The cruise of the space yacht Royal Mother, out from Altair II and back again, had been arranged to kill some sixty years of time. Sixty years on that woman-governed planet—until the matriarch got ready to round out her iron-willed reign by directing the coronation and the formal nuptials of her daughter. Aboard the yacht, however, in the flux of space and time at interstellar speeds, the years had shrunk to days.

The prince had been twenty-four when the cruise began. A slim and unobtrusive man with a hesitant voice and dark curly hair, he was still boyishly engaging when he smiled, although the waiting burden of his royal duties had already stooped him slightly and sobered his blue eyes with a wistful resignation. His newly granted title was as yet unblooded; he had never killed a man.

He was expected to return unchanged by time, still a fit consort for his future ruler—who had been a red and wrinkled infant when he left, squalling alarmingly through the betrothal ceremony. And he fully intended to return on time. He had assented without protest when his mother and Her Majesty announced the traditional arrangements. He was merely a man. He knew his place.

A faint discontent had begun to nip him now and then, however, even while the faint spark of Altair hung reddened and fading behind the ship. Moody silences began to blight the small talk expected of him at dinners and receptions on the civilized planets he visited. For all his efforts at a princely submission, rebellion smoldered in him. When the psionic screens showed him Altair turning bright and blue ahead, beyond Alpha Centuari and Sol, desperation took hold of him.

Trapped in the cold luxury of the royal suite, he tried to learn the speech his aide had written for him to make on Proxima IV, but the hollow phrases mocked him. He tried to sleep and paced the decks, until a wild impulse drove him to arouse the aide—a grizzled, hard-bitten old duelist who had fought his way to a title that can be rendered here as count.

“Call the bridge and change our course.” He gulped to smooth his voice. “I . . . I want to stop at Sol instead of Proxima.”

“But . . . your highness!” An apprehensive disapproval flickered through the old aristocrat’s well-bred reserve. “You know the matriarch herself picked out our ports of call. She won’t be pleased. And if we’re late for the coronation—”

The count paused ominously, without words to convey the enormity of that, but the prince understood the danger. Other mothers had coveted the throne for their own sons, and their jealousy would surely turn any delay into disaster for him.

“I mean to be on time,” he protested hastily. Afterwards, all his life would be arranged for him, but suddenly now he felt that he had to have one moment of his own.

“Why Sol?” The count spoke with the candor of old friendship. “A desert system, except for a handful of savages on the third planet—I was there with the quarantine service, before I came into the fighting class. Why go there?”

“I don’t quite know,” the prince admitted hesitantly. “But when I saw Sol ahead, it set me to thinking of history. The Men’s Rebellion. There’s a legend, you know, that the survivors escaped into space, and one of my tutors had a theory they settled that third planet. I’d like to forget speech-making long enough to investigate his theory.”

“There’s evidence that the migration came the other way,” the bluff old nobleman objected. “Even today, some tribes there are largely woman-ruled. But you’ll have to take my word for that, because they’re under the Covenants of Non-Contact. No outsiders allowed, except service undercover men.”

“That won’t stop me from exploring some of the desert planets, to look for traces of those exiled men.”

“Perhaps not.” The gaunt count shrugged and stood for a moment chewing at the yellow fringes of his luxuriant mustache, frowning sadly at the prince. “There’s another reason for keeping on the safe route the matriarch selected for us. The galactic drift.”

“Haven’t we safety devices enough?”

“For the charted interstellar lanes. But if we change course out here—” The old man shrugged. “Who knows?”

“If you think there’s too much risk for the crew, I’ll give it up.”

“Our lives are safe enough,” the count admitted, “with all our survival devices. It’s just that any collision might delay us for years, waiting for a rescue ship. We might be late for your coronation.”

The prince straightened uneasily.

“If that’s all that worries you, call the bridge.”

“Are you out of your head?” The count scowled forbiddingly. “Risking the favor of the matriarch now, for just a whim?”

“It’s more than a whim,” the prince insisted. “Even if it seems an empty gesture, it’s something I have to do. The only free choice, probably, that I’ll ever get to make.”

“I’ll call the bridge—but watch yourself.” The stern old nobleman lifted a cautionary finger. “Freedom is a dangerous drink for any man to sip. A deadly habit, and difficult to break.”

He called the bridge. An astonished officer made him repeat the incredible command, but then the ship answered. Momentum flowed away into impalpable neutrionic energy, and came back with a new direction. The twin points of Alpha crept aside, and Sol blazed blue ahead.

On the planets, half a dozen years flashed away. The matriarch reigned, attending to the education and the travels of her daughter. The childish natives of Sol III rashly split the atom, and laughed at rumors of mysterious machines in the sky.

Aboard the Royal Mother, speed turned time to miles. The prince slept well again, once. He spent a day scanning the films on the planets of Sol in the ship’s library. After dinner, he had several drinks with the count. Listening to the old man’s tales of desperate undercover missions, he forgot his own stern future for a time. He went to bed again.

He was sleeping when it happened.

Neutrionic ships were almost perfect. The yacht was armed and armored against disaster, but this time something failed. Somehow, as she picked her automatic path into the thin cloud of galactic debris around

Sol, some hostile scrap of iron or stone escaped her psionic detectors and came through some unguarded chink in her shielding fields. She was wounded fatally.

Her shudder woke the prince. He tumbled out of his bed, cold with disaster, but for a moment he found nothing wrong. The impact was not repeated. The lights came on, and he had time to see the glasses and the empty bottle beside the chairs where he had sat talking with the count, not even upset. He was trying to believe that sickening jar had been a dream, when the alarm came.

Collision Alert!

That shocking warning screamed silently from the same psionic screen where they had sat watching Sol exploding like a bomb of violet light before the plunging ship.

Main Drive Disabled. Emergencies Burning Out. All Hands Adjust Life Belts. Stand by to Abandon Ship!

He reached automatically for the life belt in its glowing holder above his bed. It snapped out to meet his hand, a flat mechanical serpent. He stooped to adjust it, but it slid out of his fingers and coiled itself around his waist. Its wonderful quickness was comforting, until he thought of the count.

The old nobleman had stretched his stories to last out the bottle. Afraid he wouldn’t wake, the prince turned to call him—and felt the emergency drive collapse. Suddenly weightless, he was swept up from the deck. He snatched wildly at a passing chair, but it eluded him. He tried to shout, but panic took his voice.

Last Alert!

The screen flickered and dimmed.

Stand by Escapeways—

The screen went out. For an instant he thought the whole ship was dead, but then he saw the escape hatch in the wall of his bedroom glow red and burst open. Outrushing air flung him toward it, but he clutched at a table, still hoping to reach and help the count. A roaring wind tore the table away, tossed it ahead of him, splintered it.

For the stricken ship had died before the escapeway was fully open. The door had stopped half across his path. He had time to see the empty bottle and the weightless glasses shatter against its hard metal face, and he tried desperately to gather his own spinning body for the shock.

The next thing he knew, he was lying somewhere in the dark. He had been savagely mauled. A grating agony caught his right arm when he tried to raise himself. One side of his face felt stiff with dried blood. He tried to imagine what had happened, but his senses and his brain seemed useless as his throbbing arm.

Something was smothering him. A dull jagged blade stabbed his chest with each breath, as his body fought for air. He wondered dimly if the belt had brought him to some dark and airless asteroid, before he remembered that it ought to give illumination and ought to renew the oxygen around him. He explored the broad links of it with his good hand, and found three caved in.

Its psionic servos had been battered as badly as his body, but there were still the manual controls. He felt for the control link and slid the cover back and twisted the oxygen booster stud. His gasping lungs found comfort again, and his foggy senses cleared.

The damage to himself and the belt bewildered him at first, because that device was designed to guard itself and its wearer from almost any hazard. But then he remembered that half-open door, which he must have struck before the belt was fully activated.

He sat up carefully, clutching at his disabled arm with the other, and tried to see where he was. The shielding field of the belt supported him a little above the muddy ground. Steep banks of rain-cut clay loomed up around him. A few stars danced feebly in the murky sky above. Straggling weeds stood dark against the sky, rustling in the wind.

Wind and weeds—air and life. This was no dead asteroid, but some habitable planet of Sol. Relief eased his pain for an instant. For the quarantine station was near the inhabited planet, hidden on its moon. He would surely be picked up at once.

Or would he be? His unhurt hand moved numbly to finger the harsh stubble bristling through the caked blood on his chin, and he tried vainly to wet the rusty dryness in his mouth. He must have been adrift for many hours. The damaged belt had failed to take him to the station or to call help for him, but perhaps the voice transmitter would work. He groped with a feverish haste for that little instrument on its flexible cable.

“Calling Sol Station!” He croaked his name and title. “I’m off the Royal Mother,” he gasped. “Down in a gully on some savage planet. Please trace my signal, and send a rescue craft.”

He put the instrument anxiously to his ear and heard nothing at all, not even the whisper of the converter. The thing was dead. It slipped out of his fingers and the little cable snapped it back into place.

But part of the belt was working, for it still held him off the ground. Perhaps it could carry him on to the station, under manual control—if he could breathe. The air was already bad again, however, even with the booster stud all the way out. He was panting in spite of the pain in his chest, and anoxia was once more clouding his senses.

He saw that he must try to repair the damage. Though he wasn’t an expert technician, he had been tutored in the theory of neutrionics. He thought he could follow the psionic instructions packed with the assortment of tiny tools and spare parts in the repair link.

Yet he shrank from taking off the belt, even to inspect the damage. Without its invisible field around him, he would be exposed to all the unseen dangers of this unknown world. To hostile monsters and deadly microbes and perhaps to savage men.

