumental-ity."
"All right," said the young man. "That shows that you are more important than I am. Let's not discuss the matter. Do you like your lunch?"
Casher had learned diplomacy in his childhood, when he was the heir apparent to the dictatorship of Mizzer. When his horrible uncle, Kuraf, lost the rulership, Casher had approved of the coup by the Colonels Wedder and Gibna; but now Wedder was supreme and enforcing a period of terror and virtue. Casher thus knew courts and ceremony, big talk and small talk, and on this occasion he let the small talk do. The young Deputy Administrator had only one ambition, to get off the planet Henriada and never to see or hear of Rankin Meiklejohn again.
Casher could understand the point.
Only one curious thing happened during dinner.
Toward the end, Casher slipped in the question, very informally: "Can underpeople give orders to robots?"
"Of course," said the young man. "That's one of the reasons we use underpeople. They have more initiative. They amplify our orders to robots on many occasions."
Casher smiled. "I didn't mean it quite that way. Could an un-derperson give an order to a robot which a real human being could not then countermand?"
The young man started to answer, even though his mouth was full of food. He was not a very polished young man. Suddenly he stopped chewing and his eyes grew wide. Then, with his mouth half full, he said, "You are trying to talk about this planet, I guess. You can't help it. You're on the track. Stay on the track, then. Maybe you will get out of it alive. I refuse to get mixed up with it, with you, with him and his hateful schemes. All I want to do is to leave when my time comes."
The young man resumed chewing, his eyes fixed steadfastly on his plate.
Before Casher could pass off the matter by making some casual remark, the butler robot stopped behind him and leaned over.
"Honorable sir, I heard your question. May I answer it?"
"Of course," said Casher softly.
"The answer, sir," said the butler robot, softly but clearly, "to your question is no, no, never. That is the general rule of the civilized worlds. But on this planet of Henriada, sir, the answer is yes."
"Why?" asked Casher.
"It is my duty, sir," said the robot butler, "to recommend to you this dish of fresh artichokes. I am not authorized to deal with other matters." **
"Thank you," said Casher, straining a little to keep himself looking imperturbable. »
Nothing much happened that night, except that Meiklejohn got up long enough to get drunk all over again. Though he invited Casher to come and drink with him, he never seriously discussed the girl except for one outburst.
"Leave it till tomorrow. Fair and square. Open and aboveboard. Frank and honest. That's me. I'll take you around Beauregard myself. You'll see it's easy. A knife, eh? A traveled young man like you would know what to do with a knife. And a little girl too. Not very big. Easy job. Don't give it another thought. Would you like some apple juice in your byegarr?"
Casher had taken three contraintoxicant pills before going to drink with the ex-Lord, but even at that he could not keep up with Meiklejohn. He accepted the dilution of apple juice gravely, gracefully and gratefully.
The little tornadoes stamped around the house. Meiklejohn, now launched into some drunken story of ancient injustices which had been done to him on other worlds, paid no attention to them. In the middle of the night, past nine-fifty in the evening, Casher woke alone in his chair, very stiff and uncomfortable. The robots must have had standing instructions concerning the Administrator, and had apparently taken him off to bed. Casher walked wearily to his own room, cursed the thundering ceiling and went to sleep again.
The next day was very different indeed.
The Administrator was as sober, brisk and charming as if he had never taken a drink in his life.
He had the robots call Casher to join him at breakfast and said, by way of greeting, "I'll wager you thought I was drunk last night."
"Well..." said Casher.
"Planet fever. That's what it was. Planet fever. A bit of alcohol keeps it from developing too far. Let's see. It's three-sixty now. Could you be ready to leave by four?"
Casher frowned at his watch, which had the conventional twenty-four hours.
The Administrator saw the glance and apologized. "Sorry! My fault, a thousand times. I'll get you a metric watch right away. Ten hours a day, a hundred minutes an hour. We're very progressive here on Henriada."
He clapped his hands and ordered that a watch be taken to Casher's room, along with the watch-repairing robot to adjust it to Casher's body rhythms.
"Four, then," he said, rising briskly from the table. "Dress for a trip by groundcar. The servants will show you how."
There was a man already waiting in Casher's room. He looked like a plump, wise ancient Hindu, as shown in the archaeology books. He bowed pleasantly and said, "My name is Gosigo. I am a forgetty, settled on this planet, but for this day I am your guide and driver from this place to the mansion of Beauregard."
Forgetties were barely above underpeople in status. They were persons convicted of various major crimes, to whom the courts of the worlds, or the Instrumentality, had allowed total amnesia instead of death or some punishment worse than death, such as the planet Shayol.
Casher looked at him curiously. The man did not carry with him the permanent air of bewilderment which Casher had noticed in many forgetties. Gosigo saw the glance and interpreted it.
"I'm well enough now, sir. And I am strong enough to break your back if I had the orders to do it."
"You mean damage my spine? What a hostile, unpleasant thing to do!" said Casher. "Anyhow, I rather think I could kill you first if you tried it. Whatever gave you such an idea?"
"The Administrator is always threatening people that he will have me do it to them."
"Have you ever really broken anybody's back?" asked Casher, looking Gosigo over very carefully and rejudging him. The man, though shorter than Casher, was luxuriously muscled; like many plump men, he looked pleasant on the outside but could be very formidable to an enemy.
Gosigo smiled briefly, almost happily. "Well, no, not exactly."
"Why haven't you? Does the Administrator always countermand his own orders? I should think that he would sometimes be too drunk to remember to do it."
"It's not that," said Gosigo.
"Why don't you, then?"
"I have other orders," said Gosigo, rather hesitantly. "Like the orders I have today. One set from the Administrator, one set from the Deputy Administrator, and a third set from an outside source."
"Who's the outside source?"
"She has told me not to explain just yet."
Casher stood stock still. "Do you mean who I think you mean?"
Gosigo nodded very slowly, pointing at the ventilator as though it might have a microphone in it.
"Can you tell me whafyour orders are?"
"Oh, certainly. The Administrator has told me to drive both himself and you to Beauregard, to take you to the door, to watch you stab the undergirl, and to call the second groundcar to your rescue. The Deputy Administrator has told me to take you to Beau-regard and to let you do as you please, bringing you back here by way of Ambiloxi if you happen to come out of Mr. Murray's house alive."
"And the other orders?"
"To close the door upon you when you enter and to think of you no more in this life, because you will be very happy."
"Are you crazy?" cried Casher.
"I am a forgetty," said Gosigo, with some dignity, "but I am not insane."
"Whose orders are you going to obey, then?" Gosigo smiled a warmly human smile at him. "Doesn't that depend on you, sir, and not on me? Do I look like a man who is going to kill you soon?" "No, you don't," said Casher.
"Do you know what you look like to me?" went on Gosigo, with a purr. "Do you really think that I would help you if I thought that you would kill a small girl?"
"You know it!" cried Casher, feeling his face go white. "Who doesn't?" said Gosigo. "What else have we got to talk about, here on Henriada? Let me help you on with these clothes, so that you will at least survive the ride." With this he handed shoulder padding and padded helmet to Casher, who began to put on the garments, very clumsily. Gosigo helped him.
When Casher was fully dressed, he thought that he had never dressed this elaborately for space itself. The world of Henriada must be a tumultuous place if people needed this kind of clothing to make a short trip.
Gosigo had put on the same kind of clothes. He looked at Casher in a friendly manner, with an arch smile which came close to humor. "Look at me, honorable visitor. Do I remind you of anybody?"
Casher looked honestly and carefully, and then said, "No, you don't."
The man's face fell. "It's a game," he said. "I can't help trying to find out who I really am. Am I a Lord of the Instrumentality who has betrayed his trust? Am I a scientist who twisted knowledge into unimaginable wrong? Am I a dictator so foul that even the Instrumentality, which usually leaves things alone, had to step in and wipe me out? Here I am, healthy, wise, alert. I have the name Gosigo on this planet. Perhaps I am a mere native of this planet, who has committed a local crime. I am triggered. If anyone ever did tell me my true name or my actual past, I have been conditioned to shriek loud, fall unconscious and forget anything which might be said on such an occasion. People told me that I must have chosen this instead of death. Maybe. Death sometimes looks tidy to a forgetty."
"Have you ever screamed and fainted?"
"I don't even know that" said Gosigo, "no more than you know where you are going this very day."
Casher was tied to the man's mystifications, so he did not let himself be provoked into a useless show of curiosity. Inquisitive about the forgetty himself, he asked:
"Does it hurt—does it hurt to be a forgetty?"
"No," said Gosigo, "it doesn't hurt, no more than you will."
Gosigo stared suddenly at Casher. His voice changed tone and became at least one octave higher. He clapped his hands to his face and panted through his hands as if he would never speak again.
"But—oh! The fear—the eerie, dreary fear of being mel"
He still stared at Casher.
Quieting down at last, he pulled his hands away from his face, as if by sheer force, and said in an almost normal voice, "Shall we get on with our trip?"
Gosigo led the way out into the bare bleak corridor. A perceptible wind was blowing through it, though there was no sign of an open window or door. They followed a majestic staircase; with steps so broad that Casher had to keep changing pace on them, all the way down to the bottom of the building. This must, at some time, have been a formal reception hall. Now it was full of cars.
Curious cars.
Land vehicles of a kind which Casher had never seen before. They looked a little bit like the ancient "fighting tanks" which he had seen in pictures. They also looked a little like submarines of a singularly short and ugly shape. They had high spiked wheels, but their most complicated feature was a set of giant corkscrews, four on each side, attached to the car by intricate yet operational apparatus. Since Casher had been landed right into the palace by piano-form, he had never had occasion to go outside among the tornadoes of Henriada.
The Administrator was waiting, wearing a coverall on which was stenciled his insignia of rank.
Casher gave him a polite bow. He glanced down at the handsome metric wristwatch which Gosigo had strapped on his wrist, outside the coverall. It read 3:93.
Casher bowed to Rankin Meiklejohn and said, "I'm ready, sir, if you are." *
"Watch him!" whispered Gosigo, half a step behind Casher.
The Administrator said, "Might as well be going." The man's voice trembled.
Casher stood polite, alert, immobile. Was this danger? Was this foolishness? Could the Administrator already be drunk again?
Casher watched the Administrator carefully but quietly, waiting for the older man to precede him into the nearest groundcar, which had its door standing open.
Nothing happened, except that the Administrator began to turn pale.
There must have been six or eight people present. The others must have seen the same sort of thing before, because they showed no sign of curiosity or bewilderment. The Administrator began to tremble. Casher could see it, even through the bulk of the trav-elwear. The man's hands shook.
The Administrator said, in a high nervous voice, "Your knife. You have it with you?"
Casher nodded.
"Let me see it," said the Administrator.
Casher reached down to his boot and brought out the beautiful, superbly balanced knife. Before he could stand erect, he felt the clamp of Gosigo's heavy fingers on his shoulder.
"Master," s"aid Gosigo to Meiklejohn, "tell your visitor to put his weapon away. It is not allowed for any of us to show weapons in your presence."
Casher tried to squirm out of the heavy grip without losing his balance or his dignity. He found that Gosigo was knowledgeable about karate too. The forgetty held ground, even when the two men waged an immobile, invisible sort of wrestling match, the leverage of Casher's shoulder working its way hither and yon against the strong grip of Gosigo's powerful hand.
The Administrator ended it. He said, "Put away your knife . . ." in that high funny voice of his.
The watch had almost reached 4:00, but no one had yet got into the car.
Gosigo spoke again, and when he did there was a contemptuous laugh from the Deputy Administrator, who had stood by in ordinary indoor clothes.
"Master, isn't it time for 'one for the road'?"
"Of course, of course," chattered the Administrator. He began breathing almost normally again.
"Join me," he said to Casher. "It's a local custom."
Casher had let his knife slip back into his bootsheath. When the knife dropped out of sight, Gosigo released his shoulder; he now stood facing the Administrator and rubbed his bruised shoulder. He said nothing, but shook his head gently, showing that he did not want a drink.
One of the robots brought the Administrator a glass, which appeared to contain at least a liter and a half of water. The Administrator said, very politely, "Sure you won't share it?"
This close, Casher could smell the reek of it. It was pure byegarr, and at least 160 proof. He shook his head again, firmly but also politely.
The Administrator lifted the glass.
Casher could see the muscles of the man's throat work as the liquid went down. He could hear the man breathing heavily between swallows. The white liquid went lower and lower in the gigantic glass.
At last it was all gone.
The Administrator cocked his head sidewise and said to Casher in a parrotlike voice, "Well, toodle-oo!"
"What do you mean, sir?" asked Casher.
The Administrator had a pleasant glow on his face. Casher was surprised that the man was not dead after that big and sudden a drink.
"I just mean g'bye. I'm—not—feeling—well."
With that he fell straight forward, as stiff as a rock tower. One of the servants, perhaps another forgetty, caught him before he hit the ground.
"Does he always do this?" asked Casher of the miserable and contemptuous Deputy Administrator.
"Oh, no," said the Deputy. "Only at times like these."
"What do you mean, 'like these'?"
"When he sends one more armed man against the girl at Beaure-gard. They never come back. You won't come back, either. You could have left earlier, but you can't now. Go along and try to kill the girl. I'll see you here about five twenty-five if you succeed. As a matter of fact, if you come back at all, I'll try to wake him up. But you won't come back. Good luck. I suppose that's what you need. Good luck."
Casher shook hands with the man without removing his gloves. Gosigo had already climbed into the driver's seat of the machine and was testing the electric engines. The big corkscrews began to plunge down, but before they touched the floor, Gosigo had reversed them and thrown* them back into the up position.
The people in the room ran for cover as Casher entered the machine, though there was no immediate danger in sight. Two of the human servants dragged the Administrator up the stairs, the Deputy Administrator following them rapidly.
"Seat belt," said Gosigo.
Casher found it and snapped it closed.
"Head belt," said Gosigo.
Casher stared at him. He had never heard of a head belt.
"Pull it down from the roof, sir. Put the net under your chin."
Casher glanced up.
There was a net fitted snugly against the roof of the vehicle, just above his head. He started to pull it down, but it did not yield. Angrily, he pulled harder, and it moved slowly downward. By the Bell and Bank, do they want to hang me in thisl he thought to himself as he dragged the net down. There was a strong fiber belt attached to each end of the net, while the net itself was only fifteen to twenty centimeters wide. He ended up in a foolish position, holding the head belt with both hands lest it snap back into the ceiling and not knowing what to do with it. Gosigo leaned over and, half impatiently, helped him adjust the web under his chin. It pinched for a moment and Casher felt as though his head were being dragged by a heavy weight.
"Don't fight it," said Gosigo. "Relax."
Casher did. His head was lifted several centimeters into a foam pocket, which he had not previously noticed, in the back of the seat. After a second or two, he realized that the position was odd but comfortable.
Gosigo had adjusted his own head belt and had turned on the lights of the vehicle. They blazed so bright that Casher almost thought they might be a laser, capable of charring the inner doors of the big room.
The lights must have keyed the door.
Two panels slid open and a wild uproar of wind and vegetation rushed in. It was rough and stormy but far below hurricane velocity.
The machine rolled forward clumsily and was out of the house and on the road very quickly.
