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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Planet Savers, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Planet Savers
+
+Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
+
+Release Date: March 13, 2010 [EBook #31619]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PLANET SAVERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Meredith Bach, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ [Transcriber's Note:
+
+  This etext was produced from Amazing Stories, November, 1958. Extensive
+  research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
+  publication was renewed.
+
+  Curly brackets and a preceding underscore have been used to indicate
+  subscripted numbers.]
+
+
+
+
+ AMAZING STORIES
+
+ SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
+
+ THE
+ PLANET
+ SAVERS
+
+ By
+ MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
+
+ ILLUSTRATOR NOVICK
+
+ A SHORT NOVEL
+
+
+
+
+the planet savers
+
+
+    _Marion Zimmer Bradley has written some of the finest science
+    fiction in print. She has been away from our pages too long. So this
+    story is in the nature of a triumphant return. It could well be her
+    best to date._
+
+
+By the time I got myself all the way awake I thought I was alone. I was
+lying on a leather couch in a bare white room with huge windows,
+alternate glass-brick and clear glass. Beyond the clear windows was a
+view of snow-peaked mountains which turned to pale shadows in the
+glass-brick.
+
+Habit and memory fitted names to all these; the bare office, the orange
+flare of the great sun, the names of the dimming mountains. But beyond a
+polished glass desk, a man sat watching me. And I had never seen the man
+before.
+
+He was chubby, and not young, and had ginger-colored eyebrows and a
+fringe of ginger-colored hair around the edges of a forehead which was
+otherwise quite pink and bald. He was wearing a white uniform coat, and
+the intertwined caduceus on the pocket and on the sleeve proclaimed him
+a member of the Medical Service attached to the Civilian HQ of the
+Terran Trade City.
+
+I didn't stop to make all these evaluations consciously, of course. They
+were just part of my world when I woke up and found it taking shape
+around me. The familiar mountains, the familiar sun, the strange man.
+But he spoke to me in a friendly way, as if it were an ordinary thing to
+find a perfect stranger sprawled out taking a siesta in here.
+
+"Could I trouble you to tell me your name?"
+
+That was reasonable enough. If I found somebody making himself at home
+in my office--if I had an office--I'd ask him his name, too. I started
+to swing my legs to the floor, and had to stop and steady myself with
+one hand while the room drifted in giddy circles around me.
+
+[Illustration: The man in the mirror was a stranger.]
+
+"I wouldn't try to sit up just yet," he remarked, while the floor calmed
+down again. Then he repeated, politely but insistently, "Your name?"
+
+"Oh, yes. My name." It was--I fumbled through layers of what felt like
+gray fuzz, trying to lay my tongue on the most familiar of all sounds,
+my own name. It was--why, it was--I said, on a high rising note, "This
+is damn silly," and swallowed. And swallowed again. Hard.
+
+"Calm down," the chubby man said soothingly. That was easier said than
+done. I stared at him in growing panic and demanded, "But, but, have I
+had amnesia or something?"
+
+"Or something."
+
+"What's my _name_?"
+
+"Now, now, take it easy! I'm sure you'll remember it soon enough. You
+can answer other questions, I'm sure. How old are you?"
+
+I answered eagerly and quickly, "Twenty-two."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The chubby man scribbled something on a card. "Interesting.
+In-ter-est-ing. Do you know where we are?"
+
+I looked around the office. "In the Terran Headquarters. From your
+uniform, I'd say we were on Floor 8--Medical."
+
+He nodded and scribbled again, pursing his lips. "Can you--uh--tell me
+what planet we are on?"
+
+I had to laugh. "Darkover," I chuckled, "I hope! And if you want the
+names of the moons, or the date of the founding of the Trade City, or
+something--"
+
+He gave in, laughing with me. "Remember where you were born?"
+
+"On Samarra. I came here when I was three years old--my father was in
+Mapping and Exploring--" I stopped short, in shock. "He's dead!"
+
+"Can you tell me your father's name?"
+
+"Same as mine. Jay--Jason--" the flash of memory closed down in the
+middle of a word. It had been a good try, but it hadn't quite worked.
+The doctor said soothingly, "We're doing very well."
+
+"You haven't told me anything," I accused. "Who are you? Why are you
+asking me all these questions?"
+
+He pointed to a sign on his desk. I scowled and spelled out the letters.
+"Randall ... Forth ... Director ... Department ..." and Dr. Forth made a
+note. I said aloud, "It is--_Doctor_ Forth, isn't it?"
+
+"Don't you know?"
+
+I looked down at myself, and shook my head. "Maybe _I'm_ Doctor Forth,"
+I said, noticing for the first time that I was also wearing a white coat
+with the caduceus emblem of Medical. But it had the wrong feel, as if I
+were dressed in somebody else's clothes. _I_ was no doctor, was I? I
+pushed back one sleeve slightly, exposing a long, triangular scar under
+the cuff. Dr. Forth--by now I was sure _he_ was Dr. Forth--followed the
+direction of my eyes.
+
+"Where did you get the scar?"
+
+"Knife fight. One of the bands of those-who-may-not-enter-cities caught
+us on the slopes, and we--" the memory thinned out again, and I said
+despairingly, "It's all confused! What's the matter? Why am I up on
+Medical? Have I had an accident? Amnesia?"
+
+"Not exactly. I'll explain."
+
+I got up and walked to the window, unsteadily because my feet wanted to
+walk slowly while I felt like bursting through some invisible net and
+striding there at one bound. Once I got to the window the room stayed
+put while I gulped down great breaths of warm sweetish air. I said, "I
+could use a drink."
+
+"Good idea. Though I don't usually recommend it." Forth reached into a
+drawer for a flat bottle; poured tea-colored liquid into a throwaway
+cup. After a minute he poured more for himself. "Here. And sit down,
+man. You make me nervous, hovering like that."
+
+I didn't sit down. I strode to the door and flung it open. Forth's voice
+was low and unhurried.
+
+"What's the matter? You can go out, if you want to, but won't you sit
+down and talk to me for a minute? Anyway, where do you want to go?"
+
+The question made me uncomfortable. I took a couple of long breaths and
+came back into the room. Forth said, "Drink this," and I poured it down.
+He refilled the cup unasked, and I swallowed that too and felt the hard
+lump in my middle begin to loosen up and dissolve.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Forth said, "Claustrophobia too. Typical," and scribbled on the card
+some more. I was getting tired of that performance. I turned on him to
+tell him so, then suddenly felt amused--or maybe it was the liquor
+working in me. He seemed such a funny little man, shutting himself up
+inside an office like this and talking about claustrophobia and watching
+me as if I were a big bug. I tossed the cup into a disposal.
+
+"Isn't it about time for a few of those explanations?"
+
+"If you think you can take it. How do you feel now?"
+
+"Fine." I sat down on the couch again, leaning back and stretching out
+my long legs comfortably. "What did you put in that drink?"
+
+He chuckled. "Trade secret. Now; the easiest way to explain would be to
+let you watch a film we made yesterday."
+
+"To watch--" I stopped. "It's your time we're wasting."
+
+He punched a button on the desk, spoke into a mouthpiece. "Surveillance?
+Give us a monitor on--" he spoke a string of incomprehensible numbers,
+while I lounged at ease on the couch. Forth waited for an answer, then
+touched another button and steel louvers closed noiselessly over the
+windows, blacking them out. I rose in sudden panic, then relaxed as the
+room went dark. The darkness felt oddly more normal than the light, and
+I leaned back and watched the flickers clear as one wall of the office
+became a large visionscreen. Forth came and sat beside me on the leather
+couch, but in the picture Forth was there, sitting at his desk, watching
+another man, a stranger, walk into the office.
+
+Like Forth, the newcomer wore a white coat with the caduceus emblems. I
+disliked the man on sight. He was tall and lean and composed, with a
+dour face set in thin lines. I guessed that he was somewhere in his
+thirties. Dr.-Forth-in-the-film said, "Sit down, Doctor," and I drew a
+long breath, overwhelmed by a curious, certain sensation.
+
+_I have been here before. I have seen this happen before._
+
+(And curiously formless I felt. I sat and watched, and I knew I was
+watching, and sitting. But it was in that dreamlike fashion, where the
+dreamer at once watches his visions and participates in them....)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Sit down, Doctor," Forth said, "did you bring in the reports?"
+
+Jay Allison carefully took the indicated seat, poised nervously on the
+edge of the chair. He sat very straight, leaning forward only a little
+to hand a thick folder of papers across the desk. Forth took it, but
+didn't open it. "What do you think, Dr. Allison?"
+
+"There is no possible room for doubt." Jay Allison spoke precisely, in a
+rather high-pitched and emphatic tone. "It follows the statistical
+pattern for all recorded attacks of 48-year fever ... by the way, sir,
+haven't we any better name than that for this particular disease? The
+term '48-year fever' connotes a fever of 48 years duration, rather than
+a pandemic recurring every 48 years."
+
+"A fever that lasted 48 years would be quite a fever," Dr. Forth said
+with the shadow of a grim smile. "Nevertheless that's the only name we
+have so far. Name it and you can have it. Allison's disease?"
+
+Jay Allison greeted this pleasantry with a repressive frown. "As I
+understand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the
+once-every-48-years conjunction of the four moons, which explains why
+the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably
+eccentric orbits--I don't know anything about that part, I'm quoting Dr.
+Moore. If there's an animal vector to the disease, we've never
+discovered it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain
+districts, the next month a hundred-odd cases all over this part of the
+planet. Then it skips exactly three months without increase. The next
+upswing puts the number of reported cases in the thousands, and three
+months after _that_, it reaches real pandemic proportions and decimates
+the entire human population of Darkover."
+
+"That's about it," Forth admitted. They bent together over the folder,
+Jay Allison drawing back slightly to avoid touching the other man.
+
+Forth said, "We Terrans have had a Trade compact on Darkover for a
+hundred and fifty-two years. The first outbreak of this 48-year fever
+killed all but a dozen men out of three hundred. The Darkovans were
+worse off than we were. The last outbreak wasn't quite so bad, but it
+was bad enough, I've heard. It has an 87 per cent mortality--for humans,
+that is. I understand the trailmen don't die of it."
+
+"The Darkovans call it the trailmen's fever, Dr. Forth, because the
+trailmen are virtually immune to it. It remains in their midst as a mild
+ailment taken by children. When it breaks out into the virulent form
+every 48 years, most of the trailmen are already immune. I took the
+disease myself as a child--maybe you heard?"
+
+Forth nodded. "You may be the only Terran ever to contract the disease
+and survive."
+
+"The trailmen incubate the disease," Jay Allison said. "I should think
+the logical thing would be to drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on the
+trail cities--and wipe it out for good and all."
+
+(Sitting on the Sofa in Forth's dark office, I stiffened with such fury
+that he shook my shoulder and muttered, "Easy, there, man!")
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Forth, on the screen, looked annoyed, and Jay Allison said, with a
+grimace of distaste, "I didn't mean that literally. But the trailmen are
+not human. It wouldn't be genocide, just an exterminator's job. A public
+health measure."
+
+Forth looked shocked as he realized that the younger man meant what he
+was saying. He said, "Galactic center would have to rule on whether
+they're dumb animals or intelligent non-humans, and whether they're
+entitled to the status of a civilization. All precedent on Darkover is
+toward recognizing them as men--and good God, Jay, you'd probably be
+called as a witness for the defense! How can you say they're not human
+after your experience with them? Anyway, by the time their status was
+finally decided, half of the recognizable humans on Darkover would be
+dead. We need a better solution than that."
+
+He pushed his chair back and looked out the window.
+
+"I won't go into the political situation," he said, "you aren't
+interested in Terran Empire politics, and I'm no expert either. But
+you'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know that Darkover's been
+playing the immovable object to the irresistible force. The Darkovans
+are more advanced in some of the non-causative sciences than we are,
+and until now, they wouldn't admit that Terra had a thing to contribute.
+However--and this is the big however--they do know, and they're willing
+to admit, that our medical sciences are better than theirs."
+
+"Theirs being practically non-existent."
+
+"Exactly--and this could be the first crack in the barrier. You may not
+realize the significance of this, but the Legate received an offer from
+the Hasturs themselves."
+
+Jay Allison murmured, "I'm to be impressed?"
+
+"On Darkover you'd damn well better be impressed when the Hasturs sit up
+and take notice."
+
+"I understand they're telepaths or something--"
+
+"Telepaths, psychokinetics, parapsychs, just about anything else. For
+all practical purposes they're the Gods of Darkover. And one of the
+Hasturs--a rather young and unimportant one, I'll admit, the old man's
+grandson--came to the Legate's office, in person, mind you. He offered,
+if the Terran Medical would help Darkover lick the trailmen's fever, to
+coach selected Terran men in matrix mechanics."
+
+"Good Lord," Jay said. It was a concession beyond Terra's wildest
+dreams; for a hundred years they had tried to beg, buy or steal some
+knowledge of the mysterious science of matrix mechanics--that curious
+discipline which could turn matter into raw energy, and vice versa,
+without any intermediate stages and without fission by-products. Matrix
+mechanics had made the Darkovans virtually immune to the lure of Terra's
+advanced technologies.
+
+Jay said, "Personally I think Darkovan science is over-rated. But I can
+see the propaganda angle--"
+
+"Not to mention the humanitarian angle of healing--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jay Allison gave one of his cold shrugs. "The real angle seems to be
+this; _can_ we cure the 48-year fever?"
+
+"Not yet. But we have a lead. During the last epidemic, a Terran
+scientist discovered a blood fraction containing antibodies against the
+fever--in the trailmen. Isolated to a serum, it might reduce the
+virulent 48-year epidemic form to the mild form again. Unfortunately, he
+died himself in the epidemic, without finishing his work, and his
+notebooks were overlooked until this year. We have 18,000 men, and their
+families, on Darkover now, Jay. Frankly, if we lose too many of them,
+we're going to have to pull out of Darkover--the big brass on Terra will
+write off the loss of a garrison of professional traders, but not of a
+whole Trade City colony. That's not even mentioning the prestige we'll
+lose if our much-vaunted Terran medical sciences can't save Darkover
+from an epidemic. We've got exactly five months. We can't synthesize a
+serum in that time. We've got to appeal to the trailmen. And that's why
+I called you up here. You know more about the trailmen than any living
+Terran. You ought to. You spent eight years in a Nest."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+(In Forth's darkened office I sat up straighter, with a flash of
+returning memory. Jay Allison, I judged, was several years older than I,
+but we had one thing in common; this cold fish of a man shared with
+myself that experience of marvelous years spent in an alien world!)
+
+Jay Allison scowled, displeased. "That was years ago. I was hardly more
+than a baby. My father crashed on a Mapping expedition over the
+Hellers--God only knows what possessed him to try and take a light plane
+over those crosswinds. I survived the crash by the merest chance, and
+lived with the trailmen--so I'm told--until I was thirteen or fourteen.
+I don't remember much about it. Children aren't particularly observant."
+
+Forth leaned over the desk, staring. "You speak their language, don't
+you?"
+
+"I used to. I might remember it under hypnosis, I suppose. Why? Do you
+want me to translate something?"
+
+"Not exactly. We were thinking of sending you on an expedition to the
+trailmen themselves."
+
+(In the darkened office, watching Jay's startled face, I thought; God,
+what an adventure! I wonder--I wonder if they want me to go with him?)
+
+Forth was explaining: "It would be a difficult trek. You know what the
+Hellers are like. Still, you used to climb mountains, as a hobby, before
+you went into Medical--"
+
+"I outgrew the childishness of hobbies many years ago, sir," Jay said
+stiffly.
+
+"We'd get you the best guides we could, Terran and Darkovan. But they
+couldn't do the one thing you can do. You _know_ the trailmen, Jay. You
+might be able to persuade them to do the one thing they've never done
+before."
+
+"What's that?" Jay Allison sounded suspicious.
+
+"Come out of the mountains. Send us volunteers--blood donors--we might,
+if we had enough blood to work on, be able to isolate the right
+fraction, and synthesize it, in time to prevent the epidemic from really
+taking hold. Jay, it's a tough mission and it's dangerous as all hell,
+but somebody's got to do it, and I'm afraid you're the only qualified
+man."
+
+"I like my first suggestion better. Bomb the trailmen--and the
+Hellers--right off the planet." Jay's face was set in lines of loathing,
+which he controlled after a minute, and said, "I--I didn't mean that.
+Theoretically I can see the necessity, only--" he stopped and swallowed.
+
+"Please say what you were going to say."
+
+"I wonder if I am as well qualified as you think? No--don't interrupt--I
+find the natives of Darkover distasteful, even the humans. As for the
+trailmen--"
+
+(I was getting mad and impatient. I whispered to Forth in the darkness,
+"Shut the damn film off! You couldn't send _that_ guy on an errand like
+_that_! I'd rather--"
+
+(Forth snapped, "Shut up and listen!"
+
+(I shut up and the film continued to repeat.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jay Allison was not acting. He was pained and disgusted. Forth wouldn't
+let him finish his explanation of why he had refused even to teach in
+the Medical college established for Darkovans by the Terran empire. He
+interrupted, and he sounded irritated.
+
+"We know all that. It evidently never occurred to you, Jay, that it's an
+inconvenience to us--that all this vital knowledge should lie, purely by
+accident, in the hands of the one man who's too damned stubborn to use
+it?"
+
+Jay didn't move an eyelash, where I would have squirmed, "I have always
+been aware of that, Doctor."
+
+Forth drew a long breath. "I'll concede you're not suitable at the
+moment, Jay. But what do you know of applied psychodynamics?"
