Breathing Space Only

Breathing Space Only Wynne Whiteford

This Ace Science Fiction Book contains the complete text of the original edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading, and was printed from new film. BREATHING SPACE ONLY An Ace Science Fiction Book/published by arrangement with the author PRINTING HISTORY Cory & Collins edition published 1980 Ace Science Fiction edition/January All rights reserved. Copyright © 1986 by Wynne Whiteford. Cover art by Don Dixon. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016. ISBN: 0-441-07288-7 Ace Science Fiction Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Laurel

ONE The sound of their engines carried from a long way off, because there was no wind today up here at the Gap, and nothing else to make any noise. Small, alcohol-burning engines, fighting their way up the long climb from the bend of the Murray. Roy checked his laser rifle, then switched on the TV camera hidden down near the bend in the road below, adjusting the image on the ten-centimetre monitor screen. Swallowing, his throat suddenly dry, he shifted his position so that he could watch both the screen and the road itself, keeping them almost in line with each other. Without taking his gaze from either, he reached for the phone. "Fourteen," came a voice. "Thredbo 2. Something coming up the road. Sounds like three bikes." "Right. Stevo's on his way down to relieve you. Be there in five minutes." "OK." The air was relatively clear up here at Dead Horse Gap, and clear all the way back along the Thredbo Valley. Down to the westward, though, the smog of the Outlands was a brown, misty sea that reached to the horizon. Roy glanced briefly through the open back door of the hut as the thin whine of an electric motor came to him. The small electric car was coming up the Valley road. Long ago, it had been a brightly coloured

airport runabout, but now it was painted a dull green to merge with its background. Quickly, he put his attention back on the bend in the road below, and the TV screen. It was dark in the hut, and the scene through the irregular observation slot seemed unnaturally sharp. From the road, no one would have given the hut a second glance. It looked like a dead tree fallen across an outcrop of granite, the whole almost hidden by a screen of stunted scrub. Part of it was granite, part reinforced concrete, but it appeared just one of a number of boulders clustered at the side of the Gap. Roy flicked the switch that turned on a yellow caution light down along the road behind him, warning Stevo to come up quietly, staying out of sight of the road that climbed from the Outlands. The sound of engines was coming closer, but they were still a long way off. Roy risked pulling the long lever that raised the "big ear"—a sensitive microphone with a large parabolic reflector—and listened to the amplified sound of the machines. He could hear them change gear as they negotiated a rough stretch of road or a bend. One—two—yes, three of them. No more. Satisfied, he lowered the telltale reflector out of sight. Tyres skidded on gravel as Stevo swung the electric car off the road into the trench behind the hut. Movements automatic through habit, he flicked open a panel and snapped on the red and black cables, while Roy reached over and switched on the battery charger without taking his eyes from the road. Stevo slid into the seat beside him, pulling a black beret over his blond hair so that it did not show through the observation slit. "How far?" he asked. "Few minutes, yet. Three of them, I think." Roy glanced at the younger man. His eyes looked bright and excited, and his face was streaked with dust and rivulets of sweat. "Anything new?" "Still under radio silence. Total." "Necessary?" "Dunno. I saw the satellite go over last night, just after sunset. Like a star gone adrift." "They only need to cut the radio while it's above the horizon, don't they?" "Woulda thought so. Reckon they've lost their nerve." "Never mind. We have to concentrate on these Perms." The younger man checked his laser rifle. Roy put the spare rifle where he could snatch it up without looking at it. Then there was nothing to do but wait. "When they come," he said, "I'll give you a three-two-one so that we fire together. I'll take the leader, you take the second one. I want to time it so the third is in the spot where he can't get off either side of the road; see? He's going to have a couple of seconds while the lasers recharge, or while I'm reaching for the spare gun. What's wrong?" "Eh? Nothing. It's just—well, it seems cold-blooded." Roy handed him a pair of dark cobalt-blue goggles, and put a similar pair on his own head, keeping the lenses up on his forehead. "Listen, son. Let one of them get up here, and you'll have a dozen of their diseases right through the Heights. It could wipe us out. All of us." The younger man nodded doubtfully. "Remember," urged Roy relentlessly, "it's not just us. It's the future. The whole human future's going to develop from us, and from a few other highland areas. Jotunheim, Fuji, the top of the Rockies. Civilization's fragile, Stevo— never forget that. Wait!"

He gripped the younger man's shoulder, nodding towards the bend down the road. In silence, they both settled into a tense crouch, their laser rifles levelled through the slit. Roy could feel the quickening beat of his heart, so loud in his ears that he wondered if his companion could hear it. The roar of engines sounded closer, now, sharp and uneven. Suddenly two figures on motorcycles swung round the bend, the first with a red helmet, the other twenty metres behind him. "Only two," said Stevo. "Din you say three?" "Could have been an echo effect. Now—goggles!" Roy pulled his protective goggles down over his eyes, and Stevo did the same. The world became a dark world of violet and black. Somehow, the figures on the cycles became impersonal, stripped of individuality, easier to destroy. They became weaving black shapes on a violet road, between black slopes under a violet sky. "Now," said Roy. "Three, two, one, fire!" The hard rods of laser light struck simultaneously, and the dark shapes sprawled on the road. Roy pushed the goggles up on his forehead. The leader's cycle was still running, lying on its side with its back wheel spinning. Neither of the figures moved. Roy let out his breath in a long, shuddering sigh. "Right," he said. He switched on the big ear, but no sound came through it even on the maximum gain, apart from the thunder of the engine, and the whisper of air through grass or sparse foliage. He picked up one of the small flame-throwers, motioning Stevo to take the other. He led the way out of the hut and they began to walk down the road towards the cycles and their riders, their feet crunching on the eroded surface of what had once been a highway. Suddenly, after a sidelong glance at his companion, Roy stopped sharply. "Where the hell's your laser?" "Do I need it now?" "This close to the periphery, you don't move ten metres without it! Get it! Now!" Roy waited while the younger man stalked back to the hut and returned with his rifle. Then they walked on in silence towards the sprawled figures. When they reached the first, Roy noticed the laser burn through the centre of the chest. Neat and clean. Professional. He lit the flame-thrower and played the sterilizing fire over the prostrate body, rolling it over with a piece of stick, while Stevo went on to the second body. When he had finished, Roy used the stick to turn off the fuel tap below the tank of the cycle, and a vast silence rushed in on them as the engine died. Stevo's steps scrunched slowly back up the road. His face was the colour of ashes beneath its streaked coating of dust. "That one was a girl," he said, his eyes wide and blank. "She couldn't have been more than fifteen." "Loaded with germs you've never heard of, son. Remember that." Roy kept his voice flat and hard. Suddenly, from somewhere down beyond the bend of the road, the crackling roar of an engine spluttered alive, died, then began again, lifting to a sustained howl. Stevo, nearer the bank on the uphill side of the road, sprang into a narrow erosion gully and worked his way up to a thin line of scrub. Roy was on the point of leaping up the bank when the third rider came round the bend. Dust rolled like a breaking wave as he slid the cycle down across the road, scrambling for cover, while Roy slipped behind some rocks. Nothing moved. He could feel the blood pounding in his temples, while he levelled his laser across the

rock, getting as much of his body as possible under cover. He could not see where the other man had gone. He looked up at the slanting line of scrub following the crest of the rise, trying to pick out any movement. He couldn't even see where Stevo had hidden. He hoped Stevo was covering him, because here in this group of small rocks he felt shockingly vulnerable. He scanned the line of scrub intently. Then, abruptly, some small sound behind him made him whirl. The other man had been behind him all the time. He had crawled along the eroded ditch at the edge of the road, and now he was within ten metres of him, his deadly little metal crossbow already at his shoulder. He was thin, undersized, boyish, his pale eyes burning with white-hot fury. He had just come past the bodies of his two companions, and as Roy's eyes met his he seemed to convulse with an explosion of mingled fear and hatred. Roy flung himself sideways, and the crossbow arrow whistled past his ear. He rolled over, coming to his feet before the other man could reload his bow. He lifted his laser rifle, and then the chill of ice came to him. In rolling aside, he had broken the spiral tube, and as he pressed the firing button nothing happened. For a moment they stared at each other, wide-eyed, sweating. The thin man had a deep, jagged scar on one cheek, where his cheekbone must have been broken at some time. Roy reversed his grip of the rifle, swinging it over his shoulder like a club. With startling speed, the Outlander snapped another arrow into his crossbow, and Roy saw that he could not reach him in time. He was still three metres away as the sights of the crossbow aligned with him. Frantically, he hurled the rifle at the archer, and as the man ducked his head beneath it, his arrow discharged harmlessly over Roy's head. Throwing the crossbow down, he whipped another arrow from his quiver. It was a short arrow, all metal, a finned aluminium rod with its tip pitted with corrosion—they poisoned their arrows by leaving them in decaying organic matter. Roy drew his knife, holding it point-upward, and they circled each other slowly, the thin man trying to gain the advantage of higher ground, while Roy tried to get where he could see where Stevo was, so that he could give him a chance of an unobstructed laser shot. He didn't see him. The thin man edged closer. Roy was less afraid of the poisoned arrow than of the diseases that rotted the other man's body. In a close contact, he could be infected, and that might mean he could not return to the Heights. The thin man's head shook violently from side to side with the tension, but he didn't take his eyes from Roy's. Roy made up his mind. The only way he could use his knife safely was to throw it. But that meant spinning it so that he held it by the tip of the blade, and if his fingers were sweating he could drop it. Quickly, he spun it in the air, gripping it by the tip. At that moment, Stevo's voice called from the ridge above. "Stand clear!" The thin man looked at the ridge, just for a second, but in that second Roy hurled his knife with all the strength he possessed, running backwards away from the other man, who dropped his arrow and clutched at the knife-hilt protruding from the base of his throat. As he fell, Roy called to Stevo.

"Why the hell did you wait so long? Why didn't you shoot?" "I couldn't. I only yelled out to take his attention. I broke my laser scrambling up the gully." Roy looked at him, and in the sudden release of tension they began to laugh, a shaky gale of laughter that rang across the valley. After they had flamed the last of the bodies, they raised the microphone with its reflector dish and listened intently for any further sound of engines coming up from the Outlands, but there were no sounds that did not come from the wind. Roy turned to the telephone. "Put me through to Snowy," he said, as soon as he had a response. He waited until he heard an old and precise voice on the line. "Snowy," he said, "Roy at the Gap. We just got three Perms on their way up the road." "How were the new lasers?" "Good—but frail. We broke two of them! I had to get the third bloke with a hunting-knife." "What? Did he touch you?" "No. Threw the knife. Kept clear. But listen. I want to bring one of their bikes up to our workshop. Can I catch anything from it?" Snowy was silent for a few seconds. He had reached an age at which he could take his time to think out his answers. "What fuel are they using?" he asked. "Smells like methyl alcohol." "Good. Use some of it to wash the surfaces of the bike wherever you touch it. The controls, the seat, footrests. Let it dry before you try to start it." "Right. Can you get a general message passed along to everyone I'll meet on the way up? I don't want to be shot at." "I'll do that. But check with me before you leave." "Are we still under radio silence?" "Yes! And be careful. The satellite passes over here just about sunset, south-west to north-east. Don't move around that time. Get under a tree, if possible. We don't know how good their telescopes are." "Maybe it'd be better if we made contact with them." "What?" "Well, we're not making much of a go of things, are we?" "We're surviving, son! Surviving! And we're doing that because we all work as a team. Right?" "All right. It's only…" "Only what?" "Only that sometimes I feel we overdo our suspicion of everyone outside the team." "That's what you think, is it? How you think we would have survived if we'd all thought like that?" Roy fought to keep the irritation out of his voice. After all, Snowy was over seventy years old—nearly three times Roy's age. "Snowy, we've survived because we're in the only part of the continent that still has electric power and everything that goes with it. Let's not kid ourselves. We're not supermen. We just have the luck to live in the highest part of Australia, above the smog, the only part where there's a

functioning hydro-electric system." There was an ominous pause. "So?" said Snowy almost softly. "Look, I can see why we have to kill off these Perms as they come up from the Outlands. But the satellite people must have a more advanced technology than ours. Why…" "That's enough, son. You've just been through a rough spot. I can understand the way you feel. It'll all look different tomorrow. I'm sending another relief pair down. But check with me before you bring that bike up—we don't want you being shot at." "Right." Roy walked outside. Stevo, who was examining one of the broken laser rifles, looked up at him. "What's wrong?" Roy shrugged. "Old Snowy," he said. "A bloody cement-head!" He selected the motorcycle that had been ridden by the leader in the red helmet. It looked the newest of the three. He took a spare can of the alcohol fuel from one of the others, and wiped the twist-grips, the saddle, the sides of the fuel tank where his knees might make contact, using a piece of scrap cloth which he finally took a few metres down the road and burned. He walked back and stood looking down at the machine. "I wonder if these bugs are as contagious as we think," he said thoughtfully. "Better be certain," replied Stevo. "Nothing to lose by being careful." "I'm not sure of that, Stevo. Maybe you do lose something by being too careful." "Like what?" "Nerve, for one thing. Anyway, help me get this thing started."

TWO In a direct line, the notch in the Great Dividing Range called Dead Horse Gap was only eight kilometres south of Mount Kosciusko, the highest point on the Australian continent, and its height above sea level was only 650 metres less. From the Gap, the old Alpine Way led downhill for a while through Thredbo, once a resort flourishing in the skiing season—but that had been long ago, when the population of Australia had run into thirty million and more. By the time he reached Thredbo, Roy was used to the motorcycle, although it did not handle well. It seemed to have been built from parts of several different machines of varying types, and its engine had been extensively modified to run on alcohol fuel. The carburettor had almost a homemade look. He did not stop at Thredbo, although the team at the base waved to him as he went past. Some of the buildings, steep-roofed to shed the snow, had fallen into a state of advanced decay, and a few had been burnt or had simply collapsed, without any attempt being made to repair them. It was hard for Roy to imagine a population of thirty million—the figure seemed utterly unreal. He knew every person who lived in the Heights, and each of them knew all the others by their first names, or by nicknames. The nicknames were never malicious—the group was too small, too tightly united against outside pressures, to allow the development of internal friction. No one knew how many people lived in the rest of Australia now. One estimate stood at a hundred

thousand, another at only twenty thousand. What had happened to Australia in the preceding century was part of a world-wide trend: a massive rise in population, coinciding with a shrinkage of arable land. Yet the world might have survived the famines of the late twentieth century had it been able to make a smooth transition from coal and oil to nuclear power, then on to other forms of energy. But it had failed. A couple of reactor accidents had led to strong anti-nuclear feeling. After the oil virtually ran out, increasing reliance on coal brought ever-increasing smog. The rest was not very well documented—the slowing-down of agriculture, breakdown of social systems, the universal hunger that led to organized cannibalism, the isolating of "in-groups" with a fierce desire to protect their members against outsiders. Midway between Thredbo and Jindabyne he passed the two men of the relief team on the way down in another electric runabout. They stopped briefly, examining his captured machine with interest, while Roy sat astride it with the engine idling—he was uncertain of his ability to restart it if he let it cool down. "Nothing new about it," said one of the men. Roy shook his head. "Nothing that couldn't have been made more than a hundred years ago—and made better. Still, some of the parts might be useful. There are two more of them at the Gap." "We'll try and bring one back." "Good." Roy glanced at his wrist-watch. "Wipe them down with fuel before you touch them. See you later. I want to get to Jinda before the satellite passes." "Right. Don't want to be out in the open when that thing goes over. They reckon they can spot anything that moves." He reached Jindabyne with a quarter of an hour to spare. The sun was already setting in a sullen red glare that turned the western sky into a sea of molten iron. As he rode along the main street there was no sign of life, although a number of vehicles had been parked under verandas. He rode up to the old post office which was now the communication centre number 14. He parked the motorcycle under the large, relatively recent system of carports, which could hide at least ten machines from view from the air—or from space. It was quiet now that his engine had stopped, the only sounds being the lowing of cattle on the grassy flats bordering the lake, and the hum of the wind through the overhead power-lines on their gaunt pylons. As he turned towards the post office building he thought he saw a movement in one of the windows facing him, as if someone who had been watching him through the window had moved away suddenly at his approach. He hesitated for a moment, then walked towards the door. It opened before he reached it, and a dark-haired girl in a leather suit motioned him to silence, her finger against her lips. Roy raised an eyebrow and went quietly up to her. "What's the problem, Jill?" "What did you say to Snowy? He's been snaky ever since you talked to him on the phone." "I just had an argument with him over getting in touch with the satellite people. That's all." "That's all? Listen, I'm his secretary—remember? I'm the one who's got to put up with his temper, while you stir him up and then hang up the phone on him."

"It wasn't like that, Jill. Anyway, I'm sorry." "Well, tell him you've thought it over, and you see his point of view." "But I don't. I mean—I see it, but I don't agree with it." She rolled her dark eyes upward. "God, here we go again." Roy laughed. "All right. I'll never convince him. But I suppose I could smooth him over—for your sake. Can I see him?" "Sure. But listen. The thing's going to pass over in a couple of minutes—that's why I was looking out the window when you came along." "Do you want to see it?" "Yes—although we've been told to stay indoors." "I'm going to watch from under the carports, through the trees. Want to watch with me?" She hesitated, her eyes large and bright. Without speaking, she nodded, and he took her hand and led her across to where a clump of small trees sheltered the end carport. He looked at his watch, and as he did so she gave a sharp cry. "Look!" A brilliant star, much brighter than Venus or Jupiter, was rising diagonally into the sky to the left of the setting sun. They watched in silent awe as it crossed above the sun with a slow, majestic movement that seemed absolutely steady and undeviating. "It must be big," said Roy quietly. "Bigger than I thought!" "How high is it?" "I don't know. Must be two or three hundred kilometres, I think, to keep it clear of the atmosphere." She shivered suddenly. "Who are they? The people in it?" "Well, since we're not going to have any contact with them, I suppose we'll never know, for sure." "But they're people like us, aren't they?" "I think so. They've got records of an earlier visit up at the central library at Cabramurra. They say their ancestors came from earth. They got away and establish bases somewhere else before the Big Collapse. Or so they say—and it seems logical." "Snowy doesn't believe that. He thinks they might be some kind of alien. Not human." Roy shrugged. "As I said, if we don't contact them, we'll never know." For a minute or so, they watched the rising point of light. "They could be bright blue," said Jill. "With pointed heads." "Or they could be a bunch of rock-heads like Snowy." Roy gave a short laugh. "I don't know which would be worse." "Roy, he's not really that bad. He has a lot of responsibility. He can't afford to make mistakes." Suddenly, they both cried out simultaneously, pointing up at the satellite, which was now about thirty degrees above the horizon. It brightened for a second with a flash of brilliant green light, and then the flash was repeated in an irregular pattern, sometimes like the first, sometimes shorter, in what appeared random groups of short and long flashes.

"Wasn't there a code people used once?" asked Jill. "Yes—but I don't suppose anyone here knows it. Still, they're evidently trying to talk to us. Let's go in." Keeping under the shelter of the carports they made their way to the back door of the old post office. Just as they reached it, a chorus of excited voices sounded inside. There were no lights on in the building except for the red glow of the electric heaters—the place was at least warm, because there was never any shortage of electricity up here. The lights obviously had been turned off to avoid showing any presence of life to observers in the orbiting satellite. Roy led the way along to the main room, where slatted blinds had been drawn over all the windows. Half a dozen people were clustered in front of a television set, on which an odd pattern of light was rippling. "What's happening?" asked Roy. Snowy was sitting directly in front of the set. At the sound of Roy's voice, his white-maned head turned for a moment. "Come in! Watch this!" Roy and Jill moved alongside the others. Three of them were seated, with Snowy in the middle, and three others stood behind their chairs. The youth alongside Roy turned to him, his eyes wide in the dim light. "They're trying to send us a picture. We got a flash of something a minute ago." The screen was filled with orange and green lines that rippled diagonally. "They were flashing a green light when I came in. Looked like the light of a gas laser. Short and long flashes. Anyone know that old code?" "Eh?" Snowy turned. His previous quarrel with Roy seemed shelved. "The international code. Nobody's used that for fifty years. I think it was a short and a long for 'A,' a long and two or three shorts for 'B'—but I'm damned if I know the rest of it." "Doesn't help, then. Unless they have it up at the library at Cabramurra. They should. Couple of encyclopedias up there." Roy rubbed his chin. "Suppose I get them to run off copies and distribute them around—then some of us could learn the code. We'd at least know what they're trying to say to us." There was silence in the room while Snowy thought it over. Then he jerked his head emphatically. "No! Too big a risk. If too many people knew what their signals meant, somebody might get the idea of talking back to them the same way. Then they'd know we were here." "They probably have a fair idea already," said Roy. "Whatya mean?" "Our cattle, for one thing. They wouldn't survive the winters up this high, if we didn't keep them in the plastic sheds. And they can see the sheds are a new set-up. For that matter they can see our roads are in use." "Now listen…" Snowy's roar broke off as a simultaneous cry from several of the others drew everyone's attention to the TV screen. A picture appeared, vanished, appeared again. It showed the head and shoulders of a man, his lips moving as if he were talking, although as yet no sound came from the set. At first, the colours seemed odd—bluish skin, pallid green hair—then they seemed to reverse. Then the picture became sharp and brilliant. It still lacked sound, but with some skill in lip-reading they might almost have made out what

the man was saying. He had tanned skin and bright blue eyes, and he had evidently been chosen for his clean-cut, vital appearance. He might have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. He wore a simple, sleeveless garment like a tank-top, perhaps of blue nylon, leaving the smoothly rounded muscles of his massive shoulders bare. "Wow," whispered Jill, and there was an answering murmur from the other girl in the group. The sound of a voice came with the picture, rasping, distorted. The man smiled with a flash of even white teeth, turned his head, and gestured. He was joined by a girl, and this time it was the men in the watching group who gasped. Roy's first thought was that she was not real. Her lightly tanned skin was flawless, her large, turquoise eyes brilliant and clear, her reddish-gold hair softly sweeping her bare shoulders above a low-cut dress of the same shade as her eyes. She, too, was talking, and abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, her speech became clear. "… part of an expedition to study our ancestral home." The accent was different from that of the people of the Heights, but the voice was musical and superbly modulated. "In return for information about the past of our race, or some artifacts, we are willing to trade things which you may need. Machine tools, metals you might find hard to get, fabrics, vitamins. If there's anything you need, let us know. You can transmit on this waveband—or even flash a light." She smiled, and Roy felt as if she were looking straight at him. "I would like to meet some of you. My name is Vaya." Roy repeated the name silently to himself, then felt irrationally angry for a second as he noticed Jill watching his lips. The screen went blank for a second, and then the figure of the man appeared again, this time seen fulllength, walking towards a kind of desk. He sat down, smiling at the camera, which zoomed slowly in until his head and shoulders filled the screen. "My name is Kalman," he said. "Several generations ago, my people left Earth to found a colony elsewhere. You probably all know this. We have survived, and our technology is still developing, whereas yours seem to have slipped back. I think we might find mutual benefit in contact. I introduce our historian, Vaya." The girl joined him, and the people watching the TV suddenly realised they were seeing a replay of the same scene they had watched before. The girl gave the same little bow, then began speaking. "Thank you, Kalman. And my greetings to anyone watching. I am happy to be part of an expedition to study our ancestral home." It was the same picture, the same words, taped and possibly replayed time after time all around the planet. "There you are," said Snowy triumphantly. "Nothing to say they know we're here, after all. This is just an automatic message they put out all the time. It's a try-on. Is all." "Listen," broke in Roy. "When I came in they were signalling with a light, remember? Probably a gas laser. That means a tightly focussed beam, directed straight at us." "So?" "So they obviously knew there was someone here. Whether we reply or not, I think they'll investigate further."

The picture was repeated twice more, and then it began to deteriorate quickly into a blur as the satellite swung towards the horizon. The sound remained clear a little longer than the picture, then that, too, shut off quite abruptly. "Frequency modulated stuff," said Roy. "Line of sight." "Yes," said Snowy. "They probably receive the same way, so we're safe until the next orbit. Still, we'd better keep radio silence—there may be more than one satellite." "Is it safe to turn the lights on?" asked Jill. Snowy thought for a moment. "One light," he said, "but with the blinds closed." Roy stood looking thoughtfully at the now silent TV set while Jill moved across to the telephone switchboard as a buzz announced an incoming call. "At least, we're sure of one thing now," said Roy. "They're not aliens. They're as human as any of us." There was a muttered chorus of agreement from the others, except for Snowy, who gave no sign of hearing for a few seconds. Then he turned his head sharply to look at Roy. "I wouldn't be too certain of that, son. Those people who spoke could have been robots. Didn't they seem to be just a little too perfect? Too flawless?" Roy felt his confidence shaken a little. He pictured the red-haired girl again. The perfect skin, the large turquoise eyes with their faint upward slant. There was a perfection there which he had never seen in the people of the Heights. He looked at Jill, by far the most attractive person in Jindabyne, and compared her with his memory of the girl on the screen. True, the differences in proportions of the face amounted to only a few millimetres here and there, and Jill's skin was weathered, but the difference in total effect was unbelievable. Suddenly, she became aware that he was looking at her. Their eyes met for a second before she looked quickly away, her hand going up to a small scar near the corner of her mouth. He turned again to Snowy. "Flawless, yes. But remember, we were looking at a recorded tape. They had time to select the most attractive people they had, and make them up to give the best possible impression during that short telecast." Snowy flung his arms up in an explosive burst of fury. "What's the bloody difference, anyway? If they are human, they'll have grown so far away from us that they might as well be aliens!" He looked around the room to make sure everyone's attention was on him. "If they are human, they've been living in some alien environment for generations. They'll be further apart from us than the Perms of the Outlands." Mention of the Perms brought Roy's mind back to the man he had fought at Dead Horse Gap. "See you later everyone," he said. "I'm tired." And he went out into the night.

