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Title: On the Storm Planet
Author: Smith, Cordwainer [Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony]
   (1913-1966)
Date of first publication: February 1965
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Galaxy Magazine, February 1965
   [New York: Galaxy Publishing Corporation]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 13 May 2017
Date last updated: 13 May 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1433

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  On the
  Storm Planet

  BY CORDWAINER SMITH



  Underpeople can't give orders to humans.
  But this girl was not only an underperson
  --she was immensely, frighteningly more!




I

"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 ground car 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.



Though no longer a Lord, he nevertheless represented 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 title of "Administrator", was the only law and civil Authority
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 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 crime 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 appoint you a deputy sheriff, if you like.  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, '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 ground car 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," smiled Casher O'Neill, "who you are, Mr.
Commissioner and Administrator.  You are the honorable Rankin
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 _I_ 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
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 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 four fingers more of the byegarr into
his glass, drank it down as if it were a sip of cream, and then--only
very lightly 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 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.  _But kill that girl first_!  Just
as a favor to me."

"Why?" said 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?" said Casher, cold and loud again.



The liquor suddenly took over inside the Administrator.  He groped back
for the arm of his 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 passer-by 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.

The Administrator grinned.  "I don't know what happened," 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 ground car 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.




II

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 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 ground cars 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.  I have never been outside
this house."

Casher looked at the robot.  This one seemed unusually talkative.  He
chanced the opportunity of getting some information.

"Have you ever heard of Beauregard?"

"Yes, sir.  It is the best house on this planet.  I have heard people
say that it is the solidest 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 Henriada 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 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 Instrumentality."

"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 out 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 underperson
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 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?" said 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 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 travelled 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.




III

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 really very progressive on
Henriada."

He clapped his hands and ordered that a watch be taken to Casher's
room, along with a 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 ground car.  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 archeology 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 Casper 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 re-judging him.  The man, though shorter
than himself, 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 what your orders are?"

"Oh, certainly.  The Administrator has told me to drive you to
Beauregard, to take you to the door, to watch you stab the undergirl
and to call the second ground car to your rescue.  The Deputy
Administrator has told me to take you to Beauregard and to let you do
as you please, bringing you back here by way of Ambiloxi if you happen
to come out of Mister 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 think 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 a
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, friendlily, 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?" he asked.  "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_ me."

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 but
operational apparatus.  Since Casher had been landed right into the
palace by planoform, he had never had occasion to go outside among the
tornadoes of Henriada.

The Administrator was waiting, wearing a coverall on which was
stencilled 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 3:95.

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."  His 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 ground car, which had its
door standing opened.

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 travelwear.  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," said Gosigo to Meiklejohn, "tell your visitor to put the
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 gotten 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.

"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 had released his shoulder; he now stood
facing the Administrator and rubbing his shoulder.  He said nothing,
but shook his head gently, showing that he definitely 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
parrot-like voice, "Well, toodle-oo!"

"What do you mean, sir?" said 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'by.  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?" said Casher to 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 Beauregard.  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 5:25 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."



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 to.

"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 snug 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 this!" he thought to himself as he dragged
the net down.  There was a strong fibre 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.




IV

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 ground car 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
portholes on the side.

The battle was over before it began.

The ground car 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 ground car
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 ground cars 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 times that they tried various approaches.

The first time, the ground car 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
rocket-like 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 for
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 ground car rose several feet.  The
spikes on the wheels had been hydraulically extended until they were
each at least 150 centimeters long.  In sensation, 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.  The ground car 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
he 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 in it."

Again fire spat at the ground, this time from the side of the ground
car.  It balanced itself precariously on the four high wheels.  Gosigo
turned on the radar screen to see 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 any more from the windscreen 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 head net 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 neoasphaltum 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 then calibrated a dial.  He squinted at
his instruments and 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 turned his dials quickly.  The windscreen faded out, radar came on
and then went off.  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?" said 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?" said 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?" said Casher.

"Never," said Gosigo.

"Why not?" said 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?" Casher asked, more perplexed than ever.

"She pays for them."

"How can she?" exclaimed Casher.  "Your whole world of Henriada 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 am 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 ground car came to a panic stop, the spiked teeth eating into the
resilient firm neoasphaltum 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
spin us down a little bit more by firing the quick-rockets 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 as suddenly as
it had hit.

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.
He tried once more to relax.