The sky was brown, bright luminous brown, shot through with streaks of yellow. Casher had never seen a sky of that color on any other world he had visited, and in his long exile he had seen many planets.
Gosigo, staring straight ahead, was preoccupied with keeping the vehicle right in the middle of the black, soft, tarry road.
"Watch it!" said a voice speaking right into his head.
It was Gosigo, using an intercom which must have been built into the helmets.
Casher watched, though there was nothing to see except for the rush of mad wind. Suddenly the groundcar turned dark, spun upside down, and was violently shaken. An oily, pungent stench of pure fetor immediately drenched the whole car.
Gosigo pulled out a panel with a console of buttons. Light and fire, intolerably bright, burned in on them through the windshield and the portholes on the side.
The battle was over before it began.
The groundcar lay in a sort of swamp. The road was visible thirty or thirty-five meters away.
There was a grinding sound inside the machine and the groundcar righted itself. A singular sucking noise followed, then the grinding sound stopped. Casher could glimpse the big corkscrews on the side of the car eating their way into the ground.
At last the machine was steady, pelted only by branches, leaves and what seemed like kelp.
A small tornado was passing over them.
Gosigo took time to twist his head sidewise and to talk to Casher.
"An air whale swallowed us and I had to burn our way out."
"A what?" cried Casher.
"An air whale," repeated Gosigo calmly on the intercom. "There are no indigenous forms of life on this planet, but the imported Earth forms have changed wildly since we brought them in. The tornadoes lifted the whales around enough so that some of them got adapted to flying. They were the meat-eating kind, so they like to crack our groundcars open and eat the goodies inside. We're safe enough from them for the time being, provided we can make it back to the road. There are a few wild men who live in the wind, but they would not become dangerous to us unless we found ourselves really helpless. Pretty soon I can unscrew us from the ground and try to get back on the road. It's not really too far from here to Ambiloxi."
The trip to the road was a long one, even though they could see the road itself all the time that they tried various approaches.
The first time, the groundcar tipped ominously forward. Red lights showed on the panel and buzzers buzzed. The great spiked wheels spun in vain as they chewed their way into a bottomless quagmire.
Gosigo, calling back to his passenger^ cried, "Hold steady! We're going to have to shoot ourselves out of this one backward!"
Casher did not know how he could be any steadier, belted, hooded and strapped as he was, but he clutched the arms of his seat.
The world went red with fire as the front of the car spat flame in rocketlike quantities. The swamp ahead of them boiled into steam, so that they could see nothing. Gosigo changed the windshield over from visual to radar, and even with radar there was not much to be seen—nothing but a gray swirl of formless wraiths, and the weird lurching sensation as the machine fought its way back to solid ground. The console suddenly showed green and Gosigo cut the controls. They were back where they had been, with the repulsive burnt entrails of the air whale scattered among the coral trees.
"Try again," said Gosigo, as though Casher had something to do with the matter.
He fiddled with the controls and the groundcar rose several feet. The spikes on the wheels had been hydraulically extended until they were each at least one hundred fifty centimeters long. The car felt like a large enclosed bicycle as it teetered on its big wheels. The wind was strong and capricious but there was no tornado in sight.
"Here we go," said Gosigo redundantly. The groundcar pressed forward in a mad rush, hastening obliquely through the vegetation and making for the highway on Casher's right.
A bone-jarring crash told them that they had not made it. For a moment Casher was too dizzy to see where they were.
He was glad of his helmet and happy about the web brace which held his neck. That crash would have killed him if he had not had full protection.
Gosigo seemed to think the trip normal. His classic Hindu features relaxed in a wise smile as he said, "Hit a boulder. Fell on our side. Try again."
Casher managed to gasp, "Is the machine unbreakable?"
There was a laugh in Gosigo's voice when he answered, "Almost. We're the most vulnerable items in it."
Again fire spat at the ground, this time from the side of the groundcar. It balanced itself precariously on the four high wheels. Gosigo turned on the radar screen to look through the steam which their own jets had called up.
There the road was, plain and near.
"Try again!" he shouted, as the machine lunged forward and then performed a veritable ballet on the surface of the marsh. It rushed, slowed, turned around on a hummock, gave itself an assist with the jets and then scrambled through the water.
Casher saw the inverted cone of a tornado, half a kilometer or less away, veering toward them.
Gosigo sensed his unspoken thought, because he answered, "Problem: who gets to the road first, that or we?"
The machine bucked, lurched, twisted, spun.
Casher could see nothing anymore from the windshield in front, but it was obvious that Gosigo knew what he was doing.
There was the sickening, stomach-wrenching twist of a big drop and then a new sound was heard—a grinding as of knives.
Gosigo, unworried, took his head out of the headnet and looked over at Casher with a smile. "The twister will probably hit us in a minute or two, but it doesn't matter now. We're on the road and I've bolted us to the surface."
"Bolted?" gasped Casher.
"You know, those big screws on the outside of the car. They were made to go right into the road. All the roads here are neo-asphaltum and self-repairing. There will be traces of them here when the last known person on the last known planet is dead. These are good roads." He stopped for the sudden hush. "Storm's going over us—"
It began again before he could finish his sentence. Wild raving winds tore at the machine, which sat so solid that it seemed bedded in permastone.
Gosigo pushed two buttons and calibrated a dial. He squinted at his instruments, then pressed a button mounted on the edge of his navigator's seat. There was a sharp explosion, like a blasting of rock by chemical methods.
Casher started to speak but Gosigo held out a warning hand for silence.
He tuned his dials quickly. The windshield faded out, radar came on and then went off, and at last a bright map—bright red in background with sharp gold lines—appeared across the whole width of the screen. There were a dozen or more bright points on the map. Gosigo watched these intently.
The map blurred, faded, dissolved into red chaos.
Gosigo pushed another button and then could see out of the front glass screen again.
"What was that?" asked Casher.
"Miniaturized radar rocket. I sent it up twelve kilometers for a look around. It transmitted a map of what it saw and I put it on our radar screen. The tornadoes are heavier than usual, but I think we can make it. Did you notice the top right of the map?"
"The top right?" asked Casher.
"Yes, the top right. Did you see what was there?"
"Why, nothing," said Casher. "Nothing was there."
"You're utterly right," said Gosigo. "What does that mean to you?"
"I don't understand you," said Casher. "I suppose it means that there is nothing there."
"Right again. But let me tell you something. There never is."
"Never is what?"
"Anything," said Gosigo. "There never is anything on the maps at that point. That's east of Ambiloxi. That's Beauregard. It never shows on the maps. Nothing happens there."
"No bad weather—ever?" asked Casher.
"Never," said Gosigo.
"Why not?" asked Casher.
"She will not permit it," said Gosigo firmly, as though his words made sense.
"You mean her weather machines work?" said Casher, grasping for the only rational explanation possible.
"Yes," said Gosigo.
"Why?"
"She pays for them."
"How can she?" exclaimed Casher. "Your whole world of Henri-ada is bankrupt!"
"Her part isn't."
"Stop mystifying me," said Casher. "Tell me who she is and what this is all about."
"Put your head in the net," said Gosigo. "I'm not making puzzles because I want to do so. I have been commanded not to talk."
"Because you are a forgetty?"
"What's that got to do with it? Don't talk to me that way. Remember, I am not an animal or an underperson. I may be your servant for a few hours, but I am a man. You'll find out, soon enough. Hold tight]"
The groundcar came to a panic stop, the spiked teeth eating into the resilient firm neo-asphaltum of the road. At the instant they stopped, the outside corkscrews began chewing their way into the ground. First Casher felt as though his eyes were popping out, because of the suddenness of the deceleration; now he felt like holding the arms of his seat as the tornado reached directly for their car, plucking at it again and again. The enormous outside screws held and he could feel the car straining to meet the gigantic suction of the storm.
"Don't worry," shouted Gosigo over the noise of the storm. "I always pin us down a little bit more by firing the quickrockets straight up. These cars don't often go off the road."
Casher tried to relax.
The funnel of the tornado, which seemed almost like a living being, plucked after them once or twice more and then was gone.
This time Casher had seen no sign of the air whales which rode the storms. He had seen nothing but rain and wind and desolation.
The tornado was gone in a moment. Ghostlike shapes trailed after it in enormous prancing leaps.
"Wind men," said Gosigo glancing at them incuriously. "Wild people who have learned to live on Henriada. They aren't much more than animals. We are close to the territory of the lady. They would not dare attack us here."
Casher O'Neill was too stunned to query the man or to challenge him.
Once more the car picked itself up and coursed along the smooth, narrow, winding neo-asphaltum road, almost as though the machine itself were glad to function and to function well.
Casher could never quite remember when they went from the howling wildness of Henriada into the stillness and beauty of the domains of Mr. Murray Madigan. He could recall the feeling but not the facts.
The town of Ambiloxi eluded him completely. It was so normal a town, so old-fashioned a little town that he could not think of it very much. Old people sat on the wooden boardwalk taking their afternoon look at the strangers who passed through. Horses were tethered in a row along the main street, between the parked machines. It looked like a peaceful picture from the ancient ages.
Of tornadoes there was no sign, nor of the hurt and ruin which showed around the house of Rankin Meiklejohn. There were few underpeople or robots about, unless they were so cleverly contrived as to look almost exactly like real people. How can you remember something which is pleasant and nonmemorable? Even the buildings did not show signs of being fortified against the frightful storms which had brought the prosperous planet of Henriada to a condition of abandonment and ruin.
Gosigo, who had a remarkable talent for stating the obvious, said tonelessly, "The weather machines are working here. There is no need for special precaution."
But he did not stop in the town for rest, refreshments, conversation, or fuel. He went through deftly and quietly, the gigantic armored groundcar looking out of place among the peaceful and defenseless vehicles. He went as though he had been on the same route many times before, and knew the routine well.
Once beyond Ambiloxi he speeded up, though at a moderate pace compared to the frantic elusive action he had taken against storms in the earlier part of the trip. The landscape was earthlike, wet, and most of the ground was covered with vegetation.
Old radar countermissile towers stood along the road. Casher could not imagine their possible use, even though he was sure, from the looks of them, that they were long obsolete.
"What's the countermissile radar for?" he asked, speaking comfortably now that his head was out of the headnet.
Gosigo turned around and gave him a tortured glance in which pain and bewilderment were mixed. "Countermissile radar? Coun-termissile radar? I don't know that word, though it seems as though I should. .. ."
"Radar is what you were using to see with, back in the storm, when the ceiling and visibility were zero."
Gosigo turned back to his driving, narrowly missing a tree. "That? That's just artificial vision. Why did you use the term 'countermissile radar'? There isn't any of that stuff here except what we have on our machine, though the mistress may be watching us if her set is on."
"Those towers," said Casher. "They look like countermissile towers from the ancient times."
"Towers. There aren't any towers here," snapped Gosigo.
"Look," cried Casher. "Here are two more of them."
"No man Inade those. They aren't buildings. It's just air coral. Some of the coral which people brought from earth mutated and got so it could live in the air. People used to plant it for windbreaks, before they decided to give up Henriada and move out. They didn't do much good, but they are pretty to look at."
They rode along a few minutes without asking questions. Tall trees had Spanish moss trailing over them. They were close to a sea. Small marshes appeared to the right and left of the road; here, where the endless tornadoes were kept out, everything had a parklike effect. The domains of the estate of Beauregard were unlike anything else on Henriada—an area of peaceful wildness in a world which was rushing otherwise toward uninhabitability and ruin. Even Gosigo seemed more relaxed, more cheerful as he steered the groundcar along the pleasant elevated road.
Gosigo sighed, leaned forward, managed the controls and brought the car to a stop.
He turned around calmly and looked full face at Casher O'Neill.
"You have your knife?"
Casher automatically felt for it. It was there, safe enough in his bootsheath. He simply nodded.
"You have your orders."
"You mean, killing the girl?"
"Yes," said Gosigo. "Killing the girl."
"I remember that. You didn't have to stop the car to tell me that."
"I'm telling you now," said Gosigo, his wise Hindu face showing neither humor nor outrage. "Do it."
"You mean kill her? Right at first sight?"
"Do it," said Gosigo. "You have your orders."
"I'm the judge of that," said Casher. "It will be on my conscience. Are you watching me for the Administrator?"
"That drunken fool?" said Gosigo. "I don't care about him, except that I am a forgetty and I belong to him. We're in her territory now. You are going to do whatever she wants. You have orders to kill her. All right. Kill her."
"You mean—she wants to be murdered?"
"Of course not!" said Gosigo, with the irritation of an adult who has to explain too many things to an inquisitive child.
"Then how can I kill her without finding out what this is atl about?"
"She knows. She knows herself. She knows her master. She knows this planet. She knows me and she knows something about you. Go ahead and kill her, since those are your orders. If she wants to die, that's not for you or me to decide. It's her business. If she does not want to die, you will not succeed."
"I'd like to see the person," said Casher, "who could stop me in a sudden knife attack. Have you told her that I am coming?"
"I've told her nothing, but she knows we are coming and she is pretty sure what you have been sent for. Don't think about it. Just do what you are told. Jump for her with the knife. She will take care of the matter."
"But—" cried Casher.
"Stop asking questions," said Gosigo. "Just follow orders and remember that she will take care of you. Even you." He started up the groundcar.
Within less than a kilometer they had crossed a low ridge of land and there before them lay Beauregard—the mansion at the edge of the waters, its white pillars shining, its pergolas glistening in the bright air, its yards and palmettos tidy.
Casher was a brave man, but he felt the palms of his hands go wet when he realized that in a minute or two he would have to commit a murder.
The groundcar swung up the drive. Itfstopped. Without a word, Gosigo activated the door. The air smelled calm, sea-wet, salt and yet coolly fresh.
Casher jumped out and ran to the door.
He was surprised to feel that his legs trembled as he ran.
He had killed before, real men in real quarrels. Why should a mere animal matter to him?
The door stopped him.
Without thinking, he tried to wrench it open.
The knob did not yield and there was no automatic control in sight. This was indeed a very antique sort of house. He struck the door with his hands. The thuds sounded around him. He could not tell whether they resounded in the house. No sound or echo came from beyond the door.
He began rehearsing the phrase "I want to see the Mister and Owner Madigan...."
The door did open.
A little girl stood there.
He knew her. He had always known her. She was his sweetheart, come back out of his childhood. She was the sister he had never had. She was his own mother, when young. She was at the marvelous age, somewhere between ten and thirteen, where the child—as the phrase goes—"becomes an old child and not a raw grownup." She was kind, calm, intelligent, expectant, quiet, inviting, unafraid. She felt like someone he had never left behind; yet, at the same moment, he knew he had never seen her before.
He heard his voice asking for the Mister and Owner Madigan while he wondered, at the back of his mind, who the girl might be. Madigan's daughter? Neither Rankin Meiklejohn nor the deputy had said anything about a human family.
The child looked at him levelly.
He must have finished braying his question at her.
"Mister and Owner Madigan," said the child, "sees no one this day, but you are seeing me." She looked at him levelly and calmly. There was an odd hint of humor, of fearlessness in her stance.
"Who are you?" he blurted out.
"I am the housekeeper of this house."
"You?" he cried, wild alarm beginning in his throat.