+
+"Very little, I'm sorry to say." Allison didn't sound sorry, though. He
+sounded bored to death with the whole conversation.
+
+"May I be blunt--and personal?"
+
+"Please do. I'm not at all sensitive."
+
+"Basically, then, Doctor Allison, a person as contained and repressed as
+yourself usually has a clearly defined subsidiary personality. In
+neurotic individuals this complex of personality traits sometimes splits
+off, and we get a syndrome known as multiple, or alternate personality."
+
+"I've scanned a few of the classic cases. Wasn't there a woman with four
+separate personalities?"
+
+"Exactly. However, you aren't neurotic, and ordinarily there would not
+be the slightest chance of your repressed alternate taking over your
+personality."
+
+"Thank you," Jay murmured ironically, "I'd be losing sleep over that."
+
+"Nevertheless I presume you _do_ have such a subsidiary personality,
+although he would normally never manifest. This subsidiary--let's call
+him Jay_{2}--would embody all the characteristics which you repress. He
+would be gregarious, where you are retiring and studious; adventurous
+where you are cautious; talkative while you are taciturn; he would
+perhaps enjoy action for its own sake, while you exercise faithfully in
+the gymnasium only for your health's sake; and he might even remember
+the trailmen with pleasure rather than dislike."
+
+"In short--a blend of all the undesirable characteristics?"
+
+"One could put it that way. Certainly he would be a blend of all the
+characteristics which you, Jay_{1}, _consider_ undesirable. But--if
+released by hypnotism and suggestion, he might be suitable for the job
+in hand."
+
+"But how do you know I actually have such an--alternate?"
+
+"I don't. But it's a good guess. Most repressed--" Forth coughed and
+amended, "most _disciplined_ personalities possess such a suppressed
+secondary personality. Don't you occasionally--rather rarely--find
+yourself doing things which are entirely out of character for you?"
+
+I could almost feel Allison taking it in, as he confessed, "Well--yes.
+For instance--the other day--although I dress conservatively at all
+times--" he glanced at his uniform coat, "I found myself buying--" he
+stopped again and his face went an unlovely terra-cotta color as he
+finally mumbled, "a flowered red sports shirt."
+
+Sitting in the dark I felt vaguely sorry for the poor gawk, disturbed
+by, ashamed of the only human impulses he ever had. On the screen
+Allison frowned fiercely, "A crazy impulse."
+
+"You could say that, or say it was an action of the suppressed Jay_{2}.
+How about it, Allison? You may be the only Terran on Darkover, maybe the
+only human, who could get into a trailman's Nest without being
+murdered."
+
+"Sir--as a citizen of the Empire, I don't have any choice, do I?"
+
+"Jay, look," Forth said, and I felt him trying to reach through the
+barricade and touch, really touch that cold contained young man, "we
+couldn't _order_ any man to do anything like this. Aside from the
+ordinary dangers, it could destroy your personal balance, maybe
+permanently. I'm asking you to volunteer something above and beyond the
+call of duty. Man to man--what do you say?"
+
+I would have been moved by his words. Even at secondhand I was moved by
+them. Jay Allison looked at the floor, and I saw him twist his long
+well-kept surgeon's hands and crack the knuckles with an odd gesture.
+Finally he said, "I haven't any choice either way, Doctor. I'll take the
+chance. I'll go to the trailmen."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The screen went dark again and Forth flicked the light on. He said,
+"Well?"
+
+I gave it back, in his own intonation, "Well?" and was exasperated to
+find that I was twisting my own knuckles in the nervous gesture of
+Allison's painful decision. I jerked them apart and got up.
+
+"I suppose it didn't work, with that cold fish, and you decided to come
+to me instead? Sure, _I'll_ go to the trailmen for you. Not with that
+Allison--I wouldn't go anywhere with that guy--but I speak the
+trailmen's language, and without hypnosis either."
+
+Forth was staring at me. "So you've remembered that?"
+
+"Hell, yes," I said, "my dad crashed in the Hellers, and a band of
+trailmen found me, half dead. I lived there until I was about fifteen,
+then their Old-One decided I was too human for them, and they took me
+out through Dammerung Pass and arranged to have me brought here. Sure,
+it's all coming back now. I spent five years in the Spacemen's
+Orphanage, then I went to work taking Terran tourists on hunting parties
+and so on, because I liked being around the mountains. I--" I stopped.
+Forth was staring at me.
+
+"You think you'd like this job?"
+
+"It would be tough," I said, considering. "The People of the Sky--"
+(using the trailmen's name for themselves) "--don't like outsiders, but
+they might be persuaded. The worst part would be getting there. The
+plane, or the 'copter, isn't built that can get through the crosswinds
+around the Hellers and land inside them. We'd have to go on foot, all
+the way from Carthon. I'd need professional climbers--mountaineers."
+
+"Then you don't share Allison's attitude?"
+
+"Dammit, don't insult me!" I discovered that I was on my feet again,
+pacing the office restlessly. Forth stared and mused aloud, "What's
+personality anyway? A mask of emotions, superimposed on the body and the
+intellect. Change the point of view, change the emotions and desires,
+and even with the same body and the same past experiences, you have a
+new man."
+
+I swung round in mid-step. A new and terrible suspicion, too monstrous
+to name, was creeping up on me. Forth touched a button and the face of
+Jay Allison, immobile, appeared on the visionscreen. Forth put a mirror
+in my hand. He said, "Jason Allison, look at yourself."
+
+I looked.
+
+"No," I said. And again, "No. No. No."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Forth didn't argue. He pointed, with a stubby finger. "Look--" he moved
+the finger as he spoke, "height of forehead. Set of cheekbones. Your
+eyebrows look different, and your mouth, because the expression is
+different. But bony structure--the nose, the chin--"
+
+I heard myself make a queer sound; dashed the mirror to the floor. He
+grabbed my forearm. "Steady, man!"
+
+I found a scrap of my voice. It didn't sound like Allison's. "Then
+I'm--Jay_{2}? Jay Allison with amnesia?"
+
+"Not exactly." Forth mopped his forehead with an immaculate sleeve and
+it came away damp with sweat, "No--_not_ Jay Allison as I know him!" He
+drew a long breath. "And sit down. Whoever you are, sit _down_!"
+
+I sat. Gingerly. Not sure.
+
+"But the man Jay might have been, given a different temperamental bias.
+I'd say--the man Jay Allison started out to be. The man he _refused_ to
+be. Within his subconscious, he built up barriers against a whole series
+of memories, and the subliminal threshold--"
+
+"Doc, I don't understand the psycho talk."
+
+Forth stared. "And you do remember the trailmen's language. I thought
+so. Allison's personality is suppressed in you, as yours was in him."
+
+"One thing, Doc. I don't know a thing about blood fractions or
+epidemics. My half of the personality didn't study medicine." I took up
+the mirror again and broodingly studied the face there. The high thin
+cheeks, high forehead shaded by coarse dark hair which Jay Allison had
+slicked down now heavily rumpled. I still didn't think I looked anything
+like the doctor. Our voices were nothing alike either; his had been
+pitched rather high, falsetto. My own, as nearly as I could judge, was a
+full octave deeper, and more resonant. Yet they issued from the same
+vocal chords, unless Forth was having a reasonless, macabre joke.
+
+"Did I honest-to-God study medicine? It's the last thing I'd think
+about. It's an honest trade, I guess, but I've never been that
+intellectual."
+
+"You--or rather, Jay Allison is a specialist in Darkovan parasitology,
+as well as a very competent surgeon." Forth was sitting with his chin in
+his hands, watching me intently. He scowled and said, "If anything, the
+physical change is more startling than the other. I wouldn't have
+recognized you."
+
+"That tallies with me. I don't recognize myself." I added, "--and the
+queer thing is, I didn't even _like_ Jay Allison, to put it mildly. If
+he--I can't say _he_, can I?"
+
+"I don't know why not. You're no more Jay Allison than I am. For one
+thing, you're younger. Ten years younger. I doubt if any of his
+friends--if he had any--would recognize you. You--it's ridiculous to go
+on calling you Jay_{2}. What should I call you?"
+
+"Why should I care? Call me Jason."
+
+"Suits you," Forth said enigmatically. "Look, then, Jason. I'd like to
+give you a few days to readjust to your new personality, but we are
+really pressed for time. Can you fly to Carthon tonight? I've
+hand-picked a good crew for you, and sent them on ahead. You'll meet
+them there. You'll find them competent."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stared at him. Suddenly the room oppressed me and I found it hard to
+breathe. I said in wonder, "You were pretty sure of yourself, weren't
+you?"
+
+Forth just looked at me, for what seemed a long time. Then he said, in a
+very quiet voice, "No. I wasn't sure at all. But if you didn't turn up,
+and I couldn't talk Jay into it, I'd have had to try it myself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jason Allison, Junior, was listed on the directory of the Terran HQ as
+"Suite 1214, Medical Residence Corridor." I found the rooms without any
+trouble, though an elderly doctor stared at me rather curiously as I
+barged along the quiet hallway. The suite--bedroom, minuscule
+sitting-room, compact bath--depressed me; clean, closed-in and neutral
+as the man who owned them, I rummaged them restlessly, trying to find
+some scrap of familiarity to indicate that I had lived here for the past
+eleven years.
+
+Jay Allison was thirty-four years old. I had given my age, without
+hesitation, as 22. There were no obvious blanks in my memory; from the
+moment Jay Allison had spoken of the trailmen, my past had rushed back
+and stood, complete to yesterday's supper (only had I eaten that supper
+twelve years ago)? I remembered my father, a lined silent man who had
+liked to fly solitary, taking photograph after photograph from his plane
+for the meticulous work of Mapping and Exploration. He'd liked to have
+me fly with him and I'd flown over virtually every inch of the planet.
+No one else had ever dared fly over the Hellers, except the big
+commercial spacecraft that kept to a safe altitude. I vaguely remembered
+the crash and the strange hands pulling me out of the wreckage and the
+weeks I'd spent, broken-bodied and delirious, gently tended by one of
+the red-eyed, twittering women of the trailmen. In all I had spent eight
+years in the Nest, which was not a nest at all but a vast sprawling city
+built in the branches of enormous trees. With the small and delicate
+humanoids who had been my playfellows, I had gathered the nuts and buds
+and trapped the small arboreal animals they used for food, taken my
+share at weaving clothing from the fibres of parasite plants cultivated
+on the stems, and in all those eight years I had set foot on the ground
+less than a dozen times, even though I had travelled for miles through
+the tree-roads high above the forest floor.
+
+Then the Old-One's painful decision that I was too alien for them, and
+the difficult and dangerous journey my trailmen foster-parents and
+foster-brothers had undertaken, to help me out of the Hellers and
+arrange for me to be taken to the Trade City. After two years of
+physically painful and mentally rebellious readjustment to daytime
+living, the owl-eyed trailmen saw best, and lived largely, by moonlight,
+I had found a niche for myself, and settled down. But all of the later
+years (after Jay Allison had taken over, I supposed, from a basic
+pattern of memory common to both of us) had vanished into the limbo of
+the subconscious.
+
+A bookrack was crammed with large microcards; I slipped one into the
+viewer, with a queer sense of spying, and found myself listening
+apprehensively to hear that measured step and Jay Allison's falsetto
+voice demanding what the hell I was doing, meddling with his
+possessions. Eye to the viewer, I read briefly at random, something
+about the management of compound fracture, then realized I had
+understood exactly three words in a paragraph. I put my fist against my
+forehead and heard the words echoing there emptily; "laceration ...
+primary efflusion ... serum and lymph ... granulation tissue...." I
+presumed that the words meant something and that I once had known what.
+But if I had a medical education, I didn't recall a syllable of it. I
+didn't know a fracture from a fraction.
+
+In a sudden frenzy of impatience I stripped off the white coat and put
+on the first shirt I came to, a crimson thing that hung in the line of
+white coats like an exotic bird in snow country. I went back to
+rummaging the drawers and bureaus. Carelessly shoved in a pigeonhole I
+found another microcard that looked familiar; and when I slipped it
+mechanically into the viewer it turned out to be a book on
+mountaineering which, oddly enough, I remembered buying as a youngster.
+It dispelled my last, lingering doubts. Evidently I had bought it before
+the personalities had forked so sharply apart and separated, Jason from
+Jay. I was beginning to believe. Not to accept. Just to believe it had
+happened. The book looked well-thumbed, and had been handled so much I
+had to baby it into the slot of the viewer.
+
+Under a folded pile of clean underwear I found a flat half-empty bottle
+of whiskey. I remembered Forth's words that he'd never seen Jay Allison
+drink, and suddenly I thought, "The fool!" I fixed myself a drink and
+sat down, idly scanning over the mountaineering book.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Not till I'd entered medical school, I suspected, did the two halves of
+me fork so strongly apart ... so strongly that there had been days and
+weeks and, I suspected, years where Jay Allison had kept me prisoner. I
+tried to juggle dates in my mind, looked at a calendar, and got such a
+mental jolt that I put it face-down to think about when I was a little
+drunker.
+
+I wondered if my detailed memories of my teens and early twenties were
+the same memories Jay Allison looked back on. I didn't think so. People
+forget and remember selectively. Week by week, then, and year by year,
+the dominant personality of Jay had crowded me out; so that the young
+rowdy, more than half Darkovan, loving the mountains, half-homesick for
+a non-human world, had been drowned in the chilly, austere young medical
+student who lost himself in his work. But I, Jason--I had always been
+the watcher behind, the person Jay Allison dared not be? Why was he past
+thirty--and I just 22?
+
+A ringing shattered the silence; I had to hunt for the intercom on the
+bedroom wall. I said, "Who is it?" and an unfamiliar voice demanded,
+"Dr. Allison?"
+
+I said automatically, "Nobody here by that name," and started to put
+back the mouthpiece. Then I stopped and gulped and asked, "Is that you,
+Dr. Forth?"
+
+It was, and I breathed again. I didn't even want to think about what I'd
+say if somebody else had demanded to know why in the devil I was
+answering Dr. Allison's private telephone. When Forth had finished, I
+went to the mirror, and stared, trying to see behind my face the sharp
+features of that stranger, _Doctor_ Jason Allison. I delayed, even while
+I was wondering what few things I should pack for a trip into the
+mountains and the habit of hunting parties was making mental lists about
+heat-socks and windbreakers. The face that looked at me was a young
+face, unlined and faintly freckled, the same face as always except that
+I'd lost my suntan; Jay Allison had kept me indoors too long. Suddenly I
+struck the mirror lightly with my fist.
+
+"The hell with you, Dr. Allison," I said, and went to see if he had kept
+any clothes fit to pack.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dr. Forth was waiting for me in the small skyport on the roof, and so
+was a small 'copter, one of the fairly old ones assigned to Medical
+Service when they were too beat-up for services with higher priority.
+Forth took one startled stare at my crimson shirt, but all he said was,
+"Hello, Jason. Here's something we've got to decide right away; do we
+tell the crew who you really are?"
+
+I shook my head emphatically. "I'm not Jay Allison; I don't want his
+name or his reputation. Unless there are men on the crew who know
+Allison by sight--"
+
+"Some of them do, but I don't think they'd recognize you."
+
+"Tell them I'm his twin brother," I said humorlessly.
+
+"That wouldn't be necessary. There's not enough resemblance." Forth
+raised his head and beckoned to a man who was doing something near the
+'copter. He said under his breath, "You'll see what I mean," as the man
+approached.
+
+He wore the uniform of Spaceforce--black leather with a little rainbow
+of stars on his sleeve meaning he'd seen service on a dozen different
+planets, a different colored star for each one. He wasn't a young man,
+but on the wrong side of fifty, seamed and burly and huge, with a split
+lip and weathered face. I liked his looks. We shook hands and Forth
+said, "This is our man, Kendricks. He's called Jason, and he's an expert
+on the trailmen. Jason, this is Buck Kendricks."
+
+"Glad to know you, Jason." I thought Kendricks looked at me half a
+second more than necessary. "The 'copter's ready. Climb in, Doc--you're
+going as far as Carthon, aren't you?"
+
+We put on zippered windbreaks and the 'copter soared noiselessly into
+the pale crimson sky. I sat beside Forth, looking down through pale
+lilac clouds at the pattern of Darkover spread below me.
+
+"Kendricks was giving me a funny eye, Doc. What's biting him?"
+
+"He has known Jay Allison for eight years," Forth said quietly, "and he
+hasn't recognized you yet."
+
+But we let it ride at that, to my great relief, and didn't talk any more
+about me at all. As we flew under silent whirring blades, turning our
+backs on the settled country which lay near the Trade City, we talked
+about Darkover itself. Forth told me about the trailmen's fever and
+managed to give me some idea about what the blood fraction was, and why
+it was necessary to persuade fifty or sixty of the humanoids to return
+with me, to donate blood from which the antibody could be, first
+isolated, then synthesised.
+
+It would be a totally unheard-of thing, if I could accomplish it. Most
+of the trailmen never touched ground in their entire lives, except when
+crossing the passes above the snow line. Not a dozen of them, including
+my foster-parents who had so painfully brought me out across Dammerung,
+had ever crossed the ring of encircling mountains that walled them away
+from the rest of the planet. Humans sometimes penetrated the lower
+forests in search of the trailmen. It was one-way traffic. The trailmen
+never came in search of _them_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We talked, too, about some of those humans who had crossed the mountains
+into trailmen country--those mountains profanely dubbed the Hellers by
+the first Terrans who had tried to fly over them in anything lower or
+slower than a spaceship. (The Darkovan name for the Hellers was even
+more explicit, and even in translation, unrepeatable.)
