LITMIR.BIZ

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star world. It prevented tragedies, and saved lives, for once the reason for a man's death was known, preventive precautions were taken, so that many men who otherwise would have died, lived to walk the palm terraces of Mars and sail the tossing seas of Achernar. The histories of space featured and explained it, and glamorized its usefulness.

      But as the McCanahan let the words trail from his lips, he cursed and looked down at his palm, where part of his father's wrist had come off, to stick to it.

      He grimaced, and then reason came into his head. His father was recently dead, no rotting corpse. "Plastiskin," he breathed, and leaned down, ripping with strong fingers at that wrist, carefully built up to hide something.

      Around his father's wrist was wrapped a length of silvery wire, thin and fine. The McCanahan leaned forward and untwisted it.

      It came away and danced in his fingers, reflecting the blue glow of the wall mercuri-lamps.

      "A harpstring!"

      He sat on his ankles and forgot that a mile away the Eclipse was warming its take-off tubes. "Now why in the name of Brian Born did father hide such a thing on his wrist? He played no harp, nor anything else that ever made music!"

      * * * * *

      But this was no time to solve puzzles. With a snap of his fingers, he rolled up the silvery wire and bound it tight about an ankle, then thrust his foot back into his service boot. He went to the window and stared down at the splashing fountains and the sunflower gardens half a mile below him. The walls were lined with Senn guards, inside and out, and men with the High Mor's red dragon insignia on their cloaks moved here and there in the shrubbery, slashing at ferns and jungle vines with their swords.

      "They'll tire of that soon enough," he decided. "Then they'll come through the palace itself, a floor at a time, working the place over with the point of a dagger and the muzzle of a Thorn."

      They would be expecting him to hide. They would be expecting him to keep retreating ahead of them until they trapped him high above, in a cloud-room or on a rooftop. A Senn or a sfarran would act like that. They would do the smart, the sensible thing.

      "Faith, my belly tells me it's the smart thing for myself as well," the McCanahan muttered. "But my head tells me something else again."

      He wandered the rooms of the palace until he found the wallgrille of an atmosphere tube. With the edge of his service knife, he worked at the screws until the plate came loose from the wall. He crawled into the tube and replaced the grate as best he could. Then, sliding and levering himself from curve to curve of the tube, he began moving downwards.

      When he came to gentle loops in the tubes, he let go and slid. It took him three hours to get down, but when he came into the cold metal coils that could duplicate the atmosphere of fifty planets, he was below the search level, and as good as a free man walking the streets.

      "Except for the uniform," he told himself, glancing down ruefully at the white and gold resplendence of his fleet garb.

      In ten minutes he was crawling up through a street grille, and heading for the space docks.

      He was moving up the Avenue of Emblems, with the gleaming bullet that was the S.I.C. Eclipse towering above the buildings, nosing its point skyward, still half a mile ahead of him, when he heard the announcers. The words were just sounds, at first, like the pennons flapping above his head from the tall poles, each a gift of the United Worlds.

      His mind was torn cleanly with a thin, hard grief, for he was remembering his father, and the way of his smiling and his gentle voice, and the fun they had shared together on the Klisskahaenay Rapids in a boat, or in the crisp darkness of space, with the stars beckoning and his father pointing them out to him. And his handclasp when he left for the Academy, his letters, his visits at holidays when the needs of the Empire were relaxed enough to free the Admiral from his cruiser. It was a good companionship, that of his father and himself, born of their mutual need when his mother died on Aldebaran.

      And now it was over. No more would he see that smile or listen to that voice or wonder how it was that his father knew so much more than he about so many things. They would never hook a lyskansa-fish or blast a Martian boar with needleguns. They would never find new foods in restaurants that—

      "—under penalty of the red dragon! Repeating! Space Commodore McCanahan—Kael McCanahan, Earther—is to die on sight. All guards are hereby warned. McCanahan must not leave Akkalan. He is to be shot on sight, under penalty of the red dragon! Repeating...."

      It sank in after a while. He drew back into the shadows, and the harpstring tied to his ankle pained him, as if it whispered with his father's voice. They're afraid of me and what I can do to them, his mind told him. They don't even dare let me get close to a spacommunicator panel! But why? Why? The McCanahan shook his head and looked down at himself, neat and trim in the gold and white space uniform.

      "It's a card with my name on it asking that they shoot me," he told the shadows. "I've got to be rid of it or swallow a dozen blaster-beams."

      They would be searching the space docks just about now, minutes before take-off time. They would almost dismantle the ship to find him. And there would be others, blasters in their hands, stretched all around the field. They would shoot on sight, to kill, or they would suffer the fate of the red dragon; and no one in his right mind cared even to think about that punishment, that took a man a month of agony to die.

      McCanahan stripped naked in the shadows and bundled his uniform into a ball and weighed it with his boots. He made a compact bundle and threw it up, through the lengthening shadows, onto a low, sloping roof. Let them find that when they could! Then he turned and ran on the sun-warmed bricks, away from the field, toward the dirty alleyways that were the Akkalan slums.

      "Now where in the name of the family leprechaun could a man who is stripped to his buff hope to find a shelter in this unholy town?" he asked the wind as he ran.

      McCanahan thought of Ars Maasen, a little dark man with a colossal thirst for the pale yellow fire that was Senn wine. His lips twitched as his memory ran on the nights they had spent together in the low-land taverns, sampling every liquid that the skills and arts of men could brew. Ars Maasen traded in lyss furs, and spent his profits faster than the fierce little desert tycats could breed and run to his traps.

      With Ars Maasen he would find Flaith.

      II

      The cities of the Senorech had been built half a million years ago when their primates first modelled clay from mud and water. As the years piled knowledge on their shoulders, their buildings grew and expanded, but they still showed the heterogeneous planning the first Senn had put into them. A man could lose himself in the slum quarter, where the dragon police rarely came, for the High Mor was content to close his eyes to the manner of a man's profit, providing he paid a good tax at the end of the year. Under the creaking signs and iron grille balconies, in the dark street shadows, even a naked man could run free and unmolested.

      He came to a square of light and an open door under a carven tycat. Carefully he crept closer listening to the song a hundred throats were bellowing through the smoke and the wine fumes. He came inside on soundless feet and stood sheltered by a solid oak railing.

      Flaith was a breath in a man's throat and a catch at his guts, lovely in bronze moire, her amber shoulders bared to the curve of her breasts, the moire slashed teasingly down a naked side to the swell of a white hip. She leaned on the wooden tabletop, and her slant eyes were clear, and her crimson hair a flame caught in the blaze of a wall torch.

      The McCanahan let his eyes linger on her loveliness, but it was the little dark man, with the scar across half his face and a full foaming tankard at his mouth, that he had come to see.

      He drew back his arm and threw the pebble he held.

      Ars Maasen felt the sting of the rock on his forehead. He lowered his mug and swore by a dozen gods at the ill manners of men who would toss rocks in the middle of such a song. And then he felt Flaith's white

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