The person was of such odd appearance that it was surprising he had not been noticed before. He wore neither the conical cap of a magician nor the more common-place turban, but was bare-headed. His clothing was drab and without style: a single close-fitting blue overgarment, making it impossible to guess the mood of his native country. His features were unusual, too: sharp, with an angular nose and peculiar eyes.
To a Magus Adeptus the source of the sabotage was quickly evident. Harmasch and the examiner pointed, crying out together.
“Seize him!”
As the projector station flew over the landscape of Erspia-4, Laedo had seen spread below him what seemed to be a huge patchwork quilt. Slowly he realized that it was more like a map showing each country or political entity in a different colour. The colours resulted from the apparent fact that each country possessed its own unique weather, which ended sharply at clearly delineated borders. Sunny, stormy, tranquil, cloudy, fog-covered, and so on. The projector station came lower, and Laedo began to experience mood changes as he passed from one region to another. Delight, gloom, happiness, misery, fury, resignation, all flitted through his mind like wisps of cloud passing across the face of the sun. The transition from one emotion to another was as sudden and obvious as the edge of a moving shadow.
He suspected that he was in the presence of a social experiment similar to the one he had encountered on Erspia-1, but far more complicated.
Still outside his control, the projector station settled itself in a canyon in a bare, rocky region.
No sooner had it landed than a desire to kill Histrina plopped full-blown into his consciousness. The impulse was sudden, vicious, and full of hatred.
He resisted the urge and walked out of the control room. He had not gone far when the murder mood vanished. Instead he was assailed by an almost overwhelming wish to commit suicide.
Moving experimentally from one part of the station to another, he was able to locate a borderline running through the structure. The station straddled a frontier. On one side was the impulse to murder, on the other, suicidal depression.
In both directions the area was bleak, rocky, lacking vegetation and without a population—though possibly it had possessed one once.
Laedo’s experiences on Erspia-1 gave him the strength of mind to handle these unwelcome emotions. He treated them as originating from outside himself. This was not the case with Histrina. She made the most determined effort to murder him yet, and when he lured her into a part of the station on the other side of the invisible border, she had tried with equal enthusiasm to end her own life. His solution had been to drag her to his cargo ship and lock her in the lead cabinet which was, in effect, an isolation chamber proof against thought-rays. That was where she was now, with a store of air, food and water.
Laedo could hardly begin to guess what sort of control system could select both weather and emotions for demarcated regions on the planetoid. No orbiting projector stations showed up. Presumably everything was deep inside the worldlet, alongside the gravity generator.
Taking the cargo ship aloft for a brief reconnoitre, he had seen a town a few miles away. The murder and suicide areas were small, no more than localities. Evidently the projector station had chosen the canyon for concealment. Setting the cargo ship back in place, he had set out on foot, even though it occurred to him that Histrina would be in a poor situation should anything untoward happen to him.
On entering Neutralia he was pleased to find himself in a region free of artificially imposed mood.
Wandering through Klyston, as he learned the town was called, he had come upon the grading examinations in magic.
Magic! It did not take him long to realize what this ‘magic’ consisted of. Klystar’s technology had a finesse beyond anything he could have imagined. By some extraordinary technique of fine-tuning, thought projection was used to achieve telepathy between individuals. In similar manner, fine-tuned inertial fields projected from within Erspia-4 were made to respond to the human will and achieve telekinesis.
Not that the ‘adepts’ understood any of this. Neither did Laedo grasp what use these somewhat limited
‘magical’ powers were put to, nor why they were so valued on the planetoid. He did realize, however, that he had been rash indeed to experiment with the faculties himself, by interfering with the testing of a young apprentice. As a result he was accused of being a ‘rogue wizard’, mentally strong enough to exercise magic, but lacking the proper training. Such individuals were associated with Swirl, the land of continuous whirlwinds, whose people were eccentric mavericks and were forbidden to travel outside their borders because of their disordered lives. If they did, they were treated as outlaws.
He sat in a windowless room of white stone. Facing him across the table were the Magistrate of the Magical Convocation, the examiner whose work he had interrupted, and the magician whose apprentice he had wronged.
“Come now, admit it,” said the magistrate testily. “You are a Swirlite who have unlawfully left your country. Tell the truth if you want mercy.”
“I am not from Swirl, nor from any country on your world,” Laedo answered ingenuously. He paused.
“What do you call this world, by the way?”
“Erspia, of course! What else would we call it?”
“Yes, of course… but why do you call it Erspia?”
This time Harmasch spoke, in his usual jovial voice. “That is the name given to it by the creator, Klystar, and that is all that can be said about it.”
“Klystar,” said Laedo softly. “Did Klystar also teach you magic?”
“Naturally. Klystar made both the world and mankind, and gave us everything we have.”
“And where is Klystar now?”
“Enough of this nonsense,” the Magistrate retorted. “We already know that a band of Swirlites has broken out and is rampaging abroad, creating consternation to decent folk. It is quite clear to me that you are a member of that band. Where are your companions?”
“I know nothing of this country you call Swirl,” Laedo insisted. “I do not even come from your world. I come from another world far off in space.” He paused. “One that was not made by Klystar.”
The examiner snorted. “Only a Swirlite could talk such arrant rubbish. Honoured Magistrate, I am anxious to resume the important task of testing, unmolested by this undisciplined individual. Could you not conclude the hearing in a satisfactory manner?”
“I am sorry for the way I intruded into your procedures,” Laedo offered apologetically. “I can only say that I am ignorant of your customs and acted without considering the consequences. By the way, what is the penalty for such an offence?”
“It is death.”
The Magistrate shifted in his seat. “For a Swirlite, at any rate. And since you have just admitted your guilt, it only remains for me to condemn you, with the comment that it is most unseemly for the annual testing to have to suffer such indignities. Take him to the execution ground.”
“But wait a minute—”
Laedo had not expected this. He had even left his gun behind, assuming that the town he had seen in the distance would be peaceful. To bear weapons there might even be forbidden. But no one was prepared to listen to him. He was handcuffed, taken outside, bundled on to a horse-drawn cart, and this sent trundling over the flagstones.
The magician Harmasch, in his gold-starred, conical cap, clambered aboard as the cart began to move.
Laedo’s two guards glanced at him, but said nothing.
“Why do you say there are worlds not made by Klystar?” Harmasch asked. “That is a terrible blasphemy.”