"My name," she said, "is T'ruth."
His knife was in his hand before he knew how it had got there. He remembered the advice of the Administrator: plunge, plunge, stab, stab, runl
She saw the knife but her eyes did not waver from his face.
He looked at her uncertainly.
If this was an underperson, it was the most remarkable one he had ever seen. But even Gosigo had told him to do his duty, to stab, to kill the woman named T'ruth. Here she was. He could not do it.
He spun the knife in the air, caught it by its tip and held it out to her, handle first.
"I was sent to kill you," he said, "but I find I cannot do it. I have lost a cruiser."
"Kill me if you wish," she said, "because I have no fear of you."
Her calm words were so far outside his experience that he took the knife in his left hand and lifted his arm as if to stab toward her.
He dropped his arm.
"I cannot do it," he whined. "What have you done to me?"
"I have done nothing to you. You do not wish to kill a child and I look to you like a child. Besides, I think you love me. If this is so, it must be very uncomfortable for you."
Casher heard his knife clatter to the floor as he dropped it. He had never dropped it before.
"Who are you," he gasped, "that you should do this to me?"
"I am me," she said, her voice as tranquil and happy as that of any girl, provided that the girl was caught at a moment of great happiness and poise. "I am the housekeeper of this house." She smiled almost impishly and added, "It seems that I must almost be the ruler of this planet as well." Her voice turned serious. "Man," she said, "can't you see it, man? I am an animal, a turtle. I am incapable of disobeying the word of man. When I was little I was trained and I was given orders. I shall carry out those orders as long as I live. When I look at you, I feel strange. You look as though you loved me already, but you do not know what to do. Wait a moment. I must let Gosigo go."
The shining knife on the floor of the doorway she saw; she stepped over it.
Gosigo had got out of the groundcar and was giving her a formal, low bow.
"Tell me," she cried, "what have you just seen!" There was friendliness in her call, as though the routine were an old game.
"I saw Casher O'Neill bound up the steps. You yourself opened the door. He thrust his dagger into your throat and the blood spat out in a big stream, rich and dark and red. You died in the doorway. For some reason Casher O'Neill went on into the house without saying anything to me. I became frightened and I fled."
He did not look frighjened at all.
"If I am dead," she said, "how can I be talking to you?"
"Don't ask me," cried Gosigo. "I am just a forgetty. I always go back to the Honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, each time that you are murdered, and I tell him the truth of what I saw. Then he gives me the medicine and I tell him something else. At that point he will get drunk and gloomy again, the way that he always does."
"It's a pity," said the child. "I wish I could help him, but I can't. He won't come to Beauregard."
"Him?" Gosigo laughed. "Oh, no, not him! Never! He just sends other people to kill you."
"And he's never satisfied," said the child sadly, "no matter how many times he kills me!"
"Never," said Gosigo cheerfully, climbing back into the groundcar. " 'Bye now."
"Wait a moment," she called. "Wouldn't you like something to eat or drink before you drive back? There's a bad clutch of storms on the road."
"Not me," said Gosigo. "He might punish me and make me a forgetty all over again. Say, maybe that's already happened. Maybe I'm a forgetty who's been put through it several times, not just once." Hope surged into his voice. "T'ruth! T'ruth! Can you tell me?"
"Suppose I did tell you," said she. "What would happen?"
His face became sad, "I'd have a convulsion and forget what I told you. Well, good-bye anyhow. I'll take a chance on the storms. If you ever see that Casher O'Neill again," called Gosigo, looking right through Casher O'Neill, "tell him I liked him but that we'll never meet again."
"I'll tell him," said the girl gently. She watched as the heavy brown man climbed nimbly into the car. The top crammed shut with no sound. The wheels turned and in a moment the car had disappeared behind the palmettos in the drive.
While she had talked to Gosigo in her clear warm high girlish voice, Casher had watched her. He could see the thin shape of her shoulders under the light blue shift that she wore. There was the suggestion of a pair of panties under the dress, so light was the material. Her hips had not begun to fill. When he glanced at her in one-quarter profile, he could see that her cheek was smooth, her hair well-combed, her little breasts just beginning to bud on her chest. Who was this child who acted like an empress?
She turned back to him and gave him a warm, apologetic smile.
"Gosigo and I always talk over the story together. Then he goes back and Meiklejohn does not believe it and spends unhappy months planning my murder all over again. I suppose, since I am just an animal, that I should not call it a murder when somebody tries to kill me, but I resist, of course. I do not care about me, but I have orders, strong orders, to keep my master and his house safe from harm."
"How old are you?" asked Casher. He added, "If you can tell the truth."
"I can tell nothing but the truth. I am conditioned. I am nine hundred and six Earth years old."
"Nine hundred?" he cried. "But you look like a child . . ."
"I am a child," said the girl, "and not a child. I am an earth turtle, changed into human form by the convenience of man. My life expectancy was increased three hundred times when I was modified. They tell me that my normal life span should have been three hundred years. Now it is ninety thousand years, and sometimes I am afraid. You will be dead of happy old age, Casher O'Neill, while I am still opening the drapes in this house to let the sunlight in. But let's not stand in the door and talk. Come on in and get some refreshments. You're not going anywhere, you know."
Casher followed her into the house but he put his worry into words. "You mean I am your prisoner."
"Not my prisoner, Casher. Yours. How could you cross that ground which you traveled in the groundcar? You could get to the ends of my estate all right, but then the storms would pick you up and whirl you away to a death which nobody would even see."
She turned into a big old room, bright with light-colored wooden furniture.
Casher stood there awkwardly. He had returned his knife to its bootsheath when they left the vestibule. Now he felt very odd, sitting with his victim on a sun porch.
T'ruth was untroubled. She rang a brass bell which stood on an old-fashioned round table. Feminine footsteps clattered in the hall. A female servant entered the room, dressed in a black dress with a white apron. Casher had seen such servants in the old drama cubes, but he had never expected to meet one in the flesh.
"We'll have high tea," said T'ruth. "Which do you prefer, tea or coffee, Casher? Or I have beer and wines. Even two bottles of whiskey brought all the way from Earth."
"Coffee would be fine for me," said Casher.
"And you know what I want, Eunice," said T'ruth to the servant.
"Yes, ma'am," said the maid, disappearing.
Casher leaned forward.
"That servant—is she human?"
"Certainly," said T'rujh.
"Then why is she working for an underperson like you? I mean— I don't mean to be unpleasant or anything—but I mean—that's against all laws."
"Not here, on Henriada, it isn't."
"And why not?" persisted Casher.
"Because, on Henriada, I am myself the law."
"But the government?"
"It's gone." 1 "The Instrumentality?"
T'ruth frowned. She looked like a wise, puzzled child. "Maybe you know that part better than I do. They leave an Administrator here, probably because they do not have any other place to put him and because he needs some kind of work to keep him alive. Yet they do not give him enough real power to arrest my master or to kill me. They ignore me. It seems to me that if I do not challenge them, they leave me alone." "But their rules?" insisted Casher.
"They don't enforce them, neither here in Beauregard nor over in the town of Ambiloxi. They leave it up to me to keep these places going. I do the best I can." "That servant, then? Did they lease her to you?" "Oh, no," laughed the girl-woman. "She came to kill me twenty years ago, but she was a forgetty and she had no place else to go, so I trained her as a maid. She has a contract with my master, and her wages are paid every month into the satellite above the planet. She can leave if she ever wants to. I don't think she will."
Casher sighed. "This is all too hard to believe. You are a child but you are almost a thousand years old. You're an underperson, but you command a whole planet—"
"Only when I need to!" she interrupted him. "You are wiser than most of the people I have ever known and yet you look young. How old do you feel?"
"I feel like a child," she said, "a child one thousand years old. And I have had the education and the memory and the experience of a wise lady stamped right into my brain." "Who was the lady?" asked Casher.
"The Owner and Citizen Agatha Madigan. The wife of my master. As she was dying they transcribed her brain on mine. That's why I speak so well and know so much." "But that's illegal!" cried Casher.
"I suppose it was," said T'ruth, "but my master had it done, anyhow."
Casher leaned forward in his chair. He looked earnestly at the person. One part of him still loved her for the wonderful little girl whom he had thought she was, but another part was in awe of a being more powerful than anyone he had seen before. She returned his gaze with that composed half smile which was wholly feminine and completely self-possessed; she looked tenderly upon him as their faces were reflected by the yellow morning light of Henriada. "I begin to understand," he said, "that you are what you have to be. It is very strange, here in this forgotten world."
"Henriada is strange," she said, "and I suppose that I must seem strange to you. You are right, though, about each of us being what she has to be. Isn't that liberty itself? If we each one must be something, isn't liberty the business of finding it out and then doing it—that one job, that uttermost mission compatible with our natures? How terrible it would be, to be something and never know what!"
"Like who?" said Casher.
"Like Gosigo, perhaps. He was a great king and he was a good king, on some faraway world where they still need kings. But he committed an intolerable mistake and the Instrumentality made him into a forgetty and sent him here."
"So that's the mystery!" said Casher. "And what am I?"
She looked at him calmly and steadfastly before she answered. "You are a killer too. It must make your life very hard in many ways. You keep having to justify yourself."
This was so close to the truth—so close to Casher's long worries as to whether justice might not just be a cover name for revenge— that it was his turn to gasp and be silent.
"And I have work for you," added the amazing child.
"Work? Here?"
"Yes. Something much worse than killing. And you must do it, Casher, if you want to go away from here before I die, eighty-nine thousand years from now." She looked around. "Hush!" she added. "Eunice is coming and I do not want to frighten her by letting her know the terrible things that you are going to have to do."
"Here?" he whispered urgently. "Right here, in this house?"
"Right here in this house," she said in a normal voice, as Eunice entered the room bearing a huge tray covered with plates of food and two pots of beverage.
Casher stared at the human woman who worked so cheerfully for an animal; but neither Eunice, who was busy setting things out on the table, nor T'ruth, who, turtle and woman that she was, could not help rearranging the dishes with gentle peremptories, paid the least attention to him.
The words rang in his head. "In this house . . . something worse than killing." They made no sense. Neither did it make sense to have high tea before five hours, decimal time.
He sighed and they both glanced at'him, Eunice with amused curiosity, T'ruth with affectionate concern.
"He's taking it better than most of them do, ma'am," said Eunice. "Most of them who come here to kill you are very upset when they find out that they cannot do it."
"He's a killer, Eunice, a real killer, so I think he wasn't too bothered."
Eunice turned to him very pleasantly and said, "A killer, sir. It's a pleasure to have you here. Most of them are terrible amateurs and then the lady has to heal them before we can find something for them to do."
Casher couldn't resist a spot inquiry. "Are all the other would-be killers still here?"
"Most of them, sir. The ones that nothing happened to. Like me. Where else would we go? Back to the Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn?" She said the last with heavy scorn indeed, curtsied to him, bowed deeply to the woman-girl T'ruth and left the room.
T'ruth looked friendlily at Casher O'Neill. "I can tell that you will not digest your food if you sit here waiting for bad news. When I said you had to do something worse than killing, I suppose I was speaking from a woman's point of view. We have a homicidal maniac in the; house. He is a house guest and he is covered by Old North Australian law. That means we cannot kill him or expel him, though he is almost as immortal as I am. I hope that you and I can frighten him away from molesting my master. I cannot cure him or love him. He is too crazy to be reached through his emotions. Pure, utter, awful fright might dd it, and it takes a man for that job. If you do this, I will reward you richly."
"And if I don't?" said Casher.
Again she stared at him as though she were trying to see through his eyes all the way down to the bottom of his soul; again he felt for her that tremor of compassion, ever so slightly tinged with male desire, which he had experienced when he first met her in the doorway of Beauregard.
Their locked glances broke apart.
T'ruth looked at the floor. "I cannot lie," she said, as though it were a handicap. "If you do not help me I shall have to do the things which it is in my power to do. The chief thing is nothing. To let you live here, to let you sleep and eat in this house until you get bored and ask me for some kind of routine work around the estate. I could make you work," she went on, looking up at him and blushing all the way to the top of her bodice, "by having you fall in love with me, but that would not be kind. I will not do it that way. Either you make a deal with me or you do not. It's up to you. Anyhow, let's eat first. I've been up since dawn, expecting one more killer. I even wondered if you might be the one who would succeed. That would be terrible, to leave my master all alone!"
"But you—wouldn't you yourself mind being killed!"
"Me? When I've already lived a thousand years and have eighty-nine thousand more to go! It couldn't matter less to me. Have some coffee."
And she poured his coffee.
Two or three times Casher tried to get the conversation back to the work at hand, but T'ruth diverted him with trivialities. She even made him walk to the enormous window, where they could see far across the marshes and the bay. The sky in the remote distance was dark and full of worms. Those were tornadoes, beyond the reach of her weather machines, which coursed around the rest of Henfi-ada but stopped short at the boundaries of Ambiloxi and Beauregard. She made him admire the weird coral castles which had built themselves up from the bay bottom, hundreds of feet into the air. She tried to make him see a family of wild wind people who were slyly and gently stealing apples from her orchard, but either his eyes were not used to the landscape or T'ruth could see much farther than he could.
This was a world rich in water. If it had not been located within a series of bad pockets of space, the water itself could have become an export. Mankind had done the best it could, raising kelp to provide the iron and phosphorus so often lacking in offworld diets, controlling the weather at great expense. Finally the Instrumentality recommended that they give up. The exports of Henriada never quite balanced the imports. The subsidies had gone far beyond the usual times. The earth life had adapted with a vigor which was much too great. Ordinary forms rapidly found new shapes, challenged by the winds, the rains, the novel chemistry and the odd radiation patterns of Henriada. Killer whales became airborne, coral took to the air, human babies lost in the wind sometimes survived to become subhuman and wild, jellyfish became sky sweepers. The former inhabitants of Henriada had chosen a planet at a reasonable price—not cheap, but reasonable—from the owner who had in turn bought it from a post-Soviet settling cooperative. They had leased the new planet, had worked out an ecology, had emigrated and were now doing well.
Henriada kept the wild* weather, the lost hopes, and the ruins.
And of these ruins, the greatest was Murray Madigan.
Once a prime landholder and host, 5 gentleman among gentlemen, the richest man on the whole world, Madigan had become old, senile, weak. He faced death or catalepsis. The death of his wife made him fear his own death and with his turtle-girl, T'ruth, he had chosen catalepsis. Most of the time he was frozen in a trance, his heartbeat imperceptible, his metabolism very slow. Then, for a few hours or days, he was normal. Sometimes the sleeps were for weeks, sometimes for years. The Instrumentality doctors had looked him over—more out of scientific curiosity than from any judicial right—and had decided that though this was an odd way to live, it was a legal one. They went away and left him alone. He had had the whole personality of his dying wife, Agatha Madigan, impressed on the turtle-child, though this was illegal; the doctor had, quite simply, been bribed.
All this was told by Truth to Casher as they ate and drank their way slowly through an immense repast.
An archaic wood fire roared in a real fireplace.
While she talked, Casher watched the gentle movement of her shoulder blades when she moved forward, the loose movement of her light dress as she moved, the childish face which was so tender, so appealing and yet so wise.
