Genesis Five - A Novel of the Future

Genesis Five Henry Wilson Allen

Copyright © 1968 by William Morrow and Company, Inc. First Edition (January 1, 1968)

for my son Lt. Christopher Bruce Allen USA

But man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before High Heaven, As make the angels weep. Shakespeare Measure for Measure II, 2

CONCERNING THE SUNTAR PAPERS Somewhere in the deepest frostbound hell of the Polar ice cap there sleeps beneath the eternally frozen Sea of Tursk an island once called Okatrai. The pressure ridges in the old sea-ice about it go uncharted on the maps of any man. The mote of the mother rock no longer lifts above the Arctic tides. But one day it stood there. Above its glacial surface the midnight sun shone at minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Belowground, sixteen hundred feet into the bowels of the gelid earth, the temperature was a constant balmy 75 degrees above zero. The only sounds down there were those of electronic workbells pinging musically, warmed air sighing benignly from the ventilator grills, pneumatic elevator lifts purring, tunnel locks opening and closing, generators humming softly and, always, another one thousand feet below the last shaft level, the ominous pulsing of the nuclear pile which was the thermal power source for the island's foul colony. Upon the surface, given the endless cry of the Polar gale and the sucking rush of the induction pumps taking the heated Arctic air to the hatching combs of the fifth swarm germinating those hundreds of feet below, there was but one other memorable sound. It was the eerie, almost incessant howling of the mutant wolves of Tursk, the hellpack kept to feed upon the radioactive human waste which was the monstrous byproduct of Genesis District Five and the evil, teeming Hives of Okatrai. Concerning the nature and detail of the legendary "hives," only that is known which is to be found in the so-called Suntar Papers, a document which purports to be a firsthand account of what it describes as "those certain life-form experiments conducted at The Siberian Center for Genetic Synthesis, hereinafter identified by project code 'Genesis Five.'" Whether this controversial journal is itself authentic or the bizarre creation of some deranged hoaxer must remain the judgment of another time. Present investigators are not agreed. Some contend the evidence uncovered at the crash site could be the remains of a separate not necessarily sinister aerial expedition which came to a like but unrelated grief. Others feel that the titanium saucer—the Shikolin Skak of the Suntar Papers—being found in a locus geographically consonant with that given in the journal, must lend credence to the balance of the Suntar narrative. What appears here is a personal account taken from the official transograph copy of the voiceprint of Buryat Mongol Agent Y. U. Suntar, found in the Skak. The original tape, and the Security Bureau I.D. photos of the titanium saucer in its North American crash site discovery location, are available under classification. Hence the hard evidence exists. What the reader will make of the appended transcription must remain between himself and his conscience. At least the story will have been told, and that was the hope which sustained the final spark of life in Yuri Suntar.

The 5:09 for Siberia

ONE "You are Yuri Suntar, the brother of Yang? The non-identical twin, that is?" I stared a moment, locating my questioner. It was dark in my Moscow apartment, which I had only now entered. I saw him, a smallish man, lounging in my favorite chair. "You are the state police?" I asked. "Let us say that is not the question," waved the small man, very soft and easy in his manner. "You are the twin brother of Yang Suntar? Please be reminded of your right to refuse the discussion." "Thank you," I bowed. I was well aware of my position vis-a-vis the state. "Yes, I am he," I said, carefully, precisely. "How may I serve you?" The small man arose. He had lighted one of my smuggled American cigars, which he now clipped expertly before storing it in an inner pocket of his sheared karakul jacket. "Very cold out today," he sniffed. "I should advise something warmer than your school sweater." "Are we going to the district station? It is but around the corner." The small man saw my winter coat of foshkan wool sagging from its pot-iron hook above the alcohol stove, in the kitchen corner of my student quarters. He got it down and held it toward me. Quickly I took it. "Thank you," I said. "Can you say how far we are then going? That is, with all security to the state, naturally." "Naturally," he agreed, holding the door for me. I went out into the drear hall, he following. When we had reached the street, he surveyed it, saw no one near, cocked one beady eye upon me, kept the other patrolling the course of our walk toward Igor Previnsk Street and the Boulevard Yagovorod. "For myself," he said, "I go so far only as the Ilyamanof Station. As for you, I do not know. I have not seen your ticket." "Ticket, you say? I am being put on the train?" "Who might say, comrade?" "Yes, yes. Who indeed?" I let the matter rest. It was plain enough now. I was not in arrest but what the state called advisory companionship. As was the procedure in political cases, no time had been granted to pack a toothbrush, or touch a telephone, or pick up a lead pencil. If I had a friend, or family, he, or they, would never know what train Yuri Suntar boarded that late, gray fall afternoon, in Ilyamanof Station. I knew the game. I had only just completed four years' study of it at the Moscow Academy For Politics. The first rule for survival was silence. In the station, cold and cheerless as the tomb, a second agent picked me up and guided me downward into the catacombs of the galleried tracks. Here I was put aboard an express, in a private compartment. As the train glided into motion and before I might more than ease down upon one of the facing seats, a third agent entered, replacing the second. "Comrade," this one bowed sedately. "Yuri Suntar," I answered grimly. "The brother of Yang."

