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Title: The Last Two Alive!

Author: Alfred Coppel

Illustrator: Al McWilliams

Release date: March 8, 2021 [eBook #64759]

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST TWO ALIVE! ***




                          THE LAST TWO ALIVE!

                           by ALFRED COPPEL

             Aram Jerrold watched helplessly as Santane's
             beast-rockets screamed into the Void bearing
               madness to the Thirty Suns, and knew that
              this was cosmic Armageddon ... the crimson
               horror of Space-war would smash Galactic
             Civilization utterly and forever! Yet in his
            tortured mind a voice from the past commanded:
              "_You must save something from the ruins!_"

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                     Planet Stories November 1950.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The verdict, thought Aram Jerrold wearily, would be death. The
Supreme Council itself would demand it. He had rebelled against the
Tetrarchy--rebelled senselessly, desperately, without hope of success
or escape--and the reckoning had come. The Government of the Thirty
Suns would demand his life ... more, if the science of the Security
Police were up to it. Aram repressed a shudder. He knew that science
well. No one rose to a position of command in the Thirty Suns Navy or
to membership in the Executive Committee of the Tetrarchy without
respect for the methods of the dread Greens.

The courtroom was dark, a pattern of sombre hues calculated to
impress a prisoner with the futility of hope. It had been weeks since
Jerrold had seen the sun. Weeks of endless interrogation and repeated
narcosynthesis. He had been shunted from Bureau to Bureau, from
Department to Department, each set of cogs in the vast governmental
machinery of the Terminus probing him for evidence of sabotage or
rebellion within its own structure. He had been badgered, beaten,
drugged and threatened. Now, at last, the end of the ordeal seemed
near. There remained only the sentence of death to be passed--the
method and place decided upon--and it would be done with. The ponderous
bureaucracy of the Tetrarchy had wrung him dry, and now it prepared
to cast him aside, satisfied that his rebellion was a purely personal
aberration and not part of a widespread plot against the stability of
galactic tyranny.

The drugs had clouded his vision, giving a nightmare mistiness to the
shadowy courtroom. Jerrold could see that the room was empty but for
the guards and clerks and the black-masked tribunes. It would not do,
of course, to let the people know that one of the chosen masters--a
member of the Executive Committee--had suddenly become an insubordinate
rebel and traitor.

Behind him a door opened, splitting the gloom with a fleeting wedge of
light. The wedge vanished and Aram Jerrold heard again the light, crisp
footsteps. He knew without looking that it was Deve Jennet. She had
been in the courtroom every day, giving testimony, slamming doors in
his face. Doors that might possibly have led to freedom. Every day she
had driven another rivet into the chains of evidence that bound him,
methodically, deliberately.

She passed by him without turning her head and took a seat near the
tribune's dais. Jerrold stared at her through the mist that swam
sickeningly before his eyes. Dimly, the memory of her as she had been
before this nightmare came to him. He remembered her, soft and yielding
in his arms through the long nights of Terminus. Nights filled with
tenderness and longing talk of freedom for the two of them somewhere
beyond the stars.

This was the same woman, but changed. The lustrous dark eyes were the
same, and the full lips. The same pale hair and slim body. But it sat
encased in a severely cut uniform, all femininity gone from it. The
uniform was green. The hated color of the Security Police....

Jerrold had heard again all the words that he had spoken to her through
those nights. Only this time the words had been retold to three masked
judges and their clerk. This time, the words had had a ring of doom.

At first Aram had suffered the tortures of the damned wondering why
Deve had betrayed him. He had known well enough her high connections in
the Supreme Council and he had known that she served as a member of the
Greens. But he had imagined that she loved him, and he had been stupid
enough to trust her. Now, after weeks of ordeal, it seemed to matter no
longer. Jerrold wanted only to rest.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the dais, one of the black-masked figures was speaking. Aram leaned
forward painfully to catch what was being said.

"This court wishes to go on record as favoring a severe reprimand for
the Bureau of Psychometrics personnel involved in the testing of Aram
Jerrold. His inherent instability should have been uncovered long
before he was appointed to the Executive Committee. Only the chance use
of a mental probe on him--at the request of the Security Police--" he
nodded toward Deve Jennet, "--prevented serious inconvenience to the
Government of the Thirty Suns. Such negligence cannot be tolerated in
so vital a Bureau."

He paused while the clerk recorded his remarks, then continued: "Aram
Jerrold, you have been convicted of treason against the Government of
the Thirty Suns. You have been proved guilty of attempting to use your
position as an officer of the Thirty Suns Navy to steal a spacecraft
and escape from the dominance of your government. You have disgraced
your uniform and your high office as a member of the Executive
Committee of the Supreme Council of the Government of the Thirty
Suns--" The hooded man rolled the sonorous phrases off his tongue with
obvious relish. "Have you anything to say before the sentence of the
court is passed?"

Jerrold looked at Deve Jennet. She sat motionless, her body tense
in the green Police uniform. It was hard for Jerrold to speak. The
druggings and violent interrogations had left him weak. Yet a spark of
rebellion remained. Enough to lash out against his tormentors for one
last time.

"I ... I want only to say," he began thickly, "that ... what I have
done ... I would do again, gladly. I was sick of oppression ... tired
of not ... daring even to think a thought of my own. Sick of pompous
bureaucratic tyranny...." Jerrold drew a shuddering breath. "The
Tetrarchy rules thirty star-systems ... but thirty star systems are not
the Universe. Somewhere, I thought ... there must be freedom. My
crime ... was _failure_ ... nothing more!"

"Enough!" The tribune's voice shook with sudden anger. "This court is
not convened to listen to treasonous tirades! The clerk will strike the
prisoner's remarks from the record!"

Darkness flickered momentarily at the edges of Jerrold's field of
vision. He felt spent by his effort at defiance. He forced himself to
stand erect.

"The sentencing will proceed!"

"The prisoner will face the Standard!" intoned the clerk.

       *       *       *       *       *

Aram raised his eyes to the hated symbol on the wall behind the judges'
dais. Long habit made him square his shoulders under the tattered
remains of his blue uniform. He stared up at the Standard of the
Tetrarchy's Spaceship and Sun, despising everything it stood for.

"_Aram Jerrold, traitor and rebel: you are sentenced by this court to
death by slow disintegration!_ For the safety of the Tetrarchy!"

The words fell like stones from the lips of the masked tribune into the
fragile silence of the vaulted chamber.

In spite of himself, Jerrold flinched. Sometimes men survived weeks of
torment under the cancerous rays of the disintegrators....

One of the judges spoke in low tones to his colleagues.

"We have received a request from Kaidor V, gentlemen. Provincial
Governor Santane asks that this sentence be commuted to life
imprisonment on Kaidor V so that the prisoner may be used in some
experimental work now in progress there."

Aram could feel his stomach muscles tightening and the weakness seeping
into his knees. The disintegrators would be preferable to becoming an
experimental animal on Kaidor V. The Kaidor province was the farthest
of the Thirty Suns, and the arsenal of the Tetrarchy. The ghastliest
of the Tetrarchy's weapons came from Kaidor, and they had to be tested
there ... on living men.

"It seems," muttered one of the tribunes pettishly, "that every time
a naval officer is convicted of anything a request comes through from
Kaidor that he be turned over to Santane. One would imagine Governor
Santane is building a navy!" He shuffled the papers before him while
the others waited. "Still," he continued thoughtfully, "it would
be politically unwise to execute this prisoner here on Terminus.
The spacemen of his command are based here and there is no point
in stirring up trouble in the Fleet... I am inclined to recommend
acceptance of this offer to take him off our hands."

"_Objection, sirs!_" Jerrold looked about to see that Deve Jennet was
on her feet, addressing the members of the tribunal.

"As you know, sirs," she was saying crisply, "I have the good fortune
to be one of the lesser members of the Executive Committee in my office
as liaison officer from Security. I feel it only fair to warn you that
the Supreme Council would be extremely displeased if this prisoner
should escape with his life. It is felt that an example must be made of
him. If it is unwise to carry out the sentence here on Terminus, I will
be happy to arrange a transfer to Atmion IV. On the Green planet there
will be no possibility of trouble by Fleet members. I must insist that
you accede to the wishes of the Council. Aram Jerrold must die in the
disintegrators. No other course of action will be acceptable to the
Supreme Council!"

The three judges conferred among themselves and then the senior spoke
again. The tone of his voice indicated all too well the awe in which
the Supreme Council and all its appendages was held by members of the
Judicial Department of the Thirty Suns Government.

"This court was not aware that the Supreme Council had any special
desires concerning the disposition of this case. Had it been known to
us earlier, we would not have considered even for a moment the request
of Provincial Governor Santane."

"The Supreme Council, gentlemen," returned Deve Jennet stiffly, "_has_
an interest in this case, as I have indicated to you. It has been
communicated to you in the proper time and form. I await your action on
it."

"Of course, Leader Jennet, of course. It was not our intention to
question the policies of the Council!" The judge signalled the guards.

"Aram Jerrold is hereby remanded to the custody of the Security Police,
to be transported by first available spaceship to Atmion IV, there to
be put to death in the manner prescribed by Directive 25-A-38 governing
Execution of Convicted Persons Above the Rank of Commander. Remove the
prisoner!"

Aram passed near Deve Jennet as she replied: "It will be so reported,
gentlemen." And then looking somberly at Jerrold she added, "I myself
will go to Atmion IV to see to it that this prisoner is accorded the
treatment he deserves."

Aram stumbled out of the courtroom under guard. Deve's final words rang
strangely in his ears, a perplexing threnody of the dreams they had
shared in the hazy past. He had the odd feeling that in spite of the
things that had passed, the end was not yet....

       *       *       *       *       *

Of the flight out to Atmion, Jerrold remembered almost nothing. The
iron determination that had kept him on his feet during the last days
of his trial failed him at last and the reaction of the druggings he
had suffered hit him ... hard. He writhed in the agonies of addiction
for the duration of the trip out from Terminus. He knew vaguely that he
lay in the prison ship's infirmary, strapped to a bunk. The discomforts
of acceleration and the shift into second-stage flight above light
speed added themselves to his tortures and filled his nightmares with
nauseating spectres. For two weeks Jerrold went through sheer hell as
his drug-saturated system screamed for more narcotics. None were given.

By the time the huge prison ship touched down on the dread world of the
Greens, Aram Jerrold was on his way back. Spent, weak and emaciated,
he heard the landing alarms and knew that he would live to face the
disintegrators.