Anxiously, he blinked again at the fringe of ragged weeds above him. The light seemed stronger now, as if dawn were coming, and he could see that the plants were green. Green leaves meant chlorophyll, releasing free oxygen. That assurance decided him.

Twisting painfully, he groped for the emergency link. His quivering fingers found the repair kit and the tiny psionic translator and the deadly little neutrionic pistol, but he left them in the link. He slipped out the flat first-aid packet. Peering dimly at the bright psionic labels, he found the general immunization needle. Clumsily, he pulled off the sheath with his teeth, and stabbed the point into his disabled arm, above the injury.

That would protect him from infection. There were drugs in the packet to ease pain and speed tissue repair, but already the labels were blurring in his mind. He had to have air. He found the release key, where the belt fastened, and twisted it frantically. Something clicked. The field died. He fell.

He had meant to land on his feet, but the gravitation caught him like a great wave breaking. He must have been weaker than he knew, from his injuries and anoxia, for he staggered and went down. Blinding pain twisted his arm again, and his lacerated face plowed into cold mud.

His breath went on. For a moment the only thing in the world was the agony in his arm, but that faded slowly into a dull numbness. He got good air into his aching lungs again, and rubbed the mud out of his eyes and sat up stiffly, reaching for the belt.

It was gone.

He scrabbled desperately around him, searching for it in the weeds, and stopped when he heard the faint click of it against the hard clay bank behind it. He turned in time to see it, almost severed where the links were crushed, crawling away from him like a crippled snake.

The release key had failed to stop its damaged mechanisms. He swayed to his feet and stumbled after it. Before he was half across the gully, however, it had glided to the top of the bank. A sick dread of losing it had slowed him, when it struck a projecting root and dropped back to the bottom with a faint tinkle of the links. Sobbing with relief, he staggered on to seize it.

It rose before he could reach it, drifting straight up now as if the shock of its fall had brought some new signal from the broken servos. Its motion seemed quite slow at first, and he ran desperately. His bare toes struck something, with excruciating pain, but he hobbled on frantically.

He caught it.

He had it in his hand. His snatching fingers must have jarred the crushed servos again, however, for the free end of it whipped against his wrist like a snake striking. The sharp blow broke his hold. It slithered away, and darted upward. He saw it for an instant, a silver spark flying out toward interstellar space. Then it was gone.

He sat down weakly on a slab of driftwood, gasping painfully again for air and overwhelmed by his predicament. Down alone on a savage planet, crippled and unarmed, with no way to call for help and nothing to establish his position. With the belt, even here, he had still been a prince of the matriarchy. Without it, he was nothing. Civilization was a complex of countless worlds; cut off from it, he was as nakedly defenseless as some single cell dissected out of its body and exposed alone. Stripped of all those mechanisms that many million minds had helped to make, he couldn’t hope to do much with his own small smattering of neutrionics and psionics. He was suddenly robbed of place and class, reduced to a shuddering human zero.

“So you weren’t afraid of being late for the coronation?” he muttered harshly at himself. “You simply had to have a look for those lost men who came this way to look for liberty. Well, here you are!” He looked around him dully. “Now, what are you going to do about it?”

He felt fairly certain that this was the third planet, because of the good air and the green leaves. The belt at least had brought him past the deadly cold and the poisonous atmospheres of the desert outer worlds before it failed.

Even here, the chill of the dawn had already set him to shivering. He huddled down in his thin night clothing, nursing his numb arm and watching the bright blood oozing from his bruised toes, wondering hopelessly how to save his life.

From where he sat on the damp driftwood, the whim that had brought him here appeared incredibly fatuous. The bite of the wind and the throb of his untended injuries gave a new luster to everything that he had thrown away. His stunned mind fled from this muddy gulch to the magnificent palaces and the quick psionic servants on his mother’s vast estates, that he might never see again.

The shrieking infant princess he had knelt to kiss was doubtless a handsome girl by now, and her own interstellar travels would be arranged to preserve her youth—and to protect her mother from any unfilial haste to take the throne. But she was lost, and all the empire he might have shared with her. His mother’s enemies would make the most of his fantastic indiscretion. Unless he got back on time, he would find some rival in his place. Disgraced, robbed of title and fighting rights, he would probably live out his broken life in some labor camp.

Unless he got back—he lurched to his feet in the mud. He had to get back, and civilization was less than two seconds away. If he could only reach the quarantine station on the satellite with any sort of message, he would be rescued at once and on his way to claim his princess and his throne.

If—but how? Without the belt, he had no way to call the station, or even to talk to the natives here. The meaning of the quarantine came home to him, with a crushing effect, when he thought of the lost translator. Protected under the Covenants, this backward planet knew nothing of the outside. He could hope for no help from these savages, not even if they turned out to be friendly.

But they wouldn’t be friendly. He saw with a sickening clarity what would happen to a stranger caught wandering on his own world without any weapon to prove and defend his social place. The best an unarmed and classless alien could expect was some sort of slavery.

Hunched and shrinking from the wind, he looked around him for any warning signs of men. He found only the red banks of the gully and the rank weeds along the rim, until his eyes fell abruptly back to the shattered timber where he had sat. It had been sawed square.

He started away from the broken beam, almost as if it had been some savage workman or warrior, and then paused to listen anxiously. All he could hear was the wind. After a moment, with a stiff little grin at his own alarm, he limped cautiously up the easier side of the gully, to see what lay beyond.

Sol was rising when his cautious head came above the ragged stand of weeds, a yellow disk larger than the sun at home. It lit a level green plain, scattered in the distance with clumps of trees around tiny wooden huts. A herd of spotted cattle were grazing near him, and a primitive motorcart crept along a road beyond them. The whole landscape had a comforting look of peace, and a wild hope shook him when he saw the ship.

It burst out of the sky above the low sun. The glint of its bright metal dazzled him, and for an instant he thought it was a neutrionic flier. He thought the belt had brought him to some civilized planet, after all. He thought that shining ship could take him home.

In another moment, however, as it lumbered slowly across above him, he saw the clumsy spread of its wings and heard the noise of its primitive engines—a crude atmospheric flier. This was Sol III, and he was still marooned.

Real spaceships must come here now and then, he knew, on the business of the station, but he would never see them. They would always slip down silently at night, to leave or to meet some undercover agent at a secret rendezvous on the desert or the ocean—he had no way to know when or where.

Those disguised outsiders—could he seek out one of them? Scowling after that vanishing aircraft, he shrugged helplessly. Such undercover experts would visit the planet only rarely, on important special missions. He might never encounter one of them, even in a lifetime here. Even if he should, he had no means of recognition.

Could he bring them to him? They were here to prevent culture-collisions. Suppose he learned some native dialect, and simply began telling the truth about himself? That ought to bring the inspectors fast enough—but it wouldn’t get him back home for the coronation.

Violators of the Covenants, he remembered the count saying, were usually carried to some distant headquarters of the service for trial, so that no matter what the verdict the bewildered offender found himself released so far away in time and distance from any world he knew that he had no choice except to atone for his crime by enlistment in the service. Time never turned; such exiles never got home.

No, he could expect no aid from anybody. He cradled his hurt arm with the other and turned to let the sun warm it, wondering desperately how to reach the station without some fatal breach of the Covenants. For a long time, sick with the ache of his arm and shivering even in the sun, he stood peering through the weeds, discarding hopeless schemes. His only real chance, he saw at last, was to try building a psionic transmitter.

Any large or spectacular application of civilized technology would certainly excite the wrath of the inspectors, but they themselves carried psionic equipment. A transmitter with the short range he needed would be a tiny thing, simple enough to conceal from people who knew nothing of psionics. One brief call would bring quick rescue.

To accumulate parts and materials for the instrument would take all his luck, however, and probably years of vital time. He would doubtless have to learn some native tongue, and try somehow to gain the respect or at least the sufferance of these savages. He was not at all a skilled psionic technician; although even the crudest kind of improvised device ought to reach the station on the satellite, he would have to allow for a good deal of experimental test and error. All those risks and difficulties promised to surround the undertaking with a desperate uncertainty, but he could think of nothing else that seemed to offer any hope at all.

The first step was to come to some sort of terms with the natives. Although some degree of hostility seemed certain, he couldn’t stay hidden forever. Even at the hazard of death or mistreatment, he must have food and shelter and whatever medical care they might give him.

Uneasily, careful to set his bruised bare feet where the ground looked smoothest, he climbed out of the gully. He hoped to reach the road beyond the pasture and wait there for another passing cart. Pretending to be the victim of some traffic accident, he could conceal his ignorance of any native dialect by appearing dazed or even unconscious. With any favorable turn of luck, he might obtain emergency care and knowledge enough of the tribal customs to help him plan another step.

Picking his tender-footed way across the unkind turf, he paused abruptly when the grazing cattle raised their heads to watch him. The fat beasts made no hostile movement, however, and he had started limping on again toward the narrow pavement when he saw the tower.

That sent him crouching back into the gully, careless of his naked feet. It stood implacably over a cluster of huts far in the distance, and the weeds around him had hidden it before—an armored turret on tall metal legs. A guard tower, precisely like those on his mother’s estates at home. Those huddled huts around it must be the barracks, and all this friendly-seeming plain an agricultural labor camp.

His first hopeful plan was shattered. In or near a prison camp, he would surely be taken for an escaping worker. His injuries would get him no consideration. The overseers would doubtless whip him to find out where he belonged, and kill him because he couldn’t speak their language.

