I felt the silent buzzing that meant they were talking it over. Then Humekoy picked up two rods, a white one and a red one, from the desk. He held the white one out to me.

"You will depart the Rish world at once," he said. "Take this symbol of Rish magnanimity and go."

I shook my head, and felt the sweat start up. "I"ll take my life and freedom because it"s mine, not as a gift. I don"t want any gifts from you; no gifts at all."

"You refuse the mercy of the Hierarch?" Humekoy"s canned voice went up off the scale.

"All I want is what"s mine."

More silent conversation. Humekoy put the rods back on the desk.

"Then go, Captain Danger. You have your freedom."

"What about my crew?"

"They are guilty. They will pay their debt."

"They"re no good to you. I suppose you"ve already pumped them dry. Why not let them go?"

"Ah, you crave a gift after all?"

"No. I"ll pay for them."

"So? What payment do you offer?"

Poor Srat had briefed me on this, too. I knew what I had to do, but my mouth felt dry and my stomach was quivering. We bargained for ten minutes before we agreed on a price.

My right eye.

4.

They were skillful surgeons. They took the eye out without anesthetic, other than a stiff drink of what tasted like refrigerant fluid. Humekoy stood by and watched with every indication of deep interest. As for me, I had already learned about pain: the body is capable of registering only a certain amount of it; about what you"d get from laying your palm on a hot plate. After that, it"s all the same. I yelled and screamed a little, and kicked around a bit, but it was over very quickly. They packed the empty socket with something cold and wet that numbed it in a few seconds. In half an hour I was back on my feet, feeling dizzy and with a sort of gauzy veil between my remaining eye and the world.

They took me to the port and my crew were there ahead of me, handcuffed and looking pale green around the ears. And the consul was there, too, with his hands clamped up as tight as the rest.

"It has been a fair exchange, Captain Danger," Humekoy told me after the others were aboard. "These paid cheats have garnered their petty harvest of data on industrial and port facilities, volume of shipping and sophistication of equipment, on which to base estimates of Rish a.s.sault capability. And in return, the Hierarch has gained valuable information for proper a.s.sessment of you humans. Had we acted on the basis of impressions gained by study of the persons so-cleverly trained to delude us heretofore, we might have made a serious blunder."

We parted on that note, not as pals, exactly, but with what might be described as a mutual wary respect. At the last minute a rampcar pulled up and a pair of Rish guards dumped poor Srat out.

"The creature aided, indirectly, in our rapprochement," Humekoy said. "His payment is his freedom. Perhaps you, too, may have an account to settle."

"Put him aboard," I said. "He and I will have a lot of things to talk over before I get back to Ahax."

5.

By the time the fifty-seven-day voyage was over, I knew as much about H"eeaq as poor Srat could tell me.

"Why these mistaken kin of mine may have stolen a lady of Master"s kind, I can"t say," he insisted. But as to where-he had a few ideas on that.

"There are worlds, Master, where long ago H"eeaq established markets for the complex molecules so abundantly available to her in those days. Our vessels call there still, and out of regard for past ties perhaps, the in-dwellers supply our needs for stores. And in return, we give them what we can."

He gave me the details of a few of these old marketplaces-worlds far out in Fringe s.p.a.ce, where few questions were asked, and a human was a rare freak.

"We"ll go take a look," I said. "As soon as I collect my pay."

At Ahax, Traffic Control allotted me a slot at the remotest corner of the port. We docked and my four cheery crewmen were gone in a rampcar before I finished securing the command deck. I told Srat to follow me, and started off to walk the two miles to the nearest power way. A rampcar went past in a hurry in the next lane over, headed out toward where my tub was parked. I thought about hailing it, but even with the chill wind blowing, walking felt good after the weeks in s.p.a.ce.

Inside the long terminal building, a P.A. voice was droning something. Srat made a gobbling noise and said, "Master, they speak of you!" I looked where he pointed with one flipper and saw my face looking down from a public screen.

" . . . distinguishing scar on the right side of the neck and jaw," the voice was saying. "It is the duty of any person seeing this man to detain him and notify Central Authority at once!"

6.

n.o.body seemed to be looking my way. I was wearing a plain gray shipsuit and a light windbreaker with the collar turned up far enough to cover the scar; I didn"t look much different than a lot of other s.p.a.ce-burned crew types. Poor Srat was crouching and quivering; they hadn"t put him on the air, but he would attract attention with his whimpering. We had to get to cover, fast. I turned and headed for the nearest ramp exit and as I reached the vestibule a woman"s voice called my name. I spun and saw a familiar face: Nacy, the little tech operator I"d left Eureka with.