THREE The moon, nearing full, was shining across the lake as he walked down to the old motel along the edge of the water. He had a permanent room in the motel, just as he had a small house up at Cabramurra. There was no shortage of accommodation in the 7000-square-kilometre area of the Heights, where the few hundred people were spread through a number of towns once built for a much larger population.

There was no one in the dining-room of the motel, but a wisp of steam rose from the tea-urn, and he walked over and selected one of the cups turned face-down on the bench. There were the usual uninteresting sandwiches stacked under transparent polystyrene cylinders, and he made his selection while his hands were busy with the tea—the routine was so ingrained that he did not have to look at what he was doing. He took his meal across to a table against a window overlooking the lake, and as he was beginning to eat the door banged and Jill walked across the room. "May I join you?" she called as she walked towards the urn. "Why not?" "I dunno. You looked sort of—withdrawn." "Sorry." "Whatya having?" "The steak's not bad—and the cheese." After she set her meal down on the other side of his table, they both ate for a minute or two in silence, Roy staring out across the moonlit lake which stretched like polished metal between hills of coal. He looked suddenly at the girl to find her watching his face. "I killed a bloke down at the Gap today," he said. "I know. That's not unusual, is it? Perms don't count as people." "This was different from the others. I'd broken my laser rifle, and he'd missed with his crossbow. We finished up as close together as you and I are now." She stopped chewing, the whites of her eyes showing all around the brown irises. "What happened?" "I killed him with a hunting knife." "Did he touch you?" "No." She let out her breath in an uneven sigh. Neither of them spoke for a while, but she reached across the table and put her hand on his. "Your hands are warm," he said. "Kept them in my pockets all the way here. Listen, what did you think of Vaya?" "Who?" "You know who I mean. The ginger woman on the TV." "Oh, her?" She mimicked his tone. "Oh, her? You couldn't take her eyes off her." He shrugged his shoulders. "Too perfect to be true, I'd say. Perhaps Snowy was right—she might have been a robot." "You don't really believe that, do you?" "I don't think so. Do you?" "I'd say she was real. All easy enough for her to look like that. Probably got access to all the make-up

and other things our women haven't had since the twentieth century." She took a large bite out of a steak sandwich and chewed it vigorously, staring out of the window with bright spots of red on her cheeks. Roy, with his mind taken off Dead Horse Gap, felt a little more relaxed. He even managed to smile. "Jealous?" Her eyes flamed. "Me? Jealous?" Suddenly, they both laughed. "That's the trouble, when we all know each other," she said. "There's no mystery." "Would you like to be a woman of mystery?" "Of course I would." She waved her hand towards the communication centre. "Look at the way you all looked bug-eyed when she came on the screen. Just because she's unattainable, unreachable. A thousand kilometres up in the sky." "Wonder if they'll get any answer to their broadcast anywhere else around the world?" he mused. Suddenly, his mouth felt dry. "You know, we might be doing the wrong thing in not answering. Suppose some other settlement does, and gets the advantage of some new techniques. Some day, they could over-run us." "For God's sake don't suggest that to Snowy. But—you could be right." "I know. Question is, what do we do about it?" He glanced at his watch. "Think I'll go up to Cabramurra tomorrow. I want to take that bike up to the workshops, anyway—and while I'm there I can see a few people and find out how they feel about this." She watched him in silence for a while as he went across to the urn and brought back two more steaming cups. "Be careful, Roy. Don't do too much off your own bat. Some people don't appreciate that." "I know. That's what's wrong with our whole community. Too scared to take any chances." "We can't afford to, Roy." He looked at her glumly. "Somebody else might." They both started slightly as the telephone rang on what had once been the reception desk of the dining-room. Roy went over to it. "Roy," he said. "Good. Snowy wants to talk to you." "Right." Covering the mouthpiece, he whispered "Snowy" to Jill, who lifted her upper lip in an expression that made wrinkles beside her nose. "Roy," came Snowy's voice briskly. "Did you want to take that machine up to Cabramurra tomorrow?" "If I can get enough fuel to run it, yes." "Something more important's come up, son. We seem to be the only ones who saw that telecast. The boys managed to get it on videotape, and we want to get a copy up to HQ." "Well—could I take it up?" "That's what I figured—but it's too vital to trust to that bike. Better take one of the charcoal burners." "Right. I'll take the green Ford. I can put the bike in the back of it."

Hesitation. "All right. Do that. Get the producer stoked up early, and we'll have the tape ready for you." "I'll need to refuel on the way." "I've thought of that. Make it Adaminaby—the airport. The fewer people who know about this, the better." Roy put down the phone and stood for a few seconds staring in front of him. "Suspicion," he muttered. "Always, suspicion." "What?" asked Jill from across the room. "Oh, nothing. Going up to Cabramurra tomorrow." "Wish I was going with you." "So do I. Listen, try to get up there in the next few days. I've got the feeling almost anything might happen." She nodded. "Depends on whether His Highness can spare me. If I can, I'll get a lift up on the milk run." Next morning, the sun came up in an ominous red glare while Roy was filling the hopper of the gas producer fitted to the old, rebuilt Ford truck. A stray thought came to him: red sky at morning, a sailor's warning. Or was it shepherd's warning. Anyway, a warning to whom it might concern. He used an auxiliary electric blower to get the fire going, and while he waited for the flow to build up he walked over and stood looking across the silent lake. Far out, he could see fish leaping, making widening patterns of small ripples on the red-lit water. Footsteps crunched on gravel behind him, and he turned to see Jill coming towards him, hands in the pockets of her long leather coat. There was frost on her boots, although there was none here at the lake edge. "You're up early," he said. "Blame Snowy. He rang me while it was still dark. I'm to give you this." She took a flat, circular metal can from under her arm. "This is the new copy of the video of last night's broadcast." "Thanks. But why did he get you to bring it?" "Said the mornings are too cold at his age. Me, because I already knew about it, and he thinks the fewer people who know—" "The better," finished Roy. "I know." He stowed the can inside the cabin. "Whenya leaving?" "Soon as I've got enough gas flowing." She moved towards him. "Good luck." They put their arms around each other and he kissed her. Her face was cold in the morning air, but her lips were warm and intensely alive. He held his head back after a few seconds. "You know something? You're prettier than that ginger woman on the TV." "That's a straight-out lie. But thanks." A few minutes later, he was heading out of the town, climbing slowly eastward over the mountains. The asphalt sealing of the road had vanished long ago, and its surface was now rain-gutted gravel. The gas produced from the charcoal did not give him half the power he would have got from the scarce alcohol

fuel, but on level stretches he could slowly build up the speed to fifty kilometres per hour. Once he lost speed, it took him a long time to build it up again, so he had developed a technique of sliding through the corners as fast as possible to keep his engine revving. It was a driving style that earlier users of gas producers had discovered during the second world war of the twentieth century, but Roy and his contemporaries knew nothing about that. They had been forced to learn the same skills over again. In spite of the jarring of the bumpy road, and the dangerous heeling of the truck on the curves, the drive gave Roy time to think. His entire world was a world running down, like an ancient clock that nobody wound up. It was as if human civilization had gone over its greatest peak a couple of hundred years ago. Now, it was hard to say exactly where the human race had gone wrong, because for the last century or two, few records had been kept in most areas. But there had been a number of causes for the collapse, dominant among them a world-wide trend for minorities to try to tear down the social structures in which they lived, without having workable systems to put in their place. Destruction had become too easy. First the hysterical sabotage of a couple of nuclear plants, then an attempt to halt this trend by the firing of coal-mines—most of the brown smog that covered the Outlands to the west and south even now came from the burning of the open-cut coal-mines of Yallourn and Morwell, vast fires that had raged since before Roy was born. There had always been a proportion of the population desperately afraid of the pollution arising from the generation of power—either the possible pollution from an atomic blow-up or the slower but more inevitable poisoning of the atmosphere by fuels that ate up the oxygen and exuded carbon monoxide and tars. Now, they had both kinds of pollution without the power. Except in the Heights—high enough to escape the smog levels, and with the power of half a dozen hydro-electric generating stations drawing their life from the interlocking network of tunnels linking the headwaters of three of the continent's major rivers, the Murray, the Murrumbidgee and the Snowy, all of which rose close together near the highest summits. The system had been built in the middle of the twentieth century. It was still mostly operative, but there was no viable way of adding to it. Roy's hands tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles gleamed like ivory beneath his taut skin. An intense, undirected rage flamed in him. His race had once had a vivid, breathing, vibrant world to live in—and they had thrown it away. It took him an hour to cover the twenty-nine kilometres to the ghost town of Berridale, where he took the left-branching road that led up past Lake Eucumbene and climbed to the ridge of the Monaro Range. He had been driving for three hours by the time he chugged into Adaminaby, although the total distance he had covered was no more than ninety kilometres. He drove straight to the airstrip, with its old hangars shielding the few aircraft that still remained operational. Outside the hangars lay a row of partly demolished light aircraft of an earlier century— Cessnas, Pipers, a Beech and a Rockwell—which had ended their active life and were used to rob of parts to keep the surviving machines airworthy. Roy drove past the fuel storage section and on to an isolated shed where the charcoal fuel was stored for the gas producer vehicles used about the field. A man drove out from the hangars and followed him on an electric runabout. Roy coasted to a stop a safe distance from the shed, in an area of bare ground. He looked across at the white and orange windsock, which was hanging limply against its pole, and walked to the back of the truck, opening the grate at the bottom of the gas producer and letting the hot ashes drop on to the ground.

He walked in to the shed and selected a bag of charcoal as the man on the runabout came to a stop. "Hi, Vern," he said. "Have to make a rush trip up to HQ." "About the broadcast from the satellite, is it?" "Did you pick it up here?" "Couldn't get a picture, but we got the words. The way I see it, they're offering to trade all sorts of goods just for a few bits of information and some artifacts. I can't see what we've got to lose by trading with them." Roy, who had opened the hopper of the producer to put in fresh charcoal, stopped with a bag of charcoal in his hands and looked across at the older man. Vern's face was like brown leather, his eyes like bits of sky, lined around the comers as he grinned. "Trouble is," said Roy slowly. "What have we got to trade?" Vern winked. "I can think of something." "What?" The older man moved closer, with the stiffness of a man fighting against arthritis. "Few years ago, a couple of us took an unscheduled flight out west in one of the Cessnas. Skirted round the big lake on the Murray, then headed down over the big highway that used to link Melbourne and Sydney. Got down as far as the Dividing Range, but south of it was just a brown sea of yuk." He began rolling a cigarette, and Roy waited until he lit it, drew on it placidly, then went on. "We headed on west, without crossing the Divide, and eventually we came to a small town called Maldon. It's near an isolated mountain. Thing is, though, there's a museum there. Not a very big museum, but it's never been vandalized. Looks as if the Perms have never found it." "What have they got there?" "All sorts of things. Old things. Early phonographs that worked with a needle cutting into a rotating cylinder. Old bits of mining equipment, things like that. Reckon these blokes in the satellite'd go mad over some of the things there." "Did you bring anything back?" "No. We weren't supposed to have made a flight that far from the Heights. Burned a whole tankful of fuel, when it was already getting scarce. If we'd brought anything back, we'd have had to explain it to the Council." "Have any trouble landing there?" "No. There's a straight stretch of road north of the town, with no trees too close to it." Roy stood silent for a few seconds. "I see," he said. Then he tipped the charcoal into the hopper. "Well, I'll see you on the way back, Vern. Right now, I'll have to push on to the boys at the top." "Should get there in an hour and a half. They rolled a lot of the road with that new road-roller." "Haven't seen that, yet." "Works by steam. Burns wood. Like something prehistoric. Well, see you." Roy started the engine of the truck, running it to get the gas flowing. He looked across at Vern. "Ever feel like making that trip again?"

"You mean to that museum at Maldon? Hell's hinges, no. You fly nearly a thousand kilometres, there and back. With fuel as scarce as it is now, they'd kill me!" "I see." Roy revved the engine. "See you, Vern." As the older man walked stiffly back to the runabout, Roy accelerated sluggishly away.

FOUR The road as far as Kiandra was good, because it had once been part of the old Snowy Mountains Highway, and its gradients and curves were smooth and clean. The sealed surface had disintegrated long ago, but the present gravel surface lay on good foundations. The road that climbed from Kiandra to Cabramurra was narrower, more twisting, but well maintained. Yet it was almost midday as Roy ground laboriously up round the last bend that brought him in sight of Cabramurra. The town had been built in the mid-twentieth century as a regional centre for the construction of the hydro-electric scheme, and completely rebuilt in the 1970s. Then, as now, it was the highest town on the Australian continent, on a peak only 700 metres less in height than Kosciusko. Two roads in concentric ovals circled one of the two summits on which the town was built, with fortyodd gray brick, Government-built houses with identically sloping Alpine roofs and car ports. Not all were occupied now, and one, on the upper loop, belonged to Roy. He kept the truck pulling until he reached the square, paved area of the town centre. Parking where a few other vehicles were lined up, he switched off the engine and walked across the square to the grey building known simply as the HQ—the administrative centre from which the elected group called the Council ran the whole of the 7,000 square kilometres of the Heights. The air was chilling up here, and he moved quickly until he reached the shelter of the building. The foyer was warm, with an effective system of radiators. A couple of people were waiting on bench seats along the wall, but the receptionist behind the desk called to Roy as soon as he stepped in the door. "Max has been waiting for you, Roy. You know where his office is. Go right in." As he moved towards the passage, she switched on an intercom. He knocked at a door near the end of the passage, and a resonant voice called him in. Max Lang—one of the few people on the Heights to retain both parts of his name— was the current president of the Council. He was a broad-faced, solid man of forty-five, with an easy smile and hard eyes. "You made a good time, Roy," he said, waving to a chair beside the end of the desk. Roy leaned forward as he sat down, holding out the videotape can. "Ah, thanks," said Lang. "I'll get the Council together and we'll have a look right away. Have you seen it yourself?" "I saw the original telecast." Lang leaned forward on one elbow. "What was your impression of these people? I've heard the sound that came with the picture, but it's hard to form an opinion from the sound alone." "Well, they seemed to me sincere enough. Sincere, I mean, in their offer to trade manufactured goods for information." Lang nodded, but his eyes were as devoid of expression as pieces of steel. Roy didn't know whether he was nodding agreement, or simply nodding to himself at the confirmation of an idea he had already

formed—either about the telecast or about Roy. "Do you want to see this?" he asked, holding up the canned tape. Roy hesitated. "Well, I've seen the original—and I've just made a non-stop run up from Jindabyne, except for a brief stop to refuel." "Fair enough. You'd better grab a bite to eat." Roy stood up. "Right. Thanks for the offer to see the film. Will I see you later?" "Sure. Come back as soon as you've eaten." Roy went out, but instead of walking down towards the restaurant he headed for the regional library, which was the more comprehensive library in the Heights. Ev, the librarian, was about the same age as Roy, but her pulled-back hair and round glasses made her look older. "Hello, stranger," she said as he went in, leaning back in her chair behind her cluttered desk. "Did you see the satellite go over last night?" "Yes—quite a good view of it, Ev. Look, can I check something in one of the encyclopedias?" "Go ahead—over there under General Reference." He walked quickly across and selected a volume which should have covered "international code," but failed to find it listed. He looked across the room to the girl, who was working with her head down over her desk. "Ev, where would I find 'international code?'" She looked up. "Try under 'Morse.'" "Thanks." He changed volumes, and found the code he had been looking for. He took out his notebook and began to copy down the symbols. A, dot dash; B, dash and three dots; C, dash dot dash dot, and so on through the alphabet and numbers. He slipped the notebook back into his pocket, replaced the book, and went back to the desk. "Another thing, while I'm here, Ev. There's some rumour that people in a space satellite contacted the Heights a long time ago." She nodded. "That's right. About ninety years ago." Roy found that he was leaning forward in his excitement. "Have you any data on them?" "Yes. In the back rooms, somewhere. There's a file there with some photos." "Could I see them?" "Stop here near the phone, and I'll take a look." She leaned her hands on the desk and stood up, then went out into the back of the building. She had a stiff left knee, and walked by swinging her leg from the hip. While he waited for her to return, Roy took out his notebook and began memorizing the first few letters of the Morse code. After she had been gone several minutes, he heard a satisfied cry from the distance. "Here it is. I was right. Just ninety years ago." Ev limped back into the room with a green manila folder, which she spread out on the desk. "There's a picture of the shuttle they landed in. Futuristic-looking thing, wasn't it? And that was nearly a century ago." Standing beside her, Roy tensed as she turned a page. "What's that?"

"These are pictures of the shuttle people with some of the leaders of the Heights of that time. The Council, I suppose. All dead a long time, of course." "But that woman with the red hair. There." He stabbed his finger towards one of the pictures. "She looks like the woman on the TV screen last night." "Might be her daughter. Or granddaughter. Here, I've got a magnifier, if that's any help." "Thanks." Roy adjusted the large lens above the pictures, which were coloured prints of quite sharp definition. The man was different from the man he had seen on the TV the previous night—blackhaired and bearded. But the woman— the more he looked at her, the more he was convinced it was the same woman. "Could there be any mistake in the date of this?" he asked suddenly. "No," said Ev acidly. "That was ninety years ago. If you doubt it, look at the buildings in the background. See, the creche wasn't built when that picture was taken—now it has trees around it ten or fifteen metres high." "Could you lend me this?" "Sorry, Roy. Regulations. But I could give you a copy if you want it." "Righto, thanks. That picture of the two people from the shuttle will do." She led the way into a small room where a copier was set up, and soon he had a copy of the picture in his hands. "Thanks, Ev." She was watching him closely. "You look a bit pale. What's the matter?" "Nothing. It's just that this looked like the same woman." She smiled. "If it is, she'd be pushing 120 years old." He nodded, still looking at the picture. Suddenly, he managed a smile. "Bit old for me. Anyway, you probably had the right explanation. One's the other's granddaughter." "Or you were looking at an old videotape." "Possibly. Although I don't think they'd do that. Wouldn't be any reason, would there?" He put the picture in his pocket. "Anyway, thanks, Ev. I'll see you around." He walked quickly down to the restaurant, and ate a hamburger—the quickest reasonably sustaining meal he could think of—then went back to the HQ. Max Lang had assembled the other members of the Council, and was just beginning to run the videotape through. Roy sat quietly at the back of the group and watched the pictures of Kalman and Vaya. Especially, he watched Vaya, leaning forward to memorize every detail. The slight parting in her hair on the left side. The slight assymetry of her brows, the right slanting more steeply upward. The very slight difference in her eyes, the left eyelid tending to droop almost imperceptibly. The face was not as flawless as he had at first thought, now that he had passed the first impact and was able to concentrate on minute details. Without waiting for the discussion to begin, he tiptoed out of the building and went to his truck. Inside it, he took the photograph from his pocket—but without the magnifier he could not see it clearly enough to be sure of his impression.

He hesitated for a couple of minutes, tapping the photo against his knuckles. Then he got out of the truck and walked back towards the library. "Hello," said Ev as he walked in. "What have you forgotten?" He took the photo from his pocket. "I wonder if I could see that magnified again." She pushed the magnifier across her desk, and he focussed on the red-haired woman. He could hear his heart beating, so loudly that he wondered if Ev might be able to hear it. The same slight parting of the hair on the left side, the slightly steeper slant of the right eyebrow, the nearly imperceptible assymetry of the eyes—it was all there. There was no doubt about it. It was the same woman. But how? One by one, the explanations about granddaughters and old videotapes melted away, forcing him towards the one answer that left him feeling physically cold, with a taste in his mouth like metal. He was looking at a picture of a woman 120 years old. Or 140. Or 160. "Roy. You all right?" He looked up to find Ev's inquisitive eyes watching him through her round glasses. "I… I don't know. Have you got any tapes of these people?" "Nothing on video here, although it might be stowed away down in the Tumut tunnel. We might have some audio stuff." "Could I hear it?" "What is this, Roy? Is it what I think it is?" "What's that?" "Look, something's shaken you up. Badly. You really think this is the same woman, don't you?" For a long time, he hesitated. The silence continued until she looked down at the file on her desk. "You do think it's the same woman." Suddenly she looked up at him. "They're still running the tape through at HQ, aren't they?" "Probably." "Technically, I should have a copy of that for our records." She stood up. "Think I'll go along. Could you carry that recorder for me?" "Sure." She put on a long, heavy coat, and locked the library as they went out. The stiff knee forced her to walk slowly, and he had to conceal his impatience, especially when she had to go up the steps to the HQ building one step at a time, bringing her rigid leg up beside the other each time. When they entered the Council chamber, Max Lang and the four other members of the Council were standing together in a group, talking. "Max," said Ev brightly, "could we have a copy of this videotape for our records? I can copy it here." Lang looked round at the others. "Don't see why not. We might as well watch it again on the monitor while she's taping it." "Fair enough," agreed one of the others, and Ev took the recorder from Roy and placed it near the other machine which was linked to the screen. Together, they all watched the picture of Kalman and Vaya. "I could watch that redhead as often as you want to run it," said a stocky, bald councillor.

Roy and Ev exchanged glances. Neither mentioned the photograph in the old file. Roy had halfexpected Ev to announce it. Now, as the moment passed, it became progressively more difficult for either of them to mention it. Each of them knew this, and each knew the other knew it. After the tape had been run through, Roy got quickly to his feet. "Well," he said, "I suppose the Council wants to hold a meeting on that right away." Before anyone could answer, he moved over and switched off the library recorder, pulling out the shielded patch-cord linking it with the other set. He turned to the librarian. "Can I carry this back for you, Ev?" "Oh… thanks, yes." Neither of them spoke on the way back to the library, except when she asked to take his arm so they could move more quickly. Once they were inside the building, they stood facing each other. "Well," he said, "what do you think?" She took off her glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. Her eyes looked small and vague without the glasses, and she didn't answer until she had put them back on. "I think you're right," she said in an awed voice. "You realise what that means?" She nodded. "Immortality," she said almost in a whisper. "Well, perhaps not exactly that. But it looks as if they've overcome the ageing process, doesn't it?" "It does." She moved across to her desk, where the file was still lying, and began turning the pages. "I read a bit more of this while you were out. There was a superstition among the local people that the Outworlders, as they called them, had discovered a technique for immortality." She looked up at him. "That's what they called it here—a superstition. But suppose…" He nodded. "I already have." She looked down at the file, then up at Roy again. "I suppose we should have told them." "Why?" She shrugged her shoulders. Roy walked slowly up and down the room three or four times. "You know," he said, "Old Snowy, the Mayor down at Jindabyne, has an interesting saying. Whenever any new piece of knowledge comes up, he says 'The fewer people know about it, the better.'" She nodded. "A lot of our people think like that—especially the older ones. It's what they used to call paranoia." He flung his arms wide. "It's a function of the whole set-up. Suspicion." "Are we being the same?" "Us? Maybe we are. But look—I think we're on to something very big, here. Immortality! God, there couldn't be anything bigger!" "What'll we do?" "I don't know, yet. But I'll figure out something. In the meantime, let's just keep it the way it is. Just between the two of us." She limped across to the window and stood looking out for a long time. When she turned to face him, her face was pale, her eyes blank with terror. "Just between us," she said in a trembling voice. "What's the matter?" he asked. "You sound scared."

Her voice lifted almost an octave higher. "Of course I'm scared. I'm petrified." He moved forward to reassure her, and she flinched away from him. It was only then that he realised she was afraid of him. "We should have told the Council about the picture," she said, and suddenly she held her head up, her chin thrust forward. "I'll do it. Now." She began to move towards the door. Roy intercepted her with a long stride and caught her arm. She froze, but did not try to struggle. "Let go of me, please." "Wait just a minute. Let's think this over. Hell, you're not in any danger from me. Look, I think we have something here that could be tremendously valuable to both of us. These people"—he pointed upward —"have some technique for prolonging life. Now, I can't see them giving the secret to the whole population of the Heights, or to any other large group. But to a few individuals—well, they might give it to a few." "But why should they?" "Because I think I have something to trade. Something they might want badly enough to offer just a few of us—immortality, if you can call it that." "What have you to trade?" Her fear seemed to have ebbed as her interest ignited. "Something I have to arrange, first—but I have a definite plan." He looked round the library. "You might have something to trade, too. Copies of some of your records. Better still, your specialized knowledge." She moved across to her desk when he freed her arm, and sat down, looking at him. "Specialized knowledge—yes," she said. "I've spent years accumulating it, and nobody around here seems to appreciate it." "Maybe in a different environment—" He gestured with a wide swing of his arm. "You know, young Stevo and I had to kill three men, yesterday. We've done it before, and we're going to have to do it over and over again, if we stay here." He found that he was breathing heavily. "I want out," he said. "And now, there might be a door opening." "You'll have to tell me what you're planning to trade," she said in a quiet voice which had become unexpectedly firm. "All right. Briefly, artifacts. I think I can get some from an old museum that practically nobody remembers." He sat on the corner of her desk. "Listen, I don't think the Council wants to contact the satellite people. But I could—as an individual." "That's why you wanted the Morse code?" He nodded. "Listen, Ev. Say nothing to anyone for a few hours. Can you trust me?" She managed a small, wry smile as she shook her head. "No. But I have no choice, have I?" His eyes explored her face. "No, you haven't. Neither have I. We have too much to gain—or lose."

FIVE After he left the library, Roy moved quickly. First, he went along through the chill wind to the post office and made a long-distance call to Jill in her office at Jindabyne.