Knowing as little as he did about the planet of Henriada, Casher tried desperately to fit his own thinking together and to make sense out of the predicament in which he found himself. Even if the girl was attractive, this told him nothing of the real challenges which he still faced inside this very house. No longer was his preoccupation with getting the power cruiser his main job on Henriada; no evidence was at hand to show that the ctrunken, deranged Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn, would give him anything at all unless he, Casher, killed the girl.
Even that had become a forgotten mission. Despite the fact that he had come to the estate of Beauregard for the purpose of killing her, he was now on a journey without a destination. Years of sad experience had taught him that when a project went completely to pieces, he still had the mission of personal survival, if his life was to mean anything to his home planet, Mizzer, and if his return, in any way or any fashion, could bring real liberty back to the Twelve Niles.
So he looked at the girl with a new kind of unconcern. How could she help his plans? Or hinder them? The promises she made were too vague to be of any real use in the sad, complicated world of politics.
He just tried to enjoy her company and the strange place in which he found himself.
The Gulf of Esperanza lay just within his vision. At the far horizon he could see the helpless tornadoes trying to writhe their way past the weather machines which still functioned, at the expense of Beauregard, all along the coast from Ambiloxi to Mottile. He could see the shoreline choked with kelp, which had once been a cash crop and was now a nuisance. Ruined buildings in the distance were probably the leftovers of processing plants; the artificial-looking coral castles obscured his view of them. And this house—how much sense did this house make?
An undergirl, eerily wise, who herself admitted that she had obtained an unlawful amount of conditioning; a master who was a living corpse; a threat which could not even be mentioned freely within the house; a household which seemed to have displaced the planetary government; a planetary government which the Instrumentality, for unfathomable reasons of its own, had let fall into ruin. Why? Why? And why again?
The turtle-girl was looking at him. If he had been an art student, he would have said that she was giving him the tender, feminine and irrecoverably remote smile of a Madonna, but he did not know the motifs of the ancient pictures; he just knew that it was a smile characteristic of T'ruth herself.
"You are wondering ... ?" she said.
He nodded, suddenly feeling miserable that mere words had come between them.
"You are wondering why the Instrumentality let you come here?"
He nodded again.
"I don't know either," she said, reaching out and taking his right hand. His hand felt and looked like the hairy paw of a giant as she held it with her two pretty, well-kept little-girl hands; but the strength of her eyes and the steadfastness of her voice showed that it was she who was giving the reassurance, not he.
The child was helping himl
The idea was outrageous, impossible, true.
It was enough to alarm him, to make him begin to pull back his hand. She clutched him with tender softness, with weak strength, and he could not resist her. Again he had the feeling, which had gripped him so strongly when he first met her at the door of Beauregard and failed to kill her, that he had always known her and had always loved her. (Was there not some planet on which eccentric people believed a weird cult, thinking that human beings were endlessly reborn with fragmentary recollections of their own previous human lives? It was almost like that. Here. Now. He did not know the girl but fie had always known her. He did not love the girl and yet had loved her from the beginning of time.)
She said, so softly that it was almdst a whisper, "Wait. . . . Wait. .. . Your death may come through that door pretty soon and I will tell you how to meet it. But before that, even, I have to show you the most beautiful thing in the world."
Despite her little hand lying tenderly and firmly on his, Casher spoke irritably: "I'm tired of talking riddles here on Henriada. The Administrator gives me the mission of killing you and I fail in it. Then you promise me a battle and give me a good meal instead. Now you talk about the battle and start off with some other irrele- vance. You're going to make me angry if you keep on and—and— and—" He stammered out at last: "I get pretty useless if I'm angry. If you want me to do a fight for you, let me know the fight and let me go do it now. I'm willing enough.
Her remote, kind half smile did not waver. "Casher," she said, "what I am going to show you is your most important weapon in the fight."
With her free left hand she tugged at the fine chain of a thin gold necklace. A piece of jewelry came out of the top of her shift dress, under which she had kept it hidden. It was the image of two pieces of wood with a man nailed to them.
Casher stared and then he burst into hysterical laughter.
"Now you've done it, ma'am," he cried. "I'm no use to you or to anybody else. I know what that is, and up to now I've just suspected it. It's what the robot, rat and Copt agreed on when they went exploring back in Space three. It's the Old Strong Religion. You've put it in my mind and now the next person who meets me will peep it and will wipe it out. Me too, probably, along with it. That's no weapon. That's a defeat. You've doneine in. I knew the sign of the Fish a long time ago, but I had a chance of getting away with just that little bit."
"Casher!" she cried. "Casher! Get hold of yourself. You will know nothing about this before you leave Beauregard. You will forget. You will be safe."
He stood on his feet, not knowing whether to run away, to laugh out loud, or to sit down and weep at the silly sad misfortune which had befallen him. To think that he himself had become brain-branded as a fanatic—forever denied travel between the stars— just because an undergirl had shown him an odd piece of jewelry!
"It's not as bad as you think," said the little girl, and stood up too. Her face peered lovingly at Casher's. "Do you think, Casher, that I am afraid?"
"No," he admitted.
"You will not remember this, Casher. Not when you leave. I am not just the turtle-girl T'ruth. I am also the imprint of the citizen Agatha. Have you ever heard of her?"
"Agatha Madigan?" He shook his head slowly. "No. I don't see how .. . No, I'm sure that I never heard of her."
"Didn't you ever hear the story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon?"
Casher looked surprised. "Sure I saw it. It's a play. A drama. It is said to be based on some legend out of immemorial time. The 'space witch' they called her, and she conjured fleets out of nothing by sheer hypnosis. It's an old story."
"Eleven hundred years isn't so long," said the girl. "Eleven hundred years, fourteen local months come next tonight."
"You weren't alive eleven hundred years ago," said Casher accusingly.
He stood up from the remains of their meal and wandered over toward the window. That terrible piece of religious jewelry made him uncomfortable. He knew that it was against all laws to ship religion from world to world. What would he do, what could 'he do, now that he had actually beheld an image of the God Nailed High? That was exactly the kind of contraband which the police and customs robots of hundreds of worlds were looking for.
The Instrumentality was easy about most things, but the transplanting of religion was one of its hostile obsessions. Religions leaked from world to world anyhow. It was said that sometimes even the underpeople and robots carried bits of religion through space, though this seemed improbable. The Instrumentality left religion alone when it had a settled place on a single planet, but the Lords of the Instrumentality themselves shunned other people's devotional lives and simply took good care that fanaticisms did not once more flare up between the stars, bringing wild hope and great death to all the mankinds again.
And now, thought Casher, the Instrumentality has been good to me in its big impersonal collective way, but what will it do when my brain is on fire with forbidden knowledge?
The girl's voice called him back to himself.
"I have the answer to your problem, Casher," said she, "if you would only listen to me. I am the Hechizera of Gonfalon, at least I am as much as any one person can be printed on another."
His jaw dropped as he turned back to her. "You mean that you, child, really are imprinted with this woman Agatha Madigan? Really imprinted?
"I have all her skills, Casher," said the girl quietly, "and a few more which I have learned on my own."
"But I thought it was just a story . . ." said Casher. "If you're that terrible woman from Gonfalon, you don't need me. I'm quitting. Now."
Casher walked toward the door. Disgusted, finished, through. She might be a child, she might be charming, she might need help, but if she came from that terrible old story, she did not need him.
"Oh, no, you don't," she said.
Unexpectedly, she took her place in the doorway, barring it.
In her hand was the image of the man on the two pieces of wood.
Ordinarily Casher would not have pushed a lady. Such was his haste that he did so this time. When he touched her, it was like welded steel; neither her gown nor her body yielded a thousandth of a millimeter to his strong hand and heavy push.
"And now what?" she asked gently.
Looking back, he saw that the real T'ruth, the smiling girl-woman, still stood soft and real in the window.
Deep within, he began to give up; he had heard of hypnotists who could project, but he had never met one as strong as this.
She was doing it. How was she doing it? Or was she doing it? The operation could be subvolitional. There might be some art carried over from her animal past which even her re-formed mind could not explain. Operations too subtle, too primordial for analysis. Or skills which she used without understanding.
"I project," she said.
"I see you do," he replied glumly and flatly.
"I do kinesthetics," she said. His knife whipped out of his boot-sheath and floated in the air in front of him.
He snatched it out of the air instinctively. It wormed a little in his grasp, but the force on the knife was nothing more than he had felt when passing big magnetic engines.
"I blind," she said. The room went totally dark for him.
"I hear," he said, and prowled at her like a beast, going by his memory of the room and by the very soft sound of her breathing. He had noticed by now that the simulacrum of herself which she had put in the doorway did not make any sound at all, not even that of breathing.
He knew that he was near her. His fingertips reached out for her shoulder or her throat. He did not mean to hurt her, merely to show her that two could play at tricks.
"I stun," she said, and her voice came at him from all directions. It echoed from the ceiling, came from all five walls of the old odd room, from the open windows, from both the doors. He felt as though he were being lifted into space and turned slowly in a condition of weightlessness. He tried to retain self-control, to listen for the one true sound among the many false sounds, to trap the girl by some outside chance.
"I make you remember," said her multiple echoing voice.
For an instant he did not see how this could be a weapon, even if the turtle-girl had learned all the ugly tricks of the Hechizera of Gonfalon.
But then he knew.
He saw his uncle, Kuraf, again. He saw his old apartments vividly around himself. Kuraf was there. The old man was pitiable, hateful, drunk, horrible; the girl on Kuraf s lap laughed at him, Casher O'Neill, and she laughed at Kuraf too. Casher had once had a teenager's passionate concern with sex and at the same time had had a teen-ager's dreadful fear of all the unstated, invisible implications of what the man-woman relationship, gone sour, gone wrong, gone bad, might be. The present-moment Casher remembered the long-ago Casher and as he spun in the web of T'ruth's hypnotic powers he found himself back with the ugliest memory he had.
The killings in the palace at Mizzer.
The colonels had taken Kaheer itself, and they ultimately let Kuraf run away to the pleasure planet of Ttiolle.
But Kuraf s companions, who had debauched the old republic of the Twelve Niles, those people! They did not go. The soldiers, stung to fury, had cut them down with knives. Casher thought of the blood, blood sticky on the floors, blood gushing purple into the carpets, blood bright red and leaping like a fountain when a white throat ended its last gurgle, blood turning brown where handprints, themselves bloody, had left it on marble tables. The warm palace, long ago, had got the sweet sick stench of blood all the way through it. The young Casher had never known that people had so much blood inside them, or that so much could pour out on the perfumed sheets, the tables still set with food and drink, or that blood could creep across the floor in growing pools as the bodies of the dead yielded up their last few nasty sounds and their terminal muscular spasms.
Before that day of butchery had ended, one thousand, three hundred and eleven human bodies, ranging in age from two months to eighty-nine years, had been carried out of the palaces once occupied by Kuraf. Kuraf, under sedation, was waiting for a starship to take him to perpetual exile and Casher—Casher himself O'Neill!—was shaking the hand of Colonel Wedder, whose orders had caused all the blood. The hand was washed and the nails pared and cleaned, but the cuff of the sleeve was still rimmed with the dry blood of some other human being. Colonel Wedder either did not notice his own cuff, or he did not care.
"Touch and yield!" said the girl-voice out of nowhere.
Casher found himself on all fours in the room, his sight suddenly back again, the room unchanged, and T'ruth smiling.
"I fought you," she said.
He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.
He reached for his water glass, looking at it closely to see if there was any blood on it.
Of course not. Not here. Not this time, not this place.
He pulled himself to his feet.
The girl had sense enough not to help him.
She stood there in her thin modest shift, looking very much like a wise female child, while he stood up and drank thirstily. He refilled the glass and drank again.
Then, only then, did he turn to her and speak:
"Do you do all that?"
She nodded.
"Alone? Without drugs or machinery?"
She nodded again.
"Child," he cried out, "you're not a person! You're a whole weapons system all by yourself. What are you, really? Who are you?"
"I am the turtle-child T'ruth," she said, "and I am the loyal property and loving servant of my good master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan."
"Madam," said Casher, "you are almost a thousand years old. I am at your service. I do hope you will let me go free later on. And especially that you will take that religious picture out of my mind."
As Casher spoke, she picked a locket from the table. He had not noticed it. It was an ancient watch or a little round box, swinging on a thin gold chain.
"Watch this," said the child, "if you trust me, and repeat what I then say."
(Nothing at all happened: nothing—anywhere.)
Casher said to her, "You're making me dizzy, swinging that ornament. Put it back on. Isn't that the one you were wearing?"
"No, Casher, it isn't."
"What were we talking about?" demanded Casher.
"Something," said she. "Don't you remember?"
"No," said Casher brusquely. "Sorry, but I'm hungry again." He wolfed down a sweet roll encrusted with sugar and decorated with fruits. His mouth full, he washed the food down with water. At last he spoke to her. "Now what?"
She had watched with timeless grace.
"There's no hurry, Casher. Minutes or hours, they don't matter."
"Didn't you want me to fight somebody after Gosigo left me here?"
"That's right," she said, with terrible quiet.
"I seem to have had a fight right here in this room." He stared around stupidly.
She looked around the room, very cool. "It doesn't look as though anybody's been fighting here, does it?"
"There's no blood here, no blood at all. Everything is clean," he said.
"Pretty much so."
"Then why," said Casher, "should I think I had a fight?" *
"This wild weather on Henriada sometimes upsets off-worlders until they get used to it," said T'ruth mildly.
"If I didn't have a fight in the past, am I going to get into one in the future?"
The old room with the golden-oak furniture swam around him. The world outside was strange, with the sunlit marshes and wide bayous trailing off to the forever-thundering storm, just over the horizon, which lay beyond the weather machines. Casher shrugged and shivered. He looked straight at the girl. She stood erect and looked at him with the even regard of a reigning empress. Her young budding breasts barely showed through the thinness of her shift; she wore golden flat-heeled shoes. Around her neck there was a thin gold chain, but the object on the chain hung down inside her dress. It excited him a little to think of her flat chest barely budding into womanhood. He had never been a man who had an improper taste for children, but there was something about this person which was not childlike at all.
"You are a girl and not a girl.. .." he said in bewilderment.
She nodded gravely.
"You are that woman in the story, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You are reborn."
She shook her head, equally seriously. "No, I am not reborn. I am a turtle-child, an underperson with very long life, and I have been imprinted with the personality of the citizen Agatha. That is a "-"
"You stun," he said, "but I do not know how you do it."
"I stun," she said flatly, and around the edge of his mind there flickered up hot little torments of memory.
"Now I remember," he cried. "You have me here to kill somebody. You are sending me into a fight."
"You are going to a fight, Casher. I wish I could send somebody else, not you, but you are the only person here strong enough to do the job."
Impulsively he took her hand. The moment he touched her, she ceased to be a child or an underperson. She felt tender and exciting, like the most desirable and important person he had ever known.
His sister? But he had no sister. He felt that he was himself terribly, unendurably important to her. He did not want to let her hand go, but she withdrew from his touch with an authority which no decent man could resist.
"You must fight to the death now, Casher," she said, looking at him as evenly as might a troop commander examining a special soldier selected for a risky mission.