"I was in Ops Three when your clearance request came, four hours ago," she said in a fast whisper. She saw the patch over my eye and her voice faltered and went on: "I thought . . . after all, no one expected you to come back . . . it would be nice to come down and meet you.

"Then . . . I heard the announcement. . . ."

"What"s it all about, Nacy?"

She shook her head. She was a pert little girl with a turned-up nose and very white, even teeth. "I don"t know, Billy. Someone said you"d gone against your orders, turned back early-"

"Yeah. There"s something in that. But you don"t want to be seen talking to me-"

"Billy-maybe if you went to them voluntarily . . ."

"I have a funny feeling near the back of my neck that says that would be a wrong play."

Her face looked tight; she nodded. "I think I understand." She took a bite of her lip. "Come with me." She turned and started across the lobby. Srat plucked at my sleeve.

"You"ll do better on your own," I said, and followed her.

She led me through a door marked for private use, along a plain corridor with lots of doors, out through a small personnel entry onto a parking lot full of ramp vehicles.

"Good thinking, girl," I said. "You"d better fade out fast now-"

"Just a minute." She ducked back inside. I went to a small mail-carrier, found the controls unlocked. I started it up and backed it around by the door as it swung open and a sleek pepper and salt and tan animal stalked through, looking relaxed, as always.

"Eureka!" I called, and the old boy stopped and looked my way, then reached the car in one bound and was in beside me. I looked up and Nacy was watching from the door.

"Thanks for everything," I said. "I don"t know why you took the chance, but thanks."

"Maybe it"s because you"re what"s known as a romantic figure," she said and whirled and was gone before I could ask her what that meant.

I pulled the car out and into a lane across the ramp, keeping it at an easy speed. There was a small click from over my head and a voice said, "Seven-eight-nine-o, where do you think you"re going?"

"Fuel check," I mumbled.

"Little late, aren"t you? You heard the clear ramp order."

"Yeah, what"s it all about?"

"Pickup order out on some smuggler that gave Control the slip a few minutes ago. Now get off the ramp!" He clicked off. I angled right as if I were headed for the maintenance bay at the end of the line, but at the last second I veered left and headed out toward where I"d parked Jongo. I could see rampcars buzzing back and forth, off to my left; I pa.s.sed two uniformed men, on foot. One of them stared at me and I kept my chin down in my collar and waved to him. A hundred yards from the tub, I saw the cordon of cars around it. So much for my chances of a slick takeoff under their noses. I pulled the car offside between a ma.s.sive freighter that looked as if it hadn"t been moved for a couple of hundred years, and a racy yacht that reminded me of Lord Desroy"s, and tried to make my brain think. It didn"t seem to want to. My eyes kept wandering back to the fancy enamel-inlaid trim around the entry lock of the yacht. The port was open and I could see the gleam of hand-rubbed finishes inside. . . .

I was out of the car and across to the yacht before I realized I"d made a decision. Eureka went in ahead of me, as if he owned the boat. Just as I got a foot on the carpeted four-step ladder, one of the pedestrian cops came into sight around the side of the old freighter. He saw me and broke into a run, fumbling with a holster at his side in a way that said he had orders to shoot. I unfroze and started up, knowing I wouldn"t make it, and heard a scuffling sound and a heavy thud and a crash of fire that cracked and scorched the inlay by the door. I looked back and he was spread out on the pavement, out cold, and poor Srat was untangling himself from his legs. He scrambled in behind me and I tripped the port-secure lever and ran for the flight deck. I slammed the main drive lever to full emergency lift-off position and felt my back teeth shake as the yacht screamed off the ramp, splitting the atmosphere of Ahax like a meteorite outward-bound.

7.

The ship handled like a yachtsman"s dream; for the first few hours I ducked and bobbed in an evasion pattern that took us out through the planetary patrols. I kept the comm channels open and listened to a lot of excited talk that told me I"d picked the personal transportation of an Ahacian official whose t.i.tle translated roughly as a.s.sistant Dictator. After a while a.s.semblyman Ognath came on, looking very red around the ears, and showed me a big smile as phony as a UN peace proposal.