       *       *       *       *       *

Atmion IV, the only habitable planet of a star-system bizarre and
hateful! Three suns in the smoky sky, air that tasted of brimstone and
ashes. Heavy, deadening gravity. A world of hot rain that fell daily
out of the hazy cloud canopy, a desert at periaston and quagmire at
apastron. Barren ground and a turbulent, sulphuric sea.

The three suns blazed through the overcast as the prison ship settled
into the steaming mud that was the spaceport. Scalding rain sluiced
down the long flanks of the vessel, corrosive and fetid.

Aram Jerrold knew of Atmion IV. No officer in the Fleet did not. It
was a foul planet, a world unwanted by any of the many Bureaus, and
as such the perfect prison world. The planet of the Greens. On all
its vast hulk there was only one settlement. The Green Fortress.
Political exiles and condemned prisoners from all over the Tetrarchy of
the Thirty Suns were brought to the Fortress on Atmion IV. None ever
returned.

Aram remembered that Atmion lay in the Twenty Ninth Decant, only four
light years from Kaidor on the very periphery of the Tetrarchy. These
were the outpost systems, the suns far from mighty Terminus and the
center of the teeming life of the galaxy. These were the hinterlands of
empire, sullen, unknown, unwanted.

The Green Fortress proper stood on a high crag, etched against the
smoky grey of Atmion IV's eternal overcast. Standing in the open port
of the prison ship, Jerrold could see the black bulk of the turreted
stronghold through the curtain of driving rain. The spaceport was a
sea of mud that still boiled in places from the heat of the great
starship's landing jets.

Chained in a long line, the human cargo of the vessel was herded
through the rain and mud toward an electrified wire enclosure. Aram
smiled wryly at that evidence of "Security." What need was there for
it on this world? Where could a prisoner go if he should find himself
on the other side of the wire barrier? It was likely, Jerrold thought,
that there was a Directive on it from Terminus, and that accounted for
the electrified wire.

He estimated that there were perhaps nine hundred men and women in the
human chain that stretched from the starship to the long reception
buildings within the enclosure. The chaff of heterodoxy--cast off by
the single-track machinery of galactic bureaucracy.

The Greens drove the sodden prisoners through the gates without rancor
or interest. It was as though the prisoners had ceased to be human once
they crossed the line that excluded them from the society of free men.

Inside the long, draughty shelters, the prisoners were stripped naked,
men and women alike, run through cleansing water jets, dried, clothed
and photographed. Then they were broken into groups and registered
by Greens sitting in armored cubicles within the walls. There was a
machine-like efficiency to the bureaucratic procedure on this level.
Aram Jerrold had the impression that the operation would continue to
run by sheer momentum should higher authority suddenly try to halt
it....

       *       *       *       *       *

Jerrold presented himself before a Green of about forty, a man with
a thin, tired face and colorless eyes, who codified the information
given him, looking up at the prisoner with no apparent interest. Quite
abruptly, he emerged from his cubicle, signalling another Green to take
his place.

"You," he said to Aram; "come with me."

Jerrold followed the Green out of the reception building and out into
the rain. For a wild moment, Aram had the impulse to try an escape, but
the thought died stillborn. Escape was plainly impossible. There was
simply no place to go--even if he could shake free of his guard and
the others stationed about the enclosure. The prison ship was being
refuelled a short distance from the reception pen, but the valves were
closed and guarded.

Presently Jerrold and his guide reached a shaft imbedded in the side
of the crag, atop which sat the grim Fortress. Aram turned his eyes
upward. The great, bastioned stronghold seemed to crouch on the crest
of the cliff. On the highest turret, a green banner emblazoned with a
golden Spaceship and Sun hung sodden and limp in the falling rain.

With no hesitation, the Green stationed at the guard-post by the shaft
entrance signalled Aram and his guide through. There was a short walk
up a spiralling ramp and then they stood before what appeared to be
simply a blank wall. Jerrold stared in perplexity as his guard took a
bit of metal from his tunic and held it to the wall.

"Isotope," said the guard shortly, "It acts as a key to the scanner ...
below."

Before Aram could question him, the section of wall slid back
soundlessly and they stepped into a tubecar. Quickly, the Green set up
a complicated series of stops on the tubecar controls and the vehicle
started downward with a rush.

Aram clutched at the man for support. Something was not as it should
be. Then, quite suddenly, he realized what it was. The tubecar was
travelling _down_ ... and the Fortress lay above!

"Where are we going?" he asked cautiously.

The Green shook his head.

"Aren't the condemned cells above in the Fortress?"

"Be quiet. Talk is dangerous!"

"But...."

"Be quiet," the Green said again. "You'll understand soon enough. We
have to be careful. Not all of us here are of the Group." He turned
his back on Jerrold.

Aram's head was spinning. What was there on Atmion that a Green need
fear? And what was this ... Group?

With a wisdom born of his long imprisonment, Aram Jerrold decided
to hold his peace. What would be would be, and it was becoming
increasingly plain that he was about to learn of things that he had not
dreamed existed.

After what seemed to be an interminable period, the tubecar began to
slow. The hum of atomics died and the car came to a stop. They must
be well below the level of the Fortress now, reflected Jerrold, and
very likely under the sea. The panels slid away and in front of them
stretched a long white corridor lighted by dim bulbs set in the curved
ceiling.

"There are miles of tubeways down here," said the guard, "and only the
isotope key gives entrance. The central pattern on the tubecar has been
altered, too ... for the safety of the Group. Follow me."

At the end of the corridor, a steelite door barred further progress.
The Green produced his isotope key again and touched it to the metal.

"A word of advice," he said to Jerrold coolly. "Listen and believe.
A great many risks have been taken and a vast amount of work done to
bring you this far."

He leaned forward and shoved the metal door open. Within lay a brightly
lit chamber. The glare of it hurt Jerrold's eyes and he stood a moment,
blinking on the threshold. Slowly, as his eyes accustomed themselves to
the light, Aram became aware of a group of men and women who watched
him impassively. There were a few in Fleet uniform. One or two of them
casual acquaintances he had thought lost in space or imprisoned by the
Greens. There were others in prison garb, and here and there he could
see the dread color of the Security Police. His heart began to pound.
Another trap? But why?

One slight figure in green stood a little apart, watching him through
shadowed eyes. Jerrold felt the breath catch in his throat.

It was Deve Jennet!

       *       *       *       *       *

With a cry Deve ran to him. Jerrold felt a surge of mixed fury and
desire. Almost defensively, he lifted his hand and struck Deve across
the face.

She gasped and stepped back, eyes suddenly bright with tears, a thin
streak of blood marking her pale face. The gathered strangers muttered
angrily. Aram turned to stare at them; his face set and grim. Anger was
pulsing within him, a deep, consuming anger born of the tortures he had
suffered--he looked at the stunned girl--because of _her_.

"Oh, Aram ... what have they done to you?" whispered Deve.

"What have _they_ done to me?" he asked thickly. "_They?_ Now tell me
you had no part in it!" He was hemmed in, lost in a sea of treachery
and formless dangers. For a few moments he had dared to let himself
hope...! And this was the end of it. Deve again. And another trap!
"What more do you want from me? Is this just entertainment for you? To
raise my hopes and then step on them again? Maybe you'd like to open my
veins and have a drink of my blood?"

"Aram ... _stop it_!"

"You lying, cheating wench! Was it you that brought me to the Fortress?
Was it you that spilled all my stupid dreams to those black ghouls who
tried me?" he asked bitterly.

"Yes! Yes, it was me!" sobbed Deve, "but can you listen to me? Aram, I
beg you! Listen to me!"

Aram felt some of the rage draining out of him. He stared at Deve in
confusion. There were tears streaking her face. There was no reason for
her to cry now, he thought heavily. Her job was done. Done well.

"I had to do it that way, Aram. You can't know how I've suffered for
you ... every minute of the time. But it had to be done, I swear it!
There was no other way I could get you here to the Group! If I had let
you go your own way, you'd have been killed, Aram. I'd have died with
you gladly, but there are other things that must be done. And we can
live, Aram! Do you understand me? We can live!"

Jerrold looked about him. The group had gathered around him. Someone
said: "Listen to Deve Jennet, Jerrold!"

Dave stepped close to him again, her face upturned. He felt again the
old desire for her, even here--now. Did it matter that she had betrayed
him? Did anything matter any more to him? The last ebb of fury flowed
out of him, leaving him silent and relaxed at last. If this was a
trap ... what did it matter? He had nothing to lose now.

He realized quite suddenly then that he wanted very much to believe
what Deve said. He wanted it so badly that he reacted defensively, not
daring to let himself be hurt by her again. Very cautiously, he let
down the barriers that he had erected against her since the very first
day of the trial when he had known for the first time that she had been
his betrayer.

Deve sensed the change in him and laid a hand on his arm. "You ... you
will listen now?" she asked quietly.

Aram nodded, his eyes fixed on her face. The bruise on her lips was
dark and painful looking.

"I heard of your arrest the day it happened, Aram," she said. "I knew
what the end of it would be if they could find no real evidence against
you--you'd have been subjected to an extensive mental probing that
would have left you ... an ... an idiot. That's true. You know it is."

Aram nodded agreement.

"You would have been lost to _us_," Deve said, "and Aram, we need you!
Need you desperately!"

Aram looked about him in confusion. Still weak from his bout with the
drugs, he was having difficulty marshalling his thoughts.

"Who are you people?" he demanded. "_What_ are you?"

       *       *       *       *       *

A grizzled naval officer stepped forward. Aram recognized him as Kant
Mikal, recorded in the headquarters of the Thirty Suns Navy as having
been lost in space two years earlier while on a routine exploration
into the Thirtieth Decant.

"We have no name, other than 'the Group,'" he said simply. "We have as
our purpose the prevention of a disastrous war ... possibly even the
destruction of civilization as we have known it."

"You don't make any sense," Jerrold said confusedly. "What is there
in the galaxy that can threaten the Tetrarchy with a war such as you
describe?"

"There is a very real and present danger, Aram Jerrold," Mikal said
flatly. "_Santane_...."

Aram felt a chilling premonition. Santane again. He remembered the
testy words of the black judge who had condemned him: "One would think
Santane were building a fleet...."

Mikal seemed to read his thoughts. "Yes," he said, "Provincial Governor
Santane."