"Have a good trip up?" she asked. "I wish you'd been with me." He glanced around to see if anyone was within hearing. "Can you come up tomorrow?" She hesitated. "Well, I did sound out Snowy. He seemed in a magnanimous mood, so he said it was all right." "Can anyone else hear you there?" he asked. "Well, you know what these lines are." "Yes. Listen, I have the feeling someone may be in contact with someone over the next day or two." There was a long pause. When she spoke again her voice was level and controlled. "I'll come up tomorrow. Somehow. On the milk truck, I suppose." He kept his own voice casual. "Good. It might prove… satisfactory." Roy put the receiver down and walked quickly to his truck. The fire was still smouldering in the gas producer, and by using the electric booster he soon built up a sufficient flow of gas to move off. He drove out of the town and down the gorge of the Tumut River to the iron and fibreglass buildings of the Alternative Power Engineering plant. This had been built many years ago when there was some doubt that the hydroelectric generating system could be kept in operation. Its power came from two huge water-wheels driving line-shafts, from which individual lathes, milling machines and grinders were driven by belts running on a system of fast and loose pulleys. The water-wheels were of the overshot type; long wooden flumes brought water from a higher point on the river and delivered it into the compartments on the upper part of each wheel, so that it was actually the weight of the water, not its pressure, which drove the wheel, giving a uniform flow of power. Inside, the plant looked like something from the nineteenth century, with its overhead shafting and flapping belts. As Roy walked in through the large door after parking his truck, Barry, the manager of the plant, called to him from his office. There were only three men working in the building, scattered among more than twenty machines, most of which had been built in the twentieth century. Barry was a stocky, energetic man in his thirties, with alert, dark eyes. He left the drawing-board at which he had been working and walked briskly out to meet Roy. "Hear you brought a tape of the satellite people up here," he said. "That's right. How did you hear about it?" "Over this," Barry jerked his thumb towards a loudspeaker from which recorded music was playing. "Come in." Roy followed him into his large, cluttered office, which had a number of steel filing cabinets along one wall and a large drawing-board under the window. He glanced at the speaker. "I thought you were still under radio silence." "We are. That's coming over wires." He took a bottle and two glasses from a cupboard behind his desk, glancing at Roy, who nodded. "Thanks. I needed that. Barry, we had a brush with the Perms down at the Gap, yesterday, and we collected three of their motor-bikes. I've got one of them in the truck." Barry paused, the bottle held above a half-filled glass. "Anything new?" Roy shook his head. "Made of bits and pieces—but it handles fairly well. The design could be good for

rounding up cattle, checking fencing, things like that. Would you like to play around with it?" "I would indeed." He glanced down the plant to see what his three assistants were doing. One was working at a turret lathe, another on a crank-shaper, the third on one of the milling machines. He turned back to Roy. "I'll give you a hand to get it out of the truck." As they lifted the machine to the ground, he looked with interest at the carburettor. When he was absorbed, Roy said casually, "Barry, have you still got those old instant-developing cameras?" "The old Polaroids? Yes, three of them." "Any film still around?" "Only the stuff Mike makes in his spare time. Black-and-white, but it's sharp enough—and pretty reliable, now." He showed Roy some postcard-size pictures on a wall. "These are all taken with Mike's film—pictures of the jobs we've finished lately. As you see, he's getting a bit better. Not quite as well as they were doing it a couple of hundred years ago, but the things are recognizable." Roy kept his voice casual. "Barry, I wonder if I could borrow one of your cameras for a day or two? With some film?" Barry hesitated, then pulled open one of the drawers of his desk. "Take this one, if you like. It's loaded with film, and the battery's new. There's a spare pack of film, if you need it." "Thanks." Roy took the camera carefully. "Got an instruction book?" "Here's copy of the original. Some of the illustrations are hard to make out, but I think everything's there." "Thanks. By the way, there's a spare can of fuel on the bike. Might be an idea to get it analysed before we burn it all up." Roy stood up, slinging the camera over his shoulder. "Probably see you tomorrow." As they walked out towards his truck, Barry said, "You all right for charcoal?" "Might be safer with a spare bag. Drop it back to you tomorrow if I don't use it." Tossing the bag in the back of the truck, he drove up the winding road to Cabramurra, pulling up near the post office. He put a call through to the airfield at Adaminaby, and asked for Vern. While he waited for him, he suddenly found that he was drumming his fingers tensely, and he stopped with a silent snarl of irritation. He looked at his watch. Two o'clock. "Vern," he said, when he finally had an answer. "Will you be around there the rest of the afternoon?" "Yes. Why?" "Like to drop in to see you on the way back. I'm leaving now. Should be there by three-thirty. By the way, any of the planes ready to fly?" "Couple. Cessna and the Beech. Why?" "Nothing. Nothing important. See you." He made good time on the way back to Adaminaby—better than on the way up, because the road was more downhill than uphill, and he was running without the motorcycle in the back of the truck. When he reached the airfield it was only a few minutes after three o'clock. "You made good time," said Vern. "I had to. Something very urgent has come up. Look at these." He showed Vern the copy of the photograph Ev had given him at the library. "That woman is the one who appeared on the TV broadcast last night—and she doesn't look any older. This is a copy of a part of a report put in when the same

people came to the Heights ninety years ago. See the bit I've marked, about the old superstition that the Outworlders had discovered a technique for stopping the ageing process." Vern read it, running his hand through his grey hair. "And you think it wasn't just a superstition?" "I'm sure it wasn't. These people have discovered what amounts to immortality!" They looked at each other for a long time. "When I was here this morning," said Roy, "you mentioned you could think of something we might trade. Artifacts from the old museum at Maldon." "You're not suggesting I make a flight out there again?" Roy glanced at the plane standing on the turmac. "My suggestion is this. We fly out to the museum, load up with small, valuable things they might want for their own museums, or whatever they have. Then I signal them the next time the satellite goes over—" "How do you do that?" "With a light. I've learned the old international code." Roy gestured. "I could arrange a meeting. We could offer them the articles, offer to show them the museum so that they could take what they wanted, in exchange for immortality." Vern stared at the distant mountains. "Immortality. Would they do that for us?" "Frankly, I don't know. But even if there's only a one-in-ten chance, it's worth trying, isn't it?" "Wonder if they'd treat everyone in the Heights?" "We could ask, but I doubt it. But for two of us—say two or three, or four—they might agree, don't you think?" Vern stood thinking for a long time. Then, suddenly, he looked straight at Roy. "There's the plane," he said. "Let's go. We can be there and back before dark." As they were walking towards the plane, Roy said, "Have you got a bright lamp I could use to signal them?" "Yes. Wait on. Got a spare beacon light. Halogen light. Bloody near blinding." He stopped. "Bring your truck into the park, near the store. I'll get the lamp while the motor's warning up on the plane." Minutes later, they were sitting in the Cessna. Vern had started it on a small quantity of vintage aviation fuel, a blue liquid in an inverted flask above the instrument panel, switching to the locally produced alcohol fuel as soon as the engine had "caught." The sound was sharp and harsh, and the aircraft vibrated unevenly, but after a few minutes he pushed the throttle wide open and released the wheelbrakes. The plane bumped forward, gathering speed. For a few seconds that seemed long and unnaturally lucid, Roy thought they were not going to lift off before reaching the end of the runway. Then Vern pulled the control-wheel back and the machine lifted in a shallow climb. "Used to have retracting undercart, once," he called to Roy above the thunder of the engine. "This switch pulled the wheels up. Too hard to keep the hydraulic gear functioning. We fly with the wheels locked in the down position, now." He headed the Cessna west across the northern arm of Lake Eucumbene, one of the lakes formed in the mid-twentieth century by damming the Eucumbene River.

"We pick up the pylons of the old high-tension line near Khancoban. We follow it to a place that used to be called Dederang, then down south-west towards Melbourne." Roy looked down over the blunted summits of the mountains, swept bare of vegetation above the snow-line, except for pau grass and everlasting daisies—no trees grew here above about 1,600 metres. Southward were the highest mountains on the whole continent—Kosciusko, Townsend, the Ram's Head, Twynham—but the ancient processes of erosion had gone on for so long that it was hard to pick out which was the highest point. Westward, over the Murray River, they began to lose height as Vern tilted the nose down and throttled back the engine. As they dropped lower towards the brown sea of smog, Roy felt distinctly uncomfortable. The altimeter of the plane had been altered, a hand-painted dial fitted in place of the original, which had probably registered height above sea level. This one had its zero setting at the altitude of Adaminaby, which was some 1,200 metres above sea level, and the dial was marked with a plus and minus side. Roy could see that it already showed minus 500 metres, and the needle was still creeping further to the left. He had never been as low as this, and he imagined he could feel the dense, polluted air of the Outlands forcing its way into his lungs. "There's the line of pylons. See?" Vern pointed ahead. Roy took some time to pick them out—he had been expecting a strip cleared of vegetation. But down here, the forest of the lower slopes had crept in around the gaunt pylons, so that he could see only the heads of them. There were no high-tension lines left—only the towers standing like grotesque skeletons. Once, on the top of a ridge, they passed quite low over one of the pylons that had been converted to a different use. A complex system of wooden platforms and walls hooded the top of it. It was like a lookout post. "Who built that?" he pointed. "Who knows?" said Vern. "Perms, I suppose. They say there are different tribes of them. Fight between themselves. Probably just as well for us." They followed the line westward and southward above the brown haze, into a sullen orange sky that was quite different from the clear air of the Heights. Ultimately they lost track of the pylons as the level of the land fell lower and the brown haze swallowed all landmarks. "The Divide runs westward down there," said Vern, pointing. "All we have to do is keep it on our left." Roy found himself listening intently for the small irregularities in the sound of the engine. The Cessna had only the one engine. Four horizontally opposed cylinders. It was running on a fuel for which it had not been designed. Down below, the brown fog hid the landscape like a sinister veil, and it came to him that if they were once forced down into that wasteland there would be no possibility of rescue. He could see the blurred shadow of the aircraft following them on the upper films of the smog, although he had to lean over behind Vern to look down at it. They flew westward for an hour—for an hour and a half. Then Vern pointed down at a large, irregular lake that gleamed like bronze through the impure air. "Eppalock," he said. "Not much further, now." He took the machine lower, so that they seemed to be skimming across a blurred, brown ocean. "There's an isolated mountain, not very high. Called Mount Tarrangower, on the old maps. Once I've found that, I can locate Maldon." His eyes were narrowed and tense, as he looked several times at the fuel gauge. "What's that?" Roy pointed at a straight, vertical shape looming through the murk, and Vern gave a cry

of recognition. "The chimney! We're there! It's a brick smokestack— part of some old plant on the outskirts of the town. I think they used to refine gold, or crush the gold-bearing rock, or something. Read about it in their museum. Forget, now." He banked the aircraft round in a series of careful curves. Below, they could see buildings, some ruined, some burned, a few seemingly intact, with discoloured vegetation choking most of the spaces between them. Vern headed northward, with the mountain on his left, following a straight, clear stretch of road. "This'll do," he said. He climbed, made a 180-degree turn, then throttled back and came down towards the road, giving his engine a burst of power just as his wheels were almost touching. Seconds later, they were jolting over the broken surface. The road led them down into the town, and to Roy's surprise Vern kept the Cessna trundling forward until buildings threw back crashing echoes of its engine and propeller noise. The town seemed utterly deserted—any inhabitants would have heard the sound, but nothing moved except a stumpy-tailed lizard scuttling off the road ahead of them. "Here," said Vern, and applying one of the wheel-brakes and kicking the rudder over, he swung the machine round so that it faced back up the road in the direction they had come. "Now," he shouted. "There are a couple of wooden chocks in the back. I want you to put them against the wheels—I don't trust the brakes." "Are you going to let the motor run?" "Course I am. Hell's delights, if it cuts out on us, we're dead." Roy looked at the taut, unsmiling face, then took the chocks out and put them against the two main landing wheels. Vern left the engine idling, waiting with it until he was sure it would keep turning over. Then he pointed off the road to the right, while Roy was getting his camera ready. "Up that driveway—under the trees. Come on." They ran, side by side, up to the old building half-hidden by the trees, with its rather pretentious portico overgrown with creepers. Under it, the front door stood partly open. Vern tried to kick it further ajar, but its rusted hinges screeched. Roy picked up a fallen tree-branch and began using it as a lever, until their combined strength forced the door open. Vern led the way into the gloom. Suddenly he yelled, and a blood-chilling cry came from within. As Vern ducked, Roy had the brief glimpse of enormous eyes coming towards him, and as he sprang against the wall something whirred past him and out through the doorway on soft-beating wings. "So that's what an owl looks like," he said, looking after it. "Never mind. Let's see what we can pick out." Vern used a flashlight as they penetrated deeper into the gloom, which was filled with a grey veil of spiderwebs and the smell of animals that had used the building as a lair. They climbed a ricketty wooden stairway, keeping their feet close to the wall to lessen the chance of the half-rotted wood collapsing. The top of the stairs seemed to open into an earlier century. Roy wandered along between cluttered tables, photographing the objects arranged on them, and occasionally brushing the dust from one of the cards describing their use and origin.

"I could spend hours here," he said. "Not this trip. We have to be back before nightfall—or at least in sight of the airfield by dark." He pointed to one of the tables. "Pick out something compact, and bring each thing's card with it." Roy took down a wall-hanging that had been partly destroyed by generations of insects, and spread it on a small table. Next, he took a number of small articles and their cards — a compass, a sextant, a chronometer, then a number of photographs of old mining machinery, a model of a ship— and placed them carefully on the wall-hanging. "We can lift the lot by the corners," he said. They made three journeys down to the plane with the hanging loaded each time, stowing the articles in the back seats of the plane and on the floor. Then Vern glanced at his watch and said, "God, that took longer than I'd bargained for. Let's get the hell out of here." He slipped behind the controls. Roy grabbed the ropes attached to the chocks, flung them aboard, and climbed beside him, shutting the door as Vern opened the throttle and surged forward up the road. He taxied quickly along the road until he came to a long, straight stretch without trees too close to the edges, then he pushed the throttle lever forward to its limit. The three landing-wheels jolted over the uneven surface of the road. The brown haze cut visibility down to less than a thousand metres, and Roy found himself staring fixedly at the last visible point on the road ahead. Trees loomed out of the murk, close against either side, and at what seemed to be the last possible moment Vern pulled the controlwheel back. They climbed, the upper branches dropping slantingly back almost beneath their wheels. Vern climbed to about five hundred metres, then swung eastward. Again, after a few minutes, they passed over the bronze sheen of Lake Eppalock, and by that time their altitude had risen to 800 metres. "I'll signal them tomorrow," said Roy thoughtfully. "What's that?" yelled Vern above the steady roar. Roy raised his voice. "The satellite goes over just before sunrise tomorrow. I'll signal them with the light. Tell them we have something for them." "Good!" Vern flashed him a quick glance, somehow looking ten years younger. "Let's hope it buys us immortality." "To live forever. Keep your fingers crossed." The sun was very low to the horizon when they first reached the line of pylons. "Home and hosed," said Vern. "We follow these all the way to Dederang. From there, we can get home in the dark." "Can you land in the dark?" "Sure. Got halogen lights. See?" Vern flicked a switch momentarily, and out along either wing of the aircraft a brilliant silvery light shone forward briefly. Roy looked down ahead of them at their blurred shadow, skimming like the ghost of a giant bird across the brown haze. As the sun sank lower in the reddening western sky, its disc grew broad and distorted. "Wouldn't we be better higher up?" asked Roy. "Don't want to lose track of the pylons. They get harder to see as the sun goes further down." A ridge ahead forced them to climb. Very close below them and a little to the left was the pylon with the wooden lookout station built on to it.

"Look there," shouted Vern. "Someone on it." Roy had the impression of three or four figures with a swivel-mounted device like a huge crossbow, made evidently with truck springs and steel cable, with some kind of geared winch to draw it. Just as he realised what it was, a sharp, metallic impact shook the whole aircraft. Vern made a convulsive movement, with the beginning of a harsh cry that was somehow cut off short. His hands came off the controls. "What's wrong?" yelled Roy. Vern's eyes were shut. His mouth was open, and blood began to stream from his lips. Roy reached over to take hold of him, and found hot blood on his hands. Only then, stupefied with horror, he saw a thin iron bar coming through a hole in the left-hand door of the aircraft and passing into Vern's ribcage. The aircraft was nosing downward towards a tree-covered slope, and its left wing was tilting down. Frantically, Roy gripped the control wheel on the right side and pulled it back towards his chest. The speeding-up of the engine as the plane began to dive now abated again, but the tilt to the left grew more pronounced, and the machine seemed to be sliding down the plane of its wings towards the left. The nose swung down in the beginning of a spin, and the sloping sides of the forested mountains reeled slowly around. "Vern! What the hell do I do?" Even as he said it, he knew that neither Vern nor anyone else could help him. He was curving down into a valley, now, with forests sloping up above him on every side. He knew that if the machine spun now he was finished. Gingerly, he swung the control wheel to the right, bringing the left wing up, at the same time pulling the wheel back against his chest. He kicked the rudder hard over against the direction of the spin, and gradually the line of flight straightened out. Straightened—but he was still heading downward into a darkening valley. The branches of the higher trees seemed to clutch at him like twisted fingers. Then he was flying level. Now the right wing dropped, but he brought it up again. With the mountains rising above him all around, he was unsure what was horizontal. There was an instrument near the centre of the panel with a small image of an aircraft on it—the thing Vern had called the artificial horizon—but he was so close to the trees that he couldn't take his eyes off them long enough to see how the instrument worked. The wheel was slippery in his hands, and he realised for the first time that both his palms and the wheel were covered with a mixture of sweat and blood—his own sweat, and Vern's blood. He wiped one hand after the other quickly against his trousers, but the wheel remained warm, wet, slippery. Suddenly, looking at the V-shaped area of sky where the slopes to the sides of the valley overlapped, he saw horizontal strata of cloud, and he kept his eyes on these, bringing the wing-tips level by using the cloud-base as a reference. Carefully, he brought the nose of the machine up, climbing out of the dark valley on a gradual incline. Abruptly, the whole cabin was flooded with the reddish sunshine of the late afternoon. He was out in clear air. Only then was he able to reach over to Vern. His head lolled to one side, and he was not breathing. The metal rod from the giant crossbow, probably driven by the stored energy of several men, had pierced the metal door of the plane and then slanted up through Vern's lungs and heart. Roy could not get his

body off the rod. Setting his teeth he moved his left foot across and pushed Vern's feet back, clear of the rudder pedals. He climbed higher. He looked round for the line of pylons, but could not see them. The mountains all looked much the same, and his fuel gauge showed that his tanks were less than a quarter full. And the reddened sun was almost on the horizon.

SIX Worried that he might be using more fuel than in level flight, Roy kept his angle of climb very shallow, gaining perhaps forty or fifty metres for every thousand metres he travelled forward. The timbered valleys below him were quite dark, now, except for a distant red spark that must have been a Perm camp fire. He kept looking eastward, and at last, above the nearer ranges, he could see the bare, sunlit summits of Kosciusko, Townsend, and the Ram's Head, still in the sullen glare of the setting sun. He headed straight towards the dip in the ridge near the Ram's Head—Dead Horse Gap, where it had all started. God, he thought, it seemed months ago that he had waited with Stevo in the guard-hut at Thredbo 2, while the Perm motor-cyclists came up around the bend in the road. Yet how long was it? Hardly more than twenty-four hours. The fuel supply looked dangerously low as he climbed towards the Gap. His heart pounded. Once over the ridge, he was safe. He could make some kind of landing if he kept near the road, and he would be in Heights territory. Now that the immediate danger was over, he looked again at Vern, feeling his wrist for some trace of a pulse that he knew, in the analytical part of his mind, had stopped soon after the metal arrow had slammed through the door into his body. He felt a savage anger directed towards all the Perms of the Outlands—and then, because it had no specific target, his rage burned itself out. After all, the Perms, like his own people, were trying to survive in an environment grown hostile—no, not so much hostile as indifferent. Like the people of the Heights, they survived through a paranoid fear of anyone outside their own group. Immature, all of them. Emotionally immature. It was as if real mental and emotional maturity could flower only in an environment man had under his control. His altimeter showed nearly 1,500 metres when he flew across the narrow silver strand of the Murray River, which flowed northward at this point. The Gap was still above him, and the needle of his fuel gauge was almost at zero. The range towered in front of him like a giant rampart, flame-lit along its eroded crest, dark on its vast, timbered slopes. He kept his eyes fixed on the Gap, listening for any hesitation in the engine. He went over the Gap with his altimeter showing just 1,600 metres, and the wings of the aircraft rocked violently with the uptrend of air from the ground only a few metres below him. He let out his breath in a shuddering sigh, suddenly aware that he had been holding it in. It was almost dark this side of the ridge, and he followed the Ram's Head Range down towards the Jindabyne Reservoir until he saw its metallic streak of water ahead of him in the gloom. He swung northward. Adaminaby, and the airfield, lay little more than thirty kilometres from here, with

no major mountains between. He followed the valley of the Eucumbene River, climbing because he knew that somewhere ahead of him a set of transmission lines spanned the valley. He knew he was clear of them only when he saw the curved wall of the Eucumbene Dam ahead of him. He climbed until he could see the pent-up water beyond it, and the sweat trickled down his face as he realised that he would have to cross the lake with an almost empty fuel tank. The edges of the lake were steep and heavily wooded, with nowhere an aircraft could have been set down. He could only fly up the arm of the lake—a broad band of water stretching ahead of him for ten kilometres or more. He looked once at the gauge, which now had its needle right on zero, then he did not look at it again, but kept his attention on the water ahead, looking for a possible landing place at either side. There was none. He passed over the site of Old Adaminaby, the town which had been submerged when the lake had filled with water after the completion of the dam, back in the mid-twentieth century. In a couple of places, old roads ran down into the water. Ceasing to serve any purpose as roads, they had later been used as launching ramps for boats. Suddenly, his engine spat and crackled. He throttled back and put the nose down, switching on the powerful landing lights. They lit up one of the old roads where it climbed out of the water. Sweating, he dropped until his wheels were almost brushing the still water. Then he opened the throttle wide and headed straight for the rising road. The engine faltered, and then the slope of the road slammed up against his landing wheels—the nose-wheel first, then all three. As the aircraft bounced and jolted up the slope, the engine cut out completely. He swung off the road under some overhanging trees, pulled the wheel brakes on, and switched off the lights and the ignition. The silence hit him with an almost physical impact. He opened the door, stepped out and leaned on the strut supporting the wing, looking back over the still water. Deep, that water. Had the engine run out of fuel a minute earlier, he might well have been at the bottom of it. He thought of moving Vern's body, then decided against it for the moment. He felt intensely depressed. For Vern, it had all been for nothing. One minute, the lure of immortality. The next minute, sudden, violent death. No one seemed to have heard the plane land. He looked around the darkening skyline. No lights showed anywhere, and he could hear no sound of engines. He shivered in the cold wind that blew in across the lake, and suddenly the power of movement seemed to come back to him. Quickly, he took the museum artifacts and his camera from the plane, and hid them in the grass behind a fallen tree some distance away from the road. Then he took the powerful light he had brought from the airport, and hid that alongside the other things. He wiped the right-hand control-wheel free of blood with a handful of grass, which he threw into the lake. Then he began running through the darkness, up the road towards the airfield. As he ran, he weighed possible future lines of action against each other. His first thought had been to get Vern to a hospital as soon as possible, but even before he had left the aircraft he realised that was pointless. He ran over the things that seemed to him essential. He had to contact the satellite tomorrow morning, and when he did that he had to have the light to signal his message, and the museum articles to back up his claim. That meant that he had to come back here with the truck. The position of Vern's body in the plane would be hard to account for. Obviously, he had been shot

from the ground with an extremely powerful crossbow. This had to have happened outside the perimeter of the Heights. It would be obvious to anyone that the impact of the steel shaft, driving almost completely through his body in the region of the lungs and heart, must have killed him nearly instantaneously. Yet the aircraft must have flown about a hundred kilometers after the shot, to have reached Lake Eucumbene and crossed it. A hundred kilometres through the highest mountain system in Australia—with the pilot dead at the controls. Would anyone believe that? As he ran, Roy found he was actually shaking his head. The road began to climb, forcing him to drop his speed to a brisk walk. It was now almost dark, with the reflected glow of the rising moon outlining the ridge ahead of him. At the top of the ridge, he rested for a couple of minutes sitting on a log and looking down towards the airfield. They had some of the runway lights on, and the radar dish was turning, endlessly scanning the full circle of the horizon. The moon was just above the eastern horizon, a swollen orange globe with the black, spinning radar dish outlined against its glare. Looking at the dish, Roy realised they must have turned it on to see if they could pick up the Cessna. They must have been unable to detect it—otherwise the radar dish would not be turning. Looking back, he could see why. He had flown up the valley below the dam, cleared the dam by only a few metres, then flown nearly dead level across the lake before landing on the road running up out of the water. He began running again as soon as he had recovered his breath, jogging loosely towards the level land near the airfield. He did not go to the one building where lights were showing, but first went to his truck and loaded the producer-hopper with charcoal. Then he went along to the lighted room, opening the door and looking from one to the other of the two men inside. "Hi, Bruno. Jake. Where's Vern?" "He went out on a flight. Hasn't come back." Bruno looked at him questioningly. "I thought you were with him?" "Me? No. I called in and saw him here earlier today. I was going to see him tonight." He looked up through a window. "Notice you had the radar running. Is that for Vern?" "That's right. Nothing showing." The other man, Jake, indicated a radar screen in the corner of the room. "Listen," said Roy, "I thought I heard a plane somewhere out along the Cooma road." Bruno stood up. "Sound all right?" "Sounded as if he might be running short of fuel. The sound just stopped." "Any sound of a prang?" "Didn't hear any." Bruno looked at his companion. "Stick here with the screen. I'll take a run down the Cooma road in the Holden." He looked at Roy. "Coming with me?" "All right," said Roy. But when they were half way to Bruno's car, he said, "Wait on. Might be better if I took one of the other roads. Hard to be sure of the direction a sound is coming from in these mountains. You go down the Cooma road, I'll run down to the Lake in the truck, then come up the other road to meet you. If neither of us has found him, we can take it from there."

