Who or what was the Horven? The Drone had never been curious, and consequently knew very little on this subject. The Horven was a member of a civilized species of long standing -- a species that did not deign to trade with others, or even to communicate with them. Yet one was resident within this moon.

            He searched the Drone's memory. Three times before, the Queen had descended into the depths of the Horven apartments, after setting up destroyer stations. On her return, the moon had begun the transmission cycle leading to the emplacement of the next unit. Did she have to make a report? Receive orders? This was an unacceptable concept to the Drone. The Queen bowed to no creature.

            Why, then, these regular journeys? What passed between them, the Queen and the strange alien?

            He was about to find out.

            The Queen put him aboard the hanging descent-car with something almost like affection. "Do not linger, male-thing."

            The capsule was translucent; distorted images entered to tantalize him. The polished metal walls of the upper landing gave way to bleak stone as the unit swung along at a rapid pace. Sometimes it seemed he was traveling through natural caverns; at other times the walls were so close as to resemble a tunnel. Once light blazed, as though he were navigating a fiery hell.

            He gathered that the Horven liked its privacy.

            What was he supposed to say to it? He had no idea.

            At least he knew that one could make such a visit and return intact. Whatever business the one species had with the other, it was not physically dangerous. Still, the Drone-mind within him gibbered with fear.

            Was it right to use this body so callously? He had control, and he had exercised it ruthlessly. How would he feel, if an alien intellect had taken over his own body and suppressed the higher centers of his brain?

            "I believe this is a temporary phenomenon," he said to the Drone. "When I have finished my business here, you will have your body back."

            And was surprised to pick up a fiercer burst of terror than any before.

            The capsule halted before he had a chance to ascertain the reason for this reaction. Its side panel opened and the vehicle tilted to disgorge him.

            He looked about. He was in a spacious hall, and standing on a circular platform. A manlike figure was before him, dressed in an enveloping robe. Its head was inhuman in a manner he could not quite define. It was as though his three eyes were unable to focus on it. Had they been able, he was sure he would have discovered truly alien features -- alien in ways his imagination had never hitherto touched on. Somehow his eyes ceased to track whenever he looked at it, whether he used one or two or three at once. The effect was frustrating in much the way an Earth-blackout was:         the direct glance at a given object was less productive than a peripheral view.

            "Welcome, Harold," the creature addressed him. Its voice, like its face, was undefined; perhaps it had spoken telepathically.

            "I'm not sure I -- "

            It gestured benignly with a blurred extremity. "Certainly we know you, Harold. We most appreciate your difficult excursion from hence. You are the only Earthman to participate in our venture, and we comprehend the peculiar courage required."

            Groton had not been aware of any exercise of courage, and in any event this development was contrary to anything he could have expected, let alone feared. "You know where I -- when I come from?"

            "Approximately one hundred million years hence, in the Third Siege. We have a number of volunteers from that period, since the cultures of that time have a superior perspective on history."

            "I thought I was a messenger from the Queen. I'm wearing the body of her consort."

            "So you are," the Horven said, as though just noticing. "That means that the last unit is in place and activated, and we can begin on the next. I shall initiate the cycle."

            "You handle the gravity compression? I thought the Queen -- "

            "Once the unit has been activated, the ordinary species cannot attune to the Traveler," the Horven explained gently. "Several hundred personnel must be discorporated, which means they must be assessed by the Traveler. I will handle juxtaposition."

            Of course! The destroyer blocked off that macroscopic band, as Ivo had observed, making it impossible for most minds to draw on the intergalactic knowledge. Ivo had set it up, for the human party; the Horven --

            "You are the one-in-a-thousand!" Groton exclaimed. "The species that is immune to the destroyer."

            The Horven donned a surprisingly Earthlike helmet and touched a panel. "There will be several shifts," it said. "This will take some time, but it only occupies a portion of my intellect. Please do not interrupt your discourse."

            The Queen's workers, Groton realized, would be lining up and passing through Traveler introductions, exactly as he and Beatryx and Afra had while Ivo guided them past the lurking destroyer. But the Horven must be handling them a score at a time! "You -- you built the destroyer!"

            "We -- with companion species -- designed it," the Horven admitted. "We cannot construct or emplace the individual units."

            "Why are you doing this? Why are you reserving true space travel for yourselves?"

            "It must be." Lights were flickering within the helmet, and Groton wondered what circuitry was being utilized. A lead to the macroscope, naturally, and trunk lines to the upper regions...

            "Wait! I need to get back upstairs before the cycle begins." Shifts there might be, but if he missed the last one it would be the end, for him.

            "For what purpose? Your destiny is with us."

            "It is?" He was confused.

            "We have weighted the repressive side of the scales. The destroyers have been installed. Now we must balance the other side, or the task remains half-complete. Another representative will replace me here; you and I travel to Horv."

            "And I am supposed to -- to participate in the other side too? When I'm not even certain I agree with this side?"

            "I apologize for my neglect," the Horven said. "I forgot that you have not been adequately informed, since your species evolved many millions of years after mine passed.

            "The Traveler destroyed the civilization of our galaxy once, and perhaps many times. This travel-power is too great for juvenile species; it only releases and amplifies their destructive impulses. Therefore we of the Second Civilization, rising from the ruins of the First, have had to take defensive measures against this Second Siege. Only we who have left violence behind can safely travel from star to star. In this manner we may preserve galactic civilization until the Siege is over."

            At last it was beginning to fall into place. Now he remembered a fragment of -- history? -- he had heard or read at some point, that reinforced this explanation. "The destroyer -- only destroys evil minds?"

            "Not evil minds, no. To be savage is not to be evil. It is a necessary phase in the evolution of a mature species. But until it passes, that species must be protected from itself. It must be confined to its planet of origin and that planet's immediate environs. It does not have the discretion to indulge in galactic contacts -- apart from purely communicatory, of course. Maturity requires an extended apprenticeship."

            "And you Horven are one of the mature species?" He had thought to put irony into his tone, but it misfired; he was already convinced that the Horven was mature. "Why do you make younger species do your bidding? Why not simply place the destroyer-units yourselves?"

            "Because there is insufficient violence in our nature. We can conceive of suppressive strategy, though with discomfort, but cannot implement it. We could not survive the destroyer ourselves, if such pacifism diminished in us."

            Thus this temporary cooperation between forward-looking juveniles and inactive seniles. Were they correct? Was this necessary to save civilization?

            He thought about the incalculable violence of human history, and was not prepared to deny the need for this step. Man had always been willing, even eager, to spend much more effort on calamitous war than on any peaceful pursuit. Governments had spent billions of dollars, francs, rubles for war every year, while allowing their own less fortunate citizens to starve. Man in space would be the same -- except that the stakes would be larger.

            "I am a member of a juvenile species," he said.

            "Of the juvenile stage in your species evolution, yes. No species is inherently young or old. It may be that the climax of mankind will be a far greater thing than that of the Horven. Possibly some visitor from the Fourth Siege will know. We hope the measures we have taken here will enable your species to achieve such distinction."

            "I hope so too," Groton said fervently. Then, remembering: "What is the other side of the scale? If this side is the forced preservation of galactic civilization?"

            "Exploration, comprehension, knowledge. The nature of the Traveler, and the reason for its infliction upon us. The civilization that developed such technique is as far beyond the Horven as the Horven is beyond the Queen's hive. Surely its purpose was not to extinguish our progress."

            "Why don't you just pay the source a visit and find out?"

            "That was attempted during the First Siege. But our predecessors were unable to map intergalactic convolutions prior to exploration there, and intergalactic ventures were unsuccessful."

            "What happened to them?"

            "They never returned. Some survived, but their travel mechanisms were inoperative."

            "How could you learn about them, then?"

            "Their traces were picked up subsequently on the macroscope."

            "But that could take millions of years, if they were in intergalactic space!"

            "Yes. It was the Second Civilization that recorded the signals, and they only succeeded in this because they were specially attuned and alert. The macroscope is hardly effective beyond our own galaxy, ordinarily. By the time the signals had been identified, it was far too late to come to the assistance of their originators, even had travel been feasible at that time. But these casualties did assist in the mapping of deep space in a general way, and provide clues as to the nature of its dynamics. We believe we can now achieve the other galaxies in our cluster."

            Intergalactic travel! "So you mean to discover the truth about the origin of the Traveler," Groton said. He realized that this was a similar quest to the one the party of human beings had embarked on. They had seen the destroyer as their enemy, when in fact it was their friend (though a stern one!); Earth might have been ravaged many times by other aggressor species, except for that protection, and the sapience of man might never have had the opportunity to develop. The true enemy was the Traveler -- but this too was only conjecture, until its rationale was known.

            "Your invitation tempts me," Groton said. "The prospect of such explorations is fascinating. But my essential loyalty is with my own. I can't simply -- "

            "You are not among your own. I assure you, the Queen's ire at losing her present Drone will pass quickly. The King is the game, for us. Though of course we can arrange to have you occupy a different body, and return this one to -- "

            No! No! the Drone-mind screamed. Do not send me back alone!

            "Oh, I see," the Horven said. "Thoughtless of me. Of course you would be unable to cope with the revised situation." It was addressing the Drone directly. "But it would not be kind to keep you in subservience here -- "

            The other Queen!

            "Yes, we could do that," the Horven agreed. "You realize you would be captive of the Felk, however -- "

            The Drone was more than willing to take that chance.

            "You have no objection to assuming some other form?" the Horven inquired of Groton. "We cannot act unless all parties are amenable. It would be quite unlike your normal one."

            "The horoscope does not specify species," Groton murmured. What was he getting into?

            The Horven continued to wear the helmet, but Groton was sure it was simultaneously setting about preparations for the other transfer. "There are still horoscopes in your time?"

            "Still? You mean you practice astrology here?"

            "That depends on what you mean by the term. I don't know enough about your conception either to believe or disbelieve in it, let alone practice it. If you would clarify -- "

            "It -- I -- " Groton found himself at a loss for words, never having anticipated this turn of conversation. He finally had to settle for a concrete example, his well-versed summaries having fled his mind. "Well, I was born on October 11, 1940, at Key West, Florida. That means -- but you don't know Earth chronology or geography!"

            "I comprehend your meaning, nevertheless. Go on."

            "The time was 4:10 p.m., Eastern Standard. That's important for the house structure. So the configuration of the signs and planets at that moment -- well, I'm a Libra personality, sun in the seventh house, moon in Aquarius, Mercury -- "

            "If you will provide an exact listing, I will transpose to my framework," the Horven said. "I perceive that your astrology does approximate one of our disciplines, but of course your local viewpoint does not coincide."

            "You can convert my terms to your chart?" This was as marvelous an accomplishment as any he had witnessed here.

            "We Horven specialize in orderly intellectualization. One of the tools we have developed is a unified-orientation conception of horoscopy that enables us to apply the details of any local system in the galaxy to our own framework. A precise interpolation would take much time, of course, since we have to compensate in your case for a sizable time differential, but we can certainly make a crude alignment now."

            For the next hour they compared notes, oblivious to all else except for the Horven's continued helmet-transaction. It needed no chart on which to post information, keeping complete data in its head.

            "My tentative plotting indicates that you will enter a new cycle of experience at a life duration of about forty-two of your years," the Horven remarked at last.

            "Mine also," Groton said. "My sun passes out of Scorpio at that point." He stopped. "Ouch! That's now!"

            "Of course, since you are coming with us."

            Very neat. "But my wife -- "

            "Provide me her configuration, and we shall see how she fits into this picture."

            Groton did so, though he felt increasingly uneasy about it. This being, this representative of a mature species, was frighteningly intelligent in obscure ways.

            "I am sorry," the Horven said then. "This is not an aspect that would normally be evidenced in your more limited framework; but mine is, if I may say so without giving offense, somewhat more advanced. Your wife is dead."

            The words struck with a physical impact. "But -- "

            "Your astrology cannot pinpoint such an event specifically, but ours can. Even after making due allowance for error introduced in transposition, the probability is virtually conclusive. Her skein terminates abruptly."

            Groton remained stunned, not yet ready to believe it. "How -- when -- ?"

            "On that I cannot yet provide exact details, but can say that there were ironic elements. She perished as the result of her own decision, in an effort to do what she believed was proper. She was mistaken, but it was a noble demise. As for when -- in this framework, approximately ninety-eight million years ago. In yours -- ten minutes."

            "I must go back to her!"

            The Horven removed the helmet. "It is better that you do not."

            Groton looked into the indefinite countenance and knew with terrible certainty that truth had emerged. The life he had known was over; his return could only wreak havoc. He was committed to a new existence -- alone.

 

            EARTH

 

 

            The mellow music of the bassoon welled up as he explored the final triad. Ivo saw his resources falling away. The horn had failed him after all; it had departed, never to return. Only one hope remained -- yet in this concurrency, it was impossible for him to affect its theme.

            On the ground stood a fair young woman. She cast a smile at him as though it were a handful of soil, seeking to assimilate him into her world, but he passed her by. Next was a massive bull stroking the sod with its hoof, epitome of power yet not aggressive. Last was the goat: a gentle doe, horned and bearded after the nature of her kind, and with a fine udder. Surely the symbol had been of a virile male-goat, a buck, most indefatigable of animals! Perhaps it was, elsewhere; but this was what he saw, and he would not deny it.