"I don't ask you to join us for the sake of the Tetrarchy, Aram,"
pleaded Deve Jennet earnestly, "or because of any personal relationship
between you and me. If the Thirty Suns Government knew of the Group,
and of the manipulations we've performed to get equipment and personnel
for our mission, not one of us would be left alive by the Greens. We've
penetrated the highest circles, we've subverted loyal people. We've
used every trick and subterfuge to get the men and women we need out
here without giving away our secret." She smiled ruefully. "We've even
had men arrested and condemned so that we could gather them here on
Atmion IV...."

Aram felt a terrible load being lifted from his shoulders. No matter
what happened next, it was good to know that Deve had not betrayed him
as he had thought.

"The Tetrarchy would not allow the existence of such a unit as the
Group for a moment. Every hour that passes increases our danger. But
we must finish our mission, Aram; we can do nothing else!" Deve said
fervently.

"If Santane overthrows the Tetrarchy," said Kant Mikal bleakly, "the
dark ages will descend. The man is mad for power, cruel and intelligent
enough to hold it."

Aram thought swiftly. Santane was a relative unknown back on Terminus,
was merely one of the thirty civil servants that held the Governorships
of the Thirty star-systems making up the Tetrarchy. The Tetrarchy
was a tyrannous bureaucracy ... but at least it was not a one-man
government. As bad as it was, Santane's iron hand would be infinitely
worse.

"But how," protested Jerrold. "With what? How can Santane hope to
withstand the whole of the Tetrarchy's power?"

"As you have guessed," Mikal said, "he is building a fleet; new
construction and better than anything in the Thirty Suns Navy. However,
if it were only that, there would be no real need for us to interfere.
The Fleet is antiquated, as you know, but able to muster a force of
more than ten thousand first line battlecraft. No matter how good
Santane's ships might be, they could not handle an attack by that kind
of numbers. The Kaidor system would take a terrible beating, and most
probably Kaidor V would be bombed to rubble. That would be the end
of it. The destruction would be strictly localized in the Thirtieth
Decant. But there is, unfortunately more ... much more."

"Aram," exclaimed Deve, "it's horrible!"

"Santane has developed interstellar guided missiles, Jerrold," said
Kant Mikal. "Faster than any Fleet vessel and impossible to intercept.
But that isn't the worst of it. It's the stuff he has developed for
these missiles to carry...."

"Biological weapon?" asked Aram with a sinking feeling in his heart.

Mikal nodded. "Follow me," he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

Aram Jerrold followed the grizzled naval officer into an antechamber.
With Deve Jennet at his side he let Mikal lead him down a narrow,
zig-zagging ramp into a stone room below the meeting hall. The place
was dimly lit and there was a smell in the air that reminded Aram of
a zoological garden. A strong wire mesh had been stretched across the
room to divide it roughly into two sections. In the corner of the
interior division, a figure squatted, gnawing on a piece of bone. The
sound of its teeth scraping the bits of flesh off the shank made Aram
shudder.

Mikal led him up to the wire.

"That," he said, "was a man. Santane's weapon did what you see there."

Jerrold's stomach muscles knotted. The figure in the cage was roughly
human, but it squatted on greatly foreshortened hams and waved long,
hairy arms at them angrily. The forehead sloped back from a face
completely bestial, and as Aram stood there, sickened and fascinated,
the hirsute apparition flung the chewed bone at him and bared its fangs
in a blood-chilling howl.

Aram turned away, white-faced. "Is ... is there no cure for this
thing?" he asked.

Mikal shook his head. "We have been able to develop none. This was
an agent of ours who was taken on Kaidor IV by Santane's raiders. We
tried to establish a surveillance point there and failed--the planet is
hardly livable--and Santane has been able to maintain a very complete
coverage of the two planets nearest his capital. The inoculation was
made on Kaidor V, and Santane sent him back here, thinking him an
agent of the Greens. He is laying the foundations of his psychological
attack, you see. A few cases like this, and then the shocker--the
announcement that every planet in the Thirty Suns can expect an attack
by guided missiles loaded with that virus unless his demands are
acceded to."

"But surely there must be a specific for this thing," pursued Aram. "It
would be valueless as a weapon unless there is."

"The virus attacks the higher cerebral centers first," explained
Mikal. "Then the endocrine balance. First memory goes. Our medical
people believe that Santane _has_ an antidote for this thing, but in
very limited amounts. They tell me that if caught soon enough, it can
be stopped. But within hours after infection permanent damage to the
higher nervous system is done. They suspect that even if a very small
amount of serum is introduced into the body after infection, _physical_
damage can be completely avoided. What the effect on the mind might be,
they do not care to say. Complete loss of memory certainly. A lessening
of the ability to relearn the forgotten is also probable."

The creature behind the wire howled again, plaintively now.

"Let's get out of here," breathed Deve faintly.

       *       *       *       *       *

"You see what Santane will use to seize the Tetrarchy," Mikal went on
when they were once again in the meeting hall. "He imagines that the
mere threat of it will subdue the Supreme Council."

"But that's wrong!" exclaimed Aram: "The Tetrarchy will fight! There
has never been a bureaucracy in the history of mankind that didn't
imagine itself invincible!"

"Yes, the Tetrarchy will fight," agreed Mikal. "And a war of absolute
destruction will engulf the Thirty Suns. Unless...."

"Unless what?" demanded Jerrold.

"Unless Santane can be convinced of that. Unless he can be prevailed
upon to give up his ambition and content himself with being a balance
for the rest of the Tetrarchy's power. Where there's one power only,
tyranny results invariably. But if there are two, co-equal and
autonomous, then they must compete for the favor of the people. Only
in such a way can the civilization of the Thirty Suns survive, and the
slavish lot of the people of the inhabited worlds be improved.

"That, then, is the purpose of the Group. We are pledged to stop--if
we can--the impending struggle for power between Santane and the
Tetrarchy. Savagery is the price we will pay for failure!"

       *       *       *       *       *

In the days that followed, Aram Jerrold grew to despise the name of
Santane more than he had ever despised the Tetrarchy. Deep under the
turbulent sea of Atmion IV, he rested--recuperating from his ordeals
and making ready for the time when the small band of peacemakers would
move to forestall Santane's bid for galactic dominion.

The plan, as Kant Mikal outlined it, was simple and direct. In the
colony under the sea there were forty-five men and women. These were
mainly scientists and soldiers who had incurred the wrath of the
Government of the Thirty Suns, though there were some, like Leader
Deve Jennet of the Security Police, who carried on a double existence
on Atmion IV, living both above in the Green Fortress and in the
tunnels....

Of the more than three thousand Greens stationed on the prison planet,
some fifty knew of the Group, and of the fifty, perhaps ten had access
to the secret quarters. These Greens, at great personal risk, supplied
the scientists and workers of the Group with the materials needed for
their medical and physical researches.

A falsified report of Aram Jerrold's death under the disintegrators
was sent to Terminus under the personal cachet of Leader Deve Jennet
of the Security Police; so for the first time in many weeks Aram had a
semblance of peace.

Mikal's plan was for the Group to divide into two units. One, the
larger of the two, would go--at the proper time--to Kaidor V, there to
establish contact with the Provincial Governor and try by any means to
dissuade him from his plan to defy the Thirty Suns Government. There
were several among the Group who felt that such an approach to Santane
would succeed where harsher methods might well fail in the face of
the Thirtieth Decant's hidden power. It was Mikal's plan to lead this
delegation himself in a starship now being fitted in the central pit of
the tunnel maze.

But Kant Mikal did not delude himself that Santane could be won by
arguments. Another expedition to the Kaidor Sun would be dispatched at
the same time. A small two-man destroyer that had been rendered--Mikal
claimed--"undetectable," would leave the Atmion system with the larger
vessel and land on Kaidor III, a planet uninhabited save for a few
bands of degenerated experimental subjects dumped there by Santane's
biological ecologists. Mikal took care to point out that Kaidor III had
two large land-masses, and the landing by the two members of the Group
selected for that duty would be made on the land-mass unoccupied by the
unfortunate subhumans.

This expedition would remain on Kaidor III to await word from the first
as to the success or failure of the Group's plan. Failing to hear from
them, or hearing of failure, the small ship would proceed to Kaidor V
and try to wrest the secret of the virus weapon from Santane. Plainly
enough, the second expedition into the Thirtieth Decant would be a
last, spasmodic attempt to save something from the ruins of galactic
war. That phrase stayed with Jerrold as he listened to Kant Mikal. _To
save something from the ruins._ That, he told himself, might well be
the best the Group could accomplish with their meager resources.

       *       *       *       *       *

During the hours that Deve was working in the Fortress, Jerrold
wandered freely through the maze of underground tunnels and chambers
that the Group had built. The original catacombs had been built a
thousand years earlier, and the men and women of the Group had expanded
and refurbished the forgotten maze to suit their purposes. Jerrold was
continually amazed at what they had been able to accomplish with so
little at their command and under a shroud of almost complete secrecy.

Life in the tunnels centered on the central pit--the spaceport. This,
as Kant Mikal explained with considerable pride, was connected with the
surface by a series of locks that emerged through the bottom of the sea
in the offshore shallows down the coast from the Green Fortress. Under
cover of night, a spaceship could emerge from the tunnels and lift into
space without arousing the garrison of Greens who served on Atmion IV
never dreaming of the quiet life beneath their feet.

Two spacecraft rested in their cradles in the pit, a medium sized
merchantman, the "Star Cluster," and a Fleet scout-destroyer,
"Serpent." Jerrold recognized both vessels as craft that had long ago
been reported lost in space in Admiralty headquarters back on Terminus.
The Serpent still carried its Fleet insigne of the Spaceship and Sun,
a reminder to Aram of his former life and of the immense power of the
Thirty Suns Navy. He knew only too well the position of the Group in
the coming silent struggle between the galactic Tetrarchy and the
rebellious Santane. They were the smallest, weakest corner in a vicious
triangular madness that threatened to smash the entire civilization of
the Thirty Suns.

His personal happiness at being with Deve Jennet again, and free
of the haunting pain of her supposed betrayal, was mitigated by a
realization of the dangers they would soon face when the Group's
quixotic plan went into operation. Nor were these forebodings lessened
when Kant Mikal informed him that he and Deve were the unanimous
choices of the Group for the second--and secret--expedition into the
Kaidor Province.

