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  “A visitor,” Adzel replied without slacking his even trot. “I have an urgent matter to discuss and earnestly request admittance.”

  “Who are you? How did you get here?” The voice was female human, accented, and shrill with agitation. “Stop, I tell you! This is private property. No trespassing.”

  “I humbly beg pardon, but I really must insist on being received.”

  “Go back. You will find a gatehouse at the foot of the road. You may shelter there and tell me what you have to say.”

  “Thank you for your kind offer.”

  Adzel kept advancing. “Freelady . . . ah . . . Beldaniel, I believe? It is my understanding that your partners are presently at their office. Please correct me if I am wrong.”

  “I said go back!” she screamed. “Or I open fire! I have the right. You have been warned.”

  “Actually, my business is with Captain Falkayn.” Adzel proceeded. He was quite near the main portal. Its outer valve bulked broad in the fused-stone wall. “If you will be good enough to inform him that I wish to talk to him, viva voce, we can certainly hold our discussion outdoors. Permit me to introduce myself. I am one of his teammates. My claim upon his attention therefore takes precedence over the seclusion of your home. But I have no real wish to intrude, Freelady.”

  “You’re not his companion. Not anymore. He resigned. He spoke to you himself. He does not want to see you.”

  “With profoundest regret and sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused, I am compelled to require a direct confrontation.”

  “He . . . he isn’t here. I will have him call you later.”

  “Since you may conceivably be in error as to his whereabouts, Freelady, perhaps you will graciously allow me to search your premises?”

  “No! This is your last warning! Stop this instant or you’ll be killed!”

  Adzel obeyed; but within the armor, his muscles bunched. His left hand worked the cannon control. In his palm lay a tiny telescreen whose crosshairs centered on the same view as the muzzle. His right hand loosened his blast pistol in its holster.

  “Freelady,” he said, “violence and coercion are deplorable. Do you realize how much merit you have lost? I beg of you—”

  “Go back!” Half hysterical, the voice broke across. “I’ll give you ten seconds to turn around and start downhill. One. Two.”

  “I was afraid of this,” Adzel sighed. And he sprang—but forward. His cannon flung three shaped charges at the main gate. Fire spurted, smoke puffed, shrapnel flew, eerily soundless except for a quiver through the ground.

  Two energy beams flashed at him, out of the turrets that flanked the entry port. He had already bounded aside. His cannon hammered. One emplacement went down in a landslide of rubble. Smoke and dust whirled, veiling him from the other. By the time it had settled, he was up to the wall, beneath the gun’s reach.

  The outer valve sagged, twisted metal. “I’m headed in,” he said to Chee Lan, and fired through the chamber. A single shell tore loose the second, less massive barrier. Air gushed forth, momentarily white as moisture froze, vanishing as fog dissipated under the cruel sun.

  Inside, an illumination now undiffused fell in puddles on a disarrayed antechamber. Through its shadows, he noticed a few pictures and a brutally massive statue. The artistic conventions were foreign to anything he had encountered in all his wanderings. He paid scant attention. Which way to David, in this damned warren? Like a great steel hound, he cast about for clues. Two hallways led off in opposite directions. But one held empty rooms; the chambers fronting on the other were furnished, albeit sparsely. Hm-m-m, the builders plan on enlarging the castle’s population sometime. But with whom, or what? He galloped down the inhabited corridor. Before long he encountered a bulkhead that had automatically closed when pressure dropped.

  Beldaniel’s retainers were probably on the other side of it, spacesuited, expecting to give him a full barrage when he cracked through. She herself was no doubt on the phone, informing her partners in Lunograd of the invasion. With luck and management, van Rijn could tie up the police for a while. They must be kept off, because they were bound to act against the aggressor, Adzel. No matter what allegations he made, they would not ransack the castle until warrants had been issued. By that time, if it ever came, the Serendipity gang could have covered their tracks as regarded Falkayn in any of numerous ways.