"OK. That doubles our chance of finding him quickly. Hope you're wrong, though. Don't like his chances if he had to land in the dark." After Bruno had driven off in the Holden, which had been adjusted to run on alcohol fuel, Roy left more laboriously in the charcoal burner. He headed back along the road he had come, climbing the ridge, then coasting down to where the aircraft lay. The distance seemed much shorter on wheels, even with the indifferent performance of the gas producer. He stopped near the Cessna, and looked it over carefully. Clearly, nobody had been here since he had left it. He got the lamp and the artifacts from behind the fallen tree, and loaded them out of sight in the truck cabin, in the space behind the seat. Then, without trying to move Vern's body, he drove back to the airfield and went straight to Jake, who was still looking at his radar screen. "Jake, I've found him. He's dead." "Dead? What happened?" Jake switched off the radar. "Looks as if the Perms got him with an arrow. Can you reach Bruno on the two-way?" "Not supposed to use it yet." Jake pointed to the sky. "Hell, this is an emergency." When Bruno returned, the three of them set off along the road towards the lake. Roy explained briefly what he thought had happened, as he sat in the back of Bruno's station wagon. "How could they get him from the ground with an arrow?" asked Bruno. "It wasn't an ordinary arrow you could fire from a handheld bow. Steel rod more than a centimetre thick, two metres long, aluminium fins on the tail. They must have fired it from a stationary bow. Went right through the duralumin door of the Cessna, bloody near right through Vern, I think." "But why'd they do a thing like that?" "Suspicion, I suppose. Vern was only telling me today, he saw a sort of wooden lookout post built on top of one of the old high-tension pylons down in Perm country. Might have been down this afternoon to check up on it." Bruno looked at Jake. "Ever mention it to you?" "No. Funny. He always reported everything he saw." "I think he mightn't have been sure of this," said Roy. They drove on in silence until the headlights picked up the distant insect shape of the Cessna. "Looks as if he just made it," said Bruno. "Came in across the lake." After they had felt for any pulse in the body, Roy took hold of the section of the steel arrow protruding outside the aircraft, put his foot against the pierced door, and pulled the arrow slowly out. He did it while the other two were still in the cabin, so that it would then be impossible for them to estimate how deeply the arrow had penetrated the body. He wiped the partly congealed blood from the shaft by rubbing it in the grass. He opened the left door of the machine, and together they lifted Vern's body carefully out. It was obvious that he was dead, but with the arrow out of the way it was no longer evident that he had died too quickly to bring the aircraft from the perimeter of the Heights a hundred kilometres in to this point before dying. "You were right, Roy," said Jake.

"Eh?" "About him running out of fuel. His gauge shows empty. He must have been making for the field. God, if he hadn't ran out of gas, he might have got to the field and we might have been able to help him." "Might have," said Bruno. "He's lost a hell of a lot of blood. Look, Roy, you've got it all over your jeans." "Funny," said Jake. "I haven't got much on me. Neither have you." "I tried to move him when I first got here," said Roy. "You know, before I went back to the airfield and asked you if you could radio Bruno." He looked at the body. "That suggests he may have been alive only a few minutes before I got here the first time, doesn't it?" "Yes," agreed the others simultaneously. "Well," said Bruno after a pause. "I'll put the seat down in the wagon, and we'll get him in the back. The three of us can ride in front." They were all very quiet on the way back to Adaminaby. Roy felt so tired that the world about him seemed unreal, yet to some degree he had a feeling of relief, like an out-of-condition runner who has just managed to get over the first hurdle in a race.

SEVEN It was after midnight when Roy drove his truck up the last climb into Cabramurra. He did not go to the town square, but swung on to the upper loop of road and drove around the side towards the sports ground, pulling up in front of his own house. The street lights of the whole town had been turned off, apparently through fear of advertising the presence of the place to the people in the satellite. As soon as he was certain there was no one else about, he transferred the airport light inside the house. He drew all the blinds to stop light from within showing outside—not for the benefit of the satellite people, but for his neighbours. Then he fitted the halogen light into the end of the long tube of thin metal, formerly a stove pipe. He aligned the lamp carefully within the tube and secured it there, so that it would throw a tightly concentrated beam that would not be visible to anyone away to one side of its target. Next, he took out an alcohol-powered, high-voltage generator, started it up, and ran it for a while to test it. While it ran, he improvized a spring-loaded switch that could enable him to tap out signals quickly on the light. He took all the equipment into a room which had no window that could be seen from the street or from any of the adjoining houses, connected it up, and tried the light through his special switch. The light was almost blinding in the enclosed space, and blue and yellow patches of after-vision danced in front of him for at least a minute, but he was well satisfied. He was sure the light could be seen from space. In his notebook, he composed a message in Morse code: VAYA. HAVE ARTIFACTS, HISTORICAL INFORMATION. MEET HERE. ROY. He looked at his watch. Nearly two o'clock. The satellite was expected to pass over before dawn. He yawned as he set his alarm clock at four o'clock. Two hours' sleep was better than nothing. He was just walking in to his bedroom when a knock sounded on the front door.

Hurriedly, he moved the generator and the signalling lamp out of sight, although he knew an organized search would bring everything into the open within minutes. Then he went to the front door, hesitated for a moment, then switched the outside light on and opened up. On the veranda stood Ev, the librarian. "I couldn't sleep," she said. "Saw your light." "Come in." He turned off the outside light, and stood aside for her to enter. Like most of the women of the Heights, she wore a long leather coat and boots. She stood in his small living-room with her hands in her pockets. "Like something to drink?" he asked, but she shook her head. He pointed to a chair, and as she sat down he sat opposite her. "I'm going to contact them this morning," he said. "How?" "I've borrowed a high-powered light from the airfield. I've fixed a switch so I can signal in Morse when they go over"—he glanced at his watch—"God, in three hours' time." "What are you going to tell them?" He took out his notebook and read the message he had coded: "Vaya. Have artifacts, historical information. Meet here, Roy." He yawned. "That should do it." Ev sat very still, stiffly upright. "What artifacts?" He took some of the quick-developing photos from his pocket and showed her a few. She looked at them, and then her eyes widened behind her glasses. "You were with Vern!" she said. "Yes. We flew out to Maldon, where the museum is." "And you killed him! To keep him from talking!" "What?" "I heard about it. Only a couple of hours ago. They're bringing news up by landline, and they said Vern had been killed." "What are you talking about? He was killed, yes. But he was killed by a Perm arrow." "In his plane? How can I believe that?" "Listen, I was with him when he was killed. It wasn't an ordinary crossbow arrow. A thing like a crowbar, fired from a bow made with truck springs. Would have a range of thousands of metres. I had to get the plane home myself." "But you can't fly a plane." "I can now. Not that it was the way I'd have wanted to learn." "Did you crash when you landed?" "No. Ran out of fuel." For a long time, she sat looking at him, stiffly erect, her hands still in her pockets, a bright spot of red on each of her pallid cheeks. "Would you like me to come with you when you send the signal?" she asked. "I don't know whether that would be wise, Ev."

"Why not? I've learned the code, now." "Someone else might see the signal being sent. I might have to move fast to keep one jump ahead of them." "I see. You think I'm not built for rough stuff." She gave a mirthless smile. "I suppose I'm not, really. But remember, I helped you with the code, and the historical data. If this immortality thing works, I want it for the two of us." "Three," he said. "Three?" He nodded. "Jill, you, and me. Would have been four, if Vern had lived. But three—I think they should agree to that." Her mouth tightened on one side, and for a few seconds the two sides of her face had quite different expressions. "If it's only for two, I have a good idea who's going to be left out." His tiredness gave place to sudden anger. "Listen, it may not work for any of us. They may not want my artifacts badly enough. They might tell me to throw them in the nearest river." He stood up. "You can trust me. If it works, it's for the three of us. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get a couple of hours' sleep before they come over." Reluctantly, she stood up. As they walked up to the front door, he said, "I won't put the light on outside. Don't want too much advertisement at this stage." "The moon's bright enough, anyway," she said. He opened the front door, and the bitterly cold wind of the Heights swept in. Ev went out on to the veranda, and down the two steps to the ground, moving her stiff leg down first to each step. As she turned at the bottom, she swung her leg forward. "They'll probably be able to fix this," she said. "I wouldn't doubt it. Listen, Ev, you go home and get together the things you have to trade. Want me to come along with you to your door?" "I'll be all right. I have this." She took a short-barrelled revolver out of the right pocket of her coat, spun it with her finger through the trigger guard, then slipped it back out of sight. "Hell, I didn't know you carried a thing like that. Can you use it?" "Of course. We have a lot of valuable material up at the library. I go out one of the back roads in the runabout every now and then, and practise." She waved to him as she turned. "I'll be all right." "Sure," he said. "I'll be in touch." He went inside and stretched out on the bed, without waiting to undress. He must have fallen asleep with the light still on. The next moment, it seemed to him, his alarm clock was ringing. He did a few quick physical exercises which seemed to do little good. Then, switching on an electric kettle, he opened the front door and carried the generator and the improvised signal lamp out to his truck. He started the charcoal burning, and switched on the electric blower, then went back inside and made a strong pot of the Heights-grown tea. Within a few minutes, he was heading out along the road towards Tumbarumba. The full moon was low in the western sky, its white radiance turning the landscape into a chill monochrome. He stopped well out of sight of the town near a stretch of level, open ground, then climbed into the back of the truck and started the generator. He looked at his watch. Perhaps half an hour, yet. He was irritated that he hadn't calculated more

closely—he could have had another fifteen or twenty minutes of sleep. He took out his notebook, with the coded message, and set it down near the signal-lamp with a small flashlight with a magnetic contact placed so that its beam could light the page. Then there was nothing to do but wait. Shivering a little in the pre-dawn cold, he looked up at the sky. Because of the brightness of the moon, only a relatively small number of stars were visible tonight, but their number must still have run into thousands. He wondered which of those points of light marked the home of the satellite people. Without warning, the brilliant man-made star came up over the horizon, climbing steadily up its slanting track. Roy checked the output of the generator, then lifted the signal lamp over the tail-gate of the truck, sighting the long, light-shielding tube at the satellite. He flashed out the signal, the dots and dashes coming into his memory with unexpected clarity and certainty: VAYA. HAVE ARTIFACTS, HISTORICAL INFORMATION. MEET HERE. ROY. He flashed it through a second time. A third. A fifth. Suddenly, after the eighth time, an answering green laser flash came from the satellite. Not yet facile enough to read it, he jotted it in his notebook, then translated it quickly under the light of the torch: WAIT THERE. COMING NOW. VAYA. He stared up into the sky, watching the undeviating movement of the satellite against the background stars. While it was still in sight, though sinking towards the horizon, he heard a strange, whistling sound from somewhere high in the air to the northward. Shading his eyes against the brilliant moonlight, he looked towards the sound, but could see nothing. The source of the sound seemed to swing round in an arc, dropping lower in the sky and at the same time falling in frequency, as if it were moving more slowly as it descended. Soon, it was low enough for the surrounding hillsides to reflect the sound from side to side, so that Roy lost track of its direction. He felt suddenly vulnerable, standing in the back of a stationary truck in open country, in bright moonlight, while someone—or something—he knew almost nothing about was coming to him. He found himself looking round in every direction, like a weathervane in a squall. When the machine came, he did not see it until it was within a few hundred metres of him. As he was looking in the direction the satellite had gone, a movement caught his attention right on the edge of his field of vision to the right. He whirled towards it. Something was coming in almost at ground level, silent as a gliding bird. It was quite different from anything he had expected. It was ovoid, dark, finned, in shape more like an aerial bomb than any aircraft he knew. It carried no lights, and its stubby wings were quite inadequate in area to have supported it at the speed at which it was travelling. His pulse hammered in his throat. There was no doubt, now, that he was face to face with a technology far, far ahead of his own, and he was shaken by a deep sense of insecurity. Some impulse prompted him to crouch down inside the truck, but he realised that would be taken as an advertisement of fear. He remained standing, facing the machine, which slowed in its flight as it drew nearer, stopping altogether about thirty metres away. He could not see what force was keeping it up. It hovered less than a metre above the ground, yet there was no blast of rotor-driven air beneath it as there would have been from a helicopter. The blades of

grass immediately below it lay flat, not as if they were flattened by wind, but as if they were weighed down by a great increase in their own weight. Again without any visible sign of force, it rotated in the air until the round front faced towards a clear area beside the truck. Only now, in the stillness, he could hear a faint, deep humming sound. There had seemed to be no windows in the thing, yet now, as it came alongside the truck, he could see dimly through the front of it, as if the whole forward third of the ovoid were made of dark glass. He had the impression of something sitting within, but he could make out no details of the figure. Slowly, he lifted both hands, keeping them open, with the palms towards the machine, and he gave a two-handed wave. "Hi," he said, feeling that he was being ridiculous. "I'm Roy." A hard, brilliant light shone on him from the upper part of the machine, and he had to shield his eyes. From the direction of the machine, a voice came to him. Unmistakably, it was Vaya's voice: "Could I see the artifacts, Roy?" He hesitated. "They're small. Do you want me to bring them there?" "First, just hold them up in the light." He climbed down from the body of the truck and opened the cabin. All the time, the beam of light moved so that the centre line of it was focussed on him. He pulled the seat-back forward and lifted out the articles he had brought from the museum, holding each one in its turn up in the cold blue-white radiance. "These are just samples," he said, holding his hand above his eyes and trying to see against the light. "I can show you a whole museum—an intact museum—filled with things from earlier periods." Abruptly, the light went out, leaving him in what at first seemed complete darkness, until his eyes adjusted to the moonlight again. Then Vaya's voice came to him again, with a tone of urgency. "Something coming. Get in." A door slid open in the right side of the machine, and Roy picked up the museum artifacts and stood, hesitating. A light came on within the machine, so that he could see the forward part of the interior. Strangely, although the nearer side of the hull looked dark and almost opaque, like black glass, the far side, where he could see it through the open door, seemed completely transparent. A wide bench-type seat ran across the machine, and on the left side—the side away from him—sat Vaya. He recognized her at once, although she was perhaps taller than he had expected from the television image. She wore a close-fitting blue leotard with boots and a segmented belt of metallic golden material. Her arms and shoulders were bare, and her long, red-gold hair swung as she turned to face him. She touched the seat alongside her. "Come in, Roy. Now." He climbed in and sat down, and the door immediately slid shut. Looking around him, he blinked. From inside, the walls, ceiling and floor of the cabin were all as transparent as clear glass, although from outside they had looked dark. A curved column of dark metal swept forward and upward in front of the seat, with two extended wings carrying instruments and controls to either side. Vaya touched some of the controls with her fingers, and the ground outside seemed to fall away from them with bewildering speed.

EIGHT To Roy, the strangest fact was that he felt no sense of movement. The land below swung round as it fell, as if the Earth had spun away from him while he and the machine had remained stationary. Leaning forward, he looked straight down between his feet, and unconsciously he gripped the seat. "Where are you taking me?" he asked. "Not far. To a temporary base we set up yesterday." "Did you come down from the satellite when I signalled?" "The what? Oh, satellite? I suppose you could think of it as that. We call it the starship. No, they relayed your signal, I was at our base further up these ranges." They were fully a thousand metres above the ground, now, and she swung the machine forward in a great curve towards the north and north-east. The speed was staggering, judging from the changing scene below, yet he did not feel it. "Why don't we feel the movement?" he asked. "Anti-inertia field," she said, as if that explained everything. She did not use foot controls to fly the machine—in fact, she did all the flying with the fingers of one hand on a complex pattern of keys and graduated dials. Watching her, Roy thought she looked even more beautiful than he had anticipated, and incredibly young. He decided to take the initiative. "I have a photograph of you—taken ninety years ago." "Where was it taken—back at your town?" She nodded. "That would be me." "Then you must be well over a hundred years old." "Well over." They were flying north-east, with the Fiery Range on the left and the higher ridge of the Brindabella Range ahead. To Roy, this marked the edge of his world. He had never seen what lay the other side of the Brindabella Range, although it was believed the capital of the entire continent had once been located there. "Then you must have some way of arresting ageing," he said. She didn't reply straight away, and he began to think he had pushed his luck too far, too fast. However, she did not sound irritated when she did answer him. "Yes, you could say we have a way of arresting ageing. Your people must have been quite close to it a couple of hundred years ago. We haven't been subjected to the same cultural breakdown as the people of the homeworld. We've been able to move ahead—in many ways. One of them is lengthening our lives." He sat for a while in awed silence, watching the ridge of the Brindabella come closer. "How long can you actually live?" To his surprise, she gave a sudden laugh. "We don't know, yet. We're still doing it." "You mean indefinitely? Say, until you make a mistake, have a fatal accident?" "That's right. Although the more experience we accumulate, the better we become at avoiding

accidents." They passed over the top of the range, and Roy saw that the far slopes of it were in darkness. Beyond was a deep, long valley, and then another range, the top of it catching the light of the setting moon. Along the crest of this far ridge, over a stretch of a couple of kilometres, shone a number of bright lights of a strange colour, white tinted with lilac. "Our temporary base," said Vaya, pointing. "I see," said Roy. "Listen, do your people ever make anyone else immortal?" "Under certain conditions—yes." "Could you do this for me, and for a few of my friends? Say, three or four of us?" "I'd have to confer with my people. Three or four?" "Well, three of us, anyway." Before she could reply, he rushed on: "In exchange for a whole, undisturbed museum filled with all the history you'd want. Immortality for three of us." She looked at him. "That's an odd number." "Myself, and two females." She nodded. "Mate and mother, perhaps?" "Mate, and another young woman." She smiled. "You're being either very civilized or very stupid, if I'm summing up correctly." She touched some controls, and the machine nosed downward slightly, dropping towards the line of lights on the ridge. Suddenly, as she pressed another key, the transparent front of the cabin seemed to change colour. The night sky became purple above a mountain range that glowed in red and orange as if made of hot metal. The lights showed sapphire blue, and there were other patches of bright red light among them. "What's happened?" yelled Roy, looking down at the range of what appeared to be red-hot iron below him. "Only a change of frequency. Translating infra-red octaves to visible light. I was looking for heat to see if my colleague was in the base." She smiled. "He was that patch of red." They swept over the ridge in a curve, and Roy saw a number of large domes of different sizes and modes of construction. "Did you build all these domes?" he asked. "No. They were there. That's what made us investigate. This place used to be an astronomical observatory. They called it Mount Stromlo. We were pleased to find it, because we have references to it in our own historical records." Near what appeared to be the largest of about fourteen or fifteen domes, at the northern end of the ridge, was a vacant area that must once have been a car park. She set the machine down alongside a much larger craft of similar type. "Our shuttle," she said, indicating it, as she opened the doors. Roy got out, shivering in the sharp, chill air coming up from the valley. The ground was bathed in an even glare of pale light, which came from about ten lights high in the air along the ridge. They were not mounted on poles. They seemed to float in the air, about fifty metres above the ground, brilliant, luminous discs throwing their light downward. Vaya led the way across to the largest dome. "Did you know about this place?" she asked.

"No," admitted Roy. "We never get up this far." "Each of these domes has an optical telescope. Primitive in design, but very good workmanship. The long building is a workshop." Inside, after they passed through a foyer, they came to the interior of the dome, dominated by a large telescope. Roy had seen pictures of similar instruments, but this was the first really big telescope he had encountered, and it was a few seconds before he noticed the man working at a table over against the far wall of the dome. As they entered, he walked round the mounting of the telescope to meet them. "Janro," said Vaya, "meet Roy—one of the people from the highlands." Janro was about the same height as Vaya, just slightly taller than Roy, lithe and athletic. He bowed to Roy in a manner that seemed Asian, and Roy bowed slightly in response. "Janro is not familiar with your dialect," said Vaya. "I'll explain to him what you've suggested." She turned to Janro and began speaking with unbelievable speed. Roy had the impression that the language she spoke was fundamentally English, but modified by a couple of centuries of development in a different direction from that taken by the branch of the language spoken by the people of the Heights. He caught the words "museum artifacts." They spoke between themselves for a time, occasionally interrupted by a similar voice from a speaker-box standing on a bench. Apparently some other person could hear them, and was joining in the conversation from somewhere else. At last, Vaya turned back to Roy. "We'd need to confer with our colleagues up in the starship. But it would be possible to make three of you immortal—provided your story of the museum proves true." Roy remembered the photographs he and Vern had taken in the museum, and he took them from his pocket and handed them to her. She looked through them quickly and passed them to Janro. He looked at them with the same rapid concentration, then walked across to the bench where the speakerbox stood, and held the photos one by one in front of a device like a small TV camera. A voice came from the speaker-box. Janro turned to Roy, lifting the photographs. "I keep for now?" he said in a questioning tone, but with a bizzarre accent. Roy made a gesture of assent. Suddenly Vaya put her hand on his arm. "One thing you should know. Extending your lifetime is not simple." "How do you mean?" "For one thing, we can't make three of you immortal, then leave you here." "Why not?" "It would unbalance the local ecology, and it is our rule never to do that." "How would it unbalance—?" "It would create a dichotomy of haves and have-nots, for a beginning." "We already have that—us, and the Perms." "True. But that conflict is solving itself without intervention from us. This would be different." Roy spread out his hands. "Well—what can you do?" "We could give you immortality if you came to our world. But you might not like that." "What's it like?" "We'd show you, before you made a final decision."

Roy hesitated. He pointed outside. "Is it anything like our world?" "Not very." "How's it different?" "Bigger. Geologically younger. But I'd better get you back. The starship will pass over your town an hour before dawn tomorrow. If you're ready to go ahead, signal with the light as you did before. I'll come and pick you up within minutes in the large shuttle. We can fly out to pick up the artifacts." A minute or two later, they took off in the flier, as she called the smaller machine. The sun was just rising as they dropped towards the flat stretch of land where they had made contact. He could see the green truck like a child's toy by the side of the road. He got out of the flier and walked across to the truck, turning to wave to her. The flier lifted vertically at an incredible speed, swung towards the north-east, and disappeared like a bullet into the blue morning air. Roy started the gas producer burning, and while he was waiting for it to build up its flow he took the generator and the signal lamp out of the truck and hid them behind a log some distance away from the road. No one was likely to come along this road in the next twenty-four hours, so the equipment would be safe enough in its hiding-place. On the other hand, if he had left it in the truck, there was every chance that someone might notice it, and that might lead to awkward questions. As soon as he had a flow of gas, he drove back up the road to Cabramurra, tired but happy. The sun was well up by the time he reached the town. He rubbed his hand across his chin and was surprised at the harsh rasp of stubble. Better shave as soon as he reached home. No need to advertise the fact that he had been up practically all night—although if he had told anyone the full story they would think he'd been hitting the marijuana, a common enough occurrence in an area too cold to grow tobacco. He reached the town, and was just beginning his climb to the upper level when the truck belonging to the Council thundered down the incline past him. The back of it was packed with men, most of them holding laser rifles, a few of them metal crossbows. Some of them yelled excitedly to Roy as they passed, but he could not catch the words. He parked his truck in front of his house, then walked along to a trio of women who were standing talking on the sidewalk. "What was that truckload of the boys with rifles?" he asked. The most voluble of the women turned to him. "They picked up something on radar a little while ago. Going out to investigate." "Where was it?" "Someone said out along the old Tumbarumba road." One of the other women broke in. "But nobody goes out there now, do they?" "Perhaps that's why someone picked the place to land," said the first woman. "Reckon we're being invaded." The idea of invasion threw the women into a chatter of awed excitement. Roy gave a reassuring laugh. "If there is anyone invading us, the boys have enough laser rifles to handle any trouble. I'll see you later."

He began to walk back towards his house. Just as well he had reached the town before the truckload of armed men had left it. Had they met him coming back along the Tumbarumba road, he might have had some awkward questions to answer. He stopped in mid-stride, his mouth suddenly dry. The signal lamp and the generator! If their radar fix on the landing flier had been sufficiently precise, they would go straight to the stretch of flat ground where Vaya had left him. They would look around, searching for evidence of the machine landing. They wouldn't find it, of course, because it had never actually touched the ground. But they would find the tyre-marks of Roy's truck, where he had pulled off the road, backed, and turned. Then they would undoubtedly search the immediate vicinity; and the log where he had hidden his equipment was the most obvious hiding place within hundreds of metres. He sprinted to his truck and climbed into the cabin, switching on the blower to force the draft in the gas producer. As he waited for it to generate enough gas, he ran his hand over his chin again, but decided a shave could wait. The motor had been idle such a short time that he was able to bring it to life almost as quickly as if it were running on liquid fuel. Sweating, he headed out of town along the Tumbarumba road.

NINE He began planning his line of action in different scenarios as he drove along. If they had driven past the point where he had left the lamp and generator, he would pull up and quickly load them aboard his truck, then turn round and drive back towards Cabramurra. If no one saw him on the way, he would drive some distance down the steep, winding road towards the Tumut Number 1 power station, where the bush beside the road was so thick that there would be a thousand places to hide his gear. If they stopped short of the rendezvous point, he would drive past them, then turn where he had turned before, picking up the lamp and generator while he actually stopped in the middle of his turn. Unless, of course, they were close enough to see what he did… When he was a couple of kilometres out along the road, he saw a bright red vehicle in his rear-view mirror, rapidly overtaking him. Max Lang's car. Useless to try to outdistance Lang. He had the fastest machine in the Heights— an old racing Torana, many times rebuilt over the past two centuries, probably on its tenth or twelfth engine and gearbox. Max used an electric car normally, but in emergencies, when he had to move fast, he used the red car, burning the alcohol fuel they kept mostly for aircraft. Less than a minute after Roy had sighted him, he roared past him at perhaps a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, throwing a small stone that spanged against the body of the Ford, and giving Roy a cheerful wave without taking his attention away from the road. Soon he was only a vanishing cloud of dust on the road ahead, with a dwindling glimpse of bright red showing through it. When Roy finally came within sight of his meeting-place with Vaya, he saw that the worst of his projected scenarios had come true. The large Council truck had stopped beside the road almost at the same point where he had pulled off the road a few hours earlier. Opposite was Max Lang's car, and Max was standing in the middle of the road talking to some of the Council men. Others were walking about at various distances, mostly looking at the ground.