Even if he managed to survive in the camp, he couldn’t hope to find materials or time for any sort of psionic experiment. Cowering down among the weeds, away from the watchers and the weapons in that frowning tower, he considered how to gain his liberty.

His first impulse was simply to follow down the gully, keeping out of sight. That might lead him to water that he could drink—thirst burned in his throat again, when he thought of water. And the gully should bring him, sooner or later, to the fence around the camp.

Yet that scheme was impossible, he saw at once. Hurt and half naked, he couldn’t travel far. Although he might tear up his pajamas to make some sort of wrapping for his feet, his dangling arm would hamper every movement. Cold and thirst and hunger would pursue him, relentless as the guards. His total ignorance of the camp’s geography would surely trap him in the end.

No, that wouldn’t do. Dependence on such devices as the belt had left him too little faith in his own limbs and senses, and his tutors had not trained him for any such slinking, animal effort. He knew how to fight, but only in the open, by the rules of honor. He had to play some bolder, more human game.

Searching for some sane first move, he dropped lower among the weeds and turned uneasily from that ominous tower to study the nearest little group of trees and huts, just across the pasture. The neat white buildings, too small to be barracks, had no stockade around them. The place was a dwelling, he decided; probably the home of some minor camp official.

If that were true, the inhabitants must own weapons that allowed them to move about unquestioned. Certainly there was food and water about the huts, and he could see a motorcart beside them. There, no doubt, was everything he needed to survive and escape.

Awkward with his arm, he clambered back to the muddy bottom of the gully and waded cautiously along it toward the little villa. When the gully turned, he climbed clumsily back to the rim, to look for some other cover. There was none.

The huts were still several hundred yards ahead, across the open pasture. An unpaved path came down to a rude wooden bridge near him. The tower commanded the path, but the bridge seemed to offer shelter of a sort, and he limped on to it, hoping that the traffic over it would bring him some kind of opportunity.

In preparation, he tried to arm himself. He looked for a stone, and found only crumbling clay. He found another driftwood slab beneath the bridge, but it was far too heavy for a club. He tugged at a smaller stick lodged beneath it, but the rotten wood snapped and let him stumble backward. His hurt arm struck the bank.

Pain blinded him. Sweat chilled him, and he sank down on the useless timber. For a moment he could only huddle there, crushed beneath all his handicaps, but then a dogged pride came back to stiffen him. He was still a prince of his mother’s house, and he had learned long ago to withstand equably bitter frustration when his sisters used to mock him for being only a boy.

When he could move again, he ripped both sleeves from his pajamas. One, he split to make a clumsy sling for his arm. The other, tied at the end, he packed with all the wet clay he could readily swing. So meagerly equipped, he climbed back to his post at the end of the bridge.

As he settled himself in the screening weeds, a man came out of the dwelling. A vigorous-looking, dark-haired savage, outlandishly clad in jacket and trousers. That womanish garb was a badge, no doubt, of some superior position, for he got into the cart alone. It began to roll at once.

The prince crouched lower, breathlessly testing the weight of his weapon. There came all he needed to make his forlorn bid for freedom—the queer clothing, the wheeled machine, the superior weapon of an officer. But how take them?

Crippled as he was, he could hardly jump into the moving cart. He had to make it stop. Desperately, he dropped back into the gully and seized that decaying timber. It was too heavy for him to lift one-handed, and the effort hurt his arm and his damaged ribs. Yet he managed to drag it up the sloping bank and roll it out across the path.

Gasping and trembling, he snatched his heavy little bag of clay and turned to look for the cart. It had turned the other way, toward the road beyond the huts. Sick with disappointment, he watched it creep out of sight toward that staring tower.

Dully, then, still panting from his struggle with the driftwood beam, he groped for another plan. If he could slip into the huts unchallenged while the owner was away, he might at least find food and water—

He dropped flat when another native left the dwelling and came walking toward the bridge—a slighter savage than the first, in more masculine clothing. A guard, perhaps, left to watch the premises while the officer was away. He carried a heavy-seeming, black-cased device that must be a weapon.

The prince wrapped the top of the weighted bag around his quivering hand, and crouched down to wait among the weeds. He would let the man walk on by, and then rise up to strike from behind. Here, fighting these simple human beasts, he wouldn’t have to utter any challenge or warning—or would he?

A sudden cold uncertainty crumpled his first eager resolution. He knew that any honorable challenge would be fatal to him, but the code he had learned wasn’t easy to ignore. Though the ruling sex could take everything else, the old count used to tell him, men could always keep their honor.

Desperately, he tried to sweep his compunctions aside. He was fighting for his life and a throne, against wild men who had probably never heard of honor. Why worry about the rules? Anyhow, he didn’t mean to kill the fellow, but only to disable him long enough to claim his clothing and that odd weapon.

Panic swept away his indecision when the guard stopped halfway to him, and lifted that device. He thought he had been detected. The watchers in that tower must have seen him when he started across the pasture. They must have alerted the villa. The official had fled in the cart, and left this guard to dispose of him.

His bag of clay was suddenly absurd, and his whole scheme hopeless. He wanted to scramble back into the gully, to hide or run away, but things had gone too far for that. He could only flatten himself in the shallow ditch beside the road, waiting helplessly.

Nettles stung him, and pollen from a stinking little yellow bloom tickled his nostrils alarmingly. He jammed his finger against his upper lip to keep from sneezing, and watched the savage bending with an implacable deliberation to adjust the weapon.

That black device puzzled him. It looked too short to be any kind of accurate gun. Distance hid all its details, until sunlight flashed on a lens. He dropped his head among the nettles at that, and tried to shield it with his arm, waiting for the blaze of some primitive lethal ray.

Nothing happened. Nothing that he could detect. He felt no heat, heard no blast, saw no blue glow of ions. He lay flat as long as he could endure the nettles and the strain of waiting and the pressure on his damaged arm. When he looked again, he had to blink with astonishment.

The savage had turned away to point the weapon at the cattle. He looked fearfully to see its effect, but the beasts grazed on unharmed. To his growing perplexity, the man calmly replaced the ineffectual device in its case and came strolling on toward the bridge with no appearance of alertness or caution. Perhaps the gadget was no weapon, after all. Perhaps he had not yet been seen. Perhaps, if he lay very still—

A shock of terror shattered his returning hope. For the savage had come near enough for him to see the delicate fair face and the shocking shape beneath the deceptively masculine dress.

A woman!

A girl, really, soft-haired and graceful, tall with the pride of her sex. He froze, afraid even to breathe, trying to hope she might walk on by. He was baffled by her presence, as well as terrified. Even though these tribes might be barbarous enough, for all he knew, to imprison or enslave woman, she was obviously no forced worker. Yet she could hardly be a guard; certainly no woman he had ever known would have lowered herself to such man’s work. He tried for a moment to doubt that this was a prison farm at all, but the shadow of that brooding tower was still too ominous to be forgotten.

Afraid to look at her, but more afraid to turn his head, he lay watching her go by. Whatever her business here, her sex was a fortress around her. The men of the matriarchy were expected to shed one another’s blood as freely as they could, so long as honor was observed, and he thought the customs here must be more or less the same. But women were taboo.

He couldn’t touch her. Even if the mysterious device in that black case had been another life belt, he couldn’t have swung his useless bag of clay to take it. That inhibition was his mother’s stern voice speaking in him, imperative and final.

The girl passed him, not three steps away. He thought for a moment that she would surely see him, but she held her head as high as any matriarch’s, her dark hair brushed with red by the sunlight, her lean face scrubbed pinkly clean. Her clear brown eyes looked over him to the red fingers of erosion reaching out from the gully, and her face turned sadly wistful.

“Wasted land,” she breathed softly to herself. “Lost like my own country and my people. Perhaps freedom also . . . what is the English word? Erodes, I think. For want of care, like the soil. Of course the doctor’s trying now to save this old farm. Perhaps that’s the difference. The land can be reclaimed.”

He strained to hear, but the murmured words meant nothing to him. The psionic translator in his belt would have brought him the sense of every syllable, and enabled even these psionic illiterates to understand him, but that device was just another atom now somew^here out in the interstellar drift.

Relaxing a little, as she went on by, he let his eyes follow. She looked surprisingly healthy and clean for a savage, and the sadness he sensed about her almost made him forget his own danger. Something made him feel that she was another troubled exile, as far from home as he was. Another outsider, perhaps, here on an undercover mission from the station?

Unhappily, he put out that brief spark of hope. He couldn’t hope to meet a civilized agent by accident. Certainly she wore no translator, or her words would have reached his mind in his own language. She was a native, a woman, and armed; three times an enemy.

She went on out of view, but he could follow the tap of her feet on the bridge, going on beyond him. He was breathing again, when her footfalls paused. He tried not to move, but he couldn’t keep his fearful eyes from her. He saw that she had stopped halfway across. She leaned over the wooden rail to study the footprints he had left in the gully, and turned back to look at the timber he had dragged into the path. Her frowning eyes lifted. She saw him.

He lay petrified, so still that he heard the startled intake of her breath. Whether she called the men from the tower, or decided to dispatch him now for her own amusement, there was nothing he could do. She was a woman, and he had no right or strength against her.

“How did you get here?” she gasped.

Though the words meant nothing, he heard the breathless shock in her voice. She stepped instantly backward, lifting that black-cased device defensively. He shrank from the bright threat of its lens, but nothing happened to him. She let it fall when she saw his blood-caked face and the sling around his arm, and called anxiously:

“Are you badly hurt?”