  But Beldaniel herself might attempt that, if Adzel didn’t get busy. The Wodenite retreated to the foreroom and unlimbered his working gear. No doubt another chamber, belonging to the adjacent airseal section, lay behind this one. Though gastight, the interior construction was nowhere near as ponderous as the outworks. What he must do was enter unnoticed. He spread out a plastic bubblecloth, stood on it and stuck its edges to the wall. His cutting torch flared. He soon made a hole, and waited until air had leaked through and inflated to full pressure the tent that now enclosed him. Finishing the incision, he removed the panel he had burned out and stepped into an apartment.

  It was furnished with depressing austerity. He took a moment to pull the door off a closet—yes, female garb—and inspect a bookshelf. Many volumes were in a format and symbology he did not recognize; others, in Anglic, were texts describing human institutions for the benefit of visiting extraterrestrials. Boddhisatva! What sort of background did this outfit have, anyway?

  He opened his faceplate, removed an earplug, and cautiously stuck his muzzle out into the hall. Clanks and rattles came to him from around a comer where the bulkhead must be. Hoarse words followed. The servants hadn’t closed their helmets yet . . . They were from several scarcely civilized planets, and no doubt even those who were not professional guards were trained in the use of modern weapons as well as household machinery. Cat-silent in his own armor, Adzel went the opposite way.

  This room, that room, nothing. Confound it—yes, I might go so far as to say curse it—David must be somewhere near . . . Hold! His wilderness-trained hearing had picked up the least of sounds. He entered a boudoir and activated its exterior scanner.

  A woman went by, tall, slacksuited, vigorous-looking in a lean fashion. Her face was white and tense, her breath rapid. From van Rijn’s briefing, Adzel recognized Thea Beldaniel. She passed. Had she looked behind her, she would have seen four and a half meters of dragon following on tiptoe.

  She came to a door and flung it wide. Adzel peeked around the jamb. Falkayn sat in the chamber beyond, slumped into a lounger. The woman hurried to him and shook him. “Wake up!” she cried. “Oh, hurry!”

  “Huh? Uh. Whuzza?” Falkayn stirred. His voice was dull, his expression dead.

  “Come along, darling. We must get out of here.”

  “Uhhh . . .” Falkayn shambled to his feet.

  “Come, I say!” She tugged at his arm. He obeyed like a sleepwalker. “The tunnel to the spaceport. We’re off for a little trip, my dear.”

  Adzel identified the symptoms. Brainscrub drugs, yes, in their entire ghastliness. You submerged the victim into a gray dream where he was nothing but what you told him to be. You could focus an encephaloductor beam on his head and a subsonic carrier wave on his middle ear. His drowned self could not resist the pulses thus generated; he would carry out whatever he was told, looking and sounding almost normal if you operated him skillfully but in truth a marionette. Otherwise he would simply remain where you stowed him.

  In time, you could remodel his personality.

  Adzel trod full into the entrance. “Now that is too bloody much!” he roared.

  Thea Beldaniel sprang back. Her scream rose, went on and on. Falkayn stood hunched.

  A yell answered, through the hallways. My mistake, Adzel realized. Perhaps not avoidable. But the guards have been summoned, and they have more armament than l do. Best we escape while we may.

  Nonetheless, van Rijn’s orders had been flat and loud. “You get films of our young man, right away, and you take blood and spit samples, before anything else. Or I take them off you, hear me, and not in so po
lite a place neither!” It seemed foolish to the Wodenite, when death must arrive in a minute or two. But so rarely did the old man issue so inflexible a directive that Adzel decided he’d better obey.

  “Excuse me, please.” His tail brushed the shrieking woman aside and pinned her gently but irresistibly to the wall. He tabled his camera, aimed it at Falkayn, set it on Track, and left it to work while he used needle and pipette on the flesh that had been his comrade. (And would be again, by everything sacred, or else be honorably dead!) Because he was calm about it, the process took just a few seconds. He stowed the sample tubes in a pouch, retrieved the camera, and gathered Falkayn in his arms.

  As he came out the door, half a dozen retainers arrived. He couldn’t shoot back, when he must shield the human with his own body. He plowed through, scattering a metallic bow wave. His tail sent two of the opposition off on an aerial somersault. Bolts and bullets smote. Chaos blazed around him. Some shots were deflected, some pierced the armor—but not too deeply, and it was self-sealing and he was tough. None could match his speed down the hall and up the nearest rampway. But they’d follow. He couldn’t stand long against grenades or portable artillery. Falkayn, unprotected, would be torn to pieces sooner than that. It was necessary to get the devil out of this hellhole.

