"Skip it. I"m not going anywhere. But you"re leaving, Illini. You"ve got your boat parked somewhere near here. Get in it and lift off. I"ll take it from there."

"You fool! You"d risk the entire operation for the sake of a piece of mawkish sentiment?"

"It"s my operation, Illini. I"ll play it out my way or not at all. I"m like that. That"s why you hired me, remember?"

He drew a breath like a man getting ready for a deep dive, snorted it out. "You don"t have a chance, Ulrik! You"re throwing everything away-for what?"

"Not quite everything. You"ll still pay off for a finished job. It"s up to you. You can report you checked the pod and found everything normal. Try anything else and the bubble pops."

"There are two of us. We could take you barehanded."

"Not while I"ve got my hand on the gun under my arm."

The little man"s eyes ate me raw. There were things he wanted to say, but instead he made a face like a man chewing gla.s.s and jerked his head at his hired hand. They walked sideways to the hatch and jumped down. I watched them back away.

"I"ll get you for this," Illini told me when he finally decided I was bluffing. "I promise you that," he added.

"No, you won"t," I said. "You"ll just count those millions and keep your mouth shut. That"s the way the Boss would like it."

They turned and I straightened and dropped my hands. Podnac spun and fired and the impact knocked me backward twenty feet across the hold.

The world was full of roaring lights and blazing sounds, but I held onto a slender thread of consciousness, built it into a rope, crawled back up it. I did it because I had to. I made it just in time. Podnac was coming through the hatch, Illini"s voice yapping behind him. I covered him and pressed the stud and blew him back out of sight.

27.

I was numb all over, like a thumb that"s just been hit by a hammer. I felt hot fluid trickling down the inside of my suit, felt broken bones grate. I tried to move and almost blacked out. I knew then: this was one sc.r.a.pe I wouldn"t get out of. I"d had it. Illini had won.

His voice jarred me out of a daze.

"He fired against my order, Ulrik! You heard me tell him! I"m not responsible!"

I blinked a few times and could see the little man through the open port, standing in a half crouch on the spot where I"d last seen him, watching the dark hatchway for the flash that would finish him. He was holding the winning cards, and didn"t know it. He didn"t know how hard I"d been hit, that he could have strolled in and finished the job with no opposition. He thought tough, smart Baird Ulrik had rolled with another punch, was holding on him now, cool and deadly and in charge of everything.

OK. I"d do my best to keep him thinking that. I was done for, but so was he-if I could con him into leaving now. When the Monitors showed up and found my corpse and the note I"d manage to write before the final night closed down, Illini and Company would be out of the planet-stealing business and into a penal colony before you could say malfeasance in high office. I looked around for my voice, breathed on it a little, and called: "We won"t count that one, Illini. Take your boy and lift off. I"ll be watching. So will the Monitor scopes. If you try to land again you"ll have them to explain to."

"I"ll do as you say, Ulrik. It"s your show. I . . . I"ll have to use a lift harness on Podnac."

I didn"t answer that one. I couldn"t. That worried Illini.

"Ulrik? I"m going to report that I found everything in order. Don"t do anything foolish. Remember your six million credits."

"Get going," I managed. I watched him back up a few steps, then turn and scramble up the slope. The lights kept fading and coming up again.

Quite suddenly Illini was there again, guiding the slack body of his protege as it hung in the harness. When I looked again they were gone. Then I let go of whatever it was I had been hanging onto, and fell forever through endlessness.

When I woke up, Johnny Thunder was sitting beside me.

28.

He gave me water. I drank it and said, "You big, dumb ox! What are you doing here?" I said that, but all that came out was a dry wheeze, like a collapsing lung. I lay with my head propped against the wall, the way he had laid me out, and looked at the big, gaunt face, the cracked and peeling lips, the matted hair caked with ice, the bright blue eyes fixed on mine.

"I woke and found you had gone, Carl Patton." His voice had lost its resonance. He sounded like an old man. "Woola led me here."

I thought that over-and then I saw it. It almost made me grin. A note written in blood might poke a hole in Illini"s plans-but a live giant would sink them with all hands.

I made another try and managed a pa.s.sable whisper: "Listen to me, Johnny. Listen hard, because once is all you"re likely to get it. This whole thing was a fix-a trick to get you dead. Because as long as you were alive, they couldn"t touch your world. The men here were never in danger. At least they weren"t meant to be. But there was a change in plan. But that"s only after you"re taken care of. And if you"re alive . . ." It was getting too complicated.