At once the new man's face, formless as putty the moment gone, took shape, even color. The eyes, almost, were friendly. "Ah!" he said. "That Yang!" I knew from this that I had been sent a guard who was, when off his programmed duty tour, a sports fan. The breed dies hard. If the state were to ban its rites, as it had those of Christian and Jew and Muslim, a revolution to make memories of the October kind would be in form. But the state was wise. God it might dethrone. But soccer? Ice hockey? Track and field? Nyet! "Yes," I said cautiously to my new advisor. "That Yang." The agent sat back upon the other seat "Do you remember," he said, "the second time that the Olympics were in Mexico? When Yang doubled in the sprints, took the long jump by five feet and, when they would not permit him in the high competition, waited until the winner cleared his height, then plucked a small boy from the grandstand and leaped, with him, a foot over the gold medalist's best?" "I remember." "What times, what times. And, say! How about this: do you know that Yang was the first man to beat the great Valeri Brumel's record? That height stood for what? Forty-three years? No, it was something less, perhaps. No matter. Fantastic by any number." "He broke Brumel's record in high school," I said. "Although I must confess he did not carry a child over with him." "You lie!" the agent cried excitedly. "In high school? The records say nothing of this. You must be making a poor joke." "No," I said. "Neither good nor poor. Yang so revered Brumel he would permit no one to mention the matter. And of course, if you know my brother, well—" "Yes! Of course. If that Yang said nyet, well then, that would be the end of it." "Or the end of whoever forgot," I added. "Fantastic!" said my companion, and lay back and was asleep in three breaths and a deep sigh. We were out of the tubes now, the train operating on its own power system. Signalling this fact, the autoshades on the ports withdrew, giving view of the rural countryside melting past. I felt the relief of this. Somehow, I had never accustomed myself to subterranean highspeed transport. Perhaps it was because of being a Mongol, reared where we still knew the old two-rail diesel trains of the TransSiberia Railroad. But the idea of a projectile the size of a train being fired through a blind bore of steel under pressure—no different, really, from a pellet out the barrel of an air-pistol—well, it was not the stuff to soothe the spirit of a Suntar. Bad enough that we were presently hurtling somewhere north and east from Moscow's Ilyamanof Station at a groundspeed in the order of two hundred miles an hour, and accelerating. And bad enough, beyond that, that the pace was being pressed upon a single electrified contact "pipe," no larger than a strong man's forearm. To be assured that its magnetized neo-titanium cabling would hold ten times the weight of any express train was little reward. I was presently twentyfour years aware of the sacred nature of the vows of state and science. At the Academy, the class motto, never spoken aloud before two witnesses, was, "God protect us from the experts." I had learned nothing in my eight years of state schooling—four in the lower form previous to the elite graduate work in the Academy—which would now lead me to distrust the motto. Neither had I learned anything which could draw me into ignoring the presence of more than one witness to any announcement critical of the system. So, out from underground now, where one might actually hear the buffet of the wind against the dural plating of the express capsules, and see, at least