Her sympathetic tone astonished him, for the women he knew were usually amused by the duels and the wounds of men. He hoped for a moment that she might get help for him, but then he thought of the futile threat of his own clumsy weapon. He dropped the weighted sleeve and sat up hastily to hide it with his body.

“Who are you?” She bent over him. “Can’t you speak?”

He caught her interrogative inflections and saw her waiting anxiously for some reply, but he kept his mouth shut. Evidently she had taken him to be one of her own tribesmen in trouble, but any word he uttered might give his life away. He sat watching her apprehensively.

“You’re afraid,” she whispered suddenly. “I see you are. Because you don’t belong here—or why look at me that way? Are you another refugee? Did you parachute, perhaps? Great Plains County is a long way from the Iron Curtain, but not too far I think for bombers.”

She paused to peer at him, nodding slowly.

“If that’s the way you got here, I know how things must be with you— though I came out on foot, hiding in the woods and gnawing frozen turnips, until people who remembered freedom helped me cross the border. And I want to help you—if you really are a friend of freedom. Don’t you trust me? Or is it just that you don’t understand English?”

He made no effort to answer, and soon she spoke again in a tone of troubled urgency. From the sudden changes in the accent and rhythm of her words, he guessed that she must be trying different local dialects, all equally unknown to him, but he sat blinking at her blankly, not even shaking his head. Later, of course, if he contrived to keep alive, he would have to learn some native tongue, but now he was afraid to let her know he didn’t belong here.

“Can’t you walk?” She beckoned abruptly for him to stand up. “Come with me, if you can. You must be cold and hungry, even if you aren’t too badly hurt. I can find food for you, and call Dr. Stuben to do what he can. There were strangers beyond the frontier who did as much for me.”

She held out her hands to him— clean as his mother’s, though the nails were cut short as a man’s, not grown into twisted ornamental claws. Protestingly, he showed her the mud on his good hand. With a quick little shrug, and a smile that said the grime didn’t matter, she caught his hand and tugged him to his feet.

That uncovered his bag of clay. He tried to kick it back into the weeds, but in spite of him she saw it. And she must have understood the purpose of it, from the shaken way in which she dropped his hand and stepped back to study him.

“So you were that desperate?” She shook her head, her lean face darkly troubled. “Perhaps I understand. All one night I lay hiding from the frontier patrols, with a dagger made from an old file hidden in my clothing. I meant to kill the man who found me. But don’t you know this is America?”

He shifted his weight uncomfortably on his sore feet, listening mutely. He was not convinced, from her quiet self-assurance in the shadow of that grim tower and from the curious little side arm she carried so carelessly, that she herself must be an official of the camp. He had expected her to kill him, when his own worthless weapon betrayed his abject desperation, and now he couldn’t understand why she didn’t. Adjusting his arm in the sling, he set his face to hide the pain, waiting blankly.

“You’ve no cause for such alarm,” she said softly. “You can’t be in that much danger. Are the police after you? I don’t think so. You don’t look criminal. Anyhow, I won’t hurt you. I’ve seen too many informers, and I know what freedom is worth.”

Confused by the senseless words and her inexplicable behavior, he stood wishing hopelessly that the count had got here with him. He had come to depend on the count, who killed his men at home and won his women, too— the matriarch herself had sniffled when they left her to board the Royal Mother. The count would have known what to do with this enigmatic savage.

“Can’t you understand at all?” Her urgent voice was now clear and slow, as if she spoke to a troubled child. “I want you to come with me—and try not to be afraid. Even if your head is injured . . . I’m afraid it is . . . so that you can’t talk or can’t remember, my sister’s husband can surely help you. A kind man and a clever young doctor. Whatever’s wrong, I think he’ll understand. Won’t you come?”

The count would have known how to deal with this dangerous girl, but the prince felt helpless. He knew no world except the matriarchy, and far too little of that. Ever? on the interstellar cruise, he had never been able to escape the dull round of formal state affairs arranged for him on every planet or call, for all his envy of the way the count always contrived to disappear long enough to extend his own informal observations of the local rules of love and honor.

“Won’t you come?” the girl repeated anxiously. “Or can’t you walk?”

The old nobleman might have guessed what she wanted, but the prince could only stare and shake his head. Facing her and all her unknown tribe, he had no guide except his own confined experience. Whatever the ways of her world, he had been conditioned by his own.

He saw his peril clearly, but he could not escape it. He knew her people must live by other laws and customs: no woman at home would ever debase herself by touching or even speaking to an unarmed and classless man. The count might have guided him around the deadly traps that must lie hidden in that cultural difference, but now he could only blunder on alone.

“If you simply won’t understand, I’m going to call the doctor.” She turned from him slowly. “He ought to know what to do.”

She started away from him, and swung abruptly back. He wondered with a stab of apprehension if she had decided to try that odd side arm again, but then he saw that she was only beckoning for him to follow. Although he still couldn’t guess what she wanted, he dared not disobey a woman. He limped hastily after her, toward the huts.

She adjusted her pace to fit his careful steps, with a confusingly masculine consideration. And when he blundered into a patch of sandburs and hopped painfully from one bare foot to the other, she didn’t laugh at him as a normal woman should, but bent instead to help him remove the thorned seeds with a quick solicitude that seemed almost indecent. He didn’t understand her, and he felt somewhat relieved when another native emerged from the larger hut ahead.

“Well, Eliska?”

An older woman, the other came out across the neat patch of clipped grass in front of the white-painted hut, and halted when she saw him. Her shocked eyes swept him, and he studied her hopefully. She looked akin to the girl, with the same wide forehead and wavy dark hair, though her chin and nose were bolder. A pale scar-line zigzagged down one thin cheek. The harsh lines around her mouth showed a really feminine severity, when she swung to rap at the girl:

“Where did you find that tramp?”

Even though he didn’t understand the words, her decisive air and her strident voice reassured him. He sensed something of his mother in her, and more of the matriarch. The girl’s masculine softness had baffled him, but this was the sort of woman he knew.

“I walked down to that old wooden bridge with my camera,” the girl was answering. “I found him lying in the ditch by the road. But I don’t think he’s what you call a tramp.”

“Then what’s wrong with him?”

“He seems hurt. But I don’t really know, because he doesn’t speak.”

“Deaf, maybe?”

“I think he hears. Perhaps he’ll be able to talk, when he recovers a little. I want to bring him in and call Carl for him.”

“You want to bring that into my clean house?”

The girl flushed and bit her lip, as if choking back some angry outburst. The older woman stood planted with stringy hands on lean flanks, frowning at her sternly. The prince felt the clash between them, and saw that the older was the one in authority.

“If you don’t want him in the house,” the girl said at last, “I’ll put him out in the little room where the hired man used to stay. Do you object to that?”

“I didn’t mean to seem hard,” the woman answered more quietly. “Feed him in the kitchen, if you like. And find clothes for him—there’s an old suit of Carl’s, and a pair of shoes the hired man left under the cot, if he can wear them. But why keep him on the place?”

“He’s in trouble. Afraid, as well as hurt. He needs more than food and shoes. Maybe Carl can find out what’s wrong.”

“Why not just send him on to the hospital in Great Plains?”

“He can’t have money for the bill— not with him, anyhow. Besides, I don’t think he’d want to go. From the way he was hiding in the weeds, I think he must be some kind of refugee—”

“From jail!” the woman broke in harshly. “He looks like the sort to brain us all in our sleep, so that he can loot the house.”

“If he’s dangerous, Carl should know,” the girl said. “But I don’t think he is—except perhaps to those hunting him. He does seem desperate—but then I was desperate once, before people I had never seen took me in and risked their lives to help me cross the border.”

“He doesn’t look harmless to me.” The woman swung to study his slung arm and lacerated face with a visible suspicion. “And what could make him so desperate, if he wasn’t hurt holding up somebody or breaking out of prison?”

“I think he parachuted out of a plane,” the girl said. “He doesn’t seem to speak English, or any other language I tried, but perhaps he’s just too dazed to talk. I think he is a Soviet flier, who didn’t want to bomb the free world.”

“A likely notion!” the woman muttered scornfully. “The trouble with you, Eliska, is that you’re trying to look at this homicidal maniac—a fool could see that’s what he is—in the light of your own unfortunate experience.”

“I have no other light.”

“The horde of crooks and bums and convicts that come hitchhiking along the highway yonder have given me another kind of experience,” the woman said. “Though I admit I never saw quite the like of him. He does look foreign, with that queer haircut and those odd pajamas. Won’t he talk at all?”

She stalked to the prince and prodded his chest where the ribs were cracked so hard that he almost flinched. His breath sobbed out, and he had to blink.

“You?” Her harsh voice lifted. “What’s your name?”

Yes, she was clearly the one in command. Her loud assertiveness had already convinced him that she was some high official of the camp, and now her grimly imperative air made him fairly sure that she was demanding his class weapon, though she must see that he was unarmed. He tried not to think what might come next, but he had seen classless men whipped to death for little more reason than the matriarch’s amusement. Even though she was comprehensible, he began to prefer the enigma of the girl.

“Well?” She jabbed at his ribs again, so vigorously that he gasped and swayed backward in spite of himself. “Can’t you speak?”

Holding a manful silence, he looked at the girl.

“Please, Greta!” She spoke quickly, as if in answer to his mute appeal. “You hurt him—don’t you see how white he went?”

“I don’t intend to be cruel,” the woman muttered grudgingly. “You may go ahead and put him in the garage room if you like—but just for now. Let him wash up if he’s able, and take him something to eat. I’ll call Carl.”

“Thank you, Greta,” the girl whispered. “He needs our help. You can see how desperate he is.”