He nodded. He was tired of having his mind confused. He knew something had happened to him after the forgetty, Gosigo, had left him at the front door, but he was not at all sure of what it was. They seemed to have had a sort of meal together in this room. He felt himself in love with the child. He knew that she was not even a human being. He remembered something about her living ninety thousand years and he remembered something else about her having gotten the name and the skills of the greatest battle hypnotist of all history, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. There was something strange, something frightening about that chain around her neck: there were things he hoped he would never have to know.
He strained at the thought and'it broke like a bubble.
"I'm a fighter," he said. "Give me my fight and let me know."
"He can kill you. I hope not. You must not kill him. He is immortal and insane. But in the law of Old North Australia, from which my master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan, is an exile, we must not hurt a house guest, nor may we turn him away in a time of great need."
"What do I do?" snapped Casher impatiently.
"You fight him. You frighten him. You make his poor crazy mind fearful that he will meet you again."
"I'm supposed to do this."
"You can," she said very seriously. "I've already tested you. That's where you have the little spot of amnesia about this room."
"But why"? Why bother? Why not get some of your human servants and have them tie him up or put him in a padded room?"
"They can't deal with him. He is too strong, too big, too clever, even though insane. Besides, they don't dare follow him."
"Where does he go?" said Casher sharply.
"Into the control room," replied T'ruth, as if it were the saddest phrase ever uttered.
"What's wrong with that? Even a place as fine as Beauregard can't have too much of a control room. Put locks on the control."
"It's not that kind of a control room."
Almost angry, he shouted, "What is it, then?"
"The control room," she answered, "is for a planoform ship. This house. These counties, all the way to Mottile on the one side and to Ambiloxi on the other. The sea itself, way out into the Gulf of Esperanza. All this is one ship."
Casher's professional interest took over. "If it's turned off, he can't do any harm."
"It's not turned off," she said. "My master leaves it on a very little bit. That way, he can keep the weather machines going and make this edge of Henriada a very pleasant place."
"You mean," said Casher, "that you'd risk letting a lunatic fly all these estates off into space."
"He doesn't even fly," said T'ruth gloomily.
"What does he do, then?" yelled Casher.
"When he gets at the controls, he just hovers."
"He hovers? By the Bell, girl, don't try to fool me. If you hover a place as big as this, you could wipe out the whole planet any moment. There have been only two or three pilots in the history of space who would be able to hover a machine like this one."
"He can, though," insisted the little girl.
"Who is he, anyhow?"
"I thought you knew. Or had heard somewhere about it. His name is John Joy Tree."
"Tree the go captain?" Casher shivered in the warm room. "He died a long time ago after he made that record flight."
"He did not die. He bought immortality and went mad. He came here and he lives under my master's protection."
"Oh," said Casher. There was nothing else he could say. John Joy Tree, the great Norstrilian who took the first of the Long Plunges outside the galaxy: he was like Magno Taliano of ages ago, who could fly space on his living brain alone.
But fight him? How could anybody fight him?
Pilots are for piloting; killers are for killing; women are for loving or forgetting. When you mix up the purposes, everything goes wrong.
Casher sat down abruptly. "Do you have any more of that coffee?" *
"You don't need coffee," she said.
He looked up inquiringly. »
"You're a fighter. You need a war. That's it," she said, pointing with her girlish hand to a small doorway which looked like the entrance to a closet. "Just go in there. He's in there now. Tinkering with the machines again. Making me wait for my master to get blown to bits at any minute! And I've put up with it for over a hundred years."
"Go yourself," he said.
"You've been in a ship's control room," she declared.
"Yes." He nodded.
"You know how people go all naked and frightened inside. You know how much training it takes to make a go captain. What do you think happens to me?" At last, long last, her voice was shrill, angry, excited, childish.
"What happens?" said Casher dully, not caring very much; he felt weary in every bone. Useless battles, murder he had to try, dead people arguing after their ballads had already grown out of fashion. Why didn't the Hechizera of Gonfalon do her own work?
Catching his thought, she screeched at him, "Because I can'tl"
"All right," said Casher. "Why not?"
"Because I turn into me."
"You what?" said Casher, a little startled.
"I'm a turtle-child. My shape is human. My brain is big. But I'm a turtle. No-matter how much my master needs me, I'm just a turtle."
"What's that got to do with it?"
"What do turtles do when they're faced with danger? Not under-people-turtles, but real turtles, little animals. You must have heard of them somewhere." .t
"I've even seen them," said Casher, "on some world or other. They pull into their shells."
"That's what I do"—she wept—"when I should be defending my master. I can meet most things. I am not a coward. But in that control room, I forget, forget, forget!"
"Send a robot, then!"
She almost screamed at him. "A robot against John Joy Tree? Are you mad too?"
Casher admitted, in a mumble, that on second thought it wouldn't do much good to send a robot against the greatest go captain of them all. He concluded, lamely, "I'll go, if you want me to."
"Go now," she shouted, "go right in!"
She pulled at his arm, half dragging and half leading him to the little brightened door which looked so innocent.
"But—" he said.
"Keep going," she pleaded. "This is all we ask of you. Don't kill him, but frighten him, fight him, wound him if you must. You can do it. I can't." She sobbed as she tugged at him. "I'd just be me"
Before he knew quite what had happened she had opened the door. The light beyond was clear and bright and tinged with blue, the way the skies of Manhome, Mother Earth, were shown in all the viewers.
He let her push him in.
He heard the door click behind him.
Before he even took in the details of the room or noticed the man in the go captain's chair, the flavor and meaning of the room struck him like a blow against his throat.
This room, he thought, is Hell.
He wasn't even sure that he remembered where he had learned the word Hell. It denoted all good turned to evil, all hope to anxiety, all wishes to greed.
Somehow, this room was it.
And then ... -•
And then the chief occupant of Hell turned and looked squarely at him.
If this was John Joy Tree, he did not look insane.
He was a handsome, chubby man with a red complexion, bright eyes, dancing-blue in color, and a mouth which was as mobile as the mouth of a temptress.
"Good day," said John Joy Tree.
"How do you do," said Casher inanely.
"I do not know your name," said the ruddy brisk man, speaking in a tone of voice which was not the least bit insane.
"I am Casher O'Neill, from the city of Kaheer on the planet Mizzer."
"Mizzer?" John Joy Tree laughed. "I spent a night there, long, long ago. The entertainment was most unusual. But we have other things to talk about. You have come here to kill the undergirl T'ruth. You received your orders from the honorable Rankin Mei-klejohn, may he soak in drink! The child has caught you and now she wants you to kill me, but she does not dare utter those words."
John Joy Tree, as he spoke, shifted the spaceship controls to standby, and got ready to get out of his captain's seat.
Casher protested, "She said nothing about killing you. She said you might kill me." -**
"I might, at that." The immortal pilot stood on the floor. He was a full head shorter than Casher but he was a strong and formidable man. The blue light of the room made him look clear, sharp, distinct.
The whole flavor of the situation tickled the fear nerves inside Casher's body. He suddenly felt that he wanted very much to go to a bathroom, but he felt—quite surely—that if he turned his back on this man, in this place, he would die like a felled ox in a stockyard. He had to face John Joy Tree.
"Go ahead," said the pilot. "Fight me."
"I didn't say that I would fight you," said Casher. "I am supposed to frighten you and I do not know how to do it."
"This isn't getting us anywhere," said John Joy Tree. "Shall we go into the outer room and let poor little T'ruth give us a drink? You can just tell her that you failed."
"I think," said Casher, "that I am more afraid of her than I am of you."
John Joy Tree flung himself into a comfortable passenger's chair. "All right, then. Do something. Do you want to box? Gloves? Bare fists? Or would you like swords? Or wirepoints? There are some over there in the closet. Or we can each take a pilot ship and have a ship duel out in space."
"That wouldn't make much sense," said Casher, "me fighting a ship against the greatest go captain of them all. . . ."
John Joy Tree greeted this with an ugly underlaugh, a barely audible sound which made Casher feel that the whole situation was ridiculous.
"But I do have one advantage," said Casher. "I know who you are and you do not know who I a/n."
"How could I tell," said John Joy Tree, "when people keep on getting born all over the place?"
He gave Casher a scornful, comfortable grin. There was charm in the man's poise. Keeping his eyes focused directly on Casher, he felt for a carafe and poured himself a drink.
He gave Casher an ironic toast and Casher took it, standing frightened and alone. More alone than he had ever been before in his life.
Suddenly John Joy Tree sprang lightly to his feet and stared with a complete change of expression past Casher. Casher did not dare look around. This was some old fight trick.
Tree spat out the words, "You've done it, then. This time you will violate all the laws and kill me. This fashionable oaf is not just one more trick."
A voice behind Casher called very softly, "I don't know." It was a man's voice, old, slow and tired.
Casher had heard no one come in.
Casher's years of training stood him in good stead. He skipped sidewise in four or five steps, never taking his eyes off John Joy Tree, until the other man had come into his field of vision.
The man who stood there was tall, thin, yellow-skinned and yellow-haired. His eyes were an old sick blue. He glanced at Casher and said, "I'm Madigan."
Was this the master? thought Casher. Was this the being whom that lovely child had been imprinted to adore?
He had no more time for thought.
Madigan whispered, as if to no one in particular, "You find me waking. You find him sane. Watch out."
Madigan lunged for the pilot's controls, but his tall, thin old body could not move very fast.
John Joy Tree jumped out of his chair and ran for the controls too.
Casher tripped him. • 4.
Tree fell, rolled over and got halfway up, one knee and one foot on the floor. In his hand there shimmered a knife very much like Casher's own.
Casher felt the flame of his body as some unknown force flung him against the wall. He stared, wild with fear.
Madigan had climbed into the pilot's seat and was fiddling with the controls as though he might blow Henriada out of space at any second. John Joy Tree glanced at his old host and then turned his attention to the man in front of him.
There was another man there.
Casher knew him.
He looked familiar.
It was himself, rising and leaping like a snake, left arm weaving the knife for the neck of John Joy Tree.
The image Casher hit Tree with a thud that resounded through the room.
Tree's bright blue eyes had turned crazy-mad. His knife caught the image Casher in the abdomen, thrust hard and deep, and left the young man gasping on the floor, trying to push the bleeding entrails back into his belly. The blood poured from the image Casher all over the rug.
Blood!
Casher suddenly knew what he had to do and how he could do it—all without anybody telling him.
He created a third Casher on the far side of the room and gave him iron gloves. Theresas himself, unheeded against the wall; there was the dying Casher on the floor; there was the third, stalking toward John Joy Tree. •
"Death is here," screamed the third Casher, with a voice which Casher recognized as a fierce crazy simulacrum of his own.
Tree whirled around. "You're not real," he said.
The image Casher stepped around the console and hit Tree with an iron glove. The pilot jumped away, a hand reaching up to his bleeding face.
John Joy Tree screamed at Madigan, who was playing with the dials without even putting on the pinlighter helmet.
"You got her in here," he screamed, "you got her in here with this young man! Get her out!"
"Who?" said Madigan softly and absentmindedly.
"Truth. That witch of yours. I claim guest-right by all the ancient laws. Get her out."
The real Casher, standing at the wall, did not know how he controlled the image Casher with the iron gloves, but control him he did. He made him speak, in a voice as frantic as Tree's own voice:
"John Joy Tree, I do not bring you death. I bring you blood. My iron hands will pulp your eyes. Blind sockets will stare in your face. My iron hands will split your teeth and break your jaw a thousand times, so that no doctor, no machine will ever fix you. My iron hands will crush your arms, turn your hands into living rags. My iron hands'will break your legs. Look at the blood, John Joy Tree.. . . There will be a lot more blood. You have killed me once. See that young man on the floor."
They both glanced at the first image Casher, who had finally shuddered into death in the great rug- A pool of blood lay in front of the body of the youth.
John Joy Tree turned to the image Casher and said to him, "You're the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You can't scare me. You're a turtle-girl and can't really hurt me."
"Look at me," said the real Casher.
John Joy Tree glanced back and forth between the duplicates.
Fright began to show.
Both the Cashers now shouted, in crazy voices which came from the depths of Casher's own mind:
"Blood you shall have! Blood and ruin. But we will not kill you. You will live in ruin, blind, emasculated, armless, legless. You will be fed through tubes. You cannot die and you will weep for death but no one will hear you."
"Why?" screamed Tree. "Why? What have I done to you?"
"You remind me," howled Casher, "of my home. You remind me of the blood poured by Colonel Wedder when the poor useless victims of my uncle's lust paid with their blood for his revenge. You remind me of myself, John Joy Tree, and I am going to punish you as I myself might be punished."
Lost in the mists of lunacy, John Joy Tree was still a brave man.
He flung his knife unexpectedly at the real Casher. The image Casher, in a tremendous bound, leaped across the room and caught the knife on an iron glove. It clattered against the glove and then fell silent onto the rug.
Casher saw what he had to see.
He saw the palace of Kaheer, covered with death, with the intimate sticky silliness of sudden death—the dead men holding little packages they had tried to save, the girls, with their throats cut, lying in their own blood but with the lipstick still even and the eyebrow pencil still pretty on their dead faces. He saw a dead child, ripped open from groin upward to chest, holding a broken doll while the child itself, now dead, looked like a broken doll itself. He saw these things and he made John Joy Tree see them too. a
"You're a bad man," said John Joy Tree.
"I am very bad," said Casher.
"Will you let me go if I never enter this room again?"
The image Casher snapped off, both the body on the floor and the fighter with the iron gloves. Casher did not know how T'ruth had taught him the lost art of fighter replication, but he had certainly done it well.
"The lady told me you could go."
"But who are you going to use," said John Joy Tree, calm, sad and logical, "for your dreams of blood if you don't use me?"
"I don't know," said Casher. "I follow my fate. Go now, if you do not want my iron gloves to crush you."
John Joy Tree trotted out of the room, beaten.
Only then did Casher, exhausted, grab a curtain to hold himself upright and look around the room freely.
The evil atmosphere had gone.
Madigan, old though he was, had locked all the controls on standby.
He walked over to Casher and spoke. "Thank you. She did not invent you. She found you and put you to my service."
Casher coughed out, "The girl. Yes."
"My girl," corrected Madigan.
"Your girl," said Casher, remembering the sight of that slight feminine body, those budding breasts, the sensitive lips, the tender eyes.
"She could not have thought you up. She is my dead wife over again. The citizeness Agatha rnight have done it. But not T'ruth."
Casher looked at the man as he talked. The host wore the bottoms of some very cheap yellow pajamas and a washable bathrobe which had once been stripes of purple, lavender and white. Now it was faded, like its wearer. Casher also saw the white clean plastic surgical implants on the man's arms, where the machines and tubes hooked in to keep him alive.
"I sleep a lot," said Murray Madigan, "but I am still the master of Beauregard. I am grateful to you."
The hand was frail, withered, dry, without strength.
The old voice whispered, "Tell her to reward you. You can have anything on my estate. Or you can have anything on Henriada. She manages it all for me." Then the old blue eyes opened wide and sharp and Murray Madigan was once again the man, just momentarily, that he had been hundreds of years ago—a Norstrilian trader, sharp, shrewd, wise and not unkind. He added sharply, "Enjoy her company. She is a good child. But do not take her. Do not try to take her."
"Why not?" said Casher, surprised at his own bluntness.