Once more the car picked itself up and coursed along the smooth,
narrow, winding neoasphaltum road, almost as though the machine itself
were glad to function and to be functioning well.




V

Casher could never quite remember when they went from the howling
wildness of Henriada into the stillness and beauty of the domains of
Mister 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
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 non-memorable?  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 ground car 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 head net.

Gosigo turned around and gave him a tortured glance in which pain and
bewilderment were mixed.  "Countermissile radar?  Countermissile 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 word
'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."

"Oh, no man made those.  They aren't buildings, 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 park-like 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 ground car 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 all 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 ground
car.

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.




VI

The ground car swung up the drive.  It stopped.  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, 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 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 marvellous age,
somewhere between ten and thirteen, where the child--as the phrase
goes--"becomes an old old child and not a raw grown-up."  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."

There was humor and fearlessness in her eyes.

"Who are you?" he blurted out.

"I am the housekeeper of this house.  My name is T'ruth."

His knife was in his hand before he knew how it had gotten there.  He
remembered the advice of the Administrator: _plunge, plunge, stab,
stab, run_!

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 comfortable 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 gotten out of the ground car and was giving her a formal,
low bow.

"Tell me," she cried, "what you have just seen!"  There was
friendliness in her cell, 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 frightened 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?" laughed Gosigo.  "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 ground car.
"'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-by 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
palmettoes 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.  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 strong orders to
keep my master and his house safe from harm."

"How old are you?" said Casher.  He added, "--if you can tell the
truth."

"I can tell nothing but the truth.  I am conditioned.  I'm 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 travelled in the ground car?  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.




VII

Casher stood there, awkwardly.  He had returned his knife to its
boot-sheath 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'ruth.

"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," she said calmly.

"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--?"

"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?" said 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," T'ruth agreed, "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 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, Casher O'Neill.  You are a good man, but 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," said she 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 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, curtseyed 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 do
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.




VIII

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 Henriada 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
further 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 off-world 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.
Even 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 co-operative.  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, a 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.  Quite simply, the doctor had been bribed.



All this was told by T'ruth 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
shoulderblades 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 were
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 drunken, 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 were 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?

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," said she, reaching out and taking his hand.  His
hand felt and looked like the hairy paw of a giant as she held his
right hand 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 him?

The idea was outrageous, impossible, true.

It was enough to alarm him, to make him begin to pull his hand away
again.  She clutched him with tender 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 he had always known her.  He did not love the
girl and yet he had loved her from the beginning of time.)

Said she, so softly that it was almost a whisper: "Wait.  Your death
may come through that door pretty soon and I will tell you how to meet
it.  But before that, I have to show you the most beautiful thing in
the world."



Despite her little hand lying tenderly 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 irrelevancy.  You're going to make
me angry if you keep on and, and--" he stammered at last--"and I get
pretty useless if I'm angry.  If you want me to 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.  Some kind of jewelry came out of the top of her shift dress,
where 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 done me 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 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.



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 fanaticism did not once more flare up between the stars, once
again bringing wild hope and great death to all the mankinds.

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.

"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," said she.




IX

Unexpected, 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 anyone as strong as this.

She was doing it, but 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 bootsheath
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 he had a
teenager'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
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 had left it on marble
tables.  The warm palace, long ago, had gotten 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 a girl-voice out of nowhere.

Casher found himself on all fours in the room, his sight suddenly back
again, the room un changed, and T'ruth smiling.

"I fought you," she said.

He did not trust himself to speak.

He reached for his water-glass, looking at it closely to see if there
were any blood on it.

Of course not.  Not here.  Not this time, not this place.

He pulled himself to his feet.

The girl has 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."

"Madame," 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 did not notice
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."

"Pretty much so."

"Then why," said Casher, "should I think I had a fight?"

"This wild weather on Henriada sometimes upsets offworlders until they
get used to it," said T'ruth mildly.

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 child-like at all.

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."

Impassively 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 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 examine a special soldier selected
for a risky mission.




X

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
that he was in love with the child, though 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 had 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 ... but 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.  Frighten him.  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
why 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."

"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.  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 would 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 went 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 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't!"

"All right," said Casher.  "Why not?"

"_Because I turn into me_."



A little startled, Casher said, "You what?"

"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
underpeople-turtles, but real turtles, little animals.  You must have
heard of them somewhere."

"I've seen them," said Casher, "on some world or other.  They pull into
their shells."