"It will be your purpose," Kant Mikal told him again, "to save
something from the wreckage if all else fails...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Aram lay comfortably under the bank of sun-lamps in the underground
infirmary. The days of rest and treatment had brought him back into
condition again, and he felt fit and ready for action. He had begun to
chafe at the inactivity, but Kant Mikal insisted that the time to move
out against Kaidor had not come, and Jerrold was forced to be content
with the older man's judgment.

Deve sat with him in the infirmary, her slim body golden under the
glowing lamps. Sitting near her, watching the graceful sweep of her
pale hair as it brushed her shoulders, Aram was filled with a sense of
well-being and contentment.

"Aram," asked Deve, "have you had time to examine the Serpent? Are you
familiar with that class of ship?"

"I spent three years on Periphery Patrol with Serpent class scouts,
Deve," murmured Aram sleepily. "There won't be any trouble...." He
stretched himself and sat up. "But there's one thing I'd like more
information on ... if I can be trusted with it."

"Aram! We trust you! You know we do ..." protested Deve.

"Kant Mikal told me the Serpent was ... undetectable. In all my
years with the Fleet, I never heard of a spaceship that could not be
detected."

"Avon Marsh--one of our scientists--has developed an energy shield,
Aram."

"That's nothing new, Deve," said Aram. "The Fleet vessels have had them
for years. They use them against attack by ray weapons of all kinds."

"But this reaches into the highest frequencies," Deve explained. "It
shunts all radiation around the ship. Of course, it can't be used
during second order flight above light speed, but it wouldn't be of any
value then, anyway."

"You mean it shunts _all_ radiation around the ship? All? Even light?"
demanded Jerrold with sudden interest.

"Yes. At close observational ranges it results in a slight
distortion--like a very clear lens, but--"

"Then the ship is ... invisible?" Aram asked incredulously.

Deve Jennet smiled. "Yes, among other things. And it prevents a radio
echo being sent back to a detector, too."

       *       *       *       *       *

Aram sank back thoughtfully. An invisible ship! His spaceman's mind
toyed with the thought. It was like something from a naval officer's
dream fantasies. A battleship so equipped could very nearly rule the
plenum...! But Deve's next words cut that dream short.

"The field is so limited, though," she said, "that only a two-man scout
can be equipped with it. And since the shield works two ways, the
occupants of the ship are blind. Nothing outside the ship itself can be
seen."

Jerrold was about to reply when Kant Mikal burst into the room. His
grey hair was matted with blood, and his face was pale and drawn with
pain and anxiety.

"I should have listened to you, Jerrold," he breathed heavily. "We
should have moved out long ago!"

"Kant! You're hurt," cried Deve.

Mikal gestured impatiently. "It's nothing! We have to get out
immediately! Get ready...!"

Jerrold and Deve were on their feet, reaching for their cloaks.

"What's happened?" asked Aram.

"The Greens have found the tunnel entrance. I think they must have
caught one of our topside people with a mental probe, I don't know for
sure. But there's fighting in the tube-shafts now. We have to get to
the ships!"

Aram cursed. "Are there any weapons nearby?"

The grey haired officer shook his head. "None. Only the medical
instruments here."

Aram ransacked the wall cabinets and produced a single small scalpel.
"This will have to do," he muttered.

"If we can reach the pit," said Kant Mikal, "the steelite doors may
give us enough time to get clear. They're disintegrator-resistant."

"Let's go," said Aram tensely. "Ready?"

Deve and Mikal nodded and followed him as he opened the door to the
corridor and stepped out. The tunnel was deserted, but there were
muffled sounds of fighting coming through the ventilators. Aram
sprinted toward the pit, his bare feet soundless on the stone floor.
Deve and Mikal ran silently beside him.

As they came to a turn in the tube, a single Green seemed to appear out
of nowhere. Aram had a fleeting glimpse of a pistol being raised and he
felt the hot, searing touch of a graze as he launched himself bodily at
the man.

There was a crashing roar as the tetrol shell exploded harmlessly
against the stone wall of the tunnel, sending echoes reverberating down
the long passageway. Aram caught the Green in the pit of the stomach
with the full force of his charge. The man doubled up painfully,
dropping his weapon to the floor. Aram rolled to his feet, catlike.
The Green roared with rage and lunged at him. Aram stepped under the
attack and brought his two clenched fists down on the back of the man's
neck. The Green staggered and spun about, catching Aram in a vise-like
embrace. The policeman was huge, and as his arms closed about Aram's
lighter frame, Aram could feel his ribs being crushed. His hand closed
on the scalpel he had thrust into the waistband of his shorts. He
raised it high and drove it hard into the man's broad back. The Green
stiffened. With an incredulous expression, he released Aram and toppled
to the stone floor.

Aram leaned against the wall of the tunnel, panting, sickened. His
hands were red with blood. From somewhere down the tunnel came the
sound of booted feet clattering on the stones. Suddenly another Green
rounded the turn, an energy rifle in his hands. Aram straightened
for the expected attack, but the Green stopped abruptly, his head
vanishing into a red smear as another crashing roar echoed down the
corridor. As he sank to the floor, Aram turned to see Kant Mikal
lowering the first Green's still smoking pistol.

"Let's keep going," Mikal muttered breathlessly.

Stopping only to pick up the fallen Green's rifle, Aram, Kant Mikal and
Deve ran on toward the pit.

"Will the others try to make the spaceport?" gasped Jerrold as they ran.

"There's nowhere else to go," returned Mikal simply.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Greens had not completely occupied the tunnels, for they met no
more opposition. The sounds of fighting had stopped, though, as they
burst into the large chamber that housed the spacecraft, and Aram
realized that the Greens were gathering their forces for an attempt to
prevent the Group's escape in the vessels. Aram looked about him with
a sick heart. Of the original forty-five that had been in the tunnels
before the attack, only ten besides himself and Deve had reached the
pit. The others, they told him, had been killed or captured by the
Greens, and one of them must have been forced to tell of the spaceships
and the plan of escape through the locks.

The steelite doors of the pit were closed, and the remnants of the
Group straggled aboard the Star Cluster. Kant Mikal took immediate
command of the ship and made ready for the perilous passage through the
locks to the sea above. He laid a hand on Aram's shoulder and spoke
with feeling. "This isn't the way I planned it, Jerrold, but we must do
the best we can. Good luck!"

Aram helped rig the Star Cluster for flight and then stepped down onto
the floor of the pit. He realized only too well, as he stood with Deve
alone on the floor of the vast chamber, that they would have to wait
until the heavy Star Cluster had cleared the locks before they could
blast free of the cavern in the Serpent.

He helped Deve through the valve of the small scout ship and hoisted
himself up, crouching in the open lock with the dead Green's energy
rifle, ready to pick off the first Green to come through the door. The
Greens had brought their disintegrators into play, and within minutes
the door would reach its limit of endurance. The steelite panels
already glowed red....

The Star Cluster lifted from its cradle with a hissing roar that set
the smaller Serpent to trembling. The first lock opened above it and
it was gone into the black maw of the vertical shaft, its tail-flare
vanishing in the stygian darkness. The lock did not close, and Aram
Jerrold breathed a silent message of thanks to Kant Mikal who had left
it open to ease the Serpent's escape.

"How long will it take them to clear the remaining locks?" Jerrold
asked Deve anxiously.

Deve divined his thoughts, and shook her head. "More time than it will
take the Greens to cut through that door!"

Aram was struck with an idea. "The shield, Deve! The energy shield!"

For a moment hope lighted her face, but it quickly faded. "There
is a time-lag when the shield is deactivated, Aram," she said. "If
we use it now, we won't be able to operate the locks in time. They
are radio-controlled from inside the ship and the shield stops all
radiation ... both ways!"

"Then we'll ram the locks!"

"Will the ship stand it?"

"I don't know, Deve, but it's our only chance. If we can confuse them
just long enough to get under way, we may make it. Show me how the
shield is energized."

Deve shrugged and sat down before the control panel. Her fingers
flashed lightly over the banks of switches. A low whining of generators
started deep in the vitals of the small starship. Aram, watching the
process, glanced through the ports at the melting steelite door of the
cavern, and he was amazed to see the scene fade before his eyes into a
murky grayness.

"They can't see us now," Deve Jennet said with a slow smile, "and we
can't see them."

"Let's go," breathed Aram.

       *       *       *       *       *

He hurriedly began rigging the Serpent for flight, warming the jets,
energizing the pumps and aerators. He gave silent thanks for the
rigid training of the Thirty Suns Navy, for his hands automatically
and swiftly found the proper instruments and controls. Gyros began
their ascending crescendo, whining in strident unison with the shield
generators to shape a harmonic pattern that pulsed in the eardrums and
set the teeth on edge. Accumulators filled slowly, relays clicked shut
as the Serpent poised itself for flight.

A harsh, thumping sound made Aram Jerrold pause. He cursed bitterly
and resumed his work. The Greens, of course, were not fools. They
could not see the Serpent, nor, presumably, had they ever encountered
an invisible craft before. But having melted down the steelite portal
at last and flooded into the vast pit, they could hear the Serpent's,
myriad warnings of impending takeoff, and they must have begun raking
the pit with projectile fire. Some of the shots were finding the
invisible Serpent, and Aram knew that the destroyer's light armor could
not long withstand a shelling.

"Deve! Has Mikal had time to get the Star Cluster clear of the locks
now?" Jerrold shouted at the girl over the whine of machinery.

Deve Jennet had heard the projectiles too. She nodded her head and
braced herself against the navigation table. "Let's go!" she shouted
back.

With pounding heart, Aram Jerrold lifted the Serpent off the floor
of the pit. Blindly, he let the invisible starship nose into the
open shaft above. He knew that the moment the Greens realized their
quarry was gone, they would begin firing blindly up into the vertical
tunnel above them. If one shot should hit the jets...! Aram shuddered.
The destroyer would come hurtling down out of the shaft to smashing
destruction on the floor of the pit. He held his breath and eased the
power forward. The Serpent responded eagerly, leaping up the mile-long
tunnel....

Ahead lay the second set of locks and then the shallows of the sea.
The small starship careened upward, scraping its flanks on the smooth
metal of the shaft. Aram sat frozen before the controls. A thousand
questions burned in his mind, and there were no sure answers for any of
them.

He couldn't be sure that Mikal had gotten the Star Cluster free. He
might at this moment be driving the Serpent into the atomic tail-flare
of the larger ship. He did not know whether or not the small destroyer
could withstand the impact of the locks ... or the sea itself. Still,
he drove the ship upward and outward, the automatics set to continue
the same suicidal course should his own human hands falter or fail.