"Because if you do, she will die. She is mine. Imprinted to me. I had her made and she is mine. Without me she would die in a few days. Do not take her."
Casher saw the old man leave the room by a secret door. He left himself, the way he had come in. He did not see Madigan again for two days, and by that time the old man had gone far back into his cataleptic sleep.
Two days later T'ruth took Casher to visit the sleeping Madigan.
"You can't go in there," said Eunice in a shocked voice. "Nobody goes in there. That's the master's room."
"I'm taking him in," said T'ruth calmly.
She had pulled a cloth-of-gold curtain aside and she was spinning the combination locks on a massive steel door. It was set in Daimoni material.
The maid went on protesting. "But even you, little ma'am, can't take him in there!"
"Who says I can't?" said T'ruth calmly and challengingly.
The awfulness of the situation sank in on Eunice.
In a small voice she muttered, "If you're taking him in, you're taking him in. But it's never been done before."
"Of course it hasn't, Eunice, not in your time. But Casher O'Neill has already met the Mister and Owner. He has fought for the Mister and Owner. Do you think I would take a stray or random guest in to look at the master, just like that?"
"Oh, not at all, no," said Eunice.
"Then go away, woman," said the lady-child. "You don't want to see this door open, do you?"
"Oh, no," shrieked Eunice and fled, putting her hands over her ears as though that would shut out the sight of the door.
When the maid had disappeared, T'ruth pulled with her whole weight against the handle of the heavy door. Casher expected the mustiness of the tomb or the medicinality of a hospital; he was astonished when fresh air and warm sunlight poured out from that heavy, mysterious door. The actual opening was so narrow, so low, that Casher had to step sidewise as he followed T'ruth into the room.
The master's room was enormous. The windows were flooded with perpetual sunlight. The landscape outside must have-been the way Henriada looked in its prime, when Mottile was a resort for the carefree millions of vacationers, and Ambiloxi a port feeding worlds halfway across the galaxy. There was no sign of the ugly snaky storms which worried and pestered Henriada in these later years. Everything was landscape, order, neatness, the triumph of man, as though Poussin had painted it.
The room itself, like the other great living rooms of the estate of Beauregard, was exuberant neo-baroque in which the architect, himself half mad, had been given wild license to work out his fantasies in steel, plastic, plaster, wood and stone. The ceiling was not flat, but vaulted. Each of the four corners of the room was an alcove, cutting deep into each of the four sides, so that the room was, in effect, an octagon. The propriety and prettiness of the room had been a little diminished by the shoving of the furniture to one side, sofas, upholstered armchairs, marble tables and knickknack stands all in an indescribable melange to the left; while the right-hand part of the room—facing the master window with the illusory landscape—was equipped like a surgery with an operating table, hydraulic lifts, bottles of clear and colored fluid hanging from chrome stands and two large devices which (Casher later surmised) must have been heart-lung and kidney machines. The alcoves, in their turn, were wilder. One was an archaic funeral parlor with an immense coffin, draped in black velvet, resting on a heavy teak stand. The next was a spaceship control cabin of the old kind, with the levers, switches and controls all in plain sight—the meters actually read the galacticaHy stable location of this very place, and to do so they had to whirl mightily—as well as a pilot's chair with the usual choice of helmets and the straps and shock absorbers. The third alcove was a simple bedroom done in very old-fashioned taste, the walls a Wedgwood blue with deep wine-colored drapes, coverlets and pillowcases marking a sharp but tolerable contrast. The fourth alcove was the copy of a fortress: it might even have been a fortress: the door was heavy and the walls looked as though they might be Daimoni material, indestructible by any imaginable means. Cases of emergency food and water were stacked against the walls. Weapons which looked oiled and primed stood in their racks, together with three different calibers of wirepoint, each with its own fresh-looking battery.
The alcoves had no people in them.
The parlor was deserted.
The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan lay naked on the operating table. Two or three wires led to gauges attached to his body. Casher thought that he could see a faint motion of the chest, as the cataleptic man breathed at a rate one-tenth normal or less.
The girl-lady, T'ruth, was not the least embarrassed.
"I check him four or five times a day. I never let people in here. But you're special, Casher. He's talked with you and fought beside you and he knows that he owes you his life. You're the first human person ever to get into this room."
"I'll wager," said Casher, "that the Administrator of Henriada, the Honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, would give up some of his 'honorable'just to get in here and have one look around. He wonders what Madigan is doing when Madigan is doing nothing. ..."
"He's not just doing nothing," said T'ruth sharply. "He's sleeping. It's not everybody who can sleep for forty or fifty or sixty thousand years and can wake up a few times a month, just to see how things are going."
Casher started to whistle and then stopped himself, as though he feared to waken the unconscious, naked old man on the table. "So that's why he chose 3>ow."
T'ruth corrected him as she washed her hands vigorously in a washbasin. "That's why he had me made. Turtle stock, three hundred years. Multiply that with intensive strobn treatments, three hundred times. Ninety thousand years. Then he had me printed to love him and adore him. He's not my master, you know. He's my god."
"Your what?"
"You heard me. Don't get upset. I'm not going to give you any illegal memories. I worship him. That's what I was printed for, when my little turtle eyes opened and they put me back in the tank to enlarge my brain and to make a woman out of me. That's why they printed every memory of the citizeness Agatha Madigan right into my brain. I'm what he wanted. Just what he wanted. I'm the most wanted being on any planet. No wife, no sweetheart, no mother has ever been wanted as much as he wants me now, when he wakes up and knows that I am still here. You're a smart man. Would you trust any machine—any machine at all—for ninety thousand years?" "It would be hard," said Casher, "to get batteries of monitors long enough for them to repair each other over that long a time. But that means you have ninety thousand years of it. Four times, five times a day. I can't even multiply the numbers. Don't you ever get tired of it?"
"He's my love, he's my joy, he's my darling little boy," she caroled, as she lifted his eyelids and put colorless drops in each eye. Absent-mindedly, she explained. "With his slow metabolism there's always some danger that his eyelids will stick to his eyeballs. This is part of the checkup."
She tilted the sleeping man's head, looked earnestly into each eye. She then stepped a few paces aside and put her face close to the dial of a gently humming machine. There was the sound of a shot. Casher almost reached for his gun, which he did not have.
The child turned back to him with a free mischievous smile. "Sorry, I should have warned you. That's my noisemaker. I watch the encephalograph to make sure his brain keeps a little auditory intake. It showed up with the noise. He's asleep, very deeply asleep, but he's not drifting downward into death."
Back at the table she pushed Madigan's chin upward so that the head leaned far back on its neck. Deftly holding the forehead, she took a retractor, opened his mouth with her fingers, depressed the tongue and looked down into the throat.
"No accumulation there," she muttered, as if to herself.
She pushed the head back into a comfortable position. She seemed on the edge of another set of operations when it was obvious that an idea occurred to her. "Go wash your hands, thoroughly, over there, at the basin. Then push the timer down and be sure you hold your hands under the sterilizer until the timer goes off. You can help me turn him over. I don't have help here. You're the first visitor."
Casher obeyed and while he washed his hands, he saw the girl drench her hands with some flower-scented unguent. She began to massage the unconscious body with professional expertness, even with a degree of roughness. As he stood with his hands under the sterilizer-dryer, Casher marveled at the strength of those girlish arms and those little hands. Indefatigably they stroked, rubbed, pummeled, pulled, stretched and poked the old body. The sleeping man seemed to be utterly unaware of it, but Casher thought that he could see a better skin color and muscle tone appearing.
He walked back to the table and stood facing T'ruth.
A huge peacock walked across the imaginary lawn outside the window, his tail shimmering in a paroxysm of colors.
T'ruth saw the direction of Casher's glance.
"Oh, I program that too. He likes it when he wakes up. Don't you think he was clever, before he went into catalepsis—to have me made, to have me created to love him and to care for him? It helps that I'm a girl, I can't ever love anybody but him, and it's easy for me to remember that this is the man I love. And it's safer for him. Any man might get bored with these responsibilities. I don't."
"Yet—" said Casher.
"Shh," she said, "wait a bit. This takes care." Her strong little fingers were now plowing deep into the abdomen of the naked old man. She closed her eyes so that she could concentrate all her senses on the one act of tactile impression. She took her hands away and stood erect. "All clear," she said. "I've got to find out what's going on inside him. But I don't dare use X rays on him. Think of the radiation he'd build up in a hundred years or so. He defecates about twice a month while he's sleeping. I've got to be ready for that. I also have to prime his bladder every week or so. Otherwise he would poison himself just with his own body wastes. Here, now, you can help me turn him over. But watch the wires. Those are the monitor controls. They report his physiological processes, radio a message to me if anything goes wrong, and meanwhile supply the missing neurophysical impulses if any part of the automatic nervous system began to fade out or just simply went off."
"Has that ever happened?"
"Never," she said, "not yet. But I'm ready. Watch that wire. You're turning him too fast. There now, that's right. You can stand back while I massage him on the back."
She went back to her job of being a masseuse. Starting at the muscles joining the skull to the neck, she worked her way down the body, pouring ointment on her hands from time to time. When she got to his legs, she seemed to work particularly hard. She lifted the feet, bent the knees, slapped the calves.
Then she put on a rubber glove, dipped her hand into another jar—one which opened automatically as her hand approached— and came out with her hand greasy. She thrust her fingers into his rectum, probing, thrusting, groping, her brow furrowed.
Her face cleared as she dropped the rubber glove in a disposal can and wiped the sleeping man with a soft linen towel, which also went into a disposal can. "He's all right. He'll get along well for the next two hours. I'll have to give him a little sugar then. All he's getting now is normal saline."
She stood facing him. There was a faint glow in her cheeks from the violent exercise in which she had been indulging, but she still looked both the child and the lady—the child irrecoverably remote, hidden in her own wisdom from the muddled world of adults, and the lady, mistress in her own home, her own estates, her own planet, serving her master with almost immortal love and zeal.
"I was going to ask you, back there—" said Casher, and then stopped.
"You were going to ask me?"
He spoke heavily. "I was going to ask you, what happens to you when he dies? Either at the right time or possibly before his time. What happens to you?" . ,,.
"I couldn't care less," her voice sang out. He could see by the open, honest smile on her face that she meant it. "I'm his. I belong to him. That's what I'm/or. They may have programmed something into me, in case he dies. Or they may have forgotten. What matters is his life, not mine. He's going to get every possible hour of life that I can help him get. Don't you think I'm doing a good job?"
"A good job, yes," said Casher. "A strange one too."
"We can go now," she said.
"What are those alcoves for?"
"Oh, those—they're his make-believes. He picks one of them to go to sleep in—his coffin, his fort, his ship or his bedroom. It doesn't matter which. I always get him up with the hoist and put him back on his table, where the machines and I can take proper care of him. He doesn't really mind waking up on the table. He has usually forgotten which room he went to sleep in. We can go now."
They walked toward the door.
Suddenly she stopped. "I forgot something. I never forget things, but this is the first time I ever let anybody come in here with me. You were such a good friend to him. He'll talk about you for thousands of years. Ixmg, long after you're dead," she added somewhat unnecessarily. Casher looked at her sharply to see if she might be mocking or deprecating him. There was nothing but the little-girl solemnity, the womanly devotion to an established domestic routine.
"Turn your back," she commanded peremptorily.
"Why?" he asked. "Why—when you have trusted me with all the other secrets." *»
"He wouldn't want you to see this."
"See what?" .
"What I'm going to do. When I was the citizeness Agatha—or when I seemed to be her—I found that men are awfully fussy about some things. This is one of them."
Casher obeyed and stood facing the door.
A different odor filled the room—a strong wild scent, like a geranium pomade. He could hear T'ruth breathing heavily as she worked beside the sleeping man.
She called to him: "You can turn around now."
She was putting away a tube of ointment, standing high to get it into its exact position on a tile shelf.
Casher looked quickly at the body of Madigan. It was still asleep, still breathing very lightly and very slowly.
"What on earth did you do?"
T'ruth stopped in midstep. "You're going to get nosy."
Casher stammered mere sounds.
"You can't help it," she said. "People are inquisitive."
"I suppose they are," he said, flushing at the accusation.
"I gave him his bit of fun. He never remembers it when he wakes up, but the cardiograph sometimes shows increased activity. Nothing happened this time. That was my own idea. I read books and decided that it would be good for his body tone. Sometimes he sleeps through a whole Earth year, but usually he wakes up several times a month."
She passed Casher, almost pulled herself clear of the floor tugging on the inside levers of the main door.
She gestured him past. He stooped and stepped through.
"Turn away again," she said. "Aft I'm going to do is to spin the dials, but they're cued to give any viewer a bad headache so he will forget the combination. Even robots. I'm the only person tuned to these doors."
He heard the dials spinning but did not look around.
She murmured, almost under her breath, "I'm the only one. The only one."
"The only one for what?" asked Casher.
"To love my master, to care for him, to support his planet, to guard his weather. But isn't he beautiful? Isn't he wise? Doesn't his smile win your heart?"
Casher thought of the faded old wreck of a man with the yellow pajama bottoms. Tactfully, he said nothing.
T'ruth babbled on, quite cheerfully. "He is my father, my husband, my baby son, my master, my owner. Think of that, Casher, he owns me! Isn't he lucky—to have me? And aren't I lucky—to belong to him?"
"But what for?" asked Casher a little crossly, thinking that he was falling in and out of love with this remarkable girl himself.
"For life!" she cried, "In any form, in any way. I am made for ninety thousand years and he will sleep and wake and dream and sleep again, a large part of that."
"What's the use of it?" insisted Casher.
"The use," she said, "the use? What's the use of the little turtle egg they took and modified in its memory chains, right down to the molecular level? What's the use of turning me into an undergirl, so that even you have to love me off and on? What's the use of little me, meeting my master for the first time, when I had been manufactured to love him? I can tell you, man, what the use is. Love."
"What did you say?" said Casher.
"I said the use was love. Love is the only end of things. Love on the one side, and death on the other. If you are strong enough,;to use a real weapon, I can give you a weapon which will put all Mizzer at your mercy. Your cruiser and your laser would just be toys against the weapon of love. You can't fight love. You can't fight me."
They had proceeded down a corridor, forgotten pictures hanging on the walls, unremembered luxuries left untouched by centuries of neglect.
The bright yellow light of Henriada poured in through an open doorway on their right.
From the room came snatches of a man singing while playing a stringed instrument. Later, Casher found that this was a verse of the Henriada Song, the one which went:
Don't put your ship in the Boom Lagoon, Look up north for the raving wave. Henriada's boiled away But Ambilosci's a saving grave.
They entered the room.
A gentleman stood up to greet them.
It was the great go-pilot, John Joy Tree. His ruddy face smiled, his bright blue eyes lit up, a little condescendingly, as he greeted his small hostess, but then his glance took in Casher O'Neill.
The effect was sudden, and evil.
John Joy Tree looked away from both of them. The phrase which he had started to use stuck in his throat.
He said, in a different voice, very "away" and deeply troubled, "There is blood all over this place. There is a man of blood right here. Excuse me. I am going to be sick."
He trotted past them and out the door which they had entered.