            She contemplated him, the gaze of one eye suggesting DISCRIMINATION, and the gaze of the other -- and he paused to verify this, taken aback -- LOVE. He stood before Capricorn, responding to the bleat of the bassoon and the ambience of earth, and could not speak.

            She said: "Music is love in search of a word."

            Then he saw behind her, written upon an erosion-ragged mountain cliff, as it were a palimpsest:

            ***

            There was some initial difficulty emplacing the suppressors -- popularly known as "destroyers" -- as many immature cultures were unable to appreciate the long-range purpose of these devices. The mission was nevertheless accomplished. Although galactic communications were necessarily inhibited during the Second Siege, civilization itself suffered stasis instead of abolition.

            In fifteen to twenty thousand years the fields of the several destroyers overlapped each other, and crews were dispatched to place their defenses on standby. As more time passed, these units became repositories for galactic artifacts, and even assumed museum-status. As individual species came of age and thus were immune to the interference signal, they tended to visit the stations, and sometimes to leave examples of their own cultures for display. No untended immatures were able to visit the stations, because of the nature of the broadcasts, so selectivity was no problem.

            The Second Siege, like the First, endured about a million years. This time civilization rebounded almost immediately, no worlds having been ravaged or cultures destroyed by other than natural means.

            The destroyer network was considered to be only a holding action, not a solution. The major thrust was of a different nature. The first concerted extragalactic exploration was undertaken, and entire civilized planets made the jump into deep space. Chief among the advanced species participating were the Ngslo, the Horven and the Dooon. Their objective was the realization of the true nature of the Traveler and its reason for being. They departed -- and did not return.

            The ultimate nature of the Traveler was not discovered until the Third Civilization picked up reports from the surviving explorers, many millions of light-years removed. The truth, as brought out by the dispatch from Horv, was remarkable, and it changed the entire complexion of galactic intercourse.

            ***

            Afra felt the impetus shoving her into an alternate existence. She felt the compulsion of the music, the fascination of galactic history, so much more vast than anything she had studied before. There was a period of timelessness, of drifting to melody; then the surroundings firmed and she was standing in --

            A supermarket.

            Ahead of her was an aisle bordered by towering promontories of canned goods: on one side beans -- lima, pinto, kidney, navy, great northern, vegetarian, pork &, black-eyed peas. On the other side, other vegetables -- potatoes, canned sliced white; corn, whole kernel; corn, cream-style; tomatoes, stewed; peas, baby; peas, dried; beets, cut. To one side beyond the near islands were the fresh vegetable bins, leafy green, round red, puffy white. To the other side was the main portion of the store, neat hanging signposts identifying the aisles; there were pyramidding displays of canned fruit juice, boxed powdered milk, cartoned cigarettes, bagged charcoal and the eleventh volume of a cheap coupon-encyclopedia.

            Shoppers moved with their wire push-baskets, their noisy children running free to sneeze into the wilting lettuce, splatter bottles of grape-juice on the worn tiles, and eat bananas before they were weighed and marked, dropping the peels behind the larger boxes of detergent where the cleanup crews wouldn't discover them for days. Harried housewives changed their minds about half-gallon cardboard containers of ice cream and left them melting on the racks of chewing gum by the cash registers. Pot-bellied, sun-baked men ambled along in shorts and the hairs on their chests, picking up six-packs of beer. Freshly nubile girls clustered titteringly near the magazine rack, ignoring the PLEASE DO NOT READ IN STORE sign.

            Afra stood there, absorbing it all. This was not the kind of vision she had anticipated. The market was ordinary, the people typical. Everything was routine middle-class, and there was nothing alien or even outré about it, apart from its slightly old-fashioned aspect. Certainly it illuminated the "truth" about the Traveler signal in no obvious way.

            She turned about, seeking the exit. It was her conjecture that this vision would endure for an established period, and that whatever was to be manifested would be manifested regardless of her own actions. All she could do was wait it out, and act to preserve her equanimity.

            Her eye fixed on a man standing in the nearest checkout line. He was muffled up as though braced against a storm, though the temperature within the store was comfortable, and he wore a tall silk hat tilted at a rakish angle. His hand was buried in a pocket as though he were searching for small change, and there was something familiar about him.

            And she was screaming and running down the aisle away from that sight, terrified. She lurched into the bean shelf, hurting her shoulder and sending cans toppling down about her and bouncing to the floor and rolling across the aisle. People turned to look at the commotion, surprised.

            "No!" she cried shrilly. "I reject it! I refuse -- "

            So negative was her reaction that the scene itself wavered, losing its reality. She knew it was a vision, and she had a strong will and a fundamental aversion, and it was enough. The setting could not hold her any more than a nightmare could hold the sleeper who once consciously realized that it was dream-fabric and rejected it.

            The room in the destroyer station came into view, the other people floating in their places. She had broken out.

            Harold and Beatryx appeared to be conscious also, until she saw that they were not reacting to tangible events. Their eyes moved, their limbs worked, and now and then one of them would speak -- but they paid no attention to her or to each other. They were deep in vision.

            Ivo still played his instrument. His hands did all of it; he did not need to blow into any type of mouthpiece. The sounds were a medley of instruments, an entire orchestra, but with four predominating: the violin, the flute, the French horn and the bassoon. She could even pick out the individual themes. Strongest, for her, was that of the bassoon, though she knew it to be a difficult instrument to play effectively. Once someone had told her a story of a bassoonist who had gone crazy because of the reaction of his body to the reed vibration, tight lip-compression and extended breath pressure; he had suffered from chronic suffocation during long passages because he never had enough time to breathe out, and so his brain had been starved of oxygen. She had rejected this notion even in childhood, but knew that the bassoon in certain respects defied the conventional laws of sound, and that standard fingering did not guarantee proper notes.

            She remembered hearing -- minutes ago? hours? -- one of the distinctive bassoon passages that composers were fond of; they were typically enamored of the coloring of this instrument's tone, and of the clownlike propensities of its upper register. She had experienced both a short while ago, when she had been a --

            A goat?

            She shrugged away the suggestion. Evidently music did have power -- the power to project the members of the present company into individual visions. Was Ivo himself having a vision? He was playing -- yet his eyes moved and his lips parted as though in speech, without a sound. A partial vision, perhaps.

            She had escaped the nightmare planned for her, but did not seem to be much better off. She was with the others physically, but in effect alone. What had gone wrong? Surely she should have entered an illumination of history or philosophy, not a supermarket!

            Beatryx spoke: first an embarrassed laugh, then words. "I am not fair! I'm almost forty!"

            Almost. Harold had of course made up one of his horoscopes on her, saying something about a "seesaw" planetary typing. From that, ironically, he was able to conclude that Beatryx was the proper wife for him. Was he right? It did seem so. And what did he have to say about Afra's own marital propensities, determined by her moment of birth? She had never admitted it to him, but she was quite curious.

            As though in answer to his wife, Harold said: "One static brush for the Queen."

            Ivo went on playing, and from his weird instrument the music of the symphony projected throughout the chamber. Afra continued to respond to the passages of the bassoon, neither loud nor sharp yet truly penetrating in their fashion. Almost, as she watched, she could make out the outline of the unique woodwind within the framework of his moving hands. Eight feet of tubing, narrowing and folding back upon itself, with the tilted slender mouthpiece containing the double reed, and with holes to govern the notes. The theme was expressive, distinctive, evocative, expert, soulful; it moved her, drew her down into --

            She yanked herself out, refusing to reenter that vision.

            "It's very nice," Beatryx said. "But -- "

            "The Drone will assume command," Harold replied.

            A pause. "Thank you so much."

            Afra watched and listened, confining the encompassing music to the background of her awareness. They were participating, and she was not, and that bothered her -- but her own vision was unacceptable. Could she enter one of theirs?

            "What is the immediate objective?" Harold asked.

            Afra arched an eyebrow at him. "The immediate objective? To find out exactly what is -- "

            "And the mines will prevent subsequent attacks?"

            "That depends what -- "

            "How does the Felk armament compare to ours?"

            Afra shrugged. "I don't think you're paying proper attention, Harold."

            "How much time do we have?"

            She looked at Beatryx and at Ivo. "We may have forever, Harold, if we don't get out of here before we starve. If we can starve in vision-land. Dreaming may be entertaining, but, as Frost said -- "

            "How much time do we have before the enemy breaks through and destroys the station?"

            "Really, Robert Frost is hardly an enemy. He -- "

            "You plan to wait for them to attack?"

            "As Frost said: 'The dreams are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And -- ' "

            "Why?"

            "Harold, you don't ask 'why?' to a poem!"

            "Yet with their ships massed and traveling at high velocity, our scattered forces cannot hope to stop them all. And one ship should be sufficient to blast the station."

            "Of course Frost said 'woods' rather than 'dreams' but I thought I'd -- "

            "You have no manuals of strategy?"

            "No I don't, damn you! I stick to simple sex appeal."

            "Provided he lives."

            "Provided you live. You are impossible, Harold."

            "And the Felks are similarly organized? No study of the lessons of history?"

            She turned away from him, finding the amusement shallow. The mellow bassoon theme surrounded her again, and she fought it off again. She could even make out the rosewood length of the instrument, the distinctive circle of ivory around the top opening. Despite the bizarre circumstance she was moved by the poignant beauty of Ivo's music. He had taken this alien contraption and produced -- a symphony, each theme, each instrument of which was discrete and perfect. He was a skilled bassoonist, as well as a remarkable flutist. If only she had known about his musical gifts earlier!

            Beatryx looked unhappy. "Here?" she inquired.

            Afra wondered what it was that so disturbed the woman; then, observing her actions, began to understand. Inadequate sanitary facilities, in that particular vision. She went to help Beatryx, so as to spare her embarrassment when she came out of it. It turned out to be the motions only, and a little later the older woman slept.

            Time passed.

            Harold talked again, of ships and tactics and negotiations. Never, oddly, of astrology. She would have been happier if he had.

            Afra practiced swimming in the air, and made her way away from the others. She searched for the boundaries of the chamber, but the mist became dense -- "lovely, dark and deep," she thought -- and in this free-fall state she had no internal sense of direction. She realized that she could lose herself here, from even that pseudo-companionship the others provided, and did not relish the prospect.

            She returned to the group, fixed her eyes on Ivo and his mythical band, and allowed herself to drift toward sleep. When this was over, there would be -- oh, important matters -- to discuss with him. His -- well, his talents, and...his...

            ***

            Nothing had changed when she woke.

            "I really don't know anything about campsites," Beatryx was saying.

            Several hours had passed, certainly -- yet she was not hungry or otherwise in distress, physically. It was as though bodily processes had ceased for the duration, except as suggested (but not consummated) in the visions for verisimilitude. Somehow consciousness, direct or indirect, persisted in each person in spite of this stasis. Another marvel of galactic science? Why not.

            Ivo still played. She wondered how his steadily agile hands were enduring. No fatigue either, here? At any rate, the visions were likely to end when the music finished. Then what?

            Their mission -- her mission -- had brought them to this dread place, yet the climax was oddly insubstantial. Where was the enemy? Where the denouement? She had not really expected to struggle bloodily against a horde of ravening monsters; but this?

            More hours passed. Harold slept. Beatryx went through a mysterious episode of terror, crying "Kill it!" and after subsiding from that, "That's a man!" Then she was very quiet.

            Harold talked to someone or something evidently inhuman, unhuman. Portions of his dialogue were revealing. "You are the one-in-a-thousand! The species that is immune to the destroyer...You -- you built the destroyer!...Why are you doing this? Why are you reserving true space travel for yourselves?" Then: "And I am supposed to -- to participate in the other side too? When I'm not even certain I agree with this side?"

            Waking or dreaming, at least Harold seemed to know which side he was on. He was putting up, in his fashion, a good fight. Afra, in his (assumed) position, would have deleted the polite qualifications and told somebody to go to hell sideways.

            "The destroyer -- only destroys evil minds?"

            Afra was forming more of the picture. Evil minds -- like that of Bradley Carpenter? Surely Harold would not succumb to casuistry of that ilk.

            But certain other bits he uttered stirred the beginnings of a profound doubt in her. Had they misjudged the destroyer, after all this? Impossible -- yet...

            Beatryx began to speak again. She was talking with someone about fire, and water, and humanity. Before that she had spent considerable time calling "Black -- black -- where are you?" Afra had had to tune out the plaintive repetition. Now they were talking together, and Harold was finally on the subject of astrology. It was difficult to follow both conversations simultaneously, and she had to settle for snatches from one or the other.

            Then:    "You were not wrong, Dolora."

            Beatryx went through an inexplicable series of contortions, then was walking or swimming strenuously, while Harold continued blithely discoursing on astrological technology. Then a sudden outburst: "But you don't understand! You have to listen -- "

            Her voice was cut off by an inarticulate noise, and Beatryx doubled over, her face twisted in agony.

            Afra paddled over as rapidly as she could, aware that a new and ugly element had been added. A crisis of some sort was at hand.

            Ivo went on playing.

