LITMIR.BIZ

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switch with a glittering red handle was a foot above Jones' bent head. Grim went for it in a flying leap. His hands came up and the switch went down and—

      Hell broke loose.

      * * * * *

      Sound welled up, pitched high and keening and almost inaudible. What was heard, was jarring and maddening. It took a man's nerve-ends out and scratched on them until his entire body was dancing. Grim stood shivering, trying to lift his hands to shelter his eardrums; discovering this his arms were jumping free of his will.

      He whispered, "I can't do it. I can't turn it off." Something rolled against his leg. It was old Jasper Jones, eyes rolling in his head, a bubbly white froth at his mouth.

      Grim's knees shook. They went in different directions and he pitched to the metal floor. His body danced a weird saraband against the metal. He thought, 'If something doesn't happen, we'll all go mad!' He knew that sound could crush them; that this sound that was jumbling their brains was enough for that, given the time to build itself.

      His hands shook. His body quivered. His brain throbbed, and blackness swept down and blinded him.

      * * * * *

      The sound was gone. Someone was shaking him by the shoulder, urgently. Grim opened tired eyelids. Tlokine bent over him, fright making her red nails dig deep into his shoulder.

      Grim said words, but he did not hear them. He put hands to his ears, found them plugged with cotton. The sound came through, a little, but it was muffled, ineffective.

      He got up and took the wad of cotton that Tlokine still held and forced two balls of it into old Jasper Jones' ears. After a while the old man sat up and looked at them.

      Grim said, even though he knew they could not hear him, "I'm going up and tie up Black Randolph for once and all. Then we'll turn this thing off and parley with the others."

      The pirate was in even worse state than Grim had been; he had been nearer to the vast loudspeakers, had felt the numbing shock of those sound-waves. Like a man in water, close to an explosion, his brain and lungs had hemorrhaged. His chest was bloated, swollen. Grim covered him, turned to the lovely Althaya; covered her quickly, too.

      He turned off the machine and stood in a silence that was almost as dreadful as the sound had been. Jasper Jones and Tlokine came up the floor opening, removing their earplugs.

      "They got it the worst. They were right on top of the high pressure waves coming from the speaker," Grim said, gesturing at the covered bodies. "The others, outside—they were further away, as we were. They'll be all right, in a little while."

      Jones said, "It was horrible."

      Tlokine whispered, "It did not bother me. I was too far away. But when I saw Black Randolph and Althaya bend over, clutching at their stomachs—what was it, Grim?"

      "High pressure waves, that hit anything in their path with terrific impact. It's sound, but not sound as we generally think of it. After the first wave a section of air follows, acts as suction. Repeated high pressure and suction waves—well, they rip out tissues and smash blood vessels."

      Jasper Jones looked at him. He licked his lips with a dry tongue. He wavered, "This is the end of my experiments, then? I can't go on. You'll make your report and—"

      "I'll report a natural phenomena. Build sound dams, old timer. After all, it's a pretty destructive thing you've built. If Tlokine hadn't been a good distance from that speaker, she'd be as Althaya and Black Randolph are. And speaking of Althaya—how did she know when the Change would come?"

      Jones said, "I operated on her while she was in the amnesiac hospital. She was a violent case. Brain surgery helped her. I put in a thin slip of metal foil. Later I discovered that the foil caught the subsonic rhythm of the machine as it warmed. Its vibrations told her what was coming."

      "Good enough. Give half the planet to the amnesiac men and women. Let Tlokine rule them. Keep half the planet for your own experiments."

      Jasper Jones grinned slyly, "I'm an old man. My planet needs new blood. Tlokine as queen would need a king."

      "I've been thinking the same thing myself," chuckled Grim, watching Tlokine flush red. "After I make my report I'll be back." He bent and lifted the girl in his arms. "We're going to talk over the future, Jasper. I'll let you know what Tlokine thinks of the idea."

      Jasper Jones grinned. The white arms around Grim's neck and the red lips pressed to his gave the old man his answer. He sighed. It would be nice, having toddlers around the place. There was so much he could teach them about sound.

      Jasper Jones sat down and began to plot his space-dams.

      The Warlock of Sharrador

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      The McCanahan came awake in the pearl mists of a Senn dawn, staring upward into the round blue muzzle of a Thorn blaster. The handgun hung in the air without visible support, its trigger moving slowly back. In an instant, it would lash out at him with a thousand tares of destruction.

      He whipped the bedclothes into a geyser of silk and moonylon, and dove naked over the edge of the bed to roll on the floor and turn over and over. He brought up against the chair where his uniform belt hung, and fumbled blindly for his service holster.

      The blaster spoke in a soft whooosh of yellow flame, and the bedclothes puffed once, billowing into a thick, reddish smoke. That would have been me, instead of the blankets, if the Little People had not come in my dreams to whisper in my ears of Flaith's loveliness, the McCanahan thought, and tore loose his addy-gun.

      His wrist steadied, and he touched the stud. The blaster, hung on a tensor beam, went red, then white, and began to melt in droplets all over the thick Morrvan carpet of his officer's quarters. The tensor beam, held by a minute mechanism inbuilt within the handgun's butt, let loose, and the blistered, melting thing thudded to the floor.

      "It was a close thing," Kael McCanahan told himself, sitting there naked on the floor.

      It had been the sfarri who had sent the gun. The sfarri, who hated the men of Terra with a hate like a fierce, blazing flame, who would not scruple at assassination to gain their aims.

      They were a cold, efficient breed of men, these sfarri. The farflung Galactic fleet ships of Mother Terra, stretched in a thin line between the stars, had crossed addy beams and searirays with their slim vessels a thousand times. Almost always, Terra lost her ships. Almost always, those far-ranging sfarran ships smashed the eagle-blazoned Terran cruisers, and fled like laughing ghosts into the black infinity of space.

      No Terran ship had ever captured a living sfarran. Somehow, with the barbaric philosophy of hara-kari, they committed suicide. It never failed.

      And slowly, but remorselessly, the ships of Terra and the Solar Combine were pushed back and back, away from the Rim planets and the close vastness of the Sack worlds that were so rich in every mineral, jewel and foodstuff known to man, and even in some that Terran man had never known.

      The Solar Command had ordered Kael's father, Sire Patric McCanahan, Fleet Admiral, with Captain Raoul Edmunds and Commodore Kael McCanahan, to Senorech, there to make at last parlay with the High Mor who ruled the Senn. They were to offer alliances and trade agreements.

      Too many times, at the foot of the great ruboid throne of the Senn ruler, had young Kael McCanahan seen the thin, hard lips of the High Mor twist cruelly as he lashed out at the gray-haired Admiral. Too many times had the red flush of fury crept up past his tight white uniform collar with its crimson Commodore braid encrusted thick on its rich surface, as he listened to the High Mor explaining to his father the fact that the men of the Solar Command were no match for the relentless fury of the sfarri.

      The High Mor, it was plain, was eager to ally himself with the sfarri.

      In return, the sfarri

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