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He heard Tamara move about, slow in the unfamiliar kitchen, surely more than a little frightened of this old barbar­ian. If he went to space, she would have to stay here, bound by a propriety which was one of the chains they had hoped to shed on Rama. It was a cheerless prospect for her, too.

  And yet, thought David, the grim face before him had once turned skyward, on a spring night, telling him the names of the stars.

  THE other man, Ohara, was good, third-degree black. But finally his alertness wavered. He moved in unwarily, and Seiichi Nakamura threw him with a foot sweep that drew approving hisses from the audience. Seeing his chance, Nakamura pounced, got control of Ohara from the waist down by sitting on him, and applied a strangle. Ohara tried to break it, but starving lungs betrayed him. He slapped the mat when he was just short of unconsciousness. Nakamura released him and squatted, waiting. Presently Ohara rose. So did the win­ner. They retied their belts and bowed to each other. The abbot, who was refereeing, murmured a few words which ended the match. The contestants sat down, closed their eyes, and for a while the room held nothing but meditation.

  Nakamura had progressed beyond enjoying victory for its own sake. He could still exult in the aesthetics of a perfect maneuver; what a delightful toy the human body is, when you know how to throw eighty struggling kilos artistically through the air! But even that, he knew, was a spiritual weakness. Judo is more than a sport, it should be a means to an end: ideally, a physical form of meditation upon the principles of Zen.

  He wondered if he would ever attain that height. Rebel­liously, he wondered if anyone ever had, in actual practice, for more than a few moments anyhow . . . It was an unworthy thought. A wearer of the black belt in the fifth degree should at least have ceased inwardly barking at his betters. And now enough of all the personal. It was only his mind reflecting the tension of the contest, and tension was always the enemy. His mathematical training led him to visualize fields of force, and the human soul as a differential quantity dX—where X was a function of no one knew how many variables—which applied just enough, vanishingly small increments of action so that the great fields slid over each other and—Was this a desirable analogue? He must discuss it with the abbot sometime; it seemed too precise to reflect reality. For now he had better meditate upon one of the traditional paradoxes: consider the noise made by two hands clapping, and then the noise made by one hand clapping.

  The abbot spoke another word. The several contestants on the mat bowed to him, rose, and went to the showers. The audience, yellow-robed monks and a motley group of towns­people, left their cushions and mingled cheerfully.

  When Nakamura came out, his gi rolled under one arm, his short thick-set body clad in plain gray coveralls, he saw the abbot talking to Diomed Umfando, chief of the local Protector­ate garrison. He waited until they noticed him. Then he bowed and sucked in his breath respectfully.

  "Ah," said the abbot. "A most admirable performance to­night."

  "It was nothing, honorable sir," said Nakamura.

  "What did you . . . yes. Indeed. You are leaving tomorrow, are you not?"

  "Yes, master. On the Southern Cross, the expedition to the dark star. It is uncertain how long I shall be away." He laughed self-deprecatingly, as politeness required. "It is al­ways possible that one does not return. May I humbly ask the honorable abbot that—"

  "Of course," said the old man. "Your wife and children shall always be under our protection, and your sons will be educated here if no better place can be found for them." He smiled. "But who can doubt that the best pilot on Sarai will return as a conqueror?"

  They exchanged ritual compliments. Nakamura went about saying good-by to various other friends. As he came to the door, he saw the tall blue-clad form of Captain Umfando. He bowed.

  "I am walking back into town now," said the officer, almost apologetically: "May I request the pleasure of your company?"

  "If this unworthy person can offer even a moment's distrac­tion to the noble captain?"

  THEY left together. The dojo was part of the Buddhist monastery, which stood two or three kilometers out of the town called Susa. A road went through grainfields, an empty road now, for the spectators were still drinking tea under the abbot's red roof. Nakamura and Umfando walked in silence for a while; the captain's bodyguard shouldered their rifles and followed unobtrusively.