            Beatryx was lying quietly by the time she got there. Afra tried to lift the older woman, but in the null-G only wrestled herself around. It was pointless, anyway -- position made no difference, when there was no weight to support. She was acting without thinking, and to no avail.

            Suddenly she realized that Beatryx was not breathing.

            Afra clasped the woman's head, poked a finger in her mouth to clear it of any possible obstruction, and applied the kiss of life: mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

            There was no immediate response, but she kept on, exhaling into Beatryx's lungs, breaking to inhale herself while hugging the inert chest to force out the air. Again, she could not depend on gravity to assist.

            As she labored in such measured desperation, hearing Ivo's bassoon and Harold's intermittent remarks in the background, scenes of their association illuminated her vision.

            Beatryx, at the torus-station, carrying a platter of food in to their first meal as a foursome: She and Harold, Afra and Ivo...and Brad too, then. Beatryx, beside her as Joseph blasted into space with the macroscope. Beatryx, trying to comprehend a difficult concept during an early discussion. Beatryx, declaring "Meeting come to order!" Beatryx in spacesuit, tentatively exploring the Schön-moonlet of Triton.

            Beatryx, always ameliorative. Unimportant flashes -- yet so poignant now, as Afra realized how important the quiet presence and support of the older woman had been to her.

            Older? Beatryx had never looked so young as she did at this moment...

            Still she did not breathe -- and there was no heartbeat.

            Beatryx, tending her garden on Triton. Beatryx, waxing hysterical in Afra's defense, during that mock, not-so-mock trial.

            "Tryx, Tryx!" she cried. "You were the only one who understood -- "

            It was no use. Beatryx was dead.

            Afra wrenched away and launched herself at Harold. She took hold of his shoulders and shook, rocking herself more violently than him. "Wake up! Wake up!"

            Harold did not respond.

            "Harold -- your wife is dead!" she cried in his ear, slapping him.

            Now he began to react. "But -- "

            "She just died and I can't -- I can't -- you've got to do something! Wake up!"

            He looked stunned. "How -- when -- ?"

            Hastily Afra explained, continuing to shake him so that he could not relapse.

            His eyes widened. "I must go back to her!"

            Then, gradually, he went limp, and nothing she could do revived him. The dream had reclaimed him.

            Afra looked around in a fever of desperation -- and saw Ivo, still playing.

            It was time for the music to end.

            She went to Ivo and yanked the instrument from his grasp.

            The orchestra stopped, the sound dying away from all the misty reaches of the hall.

            The floor reappeared beneath them, and walls around them, much closer than she had supposed, and doors in front and back. Weight returned.

            She watched Ivo, waiting for his awareness. He sat for a moment, eyes unfocused. Then he raised his head with a sharpness of decision that was not typical and looked directly at her.

            "Thanks, doll," he said.

            "Ivo -- something terrible has happened. Beatryx -- "

            He stood up smoothly, flexing his fingers as though they were stiff. "I know. A black shot her with a speargun. Silly woman."

            Afra stared at him.

            "And your engineer -- he's in stasis on the way to deep space. He's beyond the reach of this toy, now. It'll be years before he comes out of it, if he ever does. That cuts it down to two, baby."

            She backed away. "You're not Ivo! You're -- "

            He picked up the orchestral instrument. "Ivo -- Ivon -- Ivan -- Johan -- John -- Sean -- Shane -- Schön! You broke the chain, blue-eyes. You interfered -- again! -- and Ivo-at-the-idiot-end lost out, just as Brad did. You do have a talent for that. Now -- "

            A memory -- something important -- nudged the surface of her awareness, but she had no time for it now. Afra raced toward the door, not pausing to consider where she might be going or why.

            "Not so hasty, dish," Schön called after her. "I am not finished with you." He lifted the musical device and held it dramatically before him. "In fact, I have not yet begun to fight."

            She had almost reached the door, and could see a lighted hall beyond. It was not the one they had entered by. She reached toward it --

            And rebounded from a pliant rail.

            The recoil threw her to the floor. She landed on her fanny, facing back toward the center of the room.

 

            ASCENDANT

 

 

            It was not a room any more. It was a stadium, filled by faces peering up, none distinguishable, and by crowd noises that remained in the background. She perched on a raised platform enclosed by resilient cord. It was a square: the type of arrangement known as a boxing or wrestling ring.

            Schön was entering at the far corner, dressed in fighting trunks and laced footwear. His muscular torso shone brown in the glare of the overhead light, and his eyes and teeth were brilliant.

            Her glance caught him in that pose: a pugilist entering the ring. It was, as she saw it, the moment of supreme power for him; he dominated. There was nothing she could do to stop him or even inhibit him, whatever he intended.

            As though recognizing the strength of the image, he paused, head inside the ring, one foot outside, the rope held up by one hand. "You don't understand, do you, stupid," he said. "You don't know what any of this means. Hell, you purebred clod, you can't even face your own symbol."

            She pulled herself up, but hesitated to climb out of the rope enclosure until she knew what Schön was planning, and what other barriers he was able to conjure. It just might be safer in the ring than out.

            He did not move immediately, and in that interim of tension she assessed herself. She was dressed as she had been: culottes halted above the knee, snap-slippers designed to fit within the large space-suit shoes, elastic blouse, ribbon tie-down for her hair. The outfit was brief, for the sake of mobility and air-circulation within the space suit, and attractive, for the sake of appearances outside. She cared about those appearances and didn't mind admitting it, and she had had special reason to be presentable at this time.

            Now Beatryx was dead and Harold gone, and Ivo had given way grotesquely to Schön.

            Beatryx, looking raptly at alien pictures.

            Harold, fascinated by strange machines.

            Ivo --

            Her aspirations of yesterday were meaningless. She could not even spare attention for proper grief, though that would come the moment this chase abated.

            Her assessment was now in terms of physical fitness: the clothing she wore would not encumber her in any way, and she had the health to move quickly and with stamina. She knew from fairly intimate observation that the Ivo/Schön physique was not particularly impressive. The apparent musculature of his present body was a function of the illusion, the waking vision he had somehow simulated for them both. She had no doubt that Schön, with his multiple and devastating skills, could overcome her readily if he once caught her -- but he might not be able to catch her.

            She confined her assessment to those physical terms. She did not question his mental superiority. Emotionally he might be a child, or at best an adolescent; intellectually he was the leading genius mankind had produced.

            He had been talking while she considered these things. He seemed to be showing off his knowledge: bragging, now that he had the opportunity.

            "No, you don't comprehend at all." Schön repeated. "So I'll have to lecture you on the fine points, or you won't appreciate any of it. Too bad you're such a puny audience, but you're the only part of it that's real."

            Afra waited with one hand on the rope, ready to dive out of the ring the moment he entered. She knew she was in trouble, but she was also aware that unreasoned flight would get her nowhere she wanted to go. That had already been demonstrated. Somehow Schön had the power to form a setting that physically inhibited her -- and she would be well advised to discover exactly how he did it. This time it had been a square formed of rope; next time it might be worse.

            "The key," Schön said, "is this tool of the galactics." He held the instrument aloft, the one Ivo had played, and she realized that it must have been in his hand all the time. She had not noticed it before, since the ring. "And 'key' is exactly what I mean. The key to the inner sanctum; the key to history; the key to personality. Call it the symbolizer. SYMBOLIC = SYMBOL PRIME = S'. It transmutes reality to symbols and vice versa, and thereby makes plain the truth. I recognized it for what it was immediately, of course." He snickered. "Ivo thought it was a flute! He tried to play Sidney Lanier on it!"

            And succeeded, she thought, knowing better than to interrupt now. She was recovering confidence in herself; if she maintained the proper spirit, she would be supreme over this situation, somehow. Schön had been overrated.

            "Actually, it is a teaching device," he continued. "By bringing to life the symbolic essence of a situation or personality, it instructs the participant and viewer. Of course it is necessary to interpret the symbols correctly, but anyone with a smattering of -- yet you lack even that, naturally."

            "Lack what?" she asked, wiling to cooperate in order to keep the dialogue going. He was teasing her, childishly; she knew that, but already she had a valuable hint. If she could get the galactic instrument -- S prime -- away from him --

            "Astrology," he said. "You have closed your mind to it, and that makes it ideal for my purpose. So the symbolic ascendant means nothing to you."

            She waited, refusing this time to rise to the bait. Schön, obviously, had dipped into Ivo's memory and picked up her continuing debate with Harold. He was trying to annoy her -- and that could mean that his power would be diminished if she refused to react. The sophisticated response to his exertions was best.

            "The ascendant is the overall indication of personality; the rising sign for each individual. My own ascendant falls at Aries 21, and the symbol for that position is A PUGILIST ENTERING THE RING, as you can readily perceive if you concentrate. This indicates full confidence in my own powers -- justified, of course -- and a complete lack of personal sensitiveness. Thus the galactic machine has dramatized my basic personality and graphically illustrated the power inherent in me."

            "That isn't the way Harold described astrology," Afra murmured, wishing this time that she had taken the trouble to learn more about it, whether she believed in it or not. Its rules were evidently governing this game.

            "Harold was an engineer, not an astrologer. His approach was too conventional and conservative, though last I saw of him he was getting disabused in a hurry. Those old galactics really had their sciences worked out."

            He was still toying with her. If she tried to defend Harold, she would be defending his hobby as well, and so be on exceedingly tenuous ground. "What about Ivo?"

            Schön gazed at her speculatively across the ring, but did not challenge the shift in topic. "Ah yes, Ivo. There's someone really confused, for all that I invented him. He oriented on something from each of you, not really knowing the proper use of S-prime, and came up with a mélange that must have made the galactic creators wince. Harold Groton's astrology, Sidney Lanier's poetry, darlin' Afra Glynn's supposed intellectual discrimination and Tryx Groton's suicidal sympathy -- all tied in with a galactic history text that the instrument put out as a kind of sideshow attraction. Fascinating juxtaposition, I admit. I was a fiery ram, 'Aspiration' astrologically, 'Trade' poetically, and the strings musically. I engaged in First Siege internecine power politics. I had a good thing going, too -- until you torpedoed Ivo for me."

            Suddenly the goat image made sense to her, and the evocative music of the bassoon. These had been her symbols, in the combined context. And love -- where the poem had specified Trade for him, it had specified Love for her. And she had felt it --

            "What is my symbol?" she inquired, genuinely curious now. "My -- ascendant."

            "You don't want to know it, cutie. You are afraid of it, neurotic that you are."

            "Am I? Or is it that you are afraid to animate my symbol, instead of yours? Would that give me dominance?"

            "Lady, I'll gladly match symbols with you planet by planet. That would put us on an even footing, in spite of my inordinate superiority in overt life. But you would achieve parity only if you are able to face your own nature when you see it objectively -- and you aren't. Your ascendant controls you, and probably your planets do too. It is a contest you would lose by your own prejudice."

            "I'll take that chance -- if you will. I don't think you know how to compete, on an even basis."

            He smiled, the vicious grin of the warrior tasting blood. "Calling my bluff, Glynn?"

            She smiled back, as maliciously as he, though she was afraid of him. "Yes, prettyboy. And if you cheat, you lose." She wasn't sure what to expect, or whether Schön would really bind himself to the outcome of a fair competition, but if it nullified the advantage of his intellect...

            "Take it, child," he said, touching the instrument. "Your ascendant is Taurus 15 -- A MAN MUFFLED UP, WITH A RAKISH SILK HAT."

            And she was back in the supermarket, the same one she had fled, and she was facing the man beside the checkout counter. She had asked for it -- and she was terrified.

            Something obscure happened. People backed away from the cash register. The muffled man looked up, around, pausing a moment as though considering. It seemed that he was looming over Afra, and she was very small, very fragile. Something remarkable was about to happen --

            The large man moved.

            There was the sound of a gun being fired.

 

            SUN

 

 

            She wrenched herself out of it -- and was out of the rope enclosure and passing through the door she had originally been running toward. She had escaped one vision only to return to another -- unless she could also escape Schön and the galactic, the demonic, S' device.

            This room was thoroughly finite, at least, and well lighted. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment stood against the walls, and there were a number of screens flashing what she took to be broadcast patterns. This was, by her reckoning, a communications center. That suggested some kind of occupation of the station, at least at intervals. Automatic machinery would not be set up for viewing like this.

            Schön was there ahead of her. He sat on a podium in the center of the room, behind a table whose white cloth extended down to touch the floor. He wore a high turban and stared into a shiny crystal ball. "Man," he said grandiosely, "has the capacity to bring the entire universe within the purview of his mind."

            She had either to retreat into the original chamber or to pass directly by him. Neither alternative appealed, so she temporized. "I thought you were supposed to be a pugilist."

            "That, my dear, as I so tediously explained, was the ascendant. Now we are with the sun, and it behooves us to be more acute. My sun is in Aries 19, and so I am as you see me: A CRYSTAL GAZER. So it is written in the most authoritative text." He stared into the ball. "I see that the referee has graded the first round on the ten-point must system: ten points to Fire, no points to Earth, who washed out. An excellent start -- though it would be more entertaining if you were to at least put up some show of competition."

            So she hadn't lost yet! "How do I know that's an honest score?"

            He shoved the ball in her direction. "Witness."

            She stepped up to look into it. Inside was a great-horned ram copulating with a frightened doe.