+
+"What about this crew you picked? They're not Terrans?"
+
+Forth shook his head. "It would be murder to send anyone recognizably
+Terran into the Hellers. You know how the trailmen feel about outsiders
+getting into their country." I knew. Forth continued, "Just the same,
+there will be two Terrans with you."
+
+"They don't know Jay Allison?" I didn't want to be burdened with
+anyone--not anyone--who would know me, or expect me to behave like my
+forgotten other self.
+
+"Kendricks knows you," Forth said, "but I'm going to be perfectly
+truthful. I never knew Jay Allison well, except in line of work. I know
+a lot of things--from the past couple of days--which came out during
+the hypnotic sessions, which he'd never have dreamed of telling me, or
+anyone else, consciously. And that comes under the heading of a
+professional confidence--even from you. And for that reason, I'm sending
+Kendricks along--and you're going to have to take the chance he'll
+recognize you. Isn't that Carthon down there?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Carthon lay nestled under the outlying foothills of the Hellers, ancient
+and sprawling and squatty, and burned brown with the dust of five
+thousand years. Children ran out to stare at the 'copter as we landed
+near the city; few planes ever flew low enough to be seen, this near the
+Hellers.
+
+Forth had sent his crew ahead and parked them in an abandoned huge place
+at the edge of the city which might once have been a warehouse or a
+ruined palace. Inside there were a couple of trucks, stripped down to
+framework and flatbed like all machinery shipped through space from
+Terra. There were pack animals, dark shapes in the gloom. Crates were
+stacked up in an orderly untidiness, and at the far end a fire was
+burning and five or six men in Darkovan clothing--loose sleeved shirts,
+tight wrapped breeches, low boots--were squatting around it, talking.
+They got up as Forth and Kendricks and I walked toward them, and Forth
+greeted them clumsily, in bad accented Darkovan, then switched to Terran
+Standard, letting one of the men translate for him.
+
+Forth introduced me simply as "Jason," after the Darkovan custom, and I
+looked the men over, one by one. Back when I'd climbed for fun, I'd
+liked to pick my own men; but whoever had picked this crew must have
+known his business.
+
+Three were mountain Darkovans, lean swart men enough alike to be
+brothers; I learned after a while that they actually were brothers,
+Hjalmar, Garin and Vardo. All three were well over six feet, and Hjalmar
+stood head and shoulders over his brothers, whom I never learned to tell
+apart. The fourth man, a redhead, was dressed rather better than the
+others and introduced as Lerrys Ridenow--the double name indicating high
+Darkovan aristocracy. He looked muscular and agile enough, but his hands
+were suspiciously well-kept for a mountain man, and I wondered how much
+experience he'd had.
+
+The fifth man shook hands with me, speaking to Kendricks and Forth as if
+they were old friends. "Don't I know you from someplace, Jason?"
+
+He looked Darkovan, and wore Darkovan clothes, but Forth had forewarned
+me, and attack seemed the best defense. "Aren't you Terran?"
+
+"My father was," he said, and I understood; a situation not exactly
+uncommon, but ticklish on a planet like Darkover. I said carelessly, "I
+may have seen you around the HQ. I can't place you, though."
+
+"My name's Rafe Scott. I thought I knew most of the professional guides
+on Darkover, but I admit I don't get into the Hellers much," he
+confessed. "Which route are we going to take?"
+
+I found myself drawn into the middle of the group of men, accepting one
+of the small sweetish Darkovan cigarettes, looking over the plan
+somebody had scribbled down on the top of a packing case. I borrowed a
+pencil from Rafe and bent over the case, sketching out a rough map of
+the terrain I remembered so well from boyhood. I might be bewildered
+about blood fractions, but when it came to climbing I knew what I was
+doing. Rafe and Lerrys and the Darkovan brothers crowded behind me to
+look over the sketch, and Lerrys put a long fingernail on the route I'd
+indicated.
+
+"Your elevation's pretty bad here," he said diffidently, "and on the
+'Narr campaign the trailmen attacked us here, and it was bad fighting
+along those ledges."
+
+I looked at him with new respect; dainty hands or not, he evidently knew
+the country. Kendricks patted the blaster on his hip and said grimly,
+"But this isn't the 'Narr campaign. I'd like to see any trailmen attack
+us while I have this."
+
+"But you're not going to have it," said a voice behind us, a crisp
+authoritative voice. "Take off that gun, man!"
+
+Kendricks and I whirled together, to see the speaker; a tall young
+Darkovan, still standing in the shadows. The newcomer spoke to me
+directly:
+
+"I'm told you are Terran, but that you understand the trailmen. Surely
+you don't intend to carry fission or fusion weapons against them?"
+
+And I suddenly realized that we were in Darkovan territory now, and that
+we must reckon with the Darkovan horror of guns or of any weapon which
+reaches beyond the arm's-length of the man who wields it. A simple
+heat-gun, to the Darkovan ethical code, is as reprehensible as a
+super-cobalt planetbuster.
+
+Kendricks protested, "We can't travel unarmed through trailmen country!
+We're apt to meet hostile bands of the creatures--and they're nasty with
+those long knives they carry!"
+
+The stranger said calmly, "I've no objection to you, or anyone else,
+carrying a knife for self-defense."
+
+"A _knife_?" Kendricks drew breath to roar. "Listen, you bug-eyed
+son-of-a--who do you think you are, anyway?"
+
+The Darkovans muttered. The man in the shadows said, "Regis Hastur."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kendricks stared pop-eyed. My own eyes could have popped, but I decided
+it was time for me to take charge, if I were ever going to. I rapped,
+"All right, this is my show. Buck, give me the gun."
+
+He looked wrathfully at me for a space of seconds, while I wondered what
+I'd do if he didn't. Then, slowly, he unbuckled the straps and handed it
+to me, butt first.
+
+I'd never realized quite how undressed a Spaceforce man looked without
+his blaster. I balanced it on my palm for a minute while Regis Hastur
+came out of the shadows. He was tall, and had the reddish hair and fair
+skin of Darkovan aristocracy, and on his face was some indefinable
+stamp--arrogance, perhaps, or the consciousness that the Hasturs had
+ruled this world for centuries long before the Terrans brought ships and
+trade and the universe to their doors. He was looking at me as if he
+approved of me, and that was one step worse than the former situation.
+
+So, using the respectful Darkovan idiom of speaking to a superior (which
+he was) but keeping my voice hard, I said, "There's just one leader on
+any trek, Lord Hastur. On this one, I'm it. If you want to discuss
+whether or not we carry guns, I suggest you discuss it with me in
+private--and let me give the orders."
+
+One of the Darkovans gasped. I knew I could have been mobbed. But with a
+mixed bag of men, I had to grab leadership quick or be relegated to
+nowhere. I didn't give Regis Hastur a chance to answer that, either; I
+said, "Come back here. I want to talk to you anyway."
+
+He came, and I remembered to breathe. I led the way to a fairly deserted
+corner of the immense place, faced him and demanded, "As for you--what
+are you doing here? You're not intending to cross the mountains with
+us?"
+
+He met my scowl levelly. "I certainly am."
+
+I groaned. "Why? You're the Regent's grandson. Important people don't
+take on this kind of dangerous work. If anything happens to you, it will
+be my responsibility!" I was going to have enough trouble, I was
+thinking, without shepherding along one of the most revered Personages
+on the whole damned planet! I didn't want anyone around who had to be
+fawned on, or deferred to, or even listened to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He frowned slightly, and I had the unpleasant impression that he knew
+what I was thinking. "In the first place--it will mean something to the
+trailmen, won't it--to have a Hastur with you, suing for this favor?"
+
+It certainly would. The trailmen paid little enough heed to the ordinary
+humans, except for considering them fair game for plundering when they
+came uninvited into trailman country. But they, with all Darkover,
+revered the Hasturs, and it was a fine point of diplomacy--if the
+Darkovans sent their most important leader, they might listen to him.
+
+"In the second place," Regis Hastur continued, "the Darkovans are my
+people, and it's my business to negotiate for them. In the third place,
+I know the trailmen's dialect--not well, but I can speak it a little.
+And in the fourth, I've climbed mountains all my life. Purely as an
+amateur, but I can assure you I won't be in the way."
+
+There was little enough I could say to that. He seemed to have covered
+every point--or every point but one, and he added, shrewdly, after a
+minute, "Don't worry; I'm perfectly willing to have you take charge. I
+won't claim--privilege."
+
+I had to be satisfied with that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Darkover is a civilized planet with a fairly high standard of living,
+but it is not a mechanized or a technological culture. The people don't
+do much mining, or build factories, and the few which were founded by
+Terran enterprise never were very successful; outside the Terran Trade
+City, machinery or modern transportation is almost unknown.
+
+While the other men checked and loaded supplies and Rafe Scott went out
+to contact some friends of his and arrange for last-minute details, I
+sat down with Forth to memorize the medical details I must put so
+clearly to the trailmen.
+
+"If we could only have kept your medical knowledge!"
+
+"Trouble is, being a doctor doesn't suit my personality," I said. I felt
+absurdly light-hearted. Where I sat, I could raise my head and study the
+panorama of blackish-green foothills which lay beyond Carthon, and
+search out the stone roadways, like a tiny white ribbon, which we could
+follow for the first stage of the trip. Forth evidently did not share my
+enthusiasm.
+
+"You know, Jason, there is one real danger--"
+
+"Do you think I care about danger? Or are you afraid I'll
+turn--foolhardy?"
+
+"Not exactly. It's not a physical danger, Jason. It's an emotional--or
+rather an intellectual danger."
+
+"Hell, don't you know any language but that psycho double-talk?"
+
+"Let me finish, Jason. Jay Allison may have been repressed,
+overcontrolled, but you are seriously impulsive. You lack a
+balance-wheel, if I could put it that way. And if you run too many
+risks, your buried alter-ego may come to the surface and take over in
+sheer self-preservation."
+
+"In other words," I said, laughing loudly, "if I scare that Allison
+stuffed-shirt he may start stirring in his grave?"
+
+Forth coughed and smothered a laugh and said that was one way of putting
+it. I clapped him reassuringly on the shoulder and said, "Forget it,
+sir. I promise to be godly, sober and industrious--but is there any law
+against enjoying what I'm doing?"
+
+Somebody burst out of the warehouse-palace place, and shouted at me.
+"Jason? The guide is here," and I stood up, giving Forth a final grin.
+"Don't you worry. Jay Allison's good riddance," I said, and went back to
+meet the other guide they had chosen.
+
+And I almost backed out when I saw the guide. For the guide was a woman.
+
+She was small for a Darkovan girl, and narrowly built, the sort of body
+that could have been called boyish or coltish but certainly not, at
+first glance, feminine. Close-cut curls, blue-black and wispy, cast the
+faintest of shadows over a squarish sunburnt face, and her eyes were so
+thickly rimmed with heavy dark lashes that I could not guess their
+color. Her nose was snubbed and might have looked whimsical and was
+instead oddly arrogant. Her mouth was wide, and her chin round, and
+altogether I dismissed her as not at all a pretty woman.
+
+She held up her palm and said rather sullenly, "Kyla-Raineach, free
+Amazon, licensed guide."
+
+I acknowledged the gesture with a nod, scowling. The guild of free
+Amazons entered virtually every masculine field, but that of mountain
+guide seemed somewhat bizarre even for an Amazon. She seemed wiry and
+agile enough, her body, under the heavy blanket-like clothing, almost as
+lean of hip and flat of breast as my own; only the slender long legs
+were unequivocally feminine.
+
+The other men were checking and loading supplies; I noted from the
+corner of my eye that Regis Hastur was taking his turn heaving bundles
+with the rest. I sat down on some still-undisturbed sacks, and motioned
+her to sit.
+
+"You've had trail experience? We're going into the Hellers through
+Dammerung, and that's rough going even for professionals."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She said in a flat expressionless voice, "I was with the Terran Mapping
+expedition to the South Polar ridge last year."
+
+"Ever been in the Hellers? If anything happened to me, could you lead
+the expedition safely back to Carthon?"
+
+She looked down at her stubby fingers. "I'm sure I could," she said
+finally, and started to rise. "Is that all?"
+
+"One thing more--" I gestured to her to stay put. "Kyla, you'll be one
+woman among eight men--"
+
+The snubbed nose wrinkled up; "I don't expect you to crawl into my
+blankets, if that's what you mean. It's not in my contract--I hope!"
+
+I felt my face burning. Damn the girl! "It's not in mine, anyway," I
+snapped, "but I can't answer for seven other men, most of them mountain
+roughnecks!" Even as I said it I wondered why I bothered; certainly a
+free Amazon could defend her own virtue, or not, if she wanted to,
+without any help from me. I had to excuse myself by adding, "In either
+case you'll be a disturbing element--I don't want fights, either!"
+
+She made a little low-pitched sound of amusement. "There's safety in
+numbers, and--are you familiar with the physiological effect of high
+altitudes on men acclimated to low ones?" Suddenly she threw back her
+head and the hidden sound became free and merry laughter. "Jason, I'm a
+free Amazon, and that means--no, I'm not neutered, though some of us
+are. But you have my word, I won't create any trouble of any
+recognizably female variety." She stood up. "Now, if you don't mind, I'd
+like to check the mountain equipment."
+
+Her eyes were still laughing at me, but curiously I didn't mind at all.
+There was a refreshing element in her manner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We started that night, a curiously lopsided little caravan. The pack
+animals were loaded into one truck and didn't like it. We had another
+stripped-down truck which carried supplies. The ancient stone roads,
+rutted and gullied here and there with the flood-waters and silt of
+decades, had not been planned for any travel other than the feet of men
+or beasts. We passed tiny villages and isolated country estates, and a
+few of the solitary towers where the matrix mechanics worked alone with
+the secret sciences of Darkover, towers of glareless stone which
+sometimes shone like blue beacons in the dark.
+
+Kendricks drove the truck which carried the animals, and was amused by
+it. Rafe and I took turns driving the other truck, sharing the wide
+front seat with Regis Hastur and the girl Kyla, while the other men
+found seats between crates and sacks in the back. Once while Rafe was at
+the wheel and the girl dozing with her coat over her face to shut out
+the fierce sun, Regis asked me, "What are the trailcities like?"
+
+I tried to tell him, but I've never been good at boiling things down
+into descriptions, and when he found I was not disposed to talk, he fell
+silent and I was free to drowse over what I knew of the trailmen and
+their world.
+
+Nature seems to have a sameness on all inhabited worlds, tending toward
+the economy and simplicity of the human form. The upright carriage,
+freeing the hands, the opposable thumb, the color-sensitivity of retinal
+rods and cones, the development of language and of lengthy parental
+nurture--these things seem to be indispensable to the growth of
+civilization, and in the end they spell _human_. Except for minor
+variations depending on climate or foodstuff, the inhabitant of Megaera
+or Darkover is indistinguishable from the Terran or Sirian; differences
+are mainly cultural, and sometimes an isolated culture will mutate in a
+strange direction or remain, atavists, somewhere halfway to the summit
+of the ladder of evolution--which, at least on the known planets, still
+reckons homo sapiens as the most complex of nature's forms.
+
+The trailmen were a pausing-place which had proved tenacious. When the
+mainstream of evolution on Darkover left the trees to struggle for
+existence on the ground, a few remained behind. Evolution did not cease
+for them, but evolved _homo arborens_; nocturnal, nystalopic humanoids
+who lived out their lives in the extensive forests.
+
+The truck bumped over the bad, rutted roads. The wind was chilly--the
+truck, a mere conveyance for hauling, had no such refinements of luxury
+as windows. I jolted awake--what nonsense had I been thinking? Vague
+ideas about evolution swirled in my brain like burst bubbles--the
+trailmen? They were just the trailmen, who could explain them? Jay
+Allison, maybe? Rafe turned his head and asked, "Where do we pull up for
+the night? It's getting dark, and we have all this gear to sort!" I
+roused myself, and took over the business of the expedition again.
+
+But when the trucks had been parked and a tent pitched and the pack
+animals unloaded and hobbled, and a start made at getting the gear
+together--when all this had been done I lay awake, listening to
+Kendricks' heavy snoring, but myself afraid to sleep. Dozing in the
+truck, an odd lapse of consciousness had come over me ... myself yet not
+myself, drowsing over thoughts I did not recognize as my own. If I
+slept, who would I be when I woke?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had made our camp in the bend of an enormous river, wide and shallow
+and unbridged; the river Kadarin, traditionally a point of no return for
+humans on Darkover. The river is fed by ocean tides and we would have to
+wait for low water to cross. Beyond the river lay thick forests, and
+beyond the forests the slopes of the Hellers, rising upward and upward;
+and their every fold and every valley was filled to the brim with
+forest, and in the forests lived the trailmen.
+
+But though all this country was thickly populated with outlying colonies
+and nests, it would be no use to bargain with any of them; we must deal
+with the Old One of the North Nest, where I had spent so many of my
+boyhood years.
+
+From time immemorial, the trailmen--usually inoffensive--had kept strict
+boundaries marked between their lands and the lands of ground-dwelling
+men. They never came beyond the Kadarin. On the other hand, almost any
+human who ventured into their territory became, by that act, fair game
+for attack.
+
+A few of the Darkovan mountain people had trade treaties with the
+trailmen; they traded clothing, forged metals, small implements, in
+return for nuts, bark for dyestuffs and certain leaves and mosses for
+drugs. In return, the trailmen permitted them to hunt in the forest
+lands without being molested. But other humans, venturing into trailman
+territory, ran the risk of merciless raiding; the trailmen were not
+bloodthirsty, and did not kill for the sake of killing, but they
+attacked in packs of two or three dozen, and their prey would be
+stripped and plundered of everything portable.