“Too desperate to stay here,” the woman said. “Carl will tell you that.”

She stalked back toward the dwelling hut, with the air of an affronted matriarch. The girl beckoned again, and the prince followed her across the grass to another tiny building. He could see, from the concrete ramp and the wide doorway facing the road, that it must house the motorcart, but the girl took him to a little door at the side and motioned for him to enter.

Beyond the door, he saw a narrow little cell, that looked and smelled surprisingly clean. Furnished only with two wooden chairs and a metal bed covered with a faded but spotless blanket, it still looked inviting to him. The girl stood nodding for him to go inside, but he stopped to examine the lock, wondering if she meant to shut him up.

“You needn’t be afraid of me.” She smiled, and her quiet tone seemed disarming. “I’m sorry my sister’s so ungracious, but she takes America for granted. Anyhow, you’ll get all the help you deserve—though I’d still like to know what you’re running away from.”

She entered ahead of him, as if to show that she meant him no harm, and he followed her doubtfully. While he stood waiting uneasily, she stepped inside a closet almost as wide as the room. Beyond her, he saw shelves cluttered with dusty oddments: the puzzling, clumsy paraphernalia of people without psionics or neutrionics; quaint artifacts that were probably worn out or broken and discarded now. Most of them he couldn’t identify, but leaning in one comer was a rusty iron tube—

He looked away from it with an apprehensive start, as the girl came out. Holding a towel and a frayed white garment, she nodded for him to follow into another room—a tiny bath, primitive but clean. She turned a valve to let water run, and he bent thirstily to drink.

“Wait.” She gave him water in a glass. After he had rinsed his mouth and drunk, she helped him wash himself and put on the clean bathrobe and a pair of woven slippers. When that was done, she opened the bed for him, but he still felt too apprehensive to lie down. He sat uncomfortably in a chair. She saw him flinch from an unexpected twinge of his arm and came quickly to help him move it in the sling. Her unwomanly tenderness embarrassed him, yet he couldn’t help feeling a baffled gratitude.

“Now,” she said, “aren’t you hungry?”

He started to follow again when he saw that she was leaving, but she shook her head and beckoned him back and showed him that she would leave the door ajar. When she was out of sight, he limped hastily into the closet to look at that iron tube.

Yes, it was obviously a discarded dueling piece. One made for long-range use. The tube was rifled, and mounted on a thick wooden stock. He bent anxiously beside it, to test the crude breech mechanism. The massive parts had been shaped with a surprising precision. Rusty and in need of oil, they still worked. He scrabbled hopefully among the stranger debris on the shelves above, and found a carton almost full of heavy little projectiles, sized to fit the chamber.

He was armed!

The mere possession of such a formidable piece might entitle him to leave the camp unquestioned, if a man’s weapon was the mark of his position here as at home. Even if he were challenged, a victory would give him the rights and weapons of the challenger—assuming that the customs of combat here were more or less like those he knew.

But were they? No man at home would leave such a deadly piece to rust in an unlocked closet. Did that mean different rules of honor here? He rummaged hastily through the shelves in search of clues, and found rough clothing, a simple battery lantern, a pair of primitive binoculars, a long iron knife in a sheath.

Equipment for a private killer, clearly; but the nature of it suggested that the killing was done in the open, possibly in some wilderness district set aside for combat, and its apparent lack of any recent use seemed to hint that affairs of honor might be restricted to some special season.

He couldn’t guess the rules, however. His momentary elation flickered out, when he saw that the weapon, powerful as it looked, had only sharpened the horns of his dilemma. Every possible course of action required assumptions about the way these people would react, but all he knew was that he didn’t know. Inexperience paralyzed him.

He had loaded and cocked the rifle, in the brief triumph of its discovery, but now he set it reluctantly back in the comer of the closet and limped unhappily back to his chair to wait for the girl. Her warm kindness seemed so unwomanly and even unnatural that he couldn’t quite believe it, or help expecting some cruel betrayal. Yet he felt too tired now, too dull-witted with his pain and too deeply confused by all the contradictory clues around him, to do anything except submit to her perplexing care. The rifle was too heavy, anyhow, for quick or accurate use, one-handed.

She came back at last, with dishes on a tray. A fragrant hot drink, toasted pieces of some thick native loaf, steaming soup. The odors made him suddenly famished, and he began eating with an uncourtly haste when she set the tray on the arm of his chair. The food was surprisingly good, but his appetite left him when he heard the throb of an engine and saw a motorcart rolling to a stop outside the windows.

He rose apprehensively, as a tall savage rapped and entered. By his own code, a man caught with no weapon at hand to show his place was fair game for any stranger, but all he could do was to straighten and compose his face, ready to die decently.

The native made no sign, however, that looked like a challenge. Surprisingly, in fact, the man carried no obvious weapon, certainly nothing like the dueling piece in the closet, but only a small leather bag. Only casually alert, he didn’t seem prepared to fight. The prince looked at him and sat down again, suddenly weak in the knees.

“Eliska,” he said, “so this is your mysterious airman?”

The girl hurried to him, speaking with a low-voiced urgency. She was begging a favor, obviously, which he appeared indisposed to grant. He shrugged and shook his head, with an air of firm decision that seemed almost feminine.

“No,” he said, “I’ll have to make a report. Really, Eliska, I can’t say I think much of your refugee theory. I’d say he was more likely hurl in a traffic accident. If so, he’ll probably have people looking for him. In any case, I can’t be responsible for hiding him.”

“But he seems so desperately afraid.”

“For some good reason, Greta’s sure. Don’t be a fool, Eliska. If he’s really wanted, you’d soon have us all in trouble.”

“Is it foolish to look for freedom, or to help men find it?”

“I’m afraid your own adventures have left you a little melodramatic, Eliska.” The tall man grinned. “Since you’re so set on it, I’ll give him first aid enough so he can stay here until I do report the case. A dressing on those lacerations, and a temporary splint on that fracture. But I imagine that either his relatives or the law will soon turn up to take him off your hands.”

“Carl, please give him a chance—”

“I’m due at the office now,” the man broke in firmly. “Let’s see your patient.”

She nodded silently and followed him across the little room, with a quiet resignation strange in a woman. The prince could see the dark anxiety brooding in her eyes, however, and the mute rebellion trembling on her compressed lips. He could guess that this curiously commanding man was somehow his enemy, and she his friend, defeated now in some obscure effort to defend him.

He felt bewildered and alarmed. His eyes fled to the window in an unconscious search for escape, and found that stilted turret again, looming cruelly above the huddled, distant barracks. Perhaps the girl had tried to save him from the slave pens there, possibly to be her own retainer, but whatever her effort she had been defeated.

“They tell me you aren’t talking.” He looked up silently when the savage spoke, and waited as stoically as he could when the man came striding toward him.

“No matter.” The native shrugged cheerfully. “Let’s have a look at that arm.”

When the doctor was done, the girl followed him out to the cart, her voice hushed and hurried with some troubled appeal. The prince sat waiting, his arm almost easy in the primitive splint, but the fire of the harsh antiseptic still burning the torn skin under the clumsy bandages on his face. He wondered dully what the girl wanted, and whether it had anything to do with him, but he felt too limp and weak to do anything about it.

She came back at last, with a thin grave look of half-beaten determination on her face. Silently, she set up a little folding table in front of his chair. She brought sheets of rough paper, and primitive marking-sticks, and a stack of huge, quaint native books.

“Now,” she begged him earnestly, “can’t you somehow tell me who you are? And what you’re hiding from? Carl’s going to report you, in spite of all I can say. I’m afraid that even here in America the police aren’t always very careful about the rights of moneyless strangers, and I want to help you if I can.”

He felt her worried urgency, and guessed that she wanted him to identify himself. Hopefully, he opened one of the queer, thick books. The lines of crowded symbols, in flat black pre-psionic printing, meant less to him than her speech. He found a few childish pictures, bare little outlines in dead ink, without depth or movement or psionic meaning. He closed the book and shook his head.

“Here’s a pencil,” she whispered anxiously. “Can’t you write?”

He dragged the marking-stick awkwardly across the paper, and bent to look at the track it left: a thick black smudge, which failed to reflect his striving mind with any image at all. He dropped the useless pre-psionic implement, hopelessly.

“Don’t get depressed,” she murmured quickly. “Let’s just try something else. Maybe you can show me on a map where you’re from.”

He leaned eagerly to study the patterns of color in the next book she opened for him. At first they looked almost like psionic films but they made no response to his mind. They were only irregular flat splotches, lifeless as the pictures. He gave the girl a puzzled frown.

“Don’t you even know where we are?” She made sweeping gestures at the room around and then land outside, and then bent to pencil a careful dot on a wide green splotch. “Great Plains County is right about here. Understand?”

He peered again at the spots and the grid of lines across them, and caught his breath when he recognized the continental outlines of Sol III, not as he had seen them in the psionic charts on the yacht, but distorted into some kind of childish flat projection. Evidently, then, the colored patches symbolized something about the land surface of the planet, probably tribal territories.

“Here’s Prague, in my own unfortunate country.” With a momentary sadness on her face, she touched another dot in a narrow red strip, pointed the stick at herself, drew a ragged line from red land to green as if to represent a journey. “Now can’t you show me where you are from?”

She gave him the marking-stick, but he shrugged and put it down.

“From Siberia?”

She touched him with the black point and put it to the page again on a vast yellow space, looking at him eagerly as if to see if he understood. He thought he did, yet he could only shake his head.