  Up, up, up! He ended in a tower room, bare and echoing, its viewports scanning the whole savage moonscape. Beldaniel, or someone, must have recovered wits and called in the patrols, because several boats approached swift above the stonelands. At a distance, their guns looked pencil thin, but those were nasty things to face. Adzel set Falkayn down in a corner. Carefully, he drilled a small hole in a viewport through which he could poke the transmitter antenna on his helmet.

  Since Chee Lan’s unit was no longer locked on his, he broadened the beam and increased the power. “Hello, hello. Adzel to ship. Are you there?”

  “No.” Her reply was half sneer, half sob. “I’m on Mars staging a benefit for the Sweet Little Old Ladies’ Knitting and Guillotine Watching Society. What have you bungled now?”

  Adzel had already established his location with reference to published photographs of the castle’s exterior and van Rijn’s arbitrary nomenclature. “David and I are in the top of Snoring Beauty’s Tower. He is indeed under brainscrub. I estimate we will be attacked from the ramp within five minutes. Or, if they decide to sacrifice this part of the structure, their flitters can demolish it in about three minutes. Can you remove us beforehand?”

  “I’m halfway there already, idiot. Hang on!”

  “You do not go aboard, Adzel,” van Rijn cut in. “You stay outside and get set down where we agreed, hokay?”

  “If possible,” Chee clipped. “Shut up.”

  “I shut up to you,” van Rijn said quietly. “Not right away to God.”

  Adzel pulled back his antenna and slapped a sealing patch on the hole. Little air had bled out. He loomed over Falkayn. “I have a spacesuit here for you,” he said. “Can you scramble into it?”

  The clouded eyes met his without recognition. He sighed. No time to dress a passive body. From the spiraling rampwell, barbaric yells reached his ears. He couldn’t use his cannon; in this narrow space, concussion would be dangerous to an unarmored Falkayn. The enemy was not thus restricted. And the patrols were converging like hornets.

  And Muddlin’ Through burst out of the sky.

  The spaceship was designed for trouble—if need be, for war. Chee Lan was not burdened by any tenderness. Lightnings flashed, briefly hiding the sun. The boats rained molten down the mountain. The spaceship came to a halt on gravfields alongside the turret. She could have sliced through, but that would have exposed those within to hard radiation. Instead, with tractor and pressor beams, she took the walls apart.

  Air exploded outward. Adzel had clashed shut his own faceplate. He fired his blaster down the ramp, to discourage the servants, and collected Falkayn. The human was still unprotected, and had lost consciousness. Blood trickled from his nostrils. But momentary exposure to vacuum is not too harmful; deepsea divers used to survive greater decompressions, and fluids do not begin to boil instantaneously. Adzel pitched Falkayn toward an open air lock. A beam seized him and reeled him in. The valve snapped shut behind him. Adzel sprang. He was caught likewise and clutched to the hull.

  Muddlin’ Through stood on her tail and grabbed herself some altitude.

  Shaken, buffeted, the castle and the mountains reeling beneath him, Adzel still received van Rijn’s orders to Chee Lan:

  “. . . You let him down by where I told you. My yacht fetches him inside five minutes and takes us to Lunograd. But you, you go straight on with Falkayn. Maybe he is thick in the noddle, but he can tell you what direction to head in.”

  “Hoy, wait!” the Cynthian protested. “You never warned me about this.”

  “Was no time to make fancy plans, critchety-crotchety, for every possible outgo of happenings. How could I tell for sure what would be the circlestances? I thought probable it would be what it is, but maybe could have been better, maybe worse. Hokay. You start off.”

  “Look here, you fat pirate, my shipmate’s drugged, hurt, sick! If you think for one picosecond he’s going anywhere except to a hospital, I suggest you pull your head—the pointed one, that is—out of a position I would hitherto have sworn was anatomically impossible, and—”

  “Whoa down, my furry friendling, easy makes it. From what you describe, his condition is nothing you can’t cure en route. We fixed you with a complete kit and manual for unscrubbing minds and making them dirty again, not so? And what it cost, yow, would stand your hair on end so it flew out of the follicles! Do listen. This is big. Serendipity puts its whole existing on stake for whatever this is. We got to do the same.”

