Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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_.