Roy could do nothing except drive on to join them—if he turned, or drove past, he would focus suspicion on himself. He slowed as he approached the group. Fifty or sixty metres beyond the Council truck was the point where he had pulled off the road, and he decided to run on to the same point, pulling off again with his wheels in the same wheel tracks. If no one had noticed them yet, there was a chance they would not look closely at the tracks afterwards, and would not realise that he had been there twice. Of course, he would have to reverse, exactly as he had done before, then drive back and stop near the other vehicles. As he drove slowly through the group, exchanging waves of greeting, a strange sensation of emptiness took hold of him. One of the men was standing with a signal lamp in his hands, while three or four others examined it. Nearby, on the ground, was the generator. He drove slowly on until he saw his own tracks made that morning, then swung carefully off the side of the road, putting his wheels in the same marks as closely as he was able to judge. Then, watching intently in the rear-view mirror mounted on the outside of the cabin, he reversed, again in his own tracks, then swung round and drove back thirty or forty metres towards the others. He climbed out and walked straight up to the little group in which Max Lang was standing. "Hi," he said. "What have you found?" "The radar boys say this is where something came down this morning, then took off again," said Max Lang. "Now, if looks as if some bastard was signalling to them. Look at that!" With an explosive burst of energy, he flung his arm towards the lamp. Roy looked at it with feigned interest. "Something of theirs, or something of ours?" he asked. "Ours," said one of the other men, a tall, gaunt man with prominent eyes and a bulging Adam's apple. "That's an airport light—only someone's stuck a bit of pipe on the end of it." Roy continued to look at the lamp, his mind racing. Only Vern had known he had taken it from the airport, and Vern was dead. There was nothing to connect him with it. He looked at Lang. "What sort of aircraft landed here?" he asked. "We don't know. All they had was a radar trace. It suggested something about the size of the old Beech Queenair— you know, the ten-passenger job with the twin engines. But it didn't behave like any aircraft the radar boys had ever tracked. Faster than anything we have—probably faster than anything we've ever had—and capable of climbing vertically like a rocket." He spread his arms wide in exasperation. "Yet nobody heard any rocket blast." "Some of them heard a whistling sound," said the man with the Adam's apple. "But not loud. Not loud enough for a rocket, anyway." One of the younger men edged a bit closer to the group. "Ay, Roy," he said, "isn't that like your generator?" Roy looked at the generator. "Yes, I have got one of those. Think it's down at Jindabyne—I know I used it there a few months ago." "This isn't yours, then?" Roy bent over the unit and looked at it closely. "I can't honestly say. It could be. But there are several like this that I know of." "Wonder why it was left here," mused Max Lang. Roy looked at him. "That's fairly obvious, isn't it? Someone used these things to signal the thing you

picked up on the radar, then went aboard it and away. No further need for this—so he left it here." Lang's brows formed a deep letter V. He stared at the generator. "Then how the hell did he get it here? There was no vehicle here when we came. Did he walk all the way out from Cabramurra with it?" He looked around, then raised his voice to a roar. "Here, boys. I want you all to hear this." He waited while the group assembled about him. Then he looked slowly around them as if gathering in their attention. "Now, I don't have to remind you fellows of your history. You know we, here in the Heights, are in a sense the custodians of human civilization. A civilization that began thousands of years ago. A civilization that reached its peak two centuries back. But, most important, a civilization that will flower again, spreading out over the world from here." He waited, his eyes sweeping the group, and there was a faint murmur of agreement. "We have a responsibility here," he went on. "A responsibility to the future. We must keep our way of life intact, uncontaminated from other sources. Right?" This time the murmur was a definite assent. "Now," he said, and the word cracked like a whip. "Someone has contacted these people from beyond space. With this lamp." He indicated the lamp with controlled fury. Roy, while shocked at the man's paranoia, grudgingly admired his sense of timing, of drama. "Tell you what we'll do," said Lang, suddenly calm and businesslike. "You, you—and you three—and Bill—I want you to go back to Cabramurra and collect every movable light in the town. Even handheld flashlights. Label each one so we can return it to its owner when this blows over and we can get back to our business of normal living. I want you to visit every house—right?" "Got it," answered the man called Bill. "Okay. There's nothing more we can do here. You take the Council truck, Bill, and the team collecting the lights. I can take three of you in the Torana." "I can fit a few on my truck, Max," volunteered Roy. "Thanks, Roy. Bit crowded with me." Lang's expression showed quick professional gratitude. No suspicion—or were his hard eyes just a little more penetrating than usual? Several of the remaining men moved towards the green truck with Roy, who turned after a few steps and looked back at Lang. "Oh, Max—want me to take that lamp and generator back for you?" "It's all right, Roy. I'll fit it in the boot." He opened the boot of the Torana and stowed away the generator and the lamp. Roy waved to him and went on his way to his truck. Two of the others crowded into the cabin with him, and another rode in the back. He waited to let Max Lang drive off, and in a minute the red car had almost vanished along the dusty road ahead. "Wonder who sent that signal?" said the youth sitting next to Roy. "Could have been almost anyone," said Roy. "I don't know about that," said the chunky man sitting on the far seat. "Only a limited number of people would have had access to a lamp like that—or a generator." "Anyone could have taken the generator—I have one of those myself," said Roy. Suddenly he laughed. "At least— I think I have. Have to check up when I get back to Jinda. Somebody could have knocked off mine."

All three of them laughed, as if they were slightly intoxicated by the release of tension, and for the rest of the journey into Cabramurra Roy felt more relaxed than he had been for many hours. After he had dropped the others off on the lower road, he climbed in bottom gear to the upper level and parked the truck in front of his house, switching off the engine and yawning as he climbed out. Sleep was the thing that dominated his mind as he walked up onto the veranda, but he was jolted awake again as he saw a piece of folded paper pushed into the crack of the door. It was a note in Jill's handwriting: Roy darling, Arrived this morning with Snowy—he wanted to be where it was all happening! Have left him walking up and down the passage at HQ swearing and waiting for Max Lang. Now I'm going along to the library. Love, J. He folded the note and pushed it back into his pocket. The library! That meant she would be talking with Ev. Without waiting to go in to his house, he turned and walked quickly along to the library. Outside it was parked the small orange electric runabout that Ev sometimes drove. He walked in to see Jill talking, as he had expected, with Ev, sitting on one corner of the desk while Ev leaned back in her chair. They both looked at Roy as he went in, and Jill ran to meet him. They kissed, and she recoiled with a startled yelp. "Hey! Don't you shave any more?" "Sorry. I've been—busy." He rasped his fingers across his chin. "Anyway," she said, feeling her face with her fingertips, "here I am. Looks as if you were right." "Right?" "About something big happening here. Ev's just been telling me they think someone's made contact with the satellite people." "Yes?" He glanced at Eve, who was looking straight at him. Behind Jill's back, she shook her head warningly. "May be only a rumour," went on Jill. "The Council don't know who it was." He took her arm. "I know a bit about this. Come on— I'll tell you about it on the way down to my place." Ev cut in, her voice shaking like a taut wire. "Why not tell her here? Better if we all pool our knowledge." Before Roy could divert the conversation, Ev stood up, leaning forward with her hands on her desk. "I know who made the contact. It was him. Ask him to tell you about his special signalling lamp. He spent most of last night putting it together." Jill looked at Roy, her eyes wide, skittering from one of his eyes to the other. "You did talk about getting in touch with them," she said in a low voice. Roy looked from Jill to Ev, then back again. "Yes, she's right. It was me." Jill looked pale under her tan. "If Snowy finds out, he'll probably try to get you killed," she said, and Roy had the feeling she was not exaggerating. He looked at Ev.

"May as well tell both of you everything I know," he said. "If I can get this to work, I want Jill with me." He looked back at Jill. "Ev, too. She helped me with a lot of details. The code I used, and some old pictures of an earlier trip the same people made here, ninety years back." Ev was coldly furious. "Why not bring in the whole of the Heights? You know what'll happen. They just won't do it." "Won't do what?" snapped Jill. Without answering immediately, Roy walked to the open front door of the library, stepped out into the porch and looked up and down the street. He could see nobody. Coming back inside, he closed the door, locked it, then walked back towards Ev's desk, picking up a couple of chairs on the way and setting them down for Jill and himself. He waved to the two girls to sit down, and when they did so he joined them. "We've stumbled on something very important," he said to Jill. "You remember Vaya? The redhead on their TV broadcast? Now, look at this." He took the photograph from his pocket. "That was taken ninety years ago. See how everything in the picture has changed? Except the stone building, and Vaya." "We figure she's 120 years old, at least," said Ev. Roy glanced at her. "A lot more than that, actually. I've found out more since I saw you last." He looked at Jill. "The point is, these people seem to have hit on a technique of stopping the ageing process. I think they could live literally forever, barring accidents." Jill looked at him with her lips parted, a slight frown creasing her forehead. "Forever," she said. "But there must be a catch." Ev gave a short laugh. "That's what I said!" "There is a catch," admitted Roy. "But it mightn't be insuperable. Listen! I did more than signal them this morning. I met them. Two of them, anyway." "You met them?" Jill stared at him in disbelief, and Ev leaned forward across her desk. "You mean the two people we saw on the TV? Vaya and Kalman?" "Vaya, yes. Not Kalman—I met another of their men, fellow called Janro." "How? Did they come down from space?" "Actually, no. They've got a temporary base on the ground, only about eighty kilometres away from here. It's up the other side of the Brindabella Range. Place where they built an observatory once." "You mean Mount Stromlo?" asked Ev. "That's right. Do you know it?" "I've read about it. Are the telescopes still there?" "Yes—but the point is, Vaya picked me up in one of their fliers, as they call them. Damned if I know how the thing flies—no propellors, no jets—but it travels quicker than a bullet. She flew me up to this Mount Stromlo to meet this fellow Janro." "Are they as physically perfect as they seem on TV?" asked Ev. "They are. A bit taller than I thought. Even the woman would be slightly taller than me, I'd say. Perfect skin, both of them. No wrinkles. No crepe. And yet they've been round for more than a century. Anyway, I sounded them out about the possibility of treating three of us to stop ageing. They didn't knock me back—but there are some conditions…"

"Conditions? What conditions?" asked Jill. "For one thing, they wouldn't make us immortal and leave us here. They'd only do it if we went with them to their own planet." "We couldn't do that. Could we?" Jill exchanged frightened glances with Ev. Roy looked from one to the other. "We could. Whether we'd want to is another matter." "What's their planet like?" "I asked that. Funny, though, they didn't tell me much, now I come to think of it. Not much like Earth, they said. Younger, geologically, whatever that implies." "You mean active volcanoes? Earthquakes? Or what?" said Ev. "Frankly, I don't know. I was only with them a short time. When she brought me back, that's when our radar boys picked up the flier on their screens. No wonder it rocked them. The thing flies faster than anything they've ever imagined." "What did you talk about, while you were with them?" asked Jill. "About immortality for three of us—in exchange for what I had to trade." "And what was that?" "The things in an old museum. Out in central Victoria. Vern knew where it was. We flew out and—" He stopped speaking as Jill drew back from him, her face looking pale and somehow smaller. "Vern?" she said. "Yes. Vern from Adaminaby. He—" "But he was killed! I heard it. Late yesterday." She stood up. "What have you done?" "What d'you mean?" "They said he was killed. Look, Roy, I know the chance of immortality is very important to you—but —what's it done to you?" "I don't think he killed him, Jill," said Ev. "But you know I didn't," he almost shouted, turning to Ev. "I know you said you didn't. Anyway, Jill knows you better than I do." He flung his arms wide in a volcanic blast of anger. "Look—this is bloody ridiculous! How the hell would I kill anybody?" Both of them were looking at him as if they weren't sure they had seen him before, and it occurred to him that the conclusion they had leaped to was a reasonable one; also, that he wasn't helping his image much by showing rage. "I could understand it, Roy," said Jill in an even, controlled voice. "You kill Perms as part of your work of defence. You have to, otherwise we'd be overrun and die out. But I suppose that makes it a small step to killing someone else—when there's an important enough reason." "Look—I can only kill Perms by thinking of it as preserving our race. I do it at a distance, generally, with a laser, and I use very dark goggles." "But the day before yesterday—was it?—you had to kill one hand-to-hand, with a knife."

"I know. I know. That's when it all started to look different." He tried to change his mood by physically shaking himself, like a dog after a swim. "Anyway, Vern was flying the aircraft, and the Perms shot him with a big crossbow— I had to teach myself to fly the thing before it spun down into the ground. Must have been the shortest flying course I've ever heard of." He went on to tell Jill and Ev all the details of the flight home with the fuel running low. "I believe you, darling," said Jill suddenly, in the middle of one of his sentences. "I just had to be sure." But she did not make any attempt to touch him. She smiled at him, but somehow the smile did not change the expression in her eyes.

TEN The idea of immortality seemed to grow slowly in Jill's mind. At first, it obviously seemed to her an impossibility. Ev found it easier to accept, because she had read more about the biological work that been carried out in the twentieth century and earlier. Roy was completely convinced. He had seen the old pictures of Vaya, and he had met her in person. "But you're basing everything on one picture," objected Jill."The woman might simply look like her grandmother." "More than one picture. Show her those others, Ev." "I've moved them. Somewhere safe, where no one can see them." "No matter." He took the copy from his pocket and put it in front of Jill. "Play it carefully, and you could live five hundred, a thousand years—and you'd never grow old." "Not grow old? Ever?" "Look at the picture. A few hours ago, I was in the same room as her—sitting alongside her in her aircraft. She seems no older than you." For a long time, Jill stared at the picture. Suddenly Ev stood up. "This needs celebrating. I've got some vintage instant coffee hidden away back here." In the adjoining room, she turned on an electric kettle. "It's not confirmed, yet," said Roy quietly. "But they as good as offered it to me—and a partner." "You mean me?" She put her hand to her cheek. "Always young. With you. Both of us, always young." Abruptly, she turned away. "No!" He was startled. "What d'you mean—no?" "There has to be a catch. There must be. Nothing's ever as good as that." "But Ev and I checked the other photos against the TV tape. Vaya was filmed here before we were born —even before old Snowy was born." "You said we'd have to go to their world." He nodded. "I admit, I don't know much about it—but they said they'd show us before we made up our minds." "H'mm."

"Look, at least it's not dying, the way our world is. We know one thing about it. They live on it." He made an angry gesture. "You'd want any kids of ours to have a future, wouldn't you?" She looked at him intently. "Would they be able to adapt?" "Kalman's and Vaya's and Janro's people did. And while we're struggling hard just to keep from slipping back into extinction, they seem to have moved a long way ahead. Far enough ahead to make excursions from one star system to another. I doubt if our descendents would ever be able to do that again, if they stayed here on the Earth." She looked thoughtfully across the room, her eyes unfocussed. "That's where it's all happening, Jill," he said. "Up there." She looked at his pointing finger, then lifted one corner of her mouth in a peculiar little smile that was individually hers. "How do you know that's the right direction, Roy?" she asked earnestly. "Oh, hell…" He began, then suddenly they were both laughing. They were still laughing when Ev came back into the room with her three mugs of steaming vintage coffee. Roy touched his mug against Jill's and raised it. "To the next generation, Jill. Wherever it is." "Wherever," she agreed. For a moment, her face was vividly alive. Almost like Vaya's. Throughout the day, tension mounted in Cabramurra as the hunt for the person who had contacted the satellite intensified. Shortly after Roy reached his home a knock sounded on the front door. One of the younger Council men stood on the veranda. "Sorry to disturb you, Roy, but have you got any movable lights?" "A torch, I think. I'll get it for you." He gave the man the smaller of his two electric torches. The man put a label on it and wrote Roy's name on it. "We'll get it back to you as soon as things are normal," he said. Watching him go, Roy wondered why he had kept his larger torch—it was hardly powerful enough to throw a beam that could be picked up from the starship. That brought his mind back to the problem of communicating with the ship when it passed over before dawn the following morning. He had to get a movable light of considerable power from somewhere, but as yet he hadn't the faintest idea where. He took a shower, then slept with his alarm clock nearby until three o'clock in the afternoon. He awoke with the bell jangling down to silence, its spring almost completely spent. He yawned, stretched, and exercised for a while, his mind slowly coming into focus on his problems again. A movable light was essential. While he shaved, for the first time in over sixty hours, listening to his electric razor snarling its way through the unaccustomed growth, he tried to think of all the usable lights he had seen around Cabramurra. The trouble was that Max Lang's boys had been infernally enthusiastic, judging from the visit he'd had. As he was pulling on a pair of black jeans, the glimmer of a solution came to him. He remembered a number of standard lamps that Barry and his associates used down at Alternative Power Engineering. They used them when they needed bright light in tight corners in their work. Each consisted of a heavy iron stand, a vertical steel rod, and a movable arm with a reflector and a high-powered globe. The generator would be a problem—but first, the light. He could always send his signal from somewhere on the ordinary 240-volt network that covered the town, if a generator proved too hard to get.

He put on a sweater and a leather jacket, and walked out of the town and down the winding road through the gorge of the Tumut River. Although it was early summer the air was still cold in the town, but as he went down into the gorge, where the bush was laced with the yellow flame of wattles, he took off his jacket and slung it over one shoulder as he walked along. Barry was working himself on one of the turret lathes as Roy went in to the roaring metallic clangor of the workshop, with its old-fashioned, spinning line-shafts and flapping belts. He looked up as Roy drew close to him. "Hi," he said. "Hold it a minute till I finish this cut." Roy stood by, watching Bary's practised precision of movement as he withdrew a drill from the casting, spun the turret and started a boring-bar feeding slowly in, at the same time winding the toolpost in to make a facing traverse. He leaned forward. "Couldn't you do with a bit more light on that?" Barry nodded, without taking his eye from the spiral of metal coming from the cutting-tool. "Be better. Yes." "Where's one of those standard lamps you have around? Can I get you one?" Barry shook his head. He wound the toolpost back, then stopped the movement of the boring-bar and threw his weight on to the big wheel that slid the turret out, turning to look at Roy. "Stupid bastard from the Council collected them all this morning. Any light that you could move." "What the hell for?" "They reckon some nong signalled to the satellite with a light, so they've grabbed any light that moves. Reckon it's a state of emergency! Delusions of grandeur, I'd call it. Meanwhile, we've got to work in the dark. Anyway, what was it you came to see me about?" "Oh, nothing urgent." With the lights gone, his visit had become pointless. He saw the Perm's motorcycle he had left here the previous day, now leaning against a wall. "Suppose you haven't had time to look the bike over?" "Not yet." "Could I try it out with some of our alcohol fuel in it?" "It's expensive stuff." "I know. This could come under research." Barry stopped the lathe by the long-handled fork that shifted the driving belt to a loose pulley, then dried his hands on a piece of waste and led the way to a store-room. "Several different grades of fuel here," he said. "Some of it's straight methanol—in the red cans. The yellow can's a mixture." "Can I take a red can and a yellow? Try it each way, or mix it." "Okay." Roy tipped some of the fuel into the tank of the Perm bike, and strapped the two cans on to the carrierrack. A burst of music sounded suddenly from a loud speaker near the roof of the workshop—the few bars of music that always preceded the news broadcasts. Obviously, this was being land-lined. Roy sat astride the motor-cycle, and turned on the fuel, resting his foot on the old-fashioned kick starter. Three or four times, he kicked vigorously, then he stopped to adjust the choke. "Reckon you've flooded it," said Barry. "Uh-huh. I'll let her dry out for a minute."

The broadcaster's voice came clearly through the shop. "This is an emergency newscast. Repeat, this is an emergency newscast. There's been a new development in the mystery of the contact made with the satellite people—" Roy brought his full weight down on the starter, and the engine roared, echoing like thunder within the iron-walled building, and completely drowning out the broadcast. Barry made downward movements with one hand, pointing with the other to the loud speaker, his mouth open as he shouted an unheard protest to Roy. Roy, deliberately misunderstanding him, gave him a cheerful wave, dropped the clutch and rode out of the workshop and up the winding road out of the gorge. He rode in to Cabramurra, leaving the machine outside his house and walking up the short path to the veranda. As he stepped up towards the front door, Jill's voice called to him. Turning, he saw her walking round the corner of the house from beneath an overhanging screen of bushes. "Jill," he said, but she did not smile. Her face was pale and set. "Max Lang's looking for you—did you know?" "Why?" "They seem to think it must have been you who sent that signal. They identified the generator as yours, and they know the light came from Adaminaby airfield. And you—" He raised his hand. "Okay. Looks as if I'd better be out of town for a while. Here." He took a quick step forward, threw his arms round her, and kissed her. At first, her lips seemed to writhe against his. Then she returned his embrace and they stood close together. She tilted her head back. "When am I going to see you?" "Where can I get in touch with you tonight?" "I'm staying in a room in the place next to HQ." "I can't go there. I'd better get in touch with you through Ev." "Oh! I almost forgot. Let go of me a second." She took a key with a bright plastic label from her pocket, and handed it to him. "That's the key to the Tumut Number One power station—the underground one." "Where'd you get it?" "Ev gave it to me to give you. They store some of their library material down in the tunnels, and she thought it might be a good place to hide out." "Could be a real trap down there if they knew I was there." "I know. Can you trust Ev?" "I don't know. I think I can, up to a point. I don't think she'd be able to contact the Outworlders herself —and I've already met them. Naturally, she wants to live a thousand years, as anyone would, given the chance. And she needs me to be able to put her in touch with them when the time comes. Yes, I think I can trust her." Jill nodded. "She hates me—I know that!" "Why?" "Do I have to beat it in with a hammer? Jealousy, for one thing. For another, she's afraid they won't pass on their immortality to all three of us."

Roy looked up and down the street. "Be careful when you're alone with her, Jill. Did you know she carries a gun?" "What?" She laughed. "I don't believe you. Ev?" He nodded. "I saw it last night. Small revolver, short barrel. Fits in her pocket. So be careful." "Right. Glad you told me. I'd never have dreamed it in years." "Now, listen. I'm going to ride round near Tumut One. Don't tell anyone. Go down the street now, before I start the engine, so no one will realise we've been together." "Good luck, darling." Suddenly, she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him. "Be careful. Be very careful." He managed a smile. "I've been getting in some practice at that for the last couple of days." She ran quickly round the corner out of sight. When he could no longer hear her steps along the street, he kicked the motor alive and rode off. As he was riding past the HQ building, he heard someone call to him, but he did not look around. He accelerated, letting the roar of his engine drown out the voice.

ELEVEN He rode out along the road towards the underground power station, but stopped half a kilometre short of the station itself, pushing the motor-cycle into the bush at the roadside. With an improvized broom of small branches, he swept away the tyre marks leading off the edge of the road. Then he moved out of sight from the road, and waited. The silence of the bush was punctuated only by the normal small noises of birds and insects. Within a few minutes, it became obvious that no one had followed him out here. The road here was cut into the mountainside like a shelf, and he had hidden his machine in one of the few places where there had been room to get it off the road. He began to move through the bush, working down towards the power station. There was something oddly relaxing in this walk through the bush, in spite of the minor difficulties in forcing his way through the thick vegetation. Lizards scurried from in front of his feet, and once some small animal crashed through the undergrowth without giving him a chance to see it. Whatever man had done to his world, life continued on in the bush as it had done for a hundred million years, and as it would continue to do for hundreds of millions more. Somehow, it seemed to frame things in a different perspective. At last, he could see the entrance to the tunnel leading down to the power station, which was more than 300 metres below ground level. It was closed by an iron grille, large enough to admit a truck. The grille appeared to be locked. He felt the key in his pocket, but decided that for the moment, at least, he was safer hiding in the bush than in the underground tunnel. He made his way slowly back to where he had left his motor-cycle. He sat down among bracken fern, with his back against a eucalypt. The problem of a movable signal light surfaced in his mind once again. He wondered whether he could use the headlamp of the motorcycle. Perhaps, if he detached it from the machine, he might be able to align it by looking along the beam of light. Switching it on and off might be a problem, but perhaps he could bypass that difficulty

by leaving the beam turned on, and swinging the light sideways off-target. Or he might simply cover the lens with something opaque, whipping it aside to make his short and long flashes. Somehow, he didn't feel very confident. The light didn't have much power—it was brighter than his flashlight, but negligible in comparison with the airport lamp that he had used before. He couldn't very well run out to the airport for another halogen light—they were probably all under guard, by now. After a time, he became aware of the thin, wavering sound of an electric motor coming down the road. He stood up, moving behind a thick screen of bushes that enabled him to get a view up to the next bend. The orange runabout came in sight, travelling sedately down the middle of the road, with Ev driving it. She passed within a few metres of him, and he was able to see her set, determined expression, her mouth compressed into a straight slit. She drove round the next bend out of view, and he listened carefully for the sounds of any other vehicle coming down the road. He could hear nothing else. Sitting astride the motorcycle, he pushed it silently into the road, then began coasting down the hill with the engine off. As he turned the last corner that brought him within sight of the tunnel entrance, he saw that Ev had stopped the runabout in front of the iron grille, and was unlocking it. She started as he rolled down towards her, turning as she heard the sound of his tyres on the gravel. Then she swung the iron gate open and motioned him to go through. He stopped and waved to her to precede him, and as she drove the runabout in he followed, stopping just inside the gate. Ev looked back at him. "Will I lock the gate? Or do you want it open?" He looked at the gate. Open, it left him a quick exit if he were trapped in here. It was secured by a padlock and steel chain, which apparently had replaced a more conventional lock which had ceased to function. He lifted the cycle onto its rest, then walked through the gate, folded it right back against the grille, and chained it open, snapping the padlock. Then he went back and sat astride the bike, motioning Ev to drive on into the tunnel. She stopped about a hundred metres in from the entrance, where a number of small alcoves held jumbled heaps of boxes. Along one side of the tunnel were long shelves covered by polythene sheeting. Roy leaned his cycle against the wall just beyond the last of the shelving. Ev parked the runabout in a small alcove, connected the red and black cables of a battery charger, then turned to Roy. "They're looking for you," she said. "Max Lang's obsessed with that signal lamp you made. They've found out the lamp came from the airfield where you were yesterday, so they want to see you." "Looks as if I'd better keep a low profile until tomorrow morning," he said. "You mean—when you contact them again?" She looked worried. "But how are you going to signal them without a light? Max has had his boys pick up every suitable light in town. Even torches and hurricane lamps. Movable lead-lights. Everything." "I'll find something," he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. Ev moved closer to him. "I want this to work, Roy. For the three of us." "It'll work, Ev," he said. He put both hands on her shoulders. "It's got to work."