"Never mind that," I said. "You outsmarted "em. Outsmarted all of us. You"re alive after all. Now the trick is to stay that way. So you lie low. There"s heat and emergency food stores here, all you need until pickup. And then you"ll have it made. There was a jammed solenoid, you understand? You know what a solenoid looks like? And you freed it. You saved the men. You"ll be a hero. They won"t dare touch you then . . . ."

"You are badly hurt, Carl Patton-"

"My name"s not Carl Patton, d.a.m.n you! It"s Ulrik! I"m a hired killer, understand? I came here to finish you-"

"You have lost much blood, Ulrik. Are there medical supplies here?"

"Nothing that will help me. I took a power gun blast in the hip. My left thigh is nothing but bone splinters and hamburger. The suit helped me some-but not enough. But forget that. What"s important is that they don"t know you"re alive! If they sneak back for another look and discover you-before the relief crew gets here-then they win. And they can"t win, understand? I won"t let "em!"

"At my house there is a medical machine, Ulrik," Big Boy told me. "Doctors placed it there, after the Sickness. It can heal you."

"Sure-and at med center they"d have me dancing the Somali in thirty-six hours. And if I"d stayed away, I wouldn"t have been in this fix at all! Forget all that and concentrate on staying alive. . . ."

I must have faded out then, because the next I knew someone was sticking dull knives in my side. I got my eyelids up and saw my suit open and lots of blood. Big Johnny was doing things to my leg. I told him to leave me alone, but he went on sawing at me with red-hot saws, pouring hot acid into the wounds. And then after a while I was coming up from a long way down, looking at my leg, bandaged to the hip with tape from the first aid locker.

"You have much strength left, Ulrik," he said. "You fought me like the frost-demon."

I wanted to tell him to let it alone, let me die in peace, but no sound came out. The giant was on his feet, wrapped in purple and green fur. He squatted and picked me up, turned to the port. I tried again to yell, to tell him that the play now was to salvage the only thing left: revenge. That he"d had his turn at playing Saint Bernard to the rescue, that another hopeless walk in the snow would only mean that Podnac and Illini had won after all, that my bluff had been for nothing. But it was no use. I felt him stagger as the wind hit him, heard my suit thermostat click on. Then the cotton-wool blanket closed over me.

29.

I don"t remember much about the trip back. The suit"s metabolic monitors kept me doped-those and nature"s defenses against the sensation of being carried over a shoulder through a blizzard, while the bone chips separated and began working their way through the crushed flesh of my thigh. Once I looked into the big frost-scarred face, met the pain-dulled eyes.

"Leave me here," I said. "I don"t want help. Not from you, not from anybody. I win or lose on my own."

He shook his head.

"Why?" I said. "Why are you doing it?"

"A man," he said. "A man . . . must do . . . what he sets out to do."

He went on. He was a corpse, but he wouldn"t lie down and die.

I ate and drank from the tubes in my mouth from reflex. If I"d been fully awake I"d have starved myself to shorten the ordeal. Sometimes I was conscious for a half an hour at a stretch, knowing how a quarter of beef felt on the butcher"s hook; and other times I slept and dreamed I had pa.s.sed the entrance exams for h.e.l.l. A few times I was aware of falling, of lying in the snow, and then of big hands that painfully lifted, grunting; of the big, tortured body plodding on.

Then there was another fall, somehow more final than the others. For a long time I lay where I was, waiting to die. And after a while it got through to me that the suit wouldn"t let me go as easily as that. The food and the auto-drugs that would keep a healthy man healthy for a year would keep a dying man in torture for almost as long. I was stuck on this side of the river, like it or not. I opened my eyes to tell the giant what I thought of that, but didn"t see him: what I did see was his house, looming tall against the big trees a hundred yards away. It didn"t take me more than a day to crawl to it. I did it a hundred miles at a time, over a blanket of broken bottles. The door resisted for a while, but in the end I got my weight against it and it swung in and dumped me on the plank floor. After that there was another long, fuzzy time while I clawed my way to the oversized med cabinet, got it opened, and fell inside. I heard the diagnostic unit start up, felt the sensors moving over me. Then I didn"t know any more for a long, long time.