  “I like money as well as you do,” Chee said with unwonted slowness. “But there are other values in life.”

  “Ja, ja.” Adzel grew dizzy from the whirling away of the land beneath. He closed his eyes and visualized van Rijn in the transmitter room, churchwarden in one fist, chins wobbling as he ripped off words, but somehow a-crackle. “Like what Serendipity is after. Got to be more than money.

  “Think hard, Chee Lan. You know what I deducted from the facts? Davy Falkayn had to be under drugs, a prisoner chained worse than with irons. Why? Because a lot of things, like he wouldn’t quit on me sudden . . . but mainly, he is human and I is human, and I say a healthy lecherous young man what would throw over Veronica—even if he didn’t think Veronica is for anything except fun—what would throw over a bouncer-bouncer like that for a North Pole like Thea Beldaniel, by damn, he got something wrong in his upper story. So it looked probabilistic he was being mopped in the head.

  “But what follows from this? Why, Serendipity was breaking the covenant of the Polesotechnic League. And that meant something big was on foot, worth the possible consequentials. Maybe worth the end of Serendipity itself—which is for sure now guaranteed!

  “And what follows from that, little fluffymuff? What else, except the purpose was not commercial? For money, you play under rules, because the prize is not worth breaking them if you got the sense you need to be a strong player. But you could play for different things—like war, conquest, power—and those games is not nice, ha? The League made certain Serendipity was not doing industrial espionaging. But there is other kinds. Like to some outsider—somebody outside the whole of civilizations we know about—somebody hidden and ergo very, very likely our self-appointed enemy. Nie?”

  Adzel’s breath sucked in between his teeth.

  “We got no time for fumblydiddles,” van Rijn went on. “They sent off a messenger ship two weeks ago. Leastwise, Traffic Control records clearing it from the castle with two of the partners aboard personal. Maybe you can still beat their masters to wherever the goal is. In every case, you and Falkayn makes the best we got, right now in the Solar System, to go look. But you wait one termite-bitten hour, the police is in action and you is detained for material witnesses.

  “No
, get out while you can. Fix our man while you travel. Learn what gives, yonderwards, and report back to me, yourselfs or by robocourier. Or mail or passenger pigeon or whatever is your suits. The risk is big but maybe the profit is in scale. Or maybe the profit is keeping our lives or our freedom. Right?”

  “Yes,” said Chee faintly, after a long pause. The ship had crossed the mountains and was descending on the rendezvous. Mare Frigoris lay darkling under a sun that stood low in the south. “But we’re a team. I mean, Adzel—”

  “Can’t go, him,” van Rijn said. “Right now, we are also ourselfs making crunch of the covenant and the civil law. Bad enough you and Falkayn leave. Must be him, not Adzel, because he’s the one of the team is trained special for working with aliens, new cultures, diddle and counter-diddle. Serendipity is clever and will fight desperate here on Luna. I got to have evidences of what they done, proofs, eyewitnessing. Adzel was there. He can show big, impressive testimonials.”

  “Well—” The Wodenite had never heard Chee Lan speak more bleakly. “I suppose. I didn’t expect this.”

  “To be alive,” said van Rijn, “is that not to be again and again surprised?”

  The ship set down. The tractor beam released Adzel. He stumbled off over the lava. “Fare you well,” said Chee. He was too shaken for any articulate answer. The ship rose anew. He stared after her until she had vanished among the stars.

  Not much time passed before the merchant’s vessel arrived; but by then, reaction was going at full tide through Adzel. As if in a dream, he boarded, let the crew divest him of his gear and van Rijn take over his material from the castle. He was only half conscious when they made Lunograd port, and scarcely heard the outraged bellows of his employer—was scarcely aware of anything except the infinite need for sleep and sleep and sleep—when he was arrested and led off to jail.

  VIII

  The phone announced: “Sir, the principal subject of investigation has called the office of Mendez and is demanding immediate conference with him.”