            "Miscegenation is all I see," she said. Then, saying it, she realized that the animals too were symbols: the ram of Aries and the goat of Capricorn. Schön had played his little prank on her. Two different species -- somewhat as the two of them were of different races. A bald proposition, a dirty joke -- or a threat. He had said that her own prejudice would cost her victory...

            "Too bad nature forbids it," she said in reply to his mocking gaze. She resented the implication that this was the only use for her -- to submit to the sexual assault of the male -- knowing it to be a conventional objection of womankind but still stirred by it. There was that about Schön that fascinated her in ways Ivo had not; yet she was not about to encourage his casual lewdness. In her mind was the remark Ivo had made about childhood sexual activity at their project: homo, hetero and group. She would contest the issue more fiercely in the coming rounds.

            It was amazing what a difference the mind made. Schön did not resemble Ivo at all, though the body was the same.

            "Yes, you would lecture on nature," he remarked, as though that proved something. "Your symbol for Capricorn 12 is A STUDENT OF NATURE LECTURING."

            "How do you know?" she demanded, nettled again in spite of her disbelief in the personal relevance of such things.

            "Dear little Ivo studied your horoscope. Now all that information is mine." He grinned. "You are, you see, in my power. That chart has you laid out and nakedly displayed, and I can sample any part of you I desire. Fortunately I don't desire your mind."

            She controlled her mounting irritation. "How much do you expect to accomplish, depending on astrology?" Again, she had to keep him talking, while waiting for an opportunity to gain some advantage. Genius he might be, but his youthful arrogance might defeat him yet.

            "There are many ways to view existence," Schön said. "Symbols are useful for minds of any potential, and astrology is an organized system of symbols as valid as any. I would accept it as readily as, say, religion. Of course, no symbol has validity apart from the values and qualities assigned to it by the user. What alternative would you prefer for your nuptial?"

            "What makes you think the ram is so damned attractive to the doe?"

            "What makes you think the ram is trying to be?"

            "You imagine your word is my command?"

            "Sister, there is no other functioning homo-sapiens man within fifty thousand light-years, and you can't penetrate the destroyer field by yourself. I can. The question is, am I to be obliged, however clumsily, on my way home, or do I travel alone?"

            Could he travel alone? Even if he turned off the destroyer broadcast -- a thing he might not be able to do, assuming it had safeguards against interference -- he would not succeed in freeing the spaceways of its effect. Earth was in the field of another station, and in any event it would require at least fifteen thousand years for the destroyer to clear itself, limited as it was by light velocity.

            Yet he was in control of his body and Ivo's experience now. That meant he had found a way around the destroyer memory -- and, therefore, the destroyer itself.

            Or so he wanted her to believe.

            "I don't believe you," she said. "I don't think you can go home without my help. Otherwise you wouldn't be chasing me now, or trying so hard to impress me."

            "Or winning rounds against you. Maybe I'm too softhearted to leave you here alone. Are you calling my bluff again?" he inquired scornfully.

            Suddenly she was afraid again, and could not answer. Ivo's body had been possessed by a demon. How important was this peculiar contest, and how badly was she losing? Evidently the verbal interchange was part of it, and she was at a disadvantage there. Brad had always been able to twist around her statements and confuse her, and Schön had the same ability.

            On the other hand, if she should somehow win -- and theoretically she had an equal chance to do so, if she could only marshal her complete resources -- what would be her victory? A liaison with Schön?

            "You always were slow to get the message," he said. "I sent you an obvious one as soon as Brad lost out, but naturally you fouled it up."

            "You sent me a message!"

            "Surely you didn't think I needed to send Ivo one? I had to borrow his hand to type it."

            Her curiosity had been aroused, and she didn't care that this was what he had intended. "Then why didn't you just tell him what you wanted?"

            "He wouldn't listen."

            That simple? That all the mystery and confusion engendered by the obscure missives had been Ivo's fault? Again, she doubted it.

            "Why, you wonder, did I not address the message to you? And, I explain -- for you are exceedingly interested in explanations at the moment, your symbol says -- I found it necessary to be circumspect. Ivo was almost always on guard, and only in rare moments of negligence was I able to assume control of so much as a single limb. He happened to pass the teletype section while in a condition of shock from the Senator's demise and Brad's discommodation, and I froze him unaware and set up the message. But I didn't dare to do it in any style he comprehended, or mention you at all, or he would have snapped right out of it then. I had very little time, so I just jotted down the opening line of Lanier's "The Marshes of Glynn" in polyglot, sticking to languages you could interpret. I thought you'd be smart enough to follow that up and get the real message."

            "Well, I wasn't and I didn't," she snapped. "So what was the 'real message'?"

            "The terminal couplet of the poem, stupid. 'And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in / On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.' Anybody with a note of savvy could see that what swam below Ivo's Glynn was Schön, and of course a Georgia girl would be familiar with the poem. Once you fluttered your pale pink eyelashes and told him to give over -- "

            "What makes you so sure I would have told him?"

            "Back in that hour you fancied you were enamored of Brad Carpenter. You thought Schön would help you get him back. You were charmingly naïve. Still are, too."

            She remembered. Had she known the truth then, she would have sacrificed Ivo...foolishly. It had taken the phenomenal chain of events of the ensuing period to change her thinking -- and her values.

            "After that, Ivo was on to the polyglot dodge, so I had to try other stuff. He wasn't exactly bright, but he did know enough not to get taken twice on the same boat, and he was stubborn as hell. The problem was to identify him without alerting him, and there were not many opportunities. Fortunately he never did catch on to the fact the messages were not intended for him, so the arrow-address gimmick got through."

            "So you made a Neptune-symbol to send us so far out we'd be dependent on you to get us home again -- "

            "Obliged to cry uncle, yes. Neptune is the planet of obligation, if we accept the view of your engineer's main authority on the subject. Traditionally, of course, Neptune is allied with liquids, gases, mystery, illusion, dreams, deceit -- but that simple hint passed you by, naturally. At least Groton, duffer that he was, began to catch on that -- "

            "And a shorthand message once we were there," she said, cutting him off. She was furious with herself for not delving beyond the superficial, at the time of that message. Liquids and gases -- as in the melting process? Could Schön actually have foreseen that? Mystery, illusion -- as in the whereabouts of Schön behind the illusion of Ivo. A multileveled communiqué indeed, and she had missed it. Brad would have grasped all of it...

            "But why did you want to take over if you couldn't help Brad?" she asked him then. "Surely you didn't care about the world crisis?"

            "There was an entertaining situation developing. Why else?"

            She stared at him, aghast at his indifference, but he met her gaze levelly. "Brad's mind gone and a United States Senator dead, the very future of the macroscope project in peril -- and you found it amusing?"

            "Entertaining. There's a distinction, had you but the wit to grasp it, chick. The challenge of a signal from space that could stupefy and kill -- "

            "Why did the Senator die? No one else did."

            "The rules of the game require me to remind you that every serious question I answer seriously is gaining me points."

            "And any you can't or won't answer will gain me points." She hoped.

            He shrugged. "More people would have died had more been exposed. Your others were all mature, sedate, pacifistic scientists who had largely come to terms with reality. The destroyer activates a neural feedback that varies directly with intelligence and inversely with maturity. Thus an intelligent mature person is unaffected, or an unintelligent immature person. But an intelligent immature one is hit with all the voltage of the disparity between those qualities. The Senator was a primitive genius (I use the term loosely) -- so he died. Brad was a medium-mature genius, as were the other scientists."

            "And what are you?" she inquired bitterly.

            "I'm like the Senator, only more so. I'm smarter and less mature than he was. That was part of the challenge: to handle that alien signal, when its direct impact on me would have fried my brain -- almost literally. I dare say I'm the brightest primitive ever to be spawned on Earth."

            She was not going to debate that. "You plan to do a lot of maturing in the next few hours -- or whenever you decide to toddle off home?"

            "Hardly. I'm happy the way I am. No point in going the way Brad did. I could, incidentally, have saved his life, there on Triton, had I been on hand. Not that you would have wanted me to."

            "What?" Afra knew that he was trying to shock her again. He was succeeding. He was also leading her on to more questions and so eroding her competitive position farther. Yet her recognition of this process did not halt it; she had to know. She was hooked on the bits of knowledge he injected.

            "No, I don't mean you were in love with Ivo then. You still were fixed on Brad, for what that was worth. But you wouldn't have wanted him to live."

            She continued to stare at him, at his mercy.

            Now his eyes dropped to the ball. "I see," he murmured, "I see the evolution of man, from a speck of protoplasm to maturity. I see the free-swimming larvae of the echinoderms developing into the radially-symmetrical forms of adulthood. But I also see neoteny: the larval form preempting the reproductive capacity, and so bypassing maturity. I see a long evolution of such ambitious larval forms, extending even beyond the sea and onto land where true maturity becomes not merely impractical but impossible. Thus, instead of mature starfish, larval Man."

            "Are you trying to suggest -- "

            "You knew we derive from the Echinoderm superphylum. You know the characteristics of that type of life. What did you suppose would happen, when you interfered with the evolutionary reconstitution? By abolishing the timing mechanism, you permitted the subject to run its full course -- without benefit of the proper terminal environment."

            "Oh, Brad!" she cried in anguish.

            "But you wouldn't have cared to marry a starfish, however mature. So -- you arranged to kill him."

            "I didn't know!"

            "Sweetie, ignorance of the law is never an excuse -- particularly the law of nature, and most particularly when you are supposed to be a student of nature lecturing."

            "But -- "

            "But even proper attention would not have reconstituted his blasted mind. Recycling can't extirpate tissue damage; it merely reshapes what's there. He would have made a very stupid starfish."

            "Stop it!" she cried.

            "You stop it. You know how -- if you have the courage."

            And she was in the supermarket again, still terrified.

            The sound of the gun's explosion was fresh in her ears. There was a struggle occurring at the counter. The checkout girl screamed, a man fell. The silk hat rolled across the floor toward Afra. It was huge, and it grew larger as it came, swelling as though to crush her beneath its turning mass.

            She screamed and ran. She crashed into the bean shelf, hurting her shoulder and sending cans toppling heavily...somehow aware that this had happened before, but unable to stop. People turned to stare, but she ignored them, crying "No! No! No!"

            Somehow her unguided rush took her through a door at the rear, and she was hustling through a winter chamber with hanging slabs of raw meat, stumbling among tremendous boxes. A man with a cleaver loomed over her, and she saw the dark blood on it, and she screamed again and crashed through another door.

            Then she was in a narrow alley, running between steaming garbage cans. The door behind her burst open and a man charged out. "Little girl!" he bellowed. "Little girl! Come back here!"

            He was twice her size in every direction, and his skin was dark, his teeth great and white, and she fled.

            There were trucks with baked black rubber tires taller than she was, and an ambience of gasoline odors and growling motors and the choking fog of exhausts, and she was trapped between them and the black man. She screamed again and dashed for yet another door, symbol of escape. It was closed. Desperately she reached up to grasp the handle and pull down the stiff latch, while the black pursuer closed in.

            Suddenly it opened and she burst inside.

 

            MOON

 

 

            These were strange quarters: tables of alien contour, bed-pallets of singular discomfort, toilet facilities embarrassingly foreign to biped anatomy. Yet they were obviously quarters, intended to be of comfort for resident creatures of established form, if not for man.

            Afra went through the rooms of this complex, wondering whether the owners were present or when they might return. Obviously someone ran this station, or at least attended it periodically, and this was where the caretakers reclined in comfort during their off-hours.

            One room terminated in a low wall, emptiness above it. She found that it was a balcony. It overlooked a courtyard of fair size, and green shrubbery sprouted from planters about its nether perimeter. This suggested that the caretakers were not so different from human beings in the things that mattered. This was essentially Earth-air, Earth-gravity, human-comfort temperature, and the decor was harmonious to manlike tastes. There had to be strong biological resemblances between the species, however many eyes or ears or antennae either had.

            Noise; and into the court below marched a troop of men, a motley mob. They were in blue-collar working clothes -- overalls, protective helmets, grime. Some were white in the face, some black, some yellow; most were composite shades.

            She discovered that she had with her a huge shopping bag, evidently acquired at the supermarket, and she was holding it in her arms as she tried to lean over the rail for a better view. The balcony had been constructed with adults in mind, and she had a hard time of it. It did not occur to her to put down the shopping bag; that was filled with nameless but wonderfully promising things. Things that her mother would undoubtedly fashion mysteriously into chocolate cake, raspberry ice cream and crisp pinwheel cookies. She could not let that bag go, even for a moment.

            But as she poked her head over, so that one pigtail flopped against the rail, the men beneath spotted her. A rolling cry went up. "We want REPRESENTATION!" the workers cried.

            "Well, send up your represen -- repre -- somebody!" she called back, not expecting her soprano voice to be heard in all that clamor.

            A single man entered behind her. "I am he," he said, startling her. She began to cry, but stopped in a moment, realizing that it could do no good.

            The man was Schön, tremendous.

            "I thought you were a crystal gazer," she remarked in an attempt to conceal her lingering tears. She was not, actually, as surprised as she might have been.