She meant to tell him, evidently, that she had come from the area shown in red, perhaps as a hostage or a prisoner of war. And she thought that he belonged to that third tribe, whose wider lands were in yellow—a people allied to her own, no doubt, and hostile to her savage captors here. That would account for her obviously inferior position now, and her apparent apprehension for him.

“Don’t you trust me?” she whispered quickly. “I can see on your face that you do understand.”

He didn’t try to answer. If he touched that yellow splotch, the act would doubtless brand him as an alien foe of her captors, with all rights forfeit. Impulsively, he started to set the point down, hit or miss, on some other color, but he checked himself instantly; with these tribal rivalries extending over all the planet, he could too easily claim some people she hated, and so lose even her uncertain friendship. Yet, if he let her suspect that he came from nowhere at all on the planet, that would be a dangerous violation of the Covenants.

“Try to answer,” she was begging. “I’m afraid you won’t have much time.”

Her air of heightened urgency forced his decision. He put the point down at random on the green and traced a wandering spiral toward the dot where they were, put down the stick to peer around him with shaded eyes like one lost, and then firmly closed the book to end that dangerous line of inquiry.

“I don’t quite get it.” She looked at him searchingly. “Can’t you speak? Or can’t you remember? Or are you just afraid?”

“‘Fraid?”

He imitated the meaningless syllable, and gave her the stick. At first she merely stared, but then with a nod of comprehension she uttered the word again and carefully formed a symbol for it. The mark she made was senseless to him as the sound, but he kept on trying. He pointed at her, and made the movement of marking, and cupped a hand at his ear.

“My name?” she said. “Eliska. Eliska Machar.” She drew it on the paper and repeated the sound and corrected him when he mouthed it after her. “Now who are you?”

He knew what she meant when she pointed at him, but he touched his bandaged head and shrugged again. Any sound he uttered, except his imitations of her speech, would let her know that he hadn’t come from any friendly land. Hastily, he began indicating objects around the room, and trying to learn the names she gave them. At first she seemed reluctant.

“English is hard for a Russian,” she murmured uneasily. “And I’m afraid we won’t have time for many language lessons, before Carl sends out the police.”

He firmly ignored the protest he sensed in her voice. Anything he tried to tell her, true or false, might destroy him, but he had to learn all he could from her. A few dozen words, really understood, could save him from some deadly blunder. The merest smattering of her tongue ought to be enough, if he were lucky, to help him find materials for a psionic transmitter good enough to reach the station on the Moon. He began thumbing eagerly through the books, pausing to make her name those few of the dead, dimensionless pictures that meant anything at all.

He thought she seemed pleased with him, as they went on. She smiled a little once as if in amusement at some blunder of his tongue, and again with a quick approval when she found that he was really learning words. Table, pencil, chair. Map, picture, book. Arm and bandage. Eliska Machar.

As he spoke her name again, more easily now, and watched her frowning over ways to teach him verbs a little less simple than walk and strike and fall, he found a moment to hope that the matriarch’s screeching infant had grown up to be as charming as this simple savage girl. But that was unlikely, he knew; his future consort, if he really got back for the coronation, would be louder and bolder and altogether more womanly, entertained instead of hurt if he happened to break his head again.

“I’m afraid that’s all,” she whispered suddenly. “Here they come.”

He tried to shape the sounds, before he saw her alarm. She turned to the window, her face drawn grave. Beyond her, he saw three motorcarts that came in an ominous procession down the pavement from that armored tower and turned off the highway toward the huts.

“Eliska?” He swayed out of the chair and shuffled quickly to her side. “Eliska—”

He wanted to ask her why the carts had come, and what he could do to meet the danger reflected on her face, but those primitive vehicles were not tables, nor the stilted fortress beyond them a chair. All he could say was her name.

The carts stopped. Four men left them. He recognized the tall native doctor. The lean savage striding from the second cart also looked somehow familiar, but the others were strangers, and they terrified him with the bright badges on their blue jackets and the short guns belted to their bodies. Obviously, they were guards from the tower.

The scarred, older woman ran out of the dwelling to meet the four. The doctor called something, and she pointed, and they all came toward the little hut where he waited with the silent girl. Quivering at the brink of panic, he caught her arm.

“Eliska!”

He wanted her to tell him what to do, the way his mother had always done, the way the new matriarch would do—if he ever got back to become prince consort. But the girl shrugged confusedly, as if torn by an unwomanly uncertainty and concern. She was only another placeless alien here, far from her tribe, friendless and defenseless as he was.

“I can’t imagine why you’re so afraid.” Her voice was hushed and troubled. “I can’t believe you’re wanted for anything that serious. But I don’t know who you are, and there’s nothing else I can do.”

She gave him a long, searching glance, that let him see the uneasy wonder and the baffled resignation dark in her eyes, and turned quietly to wait for the oncoming savages. Clearly she could do no more to help him. Suddenly alone beside her, waiting helplessly for life or death, he tried to find a manly calm.

He even tried to hope these men hadn’t come to do him harm. After all, he tried to cheer himself, the native doctor had seemed surprisingly skillful and kind. But he couldn’t keep from feeling the girl’s disturbed expectancy, or seeing that bleak steel tower behind the stalking guards, or hearing the screams of placeless men who had failed to win the mercy of the matriarch.

These people were different, he told himself hopefully, so different that their culture had to be protected. Certainly this humble, generous, troubled girl would find no womanly delight in baiting and humiliating men. But then she came from another tribe. That loud, scarred female with the men outside was more like his. mother.

He knew she had been displeased with him, and he thought she must have called these guards to take him. Though they might be willing to grant him some sort of honorable truce, honor was not a table, nor peace a chair. Time wouldn’t wait for him to learn a language.

He was beaten. His notion of improvising means to reach the Moon was nonsense. This world was too different for him to cope with. These incomprehensible savages would kill him, now or later, because of some local law or custom he had never guessed, and that would be the end.

He caught his breath and bit his lip and tried to wait in a manly way. Without the words, he couldn’t talk. He couldn’t hide, in this bare room. He couldn’t even try to run; men of honor didn’t run. He couldn’t fight, with his right arm. Useless. Or could he?

A hot bright joy burst through his blank despair, when he thought of that rusty rifle leaning in the closet. His trembling stopped. His breath came back. His slung arm stopped throbbing. He was suddenly strong enough.

He ran from the window to the closet and came back with the rifle. It was too heavy for him to raise with one hand, but he thrust it across the back of the chair and dropped to his knees behind it. He found the trigger, as the guards came to the open door, and settled the stock against his shoulder. Defenseless as he was against this alien culture, he still knew how to kill and how to die.

“Stop it!” the girl screamed. “They don’t intend to shoot. What sort of savage are you?”

He caught the unbelieving shock in her voice. He knew he had shattered her inexplicable sympathy, yet he shut his ears to her hurt outcry. For she was just another stranger, seemingly, trapped here as hopelessly as he was. She couldn’t help him now.

Her frightened voice had checked the guards at the doorway. They crouched. Their brown faces sobered instantly with the frowning effort of all men at the old game of death. Their lean hands snatched for their own short guns, and they ran diagonally into the room, separating warily.

The quick and silent competence of their advance gave him a keen satisfaction in them, as well-trained antagonists. Their deadly readiness even restored his desperate hope that they might be civilized enough to know and keep his own high code of honor, which granted the winner the loser’s rights and rank and weapons.

He hugged the rifle, swung the muzzle toward the empty doorway, squeezed the clumsy trigger. It came back stubbornly, but the report was a devastating blast. The recoil jarred him painfully, but the savages cringed back with a pleasing respect for the weapon. That warning shot was his challenge; adequate, surely, by any code of honor.

He bent behind the chair to reload. The neglected mechanism was hard to work, one-handed, but a fierce elation gave him strength enough. This was what he understood. This hot haste, this cold test of hand and eye, this healing release of all the bottled violence accumulated in him from his own frustrations and the crippling tyrannies of woman.

His next shot would be to kill. That was all that mattered now, for he knew at last that he would never reach the Moon or see his home again or kneel at the throne of the new matriarch. If one of these fighting men didn’t get him now, some other savage would. But let it come. Even though all his civilized education hadn’t taught him how to survive in this barbarous culture, at least he knew the decent way for a man to die.

“Drop your gun, brother,” the nearer savage called. “We don’t want to shoot.” The quiet words sounded to him like a formal counterchallenge. He drove the stiff bolt home, and leveled the rifle over the chair again, and rose on his knees to kill the challenger. There was time enough, for the savage hadn’t fully drawn. He drew the heavy gun against him, in a last grateful embrace, and found the trigger.

“Your highness—please!”

The words paralyzed him. Because he understood them. Because he almost recognized the breathless voice that shouted them. His finger slackened on the trigger. He let the rifle drop across the chair and stumbled to his feet, staring at the door.

“All right, brother,” rasped the nearer savage. “Just stay where you are.”

The sound of that was a senseless echo. He had forgotten the two crouching guards and their guns. He scarcely saw the pale girl shrunk back against the wall, her face lax with shock. He stood dazedly watching the door, and the three others entering: The bewildered native doctor. The scarred woman, twisting nervously at a lock of her hair, her manner of womanly dominion shattered by the shot. The fourth man, who had looked unaccountably familiar, walking from the carts. A man he must have known—where?

The prince stared at him. A rough-hewn and weather-beaten savage, taller than the lean doctor even in spite of the forward stoop of readiness that marked him for a man of honor. He was unarmed now, however, though he carried a flat brown leather case; and he looked somehow uncomfortable, as if the thick fabric of his clumsy native coat and trousers got in his way. He paused in the doorway to listen for an instant with one hand cupped to his ear, glanced down to adjust his hearing aid, and then drawled softly:

“Don’t you know me?”