fleetingly, the sunset making the ugly stubble of the wheatfields glow with brief beauty, I sighed and joined my state traveling companion in repose. The effort was premature. Circumstances would scarcely permit the luxury of relaxation. What had my giant twin done to bring me into pro forma arrest? More compelling to dream upon, what might I have done to warrant being picked up and put aboard a sealed train? And regardless of the academic nature of involvement, where might the train be bound? The destination of guests of the state is frequently more engaging to the imagination than the direct charge, or binding over upon accusation. To be politely told, "This is not an arrest, please come with me," is knife-steel to the knowing. Particularly when the kindness comes buttressed with the diffident advice, "You are aware of your right to refuse." Ah, no. There was more in the icy autumn wind than rewarding my failure to make the major assignment list in my graduating class. That matter was serious enough. For the state to select a Mongol for eight years of investment in the manufacture of a political tool, then to find the tool not of the steel originally assumed, well, that was not a happy thing. But, at worst, it had gained me the appointment to the doctrinal mousehole of "Politik Master" in my own native village of Kuluk Nor. This was the same post I had been packing to depart to, when interrupted by the protocol detention. But now what? Siberia? I smiled, superior in my knowledge of the little joke I had just made. The state does not devote eight years to the making of a programmed robot, only to imprison the machine, or banish it, for some inconsiderable infraction of God—excuse the term—alone might know what arcane rule. No, they were taking me somewhere more important to them than Kuluk Nor, and certainly it was not to Siberia. So what had brother Yang Suntar to do with the matter? Informer? My giant twin turning me in? The hero of the Second Mexican Olympics? A Mongol selling a brother Mongol to the state? For any price? Maybe. But not that Mongol. Not that Yang. Across from me, the third guard snored on. And why should he not? The compartment was sealed. And if it had not been, there was no escape anyway from a train moving toward three hundred miles an hour. But the thought had entered a recess of my conditioned mind. Why? Why, after all the years of ingrained obedience to dogma, did I insist upon these dark rebellions of the spirit? It was disturbing to a faithful minion of the state to know that, in his heart, the thought of abstract freedom might still bring the impulse to strike a comrade servant of the system, and to fell him with possible grievous bodily hurt, to gain liberty, even if but for the shining length of a capsule's compartment corridor. I looked at the guard again, almost afraid he might have seen my mind's deviationism. But he was a peasant. He ate, slept, possibly reproduced, worked, saluted, died as he was directed. He was a courier-guard, nothing more. The others, the "experts," would come later. This one had sealed his bird in its burnished Duralumin cage. That was the extent of his order-line. And so he slept soundly. I brought forth my one remaining cigar, lit it, leaned back, thought of Yang and of our boyhood in Kuluk Nor and of our Mongol heritage before that.

Originally our people were of the old Buryat band, descended from the loins of Ulan Suntar, the Elder. Our mother's family was of Suntar's own tent, but our father was not of that blood. He was, our mother claimed, a hunter of the Tunku band, herding his ponies upon the lower horn of Lak Baikal. Others said our mother lied, that our father was the semen of an alien wind and we, poor bastards, the product of its forbidden passage. It is useless to deny the possibility. Whatever the tent of our father, it was no Mongol shelter. How might it have been and Yang and I appear so different as we do, unlinked as the bear and the flea? My twin is singularly large. I tower but a yak's horn over five feet. He is dark of hide and light of heart, slant of eye and black of hair. My skin is pale, my pate blond, my outlook melancholy, my eyes as round and blue as any Westerner's. Still, we are both Mongols. We know about life and we know that its ultimate price is death. Upon the last parting with Yang four years past, we were resolved that service to the state was the supreme opportunity, perhaps I a bit more than he, but both realizing that to serve brought no greater risk than to refuse. The likely stipend in either case was the same. Yang is, or was, defiant about the risk. No, disdainful of it. And he, at the time, had certainly the more dangerous assignment When I took the old two-rail train for Moscow and the Academy, he began his service as a government hunter. It was a natural thing, of course. Reared in the wilderness, eye of the eagle, swiftness of the horse, cunning of the ermine, size of the bear and heart, also, to equal old Ursus, Yang was meant in the seed for sprouting as a guardian of the wild lands which he loved. Happily, the provincial selection committee was bright enough to observe this. A story circulated that its chairman had been promised by my savage twin a ride between two studs of the outer grasslands should he and his fellows fail to appoint Y. K. Suntar to the Game Control apparat. Another yarn even held that my own selection as an Academy nominee, a choice which my heart hungered after in those days, was influenced by the same Tatar promise from the same Y. K. Suntar. Of course, I never believed either tale. The argument that it was proved by the swift nod of the committee's "Da" for the naming of Y. U. Suntar, the "wet rat" twin, to the Moscow Academy was always beneath acknowledgment. Yang Suntar had that effect upon mere humans. It was his pagan attitude. He insisted he was the son of a Mongol ghost and the Siberian wind and of no man. He would laugh his laugh which could be heard the length of Lak Baikal, and shout, "If I die, may my testicles fail to descend when I am reborn!" He contended he was apart from the pack in his genesis. A man, he said, who had no human father, cannot die. He was never born in the beginning. When such a son of the wind happens also to be a Mongol, even God grows pale. For myself, I was never so certain of all this. It was one thing for my brother to laugh at Heaven and Hell. He was himself more frightening than the prospects of most deaths. His modest beauty, as he liked to call it, would curdle the milk in the infant's mouth who saw him grinning over its mother's nipple. His head was not a head, but a skull with smoked leather trim. His pale green Mongol eyes did not beam or shine, they burned. He looked and thought like Jenghiz or Timur Lenk. He even had one bad leg like the latter—the same leg—and limped with it in the precise way ascribed to him the West calls Tamerlane. He was an atavism from the East. A Twentieth Century anachronism. A brute from the deepest pit of the past. But I? Whey-skinned Yuri? The white bastard of Buryat? I feared God and I feared death, and I always had.