Suddenly she held her hand up. "Listen!" He could hear nothing. He shook his head. "I wasn't sure," she said. "I thought I could hear the sound of engines." He looked down the sloping tunnel, which curved to the left as it descended into complete darkness. Even here, a hundred metres from the entrance, there was very little light. "Is there anyone working down there?" he asked. "Only the hydro-turbines—or some of them." "No maintenance team?" "No. If they were there, they would have left lights on down the tunnel. They always do that." "I went down there, once," he said. "Might be a better place to hide than up here. More odd corners around the turbines and generators." "Unless they were sure you were down there," she objected. "Then it would be a real trap, because it's a dead end." "Perhaps you're right. If they found the bike, they'd make a thorough search." She moved out into the middle of the tunnel and stood looking up at the sunlit entrance. Suddenly she whirled. "I was right. I can hear engines. Listen!" He moved out beside her, and now he could just detect the sound of engines coming down the road. Charcoal-burners, from the sound of it—and more than one. "I don't like this," he said. Although it was cold in the tunnel, he could feel sweat trickling down his back. He went across to the motor-cycle and straddled it. "Where are you going?" she asked. "Down." He pointed into the dark tunnel. "But it's a dead end." "I know. Listen—if you hear a bike roaring up the tunnel at full speed, flatten yourself against the wall. Better still, get into one of the alcoves." He began to move off, coasting downward. She called after him. "There's a telephone in the maintenance room on the left, just as you reach the bottom. Stay near it. I'll try to warn you if anyone goes down." "Thanks. Remember to keep clear as I come out." He waved, then released the brake and began rolling down the echoing tunnel. Another hundred metres down into the deepening darkness, he was forced to switch on his headlight. It did not show the end of the tunnel, which continued to sweep down and to the left. At last, he could hear the faint, deep hum of the great hydro-turbines. There were four in the station, but probably only two would be running. When he had been shown the station before, it had been lit by flourescent tubes behind frosted windows high up on one wall, giving the illusion of daylight, although the station was more than three hundred metres below the surface, taking its power from water that fell down a vertical shaft. Now, however, the place was in total darkness. There were undoubtedly light-switches somewhere, but he thought the darkness might be safer.

He used the headlight of his cycle to locate the phone, then waited alongside it in the dark. It was an eerie place, cold, and filled with the roar of water and the hum of the generators. The four great dynamos were mounted above the turbines on vertical axles. Using the headlamp sparingly, he found an electric torch on a bench in the maintenance workshop. It threw very little light, but it enabled him to find his way about. He located a pair of goggles near a grinding wheel, and wondered whether they might serve him as a kind of mask—it would be better if anyone searching the station were not able to make a positive identification. However, when he put them on and studied his reflection in a glass partition, he still looked like Roy. Nobody in the Heights would have mistaken him for anyone else. He put the goggles back where he had found them. If he were definitely connected with the signalling, it might be very hard to make the next contact. Any idea of disguise, however, was completely impracticable—the population of the Heights was too small, and they all knew each other too well, for any disguise to be effective for more than a few seconds. It looked as if they already suspected him at HQ, and if the suspicion deepened they might begin an allout hunt for him. It would end in his being locked up somewhere—even in his being shot, if the general paranoia and xenophobia developed much further. He jumped physically as the intercom tinkled in the darkness, and switching on the failing torch briefly he went to the phone. "Roy," came Ev's voice. "One car stayed here, the other went on. They're coming down the tunnel—on foot. Four of them. I'm at the gate, and it's open. No one else is here." "How far are they down the tunnel?" "They must be about half way." Roy went to the motor-cycle and turned it round so that it faced the dark mouth of the tunnel where it entered the large hall. He swallowed as his mouth began to dry out, switching off the torch and waiting in the dark. He could hear sounds coming down the tunnel, distorted by echoing from the curving walls—the multiplied sound of footsteps, as if a small army were marching in broken step down the hard pavement. Voices, although he could distinguish no words. After what seemed a very long time, he could see the fitful reflection of moving torchlight on the outer wall of the tunnel where it curved more sharply towards the lower end. He stood up, his foot on the kick starter, checking the ignition switch and keeping his fingers on it. When he judged they were less than a hundred metres from the tunnel-mouth, he stamped down on the starter. The engine wheezed and failed to fire. He waited for the longest second he had ever known, then kicked again. This time there was a metallic cough, and he thought he heard some break in the approaching footsteps. On his third kick, the engine was alive, filling the echoing space around him with a shattering torrent of sound. He released the clutch and shot forward into the mouth of the tunnel, without turning on his lights, as the dim, wavering torchlight outlined the opening sufficiently for him to locate it. Once the motor-cycle was actually in the tunnel, the noise was almost stupefying. He could see a moving torch sixty or eighty metres in front of him, but he could not see the men behind it. When he was within about forty metres of them, he switched on his headlight, changing to a higher gear and opening the throttle wide.

In the darkness, the sudden blaze of the headlight must have been blinding. Ahead, he saw four figures spread out across the tunnel, quickly raising hands to shield their eyes. As they saw the light coming at them they leaped aside, three to one wall, one to the other. He was between them and racing away up the tunnel while they were still stunned by the channelled thunder of the engine. He didn't look back, but rode as fast as he thought safe up the long, curving climb to the open air. At last, the reflection of sunlight on the outer wall of the curve began to brighten, and then he could see the opening ahead. He slackened speed as he neared the entrance, lifting a hand to shade his eyes as he rode out into the daylight. Ev was standing near the runabout, and he swung to a stop near her. "Thanks," he said. "What happened?" "Nobody's hurt. Just rode between them out of the dark. Frightened them, that's all." "I'm glad," she said. The intercom near the gate tinkled insistently. She pointed to it and smiled. "I'll see you," he said. "Probably tomorrow morning, after I've contacted them again." He pointed to the sky. "How are you going to signal to them?" "I'll figure something out. I'd better go, now." As he rode back up the road towards Cabramurra, it occurred to him that it didn't matter much whether the men in the tunnel had identified him or not. By the time Max Lang and his team had correlated all the reports from various sources, it was going to be obvious to them that Roy was the only man riding a motor-cycle around the Heights on this particular morning. He had to pass through Cabramurra to get on to any of the other roads. If he could race through the town without being stopped, it would be safest to head north, where the road forked, one branch going to Tumut Number Two power station and the other to the ghost town of Kiandra, where a further fork led either to Adaminaby or the northward area around Talbingo, with a branch track to the Yarrangobilly Caves. If anyone followed him out of the town, he was only in danger from pursuit by Max Lang's rebuilt sports Torana, which was capable of far higher speed than the motor-cycle, even now that he had it running on Barry's methanol-based fuel. None of the charcoal-burners could hope to overtake him. However, there were telephones—and even though there was no one living in Kiandra now, there was the airfield at Adaminaby, with some usable aircraft. He was making too much noise to sneak through Cabramurra unnoticed, so he rode through at full speed. He did not have to go to the upper road near the HQ, but skirted the high part of the town and roared out along the northward road without hesitating. Perhaps some people who heard him still thought he was merely testing the newly captured motor-cycle—but these were not the people he had to worry about. He rode fast until he reached the first of the tumbledown buildings on the outskirts of the deserted town of Kiandra. Long ago, gold had been discovered here, and in the early 1860s Kiandra was said to have a population of fifteen thousand, but there was little sign now of its ancient flare of vitality—a brief flare, because the gold had been worked out within three years. Roy rode through the remains of the town until he came to the main road that had once been the Snowy Mountains Highway. This was the road he had used to come up to Cabramurra in the truck. To the

right, it ran down to Adaminaby, and it was still tyre-marked by busy traffic. To the left, its dusty surface lay unmarked since the previous rain— this was the branch that led up to the Yarrangobilly Caves, and the sight of it brought Roy to a sudden decision. He swept round in a curve, leaving well-defined tracks entering the road to the Caves, and for a few hundred metres he rode straight up the middle of the gravel road, leaving a track that no one could miss. Then, on an inspiration, he rode off on the grass at the side as if it had suddenly occurred to him to hide his marks from pursuers. A little further along, he let his tracks show on the edge of the gravel again. A few hundred metres onward, he made the same apparent slip again. Then, on a ridge where the ground was hard and did not show tracks, he rode to the left through a gap in broken-down fencing, and switched off his motor, listening. He could hear no sound of any pursuit, either on the road or in the air. Pushing the bike forward, he coasted down the grassy slope the way he had come, parallel to the road. He came in behind the buildings near the junction, stopping behind one that looked solid enough to stand up for the night. He pushed the motor-cycle under the shelter formed by the roof of a collapsed shed, then broke in to the rear of the half-ruined house—and waited. He could hear nothing. He went outside after a while, and broke a branch from a bush to use as a broom to sweep away some of the cobwebs inside the house, at least in the windowed room he had selected for a lookout point. As he was returning, he heard the sound of a car engine on a ridge a few kilometres away. Hurriedly, he entered the house, closing the ricketty back door behind him, and went to the front corner room, which had evidently been the main bedroom in the house, with windows on two walls. He could hear the sound of the car coming closer, now— the deep, musical note of an engine running on old petrol or the best aviation alcohol, like the echo of a sound from the twentieth century. Almost certainly Max Lang's car, unless Snowy had brought up one of the petrol-fuelled cars from Jindabyne— a trip that would have used a lot of the dwindling store of petrol, but one that Snowy might have considered justified by the emergency. As the car came closer, Roy was tempted to look out the window, but he decided the risk was too great. He walked away from the window and squatted down against the wall as the machine roared past. He heard the sudden application of brakes, and his heart pounded for a few seconds as he thought someone had spotted him, or spotted something that suggested there was someone in the house. Then he realised they had seen his tracks leading left at the intersection ahead of them. The car stopped, and he heard excited voices. He even caught the word "caves," although he couldn't recognize the voice. A moment later, the car turned up the road towards the caves and droned away into the distance. Roy stood up, looked carefully through the windows to make sure no one had stayed in Kiandra, then went out through the back door and looked at the water in a half-ruined tank, wondering whether it was safe to drink it. He decided to wait until his thirst became really urgent, watching a minute insect skimming across the dappled surface of the water. A pulsing sound gradually beat in on his consciousness, coming from very far away. He couldn't place it at first, and then he realised it was a helicopter. He looked around, and didn't see it. He looked quickly around the yard behind the house, and noticed the tyre tracks of his motor-cycle leading under the sloping sheets of rusted iron where he had hidden it. He took the broom he had made from the leafy branch and carefully swept away the tracks, beginning at the edge of the grass and working backwards, so that his own footprints were erased as he

went along. In the distance, the beat of the helicopter was coming closer, not gradually, but in a series of sudden surges of sound, as if it were hovering for a time and then leaping forward a kilometre closer to him at a bound. He swept his way back to the door and went inside, taking the branch with him and closing the door. Then he went in to the front bedroom again. He could hear the machine's engine note, now, broken into beats by the spinning rotor, but he didn't know exactly where it was. Suddenly, the shadow of whirling blades flickered on the buildings on the other side of the street, and the loose iron on the roof of the house flapped in the downdraft as the machine flew directly above him. He sprang quickly back into the hall, which had no outside windows, and stood listening. The helicopter was hovering, turning, judging from the sound. Looking down the hall towards the kitchen at the rear of the house, he saw the reflected sunlight flicker with the shadow of blades, then dim for a few seconds as the body of the helicopter threw its shadow on the kitchen window. Then the loose iron on the roof shook again. Roy found he was holding his breath. Then, slowly, the beat of the rotor drew further away. It seemed to cut off sharply, and for a moment he thought the machine had landed. Then he heard it again, much further away. At last, he risked a glance from the window of the bedroom, and saw the glittering shape of the helicopter heading over the ridges towards Cabramurra. He looked irritably at his watch—without registering the time he saw, because a minute later he had to look at it again. Wearily, he lay down on a swept section of the floor against the outside wall, where he was out of sight of the windows. He closed his eyes, but a minute later he opened them again as the sound of a car engine crept into the edge of his awareness, like a buzzing insect. He could hear it coming down the road from the caves. He lay still, tense. He heard the engine note reflected from the walls of some of the old buildings, then the sound of the car at the intersection. It did not turn along the street in front of the house, but continued straight on south along the valley of the Eucumbene River, towards Adaminaby. He closed his eyes again and went into a fitful sleep.

TWELVE It was dark when Roy awoke, and freezingly cold. His muscles seemed to creak when he moved them. He sat up and listened, but the only sounds through the deserted town were those of the wind—the intermittent creaking and banging, creaking and banging of some loose piece of sheet-iron, and the whistle of air across a long-disused chimney. Roy stood up, yawning and stretching his muscles. He went out through the back door and stood in the empty yard, looking westward at the last fiery streaks of the sunset. In about an hour, the moon would be rising, still almost full, and a further seven or eight hours after that the starship would come up over the horizon; and it was then that he would have to flash them his signal. He had the feeling he was running very short of time. So far, the best idea he'd had for signalling was the headlight of the motor-cycle, but he was by no means confident that it was bright enough for the Outworlders to see it. From their height in orbit, looking down through the Earth's sea of atmosphere, they would have difficulty seeing the lights of a town, let alone the light of a motor-cycle.

Suddenly, he gave an exultant shout in the silence, driving his fist into his palm. He could see now the way he was going to signal them! He went back into the house and collected the dim torch he had taken from the power station. Then he took his notebook with its listing of the Morse code, and worked out another message: VAYA. MEET SAME PLACE. THIRTY MINUTES. He put the notebook in his pocket. Then he rolled the motor-cycle out of its hiding place, refilled its tank from the fuel cans Barry had given him, started it, and sat with the engine idling to warm it up. Then he rode carefully out on to the road and headed west. He didn't ride back into Cabramurra the way he had come out here, but branched to the right on a shocking road, which led round by a circuitous loop to link up with the old Tumbarumba road. This way, he would approach the town from a direction no one would expect him to use. When he neared the junction with the Tumbarumba road, he switched off his lights and waited under some trees for the moon to rise. It would be better if he approached the town without lights, riding by moonlight. The headlight of the machine might not be adequate for the signalling into space, but on the lonely night roads of the Heights it would attract attention for several kilometres. Slowly, the golden glow heralding the moonrise spread along the eastern sky. Rubbing his hands together in the sharpening cold, Roy waited until the magnified globe of the moon was clear of the ranges. Then he started his motorcycle and rode carefully southward through a mesh of pale golden light and long shadows. He rode past the rendezvous point of the previous morning, checking carefully that there was no one in the vicinity. Then he went on cautiously towards Cabramurra. Before he came within sight of it, he stopped his machine just short of the crest of a rise, then hid it among the trees at the side of the road, turning it so that it headed downhill the way he had come. This way, he was sure of making it start—if the kickstarter failed, he could roll the machine down the hill until he gained enough momentum for a clutch start. He took the torch with him and walked along the moonlit road. As the moon swung higher in the sky its light lost the golden tint, and the landscape was whitewashed into a frozen monochrome. He stopped several times as he drew closer to the town. At last, up ahead of him, he could see his target —the electric sub-station that distributed power from the network to the town itself. Through here went all the power for the house lights and street lights throughout Cabramurra. Roy knew the sub-station. He had once helped Barry and one of the electrical experts to move a piece of equipment from the station to have its bearings re-turned in Barry's workshops. Now, he waited in bushes nearby for a long time until he was sure no one was about. There were a few small clouds drifting across the sky from the west, and he decided to wait for one of them to obscure the moon. He had plenty of time, yet, and it was vital that nothing went wrong. While he waited, he heard the distant, uneven whine of an electric motor, and he sat down on the ground in a patch of dense shadow. After a few minutes an electric runabout came down the road. Three men in it, one driving, the others holding laser rifles, with loaded crossbows in easy reach in a rack behind the back seat. Roy didn't move until the runabout was well out of sight down the road. The moonlight dimmed as the fringe of the cloud began veiling the disc. Roy estimated from the size and speed of the cloud that he would have about twenty minutes' darkness, and he rose and began running lightly towards the sub-station. He reached the door, which was facing away from the road, and began feeling for the key on the ledge

where he had seen Barry leave it. In the Heights, with its small population, there was no need to lock installations of this type except against curious children—the station was far from the perimeter of the Heights, and therefore in no danger from Outlanders. He found the key, opened the door, and stood inside for a time just letting his eyes become accustomed to the gloom. The small windows on the east side of the building let in bars of moonlight that ended in milky parallelograms on the floor, reflecting a faint, diffused glow upward through the building. Using his torch for a few seconds—the amount of life left in its batteries seemed very limited—Roy checked over the main switchboard and fuse board. He saw that the street lights were controlled by a number of labelled switches, with letters corresponding to a map of the centre of the town near the board. At the end of the board, on the right, was a large master switch. He decided to do nothing, yet, in case he accidentally alerted someone that there was some activity in the substation. He settled down in the humming darkness near a transformer, holding his left wrist into a streak of moonlight so that he could check his watch. He kept in an uncomfortable position, deliberately, because at this point he couldn't afford to go to sleep. With maddening slowness, the moon climbed towards the meridian, while Roy watched the patches of moonlight on the concrete floor shorten and gradually change their angles. After what seemed to him many, many hours, the station became completely dark, and then streaks of light began to edge in through the windows on the western side. In the hour before daybreak, he took out his notebook with the coded message and set it near the switchboard, with the electric torch alongside if. Then he carefully checked that the main switch controlling the street-lights—a big, old-fashioned double-pole knife-switch—was in the off position. One by one, he turned on the individual switches of the street-lights. Normally, it looked as if they were controlled by a timer, but someone must have overridden this because of the blackout of the past few days. He was glad. This made his task easier. Now, when they were all on, he could control the street lighting of the whole town with the main switch. He smiled. Max Lang and his boys had been very careful to collect any lights that could be used for signalling. But they had over-looked the most powerful light in the town — the street lighting of the town itself. The sky was already lightening faintly along the range to the east when he saw the starship come up over the horizon, a brilliant, serenely moving star that looked brighter than Venus. Hand on the handle of the knife-switch, he watched it climb higher. Twenty degrees above the horizon. Thirty. Now! He threw in the knife-switch. Through the windows he saw all the streets of Cabramurra brilliantly lit for one second, as if by a flash of lightning. He waited a few seconds, then began sending his signal: VAYA. MEET SAME PLACE. THIRTY MINUTES. ROY. He sent the message through twice, and then on the third time he saw the answering green flash from the starship. He jotted it down as it came into his notebook. Already, he could hear the uproar of the awakening town. Doors opened, and lights streamed out from houses. With sudden inspiration Roy turned off all the main switches, plunging the entire place into darkness. Using his torch, he pulled out the main fuses and took them with him as he ran out the door, dropping them into dark bushes in the shadow of the building. Then he went pounding on down the sloping road. With the exception of Max Lang's car and possibly one other that had come up from Jindabyne, all the vehicles in the town were either electric runabouts, so slow that he could almost outrun them on foot, or

conventional old cars powered by gas producers, which would take quite a time to get moving. He reached his motor-cycle, straddled it, and coasted down the long hill, getting as far away as possible before advertising his position with the sound of the engine. Near the foot of the hill he let in the clutch. The motor fired at once, and he was on his way. He reached the rendezvous point and hid the motor-cycle about a half kilometre away from the original spot, just in case someone had noted his Morse message in the flashing lights. The only person he could think of who would have understood it was Ev — unless someone like Max Lang had taken the trouble to learn the code in the last day or two. Or Snowy — now that he thought of it, he'd had some idea of it that first night when the telecast came over at Jindabyne. He looked at his watch. There was still ten minutes to go before the pick-up time. He moved into the shadow of a dense clump of trees, looking back towards the rendezvous point. Lights appeared along the road, and soon a truck lumbered along, stopping at the point where Roy had hidden his signal lamp—even from five hundred metres away, he could identify the spot by the fallen tree. He saw seven or eight men get out of the truck and explore the surrounding scrub, using several torches which must have been specially issued by the Council, in view of the seizure of movable lights. Roy stayed where he was. He was probably safe enough this far away from the starting point of their search, especially as a downward slope behind him gave him a way of escape. However, this was going to make it awkward when Vaya arrived and he had to make contact. The men with the truck made no move to go away. After a minute or two they turned out the lights of the truck and stopped using their torches. Now, looking in that direction, Roy would not have known they were there. He started at the sound of whistling high in the air towards the north. The sky was still lightened by the setting moon, with only a few of the brighter stars showing, and he could see nothing moving as he looked in the direction of the sound. It swung round to the westward and southward, dropping lower down the scale as its source came lower in the air. He could hear confused shouting among the men near the truck, now. They had evidently heard the sound, and couldn't locate its origin. Roy began to move cautiously out from under the trees, taking out his electric torch. Suddenly, a pulsing sound like a rapid wing-beat sounded in the air near him, and he whirled. A few seconds later, a voice came to him out of what appeared to be empty air, only a few metres away from him and above him. "Roy," it said, and the accent was Vaya's, although the voice sounded thin and mechanical. "Don't light that lamp. Turn round and walk westward—away from the road." "But where are you?" he asked, looking from side to side. "Follow this light. Can you see it?" He was suddenly aware of a faint streak of green light in the air in front of him. It was as if a slanting beam of light focussed through a sharp point and diffused again beyond it, like the focus of a burningglass, but he could not see how it was produced. It moved suddenly, as if to draw his attention to it. "See it?" came the voice. "Yes," he answered, although he felt foolish talking to what seemed to be empty air. "Follow it," said the voice, and the faint focus of light danced away from him, down the slope away

from the road. He walked after it, breaking into a run as it moved more swiftly. It let him through a belt of trees, flickering as if the trees somehow interrupted its projection, then went out across an open area. Roy followed it through knee-high grass silvered by the slanting moonlight—and then abruptly he could see it no longer. "Where are you?" he asked in a low voice. "Wait there," said Vaya's voice. He turned slowly around. Then, from a gully, he saw the shuttle coming. It was the one he had seen on the parking lot at Mount Stromlo, the larger of their two fliers. A door slid open in the side of the dark hull. "Get in," said a voice. It seemed to come from a speaker just inside the door, and he wasn't sure whether it was Vaya's voice or not. "Quickly. Someone coming." A flexible stairway seemed to unroll from beneath the door, stiffening as he stepped on to it. A moment later, he was inside the machine, and the door had closed. He looked around in amazement. The hull had looked dark and opaque from outside, without windows. From within, it looked completely transparent. "Up here," called Vaya's voice, and he saw her at the forward end of the machine, sitting at a set of controls similar to those in the small flier. He walked forward and sat on the seat alongside her. "How did you find me?" he asked. "On the infra-red. Like this." For a couple of seconds, the front view from the cabin changed. White and blue trees stood against a black sky, above ground like hot, glowing iron. Over near the truck, which seemed to have a red-hot engine and a brilliantly radiant gas producer, a number of glowing red figures moved about through the blue bushes. Then the scene reverted to normal, and he could see nothing of either the men or the truck. "You were the one by itself," said Vaya. The machine took off. Again, there was no physical sense of movement, the inertia exactly cancelled by some internal field. Roy felt something nagging at the back of his mind. Something bothered him about that phrase of hers: "You were the one by itself." It was not quite the way he would have put it. It sounded like someone talking about a lower form of animal life. From her point of view, perhaps he was. The shuttle lifted vertically for thousands of metres, much higher than Roy had ever been in his life. Far to the east he could see the flame of the sunrise spreading along the horizon, and then the sun itself was in view, lighting a broad streak of the Earth's surface that curved in an enormous crescent. Directly below, the land was still in relative darkness, lit only by the silver of the moon. Roy leaned forward in his seat, staring down through the transparent floor at the immense gulf below him, and it came to him that he no longer had the feeling of vertigo that had shaken him the first time. He was about to tell Vaya when he realised she was looking at him curiously. "Tell me," she said, "why were those other men looking for you?" When he hesitated, she went on. "I know they were looking for you, because they stopped just where I first picked you up. And I noticed some of them were armed." He nodded. "Some people didn't agree with my making contact with you."

She sat looking at him. She was wearing a bronze-tinted garment like a ballet-dancer's leotard, not supported by shoulder straps, and coming just over her breasts, leaving her smooth shoulders bare. "And you think they might have killed you?" she asked. "They might. We have a lot of suspicion right through our people. We're suspicious of the Perms who live in the lowlands, and the different groups of Perms are suspicious of each other." "Why do you call them Perms?" "I think the word was originally short for Permissive. Something about their way of life. I think it was all right at the start, then it gradually went sour." She nodded. "The story of so many human experiments," she said. He smiled. "Yours seems to have turned out very well." To his surprise, she made no immediate response, but appeared to be thinking—her face, for a few seconds, seemed quite devoid of expression. Then she nodded. "I suppose it has. Quite well." But her tone had a strange lack of enthusiasm. "Anyway," he said, "you don't show any suspicion. Look at the way you come right down here to the surface of our planet." "Yes," she said in a curiously unexpressive tone. Then, abruptly, her volatile flair seemed to return. She swivelled the chair she was sitting in and touched a control at the side of a white, square table like a chart table, behind the two seats in the cabin and between them. Roy found his own seat swivelled when he touched a release under the edge of it, as she had done. On the table, a detailed map appeared, as if projected from below—a strangely old-fashioned map, brightly coloured, evidently copied from an oil-company map of the State of Victoria, drawn somewhere in the late twentieth century. He could see the marks of cracks where the original map had been folded too many times and repaired with some kind of adhesive tape. "That's one of ours," he said. "Oh, we have copies of maps of most of your planet." She leaned forward and looked at Roy. "Now," she said, "show me your museum."

