Chapter I

History, by any reckoning, is a fluid thing. Once a thing has happened, no instrument yet devised by man can show exactly what it was in minute detail. _All_ of the data simply cannot be recovered.

In spite of this, if Man were an intellectually honest animal, it wouldn't be too difficult to get a reasonably accurate picture of the past. At least the data that could be recovered and retained would show a reasonably distinct picture of long gone events and their relationship to the present.

But Man isn't that kind of creature. Once men discovered the fact that the events of tomorrow are based on what is happening today, it didn't take them long to reach the conclusion that changing the past could change the present. Words are magic, and the more cleverly and powerfully they are connected together, the more magic they become. The ancient "historians" of Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Sumeria, Judea, and Rome did not conceive of themselves as liars when they distorted history to conform to their own beliefs; they were convinced that if what they wrote were accepted as true, then it _was_ true. Word magic had changed the past to conform to the present.

Now, one would suppose that, as methods of recording and verifying the contemporary happenings of a culture became more and more efficient and more easily correlated, the ability to change the past would become more difficult. Not true. The actual records of the past are not read by the average man; he is normally exposed only to biased, carefully selected excerpts from the past.

Granted, with a few thousand civilized and tens of thousands semi-civilized planets in the occupied galaxy, the correlation of data is difficult. But, nonetheless, errors of the magnitude of the one made in the history of Cardigan's Green shouldn't be committed.

The average man doesn't give two hoots in hell about historical truth; he would much rather have romantic legends and historic myths. The story of Cardigan's Green is a case in point.

Call this a debunking spree if you wish, but the facts can be found in the archives of the Interstellar Police and the Interstellar Health Commission; and the news recordings on several nearby planets uphold the story to a certain extent, although the beginnings of the distortion were already visible.

Time and space have a tendency to dilute truth, and it is the job of the honest historian to distill the essence from the mixture.

The story proper begins nearly a century ago, just before Leland Hale landed on Cardigan's Green, but in order to understand exactly what happened, it is necessary to go back even farther in time--a full three centuries. It was at that time that the race of Man first came to Cardigan's Green.

Exactly what happened is difficult to determine. It is likely that the captain of the ship that brought the colonists to the planet actually was named Cardigan, but there is no record of the man, nor, indeed, of the ship itself. At any rate, there _was_ a ship, and it carried five hundred colonists, if the ship was representative of the colonial ships of the time. Evidently, they tore the ship down to make various other equipment they needed, which, of course, marooned them on the planet. But that was what they wanted, anyway; it is usual among colonists.

And then the Plague struck.

The colonists had no resistance whatever to the disease. Every one of them caught it, bar none. And ninety per cent of them died while the rest recovered. Fifty people, alone on a strange planet. And, as human beings always do, they went on living.

The next generation was on its way to adulthood when the Plague struck again. Seventy-five per cent of them died.

It was over a hundred years before the people of Cardigan's Green received another visit from the Plague, and this time less than twenty per cent died.

But, even so, they had a terrible, deep-seated fear of the Plague. Even another century couldn't completely wipe it out.

And that was more or less the way things stood when Leland Hale snapped his ship out of infraspace near the bright G-2 sun that was Cardigan's Green's primary.

* * * * *

Leland Hale looked at the planet that loomed large in his visiscreen and his eyes narrowed automatically, as they always did when he was in deep thought. The planet wasn't registered in the _Navigator's Manual_ or on the stellographic charts. The sun itself had a number, but the planet wasn't mentioned.

Hale was a big man; his shoulders were much wider than they had any right to be, his arms were thick and cabled with muscle, and his chest was broad and deep. Most men who stand six-feet-six look lean and lanky, but Hale actually looked broad and somewhat squat. At one standard gee of acceleration--1000 cm/sec^2--he topped three hundred pounds. There was just enough fat on his body to smooth the outlines a little; his bones were big, as they had to be to anchor tendons solidly; and he had the normal complement of glands and nerves to keep the body functioning well. All the rest of him seemed to be muscle--pounds and pounds of hard, powerful muscle.

His head was large in proportion; a size 8 hat would have suited him perfectly--if he'd ever troubled to buy a hat. His face was regular enough to be considered handsome, and too blocky and hard to be considered pretty. His dark hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin marked him as most likely being of late-migration Earth stock.