30.

This time I came out of it clearheaded, hungry, pain-free, and with a walking cast on my leg. I looked around for my host, but I was all alone in the big lodge. There was no cheery blaze on the hearth, but the house was as hot as a skid-row flop in summertime. At some time in the past, the do-gooders had installed a s.p.a.ce heater with automatic controls to keep the giant cozy if the fire went out. I found some food on the shelves and tried out my jaws for the first time in many days. It was painful, but satisfying. I fired up the comm rig and got ready to tell the Universe my story. Then I remembered there were still a few details to clear up. I went to the door with a vague idea of seeing if Johnny Thunder was outside, chopping wood for exercise. All I saw was a stretch of wind-packed snow, the backdrop of giant trees, the gray sky hanging low overhead like wet canvas. Then I noticed something else: an oblong drift of snow, halfway between me and the forest wall.

The sound of snow crust crunching under my feet was almost explosively loud in the stillness as I walked across to the long mound. He lay on his back, his eyes open to the sky, glazed over with ice. His arms were bent at the elbow, the hands open as if he were carrying a baby. The snow was drifted over him, like a blanket to warm him in his sleep. The dog was beside him, frozen at her post.

I looked at the giant for a long time, and words stirred inside me: things that needed a voice to carry them across the gulf wider than s.p.a.ce to where he had gone. But all I said was: "You made it, Johnny. We were the smart ones; but you were the one that did what you set out to do."

31.

I flipped up the SEND key, ready to fire the blast that would sink Podnac and crew like a lead canoe; but then the small, wise voice of discretion started whispering at me. Nailing them would have been a swell gesture for me to perform as a corpse, frozen with a leer of triumph on my face, thumbing my nose from the grave. I might even have had a case for blowing them sky-high to save Johnny Thunder"s frozen paradise for him, in view of the double-cross they"d tried on me.

But I was alive, and Johnny was dead. And six million was still waiting. There was nothing back at the pod that couldn"t be explained in terms of the big bad scorpion that had gnawed my leg. Johnny would be a hero, and they"d put up a nice marker for him on some spot the excavating rigs didn"t chew up-I"d see to that.

In the end I did the smart thing, the shrewd thing. I told them what they wanted to hear; that the men were safe, and that the giant had died a hero like a giant should. Then I settled down to wait for the relief boat.

32.

I collected. Since then I"ve been semi-retired. That"s a nice way of saying that I haven"t admitted to myself that I"m not taking any more a.s.signments. I"ve spent my time for the past year traveling, seeing the sights, trying out the luxury spots, using up a part of the income on the pile I stashed away. I"ve eaten and drunk and wenched and sampled all the kicks from air-skiing to deep-sea walking, but whatever it is I"m looking for, I have a hunch I won"t find it, any more than the rest of the drones and thrill-seekers will.

It"s a big, impersonal Universe, and little men crave the thing that will give them stature against the loom of stars.

But in a world where once there was a giant, the rest of us are forever pygmies.

DINOSAUR BEACH.

1.

It was a pleasant summer evening. We were sitting on the porch swing, Lisa and I, watching the last of the pink fade out of the sky and listening to Fred Hunnicut pushing a lawn mower over his weed crop next door. A cricket in the woodwork started up his fiddle, sounding businesslike and full of energy. A car rattled by, its weak yellow headlights pushing shadows along the brick street and reflecting in the foliage of the sycamores that arched over the pavement. Somewhere a radio sang about harbor lights.

A pleasant evening, a pleasant place. I hated to leave it. But I took a breath of crisp air lightly laced with leafsmoke and newcut gra.s.s and got to my feet.

Lisa looked up at me. She had a heart-shaped face, and a short nose, and big, wide-s.p.a.ced eyes and the prettiest smile in the world. Even the tiny scar on her cheekbone only added to her charm: the flaw that makes perfection perfect.

"Think I"ll walk down to Simon"s for some beer," I said.

"Dinner will be ready when you get back, darlin"," she said, and smiled the smile. "Baked ham and corn on the cob."

She stood and moved against me all in one fluid dancer"s motion, and her lips touched my ear.

I went down the steps and paused on the walk to look back and see her silhouetted against the lighted screen door, slim and graceful.

"Hurry back, darlin"," she said, and waved and was gone.

Gone forever.