  Capella had long ago set. Its sixth planet, I1-Khan the giant, was near full phase, a vast golden shield blazoned with a hundred hues. Two other satellites, not much smaller than this Earth-sized Sarai on which humans dwelt, were visible. Only a few stars could shine through all that light, low in the purple sky; the fields lay drowned in amber radiance, Susa's lanterns looked feeble in the distance. Meteor trails criss­crossed heaven, as if someone wrote swift ideographs up there. On the left horizon, a sudden mountain range climbed until its peaks burned with snow. A moonbird was trilling, the fiddler insects answered, a small wind rustled in the grain. Otherwise only the scrunch of feet on gravel had voice.

  "This is a lovely world," murmured Nakamura.

  Captain Umfando shrugged. Wryness touched his ebony fea­tures. "I could wish it were more sociable."

  "Believe me, sir, despite political differences, there is no ill will toward you or your men personally—"

  "Oh, come now," said the officer. "I am not that naive. Sarai may begin by disliking us purely as soldiers and tax collectors for an Earth which will not let the ordinary colonist even visit it. But such feelings soon envelop the soldier himself. I've been jeered at, and mudballed by children, even out of uniform."

  "It is most deplorable," said Nakamura in distress. "May I offer my apologies on behalf of my town?"

  Umfando shrugged. "I'm not certain that an apology is in order. I didn't have to make a career of the Protector's army. And Earth does exploit the colonies. There are euphemisms and excuses, but exploitation is what it amounts to."

  He thought for a moment, and asked with a near despair: "But what else can Earth do?"

  Nakamura said nothing. They walked on in silence for a while.

  Umfando said at last, "I wish to put a rude question." When the flat face beside him showed no reluctance, he plowed ahead. "Let us not waste time on modesty. You know you're one of the finest pilots in the Guild. Any Capellan System pilot is—he has to be!—but you are the one they ask for when things get difficult. You've been on a dozen exploratory missions in new systems. It's not made you rich, but it has made you one of the most influential men on Sarai.

  "Why do you treat me like a human being?"

  Nakamura considered it gravely. "Well," he decided, "I can­not consider politics important enough to quarrel about."

  "I see." A little embarrassed, Umfando changed the subject:

  "I can get you on a military transport to Batu tomorrow, if you wish. Drop you off at the ‘caster station."

  "Thank you, but I have already engaged passage on the regular interstellar ferry."

  "Uh . . . did you ask for the Cross berth?"

  "No. I had served a few watches on her, of course, like every­one else. A good ship. A little outmoded now, perhaps, but well and honestly made. The Guild offered me the position, and since I had no other commitments, I accepted."

  Guild offers were actually assignments for the lower ranks of spacemen, Umfando knew. A man of Nakamura's standing could have refused. But maybe the way you attained such prestige was by never refusing.

  "Do you expect any trouble?" he asked.

  "One is never certain. The great human mistake is to antici­pate. The totally relaxed and unexpectant man is the one pre­pared for whatever may happen: he does not have to get out of an inappropriate posture before he can react."

  "Ha! Maybe judo ought to be required for all pilots."

  "No. I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art."

  Nakamura saw his house ahead. It stood on the edge of town, half screened by Terrestrial Bamboo. He had spent much time on the garden which surrounded it; many visi
tors were kind enough to call his garden beautiful. He sighed. A gracious house, a good and faithful wife, four promising chil­dren, health and achievement, what more could a man reason­ably ask? He told himself that his remembrances of Kyoto were hazed, he had left Earth as a very young boy. Surely this serene and uncrowded Sarai offered more than poor tortured antheap Earth gave even to her overlords. And yet some morn­ings he woke up with the temple bells of Kyoto still chiming in his ears.

  He stopped at the gate. "Will you honor my home for a cup of tea?" he asked.

  "No, thanks," said Umfando, almost roughly. "You've a fam­ily to . . . to say good-by to. I will see you when—"

  Fire streaked across the sky. For an instant Il-Khan himself was lost in blue flame. The bolide struck somewhere among the mountains. A sheet of pure outraged energy flared above ragged peaks. Then smoke and dust swirled up like a devil, and moments afterward thunder came banging down through the valley.

  Umfando whistled. "That was a monster!"

  "A . . . yes . . . most unusual . . . yes, yes." Nakamura stammered something, somehow he bowed good night and somehow he kept from running along the path to his roof. But as he walked, he began to shake.