He looked from the visiscreen to the detector plate. There wasn't a trace on it. There hadn't been for days. The skewed, almost random orbit he had taken from Bargell IV had lifted him well above the galactic plane, and he was a long way, now, from where he had started.

If the yellow light from Bargell's Sun could have penetrated the heavy clouds of dust and gas that congregated at the galactic center, it would have taken it more than seventy thousand years to reach Cardigan's Green.

No trace on the detector. Good. There was one advantage in stealing a fully equipped Interstellar Police ship; if his pursuers couldn't be detected on their own equipment, they couldn't detect him either--they were out of range of each other.

There were certain disadvantages in stealing an IP vessel, too. If he hadn't done it, the IP wouldn't be after him; his crime on Bargell IV hadn't come under their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, stealing the ship had been the only way to leave Bargell IV. Hale shrugged mentally; it was too late to worry about such trivialities now.

The empty detector plate meant something else. If there were no interstellar ships at all in the area, it was likely that the planet below was an isolated planet. There were plenty of them in the galaxy; when the infraspace drive had combined with Terrestrial overcrowding to produce the great migration, many of the pioneers had simply found themselves a planet, settled themselves into a community, dismantled their ship, and forgotten about the rest of mankind.

Well, that was all to the good. At top magnification, the view-screen showed what appeared to be small villages and plowed lands, which indicated colonization. At least there would be someone around to talk to, and--maybe--a little profit to be made.

But the first thing he'd have to look for was a place to hide his ship.

* * * * *

The Peniyan Range is a bleak, windswept series of serrated peaks that crosses the northern tip of the largest continent on Cardigan's Green. Geologically young, craggy, and with poor soil, they are uninhabited, for there is too little there to support life in any great numbers; the valleys and low hills to the south are more inviting and comfortable for humanity. Until the press of numbers forces it, there will be no need for the inhabitants of Cardigan's Green to live in the mountainous wasteland.

Finding a place of concealment in those jagged mountains ought to be fairly easy, Hale decided. He settled the spherical vessel gently to the ground at the bottom of a narrow gorge which had been cut out by a mountain freshet for a first look-around.

Grand larceny, fraud, and murder are first-magnitude crimes, but they are far more common than police statistics would lead one to believe. The galaxy is unbelievably vast, and the universe as a whole unthinkably vaster. The really adept criminal can easily lose himself in the tremendous whirlpool of stars that forms the Milky Way. Hale knew he had eluded the IP ships; therefore, unless he were found by the sheerest accident, he would be perfectly safe from the police for a long time to come.

Not that he intended to stay on Cardigan's Green for the rest of his life; far from it. He had five and a half million stellors in negotiable notes in the hold of his ship, and he would eventually want to get back to one of the civilized worlds where he could spend it. But that meant waiting until the scream for Leland Hale's blood had become submerged again in the general, galaxy-wide cry against a thousand million other marauders. Eventually, there would be other crimes, more recent, and therefore more important because they were still fresh in the public mind.

Leland Hale would wait.

For the first two weeks, he had plenty to do. He had to hide the ship well enough to keep it from being spotted from the air. It wasn't likely that the IP would find him, but if the colonists of this world had aircraft, they might wonder what a globe of metal was doing in their mountains.

He finally found a place under an overhanging monolith--a huge, solid slab of granite that would have taken an atomic disruptor to dislodge. Then he began piling rocks and gravel around it, working steadily from dawn until daylight--a goodly stretch of labor, since it was summer in the northern hemisphere and the planet made a complete rotation in a little less than twenty-eight hours.

It didn't bother Hale. His powerful body was more than a match for ordinary physical labor, and he liked to have something to do to stave off boredom.

That was Hale's big trouble--boredom. Inactivity and monotony made him frantic. So it wasn't surprising that after the first two weeks, when the ship was finally well hidden, he strapped a pack on his back and went exploring.

He had a good reason for it. Leland Hale never did anything without a good, logical reason. He could never say to himself: "I'm bored; I'll just go out and look over the countryside to have something to do." He could not say it, even to himself, because it would be admitting to himself that he actually did not like his own company. And Hale was convinced that he was, in all respects, a thoroughly likable fellow.

His reason for exploration was a need for food. He had plenty in the ship, of course, and the synthesizer could use almost any organic material to make food as long as it had an energy source. But Hale didn't like synthetics, and he didn't want to draw on his power reserves, so he decided to see what kind of menu the local countryside had to offer.