+
+Travelling through their country would be dangerous....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun was high before we struck the camp. While the others were
+packing up the last oddments, ready for the saddle, I gave the girl Kyla
+the task of readying the rucksacks we'd carry after the trails got too
+bad even for the pack animals, and went to stand at the water's edge,
+checking the depth of the ford and glancing up at the smoke-hazed rifts
+between peak and peak.
+
+The men were packing up the small tent we'd use in the forests, moving
+around with a good deal of horseplay and a certain brisk bustle. They
+were a good crew, I'd already discovered. Rafe and Lerrys and the three
+Darkovan brothers were tireless, cheerful and mountain-hardened.
+Kendricks, obviously out of his element, could be implicitly relied on
+to follow orders, and I felt that I could fall back on him. Strange as
+it seemed, the very fact that he was a Terran was vaguely comforting,
+where I'd anticipated it would be a nuisance.
+
+The girl Kyla was still something of an unknown quantity. She was too
+taut and quiet, working her share but seldom contributing a word--we
+were not yet in mountain country. So far she was quiet and touchy with
+me, although she seemed natural enough with the Darkovans, and I let her
+alone.
+
+"Hi, Jason, get a move on," someone shouted, and I walked back toward
+the clearing squinting in the sun. It hurt, and I touched my face
+gingerly, suddenly realizing what had happened. Yesterday, riding in the
+uncovered truck, and this morning, un-used to the fierce sun of these
+latitudes, I had neglected to take the proper precautions against
+exposure and my face was reddening with sunburn. I walked toward Kyla,
+who was cinching a final load on one of the pack-animals, which she did
+efficiently enough.
+
+She didn't wait for me to ask, but sized up the situation with one
+amused glance at my face. "Sunburn? Put some of this on it." She
+produced a tube of white stuff; I twisted at the top inexpertly, and she
+took it from me, squeezed the stuff out in her palm and said, "Stand
+still and bend down your head."
+
+She smeared the mixture efficiently across my forehead and cheeks. It
+felt cold and good. I started to thank her, then broke off as she burst
+out laughing. "What's the matter?"
+
+"You should see yourself!" she gurgled.
+
+I wasn't amused. No doubt I presented a grotesque appearance, and no
+doubt she had the right to laugh at it, but I scowled. It hurt.
+Intending to put things back on the proper footing, I demanded, "Did you
+make up the climbing loads?"
+
+"All except bedding. I wasn't sure how much to allow," she said. "Jason,
+have you eyeshades for when you get on snow?" I nodded, and she
+instructed me severely, "Don't forget them. Snowblindness--I give you my
+word--is even more unpleasant than sunburn--and _very_ painful!"
+
+"Damn it, girl, I'm not stupid!" I exploded.
+
+She said, in her expressionless monotone again, "Then you _ought_ to
+have known better than to get sunburnt. Here, put this in your pocket,"
+she handed me the tube of sunburn cream, "maybe I'd better check up on
+some of the others and make sure they haven't forgotten." She went off
+without another word, leaving me with an unpleasant feeling that she'd
+come off best, that she considered me an irresponsible scamp.
+
+Forth had said almost the same thing....
+
+I told off the Darkovan brothers to urge the pack animals across the
+narrowest part of the ford, and gestured to Corus and Kyla to ride one
+on either side of Kendricks, who might not be aware of the swirling,
+treacherous currents of a mountain river. Rafe could not urge his edgy
+horse into the water; he finally dismounted, took off his boots, and led
+the creature across the slippery rocks. I crossed last, riding close to
+Regis Hastur, alert for dangers and thinking resentfully that anyone so
+important to Darkover's policies should not be risked on such a mission.
+Why, if the Terran Legate had (unthinkably!) come with us, he would be
+surrounded by bodyguards, secret service men and dozens of precautions
+against accident, assassination or misadventure.
+
+All that day we rode upward, encamping at the furthest point we could
+travel with pack animals or mounted. The next day's climb would enter
+the dangerous trails we must travel afoot. We pitched a comfortable
+camp, but I admit I slept badly. Kendricks and Lerrys and Rafe had
+blinding headaches from the sun and the thinness of the air; I was more
+used to these conditions, but I felt a sense of unpleasant pressure, and
+my ears rang. Regis arrogantly denied any discomfort, but he moaned and
+cried out continuously in his sleep until Lerrys kicked him, after which
+he was silent and, I feared, sleepless. Kyla seemed the least affected
+of any; probably she had been at higher altitudes more continuously than
+any of us. But there were dark circles beneath her eyes.
+
+However, no one complained as we readied ourselves for the final last
+long climb upward. If we were fortunate, we could cross Dammerung before
+nightfall; at the very least, we should bivouac tonight very near the
+pass. Our camp had been made at the last level spot; we partially
+hobbled the pack animals so they would not stray too far, and left ample
+food for them, and cached all but the most necessary of light trail
+gear. As we prepared to start upward on the steep, narrow track--hardly
+more than a rabbit-run--I glanced at Kyla and stated, "We'll work on
+rope from the first stretch. Starting now."
+
+One of the Darkovan brothers stared at me with contempt. "Call yourself
+a mountain man, Jason? Why, my little daughter could scramble up _that_
+track without so much as a push on her behind!"
+
+I set my chin and glared at him. "The rocks aren't easy, and some of
+these men aren't used to working on rope at all. We might as well get
+used to it, because when we start working along the ledges, I don't want
+anybody who doesn't know how."
+
+They still didn't like it, but nobody protested further until I directed
+the huge Kendricks to the center of the second rope. He glared viciously
+at the light nylon line and demanded in some apprehension, "Hadn't I
+better go last until I know what I'm doing? Hemmed in between the two of
+you, I'm apt to do something damned dumb!"
+
+Hjalmar roared with laughter and informed him that the center place on a
+3-man rope was always reserved for weaklings, novices and amateurs. I
+expected Kendricks' temper to flare up: the burly Spaceforce man and the
+Darkovan giant glared at one another, then Kendricks only shrugged and
+knotted the line through his belt. Kyla warned Kendricks and Lerrys
+about looking down from ledges, and we started.
+
+The first stretch was almost too simple, a clear track winding higher
+and higher for a couple of miles. Pausing to rest for a moment, we could
+turn and see the entire valley outspread below us. Gradually the trail
+grew steeper, in spots pitched almost at a 50-degree angle, and was
+scattered with gravel, loose rock and shale, so that we placed our feet
+carefully, leaning forward to catch at handholds and steady ourselves
+against rocks. I tested each boulder carefully, since any weight placed
+against an unsteady rock might dislodge it on somebody below. One of the
+Darkovan brothers--Vardo, I thought--was behind me, separated by ten or
+twelve feet of slack rope, and twice when his feet slipped on gravel he
+stumbled and gave me an unpleasant jerk. What he muttered was perfectly
+true; on slopes like this, where a fall wasn't dangerous anyhow, it was
+better to work unroped; then a slip bothered no one but the slipper.
+But I was finding out what I wanted to know--what kind of climbers I had
+to lead through the Hellers.
+
+Along a cliff face the trail narrowed horizontally, leading across a
+foot-wide ledge overhanging a sheer drop of fifty feet and covered with
+loose shale and scrub plants. Nothing, of course, to an experienced
+climber--a foot-wide ledge might as well be a four-lane superhighway.
+Kendricks made a nervous joke about a tightrope walker, but when his
+turn came he picked his way securely, without losing balance. The
+amateurs--Lerrys Ridenow, Regis, Rafe--came across without hesitation,
+but I wondered how well they would have done at a less secure altitude;
+to a real mountaineer, a footpath is a footpath, whether in a meadow,
+above a two-foot drop, a thirty-foot ledge, or a sheer mountain face
+three miles above the first level spot.
+
+After crossing the ledge the going was harder. A steeper trail, in
+places nearly imperceptible, led between thick scrub and overhanging
+trees, thickly forested. In spots their twisted roots obscured the
+trail; in others the persistent growth had thrust aside rocks and dirt.
+We had to make our way through tangles of underbrush which would have
+been nothing to a trailman, but which made our ground-accustomed bodies
+ache with the effort of getting over or through them; and once the track
+was totally blocked by a barricade of tangled dead brushwood, borne down
+on floodwater after a sudden thaw or cloud-burst. We had to work
+painfully around it over a three-hundred-foot rockslide, which we could
+cross only one at a time, crab-fashion, leaning double to balance
+ourselves; and no one complained now about the rope.
+
+Toward noon I had the first intimation that we were not alone on the
+slope.
+
+At first it was no more than a glimpse of motion out of the corner of my
+eyes, the shadow of a shadow. The fourth time I saw it, I called softly
+to Kyla: "See anything?"
+
+"I was beginning to think it was my eyes, or the altitude. I saw,
+Jason."
+
+"Look for a spot where we can take a break," I directed. We climbed
+along a shallow ledge, the faint imperceptible flutters in the brushwood
+climbing with us on either side. I muttered to the girl, "I'll be glad
+when we get clear of this. At least we'll be able to see what's coming
+after us!"
+
+"If it comes to a fight," she said surprisingly, "I'd rather fight on
+gravel than ice."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Over a rise, there was a roaring sound; Kyla swung up and balanced on a
+rock-wedged tree root, cupped her mouth to her hands and called,
+"Rapids!"
+
+I pulled myself up to the edge of the drop and stood looking down into
+the narrow gully. Here the narrow track we had been following was
+crossed and obscured by the deep, roaring rapids of a mountain stream.
+
+Less than twenty feet across, it tumbled in an icy flood, almost a
+waterfall, pitching over the lip of a crag above us. It had sliced a
+ravine five feet deep in the mountainside, and came roaring down with a
+rushing noise that made my head vibrate. It looked formidable; anyone
+stepping into it would be knocked off his feet in seconds, and swept a
+thousand feet down the mountainside by the force of the current.
+
+Rafe scrambled gingerly over the gullied lip of the channel it had cut,
+and bent carefully to scoop up water in his palm and drink. "Phew, it's
+colder than Zandru's ninth hell. Must come straight down from a
+glacier!"
+
+It did. I remembered the trail and remembered the spot. Kendricks joined
+me at the water's edge, and asked, "How do we get across?"
+
+"I'm not sure," I said, studying the racing white torrent. Overhead,
+about twenty feet from where we clustered on the slope, the thick
+branches of enormous trees overhung the rapids, their long roots
+partially bared, gnarled and twisted by recurrent floods; and between
+these trees swayed one of the queer swing-bridges of the trailmen,
+hanging only about ten feet above the water.
+
+Even I had never learned to navigate one of these swing-bridges without
+assistance; human arms are no longer suited to brachiation. I might have
+managed it once; but at present, except as a desperate final expedient,
+it was out of the question. Rafe or Lerrys, who were lightly built and
+acrobatic, could probably do it as a simple stunt on the level, in a
+field; on a steep and rocky mountainside, where a fall might mean being
+dashed a thousand feet down the torrent, I doubted it. The trailmen's
+bridge was out ... but what other choice was there?
+
+I beckoned to Kendricks, he being the man I was the most inclined to
+trust with my life at the moment, and said, "It looks uncrossable, but I
+think two men could get across, if they were steady on their feet. The
+others can hold us on ropes, in case we do get knocked down. If we can
+get to the opposite bank, we can stretch a fixed rope from that snub of
+rock--" I pointed, "and the others can cross with that. The first men
+over will be the only ones to run any risk. Want to try?"
+
+I liked it better that he didn't answer right away, but went to the edge
+of the gully and peered down the rocky chasm. Doubtless, if we were
+knocked down, all seven of the others could haul us up again; but not
+before we'd been badly smashed on the rocks. And once again I caught
+that elusive shadow of movement in the brushwood; if the trailmen chose
+a moment when we were half-in, half-out of the rapids, we'd be
+ridiculously vulnerable to attack.
+
+"We ought to be able to get a fixed rope easier than that," Hjalmar
+said, and took one of the spares from his rucksack. He coiled it, making
+a running loop on one end, and standing precariously on the lip of the
+rapids, sent it spinning toward the outcrop of rock we had chosen as a
+fixed point. "If I can get it over...."
+
+The rope fell short, and Hjalmar reeled it in and cast the loop again.
+He made three more unsuccessful tries before finally, with held breath,
+we watched the noose settle over the rocky snub. Gently, pulling the
+line taut, we watched it stretch above the rapids. The knot tightened,
+fastened. Hjalmar grinned and let out his breath.
+
+"There," he said, and jerked hard on the rope, testing it with a long
+hard pull. The rocky outcrop broke, with a sharp crack, split, and
+toppled entirely into the rapids, the sudden jerk almost pulling Hjalmar
+off his feet. The boulder rolled, with a great bouncing splash, faster
+and faster down the mountain, taking the rope with it.
+
+We just stood and stared for a minute. Hjalmar swore horribly, in the
+unprintable filth of the mountain tongue, and his brothers joined in.
+"How the devil was I to know the _rock_ would split off?"
+
+"Better for it to split now than when we were depending on it," Kyla
+said stolidly. "I have a better idea." She was untying herself from the
+rope as she spoke, and knotting one of the spares through her belt. She
+handed the other end of the rope to Lerrys. "Hold on to this," she said,
+and slipped out of her blankety windbreak, standing shivering in a thin
+sweater. She unstrapped her boots and tossed them to me. "Now boost me
+on your shoulders, Hjalmar."
+
+Too late, I guessed her intention and shouted, "No, don't try--!" But
+she had already clambered to an unsteady perch on the big Darkovan's
+shoulders and made a flying grab for the lowest loop of the trailmen's
+bridge. She hung there, swaying slightly and sickeningly, as the loose
+lianas gave to her weight.
+
+"Hjalmar--Lerrys--haul her down!"
+
+"I'm lighter than any of you," Kyla called shrilly, "and not hefty
+enough to be any use on the ropes!" Her voice quavered somewhat as she
+added, "--and hang on to that rope, Lerrys! If you lose it, I'll have
+done this for nothing!"
+
+She gripped the loop of vine and reached, with her free hand, for the
+next loop. Now she was swinging out over the edge of the boiling rapids.
+Tight-mouthed, I gestured to the others to spread out slightly
+below--not that anything would help her if she fell.
+
+Hjalmar, watching as the woman gained the third loop--which joggled
+horribly to her slight weight--shouted suddenly, "Kyla, quick! The loop
+_beyond_--don't touch the next one! It's frayed--rotted through!"
+
+Kyla brought her left hand up to her right on the third loop. She made a
+long reach, missed her grab, swung again, and clung, breathing hard, to
+the safe fifth loop. I watched, sick with dread. The damned girl should
+have told me what she intended.
+
+Kyla glanced down and we got a glimpse of her face, glistening with the
+mixture of sunburn cream and sweat, drawn with effort. Her tiny swaying
+figure hung twelve feet above the white tumbling water, and if she lost
+her grip, only a miracle could bring her out alive. She hung there for a
+minute, jiggling slightly, then started a long back-and-forward swing.
+On the third forward swing she made a long leap and grabbed at the final
+loop.
+
+It slipped through her fingers; she made a wild grab with the other
+hand, and the liana dipped sharply under her weight, raced through her
+fingers, and with a sharp snap, broke in two. She gave a wild shriek as
+it parted, and twisted her body frantically in mid-air, landing asprawl
+half-in, half-out of the rapids, but on the further bank. She hauled her
+legs up on dry land and crouched there, drenched to the waist but safe.
+
+[Illustration: The rope swung perilously, threatening to dash her on the
+rocks.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Darkovans were yelling in delight. I motioned to Lerrys to make his
+end of the rope fast around a hefty tree-root, and shouted, "Are you
+hurt?" She indicated in pantomime that the thundering of the water
+drowned words, and bent to belay her end of the rope. In sign-language I
+gestured to her to make very sure of the knots; if anyone slipped, she
+hadn't the weight to hold us.
+
+I hauled on the rope myself to test it, and it held fast. I slung her
+boots around my neck by their cords, then, gripping the fixed rope,
+Kendricks and I stepped into the water.
+
+It was even icier than I expected, and my first step was nearly the
+last; the rush of the white water knocked me to my knees, and I
+floundered and would have measured my length except for my hands on the
+fixed rope. Buck Kendricks grabbed at me, letting go the rope to do it,
+and I swore at him, raging, while we got on our feet again and braced
+ourselves against the onrushing current. While we struggled in the
+pounding waters, I admitted to myself; we could never have crossed
+without the rope Kyla had risked her life to fix.
+
+Shivering, we got across and hauled ourselves out. I signalled to the
+others to cross two at a time, and Kyla seized my elbow. "Jason--"
+
+"Later, dammit!" I had to shout to make myself heard over the roaring
+water, as I held out a hand to help Rafe get his footing on the ledge.
+
+"This--can't--wait," she yelled, cupping her hands and shouting into my
+ear. I turned on her. "_What!_"
+
+"There are--_trailmen_--on the top level--of that bridge! I saw them!
+They cut the loop!"
+
+Regis and Hjalmar came struggling across last; Regis, lightly-built, was
+swept off his feet and Hjalmar turned to grab him, but I shouted to him
+to keep clear--they were still roped together and if the ropes fouled we
+might drown someone. Lerrys and I leaped down and hauled Regis clear; he
+coughed, spitting icy water, drenched to the skin.