            "That was back at Aries 9," he said. "The sun. The ref scored it 10 to 2, favor of the crystal gazer, incidentally. This is the moon: Gemini 21 for me, Capricorn 19 for you. I see you are dressed for the part."

            "The part?" This adult conversation was difficult.

            "Your symbol. A CHILD OF ABOUT FIVE WITH A HUGE SHOPPING BAG."

            "I'm seven," she corrected him primly. Then she reacted to her own statement. "I am?"

            She was. No wonder adults appeared so large.

            "And you called me immature!" he exclaimed, laughing. "What a fine time you had analyzing me, after I injected a little excitement into Ivo's determined mundanity. You -- a card-carrying WASP -- wanted to psychoanalyze me in absentia. Little appreciating the inherence of aggression in the human species, the factor that brought it to dominance on Earth. Well, call me a BLASP, you who think in terms of acronyms."

            "A what?"

            "A black Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Or a brown Mongolian Catholic, or a yellow Hottentot Moslem. I represent all of them; I am all of them, as you see by my symbol outside. And perhaps it is fitting, precious, that your name is Afra. That's very close to Afram, or Afro-American, the convenient designation for -- "

            "A whole group. A whole -- labor demonstration?"

            "Exactly. I am Man's universal spirit, and I reject all property and private rights as invalid limitations, other than purely social. I tell you that right and justice only prevail when properly dramatized -- when the issue is forced. And I attack this problem, as I do all problems, with courage."

            "And not a trace of false modesty," she murmured. Yet she felt the need to help the demonstrating workers, whatever their problem might be. She wanted to be a part of the group, to participate, to conform, even in rebellion. "What do you want, speci -- anyway?" Her stature as a five- or seven-year-old child (physically five, mentally seven?), though it prevented her from getting out the entire word "specifically," was not any more incongruous than the rest of this bizarre sequence.

            "I want freedom," Schön said, menacing in his emphasis. "I want security. I want power. I want equality. I, the hapless peoples of the world, want everything you have now."

            "Me -- the modern white?"

            "Yes. You have the good life. I want the right to ravage the world as you have done. I want to destroy as much as you have done. I want to drive myself to the brink of extinction as you have done, you smug white turd. You little bitch, I mean to take -- "

            And she was fleeing his madness again, whether in the station or on the streets of Macon she could not tell, nor did it make a difference.

 

            MARS

 

 

            Outside was an ocean shore, and the day was windy. Ancient Indian women sat facing outward, their quick hands fashioning useful artifacts. Afra peered up and down and found no hiding place, knowing the pursuer was not far behind. He could quickly catch her here, unless --

            Near at hand lay a blanket, woven of many colors but only half complete. She plumped herself down, full-size now, and composed her aging features. She took up the blanket and its attached apparatus and became one of the artisans.

            Schön did not appear. Afra became interested in the blanket, noticing the fineness of its warp and weft, and the skill of her own wrinkled brown hands as they manipulated the strands. She discovered in this dull routine an excellence of self-expression, a meeting of human needs. She found that she could accept this calm, unhurried work, and take special pleasure from it. She was preserving an art, and this was a worthwhile thing to do, no matter how far beyond it the machines of civilization went. The old ways were not inferior, when the larger framework of existence was considered. There was reward in simple diligence.

            Over the troubled waters flew a white dove. She watched it with minor interest, expecting it to be confused in the general turbulence of wave and cloud, but it was not. Its direction was clear, its mission firm. It flew low over the surf, skillfully reconciling the difficulties of gust and spray and maintaining its orientation. A clever bird.

            It sailed over the beach toward her, and came to rest only a few feet away. She could smell the tangy spume it carried on its feathers, now fluffing dry. It walked over the sand, cocking its head forward at each step in the manner of a chicken. Then it fixed an eye on her.

            "Welcome to Mars, honey," it said.

            Schön! She had been discovered after all, in the way she least expected. "How did you find me?"

            "I had to give you the score, sugar. You did better on Luna, but you flubbed it when you ran out again. No problem is solved that way. Ref called it 10 to 5, me."

            "Who is this referee?"

            "Funny thing. My Mars is in Taurus, where your Ascendant is, while your Mars is in Aries. Do you suppose this inversion is significant? Mars is the planet of initiative, you know."

            "You are avoiding my questions, pigeon," she remarked. But she knew the answer to the problem. Obviously they were still personifying their symbols, and her seeming act of free will had been mere conformity. He knew what the symbols were, so still had an advantage over her. He would keep on winning, as long as he could shock her or scare her into running. She had to gain the initiative -- and this was the obvious place to start.

            She stood up, breaking the spell of the symbol. She was in a large room filled with machinery, and it had been the steady sound of its operation that had suggested the breaking of ocean surf. This appeared to be a section of the station's power plant, and the generators were keening, rumbling and pulsating with internal potential. Somewhere there was probably an atomic furnace utilizing the total conversion of matter into energy, and these were merely the units that harnessed and channeled that awesome power.

            Schön was standing before her, still mocking her. Had it been physical capture he desired, he would have had her long ago, contest or no contest. It was her mind he was after, despite his denial, and he would not give up that chase until the ram had his way or the doe escaped entirely.

            Had there, she wondered, ever been a ewe for him?

            "Do you know the derivation of the Mars symbol?" he inquired. He sketched it in the air: the circle with the northeast arrow emerging.

            "Of course. It represents -- "

            "Not that cute little fib you tried to hand the engineer. Surely you realized the phallic essence of that pictograph? And Venus -- " he described that symbol also in the air -- "Venus is about as direct an image of the female apparatus -- "

            "It depends on your viewpoint," she said, interrupting him. But she hadn't thought of the symbols in this way, in spite of their normal application to designate male or female.

            Schön was in effect jabbing at her now, keeping her off-balance while he set up for his pugilistic KO. The ascendant evidently influenced his entire mode of play. Similarly, her own ascendant was a continuing liability that she had to face and reconcile, if she were ever to match him on an even basis. How many planets, how many rounds remained before the terminus? Seven?

            "And did you realize that innocent little Ivo thought you were having an affair with Harold Groton?"

            She tried to halt her reaction, but it was as though he had knocked her breath out of her. "What?"

            "Ivo failed utterly to comprehend your capricious Capricorn ways, and he labored under his own bumbling reverse-prejudice. White girl, white man, and all that suggestive dialogue -- "

            "But that was only because Harold understood how I'd -- " She paused, then went on brokenly. "How I had let Brad go and -- and -- "

           "And presented your fickle heart to Ivo -- without bothering to inform him. So you just waltzed around with the engineer, enjoying the sensation, waiting for some romantic moment to let Ivo discover what was in store for him, totally insensitive to his interim feelings. Oh, lass, that was your finest hour. It was beautiful! How the irony of that little contretemps delighted me! But you know, he almost caught on at one point. Luckily, I succeeded in diverting him before it became conscious."

            She turned a horrified glance on him. "You -- you actually -- ?"

            "Be practical, doll. Why should I match Mars to Venus, or give the water-carrier his goat? If Ivo had known how you really felt, he never would have yielded to me. As it was, the thing was near. Only his depression and the sudden breaking of the theme while he was in harness -- "

            "Oh, Ivo!" she exclaimed with the sharpest pang yet.

            "A little late for regrets, cutie. Ivo no longer exists, unless you count his special memories, that are now part of my own experience. He has no more reality than I did while he was in control. You will have to settle for his body."

            She was running again, routed again, and it was Macon. She knew that the man behind must inevitably catch up, for there was no place to hide, no one to protect her. Her father was gone; she had seen him fall when the gun fired, there in his great overcoat; and his hat, not really silk, had rolled gruesomely toward her as though it were his severed head...

            Now the black murderer was almost upon her, seeking to kill her too. In a moment his hands would fall heavily on her frail body and tear her apart --

            She tripped and fell headlong on the cold pavement. He came up, his giant body looming over hers, and, as in a nightmare, she could not move.

            "Got you!" he exclaimed.

 

            VENUS

 

 

            It was an Easter sunrise service. Jesus Christ had died and had risen again, and she was present to give thanks, this lovely anniversary of this holy occasion. Yet her heart was heavy, for no miracle of this nature had come into her own life. Twice, three times her warning might have saved a life, the life of someone dear to her -- a warning she had been too confused or self-centered to provide.

            She had lost, again -- yet somehow she had acquired a spiritual resource, an immortal strength to bear whatever had happened. This dawn ceremony --

            She was near a tree, in this open country gathering for worship. It was a spreading live-oak, the moss festooned upon it elegantly, and on the bark of the most proximate branch nestled a large and rather handsome cocoon. As she watched, momentarily distracted from the service, the chrysalis opened and a butterfly emerged, damp and gleaming. It spread its new wings, waiting for them to dry, and it was a beautiful creature unlike any other.

            Iridescence traveled along its vanes. "They don't call me Schön for nothing," it said to her.

            She snapped out of it. The room was another mass of machinery in the bowels of the station. Monstrous power cables drained into a multi-layered grid whose purpose she could not fathom. It, too, in its way, was beautiful; everything during this session seemed to be rainbow.

            "Gravity generator," Schön remarked. "Neat trick, converting electrical power to gravitrons so efficiently. Of course they learned it millions of years ago from other species, via the macroscope; no one knows who first developed the technology for broadcasting, because the early species were hesitant to use it. Once we return to Earth, we'll set up a local station; lots of things that process is good for besides sending information to space."

            "Is that all you're interested in? How to make a profit from this?"

            "By no means, babe. I would hardly be wasting my effort on you, in that case. I routed you by six points in Mars, by the way."

            That put him ahead 40 to 11, cumulative point score. She had to begin fighting back, or the final rounds would be meaningless. "Why are you wasting time on me? Because I'm the only viable girl within fifty thousand light-years?"

            "Simplistic thought. You always did view male-female interaction as primarily sexual. That was one of the things that put Ivo off. He gave you love, and in exchange you offered pudenda." He paused, but she had no comment. "Strange notion, that it is the woman who does the giving, in intellectual or physical love. In truth, all she does is acquiesce to the gifts of the man."

            "Assuming she acquiesces at all. Not every gift is attractive."

            "Fortunately, in the human species it is the male who has control. This is one of the reasons Man developed intelligence and culture instead of remaining backward. The control of reproduction, and thus of evolution, had to be taken away from the female before progress could be made. Some claim that man's capacity for rape makes him more evil than those animals that are not up to such activity, but the opposite is true."

            "Of all the -- !" But she was falling into his verbal snare again. That was the way of defeat.

            "Even so, sex is overrated. The moment the urge is indulged, it becomes uninteresting. My real passion is for knowledge; satisfaction there only begets the desire to know even more. I have an insatiable appetite for intellectual experience. A man can sustain himself for a long time, acquiring comprehension, particularly with the macroscope."

            He still hadn't admitted his real reason for pursuing her, in that case. Once she knew what he wanted from her, she might have the clue to prevail against him, somehow.

            "How did you get around the destroyer?" she inquired, trying another approach. "You claim that exposure to it would kill you immediately, but yet you plan to travel."

            "You wouldn't understand the technical medical description, so I'll make it foolishly simple," he said with a fine air of condescension. She had learned not to challenge him, and did not. He continued: "The problem was in blocking off a memory without experiencing it. I knew it was there, but I did not dare touch any part of it. It did not hurt Ivo because his personality was incomplete, acting as an inherent barrier; but the moment I absorbed that facet into the rest, the network would be complete, the circuit closed, the dam breached. Yet without that portion, I could not control the body, so I had to have it. And, unfortunately, memory is not confined to any particular area of the brain. A single impression may be laid down across untold synapses, like a thin layer of snow. It really is a generalized acid conversion. So I had to delineate the particular memory layer that was the destroyer concept, and isolate it a step at a time, neutralizing it synapse by synapse until every avenue had been caulked."

            He walked about the room, happy to be telling of his achievement. "I had to do it by developing spot enzymes attuned to, and only to, the acidic configurations typical of the destroyer trace. All without leaving my own body or brain. You ever try exerting conscious control over your own enzymes, when you didn't even have it for your body? I dare say that was the most remarkable act of surgery ever performed by man."

            Afra was impressed in spite of herself. "You operated on your own brain-chemistry?"

            "It took me six months," he said. "The final step was rephasing the synapses I'd blocked, so that I had access to other memories without invoking the destroyer. I didn't want to be stuck with Ivo's superficiality, which was what would have happened had I merely hurdled the gap without reestablishing the lines. I wasn't crossing over into his world, I was assimilating it into mine, with that one culvert remaining. But that involved mass testing and alignment. So I cast him into a historical adventure with a fair variety of experience, where I had a certain measure of supervisory control, and set up my alternate connections while that barrage of new signals was coming through."

            "All that -- just so you could come out and chase a girl around the office?"

            "All that for self-preservation, chick. Ivo was bound to foul up somewhere, and he could have gotten us all killed instead of just the two or three he did manage. I don't appreciate having my destiny managed by a moron. I had to be ready to step in if he ever got smart enough to cry uncle."

            "Or even a moment before."

            "He didn't always know when he had had enough."

            "If you were able to accomplish something as complex as blocking off a single memory," she said slowly, "why didn't you simply block off Ivo while you were at it? You seem to be able to function well enough without him. What prevented you from taking control any time you chose?"