The deep hearty voice and the hard-bitten grin at last disclosed the man inside that fantastic native garb. The noble aide he had last seen staggering away to his stateroom on the Royal Mother, just before the collision.

“I . . . I didn’t. Not without that monstrous mustache.” The prince groped weakly with his good hand for the back of the chair. “I was blown out of the wreck before I could reach you. I didn’t expect to see you again. Not here, anyhow.”

“I missed it all.” The old count shrugged regretfully. “Perhaps I had taken a drop too much of your, good

whisky. The first I knew about the disaster was when I woke up in a strange bed at Sol Station. It seems my belt had brought me there, without much help from me.”

“The yacht?”

“She went on into the sun,” the tall outsider said. “The men at the station picked up our distress signals too late to salvage her.”

“The crew?”

“All safe.” Anxiety lined the count’s hollowed visage. “All except yourself, sir. You were reported lost.” He laughed nervously. “It looks as if that report was nearly true.”

“That your old deer rifle, Doc?” the nearer guard was rasping. “Won’t you pick it up, before we have an accident?”

“You got here at a good time.” Grinning wanly at the old nobleman, the prince paused to watch the native doctor uneasily recovering the dueling piece he had dropped. “This trial of honor—against these savages who probably never heard of honor—had begun to look like my last. How did you find me?”

“That’s better.” The guard relaxed a little, wiping at his forehead, turning to the count. “Think you can calm him down?”

“A moment, your highness.”

Once more the count stopped to set his hearing aid, frowning as if it didn’t work to suit him, and then he swung to face the watchful natives.

“He’s my man.” His bluff old voice thinned and lifted, in the way of deafness. “My missing client. I can see that he has been quite a problem for you, but I understand him. I’m sure he’ll be all right now, and I’ll gladly take him off your hands. All I need is a little time to talk to him alone.”

The doctor and the guards retreated toward the door, nodding in a relieved way as if they understood. But how? The prince caught his breath, and stared at that apparent hearing aid— of course it was a psionic translator, disguised to meet the Covenants.

“You really know this man?” His startled glance went to the girl, who stood peering oddly at the count. She spoke the language of the matriarchy—but that was impossible. In an instant he realized that the sense of her words had come to his mind through that tiny instrument, so clearly that his ears could scarcely hear the strangeness of the sounds even when he tried.

“If you do, won’t you tell me who he is?”

“Surely, Miss Machar.” The old duelist smiled at her appreciatively, and replied with the enviable ease he must have learned on worlds where women were not supreme. “Dr. Stuben was telling me about your kindness to my client, and I’m deeply grateful. He’s Mr. King. Mr. Jim King.” He gestured at the door. “Now, if you don’t mind giving us a few minuses alone—”

The other natives had gone, but the girl still hesitated, looking from the prince to the count again with an air of puzzled unease.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “But . . . if you don’t mind . . . who are you?”

“His attorney,” the count rumbled heartily. “And his friend. Here’s my card. John W. Pottle, of Pottle and Swickley.” He beamed ingratiatingly. “If you’re still concerned about Jim’s predicament, you needn’t be. He’s in good hands now.”

She shook her head slightly, as if unsure of that.

“He seemed so terribly afraid,” she said impulsively. “If you don’t mind —what is his predicament?”

“Nothing alarming.” The old man smiled at her anxiety. “He’s all right now.”

“Something dreadful must have happened to him.”

“A highway accident, apparently,” the count murmured easily. “But Dr. Stuben says he isn’t hurt too badly.”

“When was it?” She watched them both. “Where?”

“Sometime last night,” he said. “Somewhere near here. Jim and I were driving through on business, you see. The car went dead, at the bridge this way from town. It was already dark, and nobody would stop to help us. Jim finally started walking down the road, to find a phone and call a wrecker. He never came back. I’ve been looking for him ever since daylight, but I couldn’t find a trace any where until I called Dr. Stuben’s office, and he told me you had found him. He must have been struck by a hit-run driver.”

“If that was all, what made him so desperate?” Eliska Machar looked back at the prince, her eyes still dark with doubt. “Why was he hiding in that gully like some hunted animal?”

“Nothing strange about it.” The count’s rawboned features straightened soberly. “You see, Jim was a fighter pilot. In the last winter of the war, he had a pretty grim experience. His airplane was shot to pieces over Germany. Jim bailed out and got down alive with a splinter of flack in his leg. For three weeks of cruel winter weather, he lived in hiding among enemies whose language he didn’t understand. The wound got infected, and he was half out of his head when he got back across the American lines. A thing like that is hard to forget. Dr. Stuben agrees with me that his accident on the road last night must have brought it all back to him. He was hurt and hiding again. As you put it, like a hunted animal. And he thought he couldn’t speak the language.”

“I see.” Her dark eyes went back to the prince, concerned again. “Then his head injury is bad?”

“Only a slight concussion, Dr. Stuben says.” The old man smiled cheerfully. “You can see that he knows me, and I’m sure his speech difficulty will clear up as he recuperates. Mostly, I think he’s just shaken up and nervous.”

“Then I’ll go and let him rest.” She started toward the door, but turned abruptly back. “When you spoke to him and he answered—what language was that?”

“An Indian dialect,” the count said smoothly. “One we learned from the guides on our vacation trips, when he and my own son were boys together. Jim was calling for my son in that dialect, before he came back to himself in the army hospital. When I used it to speak to him just now, I was hoping that the link with his boyhood would help him.”

“I think it did.” The girl nodded gravely. “Please forgive the questions, but I had to be sure you really were his friend. I’ll go now.”

The old man let her out and closed the door.

“She had me going.” He grinned with relief. “But that ought to satisfy her, long enough at least to get us started home.”

“Everything seems so simple when you do it.” The prince smiled at him with a tired gratitude. “But I was done for. At first I had a crazy notion I could throw together some kind of psionic gadget that would reach the station, but this planet turned out to be too savage for me.”

“Never underrate the natives— that was the first lesson I learned in the service.” The count came briskly to inspect the bandages. “Looks like a competent emergency job.” He nodded approvingly. “Do you feel able to travel?”

The prince nodded eagerly, although his splinted arm was throbbing again from the heavy recoil of the rifle.

“Then we had better be on our way. There’s only one ship a year to this dismal little outpost, but luckily she’s here unloading now. If we get aboard, we ought to reach her next planet of call just in time to catch one of Her Majesty’s liners. I looked up the interstellar schedules before I left the station, and I believe we can still get back in time for your coronation.”

“Excellent.” The prince nodded brightly and settled back to ease his arm. Suddenly, he felt curiously reluctant to leave the hard comforts of the bare little hut. “I’m glad you got here,” he murmured. “But how did you ever find me?”

“The psionic detectors at the station traced the automatic signals from our belts,” the count said. “The rest of us were picked up quickly, but your belt was moving erratically and it stopped transmitting before the rescue craft could run it down. It seemed hardly possible that you had survived the collision, but when the commandant called off the search I got permission to make an undercover visit to this sector of Sol III—because your belt had been moving this way when the signal stopped.”

The prince looked up gratefully. The count’s weatherworn visage had blurred and suddenly he didn’t trust his voice, but he reached impulsively with his undamaged hand to squeeze the gnarled fingers of the loyal old veteran.

“So don’t you worry, sir,” the count rumbled softly. “We can work out everything. With good luck, perhaps we can keep Her Majesty from learning that we ever left the route she arranged for us. Even if she finds out the truth, we can probably keep her favor. Just so we’re back for the coronation.” The prince sat silent for a few moments, gazing absently at the little folding table where Eliska Machar had left her clumsy pre-psionic writing implements. He aroused himself, almost with a start.

“I’m fit to travel,” he said slowly. “And I suppose you are safe enough, as a service agent. But what I don’t understand is how we are going to explain my own sudden arrival and departure, without some violation of the Covenants.”

“That’s all arranged.” The count snapped open the brown brief case to dig out a bundle of quaint native documents. “Even though I hardly hoped to find you alive—nobody else expected me to find you at all—I brought papers from the undercover office to account for you properly as Mr. James A. King.”

“Did you bring me any side arms?” The prince leaned toward him eagerly. “Or any sort of passport?”

“We’ll have to do without arms.” Frowning, the count was thumbing through the coarse fiber sheets. “Here’s your birth certificate. Social security card. Army discharge. Bank book, with two thousand dollars on deposit. Four hundred in currency. But no passport.”

The prince sank uneasily back in his chair, but the gaunt old fighting man was grinning at him as if unaware of his disappointment.

“We just continue our business trip,” the count went on confidently. “My car is to be picked up late tonight, from a lonely side road three hundred miles west of here, by a patrol craft from the station. We ought to get there with just time enough to let the station surgeon attend to your injuries, before we have to go aboard the interstellar ship.”

The prince sat wondering how far they could go unarmed, trying to encourage himself with the old man’s brisk assurance.

“These papers won’t cause you any trouble.” The count swept them back into the brief case. “The currency is good. The bank deposit actually exists. The other documents were really issued at one time or another to agents using that name. The service understands such work.”

The prince nodded wearily, trying not to worry.

“I’ll take care of everything.” The count swung toward the door. “Now I’m going to call the natives back. I’ll do the talking—under the Covenants, you can’t recover too rapidly. I’ll pay the doctor and the girl for all they’ve done, and we’ll be getting on to meet the flier.”