He shouted for Deve to strap herself to the deck rings near the
navigation table and make ready for the impact. Time seemed to slow
down to a crawling pace. The breath came harshly in his throat, and
sweat coursed down his naked back. His bare feet and legs felt cold and
clammy....

He was not ready when it came. The first rending screech of tearing
metal filled the tiny control room and the instrument panel came
smashing up to meet him. He heard a whooshing roar and the scream of
protesting gyros. He heard Deve cry out as her bindings ripped loose,
and then blackness seemed to splash up out of the control panel and
engulf him....

       *       *       *       *       *

Jerrold woke. His head was pounding painfully and his lips felt mashed
and bruised. The strap that had held him to the pilot's seat had
broken, and he lay across the instrument panel in a welter of glass
shards from shattered dials. The instruments were smeared with
blood ... his blood, Aram realized numbly. He put a hand to his face,
and it came away sticky and red.

The atomics throbbed, and the dials told him that the Serpent was still
under way. The high pitched hissing of escaping air attested to the
damage, but it also told him that the ship was in space ... and clear
of Atmion IV.

Jerrold got dizzily to his feet and looked about for Deve. She lay
crumpled in a corner under a chart-locker, bruised and scratched by
the impact of the crash. She moaned slightly as Aram picked her up and
carried her to the pilot's chair.

Red alarm lights glared at him from several points on the panel,
showing that five forward compartments had been crumpled and ruptured
by the ramming of the locks. The pressure in the ship was low enough
to add to his discomfort. Methodically, fighting off the dizziness,
Aram sealed off the leaky compartments and started the aerators to
build up the pressure. The greyness beyond the parts indicated that the
energy shield was still operating. The Serpent was traveling in slow
first-stage flight toward Kaidor, four and one half light years distant.

"Aram!"

Jerrold turned to see that Deve had opened her eyes and was staring at
him, horrified. He tried to grin reassuringly at her, but his bruised
lips succeeded only in grimacing grotesquely through the bloody smear
of his face.

Deve got to her feet, found the surgical kit that all Fleet vessels
carried and set to work mending the damage. Aram was glad to find that
aside from his battered lips, he had only a long scalp cut along his
hair-line where the instrument panel had tried to decapitate him. The
kit contained balms and soothing anaesthetics, and presently both Deve
and Jerrold were patched and cleansed of blood and dirt.

There were coveralls in the lockers, and spaceboots; and a hot drink
from the robot galley added to their rising spirits. They had escaped
a force of the best the Thirty Suns Government could throw against
them and they were free of Atmion IV. Their ship was damaged, but
serviceable ... and they were together.

Deve cut the energy shield and Aram took star-shots to reckon their
position. If the Greens had chased them in spacecraft, their long
flight under the shield had certainly lost the pursuit, for the space
behind them toward Atmion IV was clear. The three stars of the system
blazed below them and Aram pointed the ship at the spot where the
yellow Kaidor Sun lay just under the range of visibility, shifting
into second-stage flight. The three suns of Atmion streaked into a
polychromatic blur, and the Serpent plunged through the interstellar
night toward the Thirtieth Decant and the unknown.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a star-system of ten planets. Aram Jerrold could see clearly
that, as was generally the case, one of them was a ringed giant. Under
planetary first-stage drive, he brought the small starship down into
the system's ecliptic plane. At a distance of one light day, as the
Serpent passed the outermost planet, the energy shield was reactivated.

During the days of the trip from the Twenty Ninth Decant and the Atmion
Suns, no word had come from Kant Mikal and his party aboard the Star
Cluster. Both Jerrold and Deve Jennet had pondered the advisability
of trying to establish contact with the larger ship, but finally they
decided to maintain radio silence. Aram felt it inadvisable to risk
detection of the Serpent so close to Santane's stronghold.

Instead, they resolved to stick to the original plan as outlined by
Kant Mikal back on Atmion IV--landing on the third planet of the Kaidor
Sun and there awaiting word from the Star Cluster. Meanwhile, Aram
could attempt to repair the damage caused the Serpent by the ramming of
the locks.

On a dead-reckoning course, Jerrold guided the small spaceship sunward.
The peaceful pleasure of the days in space was forgotten now, forced
out of his mind by the nearness of Kaidor V and its hellish spawn of
destruction. Thinking of the poor creature he had seen in the tunnels
back on Atmion IV, Aram was taken with a sick chill. Here, under the
alien light of Kaidor Sun, the virus that had degenerated what had once
been a man lay quiescent in the sleek shells of uncounted interstellar
missiles, ready to leap out and away and carry its mind-destroying
power to all the inhabited worlds of the Thirty Suns. Jerrold knew that
the use of such a weapon would mean disaster. If war came, it would be
a war of stellar giants, smashing planets and minds alike in a hideous
carnival of death and savagery. The spawn of the Kaidor Sun meant
ruin....

As yet, Aram reflected with faint hope, there had been no break.
Provincial Governor Santane was still, as far as anyone outside the
Thirtieth Decant knew, a loyal civil servant of the Thirty Suns
bureaucracy. The Special Intelligence reports that clicked methodically
through the Serpent's subspace communicator gave no hint of rebellion
against the banner of the Spaceship and Sun in the Kaidor system. It
was possible, too, thought Jerrold, that the Group under Kant Mikal
could convince Santane of the folly of open defiance. But even as the
thoughts formed in his mind, doubt grew. Kant Mikal had said that
Santane had already stopped weapons shipments to the rest of the
Thirty Suns. He had no such authority. It would take some time for
an investigation to be activated through the ponderous bureaucratic
procedures of the Tetrarchy, but investigation there would definitely
be ... and Santane could have nothing in his mind but war with the
Thirty Suns Government to have taken such a risk. Kaidor Province was
the scientific arsenal of the Tetrarchy, and as such strategically
valuable beyond its intrinsic worth. It would not be too difficult,
Aram realized, to imagine that the man who ruled Kaidor could rule the
Tetrarchy. Only it wasn't so. No one system could muster enough power
to crush the Thirty Suns without being smashed to rubble itself in the
process. A man who had served in a galactic Fleet could understand
that. But a man who had served only as a governor could not, and _that_
was the danger....

As a naval officer, Aram Jerrold knew something that Santane did not.
He knew that vast navies will fight and destroy long after the hope of
victory has gone.

If war came, there would _be_ no victory. There would be only galactic
disaster....

       *       *       *       *       *

With the energy shield off, and under reduced power, the Serpent came
down into the atmosphere of Kaidor III. The planet's satellite lay,
like a crescent of silver, in the dark blue, star-flecked sky of the
stratosphere.

Beneath them, the vast curving surface of the planet flattened as the
starship sank lower, the mottled blues and greens and browns taking
shape of oceans, islands and continents. The sky grew lighter--a pale
blue--as the Serpent crossed the twilight line and slanted down toward
the surface of the turbulent sea.

Scud clouds raced across the sky and light rain pattered against the
ports of the slowly moving spaceship. Quite suddenly the squall passed,
and the Serpent hung above a sea of brilliant blues and greens, frothed
with white-caps.

Deve watched through the ports, enraptured. "Look, Aram! Look at the
colors in that sea!"

Side by side they watched the play of colors in the ocean, fascinated
by the swirling grace and chromatic wonder of the waves.

In the far distance lay the low silhouette of land. Jerrold let the
Serpent move toward it, keel skimming the dancing white crowns of the
sea.

There were a few graceful sea-birds with leathery wings and brightly
plumed breasts, and there was life in the sea. Deve and Jerrold could
see schools of lithe shapes flashing silver beneath the water. But the
land itself was silent. The white sand of a curving beach came up out
of the distance to meet them. Beyond lay green rolling hills and wooded
slopes bright with flowers, and farther into the glare of the morning
sun great snow-capped mountains reared their jagged spines against the
blue in the sky.

"Aram ... it's beautiful!" the girl breathed. "It's the world we
dreamed of finding...."

Jerrold remembered the nights they had shared back on mighty Terminus.
He recalled their idle dreams of a world beyond the farthest stars
where they could be free. This, he felt, was such a world.

Deve turned around suddenly to face him. There was longing in her
eyes--a look of wistfulness that filled him with tenderness.

"We ... we must never forget this world, Aram," she said. "Perhaps one
day we can come here...." She let her voice sink low. "Oh, Aram! If
we could only stay here! If we could just forget everything but this
lovely, peaceful world!"

Aram Jerrold thought of Santane and the threatening clouds of war.
He thought of the mighty, senseless civilization of the Thirty
Suns--oblivious to the dangers that threatened to engulf it. Quite
suddenly he hated it all. Hated it more than he had ever despised
it when it had tortured and persecuted him. He felt trapped by his
unasked-for responsibilities to the culture that had condemned him.
But trapped he was, and he knew it. Even hating it, he could not let a
galactic civilization vanish without trace and refuse to lift a hand to
save it ... _to save something from the wreckage_.

Kant Mikal's words came back to him. Pressing, insistent, demanding.

He took Deve in his arms. "I'd want nothing more than to stay here ...
with you," he said gently. "But we'd never be safe if Santane ruled the
Tetrarchy. He'd never leave a paradise like this alone...."

"I know that," said Deve, sighing. "But maybe someday...." She broke
off. "I'm so tired, Aram."

Jerrold thought of how long this girl had been fighting--in secret, in
constant danger of her life--against the menace of an interregnum of
savagery in the galaxy. It made him want to kill Santane with his bare
hands and smash the Tetrarchy into cosmic rubble!

But it was no good. A responsibility had fallen onto Deve's shoulders
and his. Kant Mikal had said it. And no matter how they might wish
that two others had been chosen out of all the teeming billions of the
Thirty Suns, both he and Deve knew that they must throw themselves
between the galactic millstones and try with their last breath to avert
the limbo that yawned to swallow the first stellar civilization that
the race had laboriously built. It was not perfect--but it was their
own.

       *       *       *       *       *

For two days and two nights Deve and Aram waited by the restless sea of
Kaidor III. They wandered over the green hills and through the wooded
glades hand in hand, caught up in the wonder and beauty of the silent
planet.

Aram was able to patch some of the breaks in the Serpent's hull, and
together he and Deve planned what moves they must make next. Each time
they left the ship, the recorders were set so that any possible word
from the Star Cluster would be caught; but only the endless stream of
reports and routine messages of the Thirty Suns Naval Intelligence
Bureau marred the wire of the recording device when they sought the
shelter of the ship again.