+
+I motioned to Lerrys to leave the fixed rope, though I had little hope
+that it would be there when we returned, and looked quickly around,
+debating what to do. Regis and Rafe and I were wet clear through; the
+others to well above the knee. At this altitude, this was dangerous,
+although we were not yet high enough to worry about frostbite. Trailmen
+or no trailmen, we must run the lesser risk of finding a place where we
+could kindle a fire and dry out.
+
+"Up there--there's a clearing," I said briefly, and hurried them along.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was hard climbing now, on rock, and there were places where we had to
+scrabble for handholds, and flatten ourselves out against an almost
+sheer wall. The keen wind rose as we climbed higher, whining through the
+thick forest, soughing in the rocky outcrops, and biting through our
+soaked clothing with icy teeth. Kendricks was having hard going now, and
+I helped him as much as I could, but I was aching with cold. We gained
+the clearing, a small bare spot on a lesser peak, and I directed the two
+Darkovan brothers who were the driest to gather dry brushwood and get a
+fire going. It was hardly near enough sunset to camp; but by the time we
+were dry enough to go on safely, it would be, so I gave orders to get
+the tent up, then rounded angrily on Kyla.
+
+"See here, another time don't try any dangerous tricks unless you're
+ordered to!"
+
+"Go easy on her," Regis Hastur interceded, "we'd never have crossed
+without the fixed rope. Good work, girl."
+
+"You keep out of this!" I snapped. It was true, yet resentment boiled in
+me as Kyla's plain sullen face glowed under the praise from the Hastur.
+
+The fact was--I admitted it grudgingly--a lightweight like Kyla ran less
+risk on an acrobat's bridge than in that kind of roaring current. That
+did not lessen my annoyance; and Regis Hastur's interference, and the
+foolish grin on the girl's face, made me boil over.
+
+I wanted to question her further about the sight of trailmen on the
+bridge, but decided against it. We had been spared attack on the rapids,
+so it wasn't impossible that a group, not hostile, was simply watching
+our progress--maybe even aware that we were on a peaceful mission.
+
+But I didn't believe it for a minute. If I knew anything about the
+trailmen, it was this--one could not judge them by human standards at
+all. I tried to decide what I would have done, as a trailman, but my
+brain wouldn't run that way at the moment.
+
+The Darkovan brothers had built up the fire with a thoroughly reckless
+disregard of watching eyes. It seemed to me that the morale and fitness
+of the shivering crew was of more value at the moment than caution; and
+around the roaring fire, feeling my soaked clothes warming to the blaze
+and drinking boiling hot tea from a mug, it seemed that we were right.
+Optimism reappeared; Kyla, letting Hjalmar dress her hands which had
+been rubbed raw by the slipping lianas, made jokes with the men about
+her feat of acrobatics.
+
+We had made camp on the summit of an outlying arm of the main ridge of
+the Hellers, and the whole massive range lay before our eyes, turned to
+a million colors in the declining sun. Green and turquoise and rose, the
+mountains were even more beautiful than I remembered. The shoulder of
+the high slope we had just climbed had obscured the real mountain massif
+from our sight, and I saw Kendricks' eyes widen as he realized that this
+high summit we had just mastered was only the first step of the task
+which lay before us. The real ridge rose ahead, thickly forested on the
+lower slopes, then strewn with rock and granite like the landscape of an
+airless, deserted moon. And above the rock, there were straight walls
+capped with blinding snow and ice. Down one peak a glacier flowed, a
+waterfall, a cascade shockingly arrested in motion. I murmured the
+trailman's name for the mountain, aloud, and translated it for the
+others:
+
+"The Wall Around the World."
+
+"Good name for it," Lerrys murmured, coming with his mug in his hand to
+look at the mountain. "Jason, the big peak there has never been climbed,
+has it?"
+
+"I can't remember." My teeth were chattering and I went back toward the
+fire. Regis surveyed the distant glacier and murmured, "It doesn't look
+too bad. There could be a route along that western _arête_--Hjalmar,
+weren't you with the expedition that climbed and mapped High Kimbi?"
+
+The giant nodded, rather proudly. "We got within a hundred feet of the
+top, then a snowstorm came up and we had to turn back. Some day we'll
+tackle the Wall Around the World--it's been tried, but no one ever
+climbed the peak."
+
+"No one ever will," Lerrys stated positively, "There's two hundred feet
+of sheer rock cliff, Prince Regis, you'd need wings to get up. And
+there's the avalanche ledge they call Hell's Alley--"
+
+Kendricks broke in irritably, "I don't care whether it's ever been
+climbed or ever will be climbed, we're not going to climb it now!" He
+stared at me and added, "I hope!"
+
+"We're not." I was glad of the interruption. If the youngsters and
+amateurs wanted to amuse themselves plotting hypothetical attacks on
+unclimbable sierras, that was all very well, but it was, if nothing
+worse, a great waste of time. I showed Kendricks a notch in the ridge,
+thousands of feet lower than the peaks, and well-sheltered from the
+icefalls on either side.
+
+"That's Dammerung; we're going through there. We won't be on the
+mountain at all, and it's less than 22,000 feet high in the
+pass--although there are some bad ledges and washes. We'll keep clear of
+the main tree-roads if we can, and all the mapped trailmen's villages,
+but we may run into wandering bands--" abruptly I made my decision and
+gestured them around me.
+
+"From this point," I broke the news, "we're liable to be attacked. Kyla,
+tell them what you saw."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She put down her mug. Her face was serious again, as she related what
+she had seen on the bridge. "We're on a peaceful mission, but they don't
+know that yet. The thing to remember is that they do not wish to kill,
+only to wound and rob. If we show fight--" she displayed a short ugly
+knife, which she tucked matter-of-factly into her shirt-front, "they
+will run away again."
+
+Lerrys loosened a narrow dagger which until this moment I had thought
+purely ornamental. He said, "Mind if I say something more, Jason? I
+remember from the 'Narr campaign--the trailmen fight at close quarters,
+and by human standards they fight dirty." He looked around fiercely, his
+unshaven face glinting as he grinned. "One more thing. I like elbow
+room. Do we have to stay roped together when we start out again?"
+
+I thought it over. His enthusiasm for a fight made me feel both annoyed
+and curiously delighted. "I won't make anyone stay roped who thinks he'd
+be safer without it," I said, "we'll decide that when the time comes,
+anyway. But personally--the trailmen are used to running along narrow
+ledges, and we're not. Their first tactic would probably be to push us
+off, one by one. If we're roped, we can fend them off better." I
+dismissed the subject, adding, "Just now, the important thing is to dry
+out."
+
+Kendricks remained at my side after the others had gathered around the
+fire, looking into the thick forest which sloped up to our campsite. He
+said, "This place looks as if it had been used for a camp before. Aren't
+we just as vulnerable to attack here as we would be anywhere else?"
+
+He had hit on the one thing I hadn't wanted to talk about. This clearing
+was altogether too convenient. I only said, "At least there aren't so
+many ledges to push us off."
+
+Kendricks muttered, "You've got the only blaster!"
+
+"I left it at Carthon," I said truthfully. Then I laid down the law:
+
+"Listen, Buck. If we kill a single trailman, except in hand-to-hand
+fight in self-defense, we might as well pack up and go home. We're on a
+peaceful mission, and we're begging a favor. Even if we're attacked--we
+kill only as a last resort, and in hand-to-hand combat!"
+
+"Damned primitive frontier planet--"
+
+"Would you rather die of the trailmen's disease?"
+
+He said savagely, "We're apt to catch it anyway--here. You're immune,
+you don't care, you're safe! The rest of us are on a suicide
+mission--and damn it, when I die I want to take a few of those monkeys
+with me!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I bent my head, bit my lip and said nothing. Buck couldn't be blamed for
+the way he felt. After a moment I pointed to the notch in the ridge
+again. "It's not so far. Once we get through Dammerung, it's easy going
+into the trailmen's city. Beyond there, it's all civilized."
+
+"Maybe _you_ call it civilization," Kendricks said, and turned away.
+
+"Come on, let's finish drying our feet."
+
+And at that moment they hit us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kendricks' yell was the only warning I had before I was fighting away
+something scrabbling up my back. I whirled and ripped the creature away,
+and saw dimly that the clearing was filled to the rim with an explosion
+of furry white bodies. I cupped my hands and yelled, in the only
+trailman dialect I knew, "Hold off! We come in peace!"
+
+One of them yelled something unintelligible and plunged at me--another
+tribe! I saw a white-furred, chinless face, contorted in rage, a small
+ugly knife--a female! I ripped out my own knife, fending away a savage
+slash. Something tore white-hot across the knuckles of my hand; the
+fingers went limp and my knife fell, and the trailman woman snatched it
+up and made off with her prize, swinging lithely upward into the
+treetops.
+
+I searched quickly, gripped with my good hand at the bleeding knuckles,
+and found Regis Hastur struggling at the edge of a ledge with a pair of
+the creatures. The crazy thought ran through my mind that if they killed
+him all Darkover would rise and exterminate the trailmen and it would
+all be my fault. Then Regis tore one hand free, and made a curious
+motion with his fingers.
+
+It looked like an immense green spark a foot long, or like a fireball.
+It exploded in one creature's white face and she gave a wild howl of
+terror and anguish, scrabbled blindly at her eyes, and with a despairing
+shriek, ran for the shelter of the trees. The pack of trailmen gave a
+long formless wail, and then they were gathering, flying, retreating
+into the shadows. Rafe yelled something obscene and then a bolt of
+bluish flame lanced toward the retreating pack. One of the humanoids
+fell without a cry, pitching senseless over the ledge.
+
+I ran toward Rafe, struggling with him for the shocker he had drawn from
+its hiding-place inside his shirt. "You blind damned fool!" I cursed
+him, "you may have ruined everything--"
+
+"They'd have killed him without it," he retorted wrathfully. He had
+evidently failed to see how efficiently Regis defended himself. Rafe
+motioned toward the fleeing pack and sneered, "Why don't you go with
+your friends?"
+
+With a grip I thought I had forgotten, I got my hand around Rafe's
+knuckles and squeezed. His hand went limp and I snatched the shocker and
+pitched it over the ledge.
+
+"One word and I'll pitch you after it," I warned. "Who's hurt?"
+
+Garin was blinking senselessly, half-dazed by a blow; Regis' forehead
+had been gashed and dripped blood, and Hjalmar's thigh sliced in a clean
+cut. My own knuckles were laid bare and the hand was getting numb. It
+was a little while before anybody noticed Kyla, crouched over speechless
+with pain. She reeled and turned deathly white when we touched her; we
+stretched her out where she was, and got her shirt off, and Kendricks
+crowded up beside us to examine the wound.
+
+"A clean cut," he said, but I didn't hear. Something had turned over
+inside me, like a hand stirring up my brain, and....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jay Allison looked around with a gasp of sudden vertigo. He was not in
+Forth's office, but standing precariously near the edge of a cliff. He
+shut his eyes briefly, wondering if he were having one of his worst
+nightmares, and opened them on a familiar face.
+
+Buck Kendricks was bone-white, his mouth widening as he said hoarsely,
+"Jay! Doctor Allison--for God's sake--"
+
+A doctor's training creates reactions that are almost reflexes; Jay
+Allison recovered some degree of sanity as he became aware that someone
+was stretched out in front of him, half-naked, and bleeding profusely.
+He motioned away the crowding strangers and said in his bad Darkovan,
+"Let her alone, this is my work." He didn't know enough words to curse
+them away, so he switched to Terran, speaking to Kendricks:
+
+"Buck, get these people away, give the patient some air. Where's my
+surgical case?" He bent and probed briefly, realizing only now that the
+injured was a woman, and young.
+
+The wound was only a superficial laceration; whatever sharp instrument
+had inflicted it, had turned on the costal bone without penetrating lung
+tissue. It could have been sutured, but Kendricks handed him only a
+badly-filled first-aid kit; so Dr. Allison covered it tightly with a
+plastic clip-shield which would seal it from further bleeding, and let
+it alone. By the time he had finished, the strange girl had begun to
+stir. She said haltingly, "Jason--?"
+
+"Dr. Allison," he corrected tersely, surprised in a minor way--the major
+surprise had blurred lesser ones--that she knew his name. Kendricks
+spoke swiftly to the girl, in one of the Darkovan languages Jay didn't
+understand, and then drew Jay aside, out of earshot. He said in a shaken
+voice, "Jay, I didn't know--I wouldn't have believed--you're _Doctor
+Allison_? Good Lord--Jason!"
+
+And then he moved fast. "What's the matter? Oh, hell, Jay, don't faint
+on me!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jay was aware that he didn't come out of it too bravely, but anyone who
+blamed him (he thought resentfully) should try it on for size; going to
+sleep in a comfortably closed-in office and waking up on a cliff at the
+outer edges of nowhere. His hand hurt; he saw that it was bleeding and
+flexed it experimentally, trying to determine that no tendons had been
+injured. He rapped, "How did this happen?"
+
+"Sir, keep your voice down--or speak Darkovan!"
+
+Jay blinked again. Kendricks was still the only familiar thing in a
+strangely vertiginous universe. The Spaceforce man said huskily. "Before
+heaven, Jay, I hadn't any idea--and I've known you how long? Eight, nine
+years?"
+
+Jay said, "That idiot Forth!" and swore, the colorless profanity of an
+indoor man.
+
+Somebody shouted, "Jason!" in an imperative voice, and Kendricks said
+shakily, "Jay, if they see you--you literally are not the same man!"
+
+"Obviously not." Jay looked at the tent, one pole still unpitched.
+"Anyone in there?"
+
+"Not yet." Kendricks almost shoved him inside. "I'll tell them--I'll
+tell them something." He took a radiant from his pocket, set it down and
+stared at Allison in the flickering light, and said something profane.
+"You'll--you'll be all right here?"
+
+Jay nodded. It was all he could manage. He was keeping a tight hold on
+his nerve; if it went, he'd start to rave like a madman. A little time
+passed, there were strange noises outside, and then there was a polite
+cough and a man walked into the tent.
+
+He was obviously a Darkovan aristocrat and looked vaguely familiar,
+though Jay had no conscious memory of seeing him before. Tall and
+slender, he possessed that perfect and exquisite masculine beauty
+sometimes seen among Darkovans, and he spoke to Jay familiarly but with
+surprising courtesy:
+
+"I have told them you are not to be disturbed for a moment, that your
+hand is worse than we believed. A surgeon's hands are delicate things,
+Doctor Allison, and I hope that yours are not badly injured. Will you
+let me look?"
+
+Jay Allison drew back his hand automatically, then, conscious of the
+churlishness of the gesture, let the stranger take it in his and look at
+the fingers. The man said, "It does not seem serious. I was sure it was
+something more than that." He raised grave eyes. "You don't even
+remember my name, do you, Dr. Allison?"
+
+"You know who I am?"
+
+"Dr. Forth didn't tell me. But we Hasturs are partly telepathic,
+Jason--forgive me--Doctor Allison. I have known from the first that you
+were possessed by a god or daemon."
+
+"Superstitious rubbish," Jay snapped. "Typical of a Darkovan!"
+
+"It is a convenient manner of speaking, no more," said the young Hastur,
+overlooking the rudeness. "I suppose I could learn your terminology, if
+I considered it worth the effort. I have had psi training, and I can
+tell the difference when half of a man's soul has driven out the other
+half. Perhaps I can restore you to yourself--"
+
+"If you think I'd have some Darkovan freak meddling with my mind--" Jay
+began hotly, then stopped. Under Regis' grave eyes, he felt a surge of
+unfamiliar humility. This crew of men needed their leader, and obviously
+he, Jay Allison, wasn't the leader they needed. He covered his eyes with
+one hand.
+
+Regis bent and put a hand on his shoulder, compassionately, but Jay
+twitched it off, and his voice, when he found it, was bitter and
+defensive and cold.
+
+"All right. The work's the thing. I can't do it, Jason can. You're a
+parapsych. If you can switch me off--go right ahead!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I stared at Regis, passing a hand across my forehead. "What happened?" I
+demanded, and in even swifter apprehension, "Where's Kyla? She was
+hurt--"
+
+"Kyla's all right," Regis said, but I got up quickly to make sure. Kyla
+was outside, lying quite comfortably on a roll of blankets. She was
+propped on her elbow drinking something hot, and there was a good smell
+of hot food in the air. I stared at Regis and demanded, "I didn't conk
+out, did I, from a little scratch like this?" I looked carelessly at my
+gashed hand.
+
+"Wait--" Regis held me back, "don't go out just yet. Do you remember
+what happened, Doctor Allison?"
+
+I stared in growing horror, my worst fear confirmed. Regis said quietly,
+"You--changed. Probably from the shock of seeing--" he stopped in
+mid-sentence, and I said, "The last thing I remember is seeing that Kyla
+was bleeding, when we got her clothes off. But--good Gods, a little
+blood wouldn't scare _me_, and Jay Allison's a surgeon, would it bring
+him roaring up like that?"
+
+"I couldn't say." Regis looked as if he knew more than he was telling.
+"I don't believe that Dr. Allison--he's not much like you--was very
+concerned with Kyla. Are you?"
+
+"Damn right I am. I want to make sure she's all right--" I stopped
+abruptly. "Regis--did they all see it?"
+
+"Only Kendricks and I," Regis said, "and we will not speak of it."
+
+I said, "Thanks," and felt his reassuring hand-clasp. Damn it, demigod
+or prince, I _liked_ Regis.
+
+I went out and accepted some food from the kettle and sat down between
+Kyla and Kendricks to eat. I was shaken, weak with reaction.
