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He did not speak until they had gone. “How’s your arm?” he asked Clave.

Clave’s tight grin masked his pain. “It’s okay, thanks. A mediseal will hold it until we get to the ship.”

“Well, thanks anyway. You handled Sinnt pretty well.”

“It was pretty obvious, really,” Clave said. “Sinnt’s camera is mounted on his right shoulder. That means he has a permanently blind sector on his left. All you have to do is stay in it and he can’t see you. I felt bad about hurting the kid, though.”

“Don’t. He would have beamed you down with his evil eye. But how did you get here, anyway?”

Clave managed a laugh. “You don’t think you got clean away with giving us the brush-off, do you? Redace didn’t like what was going on in that house. He thought you were getting into something, so we didn’t spend all our time sampling the delights of Kell. We kept a watch on the house. When you left we followed you here, and it didn’t seem to us that you were under your own power, so to speak. So we gave you a few hours and then came in. I must say I never bargained for… this! What the hell was going on?”

“Did you see anything?” Rodrone asked curiously.

“Only everybody screaming like crazy.”

“These people study the Streall. They’ve actually got a Streall here. Somehow they managed to project the lens’s pictures into our consciousness. But they didn’t know that their contraption was accidentally tuned to select particularly terrifying events. Let me tell you, it beats nightmares.”

Walking around the table that bore the lens, he tried to pull back the plush red curtain. When it held, he yanked harder and brought it tumbling down. Behind it, on a small platform, lay Seffatt. He was quite dead. At the back of the platform was a narrow tunnel, presumably leading to his private living quarters.

What had he tried to tell them, in those last seconds when death finally claimed him? Rodrone did not think he had really been able to control the society for some years now. The leader had not even realized he was dying. Yet from the look of it, he had hung on to life only by a miracle. The long armadillo-like body was shriveled with age, the natural skirts of hide that normally covered the six legs were discolored and shrunken. Seffatt lay on his side, so that the short, weak legs showed, pitifully curled up. Rodrone could not avoid a feeling of pity.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said brusquely.

After he had applied medication to Clave’s arm they managed to get the lens to the runabout outside. He considered taking the bodies of Redace and the others too, but decided against it. What was the point? There was nothing he could do for Redace in return for what he had done for him.

On the way to the spaceground they passed Mard Sinnt and Foyle, the boy slowly guiding his father along the street. “Redace didn’t like Sinnt,” Clave remarked. “He didn’t like what he was doing to his son. He said he was turning them both into research instruments, not human beings at all.”

“This city is full of kookies,” Rodrone agreed gruffly.

Though the cost had been heavy, on direct balance the visit to Kelever had paid off. He now knew a lot more about the lens. For one thing, his recent experience demonstrated that the information displayed in it was not merely pictorial; if one knew how to extract the data, it could inform every sense—hearing, smell, touch, and the indefinable sense of being there.

He was certain now that the lens was some sort of plan of the galaxy. Not a physical plan, but perhaps a schemata of all the events taking place in it, building up to some pattern understood only by the Streall. But he did not mention these things to Clave. In the coming weeks he did not mention them to anybody. The only man aboard the Stond with whom he had once been able to converse usefully about the matter, Redace Trudo, would not converse with anybody any more.

VII

Stundaker spaceground was a lusty, brawling, untidy sprawl which Rodrone took in with half his attention. He was used to such sights, and now his mind brooded elsewhere.

His black cloak flowing behind him in the hot breeze, he fitted well with the boisterous wastrels and adventurers who swarmed over the rigidified concrete. He moved easily among stalls, quarreling merchants, and the variegated forms of spaceships that were scattered about, not yet ready to take off—and so regarded as fixtures by the ever-shifting populace of the ten-mile ground. In his thoughts, he recounted his interview of a few minutes ago at the Council Chambers of the Merchant’s Guild.

The Stond’s departure from Kelever had left Rodrone with a simple problem: what now? It was still his ambition to gain total knowledge and control over the lens, but at first he was at a loss for ideas. On the one hand, he felt that Streall knowledge was necessary; on the other, the Streall were the people he must at all cost avoid.

In the end he had decided to put in at Stundaker. Atomic scientists of repute were known to live there, and in addition there had been tentative Streall contacts in the past, so perhaps he could gain a lead. Also, the planet was not tightly controlled. It remained a frontier planet, and was largely decentralized—a salient factor where a freebooter’s safety was concerned. Believing he had long ago shaken off pursuit, Rodrone had deemed it no risk to land.

In that, he was mistaken. Others besides himself had been undertaking research in the past few months. No sooner had the Stond’s engines cooled than he had received a summary order to appear at the elegant building on the edge of the ’ground. The building was an office of the House of Drone, which held sway over the local cluster. Though Rodrone, in common with most space-adventurers, had little respect for the Merchant Guilds which were constantly trying to constitute themselves into a form of interstellar government, he had imagined that their powers of action on Stundaker were probably limited and had decided to appear.

He had been surprised to find that he was not dealing with Drone alone. Representatives from the houses of Jal-Dee and Kormu were also present. They presented a richly-bedecked, self-satisfied crew to Rodrone, but he was keenly aware that their apparent smugness veiled a well-informed appreciation of the real nature of the doings of the free traders and hired captains who sustained man’s presence in the center of the galaxy.

He had taken one look at their costly furs, their apparel whose tailoring would have taken a lifetime’s wages from one of their bondsmen, and above all at their gross forms and money-dominated faces, and then had simply waited to hear what they had to say.

Jal-Dee’s spokesman began without preamble. “We believe that there has come into your possession a certain… article, named, by our information, the lens.”

Rodrone scanned their faces. “I have an article fitting that description,” he admitted.

The spokesman grunted in satisfaction. “Glad there’s no argument about that, then. The lens belongs to the Streall. They’re demanding it back. I’m afraid you’ll have to hand it over.”

Rodrone laughed shortly. He felt no fear of the Guild. He was a freeman, accustomed to behave as he pleased. “The whole damned lot of you collected to tell me that? Oh no. The lens is mine.”

Jal-Dee’s man sighed heavily and unpleasantly. Another merchant spoke up.

“The Streall’s claims are of long standing,” he said in a reedy voice. “Don’t think that we will risk antagonizing an alien race—a powerful and potentially friendly race, I might say—because of the personal greed of a… man like yourself.”

“What claim do the Streall have on the lens?” Rodrone asked them. “They merely say that they own it. But the lens is very old. It might have been made by a race now extinct. At any rate it’s mine and I’m keeping it.”