Together, they swam in the warm sea and rested in the sunlight on the
white beach, listening to the restless sound of the ocean. It was an
idyll of happiness made more poignant by the pressing nearness of
danger coming ever closer.

It was on the evening of the third day on Kaidor III that the subspace
radio shattered their faint hopes for the success of the Star Cluster's
mission. The information came not from the Group and Kant Mikal, but
viciously, shockingly, from the announcer in the Naval Intelligence
sending station back on Terminus. It came, smashing the peaceful
stillness of the evening calm.

"ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL FLEET UNITS OF THE TWENTY EIGHTH, TWENTY
NINTH, AND THIRTIETH DECANT SQUADRONS! RENDEZVOUS CHECK POINT 45223
KAIDOR PROVINCE ACCORDING TO PLAN 5-25 DIRECTIVE 19-A-9! TASK FORCE
COMMANDER WILL NEUTRALIZE PLANET KAIDOR FIVE FOR THE SAFETY OF THE
TETRARCHY!"

Deve's face was pale. "Santane has done it at last!"

It had come, then, thought Aram heavily. The cosmic wheels were
beginning to turn. A provincial governor rebelled and across
light years of space forces of mind-defying magnitude began to gather.
Thousands of mighty battleships, millions of men! Planet-smashing
weapons! Far away, on Terminus, government bureaus shifted ponderously
from peaceful administration to War. Clerks and department heads,
councilmen and executives--all shifting their attentions from peacetime
routines to wartime expedients. And within hours, those wartime
expedients would become routine. Fixed, immutable. Routines impossible
to change without painful, _time-consuming_, effort.

Jerrold spun the radio dials, searching for the government station on
Kaidor V. He needed information. He needed to know what Santane was
telling his population.

"... _the Thirty Suns merchant vessel, Star Cluster, has fallen into
our hands. The passengers and crew, sabotage agents of the Tetrarchy,
have been imprisoned and will be executed_ ..."

The voice of the Kaidor announcer echoed menacingly through the still
control room of the Serpent.

"Aram! They've got Kant Mikal and the others!" cried Deve.

"Sabotage agents!" Aram spat.

"... _it is expected that the worker population will conduct itself
with courage and resourcefulness under the threatened attack_,"
continued the announcer smoothly. "_Our newly organized armed forces
are even now taking measures against the tyrants' home worlds_ ..."

Aram shuddered, thinking about the "measures" Santane had devised for
use against the Tetrarchy. The brutalizing virus....

"... _it is not to be expected that the war will be of long duration.
Our scientists have developed a weapon that will make active resistance
on the part of the tyrants impossible. They will not dare to attack
us_ ..."

Confirmation, thought Aram bleakly, of Santane's dream of winning power
by threats. A savage, terrible blunder!

"_Generalissimo Santane has struck the shackles of the Tetrarchy from
the people of Kaidor! Work and fight for victory!_" The announcement
was followed by the playing of martial music.

Jerrold snapped the radio off with a curse. Kant Mikal a prisoner--very
likely dead already. The Fleet converging on Kaidor. Santane, drunk
with power, brandishing his awful weapon over the heads of the mute
billions of the Thirty Suns!

"What now, Aram?" asked Deve quietly.

"We must go to Kaidor V ... now!" he replied.

In space again, Aram tried to shake off his forebodings and failed
miserably. They were speeding into a tempest of stellar magnitude, and
they were but two--a man and a woman--against a war-mad galaxy.

The tiny Serpent pointed for the fifth planet of the Kaidor Sun and
drew its mantle of invisibility around itself, as though to hide from
the fiery stars.

       *       *       *       *       *

Far beneath the starship, Kaidor V lay like a bright scimitar. With the
energy shield momentarily off, they approached the planet's night side,
deep in the global penumbra. No lights marked the populous factory
cities--the world rested dark, poised to lash out against the stars,
falsely confident in its possession of frightful weapons.

Carefully, Jerrold lowered the Serpent toward the spot he had marked
on the planetary chart--a deep valley near Santane's capital city of
Astrel. Once course and rate of descent were computed, he reactivated
the energy shield and groped his way downward through the sullen night
of Kaidor V.

After what seemed an eternity of waiting, Deve and Jerrold felt their
ship's keel touch the ground. Aram stood by the jets, alert for the
sudden tipping that would warn them that the Serpent had landed on a
steep slope or crag. The deck assumed a slight angle--no more. Aram cut
the power and listened to the descending whine of the gyroscopes as
they coasted to a halt. Then there was silence. Only the faint hum of
the energy shield broke the stillness.

Jerrold and Deve studied the chart of Kaidor V carefully. Aram had no
desire to have the Serpent meet with the same fate as the ill-starred
Star Cluster. Concealment and secrecy were paramount.

On the gridded chart of the planet, the dark city of Astrel lay like a
blot of ink. "There is a conveyor running near here, Deve," Aram said.
"It must carry ores from the mines here--" he pointed out the shafts on
the map, "--to the foundries in the city. They won't be able to guard
the conveyor all along its length. We can get into Astrel that way, I
think."

"And what then?" asked the girl.

Jerrold shrugged. "I'm a space officer--not a spy. I know that we must
try to reach Santane and help Mikal and the others if we can--"

"We had some agents still in the city," said Deve thoughtfully.
"Perhaps they haven't been discovered. We can try and reach them ...
they might be able to help us."

"It will be risky, Deve, now that the fight is in the open."

"I don't see how we can possibly reach Santane alone," she said.

Deve was right, of course, Aram realized. Without help they would never
be able to penetrate the barriers of security the Provincial Governor
must have erected between himself and the population of his planet.

Cutting the shield, Aram searched the dark landscape beyond the ports.
The night was black and still. The stars made an unfamiliar pattern
across the sky. A thin band of nebulosity showed the edge of the
Galactic Lens in a peculiarly distorted perspective. Here, in the heart
of the Thirtieth Decant, they were far from the populous worlds of the
galaxy's center--farther even than they had been in Atmion Province.
But this barren, cold world would be for the next few hours the center
of the Thirty Suns. Here, on the metallic soil of Kaidor V, the fate of
an interstellar civilization would be decided....

There were many deadly weapons in the lockers, but Jerrold decided to
take only two plastic energy pistols. Such weapons would be less likely
to be found by the weapons alarms that were standard street fixtures on
all the planets of the Thirty Suns.

With a sigh, the valve slid open and Aram and the girl dropped to the
frozen volcanic soil. The air smelled bitter, and the cold was intense.
Kaidor V was more than twenty-four light-minutes from its primary, and
warmth was slight. It had been chosen for the center of Kaidor Province
rather than a more hospitable world because of the richness of its
radioactive ores and immense nitrogen yielding deposits.

       *       *       *       *       *

The starship had landed in a small ravine, and there, Aram decided,
it could stay relatively safe from discovery. Aram marked the spot on
his chart and etched it into his brain. It was hard to leave the tiny
Serpent. It represented all the security they could expect on this
unfriendly world.

They climbed to the crest of the ridge and dropped down onto a flat
plateau, striking out across it toward the spot where Jerrold estimated
they would intercept the line of the conveyor.

They walked along in silence under a canopy of oddly unfriendly stars.
Presently the faint sound of machinery warned that the conveyor was
near. In the darkness, they almost ran headlong into it. The light of
Deve's small pocket torch revealed two belts. One bounced along empty,
speeding back toward the mines in the hills; the other groaned under
a heavy loading of metallic ores bound for the smelters and steel
converters of Astrel.

"It's moving fast, but we'll have to jump it anyway," Aram said softly.

"Don't worry about me," replied Deve stoutly. "Just give me a hand."

Aram grinned in spite of himself. Deve's courage and resolution were a
boon on this quixotic mission.

He picked her up and began to run along the uneven soil parallel to the
racing conveyor. With an effort he heaved her up on to the pile of ore.
He heard her give a little cry of pain as she landed among the sharp
shards, and then she was gone into the blackness. Without pause, he
leaped onto the belt himself, skinning his hands and legs on the rocky
cargo.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a moment he stopped to catch his breath, and then began to crawl
forward toward Deve Jennet. It took him a long while to reach her, and
when he did, they found that she had dropped her gun in the scramble to
board the conveyor.

The thought of facing a hostile city with one small pistol did not
please; but Aram realized that under no circumstances could he have
hoped to out-gun the combined forces of the Thirtieth Decant, so the
loss of a gun really made little difference. The whole of the Serpent's
armory would do them no good if concealment failed.

"We'll have to get clear of this thing before it reaches its
destination, Deve," Jerrold shouted above the roar of the belt.

"I only hope the marshalling yards and ore stockpiles aren't too well
guarded!" Deve replied--and Aram silently echoed her hope.

In the near distance, coming ever nearer, were the periodic flares
of the great steel converters of Astrel. The city itself seemed
blacked-out, but apparently Santane--the "Generalissimo," thought
Jerrold wryly--was keeping his workers busy on weapons production
right up until the last moment of danger ... another proof to Aram's
mind that Santane did not believe the Tetrarchy would dare to actually
attack. He must already have warned the Thirty Suns Government, perhaps
sending specimens of his handiwork to impress the Supreme Council of
the power of his virus weapons. Yet the Fleet would attack--Jerrold
felt sure of it. The very nature of the Thirty Suns Government made
any other course unthinkable. Bureaucracies, Aram knew, reacted like
headless beasts to the things that threatened them, unable to make fine
distinctions or true evaluations. Defiance brought reprisal. It was as
simple as that.

It was difficult to see anything in the darkness, and Jerrold began to
fear that they might be catapulted into the furnaces themselves. The
flares in the sky seemed very close now.

A tiny blue light flashed by that Aram thought must mark the entrance
to the stockpiling yards. He scrambled to his feet and pulled Deve up
beside him.

"Get ready to jump clear!" he shouted in her ear.

Wind snatched at his words, and the swaying conveyor made standing
difficult--almost impossible. Deve clutched at him, trying to keep her
balance. And then, without warning, the belt slammed abruptly into a
flat right-angle turn, pitching them off into darkness filled with
hurtling chunks of ore.

Aram clung to the girl as they spilled off the belt and banged hard
into a great pile of ore. More of the stuff continued to flood down on
them from the conveyor above, burying them under an oppressive weight.
Desperately, Jerrold clawed his way out into the open, and still
clinging to Deve, rolled precipitously down the steep slope of the
stockpile. They struck the bottom with bone-jarring force and lay there
gasping.