            "Honey, if I told you that, I would be in your power forever," he said.

            His attitude suggested that he was lying; and so she believed him.

 

            MERCURY

 

 

            The next room contained no heavy machinery. Instead it was laid out rather like a lecture hall, with benches lined up before a podium. Afra passed through it and paused before going on. "Did you run out of symbols, genius?" she called back. She knew that she had not lost the Venus round by much; perhaps two points.

            Then the benches became occupied -- by perching birds. Sparrows, storks, hummingbirds, eagles, parakeets and buzzards -- all species were represented, crowded together in the close atmosphere, wings rustling, feathers drifting, ordure falling. And she was among them, a bird herself, of a type she could not quite identify. She, too, was confined within the tremendous cage the room had become.

            Outside, in the area that a moment ago had held the podium, were the human attendees. They were spectacularly dressed, as though seeking to out-splendor the avian horde. Each couple was more elegantly garbed than the last, and all paraded by without a glance into the aviary. In fact, the people were oblivious to it, far more concerned with the display of their own finery.

            She recognized the nature of it at last: this was an Easter promenade, following fittingly the sunrise service of the prior vision. But this was as vain an assemblage as she had ever seen. Every member of it seemed to crave attention, and to fear for the least fleck of dirt in the vicinity.

            Schön was in it too, resplendent in...a tall silk hat.

            She did not even notice what else he had on. He had gone too far. Furious, she looked about to see in what manner she might act. Surely something in this situation could be turned to her advantage. It was merely necessary to extend the breadth of her resources.

            She scrambled -- it was far too crowded to fly -- to the large front gate that separated aves from homo, jostling aside the other birds officiously. This should be about where, in station geography, the podium stood. There should be a -- yes, the catch was a simple one, not intended to withstand the attack of a human-brained bird. An ordered prying of the beak, a timed shove with the wing, and --

            The gate swung open.

            The birds exploded outward, screeching. Feathers, dust and dung enveloped the passing people. There was a grand melee, and consternation, as everyone tried to get out of the way of the dirty birds. An albatross, taking off clumsily, crashed into Schön's hat and knocked it from his head. Perhaps Afra had done it herself.

            And the lecture room was back.

            The podium had been shoved askew, and Schön stood disheveled beside it. There had indeed been contact, and not of his choosing. He had dissolved the vision, this time.

            She held on to the initiative. She sat down on the nearest bench, sure that this would trigger -- the presentation.

            It did. The illumination dimmed, and in the air of the front of the room a picture appeared. It was the Shape -- the same subtle, tortuous, flexing color she had seen back near Earth when she glimpsed the destroyer-sequence. The same red mass, the same blue dot, as though a blue-white dwarf star were orbiting a red giant. The same symbolic agglutination of concepts, building, building --

            She could not withdraw from it; the thing had hold upon her brain. She suspected that Schön was similarly transfixed. The destroyer had pounced at last.

            But the emphasis shifted, and suddenly she realized that this was not the mind-ravager. It was the same technique, but not the same message -- and the message, despite what certain fringe-interests claimed, was far more vital than the medium. Instead of oblivion, it brought information. It expanded her horizons. In another moment her mind had assimilated its universal language, the galactic gift of tongues, and she saw and heard -- the lecture.

            Formal galactic history commences with the formation of the first interstellar communication network. Only scattered authentic prior evidences exist...

            She absorbed it, entranced. She had not been offered the full history before. This lecture went on to cover the expansion of the macroscopic network, spheres of cultural influence, and the onset of the First Siege.

            An illustration, it said. Then the partial concepts became complete, and her full apperceptive mass responded. She was on a civilized planet, responding to its gravity, temperature and odors as well as its sights and sounds.

            "I can tell you how it comes out," Schön said. His voice interfered with her concentration, and she observed the shifting color-shapes that were telling the story, now three-dimensional and almost physical in substance.

            Then her mind became attuned again, and the planet returned. She passed among the ghastly yet ordinary (by galactic standards) creatures of this world, conversed with them, and learned about the desperate struggle they were engaged in. It was planetary, interplanetary war, and this species was in danger of enslavement or destruction.

            She came to understand the reason: the Traveler impulse permitted wars of conquest by immature cultures. It was like giving motorboats to hostile islanders previously separated from each other by miles of shark-infested shallows and reefs. Transportation without maturity spelled intercultural war -- and mutual disaster.

            Physical contacts between the stellar cultures of the galaxy in fact meant chaos, the lecture said, and now she agreed emphatically, having seen it in action. More information came, describing the termination of the siege. There was another animate, full-perception episode, showing the manner in which linked species had rejoined, sharing a planet, but not harmoniously. The creatures, like the last, were completely unhuman, yet she felt sympathy for their plight. She felt that she was there as a group of shoreline vigilantes killed an envoy from the undersea culture; and she reacted with dismay as she followed an enlightened land-dweller making a return quest into the ocean, only to be similarly slain by the border patrol of the other side. War broke out again, decimating both species and setting back the civilization of the planet disastrously; but still the mutual hate did not abate. Removal of the Traveler had not solved galactic problems; it had only suppressed them painfully. Better that it had never come.

            But she learned also the positive side of it: the resurgence of civilization in the absence of the Traveler. She followed the positive preparations to alleviate the foreseen Second Siege. The destroyer was put into perspective: it was like a hurricane, that prevented the savages from using their modern boats. Many died trying -- but this was better than what had happened before.

            She saw the other phase of the destroyer project: the quest into the origin and nature of the Traveler signal.

            It had to be assumed that the Traveler was beamed to the other galaxies of the local cluster. Had they gone through similar ravages? The macroscope did not provide the answer.

            Yet, the conjecture continued, if the Traveler touched other galaxies, it had the aspect of a universal conspiracy to destroy civilization wherever it occurred. If so, it was essential that it be stopped at its source.

            Still, journeys to these near galaxies had failed. Six expeditions to Andromeda had never returned. If there were a traveler there, a round trip should be possible. If there were not, then high-level macroscopic technology should have been developed and retained, and at least a few programs should have been beamed for intergalactic communication. Ordinary spherical broadcasts dissipated in the vast intergalactic reaches, but beams did not, as the Traveler itself had demonstrated.

            Could it be that the Travelers encountered the other galaxies at different times? The local program appeared to originate about three million light-years distant, at a point source, and to expand to saturate the entire galaxy and its environs: the globular clusters, the Magellanic clouds, but not Fornax or Sculptor. About thirty thousand light-years beyond the rim (arbitrarily assigned; there was no physical discontinuity marking the edge of the galaxy) the beam stopped; its total cross section at this stage was about 150,000 light-years. By the time the beam might, in its onward travel, intercept another galaxy beyond the Milky Way, it would have spread into a tremendous cone-segment far too diffuse for proper effect. It had obviously been tailored to this particular locale.

            If other beams were similarly tailored, and if they originated from the same spot in space, it might be that they had to take turns. A million years of traveler could be directed at one galaxy; then, while it was on its way, the projector could be reoriented to cover another galaxy. Thus direction and distance and schedule would determine the status of any particular galaxy.

            After the Second Siege the confirmations began to come in. Civilized planets that had jumped to other galaxies and had been stranded there had broadcast back portions of the truth. They had made the transit, but had been unable to come out of organic stasis because of the absence of the traveler signal necessary for the reconstitution. Thus millions of years had had to pass before a Traveler intercepted the new location of an exploring world. At that point reconstitution had occurred, but with losses, since even the gaseous state did not have indefinite shelf-life. Then no return was feasible, unless another delay of tens of millions of years was undertaken while waiting for the local Third Siege.

            This was the substance of the first report from Horv, stranded in a globular cluster orbiting Andromeda. It was almost as though the Travelers had been arranged to prevent intergalactic commerce. But Horven research continued, for the same signal that revived the sadly decimated populace now allowed the planet to travel freely around Andromeda. In due course the second, more remarkable report was broadcast.

            Meanwhile, one drone moon from the Dooon did reappear in the Milky Way Galaxy, carrying their full report and recordings of their Traveler signal. The recordings had no potency in themselves, but were useful for direct comparison with similar records of the local Traveler. This established that two different Travelers were involved; the "fingerprint" differed in slight but consistent ways. One more fact had replaced conjecture, and another item in the tentative map of Traveler activity had been confirmed. Data was now available on three local beams -- and all had emanated from the same point source.

            No other drone-moon returnees were discovered. Evidently a number had been dispatched, but were either lost in the uncharted configurations of jumpspace or had arrived but not been located in or near the Milky Way. A continuous and complete scan of the entire volume of the galaxy simply was not feasible, so chance played its part.

            Finally, utilizing several of the delayed macroscopic return-messages, the records of the single recovered moon, and detailed analysis of the Traveler itself when the Third Siege began, the locals were able to come at the complete story.

            It was the dawning of a new era.

 

            JUPITER

 

 

            The lecture was over. The convoluting shapes faded, and on the stage a prima donna was singing. Her talent was superlative; she seemed to represent the pinnacle of human art, the culmination of individual opportunity. This was as close, in a cappella, as one could come to perfection. This was excellence personified.

            Afra considered her human heritage, and that of the galaxy. It was as though six great manifestations of culture had occurred, in whatever mode they were considered. The galaxy had gone through three long civilizations and three short sieges, the last still in progress, and now was on the brink of the seventh and perhaps climactic manifestation. Every individual, every species, every culture was on the threshold. The mirror of history provided the reflection of all the past -- but that past was a lesser history than what was about to be.

            The prima donna was Schön; the symbols paid scant attention to the sex of the individual. Afra was not certain of the nature of her own symbol this time, having experienced no transformation other than purely conjectural, but the incipient realization of the truth -- personal and galactic and universal -- was enough. Schön might represent the ultimate in Man's prior evolution, juvenile as he was, but he did not represent Man's future. Neither did the starfish form that Brad had become; that type of maturity had been cast aside long ago as a dead-end attempt for adjustment to a bygone and limited environment. Man was destined for something else. Not physically, not technologically, but socially and emotionally. It might be millions of years before he achieved it, but that was a mere instant, galactically. The threshold was now, in his realization of his potential, in his vision of his own esthetic future.

            With only moderate effort, Afra shifted into station reality. The room had changed; this was another busy complex. Machines were turning out the element-display samples and feeding them into conveyor-slots, undoubtedly for transport to the several visitors' lounges. Art was being reproduced, and foodstuffs manufactured. This section was, in fact, an extensive but comparatively routine station production center. Either there was a considerable turnover in samples, implying many visits here, or the displays were replaced frequently as a matter of course.

            Schön was present, and he held the S' device. "Mercury was yours, 10 to 5," he announced. "Your damned birds..." He slapped the instrument.

            She had won a round at last! But the vision was upon her:

            The street of Macon, she at age seven, the Negro man standing over her. But now her terror was gone. Six manifestations -- ascendant, sun, moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury -- transmuted to the seventh -- Jupiter -- and the auspices were beneficent. She knew that the Negro had not come to hurt her; he was not the gunman. The holdup man had been white.

            "Little girl, you got to come with me. Your daddy's been hurt."

            "I know," she said.

            "I work at the store," he continued, helping her to her feet. "I saw you bolt, and I knew you was scared. But it's all right now. Your daddy grabbed that robber and held him, and he's in jail by now I know, but -- "

            Her knee was skinned, and her shoulder was bruised from the collision in the store, but these were minor injuries. She took the man's hand and began the walk back. "How bad -- I mean, my father -- "

            "He's not hurt bad. I'm sure. He's a brave man, doing that, stepping into a gun like that. A brave man."

            Afra stepped out of the memory-vision again, independent of its power as well. She did not have to run any more.

            Schön was watching her, aware that he was losing ground. He had thought to win the round by throwing her into the vision of terror and forcing her to capitulate once more, but this time she had conquered her fear. Her liability was gone. Whatever type of conquest he had contemplated was farther from realization now than it had been during their initial encounter in the ascendant.

            She was still gaining strength, riding the crest of her victory in Mercury and her release from the continuing repression of the ascendant. She was ready to expand her horizons even more, to encompass the ultimate information and profit thereby.

            "Did you consider," she demanded of Schön, "the essential paradox of the Traveler? The single fact that makes it distinct from all other broadcasts, and makes its very existence proof that its Type III technology is qualitative as well as quantitative?"

            "Certainly," he said -- but there had been a fractional hesitation that betrayed his oversight. He had missed the obvious, as had they all, and worked it out only in this instant of her challenge. Another point for her side! "The Traveler, as an impulse moving at light velocity, could never supervise so complex a chronological process as melting and reconstitution of an unfamiliar creature, since no memory of prior experience could exist in a pattern traveling past the subject at the ultimate velocity. The portion of the Traveler that directed the reduction of the epidermis would be twenty-four light-minutes beyond, by the time the heart dissolved. And the portion that finished the job would not have been advised when the process started -- not when it couldn't, relativistically, catch up for that same twenty-four minutes. Information cannot travel through the material universe faster than light. So the Traveler could not handle the job -- yet did. Paradox."

            "You've missed it!" she cried. "Genius, you're blind to the truth. You don't understand the Traveler any more than the early galactics did."