+Furthermore, I realized that we couldn't stay here. It was too
+vulnerable to attack. So, in our present condition, were we. If we could
+push on hard enough to get near Dammerung pass tonight, then tomorrow we
+could cross it early, before the sun warmed the snow and we had
+snowslides and slush to deal with. Beyond Dammerung, I knew the
+tribesmen and could speak their language.
+
+I mentioned this, and Kendricks looked doubtfully at Kyla. "Can she
+climb?"
+
+"Can she stay here?" I countered. But I went and sat beside her anyhow.
+
+"How badly are you hurt? Do you think you can travel?"
+
+She said fiercely, "Of course I can climb! I tell you, I'm no weak girl,
+I'm a free Amazon!" She flung off the blanket somebody had tucked around
+her legs. Her lips looked a little pinched, but the long stride was
+steady as she walked to the fire and demanded more soup.
+
+We struck the camp in minutes. The trailmen band of raiding females had
+snatched up almost everything portable, and there was no sense in
+striking and caching the tent; they'd return and hunt it out. If we came
+back with a trailmen escort, we wouldn't need it anyway. I ordered them
+to leave everything but the lightest gear, and examined each remaining
+rucksack. Rations for the night we would spend in the pass, our few
+remaining blankets, ropes, sunglasses. Everything else I ruthlessly
+ordered left behind.
+
+It was harder going now. For one thing, the sun was lowering, and the
+evening wind was icy. Nearly everyone of us had some hurt, slight in
+itself, which hindered us in climbing. Kyla was white and rigid, but did
+not spare herself; Kendricks was suffering severely from mountain
+sickness at this altitude, and I gave him all the help I could, but with
+my stiffening slashed hand I wasn't having too easy a time myself.
+
+There was one expanse that was sheer rock-climbing, flattened like bugs
+against a wall, scrabbling for hand-holds and footholds. I felt it a
+point of pride to lead, and I led; but by the time we had climbed the
+thirty-foot wall, and scrambled along a ledge to where we could pick up
+the trail again, I was ready to give over. Crowding together on the
+ledge, I changed places with the veteran Lerrys, who was better than
+most professional climbers.
+
+He muttered, "I thought you said this was a _trail_!"
+
+I stretched my mouth in what was supposed to be a grin and didn't quite
+make it. "For the trailmen, this is a superhighway. And no one else ever
+comes this way."
+
+Now we climbed slowly over snow; once or twice we had to flounder
+through drifts, and once a brief bitter snowstorm blotted out sight for
+twenty minutes, while we hugged each other on the ledge, clinging wildly
+against wind and icy sleet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We bivouacked that night in a crevasse blown almost clean of snow, well
+above the tree-line, where only scrubby unkillable thornbushes
+clustered. We tore down some of them and piled them up as a windbreak,
+and bedded beneath it; but we all thought with aching regret of the
+comfort of the camp gear we'd abandoned. The going had gotten good and
+rough.
+
+That night remains in my mind as one of the most miserable in memory.
+Except for the slight ringing in my ears, the height alone did not
+bother me, but the others did not fare so well. Most of the men had
+blinding headaches, Kyla's slashed side must have given her considerable
+pain, and Kendricks had succumbed to mountain-sickness in its most
+agonizing form: severe cramps and vomiting. I was desperately uneasy
+about all of them, but there was nothing I could do; the only cure for
+mountain-sickness is oxygen or a lower altitude, neither of which was
+practical.
+
+In the windbreak we doubled up, sharing blankets and body warmth: I took
+a last look around the close space before crawling in beside Kendricks,
+and saw the girl bedding down slightly apart from the others. I started
+to say something, but Kendricks spoke, first. Voicing my thoughts.
+
+"Better crawl in with us, girl." He added, coldly but not unkindly, "you
+needn't worry about any funny stuff."
+
+Kyla gave me just the flicker of a grin, and I realized she was
+including me on the Darkovan side of a joke against this big man who was
+so unaware of Darkovan etiquette. But her voice was cool and curt as she
+said, "I'm not worrying," and loosened her heavy coat slightly before
+creeping into the nest of blankets between us.
+
+It was painfully cramped, and chilly in spite of the self-heating
+blankets; we crowded close together and Kyla's head rested on my
+shoulder. I felt her snuggle closely to me, half asleep, hunting for a
+warm place; and I found myself very much aware of her closeness,
+curiously grateful to her. An ordinary woman would have protested, if
+only as a matter of form, sharing blankets with two strange men. I
+realized that if Kyla had refused to crawl in with us, she would have
+called attention to her sex much _more_ than she did by matter-of-factly
+behaving as if she were, in fact, male.
+
+She shivered convulsively, and I whispered, "Side hurting? Are you
+cold?"
+
+"A little. It's been a long time since I've been at these altitudes,
+too. What it really is--I can't get those women out of my head."
+
+Kendricks coughed, moving uncomfortably. "I don't understand--those
+creatures who attacked us--all women--?"
+
+I explained briefly. "Among the people of the Sky, as everywhere, more
+females are born than males. But the trailmen's lives are so balanced
+that they have no room for extra females within the Nests--the cities.
+So when a girl child of the Sky People reaches womanhood, the other
+women drive her out of the city with kicks and blows, and she has to
+wander in the forest until some male comes after her and claims her and
+brings her back as his own. Then she can never be driven forth again,
+although if she bears no children she can be forced to be a servant to
+his other wives."
+
+Kendricks made a little sound of disgust.
+
+"You think it cruel," Kyla said with sudden passion, "but in the forest
+they can live and find their own food; they will not starve or die. Many
+of them prefer the forest life to living in the Nests, and they will
+fight away any male who comes near them. We who call ourselves human
+often make less provision for our spare women."
+
+She was silent, sighing as if with pain. Kendricks made no reply except
+a non-committal grunt. I held myself back by main force from touching
+Kyla, remembering what she was, and finally said, "We'd better quit
+talking. The others want to sleep, if we don't."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a time I heard Kendricks snoring, and Kyla's quiet even breaths. I
+wondered drowsily how Jay would have felt about this situation--he who
+hated Darkover and avoided contact with every other human being, crowded
+between a Darkovan free-Amazon and half a dozen assorted roughnecks. I
+turned the thought off, fearing it might somehow re-arouse him in his
+brain.
+
+But I had to think of something, anything to turn aside this
+consciousness of the woman's head against my chest, her warm breath
+coming and going against my bare neck. Only by the severest possible act
+of will did I keep myself from slipping my hand over her breasts, warm
+and palpable through the thin sweater, I wondered why Forth had called
+me undisciplined. I couldn't risk my leadership by making advances to
+our contracted guide--woman, Amazon or whatever!
+
+Somehow the girl seemed to be the pivot point of all my thoughts. She
+was not part of the Terran HQ, she was not part of any world Jay Allison
+might have known. She belonged wholly to Jason, to my world. Between
+sleep and waking, I lost myself in a dream of skimming flight-wise along
+the tree roads, chasing the distant form of a girl driven from the Nest
+that day with blows and curses. Somewhere in the leaves I would find her
+... and we would return to the city, her head garlanded with the red
+leaves of a chosen-one, and the same women who had stoned her forth
+would crowd about and welcome her when she returned. The fleeing woman
+looked over her shoulder with Kyla's eyes; and then the woman's form
+muted and Dr. Forth was standing between us in the tree-road, with the
+caduceus emblem on his coat stretched like a red staff between us.
+Kendricks in his Spaceforce uniform was threatening us with a blaster,
+and Regis Hastur was suddenly wearing Space Service uniform too and
+saying, "Jay Allison, Jay Allison," as the tree-road splintered and
+cracked beneath our feet and we were tumbling down the waterfall and
+down and down and down....
+
+"Wake up!" Kyla whispered, and dug an elbow into my side. I opened my
+eyes on crowded blackness, grasping at the vanishing nightmare. "What's
+the matter?"
+
+"You were moaning. Touch of altitude sickness?"
+
+I grunted, realized my arm was around her shoulder, and pulled it
+quickly away. After awhile I slept again, fitfully.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before light we crawled wearily out of the bivouac, cramped and stiff
+and not rested, but ready to get out of this and go on. The snow was
+hard, in the dim light, and the trail not difficult here. After all the
+trouble on the lower slopes, I think even the amateurs had lost their
+desire for adventurous climbing; we were all just as well pleased that
+the actual crossing of Dammerung should be an anticlimax and uneventful.
+
+The sun was just rising when we reached the pass, and we stood for a
+moment, gathered close together, in the narrow defile between the great
+summits to either side.
+
+Hjalmar gave the peaks a wistful look.
+
+"Wish we could climb them."
+
+Regis grinned at him companionably. "Sometime--and you have the word of
+a Hastur, you'll be along on that expedition." The big fellows' eyes
+glowed. Regis turned to me, and said warmly, "What about it, Jason? A
+bargain? Shall we all climb it together, next year?"
+
+I started to grin back and then some bleak black devil surged up in me,
+raging. When this was over, I'd suddenly realized, I wouldn't be there.
+I wouldn't be anywhere. I was a surrogate, a substitute, a splinter of
+Jay Allison, and when it was over, Forth and his tactics would put me
+back into what they considered my rightful place--which was nowhere. I'd
+never climb a mountain except now, when we were racing against time and
+necessity. I set my mouth in an unaccustomed narrow line and said,
+"We'll talk about that when we get back--if we ever do. Now I suggest we
+get going. Some of us would like to get down to lower altitudes."
+
+The trail down from Dammerung inside the ridge, unlike the outside
+trail, was clear and well-marked, and we wound down the slope, walking
+in easy single file. As the mist thinned and we left the snow-line
+behind, we saw what looked like a great green carpet, interspersed with
+shining colors which were mere flickers below us. I pointed them out.
+
+"The treetops of the North Forest--and the colors you see are in the
+streets of the Trailcity."
+
+An hour's walking brought us to the edge of the forest. We travelled
+swiftly now, forgetting our weariness, eager to reach the city before
+nightfall. It was quiet in the forest, almost ominously still. Over our
+head somewhere, in the thick branches which in places shut out the
+sunlight completely, I knew that the tree-roads ran crisscross, and now
+and again I heard some rustle, a fragment of sound, a voice, a snatch of
+song.
+
+"It's so dark down here," Rafe muttered, "anyone living in this forest
+would _have_ to live in the treetops, or go totally blind!"
+
+Kendricks whispered to me, "Are we being followed? Are they going to
+jump us?"
+
+"I don't think so. What you hear are just the inhabitants of the
+city--going about their daily business up there."
+
+"Queer business it must be," Regis said curiously, and as we walked
+along the mossy, needly forest floor, I told him something of the
+trailmen's lives. I had lost my fear. If anyone came at us now, I could
+speak their language, I could identify myself, tell my business, name my
+foster-parents. Some of my confidence evidently spread to the others.
+
+But as we came into more and more familiar territory, I stopped abruptly
+and struck my hand against my forehead.
+
+"I knew we had forgotten something!" I said roughly, "I've been away
+from here too long, that's all. Kyla."
+
+"What about Kyla?"
+
+The girl explained it herself, in her expressionless monotone. "I am an
+unattached female. Such women are not permitted in the Nests."
+
+"That's easy, then," Lerrys said. "She must belong to one of us." He
+didn't add a syllable. No one could have expected it; Darkovan
+aristocrats don't bring their women on trips like this, and their women
+are not like Kyla.
+
+The three brothers broke into a spate of volunteering, and Rafe made an
+obscene suggestion. Kyla scowled obstinately, her mouth tight with what
+could have been embarrassment or rage. "If you believe I need your
+protection--!"
+
+"Kyla," I said tersely, "is under _my_ protection. She will be
+introduced as my woman--and treated as such."
+
+Rafe twisted his mouth in an un-funny smile. "I see the leader keeps all
+the best for himself?"
+
+My face must have done something I didn't know about, for Rafe backed
+slowly away. I forced myself to speak slowly: "Kyla is a guide, and
+indispensable. If anything happens to me, she is the only one who can
+lead you back. Therefore her safety is my personal affair. Understand?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we went along the trail, the vague green light disappeared. "We're
+right below the Trailcity," I whispered, and pointed upward. All around
+us the Hundred Trees rose, branchless pillars so immense that four men,
+hands joined, could not have encircled one with their arms. They
+stretched upward for some three hundred feet, before stretching out
+their interweaving branches; above that, nothing was visible but
+blackness.
+
+Yet the grove was not dark, but lighted with the startlingly brilliant
+phosphorescence of the fungi growing on the trunks, and trimmed into
+bizarre ornamental shapes. In cages of transparent fibre, glowing
+insects as large as a hand hummed softly and continuously.
+
+As I watched, a trailman--quite naked except for an ornate hat and a
+narrow binding around the loins--descended the trunk. He went from cage
+to cage, feeding the glow-worms with bits of shining fungus from a
+basket on his arm.
+
+I called to him in his own language, and he dropped the basket, with an
+exclamation, his spidery thin body braced to flee or to raise an alarm.
+
+"But I belong to the Nest," I called to him, and gave him the names of
+my foster-parents. He came toward me, gripping my forearm with warm long
+fingers in a gesture of greeting.
+
+"Jason? Yes, I hear them speak of you," he said in his gentle twittering
+voice, "you are at home. But those others--?" He gestured nervously at
+the strange faces.
+
+"My friends," I assured him, "and we come to beg the Old One for an
+audience. For tonight I seek shelter with my parents, if they will
+receive us."
+
+He raised his head and called softly, and a slim child bounded down the
+trunk and took the basket. The trailman said, "I am Carrho. Perhaps it
+would be better if I guided you to your foster-parents, so you will not
+be challenged."
+
+I breathed more freely. I did not personally recognize Carrho, but he
+looked pleasantly familiar. Guided by him, we climbed one by one up the
+dark stairway inside the trunk, and emerged into the bright square,
+shaded by the topmost leaves into a delicate green twilight. I felt
+weary and successful.
+
+Kendricks stepped gingerly on the swaying, jiggling floor of the square.
+It gave slightly at every step, and Kendricks swore morosely in a
+language that fortunately only Rafe and I understood. Curious trailmen
+flocked to the street and twittered welcome and surprise.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Rafe and Kendricks betrayed considerable contempt when I greeted my
+foster-parents affectionately. They were already old, and I was saddened
+to see it; their fur graying, their prehensile toes and fingers crooked
+with a rheumatic complaint of some sort, their reddish eyes bleared and
+rheumy. They welcomed me, and made arrangements for the others in my
+party to be housed in an abandoned house nearby ... they had insisted
+that I, of course, must return to their roof, and Kyla, of course, had
+to stay with me.
+
+"Couldn't we camp on the ground instead?" Kendricks asked, eying the
+flimsy shelter with distaste.
+
+"It would offend our hosts," I said firmly. I saw nothing wrong with it.
+Roofed with woven bark, carpeted with moss which was planted on the
+floor, the place was abandoned, somewhat a bit musty, but weathertight
+and seemed comfortable to me.
+
+The first thing to be done was to despatch a messenger to the Old One,
+begging the favor of an audience with him. That done, (by one of my
+foster-brothers), we settled down to a meal of buds, honey, insects and
+birds eggs! It tasted good to me, with the familiarity of food eaten in
+childhood, but among the others, only Kyla ate with appetite and Regis
+Hastur with interested curiosity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the demands of hospitality had been satisfied, my foster-parents
+asked the names of my party, and I introduced them one by one. When I
+named Regis Hastur, it reduced them to brief silence, and then to an
+outcry; gently but firmly, they insisted that their home was unworthy to
+shelter the son of a Hastur, and that he must be fittingly entertained
+at the Royal Nest of the Old One.
+
+There was no gracious way for Regis to protest, and when the messenger
+returned, he prepared to accompany him. But before leaving, he drew me
+aside:
+
+"I don't much like leaving the rest of you--"
+
+"You'll be safe enough."
+
+"It's not that I'm worried about, Dr. Allison."
+
+"Call me Jason," I corrected angrily. Regis said, with a little
+tightening of his mouth, "That's it. You'll have to be Dr. Allison
+tomorrow when you tell the Old One about your mission. But you have to
+be the Jason he knows, too."
+
+"So--?"
+
+"I wish I needn't leave here. I wish you were--going to stay with the
+men who know you only as Jason, instead of being alone--or only with
+Kyla."
+
+There was something odd in his face, and I wondered at it. Could he--a
+Hastur--be jealous of Kyla? Jealous of _me_? It had never occurred to me
+that he might be somehow attracted to Kyla. I tried to pass it off
+lightly:
+
+"Kyla might divert me."
+
+Regis said without emphasis, "Yet she brought Dr. Allison back once
+before." Then, surprisingly, he laughed. "Or maybe you're right. Maybe
+Kyla will--scare away Dr. Allison if he shows up."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The coals of the dying fire laid strange tints of color on Kyla's face
+and shoulders and the wispy waves of her dark hair. Now that we were
+alone, I felt constrained.
+
+"Can't you sleep, Jason?"
+
+I shook my head. "Better sleep while you can." I felt that this night
+of all nights I dared not close my eyes or when I woke I would have
+vanished into the Jay Allison I hated. For a moment I saw the room with
+his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but--habituated to
+white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors--dirty and unsanitary as
+any beast's den.
+
+Kyla said broodingly, "You're a strange man, Jason. What sort of man are
+you--in Terra's world?"
+
+I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Suddenly I had to tell her the
+whole truth:
+
+"Kyla, the man you know as me doesn't exist. I was created for this one
+specific task. Once it's finished, so am I."