A brilliant beam of light sliced through the dusty darkness, pinning
them to the ore pile. Motes danced wildly in the gleaming cone. And in
one awful flash of insight Aram knew what had happened ... understood
the meaning of that tiny blue light he had seen. A dark-light scanner!

Floodlights came on, and the intruders found themselves blinking into
a semi-circle of energy rifle muzzles in the hands of grim-faced,
black-clad guards.

Aram Jerrold felt his heart sink. They were captured....

       *       *       *       *       *

Between two files of guards, Deve and Jerrold walked into the city they
had hoped to strip of its weapons. The bitterness of their failure rode
hard on Jerrold's shoulders. He kept hearing again and again the phrase
that Kant Mikal had used: "To save something from the wreckage...." It
seemed impossible now. The giants and the furies were gathering. The
might of the Thirty Suns would descend like a rain of fire on Kaidor V,
and the mindless death nurtured here would sweep the inhabited worlds
like a plague. The forces Jerrold had hoped to chain were free now, and
threatening, like some ghastly cosmic storm. The teeming cities would
crumble, the spaceways would be deserted. Night would fall on man's
imperfect, but highest achievement, and he would return to the primeval
muck.

Aram searched the faces of the streams of workers they passed. They
were sullen, whipped men. From the tyranny of the Tetrarchy they had
slipped into the clutches of Santane. For them, there was no hope, no
dignity, and only the release of death could change their lot.

The black guards herded Deve and Jerrold onto a small air-sled, and the
tiny craft nosed upward and into the streams of aerial traffic above
the darkened city. Ahead lay the black bulk of a towering skylon.
This, Aram realized, must be Santane's citadel.

The air-sled was sinking slowly to a landing on one of the many landing
platforms that marred the flanks of the mighty skylon when the first
alarm sirens began to wail. Aram turned his eyes to the night sky
automatically. He could not hope to see the Fleet, for they must still
be beyond the orbit of Kaidor X, but he did see the red streaks of the
first interceptor rockets taking off. The sky in the east was greying;
the attack would come by day.

The air-sled touched the landing stage, and the guards hurried Jerrold
and Deve Jennet into the citadel. Through a maze of halls thronging
with white-faced officers in new and unfamiliar uniforms they went,
past guards and armored doorways. At last they stood in a vaulted,
oblong room that hummed with activity.

It was a Combat Center. In the center of the room lay a huge,
three-dimensional chart of the Thirtieth Decant and the Kaidor system.
Jerrold recognized the red blips that indicated the approaching
Fleet, fully ten thousand strong ... and he recognized something else
too. He had felt this kind of tension in ships of the Navy. It was
fear--universal, jittery fear. These people, Aram knew suddenly, were
terribly, desperately afraid of that advancing armada. Their leader had
told them that it would not dare attack, yet it came on inexorably and
they were afraid.

Yellow streaks in the chart showed the track of interceptors, already
fanning out from Kaidor V, seeking targets in the huge, onrushing
formation of mighty battleships that spread across light-minutes of
space. The tiny weapons had already taken a small toll of the slower
Fleet vessels, but the rest continued sunward, their losses unfelt.

This was what Aram feared Santane would not or could not realize ...
that no matter how dreadful his virus weapon, forces of such magnitude
could not be halted by threats once they were put in motion.

Now Santane's secretly built fleet was blasting into space.
Jerrold estimated that it consisted of perhaps five hundred large
starships--torpedo launchers mainly, built for defense.

Near Kaidor VII, the ringed giant, the two Fleets made first contact.
The battle of the Thirtieth Decant had begun.

The guards shoved at Jerrold, and he was led away from the chart
and its fascinating picture of battle. He and Deve were taken up a
spiralling staircase to the balcony that overlooked the Combat Center
and through a heavily guarded door.

The chamber in which they now found themselves was strangely quiet
after the fear-tinged confusion of the Combat Center. All but one of
their guards withdrew, and Aram faced a tall, powerfully built man who
stood engrossed in a bank of scanner-views of the battle.

Presently the man looked up to scowl at his prisoners. Aram Jerrold
knew at once that it was--at last--Santane.

       *       *       *       *       *

Aram studied the man with interest. Here was the man whose rebellion
had catapulted the galaxy into war. Because of Santane, billions faced
degradation or extinction. It seemed impossible that one man could
cause such a cataclysmic upheaval in a star-spanning culture. But there
was more to it than that, of course. Santane--as a man--was simply
one more bit of protoplasm in the vast mystery of the cosmos. But
Santane--as a symbol--was real and important. He was a living monument
to the immutable face that tyranny begets more tyranny, and that
the very existence of absolute power results in the two awful
corollaries ... ambition and strife.

The Tetrarchy had spawned Santane just as surely as night follows day.
Santane was the cancer in the body of the despotism of the Thirty Suns
that was destined to destroy it ... and, thought Aram grimly, himself
with it.

Aram Jerrold studied the craggy face and the deep-set, glowing eyes
as Santane stood there before the simulacrum of Armageddon in the
scanners, and knew there was madness in the man.

Santane spoke, and the sound rasped across the senses.

"You are Aram Jerrold and Deve Jennet--agents of the Tetrarchy.
Spies ... high ranking spies!" His icy gaze searched the faces of the
man and woman before him. "Do you deny it?"

"We are who you say," replied Jerrold evenly, "but we are not spies.
The Tetrarchy has undoubtedly set a price on our heads by now."

"You lie! The Tetrarchy sent you here because they are afraid of me."
Santane laughed scornfully, "They have seen what I can do."

"Don't be a fool, Santane," Jerrold said softly. "The Tetrarchy is
not afraid of you. It can't be. It hasn't the ability to fear you or
anything else. Can't you see that?" He indicated the scanners. The
Fleet was bearing ever closer to Kaidor V, slashing through the cordons
of defensive craft doggedly, impervious to losses and dying ships and
men.

Fear touched Santane's face ... but for just an instant. Aram knew with
sinking heart that the man's madness would not let him believe the
truth.

"No," said Santane tensely. "They are afraid of me--or you wouldn't
have been sent here."

Aram was struck with a sudden, grotesque pity for the man. All the
weeks he had spent in danger and in preparation for this mission that
had failed, he had thought of Santane as the living incarnation of
crafty evil. What he saw before him now was a insane man--frightened
by the mighty forces he had unleashed and could not now turn or
control. In that moment, Aram felt that Kant Mikal's injunction to save
something from the ruins was truly impossible, for nothing could come
right when a single madman could smash in days the work of millennia.

Santane's face was again rigid and cold. "Perhaps you have not seen
what my biological weapons can do.... Guard! Bring in the others!"

Aram felt an icy hand closing about his heart. The others....

_Kant Mikal ... the men and women of the Star Cluster...._

"Santane ... you haven't...!" Jerrold broke off in horror as the guard
returned, leading a line of five shambling beasts. The creatures fought
the chains that bound them, howling with outrage.

"How," demanded Santane, "can Terminus attack me if they face _that_?"
His eyes lit, kindled with some obscene pleasure at the spectacle.
"First there are pains in the neck and head. Blinding--agonizing pains!
Then comes unconsciousness, and memory goes ... then the glands alter,
and men become ... beasts...."

Deve Jennet moaned. Her friends and comrades were in that line of
disfigured subhuman things. She clutched at Aram for support.

Jerrold felt red fury explode within him. He wanted to feel his bare
hands on Santane's throat ... his teeth in his flesh. With an oath
he launched himself bodily at the smiling madman, hands groping for
the throat under the twisted grin. He saw Santane back away in sudden
fright, and the black flash of the guard interposing himself between
them. The guard raised his rifle and brought the muzzle down in a
chopping arc. Aram felt a searing pain above his eyes and pitched into
a reddish blur of oblivion....

       *       *       *       *       *

Jerrold awoke in a small, glassed-in chamber. His head ached dully,
and he could feel the stiffness of dried blood on his brow. He rolled
over and staggered to his feet, realizing that he must be at the very
pinnacle of the mighty skylon that housed Santane's headquarters.

The same black guard who had struck him down stood impassive in the
corner, and Aram could see Santane standing with Deve on a small
landing stage beyond the glass. He saw something else, too, and his
breath came faster. There was a small air-sled on the landing stage,
bright with new paint and Santane's own insigne of the Trident and
Flame.

There was a subspace radio installation in the corner of the aerie, and
Aram Jerrold knew instantly that he had been brought up to the skylon's
top to establish contact with the invading Fleet, to warn the forces of
the Thirty Suns to surrender.

Santane returned with Deve held at his side. The sight of the man's
hand possessively on Deve's wrist brought a return of Aram's fury.

"You see," Santane said with a thin smile, "the Fleet _does_ fear
me. They have broken off their attack and are circling beyond the
stratosphere."

That meant, Aram knew, that the ships of the Thirty Suns were
preparing for bombardment of Kaidor V. Knowing the richness of the
nitrogen-bearing surface soil of the planet, the Task Force commander
would undoubtedly be readying his vessels to rain down nitrogen
fission bombs, trying to exceed critical mass in the air and ground
of the planet and setting off chain reactions to rip it apart by the
expenditure of the energy contained in the globe itself. Santane, not
being a space officer, could not know that.

Kant Mikal's wish to have something saved from the wreckage now could
be accomplished in only two ways--both impossible to Aram's mind.

He and Deve could escape, and save themselves ... or he could prevent
Santane from launching his interstellar missiles when the bombs began
to fall.

"Call the Fleet commander," Santane ordered brusquely. "Tell him he
must land and place himself at my orders."

Such a call would be ignored. Aram knew that....

"Hurry!" Santane demanded pettishly.

Still Aram could bring himself to no decision.

Santane turned, took a stoppered vial from a cabinet and faced Aram
again with a scowl. "One drop of this on the skin, and a human being
becomes ... what you saw below. Shall I use it on the woman to convince
you where your duty lies?"

Aram felt his heart skip a beat. Santane was not bluffing. Pressed, he
would carry out his threat from sheer perverted malice. Aram looked
hungrily toward the small air-sled on the landing....

He took a step toward the radio. Very probably his voice, recognized,
would brings the bombs even quicker--but there was no way to convince
Santane of that. He was beyond reason.

A high pitched sound broke the stillness. Aram pitched instinctively to
the floor as a bomb struck the ground far below and near the base of
the skylon! The whole structure shook with the force of the concussion,
the glass of the aerie fogging into a maze of tiny cracks. Fragments of
the ceiling came powdering down. Santane staggered against the wall,
the vial still in his hand, a look of terrified disbelief on his face.