The battered old duelist went to open the door, and the prince sat nursing his arm. He had nothing to worry about, because the count would take care of everything. Rescue him from these enigmatic savages, repair his arm and rush him home, appease the matriarch and see him through the coronation. After that, his new consort would do the talking.

He shrugged, and tried to be content. The count had warned him, he recalled, that freedom was a dangerous drink. But he had seized and sipped that moment of his own, and now he had been rescued from the natural consequences, almost intact. That ought to be enough for any man, he tried to tell himself, but still he wasn’t quite content.

He sat silent, while the count called the waiting natives back from the dwelling hut and drew the doctor aside. The guards and the woman stopped cautiously at the door, but Eliska Machar came to straighten the sling on his arm, where the rifle kick had twisted it.

“Only five dollars?” the count was saying. “Since you’ve been so kind, let’s call it ten.” He paid the doctor and came smiling to the girl, with an other ten in his fingers. “Miss Machar, you’ve been very good to Jim. As a little token of my own gratitude—”

“You don’t owe me anything.” She flushed and stiffened, as if offended. “I helped Mr. King because I thought he was a refugee, who had given up everything to strike out for freedom. I’m glad to know he’s not in danger, but I don’t want your money.” Something shone in her dark eyes. “Because I know the worth of freedom,” she added softly. “Since my free people have been captured and enslaved.”

The prince saw her sadness, and suddenly he wanted to help her out of her own captivity. If he and the count could smuggle her past that dark tower in the motorcart—but that was impossible. The Covenants prohibited such meddling with native affairs, and he knew the count would never allow it.

“Jim and I are both deeply grateful, anyhow, Miss Machar.” The count smiled and bowed. “Your generosity is a thing we won’t forget, but we’ve a long”

“Tonight?” Urgency hushed her voice again. “Don’t forget that Jim needs medical attention at once. Dr. Stuben says he ought to have X-rays taken right away, and I’m afraid his head injury may turn out to be worse than it looks.”

“I’ll attend to that,” the count assured her blandly. “I’ll take care of everything. Now, Jim, do you feel like walking to the car?”

The prince stood up uncertainly. The girl saw his momentary weakness and reached quickly to steady him, and he clung to her fingers for an instant, feeling sick and grim in spite of himself because he knew his future consort would never sink to any such show of unwomanly sympathy.

Suddenly, he wanted to say something to her, some little word of parting that she might recall when he was gone. He caught his breath, but before he could speak he saw the count’s stern frown, reminding him that his moment of freedom was spent. A dangerous habit, and difficult to break, but he checked that rash impulse obediently. He smiled at her wistfully and dropped her hand and turned to go.

“Wait.” She turned quickly to the count. “He needs clothing before he goes out, and we can find him something—”

“That’s all right,” the count broke in firmly. “Very kind of you, but I have his bag at the Great Plains hotel, and we’ll leave the robe and slippers there at the desk for you. I’ll take care of him.”

The prince was hesitating, still somehow reluctant to leave, but the count took his arm and led him firmly on ahead of the natives toward the waiting carts. He went silently, until he saw the long warning finger of the tower beyond.

“You’re certain?” he whispered suddenly. “Certain we can get out?”

“Why not?” The count snapped off the translator and dropped his voice. “What’s in the way?”

“For one thing, the watch tower yonder. How am I to pass the guards, without some weapon of position?”

“What guards?” The count stared at him, and then grinned faintly. “This isn’t our world, you remember. These savages haven’t yet invented any civilized social order—not in this tribe, anyhow. These simple children of nature are still free to go about pretty much as they please. We don’t need any arms of identification.”

“Huh?” The prince blinked again at that frowning tower. “Isn’t this a forced labor camp? Or some sort of prison?”

“So that tower worries you?” The count’s lean grin widened. “It does look amazingly like the guard turrets on Her Majesty’s farms. I admit that it rather upset me at first glance, before I knew what it was.”

“You mean it isn’t—”

“We’re in another culture, remember. Actually, in spite of its grim appearance, that turret wasn’t built to house spy screens or neutrionic guns. You’ll be relieved to know that it’s really only a harmless part of the Great Plains municipal water works.”

“But those fighting men I challenged?” The prince peered unbelievingly after the two armed natives departing in their own cart. “Aren’t they tower guards?”

“State cops,” the count said. “And I’m afraid they misunderstood your challenge. We aren’t at home, remember. There’s no code of honor here— not as we know honor. These timid folk have no heart for civilized combat, and no decent respect for good killers. Instead of fighting as men should, they bribe these cops to defend their rights and lives. And even the cops—if you can imagine such an outlandish culture—even the cops disapprove of killing.”

“You mean I wasn’t in danger?” The prince caught his breath. “Not until I challenged them?”

The count nodded. “Yet that one gesture of decency almost destroyed you. The cops have a revolting custom of blood-revenge, so I was warned at the station. If you had killed one of them, the service couldn’t have saved you. Let’s get off this barbarous planet while we can.”

The prince turned thoughtfully back to look at the three remaining natives, the doctor and his wife and Eliska Machar, who were walking slowly now from the dwelling hut toward the doctor’s cart. In spite of the man’s fantastic dress and the mannish skirts the women wore, they were suddenly human beings. He felt the count’s imperative fingers on his arm, and slowly shook his head.

“I’m not going,” he blurted abruptly. “I want to stay here.”

“Your highness!” The count was shocked. “You can’t.”

“I think I can.” The prince swung to face him, breathlessly grave. “You brought all those documents to prove that I’m a native named Jim King. Why can’t I stay Jim King?”

“You know the Covenants forbid migration.”

“But you can say you found me dead, just as the commandant expected,” the prince whispered quickly. “You can say you left the papers to explain the body. You’re an old hand in the service; you can arrange things so that I won’t be discovered.”

“Perhaps I could.” The old nobleman stood scowling at him reproachfully. “But just think of—everything! All the fine future your mother schemed and I fought to arrange for you. The crown princess. Your place at her knees. Would you turn your back on the throne—on our whole civilization—for nothing at all?”

“Not quite for nothing.” The prince looked away toward the gully in the bridge, where he had lain hidden in the weeds waiting for Eliska Machar. “How did she put it? I want to strike for freedom.” His voice sank huskily, as the three natives came nearer. “Tell them I’m staying.”

“Your highness—consider!” The count’s hard fingers dug painfully into his good arm. “If you stay here now, you’ll never have a chance to change your mind. I can’t come back, and you’ll have no way out. You’ll live

and die here like a savage.”

“But at least a free savage.”

“Even that wouldn’t be so easy,” the count whispered grimly. “You’d have to adjust yourself to these grotesque tribal customs. You’d have to learn to speak their uncouth dialects and train yourself to earn some kind of living—all without the use of any outside knowledge or devices that might betray you to the station. Is freedom worth all that cost and effort?”

He nodded.

“Your mother would never approve.” The old duelist squinted at him, shrugging sadly. “But your will is my honor. If you are certain you know what you are doing—”

“I know,” he said. “Tell them.”

“Your highness—”

The old man’s voice seemed to hang. He stood motionless for a moment and then sighed and straightened and strode firmly toward the three natives standing beside the other cart, fingering at his hearing aid.

“Dr. Stuben” —his bluff old voice seemed to falter for an instant, but then it went on clearly— “I’ve been trying to talk to Jim, and I’m afraid he’s worse off than I thought. He still can’t talk—not much even in that Indian tongue—but I believe he wants to stay here. I can’t stay with him, because I’ve a long trip to make. I’d like to leave him in your care.”

“Good.” The doctor nodded, smiling gravely. “He does need immediate attention. I doubt that he’s in shape to travel far, at least for several days.”

“I won’t be back soon.” The old man’s voice thinned and cracked. “In view of my own failing health, perhaps not at all. If I don’t get back, and if it does turn out that Jim has a long convalescence, I want to know he’s in good hands.”

“I’ll help him.” The girl spoke out impulsively. “Before you came, I had started working with him, and his speech was coming back.” She turned anxiously to the doctor. “Couldn’t we let him have the hired man’s job? I mean, if he’s going to be here long. The work needn’t be more than he feels like doing, and I think it would be good for him to be here while he’s getting over all that’s happened to him.”

“Servant to savages!” the count muttered faintly.

“Please—” the prince whispered, but the count ignored him.

“Jim has money,” the stern old man said stiffly. “Here with his papers in this brief case. Enough at least to pay for his care until he is able to look for some proper employment. He won’t have to take such menial work—”

The prince silenced him at last, with an imperative gesture. Bleak-featured with the effort to control his agitated emotions, the proud old fighting man glanced at his native watch and gripped the prince’s hand in the native way of parting and got hastily into his own cart. It lurched away at once in a reek of fumes from the primitive engine, driven rather blindly.

“Come along, Mr. King.” The doctor opened the door of the other cart. “We’ve some X-rays to make.”

The prince shrank back, crouching to shield his arm again.

“Don’t be afraid, Jim,” Eliska whispered quickly. “You’ll soon be all right again.”

He couldn’t help staring at her fearfully, for the untranslated words were strange again. He was cut off from all the world he knew, even from the enigmatic kindness he had found in her, forever marooned and alone. The finality of his isolation stunned him. His frightened glance fled after the departing outsider, and found that distant tower.

Not a guard turret, but only the village water tank. This simple world was not his own, but suddenly he felt at home. Even if he had to go unarmed as these childlike natives did, even if he had to work with his hands to live, he had found something greater than the throne of the matriarchy. He straightened to inhale the sweet air of Earth, and smiled at Eliska and the doctor, and stepped hopefully into the cart.