THIRTEEN Roy leaned over the map, tracing an area with his finger. Vaya did something to the controls at the edge of the table, and part of the map blew up to a larger scale, overflowing off the edge of the table as it enlarged. Roy put his finger down with a more definite movement. "That's Mount Tarrangower," he said. "And there's Maldon, see? Just near it." "And the museum is there?" "I'll show you exactly where when we get there." She looked upward and said a word that sounded like "Copy?" and from a speaker set in the ceiling a voice answered her in a monosyllable. Roy had the unpleasant sensation of being spied on. The voice from the speaker said something too quickly for Roy to catch it, and Vaya placed a small red marker on the map where Roy had indicated Maldon. Again, a single syllable came from the speaker

above. "Who's that?" asked Roy. "Aru." She smiled. "Probably doesn't mean much, does it?" He shook his head, and yawned. "When did you last eat?" she asked. "I don't know. It seems days ago. Night before last, I think." She went to a compartment behind the control cabin, and took a package from a locker, stripping off a transparent film from a slab of reddish-brown substance. She held it out to Roy. "Eat," she said. The stuff had an odd taste, but after the second or third mouthful he began eating ravenously. "What is it?" he asked. "You wouldn't have a word for it," she said. "Could I have some more?" he asked after he had finished the slab. She brought another one, limegreen this time, different in taste but also generating intense hunger after the second or third bite. She finally handed him a transparent cup of what looked like water. It tasted odd at first, and then he recognized it. It was pure, distilled water; it was the total lack of taste that seemed strange to him. "Aren't you eating?" he asked. "Not now," she said. "But don't hurry. We want to get to your museum in daylight. It's still dark there." He had forgotten the transparent floor, and as he looked down he had a momentary sensation of giddiness. The sun was just beginning to stream across the hills below, leaving the valleys still in darkness. "How long does it take to reach your world?" he asked. "Many years," she said. "But it doesn't seem like that." "Do you use suspended animation?" She smiled. "That's an old term. We do it now by molecular stabilization techniques." "What do you call your planet?" "Merodak." When she saw the name meant nothing to him, she added: "The planets in our system are named out of Babylonian history and legend." "How's it different from this?" He pointed down. "Larger. Gravity fifteen per cent more—but we control that in our buildings and vehicles. Some areas wet, some dry." Somehow, he finished up with a very unclear picture of the place, and he had the impression that was the way she wanted it. At last, when the sun was well above the horizon, she turned to the control panel, touched a key, and said something. The voice from the roof-speaker gabbled some reply, and the machine began to move. "Who's flying this thing?" asked Roy. She pointed upward. "He is now. I'll take it when we have to land."

They covered the half-a-thousand kilometres in minutes. When they hovered over Maldon, it seemed the sun was just rising there—they must have flown westward faster than the line of the sunrise swept around the Earth. To his surprise, she took over control of the machine and flew slowly up and down over the town in a series of parallel traverses. When she noticed his questioning look, she explained. "I have cameras automatically taking three-dimensional pictures for the records," she said. "Now, where's the museum?" He pointed it out. Without comment, she dropped the shuttle vertically into the roadway just outside the entrance. Together, they walked up the overgrown driveway under the trees. The front door was still as Vern and he had left it. He went inside. No sign of the owl, this time. She followed, and he led the way up the wooden stairs. "Better keep your weight close to the sides," he said. "The wood's likely to be rotten." "Thanks for telling me that," she said. "We don't build things like this out of wood." "Don't you have wood?" "Yes. But when we build anything, we build as if it's to last forever. Perhaps because we live indefinitely ourselves." They began to move things out of the museum and store them in the aircraft. From time to time, Roy felt a twinge of conscience at giving away things that actually belonged to the race, but he rationalized it by telling himself that the Perms would probably destroy all this some day. He was surprised at some of the items Vaya selected, but made no comment. As the morning wore on, he was astounded at her energy. Her slender, supple arms seemed tireless, and several times he saw that she was much stronger than she looked. He wondered whether it was the food she ate, or whether some technique had given her more complete control over her muscles. Once, when he was lifting an old hand-press from a bench, it overbalanced, and he realised he had underestimated its weight. It teetered on the edge of the bench, and he was uncertain whether to leap aside and let it crash to the floor, or try to work it back to a more stable position. Suddenly, he heard the sound of Vaya's feet on the floor behind him, and she took hold of the press from the other side. Together, they carried it out of the museum. On the way down the stairs, there were moments when it seemed to him she was supporting more of the weight than he was, yet she showed no sign of exertion. When they had put it aboard the shuttle, he leaned against the side of the hull, gasping. "Thanks for grabbing that," he said. "I nearly finished up with it on top of me." She bowed slightly, and began walking back towards the museum. He fell into step beside her. "You seem to be in very good shape, physically," he said. "Must be something to do with not smoking or eating." She shot a quick, sidelong glance at him. "What do you mean?" He laughed. "Smoking or drinking, then. Pot or alcohol. I was just making a joke about eating." "I see." She gave him a delayed smile. Evidently senses of humour varied from culture to culture. Back in the museum, she walked carefully between the lines of tables and benches, selecting the rest of the things she wanted to take. Walking behind her, glad of the chance for a rest from carrying objects down the stairs, he watched the smooth movement of her hips, the sweep of the red-gold hair across her bare, lightly tanned shoulders. He had never seen such perfection in a human being before, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that

he was being disloyal to Jill—even if it was a disloyalty that went no further than his mental processes. His mind went back to the early morning, when Vaya had picked him up in the shuttle, and he had asked her how she had found him. He still remembered her words as she had shown him the modified infra-red picture of the men and the truck, red figures moving among blue trees: "You were the one by itself." It was something in the slant of her thinking. A view from a height. Almost like a farmer looking at a flock of sheep and saying, "There—the one by itself." Then, as she turned to ask him about one of the exhibits, her brilliant smile and widened eyes brought him right into the present moment again. They took some pieces of old electrical equipment down to the shuttle, and after they had stowed them away Vaya held up her hand. "Listen. Do you hear anything?" "No." She looked at the open door of the shuttle, and said a word that sounded like "Upsonic," and then, turning to Roy, she again said, "Listen." This time, however, she said it very softly, but as her lips moved the sound of her voice came from somewhere within the shuttle. "I see," said Roy, and an enormously magnified reproduction of his own voice boomed from the speaker in the shuttle. Evidently some device picked up all the sounds in the vicinity and multiplied their power by a factor of fifty or a hundred. Now, he could hear what had first caught her attention— the distant snarl of engines. Motor-cycle engines—a swarm of them too large for him to attempt to estimate their number. "Perms," he said. "But a long way away. Ten kilometres, maybe." "Let's get one more load of things aboard," she said, and made for the entrance to the museum. "What are the Perms like?" she asked. "They don't live very long. Any I've seen have been young, and very sick. They ride alcohol-powered bikes and shoot poisoned arrows out of steel crossbows." "What sort of poison?" "From decayed organic stuff." He shook his head. "Bad news. Doesn't kill you straight away, like cyanide, but it's just about as deadly." "Sounds as if they'd take a lot of rehabilitating," she said. "Rehabilitating? Perms? Nobody can do anything for a Perm." "Have you ever tried?" "Well—not personally." He found that he was sounding defensive. "There's no way. Just no way. You'd get an arrow into you as soon as you went near one of them." They stacked the last of the small items Vaya wanted to take with her into a couple of boxes, then carried the boxes down the stairs. As they went out the door of the museum, Vaya immediately put her box on the ground. When he saw what had taken her attention, Roy dumped his box. The shuttle was hovering a hundred metres in the air.

"What's happened?" he asked. "Don't know, yet." In the far distance, he could hear Perm engines buzzing like a swarm of angry insects. They were still several kilometres away, as far as he could judge. Then, without warning, four men on motor-cycles coasted silently down the hill and swung in to the driveway of the museum, stopping astride their machines. Their leader was a solidly built youth with a yellow helmet and red, unkempt beard. "Hold a' ri' there," he shouted. He swung a short crossbow forward—a double bow, with arrows above and below the stock. Vaya began walking straight towards him. He grinned at first, then fear flickered in his eyes as he looked from one to the other of her open hands and back to her face. "Tha's close enough," he said with a sudden change of mood, and brought the crossbow to his shoulder. The other Perms moved their cycles forward, converging on the girl. Roy gave an inarticulate shout. He rushed at the nearest youth, ducking as an arrow whistled over his head. "Stay back, Roy!" It was Vaya's voice, but it did not come from her lips. It came like a crash of thunder from the hovering shuttle. The bearded leader looked at the aircraft, then at Roy, then released an arrow straight at the girl. It struck the front of her body just below the breasts, with a hard impact that sent a chill of horror through Roy, so that he gave an involuntary cry, almost as if the arrow had struck his own body. Vaya kept walking straight towards the Perm leader, without any break in her stride. His mouth opened. "Jeez!" He screamed and released a second arrow from a distance of about four paces. It lodged in the base of her throat. Almost casually, she lifted her hand, snatched both arrows from her body and flung them away. The rest was a nightmare to Roy. The leader sprang off his motor-cycle as Vaya almost reached him, leaving the machine toppling towards her as he backed quickly away, his crossbow reloaded with what seemed an automatic reflex. He looked at the girl, then swung the crossbow towards Roy. Vaya caught the falling cycle by its front and rear forks. Although it must have been twice the weight of a man, she swung it effortlessly above her head and hurled it at its rider. It caught him at shoulder height, bringing him down in a flurry of dust and clashing metal. Unhurriedly, Vaya began walking towards the other Perms. Two of them started their engines, while the third tried to do the same, failed, abandoned his machine and sprang on to the back of one of the others. Swinging out into the road, they roared away. Vaya went over to the sprawled figure of the leader, who was lying with his cycle half on top of him. Reaching down with one hand, she threw the machine off him, and Roy watched it boomerang endover-end through a clump of overgrown hedge. "He's dead," said Vaya without emotion. Roy stared at her without moving.

"You're not human," he said at last. "What are you?" Without answering his question, she gestured to the shuttle, which was descending quickly. "Let's get away." The shuttle reached ground level. Roy hesitated, listened to the howl of the approaching Perm engines, then climbed aboard. Before she followed, Vaya looked at the motor-cycle which had been abandoned after failing to start. She picked it up with one hand and carried it aboard with her.

FOURTEEN Roy sat beside her in the control cabin, watching her as she flew the shuttle quickly above the level of a low stratum of cloud. There was a barely perceptible mark in her leotard, just below the right breast, where the arrow had penetrated. No blood. Just a puckering of the fabric as if some of the threads had been displaced without being cut. He looked for the second arrow mark, higher up, on her bare throat. He could see it when he looked closely—a short cut, like a knife stab in something like polyvinyl chloride. Again, no trace of blood. "Take," she said, looking into a camera lens on the control panel. "Got," came a reply from a speaker in the ceiling, and she leaned back, swivelling her chair to face Roy. "Thank you for coming to my help," she said. He shrugged. "It was hardly necessary, was it?" "No. But you didn't know that. You went into danger to help me. That's something I value." He looked for a long time at the bright, turquoise eyes, the shoulder-length, red-gold hair, the full red lips which had seemed to him infinitely desirable. Inside him, he felt a strange emptiness. "You're a machine." His own voice sounded expressionless to him. Drained. She did not smile. "In a sense, yes." He reached out and touched her arm. The skin—or what-ever the surface material was—actually felt warm, and when he squeezed it lightly he could feel what seemed like a steady pulse in it. He reached down and felt the side of her rib-cage. Again, there was the surface feeling of flesh, but when he pressed harder he encountered a smooth, rock-solid base underneath. He could feel no separate ribs. It felt more like segmented armour, overlaid with a centimetre or two thickness of softer substance. "A robot?" he asked. She shook her head. "Not if we mean the same thing by 'robot.' We think of a robot as self-acting, programmed to react in certain ways to certain stimuli. That what you mean by it?" He nodded. "What do you see here"—she spread out her hands— "is what we call a servo. A distant, more sophisticated version of what you might describe as a puppet." "A puppet?" Her hair swung, brushing her shoulders as she nodded. Or as it nodded. He wasn't sure how to describe

the thing in front of him any more. He almost flinched as it leaned forward and rested a hand on his shoulder. The eyes that looked into his now seemed just a shade too perfect to be human. "Roy, there is a person called Vaya. I exist. Brain, blood, nerves, sense organs, DNA—I'm alive. But I'm not there alongside you. I'm speaking to you through a speaker in the servo's head, seeing you with little TV cameras behind its eyes. Hearing you. Even getting the feel of you through sensors in the hand on your shoulder." The fingers squeezed him gently. "But—where are you? The real you?" The slim hand pointed upward. "Above you. Too far up for anyone to see, but not as far up as space. If I were too far away, the reaction times of the servo might show a delay." "But why do you work this way?" "For one thing, I'm probably not immune to all Earth diseases. And remember, Earth is not really my planet. I'm of human stock, but… modified. Evolved. Physically different. By using the servo body, I can look closer to Earth norms." "Away ahead of them, I'd say. You look like the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." She—somehow he had to think of the servo as she, even now—smiled and spread out her hands. "I'll tell my designer—she's really an excellent artist. Better, if you come with us you can tell her yourself." "You mean—this body was designed by an artist?" "Its exterior, yes. I have others that look like different norms—African, Japanese, or whatever—so I'm more easily accepted wherever I land." "I see," he said dully. She smiled. "Again, there's the matter of violence. This body is unbelievably tough, by your standards. And if anyone did wreck it, I could replace it. It'd be annoying, but no more than the loss of a vehicle." She turned to look at the instruments, and Roy was surprised to find that they were hovering at an enormous height—he had not looked out of the machine since he had entered it. The low strata of cloud looked like an intermittent white carpet far below, and higher, feathery streaks of ice-crystal cirrus also lay below the machine. There was no cloud visible above them, only the unusually dark blue of the sky. He looked at her profile. "I'd like to meet you," he said. "The real you." Still looking at the instrument panel, she smiled. "I don't think you'd find me as attractive as my servo." "But you'd be real." Her smile broadened, and she turned again to face him, putting both hands on his shoulders and giving him a little shake. "This is real, Roy. What's the difference between the hands on your shoulders and the hands I have up there?" She moved her eyes skyward momentarily. "Both are controlled by the same brain. One set through a metre or so of nerves, the other through a few kilometres of radio beam, plus electronic relays. As to sense organs, my own eyes see about the same light-frequencies as yours. The eyes in the servo are adjusted to see the same, so I can agree with people I meet on the appearance of things—but I have only to move a dial, up here, and they can see in anything from infra-red to soft X-rays." He shook his head stubbornly. "Vaya, I still want to meet the real you." She made a casual gesture with her hand. "All right. If you must. Some time." For a while they were both silent. When she spoke again her voice was crisp and businesslike.

"Well, you've kept your side of the bargain. The material from the museum fills up quite a gap in our knowledge of Earth history. Now, as to our side of the arrangement, we're willing to transport you and the two girls to Merodak— although you understand there's no question of coming back." "You mean—we could never come back?" "Not in the near future, no. Even at quite a fair percentage of the speed of light, the journey there and back would take more than forty years." "Wait. Would that mean that the girls and I would be twenty years older when we arrived there to be treated?" "No. Remember our molecular stabilization system. For all practical purposes, you'd arrive at the same age as you are now." "Look—you'll have to tell us more about Merodak, if we're going to be living there." She seemed slightly evasive. "I feel two ways about this. I know, you'll be making a big step. Yet the first impression of our world might turn you off, as you'd say. There are differences. But remember, you'll have all the time in the world to adjust to them." He did not answer. After a few seconds she went on speaking. "In a few hours, we'll bring down a load of trading goods to your people. Small, portable atomic generators. Machine tools. Communication devices. Anything else you would suggest?" "I don't like the idea of atomic generators. We're not geared for nuclear safeguards." "Nuclear? Oh, I see. No, we've gone a long way beyond nuclear power. When I say atomic, I mean a different use of inter-atomic forces altogether. Completely safe." The ship was dropping rapidly, although he could tell only by looking out. "I'll drop you at the point where I picked you up," said Vaya. "No. Better over the other side of town. As you saw, some of my people didn't agree with my making contact with you—and a few of them might be a bit trigger-happy." He pointed. "Fellow I know has a farm over there. It's empty just now—he had to go down to the hospital at Jindabyne to have something done. But there's a phone there, and I can contact my friends." Under his direction, after a quick survey to make certain there were no vehicles in the vicinity, she set him down on the farm out north-east of the town along the Kiandra road. Vaya showed an immediate grasp of the situation. She approached the farm at very low level, almost skimming the grass, keeping a hill between the machine and Cabramurra. "They have radar, don't they? I saw it before." "Yes," said Roy admiringly. He had not even thought of it. As soon as she had let him out, she swung the machine around and went off in the same way, in the radar-shadow of the hill, going so far away before rising that he did not see the machine go up. Perhaps she had veered round to a different direction before rising. He went in to the farmhouse, using his knife to open a window catch on the side away from the road. He found the telephone, lifted it, and sighed with relief as he heard the dial tone. Partly covering the mouth piece with his hand to disguise his voice, he asked for Jill after dialling the number she had given him, and waited for her to come on with his fingers drumming. "Jill," he said. "Can anyone hear you there?"

"Oh, that's possible," she said in a guarded voice. "Listen, I'm at Gary's farm, out Kiandra way. No one else here. Can you come out here?" "I can do that. Listen, I'll drop round at lunch time. I have the use of the blue runabout while I'm here." "Good. Be careful, Jill. Got a lot to tell you." He hesitated. "And, Jill, when you bring the runabout up to the farmhouse, park it round the back where it isn't seen from the road. Okay?" "Of course," she said. "I'll see you." He went in to the bedroom and stretched out on the bed, and almost at once he was asleep. The tiring vigil in the substation had evidently taken more toll than he had thought. He hadn't been sleeping long when he was awakened by a knock on the back door. He looked at his watch. Eleven o'clock. And Jill had said she would be here at lunch-time. Instantly, he was fully awake. Someone had evidently seen the shuttle land here. But who? He tiptoed quietly to the back door. The knock was repeated, and then he heard Jill's voice: "It's all right. It's me." He flung the door open. Jill came into the kitchen with an armful of parcels, which she dumped on the table. "You're probably starving," she said as she put them down. "There's meat, cheese, bread, wine, smokes." He threw his arms round her and kissed her. "I didn't expect you yet. I thought you said lunch time." "I did. There's been a change of plan." "Nothing to the one that's coming. They're going to land at Cabramurra later today." "I know. That's what I meant. They're landing at midday. They broadcast to the whole town." "How? Radio?" "No. A voice out of the sky. We don't know how they did it, but you could hear every word. But listen, darling. I've been worried stiff about you. They're all looking for you. Some of them were even talking about shooting you, although I think Max put a damper on that." He began eating some of the food she had brought, while she sat across the kitchen table from him and sipped a glass of the local wine she had brought along. Roy drank only a small amount of the wine, and refused the offer of a cigarette—the marijuana might be relaxing, but he was afraid it might also blur his judgement. "I've thought of a way out for you," she said. "What?" "Tell everyone they took over your mind." "But that's ridiculous." "It's better than being shot. And I think it's your only chance. Say they hypnotized you, or something like that." "But they didn't. The initiative came from me, remember." "I know it did. But Max and the others aren't happy about you signalling what they still think might be

an alien race." "Alien? They're as human as you and me. Their ancestors came from Earth, you know." "Max doesn't feel sure of that, and Snowy—well, you know what he thinks." She looked sidelong at Roy as if trying to make up her mind whether to mention something. "Max was very angry about the lights," she said. "The lights?" "He prides himself on being one jump ahead of everyone else. You know that. He was very pleased with his idea of calling in all the movable lights to stop anyone signalling." She smiled. "When you signalled with the street-lights of the whole town, he nearly blew a fuse." Roy looked at his watch. "Midday, you said they're arriving?" "Yes. Everyone's to assemble at the sports ground." She pointed to the food left on the table. "I thought you'd be starving." "I was, but I've had something this morning." "What?" "I've no idea. Two little slabs. One dark red, one light green." "What?" "Vaya gave it to me." "H'mm. Perhaps they are aliens, if they eat stuff like that." She tilted her head on one side. "What's she really like? Close up?" "Much the way she looks. A bit harder, I'd say. I'll tell you some time." He looked at her keenly. "If we go ahead with this immortality treatment, you'll probably see a lot of her—on her own planet." "Did you find out any more about it?" "Not much. It's called Merodak. It's bigger than the Earth. And it takes twenty years to get there." "Twenty years?" "Yes. But you don't age on the trip. Some technique they've got to keep everything the same. What did they call it? Molecular something." Jill shivered. "I don't like the idea, much. I get scared even in a plane." When Roy didn't answer, she looked across at him. "What's the matter?" "Something you said. I was scared in a plane the night before last. Vern's plane, when the Perms shot him." She put her hand on his. "That must have been ghastly." "You know, it's as if we owe it to Vern to go through with this," he said. "It was because of me that he was killed." "But you can't blame yourself for that. He wanted immortality the same as the rest of us. That's what killed him." "But he'd never have made the flight out to Maldon if I hadn't dangled the idea of immortality in front of him." For a long time she was silent. "All right," she said at length. "Don't let's waste the chance."

He turned his hand over and gripped hers with a fierce pressure. He poured two glasses of wine, handed her one, and touched the other against it. "To live forever," he said. "To live forever," she echoed. They drank, and he looked again at his watch. "Eleven thirty. If we leave in a few minutes, we should be able to time it to arrive in Cabramurra at the same time as the shuttle." "But someone might shoot you!" "With the visitors there? I don't think so." He stood up. "Anyway, it's a chance I have to take." As they were getting into the blue electric runabout, a sudden thought struck him, and he looked across at Jill. "You actually heard this broadcast of theirs this morning, did you?" he asked. "Of course. No one in Cabramurra could miss it. It made the roofs shake." "Did they mention what they were offering to trade?" "Yes. Some kind of generators, communication devices, vitamin supplements, and a few things like that." He nodded. "Yes. They mentioned those things to me. But did they say what they wanted to take in return?" She thought for a moment, a puzzled frown slowly appearing. "No. Come to think of it, they didn't." She looked at him. "Did they tell you what they wanted?" He shook his head. "Not as I recall," he said. "Odd, isn't it?" He switched on the motor of the runabout and they drove slowly and purposefully up the road to Cabramurra.

FIFTEEN Shortly before midday, the runabout was whining its way up the last hill towards Cabramurra. Jill suddenly gripped Roy's arm and pointed upward. He swung the car in to the side of the road. Above, a great, silver machine was sliding through the blue air. It was different from either of the craft Roy had seen before. It was gigantic, far larger than the intercontinental jets of the great age of air transport. As it swung round in a curve over the sports ground and began slowly descending, Jill gave a cry of disbelief. "What's keeping it up? It doesn't seem to have any helicopter rotors or jets." "Their smaller craft were like that," said Roy. "Frankly, I haven't the slightest idea how they stay up." A couple of hundred people—the total population of Cabramurra—plus some from other parts of the Heights— were grouped round the sports ground. Roy drove up the last slope, and he and Jill joined the outskirts of the crowd.