"You have passed a test," said T'ruth. "Your help to my master has solved the problem of the captain and honorable John Joy Tree. He will not go near that control room if he thinks that you are there."
"Do you have more tests for me? Still more? By now you ought to know me well enough not to need tests."
"I am not a person," she said, "but just a built-up copy of one. I am getting ready to give you your weapon. This is a communications room as well as a music room. Would you like something to eat or drink?"
"Just water," he said.
"At your hand," said T'ruth.
A rock crystal carafe had been standing on the table beside him, unnoticed. Or had she transported it into the room with one of the tricks of the Hechizera, the dreaded Agatha herself? It didn't matter. He drank. Trouble was coming.
T'ruth had swung open a polished cabinet panel. The communicator was the kind they mount in planoforming ships right beside the pilot. The rental on one of them was enough to make any planetary government reconsider its annual budget.
"That's yours?" cried Casher.
"Why not?" said the little-girl lady.*"I have four or five of them."
"But you're richl"
"I'm not. My master is. I belong to my master too."
"But things like this.... He can't handle them. How does he manage?"
"You mean money and things?" The girlish part of her came out. She looked pleased, happy and mischievous. "I manage them for him. He was the richest man on Henriada when I came here. He had credits of stroon. Now he is about forty times richer."
"He's a Rod McBan!" exclaimed Casher.
"Not even near. Mr. McBan had a lot more money than we. But he's rich. Where do you think all the people from Henriada went?"
"I don't know," said Casher.
"To four new planets. They belong to my master and he charges the new settlers a very small land rent."
"You bought them?" Casher asked.
"For him." T'ruth smiled. "Haven't you heard of planet brokers?"
"But that's a gambler's business!" said Casher.
"I gambled," she said, "and I won. Now keep quiet and watch me."
She pressed a button. "Instant message."
"Instant message," repeated the machine. "What priority?"
"War news, double A one, subspace penalty."
"Confirmed," said the machine.
"The planet Mizzer. Now. War and peace information. Will fighting end soon?"
The machine clucked to itself.
Casher, knowing the prices of this kind of communication, almost felt that he could see the arterial spurt of money go out of Henri-ada's budget as the machines reached across the galaxy, found Mizzer and came back with the answer.
"Skirmishing. Seventh Nile. Ends three local days." „,,.- «
"Close message," said T'ruth.
The machine went off.
T'ruth turned to him. "You're going home soon, Casher, if you can pass a few little tests."
He stared at her.
He blurted, "I need my weapons, my cruiser and my laser."
"You'll have weapons. Better ones than those. Right now I want you to go to the front door. When you have opened the door, you will not let anybody in. Close the door. Then please come back to me here, dear Casher, and if you are still alive, I will have some other things for you to do."
Casher turned in bewilderment. It did not occur to him to contradict her. He could end up a forgetty, like the maidservant Eunice or the Administrator's brown man, Gosigo.
Down the halls he walked. He met no one except for a few shy cleaning robots, who bowed their heads politely as he passed.
He found the front door. It stopped him. It looked like wood on the outside, but it was actually a Daimoni door, made of near-indestructible material. There was no sign of a key or dials or controls. Acting like a man in a dream, he took a chance that the door might be keyed to himself. He put his right palm firmly against it, at the left or opening edge.
The door swung in.
Meiklejohn was there. Gosigo held the Administrator upright. It must have been a rough trip. The Administrator's face was bruised and blood trickled from ««he corner of his mouth. His eyes focused on Casher.
"You're alive. She caught you too?".
Quite formally Casher asked, "What do you want in this house?"
"I have come," said the Administrator, "to see her."
"To see whom?" insisted Casher.
The Administrator hung almost slack in Gosigo's arms. By his own standard and in his own way, he was a very brave man indeed. His eyes looked clear, even though his body was collapsing.
"To see T'ruth, if she will see me," said Rankin Meiklejohn.
"She cannot," said Casher, "see you now. Gosigo!"
The forgetty turned to Casher and gave him a bow.
"You will forget me. You have not seen me."
"I have not seen you, lord. Give my greetings to your lady. Anything else?"
"Yes. Take you master home, as safely and swiftly as you can."
"My lord!" cried Gosigo, though this was an improper title for Casher. Casher turned around.
"My lord, tell her to extend the weather machines for just a few more kilometers and I will have him home safe in ten minutes. At top speed."
"I can tell her," said Casher, "but I cannot promise she will do it."
"Of course," said Gosigo. He picked up the Administrator and began putting him into the groundcar. Rankin Meiklejohn bawled once, like a man crying in pain. It sounded like a blurred version of the name Murray Madigan. No one heard it but Gosigo and Casher; Gosigo busy closing the groundcar, Casher pushing on the big house door. 4
The door clicked.
There was silence.
The opening of the door was remembered only by the warm sweet salty stink of seaweed, which had disturbed the odor pattern of the changeless, musty old house.
Casher hurried back with the message about the weather machines.
T'ruth received the message gravely. Without looking at the console, she reached out and controlled it with her extended right hand, not taking her eyes off Casher for a moment. The machine clicked its agreement. T'ruth exhaled.
"Thank you, Casher. Now the Instrumentality and the forgetty are gone."
She stared at him, almost sadly and inquiringly. He wanted to pick her up, to crush her to his chest, to rain his kisses on her face. But he stood stock still. He did not move. This was not just the forever-loving turtle-child; this was the real mistress of Henriada. This was the Hechizera of Gonfalon, whom he had formerly thought about only in terms of a wild, melodic grand opera.
"I think you are seeing me, Casher. It is hard to see people, even when you look at them every day. I think I can see you too, Casher.
It is almost time for us both to do the things which we have to do."
"Which we have to do?" He whispered, hoping she might say something else.
"For me, my work here on Henriada. For you, your fate on your homeland of Mizzer. That's what life is, isn't it? Doing what you have to do in the first place. We're lucky people if we find it out. You are ready, Casher. I am about to give you weapons which will make bombs and cruisers and lasers seem like nothing at all."
"By the Bell, girl! Can't you tell me what those weapons are?"
T'ruth stood in her innocently revealing sheath, the yellow light of the old music room pouring like a halo around her.
"Yes," she said, "I can tell you now. Me." ••• •>
"You?"
Casher felt a wild surge of erotic attraction for the innocently voluptuous child. He remembered his first insane impulse to crush her with kisses, to sweep her up with hugs, to exhaust her with all the excitement which his masculinity could bring to both of them.
He stared at her.
She stood there, calm.
That sort of idea did not ring right.
He was going to get her, but he was going to get something far from fun or folly—something, indeed, which he might not even like.
When at last he spoke, it was out of the deep bewilderment of his own thoughts, "What do you mean, you're going to give me yourself? It doesn't sound very romantic to me, nor the tone in which you said it."
The child stepped close to him, reaching up and patting his forehead.
"You're not going to get me for a night's romance, and if you did you would be sorry. I am the property of my master and of no other man. But I can do something with you which I have never done to anyone else. I can get myself imprinted on you. The technicians are already coming. You will be the turtle-child. You will be the citizeness Agatha Madigan, the Hechizera of Gonfalon herself. You will be many other people. And yourself. You will then win. Accidents may kill you, Casher, but no one will be able to kill you on purpose. Not when you're me. Poor man! Do you know what you will be giving up?"
"What?" he croaked, at the edge of« great fright. He had seen danger before, but never before had danger loomed up from within himself.
"You will not fear death, ever again, Casher. You will have to lead your life minute by minute, second by second, and you will not have the alibi that you are going to die anyhow. You will know that's not special."
He nodded, understanding her words and scrabbling around his mind for a meaning.
"I'm a girl, Casher.. . ."
He looked at her and his eyes widened. She was a girl—a beautiful, wonderful girl. But she was something more. She was the mistress of Henriada. She was the first of the underpeople really and truly to surpass humanity. To think that he had wanted to grab her poor little body. The body—ah, that was sweet!—but the power within it was the kind of thing that empires and religions are made of.
". .. and if you take the print of me, Casher, you will never lie with a woman without realizing that you know more about her than she does. You will be a seeing man among blind multitudes, a hearing person in the world of the deaf. I don't know how much fun romantic love is going to be to you after this."
Gloomily he said, "If I can free my home planet of Mizzer, it will be worth it."Whatever it is."
"You're not going to turn into a woman!" She laughed. "Nothing that easy. But you are going to get wisdom. And I will tell you the whole story of the Sign of the Fish before you leave here."
"Not that, please," he begged. "That's a religion and the Instrumentality would never let me travel again."
"I'm going to have you scrambled, Casher, so that nobody can read you for a year or two. And the Instrumentality is not going to send you back. / am. Through Space Three."
"It'll cost you a fine, big ship to do it."
"My master will approve when I tell him, Casher. Now give me that kiss you have been wanting to give me. Perhaps you will remember something of it when you come out of scramble."
She stood there. He did nothing.
"Kiss me!" she commanded.
He put his arm around her. She felt like a big little girl. She lifted her face. She thrust her lips up toward his. She stood on tiptoe.
He kissed her the way a man might kiss a picture or a religious object. The heat and fierceness had gone out of his hopes. He had not kissed a girl, but power—tremendous power and wisdom put into a single slight form.
"Is that the way your master kisses you?"
She gave him a quick smile. "How clever of you! Yes, sometimes. Come along now. We have to shoot some children before the technicians are ready. It will give you a good last chance of seeing what you can do, when you have become what I am. Come along. The guns are in the hall."
They went down an enormous light-oak staircase to a floor which Casher had never seen before. It must have been the entertainment and hospitality center of Beauregard long ago, when the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan was himself young.
The robots did a good job of keeping away the dust and the mildew. Casher saw inconspicuous little air-dryers placed at strategic places, so that the rich tooled leather on the walls would not spoil, so that the velvet bar stools would not become slimy with mold, so that the pool tables would not warp nor the golf clubs go out of shape with age and damp. By the Bell, he thought, that man Madigan could have entertained a thousand people at one time in a place this size.
The gun cabinet, now, that was functional. The glass shone. The velvet of oil showed on the steel and walnut of the guns. They were old Earth models, very rare and very special. For actual fighting, people used the cheap artillery of the present time or wirepoints for close work. Only the richest and rarest of connoisseurs had the old Earth weapons or could use them.
T'ruth touched the guard robot and waked him. The robot saluted, looked at her face and without further inquiry opened the cabinet.
"Do you know guns?" said T'ruth to Casher.
"Wirepoints," he said. "Never touched a gun in my life."
"Do you mind using a learning helmet, then? I could teach you hypnotically with the special rules of the Hechizera, but they might give you a headache or upset you emotionally. The helmet is neu-roelectric and it has filters."
Casher nodded and saw his reflection nodding in the polished glass doors of the gun cabinet. He was surprised to see how helpless and lugubrious he looked.
But it was true. Never before in his life had he felt that a situation swept over him, washed4iim along like a great wave, left him with no choice and no responsibility. Things were her choice now, not his, and yet he felt that her power was benign, self-limited, restricted by factors at which he could no more than guess. He had come for one weapon—the cruiser which he had hoped to get from the Administrator Rankin Meiklejohn. She was offering him something else—psychological weapons in which he had neither experience nor confidence.
She watched him attentively for a long moment and then turned to the gun-watching robot.
"You're little Harry Hadrian, aren't you? The gun-watcher."
"Yes, ma'am," said the silver robot brightly, "and I'm owl-brained too. That makes me very bright."
"Watch this," she said, extending her arms the width of the gun cabinet and then dropping them after a queer flutter of her hands. "Do you know what that means?"
"Yes, ma'am," said the little robot quickly, the emotion showing in his toneless voice by the speed with which he spoke, not by the intonation. "It-means-you-have-taken-over-and-I-am-off-duty! Can-I-go-sit-in-the-garden-and-look-at-the-live-things?"
"Not quite yet, little Harry Hadrian. There are some wind people out there now and they might hurt you. I have another errand for you first. Do you remember where the teaching helmets are?"
"Silver hats on the third floor in an open closet with a wire running to each hat. Yes."
"Bring one of those as fast as you can. Pull it loose very carefully from its electrical connection."
The little robot disappeared in a sudden fast, gentle clatter up the stairs.
T'ruth turned back to Casher. "I have decided what to do with you. I am helping you. You don't have to look so gloomy about it."
"I'm not gloomy. The Administrator sent me here on a crazy errand, killing an unknown underperson. I find out that the person is really a little girl. Then I find out that she is not an underperson, but a frightening old dead woman, still walking around alive. My life gets turned upside down. All my plans are set aside. You propose to send me hope to fulfill my life's work on Mizzer. I've struggled for this, so many years! Now you're making it all come through, even though you are going to cook me through Space Three to do it, and throw in a lot of illegal religion and hypnotic tricks that I'm not sure I can handle. You tell me now to come along—to shoot children with guns. I've never done anything like that in my life and yet I find myself obeying you. I'm tired out, girl, tired out. If you have put me in your power, I don't even know it. I don't even want to know it."
"Here you are, Casher, on the ruined wet world of Henriada. In less than a week you will be recovering among the military casualties of Colonel Wedder's army. You will be under the clear sky of Mizzer, and the Seventh Nile will be near you, and you will be ready at long last to do what you have to do. You will have bits and pieces of memories of me—not enough to make you find your way back here or to tell people all the secrets of Beauregard, but enough for you to remember that you have been loved. You may even"—and she smiled very gently, with a tender wry humor on her face—
"marry some Mizzer girl because her body or her face or her manner reminds you of me."
"In a week?" he gasped.
"Less than that."
"Who are you," he cried out, "that you, an underperson, should run real people and should manipulate their lives?"
"I didn't look for power, Casher. Power doesn't usually work if you look for it. I have eighty-nine thousand years to live, Casher, and as long as my master lives I shall love him and take care of him. Isn't he handsome? Isn't he wise? Isn't he the most perfect master you ever saw?"
Casher thought of the old ruined-looking body with the plastic knobs set into it; he thought of the faded pajama bottoms; he said nothing.
"You don't have to agree," said T'ruth. "I know I have a special way of looking at him. But they took my turtle brain and raised the IQ to above normal human level. They took me when I was a happy little girl, enchanted by the voice and the glance and the touch of my master—they took me to where this real woman lay dying and they put me into a machine and they put her into one too. When they were through, they picked me up. I had on a pink dress with pastel blue socks and pink shoes. They carried me out into the corridor, on a rug. They had finished with me. They knew that I wouldn't die. I was healthy. Can't you see it, Casher? I cried myself to sleep, nine hundred years ago."
Casher could not really answer. He nodded sympathetically.
"I was a girl, Casher. Maybe I was a turtle once, but I don't remember that, any more than you remember your mother's womb or your laboratory bottle. In that one hour I was never to be a girl again. I did not need to go to school. I had her education, and it was a good one. She spoke twenty or more languages. She was a psychologist and a hypnotist and a strategist. She was also the tyrannical mistress of this house. I cried because my childhood was finished, because I knew* what I would have to do. I cried because I knew that I could do it. I loved my master so, but I was no longer to be the pretty little servant who brought him his tablets or his sweetmeats or his beer. Now I saw the truth—as she died I had myself become Henriada. The planet was mine to care for, to manage—to protect my master. If I come along and I protect and help you, is that so much for a woman who will just be growing up when your grandchildren will all be dead of old age?"