"Captain Danger, there"s been a misunderstanding," he warbled. "The police officers you may have seen at the port were merely a guard of honor-"

"Somebody forgot to tell the gun-handlers about that," I said in a breezy tone that I thought would have the maximum irritant value. "I had an idea maybe you fellows decided forty years" pay was too much to spend, after all. But that"s OK; I"ll accept this bucket as payment in full."

"Look here, Danger," Ognath let the paper smile drop. "Bring the vessel back, and I"ll employ my influence to see that you"re dealt with leniently."

"Thanks; I"ve had a sample of your influence. I don"t think I"d live through another."

"You"re a fool! Every civilized world within ten pa.r.s.ecs will be alerted; you"ll be hunted down and blasted without mercy-unless you turn back now!"

"I guess the previous owner is after somebody"s scalp, eh, Ognath? Too bad."

I gave him, and a couple of naval types who followed him, some more funny answers and in the process managed to get a fair idea of the interference I could expect to run into. I had to dodge three patrols in the first twenty hours; by the thirtieth hour I was running directly toward Galactic Zenith with nothing ahead but the Big Black.

"Give me the coordinates of the nearest of the worlds where you H"eeaq used to trade," I ordered Srat.

"It is distant, Master. So far away, so lonely. The world called Drope."

"We"ll try it anyway," I said. "Maybe somewhere out there we"ll run into a little luck."

The yacht was fueled and supplied in a way that suggested that someone had been prepared for any sudden changes in the political climate back home. It carried food, wines, a library that was all the most self-indulgent dictator could want to while away those long, dull days in s.p.a.ce.

I showed Srat how to handle the controls so that he could relieve me whenever I felt like taking a long nap or sampling the library. I asked him why he had stuck with me, but he just looked at me with those goggle-eyes, and for the first time in many weeks it struck me what a strange-looking thing he was. You can get used to anything, even a H"eeaq.

8.

Eureka was better company than the alien, in spite of not being able to talk. He settled in in a cabin full of frills that conjured up pictures of a dance-hall floozie with the brains of a Pekinese and a voice to match. Fortunately, the dictator"s taste in music and books was closer to mine than his choice of mistresses. There were tapes aboard on everything from ancient human history to the latest techniques in cell-surgery, thoroughly indexed. I sampled them all.

The Fringe worlds, I learned, were the Museum of the Galaxy. These lonely planets had once, long eons ago, been members of the tightly packed community of Center; their races had been the first in the young Galaxy to explore out through the Bar and Eastern Arm, where their remote descendants still thrived. Now the ancient Mother-worlds lingered on, living out the twilight of their long careers, circling dying suns, far out in the cool emptiness of the s.p.a.ce between Galaxies. One of those old races, Srat a.s.sured me, was the ancestral form of Man-not that I"d recognize the relationship if I encountered a representative of the tribe.

One day I ran through a gazeteer of the Western Arm, found a listing of an obscure sun I was pretty sure was Sol and coded its reference into the index. The doc.u.mentary that came onto the view-screen showed me a dull-steel ball bearing with a brilliant highlight that the voice track said was the system"s tenth planet. Number nine looked about the same, only bigger. Eight and seven were big fuzz-b.a.l.l.s flattened at the poles. I had just about decided I had the wrong star when Saturn swam into view. The sight of that old familiar ring made me feel homesick, as if I"d spent the long happy hours of childhood there. I recognized Big Jupe, too. The camera came in close on this one, and then there were surface scenes on the moons. They looked just like Luna.

Mars was a little different than the pictures I remembered seeing; the ice caps were bigger, and in the close scan the camera moved in on what looked like the ruins of a camp; not a city, just a lash-up collection of metal huts and fallen antennas, such as a South Pole expedition might have left behind. And then I was looking at Earth, swimming there on the screen, cool and misty green and upside down, with Europe at the bottom and Africa at the top. I stared at it for half a minute before I noticed that the ice caps were wrong. The northern one covered most of Germany and the British Isles, and as the camera swung past, I could see that it spread down across North America as far as Kansas. And there wasn"t any south polar cap. Antarctica was a crescent-shaped island, all by itself in the ocean, ice-free; and Australia was connected to Indochina. I knew then the pictures had been made a long time ago.