The plant life he found in the mountains wasn't much. There were a few dry, hard bristly bushes, and a tough, gray-green growth that clung to the rocks--a mosslike lichen or a lichenlike moss, take your pick. Neither looked in the least edible.

So Hale headed down the mountains toward the south.

* * * * *

Some days later, as he approached the foothills, he found queer-looking bushes that bore purple berrylike things on their branches. He opened one, and, to his disgust, a white, wormlike thing writhed and squirmed in his hand until he crushed it and wiped his palms on a rock. Every berry he opened behaved the same way. He decided they were none too savory a fare.

He came at last to a warm sea near the foothills of the mountain range. The crags almost seemed to rise out of the water. Hale couldn't see across the body of water, but he knew what its shape was, having seen it from high altitude when he came in for a landing. It was actually a wide channel that cut off a large island from the mainland on which he stood. He narrowed his eyes at the horizon and fancied he could see a shadow of the island, but common sense told him it was an illusion; the island was at least forty miles away.

The water of the channel was quite warm--Hale estimated it at about seventy degrees--and filled with life. Each wave that surged up to the shore left wriggling things behind it as it retreated, and ugly, many-legged things scuttled across the pale blue sand.

It was the blue sand that decided Hale against trying any of the larger sea animals as a meal. The sand was coral sand, and the color indicated a possibility of copper or cobalt. If the animals themselves had an excess of either element in their metabolic processes, they might not be too good for Hale's system.

He shrugged, shouldered his pack, and headed south along the beach. He was in no hurry to find food. He had plenty of concentrate on his back; when exactly half of it was gone, he would head back towards his ship.

Cardigan's Green has no moons, and the relatively mild tides caused by the planet's sun are almost imperceptible, but Hale could see that the broad beach had been built by some sort of regular change in the level of the water--probably a seasonal wind shift of some kind. At any rate, he decided that, soft as it was, the sand was no place to spend the night.

Instead, he slept on a high cliff overlooking the sea. In the mountains, he had slept in his insulation jacket for warmth, but here the heat of the sea and the warm breeze that came from it precluded any need for the jacket, so he used it for a pillow.

Sometime near midnight, the wind changed. The chill wind from the mountains swept downward, and, meeting with the warm, moisture-laden air from the sea, blanketed the coast with a chilling fog.

Leland Hale, untroubled by anything so prosaic as a conscience, and justifiably tired from his long journey on foot, didn't notice the dropping temperature until the fog had actually become a light drizzle. He awoke to find himself shivering and wet and stiff. He put on the insulation jacket immediately, but it took time for his body to warm up and generate enough heat inside the jacket to make him reasonably comfortable. There was absolutely nothing on that rocky coast that could be induced to burn, especially since the rain had begun, so Hale had to forego the primitive comfort of a fire.

Just before dawn, the wind changed direction again, and the fog slowly dissipated under the influence of the sea breeze and the heat of the rising sun. Hale stripped off his clammy clothing and put it on a rock to dry, but he already had the sniffles and sneezes.

* * * * *

Leland Hale was nothing if not determined; his record shows that. Once he had decided on a course of action, only the gravest of obstacles could block his path. Most of them could be surmounted, flanked, or, in case of necessity, smashed through by pure brute strength.

Once, on Viyellan, he set up a scheme for selling a piece of bogus artwork to a wealthy collector. He had spent months of loving care in constructing an almost indetectable phony, and his preliminary contacts with the collector had been beautifully successful.

Hale insisted on cash for the artwork, which was to be delivered on a certain date. But the day before the appointed time, Hale's accomplice, thinking he could make a better profit elsewhere, absconded with the imitation.

Hale, knowing that the collector had drawn half a million stellors in cash, burgled his home that night. Then he had the temerity to show up the next morning to complete the agreement. When the collector discovered that there was no cash on hand to pay for the "artwork," Hale indignantly refused to sell, on the grounds that the collector had reneged, was unethical, and not to be trusted in any way.

A week or so later, Hale finally traced his errant accomplice to the small hotel where he was hiding. The next day, the accomplice was found mysteriously dead. On that same day, the wealthy collector, having pleaded with Hale to be given another chance, was forgiven, and he gratefully parted with another half million stellors for Hale's bogus tidbit. Hale was never seen again on Viyellan.

Leland Hale, therefore, was not the kind of man to let a little thing like a runny nose or a slight cough stop him. He put on his clothes when they had dried, adjusted his pack and headed on southwards.