"No, no," stammered Casher O'Neill. "But your own life? A family, perhaps?"
Anger lashed across her pretty face. Her features were the features of the delicious girl-child T'ruth, but her expression was that of the citizeness Agatha Madigan, perhaps, a worldly woman reborn to the endless worldliness of her own wisdom.
"Should I order a husband from the turtle bank, perhaps? Should I hire out a piece of my master's estate, to be sold to somebody because I'm an underperson, or perhaps put to work somewhere in an industrial ship? I'm me. I may be an animal, but I have more civilization in me than all the wind people on this planet. Poor things! What kind of people are they, if they are only happy when they catch a big mutated duck and tear it to pieces, eating it raw? I'm not going to lose, Casher. I'm going to win. My master will live longer than any person has ever lived before. He gave me that mission when he was strong and wise and well in the prime of his life. I'm going to do what I was made for, Casher, and you're going to go back to Mizzer and make it free, whether you like it or not!"
They both heard a happy scurrying on the staircase.
The small silver robot, little Harry Hadrian, burst upon them; he carried a teaching helmet. 4
T'ruth said, "Resume your post. You are a good boy, little Harry, and you can have time to sit in the garden later on, when it is safe."
"Can I sit in a tree?" the little robot asked.
"Yes, if it is safe."
Little Harry Hadrian resumed his post by the gun cabinet. He kept the key in his hand. It was a very strange key, sharp at the end and as long as an awl. Casher supposed that it must be one of the straight magnetic keys, cued to its lock by a series of magnetized patterns.
"Sit on the floor for a minute," said T'ruth to Casher; "you're too tall for me." She slipped the helmet on his head, adjusted the levers on each side so that the helmet sat tight and true upon his skull.
With a touching gesture of intimacy, for which she gave him a sympathetic apologetic little smile, she moistened the two small electrodes with her own spit, touching her finger to her tongue and then to the electrode. These went to his temples.
She adjusted the verniered dials on the helmet itself, lifted the rear wire and applied it to her forehead.
Casher heard the click of a switch.
"That did it," he heard T'ruth's voice saying, very far away.
He was too busy looking into the gun cabinet. He knew them all and loved some of them. He knew the feel of their stocks on his shoulder, the glimpse of their barrels in front of his eyes, the dance of the target on their various sights, the welcome heavy weight of the gun on his supporting arm, the rewarding thrust of the stock against his shoulder when he fired. He knew all this, and did not know how he knew it.
"The Hechizera, Agatha herself, was a very accomplished sportswoman," murmured T'ruth to him. "I thought her knowledge would take a second printing when I passed it along to you. Let's take these."
She gestured to little Harry Hadrian, who unlocked the cabinet and took out two enormous guns, which looked like the long muskets mankind had had on earth even before the age of space began.
"If you're going to shoot children," said Casher with his new-found expertness, "these won't do. They'll tear the bodies completely to pieces."
T'ruth reached into the little bag which hung from her belt. She took out three shotgun shells. "I have three more," she said. "Six children is all we need."
Casher looked at the slug projecting slightly from the shotgun casing. It did not look like any shell he had ever seen before. The workmanship was unbelievably fine and precise.
"What are they? I never saw these before."
"Proximity stunners," she said. "Shoot ten centimeters above the head of any living thing and the stunner knocks it out."
"You want the children alive?"
"Alive, of course. And unconscious. They are a part of your final test."
Two hours later, after an exciting hike to the edge of the weather controls, they had the six children stretched out on the floor of the great hall. Four were little boys, two girls; they were fine-boned, soft-haired people, very thin, but they did not look too far from Earth normal.
T'ruth called up a doctor underman from among her servants. There must have been a crowd of fifty or sixty undermen and robots standing around. Far up the staircase, John Joy Tree stood hidden, half in shadow. 6asher suspected that he was as inquisitive as the others but afraid of himself, Casher, "the man of blood."
T'ruth spoke quietly but firmly to thedoctor. "Can you give them a strong euphoric before you waken them? We don't want to have to pluck them out of all the curtains in the house, if they go wild when they wake up."
"Nothing simpler," said the doctor underman. He seemed to be of dog origin, but Casher could not tell.
He took a glass tube and touched it to the nape of each little neck. The necks were all streaked with dirt. These children had never been washed in their lives, except by the rain.
"Wake them," said T'ruth.
The doctor stepped back to a rolling table. It gleamed with equipment. He must have preset his devices, because all he did was to press a button and the children stirred into life.
The first reaction was wildness. They got ready to bolt. The biggest of the boys, who by earth standards would have been about ten, got three steps before he stopped and began laughing.
T'ruth spoke the Old Common Tongue to them, very slowly and with long spaces between the words:
"Wind—children—do—you—know—where—you—are?"
The biggest girl twittered back to her so fast that Casher could not understand it.
T'ruth turned to Casher and said, "The girl said that she is in the Dead Place, where the air never moves and where the Old Dead Ones move" around on their own business. She means us." To the wind children she spoke again.
"What—would—you—like—most?"
The biggest girl went from child to child. They nodded agreement vigorously. They formed a circle and began a little chant. By the second repetition around, Casher could make it out.
Shig—shag—shuggery, shuck shuck shuck! What all of us need is an all-around duck. Shig—shag—shuggery, shuck shuck shuck!
At the fourth or fifth repetition they all stopped and looked at T'ruth, who was so plainly the mistress of the house.
She in turn spoke to Casher O'Neill. "They think that they want a tribal feast of raw duck. What they are going to get is inoculations against the worst diseases of this planet, several duck meals and their freedom again. But they need something else beyond all measure. You know what that is, Casher, if you can only find it."
The whole crowd turned its eyes on Casher, the human eyes of the people and underpeople, the milky lenses of the robots.
Casher stood aghast.
"Is this a test?" he asked softly.
"You could call it that,' said T'ruth, looking away from him.
Casher thought furiously and rapidly. It wouldn't do any good to make them into forgetties. The household had enough of them. T'ruth had announced a plan to let them loose again. The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan must have told her, sometime or other, to "do something" about the wind people. She was trying to do it. The whole crowd watched him. What might T'ruth expect?
The answer came to him in a flash.
If she were asking him, it must be something to do with himself, something which he—uniquely among these people, underpeople and robots—had brought to the storm-sieged mansion of Beauregard.
Suddenly he saw it.
"Use me, my lady Ruth," said he, deliberately giving her the wrong title, "to print on them nothing from my intellectual knowledge, but everything from my emotional makeup. It wouldn't do them any good to know about Mizzer, where the Twelve Niles work their way down across the Intervening Sands. Nor about Pontoppidan, the Gem Planet. Nor about Olympia, where the blind brokers promenade under numbered clouds. Knowing things would not help these children. But wanting—"
Wanting things was different.
He was unique. He had wanted to return to Mizzer. He had wanted return beyond all dreams of blood and revenge. He had wanted things fiercely, wildly, so that even if he could not get them, he zigzagged the galaxy in search of them.
T'ruth was speaking to him again, urgently and softly, but not in so low a voice that the others in the room could not hear.
"And what, Casher O'Neill, should I give them from you?"
"My emotional structure. My determination. My desire. Nothing else. Give them that and throw them back into the winds. Perhaps if they want something fiercely enough, they will grow up to find out what it is."
There was a soft murmur of approval around the room.
T'ruth hesitated a moment and then nodded. "You answered, Casher. You answered quickly and perceptively. Bring seven helmets, Eunice. Stay here, doctor."
Eunice, the forgetty, left, taking two robots with her.
"A chair," said T'ruth to no one in particular. "For him."
A large, powerful undSrman pushed his way through the crowd and dragged a chair to the end of the room.
T'ruth gestured that Casher should Sit in it.
She stood in front of him. Strange, thought Casher, that she should be a great lady and still a little girl. How would he ever find a girl like her? He was not even afraid of the mystery of the Fish, or the image of the man on two pieces of wood. He no longer dreaded Space Three, where so many travelers had gone in and so few had come out. He felt safe, comforted by her wisdom and authority. He felt that he would never see the likes of this again—a child running a planet and doing it well; a half-dead man surviving through the endless devotion of his maidservant; a fierce woman hypnotist living on with all the anxieties and angers of humanity gone, but with the skill and obstinacy of turtle genes to sustain her in her reimprinted form.
"I can guess what you are thinking," said T'ruth, "but we have already said the things that we had to say. I've peeped your mind a dozen times and I know that you want to go back to Mi/zer so bad that Space Three will spit you out right at the ruined fort where the big turn of the Seventh Nile begins. In my own way I love you, Casher, but I could not keep you here without turning you into a forgetty and making you a servant to my master. You know what always comes first with me, and always will."
"Madigan."
"Madigan," she answered, and with her voice the name itself was a prayer.
Eunice came back with the helmets.
"When we are through with these, Casher, I'll have them take you to the conditioning room. Good-bye, my might-have-been!"
In front of everyone, she kissed Jiim full on the lips.
He sat in the chair, full of patience and contentment. Even as his vision blacked out, he could see the thin light sheath of a smock on the girlish figure, he could remember the tender laughter lurking in her smile.
In the last instant of his consciousness, he saw that another figure had joined the crowd—the tall old man with the worn bathrobe, the faded blue eyes, the thin yellow hair. Murray Madigan had risen from his private life-in-death and had come to see the last of Casher O'Neill. He did not look weak, nor foolish. He looked like a great man, wise and strange in ways beyond Casher's understanding.
There was the touch of T'ruth's little hand on his arm and everything became a velvety cluttered dark quiet inside his own mind.
When he awoke, he lay naked and sunburned under the hot sky of Mizzer. Two soldiers with medical patches were rolling him onto a canvas litter.
"Mizzer!" he cried to himself. His throat was too dry to make a sound. "I'm home."
Suddenly the memories came to him and he scrabbled and snatched at them, seeing them dissolve within his mind before he could get paper to write them down.
Memory: there was the front hall, himself getting ready to sleep in the chair, with the old giant of Murray Madigan at the edge of the crowd and the tender light touch of T'ruth—his girl, his girl, now uncountable light years away—putting her hand on his arm.
Memory: there was another room, with stained-glass pictures and incense, and the weepworthy scenes of a great life shown in frescoes around the wall. There were the two pieces of wood and the man in pain nailed to them. But Casher knew that scattered and coded through his mind there was the ultimate and undefeatable wisdom of the Sign of the Fish. He knew he could never fear fear again.
Memory: there was a gaming table in a bright room, with the wealth of a thousand worlds being raked toward him. He was a woman, strong, big-busted, bejeweled and proud. He was Agatha Madigan, winning at the games. (That must have come, he thought, when they printed me with T'ruth.) And in that mind of the Hechizera, which was now his own mind too, there was clear sure knowledge of how he could win men and women, officers and soldiers, even underpeople and robots, to his cause without a drop of blood or a word of anger.
The men, lifting him on the litter, made red waves of heat and pain roll over him.
He heard one of them say, "Bad case of burn. Wonder how he lost his clothes."
The words were matter-of-fact; the comment was nothing special; but the cadence, that special cadence, was the true speech of Mizzer.
As they carried him away, he remembered the face of Rankin Meiklejohn, enormous eyes staring with inward despair over the brim of a big glass. That was the Administrator. On Henriada. That was the man who sent me past Ambiloxi to Beauregard at two seventy-five in the morning. The litter jolted a little.
He thought of the wet marshes of Henriada and knew that soon he would never remember them again. The worms of the tornadoes creeping up to the edge of the estate. The mad wise face of John Joy Tree. **
Space three? Space three? Already, even now, he could not remember how they had put him into Space three.
And Space three itself—
All the nightmares which mankind has ever had pushed into Casher's mind. He twisted once in agony, just as the litter reached a medical military cart. He saw a girl's face—what was her name?— and then he slept.
Fourteen Mizzer days later, the first test came.
A doctor colonel and an intelligence colonel, both in the workaday uniform of Colonel Wedder's Special Forces, stood by his bed.
"Your name is Casher O'Neill and we do not know how your body fell among the skirmishers," the doctor was saying, roughly and emphatically. Casher O'Neill turned his head on the pillow and looked at the man.
"Say something more!" he whispered to the doctor.
The doctor said, "You are a political intruder and we do not know how you got mixed up among our troops. We do not even know how you got back among the people of this planet. We found you on the Seventh Nile."
The intelligence colonel standing beside him nodded agreement.
"Do you think the same thing, Colonel?" whispered Casher O'Neill to the intelligence colonel.
"I ask questions. I don't answer them," said the man gruffly.
Casher felt himself reaching for their minds with a kind of fingertip which he did not know he had. It was hard to put into ordinary words, but it felt as though someone had said to him, Casher: "That one is vulnerable at the left forefront area of his consciousness, but the other one is well armored and must be reached through the midbrain." Casher was not afraid of revealing anything by his expression. He was too badly burned and in too much pain to show nuances of meaning on his face. (Somewhere he had heard of the wild story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon! Somewhere endless storms boiled across ruined marshes under a cloudy yellow sky! But where, when, what was that? . . . He could not take time off for memory. He had to fight for his life.)
"Peace be with you," he whispered to both of them.
"Peace be with you," they responded in unison, with some surprise.
"Lean over me, please," said Casher, "so that I do not have to shout."
They stood stock straight.
Somewhere in the resources of his own memory and intelligence, Casher found the right note of pleading which could ride his voice like a carrier wave and make them do as he wished.
"This is Mizzer," he whispered.
"Of course this is Mizzer," snapped the intelligence colonel, "and you are Casher O'Neill. What are you doing here?"
"Lean over, gentlemen," he said softly, lowering his voice so that they could barely hear him.
This time they did lean over.
His burned hands reached for their hands. The officers noticed it, but since he was sick and unarmed, they let him touch them.
Suddenly he felt their minds glowing in his as brightly as if he had swallowed their gleaming, thinking brains at a single gulp.
He spoke no longer.
He thought at them—torrential, irresistible thought.
/ am not Casher O'Neill. You will find his body in a room four doors down. I am the civilian Bindaoud.
The two colonels stared, breathing heavily.
Neither said a word.
Casher went on: Our fingerprints and records have gotten mixed. Give me the fingerprints and papers of the dead Casher O'Neill. Bury him then, quickly, but with honor. Once he loved your leader and there is no point in stirring up wild rumors about returns from out of space. I am Bindaoud. You will find my records in your front office. I am not a soldier. I am a civilian technician doing studies on the salt in blood chemistry under field conditions. You have heard me, gentlemen. You hear me now. You will hear me always. But you will not remember this, gentlemen, when you awaken. I am sick. You can give me water and a sedative.
They still stood, enraptured by the touch of his tight burned hands.
Casher O'Neill said, "Awaken."
Casher O'Neill let go their hands.
The medical colonel blinked and said amiably, "You'll be better, Mister and Doctor Bindaoud. I'll have the orderly bring you water and a sedative."
To the other officer he said, "I have an interesting corpse four doors down. I think you had better see it."
Casher O'Neill tried to think of the recent past, but the blue light of Mizzer was all around him, the sand smell, the sound of horses galloping. For a moment, he thought of a big child's blue dress and he did not know why he almost wept.