            "Ridiculous," he said, irritated. "I can tell you how the melting cycle is accomplished within that limitation. Do I have to draw you a picture?"

            "This won't fit on any picture, stupid."

            Schön intercepted a carbon-cube -- one of the tremendous diamonds -- on its way to some display and set it on top of one of the art-machines. He trotted down the hall to procure something resembling chalk, and returned to make a sketch on his improvised blackboard. A chalk sketch on a diamond!

            "The beam originates at point A, strikes the subject at point B and goes on to point C, never to return," he said, drawing a cartoon figure. She had no doubt he could turn out a work of art if he chose, but the chalk was clumsy, the surface slick, and he was preoccupied by the reversal of their competitive fortunes.

 

 

            "For the sake of simplicity," he continued, "we'll ignore such refinements as the manufactured melt-beam that actually does the work; that's merely an offshoot produced ad hoc when triggered by a suitable situation. The point is, the Traveler only touches once and moves on at light velocity. It doesn't stay to see the job finished, any more than a river stays to watch the wader crossing it. There's always new water."

            "You're still all wet," she said.

            "But an object in water will set up a stationary ripple," he continued, seemingly unperturbed. She knew he had to make his point -- or lose points. "Because the impulse is not confined to one direction. In the case of our Traveler, the interaction at point B initiates a feedback that meets and prepares the oncoming impulses. So an extended interaction is feasible." He drew another figure on a second face of the cube. "Call point D that secondary interaction, though it occurs at no fixed place. It does alert the oncoming signal in advance, making a type of memory and planning possible.

 

 

            "So the melting is actually a function of B -- the A-beam modified by the BD feedback. The only time the A-beam is encountered directly is during the introduction; and this is the reason for that introduction. Without that BD feedback, the melting would be a simple chaotic reduction of flesh leading inevitably to death. As it is, when a critical point approaches -- such as the need to close down one lung while preserving the other -- the Traveler knows, and modifies its program accordingly. The same holds for the reconstitution, which is hardly the natural reformulation of evolution it appears. It doesn't matter where it occurs, so long as the Traveler is present; the beam is geared to react to a given stimulus in the proper way. A very sophisticated program, particularly since no part of its component is solid, liquid or even gaseous; but effective, as we know."

            "You're talking about details and missing the whole, just as the galactics did," she said. "The old trees/forest ignorance. You know what? I think you can't comprehend the Traveler by yourself. You blocked it off along with the destroyer-memory! The truth is out of your reach!"

            His face was calm, but she was sure he was furious. "What can you do with your alleged comprehension that I can't do with mine? Show me one thing."

            "I can talk to the Traveler," she said.

            "To be sure. I can even talk to my foot. But what kind of a reply do you get?"

            She concentrated all her attention and will-power on this one effort, knowing that her thesis, her one superiority over Schön, depended for its proof on the performance. "Traveler," she cried, "Traveler, can you hear me?"

            Nothing happened. Schön gazed at her with a fine affectation of pity.

            Was she wrong? She had been so certain --

            "Traveler," she repeated urgently, "do you hear me? Please answer -- "

            Y E S

            It came from every direction, that godlike response. It assaulted her senses, scorched her fingers, swelled her tongue, blasted her eardrums, lanced into her eyeballs with letters of fire. Was this what Moses had experienced on the mountain?

            Schön stood dazed. He had received it.

            "What are you?" she asked, frightened herself but aware that this might be her only opportunity to make this contact. Only while she rode the crest -- And it came at her again, a torrent of information, projected into her mind in the same fashion the melting cycle had acted on the cells of her body. The passing portions of the Traveler beam triggered nerve synapses in her brain and spoke to her in true telepathy.

            In essence, this: Just as interstellar travel required the reduction of solid life to liquid life, and thence to gaseous life, so true intergalactic travel required one further stage: radiation life. The Traveler was not a broadcast beam; it was a living, conscious creature. Originally it had evolved from mundane forms, but its technology and maturity had enabled it to achieve this unforeseeable level, freeing it of any restraint except the limitation of the velocity of radiation through space. Even that could be circumvented by using the jumpspace technique -- once space had been cartographically explored by lightspeed outriders.

            There was nowhere in the universe this species could not range.

            But very few life-forms ever achieved this level. Why? The Travelers investigated and discovered that in the confined vicious cauldron that was the average life-bearing galaxy, the first species to achieve gaseous-state jumpspace capacity acted to suppress all others -- then stagnated for lack of stimulus. The problem was that technology exceeded maturity. Only if more species could be encouraged to achieve true maturity could universal civilization become a fact. They needed time -- time to grow.

            And so the Travelers became missionaries. Each individual jumped to a set spot in space and underwent the transposition to radiation, retaining awareness throughout. Physical synapses became wave-synapses, thought occurring from the leading edge backwards, but lucidly. And each individual personally brought jumpspace capacity to Type II technologies resident in individual galaxies.

            It was the Milky Way as a whole that was being cultivated. The Traveler beneficence resembled that of the destroyer: it seemed cruel, but actually fostered an acceleration of maturity. Species might suffer, but galaxies were prodded into growth. Those galaxies that achieved control over their immature elements -- so strikingly defined by their actions in the face of jumpspace temptation -- were on their way to success. The Milky Way, after several failures, had finally gained that self-control, and was on the verge of true maturity -- as an entity. This was the gift of the Traveler: the passport to the universe, and to universal civilization.

            "The white man bringing his god to the ignorant natives," Schön muttered. "Big deal." He stepped into the next chamber.

            "It is a big deal, even if you're too immature to admit that extragalactic aliens can do things you can never hope to do," she cried, pursuing him. "And mankind, too, may share in that distinction, if it survives its own adolescence. Not by becoming smarter, but by maturing. We -- "

 

            SATURN

 

 

            Schön was in a soldier's uniform, unkempt, and in his hand was a bottle of cheap whisky. If he had a post to guard, he was derelict in duty. Somewhere he had made an error, a nondiscriminating decision, and the consequence was upon him.

            Afra was in a glorious gown, a golden-haired goddess, as she swept into the room. She observed banks of computerlike machinery, and took it for the sensitive, quality-control mechanism of the station, but she was intent on her personal opportunity. Schön's deviation was her reward, his faithlessness to the common welfare her good fortune -- so long as she proceeded with confidence.

            He lifted the bottle to her in a drunken salute. "My candle burneth over," he said. "You won again."

            Then that elusive special memory unlocked itself and emerged from its dungeon of security: something Bradley Carpenter had told her. In times of stress it had pushed up, only to retreat before scrutiny. Now at last she had it. "Schön is dangerous -- make no mistake about that. He has no scruples. But there is a way to bring him under control, if the need exists and the time is proper. Now I'm going to describe it to you, but I want you to tell no one -- particularly not Ivo."

            "Who is Ivo?" she had inquired, for this was before it all had started.

            "He's my contact with Schön. But this is the one thing about Schön he doesn't know. I'm going to implant in you a hypnotic block against divulgence."

            And he had done so, skilled as he had been in such matters. She had not remembered it until this moment -- this moment of discovering Schön in his weakness, knowing that his vulnerability was temporary, dictated only by transitory animation of symbols. Schön still led her in points, and she knew what tremendous resources he possessed; she would never overcome him if she did not finish him now. Uranus or Neptune might swing the pendulum back to him, and with it the initiative and the final victory.

            "Do you remember Yvonne?" she asked him.

            The image vanished. Schön turned on her, the bottle in his hand replaced by S', and it was as though the fire of his essence took physical form. "Brad, you bastard!" he cried. "You told!"

            But he was in his weakness, she in her strength. "You have a memory like mine, one you can't face," she said. "It is the reason you could not take over control from Ivo, whatever else you managed. It is the knowledge that gives me power over you." But only if the circumstance were appropriate -- and that could be a matter of definition.

            For there had been a third genius of the project, one falling between Brad and Schön. Yvonne -- "The Archer" -- and there had been intense conflict.

            They were five years old when the culmination came, both having experienced more of life in all areas than had most adults, but both remaining children emotionally. It was the classic case of two scorpions in a bottle, two nations with nuclear overkill and insufficient patience: two children with the powers of adults. Because they were male and female, there was a certain mitigating attraction; but their rivalry was stronger, and when the camaraderie ended they put it on the line: a game, a contest, more than physical, more than intellectual, whose precise rules no other person comprehended. For a day and a night they had faced each other, locked in a private room, and in the end Schön had won and Yvo had committed suicide.

            Then Schön, protecting himself, had operated on the body and made it resemble a mutilated version of his own in certain ways that would deceive the outside world. He had arranged an impressive "accident" of conflagratory nature that made the deception complete, and had then assumed her place in the project community. Thus he had become Ivo, and somehow managed to alter the records to confuse the prying adults. It seemed to them that a male child had died, yet the count did not confirm this; instead one male had been mislabeled female. Yet if a female had been lost, which one?

            Schön had gotten away with murder.

            But he had not confused his contemporaries. They were not as clever as he, but they knew him, and they knew the score. They were his peer-group, and it operated with unprecedented force. They did not report his crime to the adults, for that was not the peer-code; they did pass the word informally and judge him themselves and impose a sentence on him. He became Ivo, then. No longer could he masquerade as another person by choice and convenience. For the group had this special power over its members, part ethics, part force, part religion, part family: what the group decreed, the individual honored. It could not be otherwise, even for Schön.

            The secret had been kept, but he had been punished. Even after the project disbanded, the peer-power remained, the inflexible code, a geis on him he could not break.

            Only Ivo himself could set him loose when the need arose -- and Ivo had never known the truth, and was stubborn to boot. Ivo had thought it was the tedium of daily existence that kept Schön buried originally. He had never heard of Yvo.

            As the Traveler disciplined the universe; as the destroyer disciplined the galaxy; as circumstance disciplined mankind; so the peer-group disciplined Schön.

            And nothing else! Schön still had the galactic instrument, S', and this was not Earth-locale, and Afra was not a peer of the project. "You cannot get home without me," he said. "The sentence cannot be invoked, here; there is still need for me."

 

            URANUS

 

 

            So the grand ploy had failed, and now that pendulum was swinging back, restoring his power, diminishing hers. It was her turn to retreat.

            The next room was another highly technical one: a strange conduit admitted something invisible, and stranger equipment manipulated it.

            "Conversion," Schön remarked with some of his old confidence. "Channeled gravitrons adapted to macrons for the broadcast." He touched S'.

            Five people stood on an Earthscape in the sunshine. A woman and two men faced south; two women -- one older, one younger -- stood fifty feet away, in the trio's line of sight.

            For the first time Afra saw the symbols and remained in doubt as to which one was hers. The woman in the northern group might be herself; the men might be Schön and Ivo. One of the southern pair was an old-fashioned woman; the other was an up-to-date girl. The one pinched, stiff; the other alert, open-faced. Their clothing and manner identified their types -- but which of the three women, really, was Afra?

            This seemed to be the time for indecision, and Schön evidently shared the mood. "Am I so bad?" he demanded somewhat plaintively. "I never tortured to death an animal, and not many who pass through conventional childhood can say that. I never shot a man, and not many who served in the armed forces can say that. All I did was play a fair game for high stakes and win. Had I lost, I would have died. I have always abided by the rules of the game."

            Then Afra knew that the woman between the two men was Yvo, as she might have been at maturity. Schön was bracketed by his past, and by competing demands, and it was not in her to condemn him out of hand.

            But Afra was bracketed too. She had witnessed the history of the galaxy and absorbed its significance. Was she now to return to her old, narrow ways and attitudes, or was she to open her mind and personality to change, movement, spontaneity? Which woman was she? There was advantage in conventionality, but also in initiative.

            She had never realized before that her own prejudice against Negroes stemmed at least in part from that chase in her childhood by a well-meaning supermarket employee. She had remembered that pursuit subconsciously and associated it with the sudden, crushing death of her father, fatally wounded that day, and she had somehow blamed all Negroes for it. Yet it had been a white man who fired the shot, attempting to hold up the cashier. It had been a Negro who had tried to help, even to the extent of expressing an unjustified confidence in her father's health. The strongest elements of the experience had been the killing and the Negro, and her subconscious had made a connection her conscious had not. No doubt the climate of her upbringing had promoted this, too...

            There were no answers for either of them here. They moved to the next room.

 

            NEPTUNE

 

 

            Maintenance: cleaners, repair machines, testing robots. She walked down the aisle, Schön following several paces behind. At the far end was a spherical dance of light, communicating in the galactic code. She studied it -- and understood that it was warning all comers that the next compartment contained the destroyer programming mechanism.

            The other chambers had not had warnings; why did this one?

            She was sure she knew. Theoretically, any creature who was able to travel to this station had achieved the maturity to be immune to the destroyer concept. But there could be less mature associates, as in the case of the species that had actually emplaced this unit; the truly mature individuals were not capable of violence, however practical its application. Younger species would have to maintain the equipment and do the work.

            Or -- there could be children, recapitulating evolution, poking aggressively into dangerous nooks. So -- a warning. There could be stray destroyer emanation here.

            "This is the end of the line," she said, showing him the warner. "We have to go back. Why don't we stop this foolish contest and try to help each other?" And she wondered whether her distaste for him had dissipated with her fear.