"_No!_" he gasped. "_They wouldn't dare...._"

Aram tried to reach Deve's side, but Santane was quicker.

"Tell them to call off the attack!" he screamed, "or I infect the
woman! Quickly! Quickly!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Aram spun on his knee and dived for Santane. The vial flew across the
room and shattered against the wall. Jerrold smashed his fist into
Santane's distorted face--he felt the splintering of teeth in the
shattered mouth. A sizzling beam of fire flashed past Aram's eyes.
He straightened and struck Santane again, sending the man staggering
across the room.

[Illustration: _Jerrold smashed his fist into Santane's distorted
face...._]

Instead of attacking or trying to escape, Santane leaped for a wall
communicator. His battered face was a mask of maniacal rage. Jerrold
caught him but ... too late to prevent four words from screeching into
the microphone....

"_Fire the virus missiles!_"

Aram sobbed with frustrated rage and swung his clenched fists again
and again into Santane's bloody face. He rolled on the littered floor,
trying to strangle the life from the wildly struggling madman who had
spawned disaster.

Another bomb fell, rocking the skylon. Beams clattered down from the
towering superstructure, caving in sections of the aerie's roof. The
guard, who had been circling for a safe shot at Aram, shrieked in agony
as a metal section took him across the shoulders and snapped his back
like a twig.

Suddenly Aram felt a wetness on his clothes and a bitterness on his
tongue. The two wrestling men had rolled into the pool of liquid from
the broken-vial.

Santane screamed with terror, and in a frantic burst of energy, broke
away and stumbled out onto the landing stage and the air-sled.

Deve rushed to Aram, helping him to his feet. As she touched him, he
recoiled.

"_Don't, Deve! Don't touch me!_"

But the girl's hands, too, were wet with the sticky stuff of the vial,
and Aram knew with a sick certainty that they were both infected with
the virus of bestiality.

"After _him_!" Hopeless now, sick with despair, Aram wanted only to
kill Santane.

But Santane had not launched the air-sled. Instead he knelt on its
deck, a medical kit in his hands. He was trying with trembling fingers
to fill a syringe from a narrow capsule. Jerrold knocked the instrument
from his hands and dragged him from the machine. The madman fought back
with desperate strength, but Aram smashed him again and again against
the stones of the landing. In a last spasmodic effort, Santane caught
Aram by the throat and forced him toward the edge. Far below, the
glowing, radioactive smoke of death roiled against the sides of the
weakened skylon. Aram could see flames eating ravenously at the lower
levels. Santane shrieked with triumph as Aram hung momentarily over the
abyss. Aram twisted....

And then Santane was gone, vanishing in a long wailing fall, twisting
and turning like a rag-doll until his scream of terror blended with the
cry of another falling bomb.

       *       *       *       *       *

Without pausing to catch his breath, Jerrold returned to the air-sled
and picked up the syringe. It was only partly full, and the capsule
that Santane had used to load it had been smashed. It was the
antidote ... it had to be the antidote!

"Deve, here!" With shaking hands he caught her arm and sank the needle
into her flesh, squeezing the plunger down. As the fluid in the
cylinder reached the half-way point, Deve pulled away.

"That's enough! The rest is for you," she breathed.

"No, Deve! I don't know if it's enough for both of us. Santane was
going to take the full measure for himself, and he should know...."

Deve Jennet shook her head. "I don't care," she said. "I wouldn't want
to go on ... without you."

Aram pleaded but Deve would not be convinced. She had no wish to
survive alone. Finally, Aram took the syringe and emptied it into his
forearm.

"Now, we'll see," he muttered.

The howl of bombs was a steady, increasing cacophony now, and,
though ships of Santane's fleet still fought, the Thirty Suns naval
force bombed almost at will. The skylon shook and buckled under the
bombardment and the radiation count on the counters in the wrecked
aerie showed an increasingly dangerous concentration. Still the virus
missiles took the air, streaking the radioactive clouds with their
tail-flares, and Aram watched with sick horror as the awful spawn of
the Kaidor Sun rose to spread bestiality while he stood helplessly by.

"Aram," Deve spoke to him gently amid the rising symphony of
destruction. "We have to get clear, Aram. Remember what Kant Mikal
said ... and we are all that's left now."

"The Fleet...."

"The Fleet will return to Terminus. We can't stop them," Deve said with
finality.

Aram knew it was true. Mindless to the last, the bureaucracy would
stick to its directives and general orders. The Fleet would return ...
to oblivion.

       *       *       *       *       *

They mounted the air-sled and slanted up into the tortured air of the
dying planet. A huge starship with the golden Spaceship and Sun blazon
came hurtling down out of the sky like a fiery brand, a smaller ship
bearing Santane's Trident and Flame imbedded in its flank. The two
ships dissolved into a ball of greasy fire as they smashed into the
crowded buildings of shattered Astrel.

More and more nitrogen fission bombs were falling now as the air-sled
streaked across the flaming sky toward the ravine that hid the
Serpent. The very soil of the planet seemed to dance in a hellish
carnival of destruction. Glancing back, Aram saw the towering skylon
come plunging down in torrents of rubble and human flesh. He knew with
finality that he was witnessing the end of everything he had known--the
chaotic collapse of a culture that had spawned its own nemesis.
Man--diving from the pinnacle of stellar dominion to the depths of
nothingness ... because he had tolerated tyranny.

Jerrold shook his head to clear away the sudden pain that stabbed
across his temples. One thought grew in his mind with increasing
clarity. He and Deve must somehow survive. Perhaps other men and
women would come through the end in remote worlds, but there was no
way of being certain. He had to be sure ... he had to know that the
end would not come for all the race. He, a man, and Deve, a woman,
could still carry out the mercifully dead Kant Mikal's injunction. In
those fleeting moments above the writhing, doomed surface of Kaidor V,
survival became an obsession with Aram Jerrold.

The Serpent awaited them where they had left it, and they hurried
through the valve, feeling the tremblors of the fifth planet's death
agonies.

Aram drove the ship upward, seeking the safety of space and their
haven. Both knew where they were going, though neither had put it into
words.

At a distance of five diameters from the globe of Kaidor V, Aram paused
to see the death of a world.

Like a savage animal, the Fleet continued to worry the trembling planet
with a vicious hail of bombs. The pair in the Serpent could see bright
internal fires as the crust of the world split under the hideous
attack. Like a stricken thing, Kaidor V seemed to totter on its axis.
Great chunks of rock were blown clear by the pressure of expanding
inner fires.

For hours, the death agonies of the planet continued, until finally,
like a bursting bubble, the globe expanded. Huge slashes appeared from
pole to pole. The ice caps vanished into twin clouds of superheated
steam. Fragments peeled off as gravitational balances were disturbed.
Globules of molten lava fanned out, like strings of beads. Kaidor V
trembled with a cosmic delirium--great prominences of atomic fire
leaping far into space. And then, quite suddenly, it was over. With
its heart ripped out by the violent fission of its inner substance,
the hollow shell collapsed into a swirling, nebulous cloud of cosmic
rubble, rapidly spreading out into a belt of tiny planetoids spanning
the place where once a mighty world circled the parent star....

       *       *       *       *       *

The Serpent settled softly into a wooded glade and grew still. Within,
Aram Jerrold fought the wracking pains in his head, screaming aloud
with the agony of it. Deve lay unconscious on the steel deck, moaning
softly.

Aram knew that the antidote he had injected into their veins was not
enough. Vaguely, he recalled that once--long ago, it seemed--he had
been told that a small amount of specific would prevent physical
damage. But the virus was claiming him, nonetheless. The pounding agony
in his head was streaked with delirious phantasms. Kant Mikal's words
echoed through his brain, though he no longer recognized them as other
than his own. His screaming madness took the shape of those words as he
lifted Deve in his arms and staggered out of the ship.

Driven by some deep seated racial memory, he stumbled toward the
sea--the mother--the giver of life. The sheer brutal agony of the virus
increased with every step, blinding him with its intensity, until at
last he could bear it no longer and sank to his knees on the white sand
of a beach and pitched forward across the still form of the woman he
carried, hands outstretched toward the shallows of a restless sea that
laved him ... laved him....

       *       *       *       *       *

Deve stood nude in the glory of the morning sunlight and lifted her
arms to the sky in an ecstacy of freedom. "How lovely it is," she
murmured.

The figure at her feet stirred and she touched him playfully with a
bare foot.

Aram woke, puzzled. Something, deep in the back of his mind troubled
him. There had been something....

"Come swim with me!"

Aram looked up at the naked girl before him. She was Deve. He knew
that. He tried to remember more, but he could not. A strange shroud
seemed to have covered up everything ... language he seemed to command,
but....

He put the troublesome thoughts out of his mind and stripped off the
strange coverings on his body. Hand in hand with Deve, he waded into
the sea. They swam and played in the warm sunlight, and presently,
tiring of their sport, sought the shade of a wooded glade.

As they walked hand in hand among the flowering shrubs under the trees,
Deve stopped abruptly.

"Aram," she said, puzzled, "what is that?"

An alien shape stood among the verdure, gleaming where the sunlight
pierced the foliage. It was a long cylinder, tapered at both ends
and lined with round, blank ports. They stood there staring at the
spaceship with perplexed incomprehension. Both had a vague feeling that
it was familiar.

"What is it, Aram?" the girl asked again.

"I ... don't know," he confessed.

"I think we did know ... once," Deve said softly. "Aram, why are we
here?"

Why? The question touched off sparks of memory that brightened and as
quickly faded. Aram spoke, painfully dredging the words from beyond the
veil of forgetfulness.

"We ... must ... save ... something ... from the ruins."

"What ruins?" the girl asked impatiently. "What is it we must save?"

But memory had faded. Aram could not answer her.

Still she persisted with feminine curiosity unsatisfied.

"Aram, what is this place?"

For a long moment he stood in silence beside her in the sun-splashed
glade. He listened to the gentle sound of the wind in the trees and the
restless murmur of the sea. Presently he replied, but with a question.
"Are you happy here, Deve?"

"Oh, yes!" she breathed.

He took her in his arms, the spaceship and the past completely
forgotten.

"Then this is ... Paradise," he said.


                               EPILOGUE

... And twenty thousand years after, as Man reached again for the
stars ... these two lived in memory ... as _Adam and Eve_.




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