  It was only a meteorite, he told himself frantically. Only a meteorite. The space around a giant star like Capella, and especially around its biggest planet, was certain to be full of cosmic junk. Billions of meteors hit Sarai every day. Hundreds of them got through to the surface. But Sarai was as big as Earth, he told himself. Sarai had oceans, deserts, uninhabited plains and forests . . . why, even on Sarai you were more likely to be killed by lightning than by a meteorite and—and—Oh, the jewel in the lotus! he cried out. I am afraid. I am afraid of the black sun.

  IT was raining again, but no one on Krasna pays attention to that. They wear a few light non-absorbent garments and welcome the rain on their bodies, a moment's relief from saturated hot air. The clouds thin overhead, so that the land glimmers with watery brightness, sometimes even the upper­most clouds break apart and Tau Ceti spears a blinding red­dish shaft through smoke-blue masses and silvery rain.

  Chang Sverdlov rode into Dynamogorsk with a hornbeast lashed behind his saddle. It had been a dangerous chase, through the tidal marshes and up over the bleak heights of Czar Nicholas IV Range, but he needed evidence to back his story, that he had only been going out to hunt. Mukerji, the chief intelligence officer of the Protectorate garrison, was get­ting suspicious, God rot his brain.

  Two soldiers came along the elevated sidewalk. Rain drummed on their helmets and sluiced off the slung rifles. Earth soldiers went in armed pairs on a street like Trumpet Road: for a Krasnan swamprancher, fisher, miner, logger, trapper, brawling away his accumulated loneliness, with a skinful of vodka or rice wine, a fluff-headed fille-de-joie to impress, and a sullen suspicion that the dice had been loaded, was apt to unlimber his weapons when he saw a blueback.

  Sverdlov contented himself with spitting at their boots, which were about level with his head. It went unnoticed in the downpour. And in the noise, and crowding, and blinking lights, with thunder above the city's gables. He clucked to his saurian and guided her toward the middle of the slough called Trumpet Road. Its excitement lifted his anger a bit. I'll report in, he told himself, and go wheedle an advance from the Guild bank, and then make up six weeks of bushranging in a way the joyhouses will remember!

  He turned off on the Avenue of Tigers and stopped before a certain inn. Tethering his lizard and throwing the guard a coin, he entered the taproom. It was as full of men and racket as usual. He shouldered up to the bar. The landlord recognized him; Sverdlov was a very big and solid young man, bullet-headed, crop-haired, with a thick nose and small brown eyes in a pockmarked face. The landlord drew a mug of kvass, spiked it with vodka, and set it out. He nodded toward the ceiling. "I will tell her you are here," he said, and left.

  Sverdlov leaned on the bar, one hand resting on a pistol butt, the other holding up his drink. I could wish it really were one of the upstairs girls expecting me, he thought. Do we need all this melodrama of codes, countersigns, and cell organiza­tion? He considered the seething of near-naked men in the room. A chess game, a card game, a dirty joke, an Indian wrestling match, a brag, a wheedle, an incipient fight: his own Krasnans! It hardly seemed possible that any of those ears could have been hired by the Protector and yet…

  The landlord came back. "She's here and ready for you," he grinned. A couple of nearby men guffawed coarsely. Sverdlov tossed off his drink, lit one of the cheap cigars he favored, and pushed through to the stairs.

  At the end of a third floor corridor he rapped on a door. A voice invited him in. The room beyond was small and drably furnished, but its window looked down a straight street to the town's end and a sudden feathery splendor of rainbow trees. Lightning flimmered through the bright rain of Krasna. Sver­dlov wondered scornfully if Earth had jungle and infinite promise on any doorstep.

  He closed the door and nodded at the two men who sat waiting. He knew fat Li-Tsung; the gaunt Arabic-looking fel­low was strange to him, and neither asked for an introduction.

  Li-Tsung raised an eyebrow. Sverdlov said, "It is going well. They were having some new troubles—the aerospores were playing merry hell with the electrical insulation—but I think I worked out a solution. The Wetlanders are keeping our boys amply fed, and there is no indication anyone has betrayed them. Yet."

  The thin man asked, "This is the clandestine bomb factory?"