+
+She started, her eyes widening. "I've heard tales of--of the Terrans and
+their sciences--that they make men who aren't real, men of metal--not
+bone and flesh--"
+
+Before the dawning of that naive horror I quickly held out my bandaged
+hand, took her fingers in mine and ran them over it. "Is this metal? No,
+no, Kyla. But the man you know as Jason--I won't be him, I'll be someone
+different--" How could I explain a subsidiary personality to Kyla, when
+I didn't understand it myself?
+
+She kept my fingers in hers softly and said, "I saw--someone
+else--looking from your eyes at me once. A ghost."
+
+I shook my head savagely. "To the Terrans, I'm the ghost!"
+
+"Poor ghost," she whispered.
+
+Her pity stung. I didn't want it.
+
+"What I don't remember I can't regret. Probably I won't even remember
+you." But I lied. I knew that although I forgot everything else,
+unregretting because unremembered, I could not bear to lose this girl,
+that my ghost would walk restless forever if I forgot her. I looked
+across the fire at Kyla, cross-legged in the faint light--only a few
+coals in the brazier. She had removed her sexless outer clothing, and
+wore some clinging garment, as simple as a child's smock and curiously
+appealing. There was still a little ridge of bandage visible beneath it
+and a random memory, not mine, remarked in the back corners of my brain
+that with the cut improperly sutured there would be a visible scar.
+_Visible to whom?_
+
+She reached out an appealing hand. "Jason! Jason--?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My self-possession deserted me. I felt as if I stood, small and reeling,
+under a great empty echoing chamber which was Jay Allison's mind, and
+that the roof was about to fall in on me. Kyla's image flickered in and
+out of focus, first infinitely gentle and appealing, then--as if seen at
+the wrong end of a telescope--far away and sharply incised and as remote
+and undesirable as any bug underneath a lens.
+
+Her hands closed on my shoulders. I put out a groping hand to push her
+away.
+
+"Jason," she implored, "don't--go away from me like that! Talk to me,
+tell me!"
+
+But her words reached me through emptiness.... I knew important things
+might hang on tomorrow's meeting, Jason alone could come through that
+meeting, where the Terrans for some reason put him through this hell and
+damnation and torture ... oh, yes ... the trailmen's fever.
+
+Jay Allison pushed the girl's hand away and scowled savagely, trying to
+collect his thoughts and concentrate them on what he must say and do, to
+convince the trailmen of their duty toward the rest of the planet. As if
+they--not even human--could have a sense of duty!
+
+With an unaccustomed surge of emotion, he wished he were with the
+others. Kendricks, now. Jay knew, precisely, why Forth had sent the big,
+reliable spaceman at his back. And that handsome, arrogant
+Darkovan--where was he? Jay looked at the girl in puzzlement; he didn't
+want to reveal that he wasn't quite sure of what he was saying or doing,
+or that he had little memory of what Jason had been up to.
+
+He started to ask, "Where did the Hastur kid go?" before a vagrant
+logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been
+lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he
+did not even speak the trailmen's language, that it had slipped from his
+thoughts completely.
+
+[Illustration: She felt a touch of panic. He was leaving her again.]
+
+"You--" he fished desperately for the girl's name, "Kyla. You don't
+speak the trailmen's language, do you?"
+
+"A few words. No more. Why?" She had withdrawn into a corner of the tiny
+room--still not far from him--and he wondered remotely what his damned
+alter ego had been up to. With Jason, there was no telling. Jay raised
+his eyes with a melancholy smile.
+
+"Sit down, child. You needn't be frightened."
+
+"I'm--I'm trying to understand--" the girl touched him again, evidently
+trying to conquer her terror. "It isn't easy--when you turn into someone
+else under my eyes--" Jay saw that she was shaking in real fright.
+
+He said wearily, "I'm not going to--to turn into a bat and fly away. I'm
+just a poor devil of a doctor who's gotten himself into one unholy
+mess." There was no reason, he was thinking, to take out his own misery
+and despair by shouting at this poor kid. God knew what she'd been
+through with his irresponsible other self--Forth had admitted that that
+damned "Jason" personality was a blend of all the undesirable traits
+he'd fought to smother all his life. By an effort of will he kept
+himself from pulling away from her hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Jason, don't--slip away like that! _Think!_ Try to keep hold on
+_yourself_!"
+
+Jay propped his head in his hands, trying to make sense of that.
+Certainly in the dim light she could not be too conscious of subtle
+changes of expression. She evidently thought she was talking to Jason.
+She didn't seem to be overly intelligent.
+
+"Think about tomorrow, Jason. What are you going to say to him? Think
+about your parents--"
+
+Jay Allison wondered what they would think when they found a stranger
+here. He felt like a stranger. Yet he must have come, tonight, into this
+house and spoken--he rummaged desperately in his mind for some fragments
+of the trailmen's language. He had spoken it as a child. He must recall
+enough to speak to the woman who had been a kind foster-mother to her
+alien son. He tried to form his lips to the unfamiliar shapes of words...
+
+Jay covered his face with his hands again. Jason was the part of himself
+that remembered the trailmen. _That_ was what he had to remember--Jason
+was not a hostile stranger, not an alien intruder in his body. Jason was
+a lost part of himself and at the moment a damn necessary part. If there
+were only some way to get back the Jason memories, skills, without
+losing _himself_ ... he said to the girl, "Let me think. Let me--" to
+his surprise and horror his voice broke into an alien tongue, "Let me
+alone, will you?"
+
+Maybe, Jay thought, I could stay myself if I could remember the rest.
+Dr. Forth said: Jason would remember the trailmen with kindness, not
+dislike.
+
+Jay searched his memory and found nothing but familiar frustration;
+years spent in an alien land, apart from a human heritage, stranded and
+abandoned. _My father left me. He crashed the plane and I never saw him
+again and I hate him for leaving me ..._
+
+But his father had not abandoned him. He had crashed the plane trying to
+save them both. It was no one's fault--
+
+_Except my father's. For trying to fly over the Hellers into a country
+where no man belongs ..._
+
+He hadn't belonged. And yet the trailmen, whom he considered little
+better than roaming beasts, had taken the alien child into their city,
+their homes, their hearts. They had loved him. And he ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And I loved them," I found myself saying half aloud, then realized that
+Kyla was gripping my arm, looking up imploringly into my face. I shook
+my head rather groggily. "What's the matter?"
+
+"You frightened me," she said in a shaky little voice, and I suddenly
+knew what had happened. I tensed with savage rage against Jay Allison.
+He couldn't even give me the splinter of life I'd won for myself, but
+had to come sneaking out of my mind, how he must hate me! Not half as
+much as I hated him, damn him! Along with everything else, he'd scared
+Kyla half to death!
+
+She was kneeling very close to me, and I realized that there was one way
+to fight that cold austere fish of a Jay Allison, send him shrieking
+down into hell again. He was a man who hated everything except the cold
+world he'd made his life. Kyla's face was lifted, soft and intent and
+pleading, and suddenly I reached out and pulled her to me and kissed
+her, hard.
+
+"Could a ghost do this?" I demanded, "or this?"
+
+She whispered, "No--oh, no," and her arms went up to lock around my
+neck. As I pulled her down on the sweet-smelling moss that carpeted the
+chamber, I felt the dark ghost of my other self thin out, vanish and
+disappear.
+
+Regis had been right. It had been the only way ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Old One was not old at all; the title was purely ceremonial. This
+one was young--not much older than I--but he had poise and dignity and
+the same strange indefinable quality I had recognized in Regis Hastur.
+It was something, I supposed, that the Terran Empire had lost in
+spreading from star to star. A feeling of knowing one's own place, a
+dignity that didn't demand recognition because it had never lacked for
+it.
+
+Like all trailmen he had the chinless face and lobeless ears, the
+heavy-haired body which looked slightly less than human. He spoke very
+low--the trailmen have very acute hearing--and I had to strain my ears
+to listen, and remember to keep my own voice down.
+
+He stretched his hand to me, and I lowered my head over it and murmured,
+"I take submission, Old One."
+
+"Never mind that," he said in his gentle twittering voice, "sit down, my
+son. You are welcome here, but I feel you have abused our trust in you.
+We dismissed you to your own kind because we felt you would be happier
+so. Did we show you anything but kindness, that after so many years you
+return with armed men?"
+
+The reproof in his red eyes was hardly an auspicious beginning. I said
+helplessly, "Old One, the men with me are not armed. A band of
+those-who-may-not-enter-cities attacked us, and we defended ourselves. I
+travelled with so many men only because I feared to travel the passes
+alone."
+
+"But does that explain why you have returned at all?" The reason and
+reproach in his voice made sense.
+
+Finally I said, "Old One, we come as suppliants. My people appeal to
+your people in the hope that you will be--" I started to say, _as
+human_, stopped and amended "--that you will deal as kindly with them as
+with me."
+
+His face betrayed nothing. "What do you ask?"
+
+I explained. I told it badly, stumbling, not knowing the technical
+terms, knowing they had no equivalents anyway in the trailmen's
+language. He listened, asking a penetrating question now and again. When
+I mentioned the Terran Legate's offer to recognize the trailmen as a
+separate and independent government, he frowned and rebuked me:
+
+"We of the Sky People have no dealings with the Terrans, and care
+nothing for their recognition--or its lack."
+
+For that I had no answer, and the Old One continued, kindly but
+indifferently, "We do not like to think that the fever which is a
+children's little sickness with us shall kill so many of your kind. But
+you cannot in all honesty blame us. You cannot say that we spread the
+disease; we never go beyond the mountains. Are we to blame that the
+winds change or the moons come together in the sky? When the time has
+come for men to die, they die." He stretched his hand in dismissal. "I
+will give your men safe-conduct to the river, Jason. Do not return."
+
+Regis Hastur rose suddenly and faced him. "Will you hear me, Father?" He
+used the ceremonial title without hesitation, and the Old One said in
+distress, "The son of Hastur need never speak as a suppliant to the Sky
+People!"
+
+"Nevertheless, hear me as a suppliant, Father," Regis said quietly. "It
+is not the strangers and aliens of Terra who are pleading. We have
+learned one thing from the strangers of Terra, which you have not yet
+learned. I am young and it is not fitting that I should teach you, but
+you have said; are we to blame that the moons come together in the sky?
+No. But we have learned from the Terrans not to blame the moons in the
+sky for our own ignorance of the ways of the Gods--by which I mean the
+ways of sickness or poverty or misery."
+
+"These are strange words for a Hastur," said the Old One, displeased.
+
+"These are strange times for a Hastur," said Regis loudly. The Old One
+winced, and Regis moderated his tone, but continued vehemently, "You
+blame the moons in the sky. _I_ say the moons are not to blame--nor the
+winds--nor the Gods. The Gods send these things to men to test their
+wits and to find if they have the will to master them!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Old One's forehead ridged vertically and he said with stinging
+contempt, "Is this the breed of king which men call Hastur now?"
+
+"Man or God or Hastur, I am not too proud to plead for my people,"
+retorted Regis, flushing with anger. "Never in all the history of
+Darkover has a Hastur stood before one of you and begged--"
+
+"--for the men from another world."
+
+"--for all men on our world! Old One, I could sit and keep state in the
+House of the Hasturs, and even death could not touch me until I grew
+weary of living! But I preferred to learn new lives from new men. The
+Terrans have something to teach even the Hasturs, and they can learn a
+remedy against the trailmen's fever." He looked round at me, turning the
+discussion over to me again, and I said:
+
+"I am no alien from another world, Old One. I have been a son in your
+house. Perhaps I was sent to teach you to fight destiny. I cannot
+believe you are indifferent to death."
+
+Suddenly, hardly knowing what I was going to do until I found myself on
+my knees, I knelt and looked up into the quiet stern remote face of the
+nonhuman:
+
+"My father," I said, "you took a dying man and a dying child from a
+burning plane. Even those of their own kind might have stripped their
+corpses and left them to die. You saved the child, fostered him and
+treated him as a son. When he reached an age to be unhappy with you, you
+let a dozen of your people risk their lives to take him to his own. You
+cannot ask me to believe that you are indifferent to the death of a
+million of my people, when the fate of one could stir your pity!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a moment's silence. Finally the Old One said,
+"Indifferent--no. But helpless. My people die when they leave the
+mountains. The air is too rich for them. The food is wrong. The light
+blinds and tortures them. Can I send them to suffer and die, those
+people who call me father?"
+
+And a memory, buried all my life, suddenly surfaced. I said urgently,
+"Father, listen. In the world I live in now, I am called a wise man. You
+need not believe me, but listen; I know your people, they are my people.
+I remember when I left you, more than a dozen of my foster-parents'
+friends offered, knowing they risked death, to go with me. I was a
+child; I did not realize the sacrifice they made. But I watched them
+suffer, as we went lower in the mountains, and I resolved ... I resolved
+..." I spoke with difficulty, forcing the words through a reluctant
+barricade, "... that since others had suffered so for me ... I would
+spend my life in curing the sufferings of others. Father, the Terrans
+call me a wise doctor, a man of healing. Among the Terrans I can see
+that my people, if they will come to us and help us, have air they can
+breathe and food which will suit them and that they are guarded from the
+light. I don't ask you to send anyone, father. I ask only--tell your
+sons what I have told you. If I know your people--who are my people
+forever--hundreds of them will offer to return with me. And you may
+witness what your foster-son has sworn here; if one of your sons dies,
+your alien son will answer for it with his own life."
+
+The words had poured from me in a flood. They were not all mine; some
+unconscious thing had recalled in me that Jay Allison had power to make
+these promises. For the first time I began to see what force, what
+guilt, what dedication working in Jay Allison had turned him aside from
+me. I remained at the Old One's feet, kneeling, overcome, ashamed of the
+thing I had become. Jay Allison was worth ten of me. Irresponsible,
+Forth had said. Lacking purpose, lacking balance. What right had I to
+despise my soberer self?
+
+At last I felt the Old One touch my head lightly.
+
+"Get up, my son," he said, "I will answer for my people. And forgive me
+for my doubts and my delays."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Neither Regis nor I spoke for a minute after we left the audience room;
+then, almost as one, we turned to each other. Regis spoke first,
+soberly.
+
+"It was a fine thing you did, Jason. I didn't believe he'd agree to it."
+
+"It was your speech that did it," I denied. The sober mood, the
+unaccustomed surge of emotion, was still on me, but it was giving way to
+a sudden upswing of exaltation. Damn it, I'd _done_ it! Let Jay Allison
+try to match _that_ ...
+
+Regis still looked grave. "He'd have refused, but you appealed to him as
+one of themselves. And yet it wasn't quite that ... it was something
+more ..." Regis put a quick embarrassed arm around my shoulders and
+suddenly blurted out, "I think the Terran Medical played hell with your
+life, Jason! And even if it saves a million lives--it's hard to forgive
+them for that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late the next day the Old One called us in again, and told us that a
+hundred men had volunteered to return with us and act as blood donors
+and experimental subjects for research into the trailmen's disease.
+
+The trip over the mountains, so painfully accomplished was easier in
+return. Our escort of a hundred trailmen guaranteed us against attack,
+and they could choose the easiest paths.
+
+Only as we undertook the long climb downward through the foothills did
+the trailmen, un-used to ground travel at any time, and suffering from
+the unaccustomed low altitude, begin to weaken. As we grew stronger,
+more and more of them faltered, and we travelled more and more slowly.
+Not even Kendricks could be callous about "inhuman animals" by the time
+we reached the point where we had left the pack animals. And it was Rafe
+Scott who came to me and said desperately, "Jason, these poor fellows
+will never make it to Carthon. Lerrys and I know this country. Let us go
+ahead, as fast as we can travel alone, and arrange at Carthon for
+transit--maybe we can get pressurized aircraft to fly them from here. We
+can send a message from Carthon, too, about accommodations for them at
+the Terran HQ."
+
+I was surprised and a little guilty that I had not thought of this
+myself. I covered it with a mocking, "I thought you didn't give a damn
+about 'any of my friends.'"
+
+Rafe said doggedly, "I guess I was wrong about that. They're going
+through this out of a sense of duty, so they must be pretty different
+than I thought they were."
+
+Regis, who had overheard Rafe's plan, now broke in quietly, "There's no
+need for you to travel ahead, Rafe. I can send a quicker message."
+
+I had forgotten that Regis was a trained telepath. He added, "There are
+some space and distance limitations to such messages, but there is a
+regular relay net all over Darkover, and one of the relays is a girl who
+lives at the very edge of the Terran Zone. _If_ you'll tell me what will
+give her access to the Terran HQ--" he flushed slightly and explained,
+"from what I know of the Terrans, she would not be very fortunate
+relaying the message if she merely walked to the gate and said she had a
+relayed telepathic message for someone, would she?"
+
+I had to smile at the picture that conjured up in my mind. "I'm afraid
+not," I admitted. "Tell her to go to Dr. Forth, and give the message
+from Dr. Jason Allison."
+
+Regis looked at me curiously--it was the first time I had spoken my own
+name in the hearing of the others. But he nodded, without comment. For
+the next hour or two he seemed somewhat more pre-occupied than usual,
+but after a time he came to me and told me that the message had gone
+through. Sometime later he relayed an answer; that airlift would be
+waiting for us, not at Carthon, but a small village near the ford of the
+Kadarin where we had left our trucks.
+
+When we camped that night there were a dozen practical problems needing
+attention; the time and exact place of crossing the ford, the
+reassurance to be given to terrified trailmen who could face leaving
+their forests but not crossing the final barricade of the river, the
+small help in our power to be given the sick ones. But after everything
+had been done that I could do, and after the whole camp had quieted
+down, I sat before the low-burning fire and stared into it, deep in
+painful lassitude. Tomorrow we would cross the river and a few hours
+later we would be back in the Terran HQ. And then....