"That's why 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!"

"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 hissed.  "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 opened the door.  The light
beyond was clear and light and tinged with blue, the way the skies of
Manhome, Mother Earth, were shown in all the viewers.

He let her push him in through the door.

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 flavoring 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...




XI

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."

"How do you do?" said Casher inanely.

"I do not know your name," said the ruddy brick 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?" laughed John Joy Tree.  "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 Meiklejohn, 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 stand-by,
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 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 am."

"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 fighting 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 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.

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.  There was 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.

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.

"T'ruth.  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 split 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 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 real-Casher.  Image-Casher, in a
tremendous bound, leaped across the room and caught the knife on an
iron glove.  It clattered against the iron glove and then fell silent
into the rug.

Casher saw what he had to see.

He saw the place 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 holding a broken
doll, looking like a broken doll itself.  He saw these things and he
made John Joy Tree see them too.

"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?"

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 stand-by.

He walked over to Casher.

"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.  "She could not have thought you up.
She is my dead wife over again.  The citizeness Agatha might 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 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.




XII

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 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 medicine-smell 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 Turner
had painted it.



The room itself, like the other great living-room of the estate of
Beauregard, was an 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:
it had a nave.  The four corners of the room were each alcoves, cutting
deep into 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 knicknack 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 galactically-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 Wedgewood 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
be 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.

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.  "So that's why he chose you."



T'ruth corrected him as she washed her hands vigorously in a
wash-basin.  "That's why he had me made.  Turtle stock, three hundred
years.  Multiply that with intensive stroon 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 carolled,
as she lifted his eyelids and put colorless drops in each eye.
Absentmindedly she explained, "With this slow a metabolism, there's
always some danger that the eyelids will stick to his eyeballs.  This
is part of the checkup."

She tilted the sleeping man's head, looked earnestly into each eye.
Then she 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 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 accumulations 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-drier,
Casher marvelled at the strength of those girlish arms and those little
hands.  Indefatigably they stroked, rubbed, pummelled, 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.




XIII

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.  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.

Her face cleared.  "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 down 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.

"I was going to ask you, back there--" Casher started.

"You were going to ask me?"

He spoke heavily.  "I was going to ask you, what happens to you when he
dies?"

"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 _for_."

She passed Casher, almost pulled herself clear of the floor tugging on
the great inside levers of the main door.

She gestured him past.  He stooped and stepped through.

"Turn away again," she said.  "All 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 he did not look around.

She murmured, almost under her breath, "I'm the only one.  The only
one."



They 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.  It must be a room, thought Casher, with its window
open.

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 Ambiloxi'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.




XIV

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."

"But you're _rich_!"

"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!" cried Casher.

"No, not even near.  Mister 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?" said Casher.

"For him," smiled T'ruth.  "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 artificial spurt of money go out of Henriada'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 and 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 there
was a trickle of blood coming out of the 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.

Said Casher, "She cannot 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 your 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 ground car.  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 for Gosigo and Casher; Gosigo
busy closing the ground car, Casher pushing on the big house door.

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 even looking at the
console, she reached out and controlled it with her extended right hand
while 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 and bombs 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."

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 looked.

She stood there, calm.

That sort of an 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 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 a great fright.  He had seen danger
before, but never danger 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 now 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.  _I 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
tip-toe.

He kissed her the way a man might kiss 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."




XV

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-driers 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
neuro-electric 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, washed 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 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.
Now you tell me 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 me to you."

"In a week?" he gasped.

"Less than that."



He cried out, "Who are you, that you, an underperson, should run real
people and 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 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 shop?
I'm me.  I may be 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.

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?" said the little robot.

"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 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."




XVI

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.  Casher suspected that he was as inquisitive as the others but
afraid of himself, Casher, "the man of blood."

T'ruth said quietly but firmly to the doctor.  "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 of 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 said

"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.  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 would not 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 zig-zagged
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?" she asked
softly.

"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.  "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 underman 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 could 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 travellers 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 like 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 re-imprinted 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 into your mind a dozen
times and I know that you want to go back to Mizzer 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-by, my might have been."

In front of everyone, she kissed him 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 on to 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 a 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 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, bejewelled 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 man, 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 him
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.




XVII

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 loose among the people of this planet."

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, "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.

_I 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, quietly, 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 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."

They left, talking.

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.






[End of On the Storm Planet, by Cordwainer Smith]