The camera moved in close, and I saw oceans and jungles, deserts and ice-fields, but nowhere any sign of Man. The apparent alt.i.tude at the closest approach was at least ten thousand feet, but even from that height I could make out herds of game. But whether they were mammoths and megatheria or something even older, I couldn"t tell.

Then the scene shifted to Venus, which looked like Neptune, only smaller and brighter, and I switched the viewer off and made myself a long, strong drink and settled down for the long run ahead.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Drope was a lone world, circling a tired old star the color of sunset in Nevada. No hostile interceptors rose to meet me, but there was no welcoming committee either. We grounded at what Srat said was a port, but all I saw was a windblown wasteland with a few hillocks around it, under a purplish-black sky without a star in sight, Center being below the horizon. The air was cold, and the wind seemed to be whispering sad stories in the dusk. I went back aboard; I dined well and drank a bottle of old Ahacian wine and listened to music, but it seemed to be telling sad stories, too. Just before dawn Srat came back with a report that a H"eeaq ship had called-about a century ago, Earth time.

"That doesn"t help us much," I pointed out.

"At least," Poor Srat got down and wriggled in the dust, but I sensed a certain insolence in his voice- "at least Master knows now I speak truly of the voyages of the H"eeaq."

"Either that or you"re a consistent liar," I said, and stopped. My tone of voice when I talked to the midget reminded me of something, but I couldn"t say what it was.

Srat"s informant had mentioned the name of the H"eeaq vessel"s next port of call: a world known as E"el, ten lights farther out into intergalactic s.p.a.ce, which meant a two weeks" run. I set ship time up on a cycle as close to Earth time as I could estimate, and for a while I tried to sleep eight hours at a stretch, eat three meals a day, and maintain some pretense of night and day; but the habit of nearly six years in s.p.a.ce was too strong. I soon reverted to three on, three off, with meals every other off-period.

We picked up E"el on our screens at last, a small, dim star not even shown on the standard charts. I set the yacht down on a gra.s.sy plain near a town made of little mud-colored domes and went into the village with Srat. There was nothing there but dust and heat and a few shy natives who scuttled inside their huts as we pa.s.sed. An hour of that was enough.

After that we called at a world that Srat called Zlinn, where a swarm of little atmosphere fliers about as st.u.r.dy as Spads came up and buzzed us like irate hornets. They refused us permission to disembark. If any H"eeaq vessel had been there in the last few decades, it was their secret.

We visited Lii, a swamp-world where vast batteries of floodlights burned all day under a dying sun, and Shoramnath, where everyone had died since Srat"s last visit, and we walked around among the bones and the rusted machines and the fallen-in buildings, and wondered what had hit them; and we saw Far, and Z"reeth, and on Kish they let us land and then attacked us, just a few seconds prematurely, so that we made it back to the lock and lifted off in the middle of a barrage of HE fire that burned some of the shine off the hull. Suicide fliers threw themselves at us as we streaked for s.p.a.ce; they must have been tough organisms, because some of them survived the collisions and clung to the hull and I heard them yammering and rat-tat-tatting there for minutes after we had left the last of the atmosphere behind.

On t.i.th, there were fallen towers that had once been two miles high, lying in rows pointing north, like a forest felled by a meteor strike. We talked to the descendants of the tower builders, and they told me that a H"eeaq ship had called; a year ago, a century ago, a thousand years-it was all the same to them.

We pushed on, hearing rumors, legends, hints that a vessel like the one I described had been seen once, long ago, or had visited the next world out-system, or that creatures like Srat had been found, dead, on an abandoned moon. Then even the rumors ran out; and Srat was fresh out of worlds.

"The trail"s cold," I told him. "There"s nothing out here but death and decay and legends. I"m turning back for Center."

"Only a little farther, Master," Poor Srat pleaded. "Master will find what he seeks, if only he presses on." He didn"t have quite the whimpering tone now that he used to use. I wondered about poor Srat; what he had up his sleeve.

"One more try," I said. "Then I turn back and try for Center, even if every post office this side of Earth has my picture in it."

But the next sun that swam into range was one of a small cl.u.s.ter; eight small, long-lived suns, well past Sol on the evolutionary scale, but still in their prime. Srat almost tied himself into a knot.

"Well do I remember the Eight Suns, Master! These are rich worlds, and generous. After we filled our holds here with succulent lichens-"

"I don"t want any succulent lichens," I cut off his rhapsody. "All I want is a hot line on a H"eeaq ship."