The silver ship was settling slowly down, its ends overlapping the dimensions of the sports oval. It did not touch the ground, but stopped with its lower surface about a metre above the level grass, which seemed flattened below the craft as if pressed by an invisible weight. There was no rush of driven air, no smell of burned fuel, no trace of any exhaust. Easing forward through the crowd, Roy found Snowy in the front row, and he reached over and touched his shoulder. Snowy looked at him with eyes like polished metal, his mouth like a sprung trap, a deep tension-line between his brows like a vertical knife-cut. "Now, son," he snapped. "Any minute, we'll know just what you've let us in for." He became aware of Jill at Roy's shoulder, opened his mouth, then shut it tightly and turned to the ship again. At two points in the long hull, doors were opening, bottomhinged doors that swung down to touch the ground, revealing stairways running up their inner sides. The doorways were square, with rounded corners, three metres wide and the same in height. Bright light, like daylight, filled the interior of the hull. A figure came forward from within and stood in the forward doorway. It was Kalman, in a black leotard that set off his magnificent physique, with a luminous blue cloak slung behind his shoulders. He raised both arms to the watching crowd, smiling with a flash of white teeth in his tanned face. "Greetings, people," he said in a deep voice that somehow gave the impression of immense power. He descended the stairs two at a time, and stood to one side of the foot of the stairway with his feet apart. He was taller than Roy had thought, tall enough to see over the heads of the crowd, even while standing on the same level. "Greetings." The answering voice was Max Lang's, but Max did not step forward from the front row. Kalman lifted his hands again. "Some of you may have seen me on telecast," he said. "For others, my name is Kalman. Not practised in your dialect, so I leave more explanations to our historian, Vaya." He stepped aside and made a sweeping gesture towards the head of the stairway. Vaya stood in the doorway in a red leotard and gold cloak. "Hello, everyone," she said in a relaxed voice. Slowly, she descended the stairs, her eyes sweeping the crowd below. She stopped about two steps above the ground. "Nearly two hundred of your years ago," she said, "our ancestors left Earth. We have had a mixed history on several planets in other starsystems. Now, we wish to know more about you, and to help where we can." The crowd was still silent, uncertain. She suddenly looked straight at Roy, and beckoned to him. "Come out here, Roy." It had some of the authority of a royal command. He walked forward, and as he neared the foot of the stairway she stepped down to join him. With easy, superbly co-ordinated movements, she took him by the arm and gently turned him to face the crowd. He was sharply aware of the hard stare of Max Lang and the blazing eyes of Snowy. "You all owe very much to Roy," she said in a clear, ringing voice. "He is the one who had the courage and the foresight to make contact with us." A murmur swept through the crowd, and Vaya's fingers tightened momentarily on his arm. "Smile," she said in a whisper that he alone could hear. "Wave your hand." He grinned and waved to the crowd. "I know some of you didn't agree with my making contact with these people," he said, speaking loudly to keep any tremor of uncertainty out of his voice. "But I did

what I felt was right—and I think you'll all agree I was lucky. It's going to pay off for all of us." He glanced at Vaya. "Very good," she murmured. Her hand was warm on his arm, and he could smell her perfume. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew the thing standing beside him was metal and plastic and printed circuitry, yet the illusion of life was so potent that he found himself trying to seize the idea that this was the real Vaya. Even as close as this, her eyes looked unquestionably alive as they made tiny movements to scan his face. He looked down at her throat, where the arrow had pierced the surface, and he could see no mark. Then it came to him that her breasts looked just slightly fuller, her jaw outline a trifle heavier—and there was a faint grey streaking of her red-gold hair near the temples. "Vaya," he whispered tensely. "It's the real you!" She gave a rippling laugh as if he had made some joke, and her head moved in an almost imperceptible shake. "Don't tell. It'd serve nothing," she murmured, and turned again to the crowd. "We have arranged a trade exhibition—inside this ship. You can enter through this door, pass right through the display, and come out the far door." She moved back up the stairs a few steps. "We want you to come through a few at a time, so you can examine all the products. My colleagues Janro and Aru can explain any machines which have not too obvious a purpose, or if they are hard to understand, I can always act as interpreter. Anything you want, in any reasonable quantity, we can easily replicate in our large ship which is still in space." She pointed towards the sky. "And now—who'll be first?" Roy made a sudden decision. Before anyone could move, he stepped forward and mounted the lowermost step, turning to face the crowd. The move seemed to take Kalman and Vaya by surprise as much as it did the people of the Heights. "Can I say something first?" There was silence, while Kalman made an easy gesture of assent. Learning his timing from Kalman and Vaya, Roy waited until he had everyone's attention. "Since our visitors don't know anybody here—except me—may I make some introductions?" He looked at the crowd, then at Vaya and Kalman. Kalman waved his hand, and Roy turned back to the crowd. "First, the President of the Council, Max Lang. Would you come out here, Max?" For a second, Lang's face was unreadable. Then he smiled broadly with professional goodwill and strode briskly forward. Before he could turn to face the others, Roy went on. "And now—the four other members of the Council. Right. Right. Right. And Barry—our best engineering innovator. And our librarian, Ev. Will you all come forward, please?" While they were moving, he turned quickly to Kalman. "These people are all from Cabramurra. But there are a couple of others from the southern part of our territory. Snowy—we all call him Snowy—the Mayor of Jindabyne. And his secretary, Jill." Snowy stood with his mouth open for a few seconds before moving grimly forward. Jill stepped forward beside him, her eyes dancing as they caught Roy's. "Right," said Vaya from a few steps higher up. "Now, if you'll all come up this way, we can go through the display." She looked out over the crowd. "We seem to have a total of ten people here—that's just a good, uncrowded number to look at the articles. As they move through, would another ten of you line up? It shouldn't take long for all of you to see everything." Most of the inside of the ship was a brightly lit room obviously designed as an exhibition hall. A bewildering variety of appliances were laid out for inspection, some simple, some complex, all with a

perfection of finish and cleanness of design that showed a staggering level of technical sophistication. Kalman and Vaya led the procession of ten spectators, and Roy found himself walking alongside Jill at the rear of the column. "You worked that very well," she whispered. "Looks as if all might be forgiven," he agreed. "But for God's sake don't tell anyone about our other deal." Certainly, animosity towards Roy seemed at least temporarily forgotten as the Heights people moved through examining the trade items. The range was incredible, from atomic motors to vidicons which enabled them to see through smog—even equipment which would eventually eliminate smog altogether. There was also the promise of medical equipment which would eliminate a wide range of diseases, removing some of the fear in which the Heights people held the Perms. "Could anything be done for the Perms?" asked Jill. It was the first time she had spoken out, and everyone turned to her in amazement. It was Vaya who answered. "I don't see why not. They are human. They are badly diseased, but there are techniques for handling that. We won't be able to do anything directly for them this time— the problem is too widespread—but on a later expedition, perhaps…" "There's another possibility," said Kalman. "We can give you instructions and kits for dealing with their troubles. Some of you might like to volunteer. No? Well, we can leave it with you, anyway." When he saw the opportunity, Roy went up to Vaya while there was no one else near enough to overhear. "Remember your promise? Immortality for three of us?" She nodded. "Three, yes. Which three?" He was about to point out Jill and Ev when Vaya stopped him. "Wait. See if I'm correct. You, and the two young females. Right?" He felt his forehead grow hot. "Are you telepathic?" She shook her head slowly. "There was no need for telepathy. Just let's say that I've been around for a very long time." "But you'll do it?" "We'll do it. A bargain is a bargain. Of course, we might decide to include someone else, if we think them desirable. Or—your girls may decide against it. But that's up to them. Isn't it?" "Yes." She pointed to the forward end of the ship. "When the others are leaving, take the girls through the green door at the far corner. Wait in there." "Thanks," he said, and she bowed slightly. Then he moved through the exhibits to Jill, then to Ev. They stayed near to him as the file neared the exit door. "Now," he said, and walked back up the length of the exhibition hall, with the two girls following him. As he neared the metallic green door it slid open, giving access to a room about five metres square. When the three of them were inside the door slid silently shut. There seemed no other way out of the room, but on the other hand there was nothing to show the

position of the door through which they had entered. "What happens now?" asked Jill. "I suppose we wait," said Roy. "She'll be showing the next ten customers through the exhibition." The room was absolutely bare, with metallic green walls and a metal floor. The ceiling was marked by luminous white lines that formed an intricate pattern, and it was these lines that supplied the illumination. While they were standing near the centre of the floor, a set of hinged slabs swung down from one wall to form a table and two seats, each long enough to seat two people. Somehow, they felt less at home in this room than in the exhibition hall. Its proportions, its decor— what there was of it—seemed strange to them. After what seemed an interminable time, the door slid open and Vaya walked in, still in the red leotard and gold cloak. "I'm sorry for the delay. Your people asked many questions," she said. She looked from one to the other of the two girls. "Now—you're Jill, you're Ev—right? And I assume you know the arrangement Roy worked out for you?" "I believe you have a method of stopping the ageing process," said Jill. Vaya seemed to hesitate for a second before she nodded. "You could say that. Yes." She waved towards the seats. "This could take some time. We'd better sit down." Jill and Ev sat on one of the seats, Roy on the other. Vaya moved beside him. "Now," she said. "I know Roy's reason for wanting to change worlds. I want to hear yours." Jill and Ev exchanged glances. It was Jill who spoke first. "I think our world is running down. I want my children to grow up in a world where they have some chance of a future." "You're thinking mainly of the chances for your children? Not so much for your own opportunities?" "That's right." "I see." Vaya turned her attention to Ev. "And you?" "I'm in charge of our main library. I've accumulated a lot of specialized knowledge, historical knowledge, in a world that doesn't seem to have any place for it." "And you think you might have a better outlet for your talents on Merodak?" "I don't know. I hope so." While Vaya was talking to the other girls, Roy studied her. Was this another servo? Or was it the real woman? Suddenly, as if becoming aware of his scrutiny, she turned to face him, with a questioning lift of an eyebrow. "I was thinking," he said. "You haven't told us very much about Merodak." "I can show you some pictures," she said. Roy nodded. "That'd be fine." She moved her hand across part of the wall above the end of the table, and a bright pattern of differently coloured lines appeared. She touched several parts of the design with quick movements of her fingers, and the overhead lighting of the room faded. Simultaneously, one wall darkened, seemed to open into a black abyss, in which a three-dimensional picture appeared. "I'm giving you the visual without the sound," said Vaya, "because the commentary is not in your dialect."

The first scene shook them. Stark, jagged mountain ranges with peaks like snarling fangs soared against a sky the green of corroded copper. A deep orange sunlight flooded one side of the peaks, and a chill blue-white light came down from a different angle. The picture was moving, but the scene changed after each few seconds. They found themselves looking across an inky sea blotched with floating, lime-green weed. Then they saw a swollen red sun throwing its eerie light over a towering city of intricate metallic and crystalline buildings. The whole environment looked shockingly alien. "But it's nothing like Earth," said Jill. "How do you live there?" "To us; it's beautiful," said Vaya. "Of course, our ancestors had to adapt. You can't expect to move to another planet and find it tailor-made for you." The pictures began to change more swiftly, as if meant for people very quick on the uptake. In some there were two suns—the deep orange-red disc and the fierce, blue-white star that burned with the concentrated brilliance of an electric arc. In many of the scenes, both suns shone down from varying angles on buildings, strange sculptures, enormous machines of obscure purpose. "This place would drive me mad," muttered Ev. But it was Jill who first put her finger on the missing element that had been bothering Roy. "Where are the people? None of these pictures show any people." "They're there," said Vaya easily. "In the buildings, the vehicles. See, there are aircraft flying, and traffic moving along the stripways." "But we can't see the people inside them," objected Jill. Quite abruptly, the pictures came to an end, and the light of the ceiling rose smoothly to its original level. "That's all," said Vaya, and Roy had the impression she had deliberately cut them short, although he didn't see her operate any control. "I don't think I could live there," said Jill in a small voice. "I know I couldn't," agreed Ev. "One's a part of one's environment, after all." She looked earnestly at Vaya. "Thank you for showing it to us, anyway." "Well, think it over, all of you," said Vaya. "We're not leaving until tomorrow. We have to arrange distribution of the equipment your people need, and take on the things we want." "Which are—" Roy prompted. "Seeds, mostly, and plant seedlings. Some animals. Things like that." "Why do you need those?" "To build up eco-systems. Sometimes the things have to evolve to adapt to a different environment, but we can help there. We've gone quite a long way in genetic engineering." While she was speaking, she stood up. "Now, I'll have to get you to leave us. If you decide to go with us—we leave at sunset tomorrow." As they were saying goodbye, Roy looked again for the mark left on Vaya's neck by the arrow. There was no sign of it, even on close inspection. Impulsively, he put his hand on her shoulder, and it felt warm and supple. She looked at him with one eyebrow lifted quizzically. "It's you," he said. "Really you." She smiled. "Perhaps. You've been wrong before, you know."

He looked at her intently. Somehow, he was still not sure. As he turned away, he found Jill staring at him with her face set and pale. As he moved towards her, she turned quickly and went out of the ship ahead of him.

SIXTEEN As they walked toward the blue runabout, Jill said, "I'll drive. I can drop you, then Ev." "Okay," said Roy, and climbed in to the back of the car. Jill drove with her face like a stone carving, her eyes coldly hostile. Roy knew why, but he didn't know how to bridge the rift. Ev seemed lost in her own thoughts. Jill looked straight ahead until she pulled up in front of Roy's house. "I'll see you both tomorrow," he said as he got out. "I'm not going," said Jill in a level voice. "But Jill! This is a chance to have something people have dreamed about since the beginning of history. What amounts to everlasting youth." "You can have it," snapped Jill. "Enjoy it with Vaya. You seem to get on well with women 150 years old." "I… hell, I was grateful to her for giving us the chance to live for centuries. Look—sleep on it. You'll feel differently after a night's sleep." "No. I'm not going." Ev broke in to the conversation. "I'm not going, either. Not without knowing more about their world. Jill caught the main point. Their pictures didn't show us any people." "But look—they must have people there." "I suppose they have. But what are they like?" He was about to say they probably looked like Kalman and Vaya. Then he remembered something Vaya had said: "I have other bodies that look like different norms—African, Japanese, or whatever—so I in more easily accepted wherever I land." A wave of doubt shook him, and as soon as he straightened up from the car Jill drove off without looking back. As he was turning to go in to his house, he heard his name called. Max Lang came striding along towards him. "Roy. Looks as if we owe you an apology. You acted on your initiative, and it's going to pay off—for all of us." He extended his hand and grasped Roy's. Then he turned aside, looking down the street. "Trouble is, Roy, Snowy doesn't see it the way I do. And down your neck of the bush, Snowy's the boss, right? I felt I'd better warn you— the way he sees it, our survival depends on everyone following directives. Now, I don't agree with him. I value initiative. But it's Snowy who runs your area." "I see. He wants to terminate me—is that it?" "He didn't say so in as many words, but that looks about the shape of it." "Anything I can do in your team up this end?" "Well, not right now, Roy. I'll keep you in mind." "Sure. And thanks for telling me."

That night, and the next day, there was a flurry of activity all over Cabramurra. The ship made two trips into orbit, taking up seeds and small plants and animals, and returning with many things the people of the Heights would need to achieve a higher living standard. Some were machines for making other machines, and there was chemical equipment for extracting a wealth of raw materials from sources hitherto ignored. Many of the items taken away by the visitors were not seeds of plants, but portions of mature plants. They claimed to be able to build life from any cells. They took no minerals whatever, saying they had sources closer to home. Nearing sunset on the day of their departure, Kalman and Vaya made a farewell speech to the assembled people of the Heights. When they had finished, Vaya called Roy. "Our offer to you is open," she said. "I won't go alone," he said. "So be it." Vaya and Kalman waved to the crowd, and moved inside their ship. Roy felt a hand on his arm, and turned to find Jill standing beside him, her eyes shadowed by lack of sleep. "You're not going?" she asked him. "Not alone." "I see." She stood looking at the ship, her hands in the pockets of her leather coat. "You going back with Snowy?" he asked. She shook her head. "Snowy doesn't want to know me any more. I've stopped being his secretary." "Looks as if I'll be at a loose end, too." She put her hand through his arm. "You were right, you know. That's where the future is." She nodded towards the ship. "Let's go!" he said suddenly. "But I've got nothing. None of my things." "Nor have I. But we could have all the time in the world to get others." They looked at each other. Slowly, the bottom of the stairway lifted from the ground. With a shout, Roy dragged Jill forward. He lifted her on to the stairway when its foot was nearly a metre from the ground, and she grasped his hand as he scrambled up beside her. The stairs tilted inward as the door swung up to close the opening in the hull. They tumbled through onto the floor within, and the door closed tightly. The large room that had contained the trade display had nobody in it, but its floor was covered with stacks of boxes of some transparent plastic material, with exchange goods within them. On the sides of many were painted marks that looked like fragments of figures, letters. After the door closed, they had only seconds to look about them before the overhead lighting went out, leaving them in almost total darkness. The only light came from a doorway along in the far corner of the room, on the opposite side of the door Vaya had sent them through. "I'd better let them know we're aboard," said Roy. "They probably know, but it's going to look better—" He stopped speaking as a deep hum surged through the ship, a sound so deep that it was felt rather than heard, vibrant and pervasive.

Jill clung to him in the darkness. She had none of the delicate fragrance of Vaya. She smelled of leather and fear-sweat—and strangely he found it compelling as he crushed her tightly against him. There was no sense of movement, as he had expected— the way the boxes of cargo were stacked, without any attempt to secure them, made it obvious that these people had complete faith in their antiinertia fields. Gradually, their eyes became attuned to the dim light from the passageway beyond the corner door. They could see another light, now—a ring of green luminous spots high on a wall, with three other spots, white, yellow and red, irregularly spaced around the ring. The red spot was moving; evidently the thing was a clock, although there were only ten of the hour marks. "When are they going to take off?" asked Jill. "We're already up. Something stops you feeling movement." He stood up, giving her a reassuring pat. "I'm going to see them. Wait here, Jill." He had taken only two or three steps towards the lighted door when she clutched his arm. "I'm coming with you." They felt their way cautiously along between stacks of boxes until they could see the door, which seemed unnecessarily large—nearly three metres high, and almost as wide. Beyond was a curving passage, the outer wall of the curve apparently following the shape of the external hull. The light came from a window-like, transparent section of hull a few metres along the passage. Roy couldn't recall seeing any window there from outside. It must have been made of one of their materials that passed light only one way. Taking Jill's hand, he led her along to the passage. He wondered what she would say when he let her look out the window and see the clouds—but when he reached it, he was the one who gave an involuntary shout. Jill's reaction was a scream. They were looking down on the Earth from a vast height. It looked like a blotched blue and white globe, roughly half the visible side in darkness, with the daylit zone ending in a reddish, blurred line with ragged indentations formed by mountains and valleys. "We're already in space." He tried to keep his voice confident, but Jill, looking over his shoulder, shrieked more piercingly than before. He whirled. Along the other side of the passage stood a row of figures. Servos, male and female, standing to attention. One was Kalman, just as they had seen him before take-off. Another was Vaya, still in the red leotard and gold cloak. Their eyes were open, but with a fixed, void stare. "What's the matter with them?" "These are not the real people. They're… duplicates, if you like." He moved along the line. Next to the figure of Vaya was another of an Asian woman in a gold cheongsam, black-haired, dark-eyed, but the same height and length of limbs of the Vaya figure. Next was the form of a black girl, again of the same physical proportions. Further along, the figures became more outlandish. One was a completely hairless woman with skin like a white shark and flame-red eyes. Another was a humanoid shape apparently made of stainless steel. Always the proportions were identical. "My God," said Roy softly. "Where does she use these?" Jill scurried back into the large room, sitting down on one of the smaller boxes with her back against a larger one. "I'll be all right in a little while," she said in a shaking voice.

"Wait here," he said. He walked back along the corridor past the silent figures. He came to a wall that closed off the forward part of the ship, and after some difficulty he located a door leading forward. He knocked on it, but there was no response, although anyone the other side must have heard him. He could tell by the narrowing of the external walls that the door was only a few metres back from the ship's nose. He walked back to Jill. "Funny," he said. "They won't open the door to the control room to me." "Perhaps they couldn't hear you." When he shook his head, she said: "Maybe they have to concentrate on flying, and don't want any interruption." "As far as they know, there should be no one else on the ship. You'd think they'd have opened the door to see who was knocking." "Perhaps they're afraid of a hijack," she suggested, and when he snorted in disgust, she said, "Sorry—I was only trying to get you to relax a bit." After a few minutes, they went back to the window. The sky looked quite black, now, and the small, unwinking points of the stars formed a multitude beyond their imagining. The room about them was growing cold, as if the cold of space were seeping into the ship—or as if its heat were being allowed to radiate away. Or perhaps it had something to do with their own physical inactivity and fear. "Look!" said Jill. She was pointing obliquely through the window, forward in the direction of the ship's travel. Coming into view was an enormous, sunlit structure like a curving metal wall, bright and solid against the star-dusted emptiness. "It's their main starship," said Roy. "We're moving inside it." Their ship was moving slowly, now, in relation to the larger craft. It nosed in through a giant doorway into a broad, brightly lit space with a metal deck below and a metal ceiling above, both of an unfamiliar, silver-green colour. Girders bracing the walls seemed to be of the same metal, and it looked somehow as if they were not painted, but as if that was the basic colour of the metal. The shuttle sank to rest on the metal floor, and there seemed to be a sudden change in gravity, as if it had lightened a little. Roy had not stopped to think of it before, but all the way up into space the inside of the shuttle must have had an artificial gravity field that copied the intensity of Earth gravity. The outside door swung open, and Roy walked across to it. The deck—somehow he thought of it as a flight-deck—seemed to stretch away for thousands of metres into misty distance. Surely some of the distance must have been an illusion, he thought. No one could build a structure on that scale. Then he realised that the shuttle was the last in one row of several rows of similar shuttles. He went back to Jill. "I'm going to knock on that door again. They have to come out, now they're home." But when he reached the door leading to the control cabin, it was wide open. At the controls sat a man the same size as Kalman—but lightly clad, with dark brown skin and the frizzy hair of a Melanesian. Roy walked in and stood looking down at him. Or at it, because it was obvious that it was another of Kalman's servos. A servo patterned on a Pacific islander, which he had used to pilot the shuttle aloft, probably because he did not need it for personal appearances in the Heights area. Roy touched it, and it felt cold, as if it had been de-activated for some time. He walked back to Jill. "I got in," he said. "But there's nobody there. Only another of the servos—like the ones in the corridor." "But where are the people controlling it?" She looked around. "Don't you see? Apart from us, there's no one on the shuttle."

"But where did they go? Kalman? Vaya?" "All servos. There was never anybody there at all." She looked at him for a long time. "But—even Vaya?" "Even Vaya?" "I thought you were falling in love with her. You were, weren't you?" He shrugged his shoulders. He expected a peal of laughter, but she did not laugh. She did not even smile. He took her hand, yet something told him their relationship would never be quite the same again. "Wait here," he said. "I'm going to find them." "How?" "I'm going to start breaking open one of their boxes." She thought for a moment. "No. Don't do that. It might annoy them—and we're not in a position to do that." "Perhaps you're right." He stepped down on to the green metal floor. It did not feel like metal. It felt as solid as bedrock. The air was fresh and cool outside of the shuttle, with an odd tang to it as if it had a somewhat different mixture of gases from what he was used to. At least, there seemed plenty of oxygen —perhaps more than he needed. He walked towards the nearest wall, and followed it along towards what appeared to be the bow of the starship. It seemed to stretch ahead of him interminably. Abruptly, he came on a doorway that opened into a brightly lit room about forty or fifty metres square, with lime-green walls and dark brown benches on which intricate apparatus was assembled. Along the far wall were banks of instruments, and Roy froze as he saw something moving on the other side of the room. It had its back to him. It was covered by a hooded cloak of some dark material, and his first impression was of a giant sitting cross-legged on the floor. Even seated, it was as tall as he was, and it was almost as broad as it was tall. As it moved sideways along the bank of gauges on the wall, he realised it was sitting on a kind of platform suspended about five or six centimetres above the floor, with no tangible support below, like their fliers. Then, moving to an array of switches and dials, it reached out with four arms. Four. He had been about to speak, but when he saw the four arms reaching out from the gigantic body he felt as if his hair was trying to stand erect. Perhaps he made some slight sound. At any rate, the being seemed to become aware of his presence. In a flash, it spun round to face him. Genetic engineering, Vaya had said. The manipulation of the DNA, juggling with genes. Human stock, perhaps, but evolved further than he would have thought it could evolve in ten million years. The head was enormous, like pictures he had seen of the huge stone heads carved by the pre-Olmec people in Central America. Pale, brilliant eyes stared at him, somehow at the same time young and unimaginably old. The figure skimmed towards him. It wore a tunic under the cloak, but the four arms were bare, with the same ivory skin as the hairless head. The upper arms were long and superbly proportioned. The lower pair, modified apparently from legs, were shorter, with strong, spade-sized hands. The face had accumulated experience beyond his imagining.

Somehow, he found his voice. "Where is Vaya?" he asked. "Vaya?" The figure gestured to another door that Roy had not noticed. He suddenly realised why their doors were three metres square. "Come." It glided towards the door, covering ten metres in about two seconds, then stopped and waited impatiently for Roy to walk after it. It reached out a hand to him, and he found his own hand engulfed in a soft, immensely powerful grip. One of the massive lower hands pushed his ankles together and enfolded both of them, lifting him clear of the ground. "Hey," he called uneasily, but the being made a sound that he took to be an attempt at reassurance. Then it went through the doorway and stemmed with him along a broad passage with complex machines of unguessable purpose. They went through doors that whipped open automatically at their approach, then swung into a huge room with what appeared to be large windows all around it, giving a view directly into space. A closer look showed him that they were vision screens. There were five—no, six—of the four-armed beings in the room, and all turned as his captor took him in. All wore differently coloured tunics of some plastic material on their massive bodies, and some had cloaks of contrasting colours slung from their shoulders. Bright, ancient eyes regarded him from faces that seemed to have forgotten more than he ever knew. "Vaya," said his guide, standing him on the floor. He staggered, then stamped his feet to get the life back into them. He looked around at the bizarre giants on their floating individual platforms. "Which—" he began, but his voice rasped into a cough, forcing him to begin again. "Which of you is Vaya?" For a moment, none of them answered, and he looked from one to another of the monstrous pre-Olmec heads. "Does it matter?" asked one of them in a deep voice. Dully, Roy shook his head. One of the four-armed giants glided towards him. It wore a red tunic and a gold cloak— the colours Vaya's servo had worn. It's hands rested in pockets in front of its tunic. The lashes of its pale eyes were red-gold. Its voice sounded older and harder than the voice of the servo, which must have been filtered in some way— but it was unmistakably Vaya's voice. "I warned you that you mightn't like the real me, as you kept calling me. However, our bargain stands." "I have someone with me," he said. "Jill." There was no change in her expression. He held out both hands. "Can you take us back to Earth?" "Not now. Next trip, perhaps—many years off." Roy's stunned gaze swept the line of giants, and returned to Vaya. "If we're made immortal—will we be like you?" "No. Of course not. We're exogenes. You know what that means?" "Something about test-tube births?" "Well—broadly speaking. You would look as you are. But your children could be like us." He must have shuddered. She moved quickly forward, and her hands—the upper pair—gripped both his with surprising gentleness.

"Right now, that seems horrible to you, I suppose. But you want to give your children a chance to make the best of their lives, don't you?" "Of course." "Unmodified, in our world, they'd be the equivalent of mentally retarded or brain-damaged children in your society. Would you want that for them?" "No." Suddenly an appalling thought came to him. "Vaya," he said, and stopped. For several seconds she said nothing. "Yes?" she prompted. "Jill and I—would we be like retarded children in your world?" "Perhaps I shouldn't have phrased it quite like that," she said. "Never mind how you phrase it. Can you do anything for us?" Her gaze was direct and uncompromising. "We can make things as easy as possible, for the sake of your children. But we can't do miracles." He backed away from her. "Thanks, anyway," he said. "I'd better go to her." "Yes," said Vaya. "We'll see each other again. Quite a lot of each other. For centuries and centuries." Suddenly she spoke quickly, unintelligibly to Roy, to the giant who had brought him there. He answered in a monosyllable, and she looked at Roy. "Aru will take you back to where you found him," she said. The journey back was made in silence at an even more blistering speed than when he had been brought here. At the doorway where he had first seen Aru, he found himself placed upright on the floor. Aru glided away from him, spun around, and widened his mouth and narrowed his eyes in what he no doubt intended as a smile. He said something Roy could not understand, then flung his four muscular arms wide in a huge letter X, turned and went back to his gauges. Roy walked slowly back to where he had left Jill. She was sitting on the steps at the entrance to the shuttle in which they had arrived. "Did you find Vaya?" she asked as he approached. "Yes," he said. He sat down alongside her and put his arms around her. "Jill," he said. "There are a few things I have to explain to you…"