            He brightened. "We are prisoners of what we are. These symbolic animations are only projections of our two personalities. We are Neptune now, planet of obligation...and such. For you this is A HOUSE RAISING, helpfulness, cooperation, joy in common enterprise. That is why you have spoken as you have."

            "Then what is your symbol?"

            "A MAN IN THE MIDST OF BRIGHTENING INFLUENCES."

            She saw that the game was not over, and that he had almost won. Beatryx was dead; Harold was gone; Ivo had been replaced by this stranger -- and she was ready, in her overwhelming spirit of helpfulness, to give whatever she had to offer to the victor. Perhaps there had been a time when she would have felt otherwise; intellect told her so. But not at this moment.

            "The score stands at 78 to 69, my favor," he said. "If we stop here, and I agree we might as well -- "

            She tried to reach the Traveler again, but that wave of ability had subsided. She might never again achieve the peak of awareness and drive necessary to call it forth directly. No help there.

            Without letting herself consciously realize what she was doing in her desperate effort to stave off defeat, Afra stepped backward into the destroyer-room.

            "Hey!" Schön called, taken by surprise. He dived for her, astonishingly swift on his feet -- but too late.

 

            PLUTO

 

 

           Ivo resumed control as the destroyer sequence hit. A rainbow of color/concept threatened to overwhelm his perception, building with merciless velocity toward oblivion -- but he had had long experience diverting it. He deflected the impact and concentrated on Afra.

            She was kneeling on the floor, trying to cover her face, but the emanations were everywhere. They leaked out in forms susceptible to reception by ears and skin as well as eyes. There was no physical way to block the destroyer off, this close.

            He reached her and clamped both hands on her wrists, hauling her around and up and back through the doorway. Her eyes were fixed, her lips parted in the obsessive rapture of assimilation. As they passed from the chamber the barrage stopped, sealed off by some unseen shield.

            Afra slumped into unconsciousness. He propped her up against an inactive scrubbing machine and peered anxiously into her face. Had he brought her out in time? If he revived her now, would she awaken to personality -- or mindlessness?

            She had won the game with Schön. Her daring had scored a clean sweep of Pluto, for she had survived where he could not. It was the one situation where lesser intelligence was an advantage. The extra minute she had withstood the destroyer was the same as a knockout victory.

            Schön had had to have her help, if he were ever to leave the station, since only by burying his own personality could he have faced the destroyer. He could have fashioned an idiot personality for the purpose -- but then the geis on him would have taken effect, keeping him bottled. Only if another person released him could he reemerge, in the absence of Ivo. A simple request would have been enough: "Schön -- come out!" -- but it had to be from someone who acted independently. Someone outside the bottle, for the seal could not be broken from within. Someone who knew him and knew what the request meant.

            Certainly Schön would never have let Ivo resume control. Not when both knew that Afra was in love with that alternate personality. But an idiot -- capable only of a directed reception of the Traveler -- she would have had to banish that. Her temperament would have forced her to uncork the responding mind, even though she hated it. And of course she would have felt obligated to honor the terms of the agreement, having lost the game.

            But she had won. Ivo was sure of this -- because he had been the referee. Had it been otherwise -- that is, had Schön not arranged to make it fair -- the results would not have been binding. A legitimate win for Schön would have forced Ivo to return control to him, even after saving him from the destroyer. Ivo, too, was bound by the geis, having agreed to arbitrate the contest.

            As it was, that intervention to save their mutual mind had cost Schön all ten points of the final round, putting Afra ahead 79 to 78, and it was over. She had won the right to choose her companion on the way home. She had made the nature of that choice plain during her dialogue with Schön.

            Provided she retained, literally, the wit to make that decision. Otherwise, she too had lost, and rendered the round a tie that was meaningless. A mindless Afra could not serve Schön's purpose.

            Ivo contemplated her face, so lovely in its repose. He had longed for this from the moment he saw her the first time. He had traveled the galaxy only to please her.

            The surface of the machine against which she leaned was reflective. He saw in that mirror the head of a man. It seemed to smile knowingly at him. He knew, as the gift of one of Schön's conscious thoughts during the contest, that this was Afra's symbol in Pluto -- A MAN'S HEAD -- just as the rainbow he had seen as he took over had been Schön's. But whose head was it to be?

            Had all his life been leading to this crisis, this empty vigil with an unconscious girl? If she were gone, what was left?

            Ivo held her, afraid to wake her, and remembered.

            There had been the project breakup, thrusting them all abruptly into the massive, confused, tormented world -- yet most had greeted it as a release and a challenge. They had exploded across the planet, three hundred and thirty eager youngsters seeking experience...and had been absorbed by it without a ripple. Brad had gone to college; Ivo had followed the melody of the flute, searching out the obscure monuments of the life of Sidney Lanier. Quite a number of the others had married nonproject people. All had sworn to keep in touch forever, but they were young then, and somehow had forgotten. There had been some almost-random encounters, however -- enough to circulate news of most. From time to time Ivo had dreamed of a grand convening, a project reunion -- recognizing the very desire as a reflection of his inadequacy, his poor adjustment to the world of the '70's.

            Then Groton, on a hot Georgia street, and adventure had been thrust upon him. Brad needed Schön! Afra, vision of love, bait of trap -- would he have stepped into it had he not wanted to? The proboscoids of Sung, overrunning their world heedlessly, and mankind doing the same. Human organs, black-market. Plump Beatryx, wife of an engineer. Image of a school crisis: boy in classroom, cigarette, smirk. Senator Borland, man of ambition, power. Destroyer image: one dead, one ruined, one untouched? Sprouts, a winning configuration, S D P S, Kovonov, who had meant to go himself...

            Joseph the rocket, accommodations for five. Learning to use the macroscope, that instrument of galactic civilization. Astrology: "The complex of your life and the complex of the universe may run in a parallel course." UN pursuit. Image of a living cell. The handling -- identity confirmation or sexual experience? The melting -- skull canting, gray-white fluid coursing out eye-socket. Reconstitution -- from cell to self in four hours.

            Mighty Neptune, sea-storm world of methane. Triton, where Tryx found a bug. Schön, moon of a moon. There he had come to appreciate real people, to know the meaning of friendship, its prerogatives and its miseries. Terraforming: a joint effort. Poetry, prejudice, a chess analogy. Starfish. Afra's horoscope, the chart that defined her. The flip of a bus token. Trial: another case of handling, really. Spacefold diagrams. Visual penetration of Neptune -- dwarf with the breath of a giant, yet more ancient than Sol. Gravitational radius.

            Tyre. Mattan, talking of superpowers. Baal Melqart, hungry for children. Swords and torches in the night. Aia: "We shall have joy in one another, while both being true to our memories." Image of Astarte, milk spurting from her breasts. Stench of rotting shellfish, for purple robes. Gorolot, offered an imperious housemaid. Afra, volunteering in lieu of Aia, comfortable harbor for ships. All because Schön craved freedom.

            Well, Schön had lost, whether Afra had mind or not.

            Suddenly Ivo could stand the suspense no longer. He put his hands under Afra's arms, drew her to her feet against him, and kissed her with all the passion he had suppressed for so long. Try that for handling!

            She woke abruptly. She brought her arms up outside his, wedged her stiffened fingers against his cheeks, and shoved back his head. "Get away from me!" she exclaimed angrily.

            Ivo released her with guilty haste. She had not chosen him!

            Then he realized with shivering relief that she thought he was Schön. She had no way to know about the contest result and changeover. He opened his mouth to explain.

            "Don't be ridiculous, Ivo," she snapped. "I can tell you two apart easily. Aside from that, I knew Schön couldn't get me out of there. It had to be you -- or nothing."

            His feeling of stupidity was back in full force. He tried to speak again.

            "You thought if only Schön were gone, everything would be just fine. Boy gets girl, curtain lowers on happy sunset. Sorry -- when I want a lapdog, I'll whistle."

            What had happened? Her dialogue with Schön had suggested that she was in love with Ivo, but now she was treating him with greater contempt than ever before.

            "Schön was right about one thing," she remarked, adjusting her clothing. "You certainly aren't very bright -- and I do dislike stupidity."

            Was she saying she wanted Schön back? That made no sense to him. But if she didn't want Schön and didn't want Ivo --

            Afra faced about and began to walk away, back toward the chamber where the visions had started. Somehow he knew that if he let her go, he would never recover her -- yet he could not act. He had lost her without ever speaking a word.

            Jumps of thousands of light-years, until they stood outside the great disk of the galaxy itself, and returned -- that he remembered clearly, yet he could not bridge the gap of a few paces between two people now. A history of the Solar System, billions of years strong -- yet seconds were undoing him. Where had he gone wrong?

            Approach to the destroyer complex: "It's tracking us!" His foolish jealousy of Harold Groton, returning his concept of the man to the impersonal surname. Afra's excitement at the element display. The final chamber. S'. Wheels on wheels, symbols meshing in "The Symphony." Simultaneous yet chronological adventures of galactic history. Schön: "That means our daughters get dinked." Beatryx: "You were not wrong, Dolora." Harold: "I had thought it was an insult to serve under Drone command." Where had he gone wrong?

            Now Schön had been nullified, Beatryx was dead, Harold was seeking the Traveler, and Afra disliked stupidity. Yet he remained, and so did his responsibilities. Where had he heard that? Promises to keep, and miles to go before...He had to do something for the gallant Groton couple, sundered so unfairly; then --

            But I love you! he cried subvocally at Afra. Imperious she might be, problems she might have -- but underneath that surface beauty was an extraordinary woman. She had fought Schön...

            She continued walking, culottes shaping a trim derriere, bright hair flouncing loose.

            Afra, whose Capricorn history segment had slipped somehow, throwing her instead into a savage personal conflict. Yet that program error had saved her -- and him -- from a dream-state that might have endured until their bodies disintegrated. The normal person did not emerge from that slumber, as Harold and Beatryx had shown. That, apparently, was the final test: only a mind that could survive and finally break the stasis was fit to go free again. The human mind lacked that capability. Even Schön had been trapped.

            Strange, fortunate coincidence, that Afra should have been evicted from that clinging mold. And that she alone, subsequently, should establish a momentary rapport with the supercreature, the Traveler. The Traveler: nerve impulse between galactic cells, whose capabilities spanned from macrocosmic to microcosmic with equal finesse.

            Coincidence? Perhaps the Traveler had touched her intentionally! This was easily within its compass. To nudge her just enough to break the trance, and then again to win a vital point from Schön...and it could not touch Schön himself -- or Ivo! -- because of the mind-block against the destroyer-concept Schön had so carefully arranged. Afra had been the only one available with an open yet sharp enough mind...

            Why? Why interfere at all, this creature with a galaxy to supervise? Could it have seen some hope in her, in humanity? Did it want them to return to Earth with their message of galactic and intergalactic culture? Yet Afra could not return to Earth by herself, and she had turned her back on him.

            At least, he thought with transitory irony, he didn't have to worry about Schön interfering. Geis apart, Schön could not take over again, since Afra wouldn't cooperate with him and the destroyer fields suffused all the galaxy. Schön was barred from space. He, Ivo, could now draw freely on any or all of Schön's talents as required without risking his identity. He could get home. He had only to reduce his personality when actually dealing with the destroyer, protecting his immunity; at other times he could, literally, be a genius.

            Fat consolation, he thought, watching Afra's dainty feet moving. You can use it to fathom why you lost her.

            Yes -- the genius of Schön would clarify that, at least. Ivo reached...sunburst! He understood exactly what Afra was doing.

            "Girl," he said clearly.

            She halted. She had not been walking rapidly and had not yet entered the adjacent chamber. She was still, in the imagery of the recent contest, in Pluto or Neptune. Obsession, obligation -- yet so much more, positive as well as negative.

            "What the cloud doeth," he said, "the Lord knoweth; the cloud knoweth not."

            She turned slowly. "I don't understand."

            "It's a quote from Sidney Lanier. The course of the cloud may be predestined, but Man possesses free will." He had spoken in Russian.

            Her capitulation was as sudden as her awakening. She skipped across the room and threw herself into his arms. "I knew you weren't a cloud, Ivo!" she murmured before she kissed him.

            Further explanation was unnecessary, yet the hard-core Ivo in him ran it through during their extended embrace. Afra had wanted neither the omniscient supercilious Schön nor the stodgy ignorant Ivo. She required compromise: Ivo's personality with Schön's abilities. For neither identity alone represented the complete man. Schön had never grown up, while Ivo had shied away from the exercise of his rightful talents. How could a woman really love half of a schizoid personality?

            But the destroyer had shifted the balance and broken the stalemate, making Ivo the artist. He could unify and control -- and time and experience had made his identity the more fit of the two for human intercourse. A child normally grew into an adult -- and to abolish the adult Ivo in favor of the child Schön would be a foolhardy inequity.

            Thus the personal equation. Boy had not won girl; man had won woman.

            What, now, of Earth? Mankind was a child-culture with adolescent technology; were they to present it with devastating adult technology? Or would it be better to stay clear and allow natural selection to function, as it did elsewhere in the galaxy?

            "What the artist doeth," he murmured, "the Lord knoweth; knoweth the artist not?"