  "No," said Li-Tsung. "It is time you learned of these matters, especially when you are leaving the system today. This man has been helping direct something more important than small arms manufacture. They are tooling up out there to make interplanetary missiles."

  "What for?" answered the stranger. "Once the Fellowship has seized the mattercaster, it will be years before reinforce­ments can arrive from any other system. You'll have time enough to build heavy armament then." He glanced inquir­ingly at Sverdlov. Li-Tsung nodded. "In fact," said the thin man, "my division is trying to so organize things that there will be no closer Protectorate forces than Earth itself. Simulta­neous revolution on a dozen planets. Then it would be at least two decades before spaceships could reach Tau Ceti."

  "Ah," grunted Sverdlov. He lowered his hairy body into a chair. His cigar jabbed at the thin man. "Have you ever thought the Earthlings are no fools? The mattercaster for the Tau Ceti System is up there on Moon Two. Sure. We seize it, or destroy it. But is it the only transceiver around?"

  The thin man choked. Li-Tsung murmured, "This is not for the rank and file. There is enough awe of Earth already to hold the people back. But in point of fact, the Protector is an idiot if there is not at least one asteroid in some unlikely orbit, with a heavy-duty ‘caster mounted on it. We can expect the Navy in our skies within hours of the independence proclamation. We must be prepared to fight!"

  "But—" said the thin man. "But this means it will take years more to make ready than I thought. I had hoped—"

  "The Centaurians rebelled prematurely, forty years ago," said Li-Tsung. "Let us never forget the lesson. Do you want to be lobotomized?"

  There was silence for a while. Rain hammered on the roof. Down in the street, a couple of rangers just in from the Up­lands were organizing an impromptu saurian fight.

  "Well," said Sverdlov at last. "I'd better not stay here."

  "Oh, but you should," said Li-Tsung. "You are supposedly visiting a woman, do you remember?"

  Sverdlov snorted impatience, but reached for the little chess set in his pouch. "Who'll play me a quick game, then?"

  "Are the bright lights that attractive?" asked Li-Tsung.

  Sverdlov spoke an obscenity. "I've spent nearly my whole leave chasing through the bush and up into the Czar," he said. "I'll be off to Thovo—or worse yet, to Krimchak or Cupra or the Belt, Thovo has a settlement at least—for weeks. Months, perhaps! Let me relax a little first."

  "As a matter of fact," said Li-Tsung, "your next berth has already been a
ssigned, and it is not to any of those places. It is outsystem." In his public persona, he was a minor official in the local branch of the Astronautical Guild.

  "What?" Sverdlov cursed for a steady minute. "You mean I'm to be locked up for a month on some stinking ship in the middle of interstellar space, and—"

  "Calmly, please, calmly. You won't be standing a routine single-handed just-in-case watch. This will be rather more interesting. You will be on the XA463, the Southern Cross."

  SVERDLOV considered. He had taken his turn on the stel­lar vessels, but had no interest in them: they were a chore, one of the less desirable aspects of the spaceman's life. He had even been on duty when a new system was entered, but it had thrilled him not. Its planets turned out to be poison­ous hells; he had finished his hitch and gone home before they even completed the transceiver station, the devil could drink his share of the celebration party.

  "I don't know which of them that would be," he said.

  "It is bound for Alpha Crucis. Or was. Several years ago, the photographs taken by its instruments were routinely robo­analyzed on Earth. There were discrepancies. Chiefly, some of the background stars were displaced, the Einstein effect of mass on light rays. A more careful study revealed there was a feeble source of long radio waves in that direction. They ap­pear to be the dying gasp of a star."

  Since Sverdlov's work involved him with the atomic nucleus, he could not help arguing: "I don't think so. The dying gasp, as you put it, would be gravitational potential energy, released as radiation when a star's own fires are all exhausted. But a thing so cold it only emits in the far radio frequencies . . . I'd say that was merely some kind of turbulence in what passes for an atmosphere. That the star isn't just dying, it's dead."

  "I don't know," shrugged Li-Tsung. "Perhaps no one does. This expedition will be to answer such questions. They gave up on Alpha Crucis for the time being and decelerated the ship toward this black star. It is arriving there now. The next per­sonnel will take up an orbit and make the initial studies. You are the engineer."