+
+And then ... and then nothing. I would vanish, I would utterly cease to
+exist anywhere, except as a vagrant ghost troubling Jay Allison's
+unquiet dreams. As he moved through the cold round of his days I would
+be no more than a spent wind, a burst bubble, a thinned cloud.
+
+The rose and saffron of the dying fire-colors gave shape to my dreams.
+Once more, as in the trailcity that night, Kyla slipped through
+firelight to my side, and I looked up at her and suddenly I knew I could
+not bear it. I pulled her to me and muttered, "Oh, Kyla--Kyla, I won't
+even remember you!"
+
+She pushed my hands away, kneeling upright, and said urgently, "Jason,
+listen. We are close to Carthon, the others can lead them the rest of
+the way. Why go back to them at all? Slip away now and never go back! We
+can--" she stopped, coloring fiercely, that sudden and terrifying
+shyness overcoming her again, and at last she said in a whisper,
+"Darkover is a wide world, Jason. Big enough for us to hide in. I don't
+believe they would search very far."
+
+They wouldn't. I could leave word with Kendricks--not with Regis, the
+telepath would see through me immediately--that I had ridden ahead to
+Carthon, with Kyla. By the time they realized that I had fled, they
+would be too concerned with getting the trailmen safely to the Terran
+Zone to spend much time looking for a runaway. As Kyla said, the world
+was wide. And it was my world. And I would not be alone in it.
+
+"Kyla, Kyla," I said helplessly, and crushed her against me, kissing
+her. She closed her eyes and I took a long, long look at her face. Not
+beautiful, no. But womanly and brave and all the other beautiful things.
+It was a farewell look, and I knew it, if she didn't.
+
+After the briefest time, she pulled a little away, and her flat voice
+was gentler and more breathless than usual. "We'd better leave before
+the others waken." She saw that I did not move. "Jason--?"
+
+I could not look at her. Muffled behind my hands, I said, "No, Kyla.
+I--I promised the Old One to look after my people in the Terran world. I
+must go back--"
+
+"You won't be _there_ to look after them! You won't be _you_!"
+
+I said bleakly, "I'll write a letter to remind myself. Jay Allison has a
+very strong sense of duty. He'll look after them for me. He won't like
+it, but he'll do it, with his last breath. He's a better man than I am,
+Kyla. You'd better forget about me." I said, wearily, "I never existed."
+
+That wasn't the end. Not nearly. She--begged, and I don't know why I put
+myself through the hell of stubbornness. But in the end she ran away,
+crying, and I threw myself down by the fire, cursing Forth, cursing my
+own folly, but most of all cursing Jay Allison, hating my other self
+with a blistering, sickening rage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Coming through the outskirts of the small village the next afternoon,
+the village where the airlift would meet us, we noted that the poorer
+quarter was almost abandoned. Regis said bleakly, "It's begun," and
+dropped out of line to stand in the doorway of a silent dwelling. After
+a minute he beckoned to me, and I looked inside.
+
+I wished I hadn't. The sight would haunt me while I lived. An old man,
+two young women and half a dozen children between four and fifteen years
+old lay inside. The old man, one of the children, and one of the young
+women were laid out neatly in clean death, shrouded, their faces covered
+with green branches after the Darkovan custom for the dead. The other
+young woman lay huddled near the fireplace, her coarse dress splattered
+with the filthy stuff she had vomited, dying. The children--but even now
+I can't think of the children without retching. One, very small, had
+been in the woman's arms when she collapsed; it had squirmed free--for a
+little while. The others were in an indescribable condition and the
+worst of it was that one of them was still moving, feebly, long past
+help. Regis turned blindly from the door and leaned against the wall,
+his shoulders heaving. Not, as I first thought, in disgust, but in
+grief. Tears ran over his hands and spilled down, and when I took him by
+the arm to lead him away, he reeled and fell against me.
+
+He said in a broken, blurred, choking voice, "Oh, Lord, Jason, those
+children, those children--if you ever had any doubts about what you're
+doing, any doubts about what you've done, think about that, think that
+you've saved a whole world from that, think that you've done something
+even the Hasturs couldn't do!"
+
+My own throat tightened with something more than embarrassment. "Better
+wait till we know for sure whether the Terrans can carry through with
+it, and you'd better get to hell away from this doorway. I'm immune, but
+damn it, you're not." But I had to take him and lead him away, like a
+child, from that house. He looked up into my face and said with burning
+sincerity, "I wonder if you believe I'd give my life, a dozen times
+over, to have done that?"
+
+It was a curious, austere reward. But vaguely it comforted me. And then,
+as we rode into the village itself, I lost myself, or tried to lose
+myself, in reassuring the frightened trailmen who had never seen a city
+on the ground, never seen or heard of an airplane. I avoided Kyla. I
+didn't want a final word, a farewell. We had had our farewells already.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Forth had done a marvelous job of having quarters ready for the
+trailmen, and after they were comfortably installed and reassured, I
+went down wearily and dressed in Jay Allison's clothing. I looked out
+the window at the distant mountains and a line from the book on
+mountaineering, which I had bought as a youngster in an alien world, and
+Jay had kept as a stray fragment of personality, ran in violent conflict
+through my mind:
+
+_Something hidden--go and find it_ ...
+
+_Something lost beyond the ranges_ ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had just begun to live. Surely I deserved better than this, to vanish
+when I had just discovered life. Did the man who did not know how to
+live, deserve to live at all? Jay Allison--that cold man who had never
+looked beyond any ranges--why should I be lost in him?
+
+Something lost beyond the ranges ... nothing would be lost but myself. I
+was beginning to loathe the overflown sense of duty which had brought me
+back here. Now, when it was too late, I was bitterly regretting ... Kyla
+had offered me life. Surely I would never see Kyla again.
+
+Could I regret what I would never remember? I walked into Forth's office
+as if I were going to my doom. I _was_ ...
+
+Forth greeted me warmly.
+
+"Sit down and tell me all about it ..." he insisted. I would rather not
+speak. Instead, compulsively, I made it a full report ... and curious
+flickers came in and out of my consciousness as I spoke. By the time I
+realized I was reacting to a post-hypnotic suggestion, that in fact I
+was going under hypnosis again, it was too late and I could only think
+that this was worse than death because in a way I would be alive ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jay Allison sat up and meticulously straightened his cuff before
+tightening his mouth in what was meant for a smile. "I assume, then,
+that the experiment was a success?"
+
+"A complete success." Forth's voice was somewhat harsh and annoyed, but
+Jay was untroubled; he had known for years that most of his subordinates
+and superiors disliked him, and had long ago stopped worrying about it.
+
+"The trailmen agreed?"
+
+"They agreed," Forth said, surprised. "You don't remember anything at
+all?"
+
+"Scraps. Like a nightmare." Jay Allison looked down at the back of his
+hand, flexing the fingers cautiously against pain, touching the
+partially healed red slash. Forth followed the direction of his eyes and
+said, not unsympathetically, "Don't worry about your hand. I looked at
+it pretty carefully. You'll have the total use of it."
+
+Jay said rigidly, "It seems to have been a pretty severe risk to take.
+Did you ever stop to think what it would have meant to me, to lose the
+use of my hand?"
+
+"It seemed a justifiable risk, even if you had," Forth said dryly. "Jay,
+I've got the whole story on tape, just as you told it to me. You might
+not like having a blank spot in your memory. Want to hear what your
+alter ego did?"
+
+Jay hesitated. Then he unfolded his long legs and stood up. "No, I don't
+think I care to know." He waited, arrested by a twinge of a sore muscle,
+and frowned.
+
+What had happened, what would he never know, why did the random ache
+bring a pain deeper than the pain of a torn nerve? Forth was watching
+him, and Jay asked irritably, "What is it?"
+
+"You're one hell of a cold fish, Jay."
+
+"I don't understand you, sir."
+
+"You wouldn't," Forth muttered. "Funny. I _liked_ your subsidiary
+personality."
+
+Jay's mouth contracted in a mirthless grin.
+
+"You would," he said, and swung quickly round.
+
+"Come on. If I'm going to work on that serum project I'd better inspect
+the volunteers and line up the blood donors and look over old
+whatshisname's papers."
+
+But beyond the window the snowy ridges of the mountain, inscrutable,
+caught and held his eye; a riddle and a puzzle--
+
+"Ridiculous," he said, and went to his work.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Four months later, Jay Allison and Randall Forth stood together,
+watching the last of the disappearing planes, carrying the volunteers
+back toward Carthon and their mountains.
+
+"I should have flown back to Carthon with them," Jay said moodily. Forth
+watched the tall man stare at the mountain; wondered what lay behind the
+contained gestures and the brooding.
+
+He said, "You've done enough, Jay. You've worked like the devil.
+Thurmond--the Legate--sent down to say you'd get an official
+commendation and a promotion for your part. That's not even mentioning
+what you did in the trailmen's city." He put a hand on his colleague's
+shoulder, but Jay shook it off impatiently.
+
+All through the work of isolating and testing the blood fraction, Jay
+had worked tirelessly and unsparingly; scarcely sleeping, but brooding;
+silent, prone to fly into sudden savage rages, but painstaking. He had
+overseen the trailmen with an almost fatherly solicitude--but from a
+distance. He had left no stone unturned for their comfort--but refused
+to see them in person except when it was unavoidable.
+
+Forth thought, we played a dangerous game. Jay Allison had made his own
+adjustment to life, and we disturbed that balance. Have we wrecked the
+man? He's expendable, but damn it, what a loss! He asked, "Well, why
+_didn't_ you fly back to Carthon with them? Kendricks went along, you
+know. He expected you to go until the last minute."
+
+Jay did not answer. He had avoided Kendricks, the only witness to his
+duality. In all his nightmare brooding, the avoidance of anyone who had
+known him as Jason became a mania. Once, meeting Rafe Scott on the lower
+floor of the HQ, he had turned frantically and plunged like a madman
+through halls and corridors, to avoid coming face to face with the man,
+finally running up four flights of stairs and taking shelter in his
+rooms, with the pounding heart and bursting veins of a hunted criminal.
+At last he said, "If you've called me down here to read me the riot act
+about not wanting to make another trip into the Hellers--!"
+
+"No, no," Forth said equably, "there's a visitor coming. Regis Hastur
+sent word he wants to see you. In case you don't remember him, he was on
+Project Jason--"
+
+"I remember," Jay said grimly. It was nearly his one clear memory--the
+nightmare of the ledge, his slashed hand, the shameful naked body of the
+Darkovan woman, and--blurring these things, the too-handsome Darkovan
+aristocrat who had banished him for Jason again. "He's a better
+psychiatrist than you are, Forth. He changed me into Jason in the
+flicker of an eyelash, and it took you half a dozen hypnotic sessions."
+
+"I've heard about the psi powers of the Hasturs," Forth said, "but I've
+never been lucky enough to meet one in person. Tell me about it. What
+did he do?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jay made a tight movement of exasperation, too controlled for a shrug.
+"Ask him, why don't you. Look, Forth, I don't much care to see him. I
+didn't do it for Darkover; I did it because it was my job. I'd prefer to
+forget the whole thing. Why don't you talk to him?"
+
+"I rather had the idea that he wanted to see you personally. Jay, you
+did a tremendous thing, man! Damn it, why don't you strut a little?
+Be--be normal for once! Why, I'd be damned near bursting with pride if
+one of the Hasturs insisted on congratulating me personally!"
+
+Jay's lip twitched, and his voice shook with controlled exasperation.
+"Maybe you would. I don't see it that way."
+
+"Well, I'm afraid you'll have to. On Darkover nobody refuses when the
+Hasturs make a request--and certainly not a request as reasonable as
+this one." Forth sat down beside the desk. Jay struck the woodwork with
+a violent clenched fist and when he lowered his hand there was a tiny
+smear of blood along his knuckles. After a minute he walked to the couch
+and sat down, very straight and stiff, saying nothing. Neither of the
+men spoke again until Forth started at the sound of a buzzer, drew the
+mouthpiece toward him, and said, "Tell him we are honored--you know the
+routine for dignitaries, and send him up here."
+
+Jay twisted his fingers together and ran his thumb, in a new gesture,
+over the ridge of scar tissue along the knuckles. Forth was aware of an
+entirely new quality in the silence, and started to speak to break it,
+but before he could do so, the office door slid open on its silent beam,
+and Regis Hastur stood there.
+
+Forth rose courteously and Jay got to his feet like a mechanical doll
+jerked on strings. The young Darkovan ruler smiled engagingly at him:
+
+"Don't bother, this visit is informal; that's the reason I came here
+rather than inviting you both to the Tower. Dr. Forth? It is a pleasure
+to meet you again, sir. I hope that our gratitude to you will soon take
+a more tangible form. There has not been a single death from the
+trailmen's fever since you made the serum available."
+
+Jay, motionless, saw bitterly that the old man had succumbed to the
+youngster's deliberate charm. The chubby, wrinkled old face seamed up in
+a pleased smile as Forth said, "The gifts sent to the trailmen in your
+name, Lord Hastur, were greatly welcomed."
+
+"Do you think that any of us will ever forget what they have done?"
+Regis replied. He turned toward the window and smiled rather tentatively
+at the man who stood there; motionless since his first conventional
+gesture of politeness:
+
+"Dr. Allison, do you remember me at all?"
+
+"I remember you," Jay Allison said sullenly.
+
+His voice hung heavy in the room, its sound a miasma in his ears. All
+his sleepless, nightmare-charged brooding, all his bottled hate for
+Darkover and the memories he had tried to bury, erupted into
+overwrought bitterness against this too-ingratiating youngster who was
+a demigod on this world and who had humiliated him, repudiated him for
+the hated Jason ... for Jay, Regis had suddenly become the symbol of a
+world that hated him, forced him into a false mold.
+
+A black and rushing wind seemed to blur the room. He said hoarsely, "I
+remember you all right," and took one savage, hurtling step.
+
+The weight of the unexpected blow spun Regis around, and the next moment
+Jay Allison, who had never touched another human being except with the
+remote hands of healing, closed steely, murderous hands around Regis'
+throat. The world thinned out into a crimson rage. There were shouting
+and sudden noises, and a red-hot explosion in his brain ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You'd better drink this," Forth remarked, and I realized I was turning
+a paper cup in my hands. Forth sat down, a little weakly, as I raised it
+to my lips and sipped. Regis took his hand away from his throat and said
+huskily, "I could use some of that, Doctor."
+
+I put the whiskey down. "You'll do better with water until your throat
+muscles are healed," I said swiftly, and went to fill a throwaway cup
+for him, without thinking. Handing it to him. I stopped in sudden dismay
+and my hand shook, spilling a few drops. I said hoarsely, swallowing,
+"--but drink it, anyway--"
+
+Regis got a few drops down, painfully, and said, "My own fault. The
+moment I saw--Jay Allison--I knew he was a madman. I'd have stopped him
+sooner only he took me by surprise."
+
+"But--you say _him_--I'm Jay Allison," I said, and then my knees went
+weak and I sat down. "What in hell is this? I'm not Jay--but I'm not
+Jason, either--"
+
+I could remember my entire life, but the focus had shifted. I still felt
+the old love, the old nostalgia for the trailmen; but I also knew, with
+a sure sense of identity, that I was Doctor Jason Allison, Jr., who had
+abandoned mountain climbing and become a specialist in Darkovan
+parasitology. Not Jay who had rejected his world; not Jason who had been
+rejected by it. But then who?
+
+Regis said quietly, "I've seen you before--once. When you knelt to the
+Old One of the trailmen." With a whimsical smile he said, "As an
+ignorant superstitious Darkovan, I'd say that you were a man who'd
+balanced his god and daemon for once."
+
+I looked helplessly at the young Hastur. A few seconds ago my hands had
+been at his throat. Jay or Jason, maddened by self-hate and jealousy,
+could disclaim responsibility for the other's acts.
+
+I couldn't.
+
+Regis said, "We could take the easy way out, and arrange it so we'd
+never have to see each other again. Or we could do it the hard way." He
+extended his hand, and after a minute, I understood, and we shook hands
+briefly, like strangers who have just met. He added, "Your work with the
+trailmen is finished, but We Hasturs committed ourselves to teach some
+of the Terrans our science--matrix mechanics. Dr. Allison--Jason--you
+know Darkover, and I think we could work with you. Further, you know
+something about slipping mental gears. I meant to ask; would you care to
+be one of them? You'd be ideal."
+
+I looked out the window at the distant mountains. This work--this would
+be something which would satisfy both halves of myself. The irresistible
+force, the immovable object--and no ghosts wandering in my brain. "I'll
+do it," I told Regis. And then, deliberately, I turned my back on him
+and went up to the quarters, now deserted, which we had readied for the
+trailmen. With my new doubled--or complete--memories, another ghost had
+roused up in my brain, and I remembered a woman who had appeared vaguely
+in Jay Allison's orbit, unnoticed, working with the trailmen, tolerated
+because she could speak their language. I opened the door, searched
+briefly through the rooms, and shouted, "Kyla!" and she came. Running.
+Disheveled. Mine.
+
+At the last moment, she drew back a little from my arms and whispered,
+"You're Jason--but you're something more. Different ..."
+
+"I don't know who I am," I said quietly, "but I'm me. Maybe for the
+first time. Want to help me find out just who that is?"
+
+I put my arm around her, trying to find a path between memory and
+tomorrow. All my life, I had walked a strange road toward an unknown
+horizon. Now, reaching my horizon, I found it marked only the rim of an
+unknown country.
+
+Kyla and I would explore it together.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Planet Savers, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
+
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