We were programmed for the lie in all this God business at the Academy, naturally. Yet I never quite assimilated the superior state doctrine. Perversely, I continued to believe there must be a higher order than man. Still, I was not quite inspired, either, to contest the official theology. We all knew where the contesters went; and knew that, for them, the place was no poor joke. At this low point in my thoughts, a rare jarring of some kind passed through the capsules of the express train, and my traveling companion awakened. "Ah!" he said. "Have I been asleep?" "Not unless you say so, comrade," I assured him. His broad face lost its momentary hint of warmth. The eyes, deep-set, small, Georgian, pounced on me like litter-mate weasels. What comment might have accompanied the feral look was forestalled by the knock upon our compartment door. Weasel-eyes lost his intentness, leaned back again. "Come," he called. "It is not locked." The door slid open, soundlessly. A train attendant peered in. "Ah," he said. "You will forgive it, comrades. The wrong compartment." He moved to withdraw, and I came to my feet, impelled by a sudden Mongol instinct "No, wait," I said. "What train is this? What destination?" The attendant turned to my companion. The fellow was plainly uneasy and, from that fact, I understood he knew of our relationship. There is that something about the state police. An aura, perhaps even an odor. But the people see it, or scent it, whichever. "Have I your permission?" he inquired of my guard. The latter shrugged, the stoatlike eyes at rest now, the porcine features again formless. "Da. He will learn it anyway in fifteen minutes." "That is right, sir. The border is but seventy miles. Perhaps you can feel the train slowing." "Be off with you. Bring us a sandwich and some tea, before the crossing." The attendant saluted, wheeled to go. "Wait!" I cried. "You forgot the train." He frowned, clearly burdened with more pressing and immediate duties. "Oh," he said. "The 5:09. For Siberia."

TWO We had our sandwich. Tinned Arctic char on a rye which had a certain unforgettable cow-pie flavor. The tea was good. Agent Three, who would not give his name, proved as lively in talk as before. After reliving Yang's four goals unaided in the final five minutes of the World Soccer Cup Matches in Breslau, he was off to sleep again. With no knowledge of our destination beyond the Siberian border, and no familiarity with the country once the monorail bent northward, I soon enough joined him. When I awoke, the train was halted. Agent Three was gone. In his place a more civilized and reasonable gentleman awaited my pleasure. "Chukova," he smiled. "Territorial Police." Ah, I thought, this is strange. I had always believed the Territorial force to be a frontier outfit. Rather a sort of "Canadian Mountie" of the Steppes, if the original Redcoats would forgive the odium. Now

what in the devil was one of these provincials doing aboard a crack express from Moscow? And patently so far from whatever far-flung border he was supposed to be patrolling? Then the obvious came belatedly to mind. This was it. Wherever we were was track's end. My face must have reflected some of this doubt. "Are you all right, sir?" Chukova seemed genuinely concerned. "It's been a long journey, of course." "Yes, it has; thank you, Sergeant." I got into my coat unbidden. "Just how long a journeyhas it been?" I inquired, preceding him into the corridor of the capsule. "I cannot imagine I slept more than a catwink." "Try to imagine it, sir," he nodded, standing aside for me to exit ahead of him into the inter-cap vestibule. "This is Novo Tobirsk. It is four in the morning, comrade. There is no more monorail north, and you are seven hundred ten kilometers inside the Arctic Circle." Novo Tobirsk? The frontier, indeed. Novo Tobirsk was the Siberia of Siberia. It was the track-end for more than the monorail from Moscow. "Ah," was all I said to the new chaperon. We left the vestibule as soon as the train crew unsealed it. On the platform an icy tundra wind howled straight from the Pole into every marrow cell of my body. "My God," I gasped. "And this is only Novo Tobirsk?" Chukova pointed to a waiting motor sledge, panting idling puffs of exhaust smoke into the frozen air. "Not quite like the Motherland, eh?" he smiled. I shook my head. "Siberia is my motherland. I am from Kuluk Nor." "Kuluk Nor?" "You have never heard of it?" "But of course. I meant only to determine whether you indicated the Kuluk Nor." "You mean the one in Old Buryat, eh, Sergeant?" "Yes, yes, that's the one." "And where is Old Buryat, sergeant?" The fellow was holding the passenger-side door for me. He closed it after me and got in on the pilotside, geared the machine into the street and away in a shower of flying snow. "Sergeant," I persisted. "You didn't answer me. About Old Buryat, that is." He shook his head, already easing the sledge to a halt before what had to be a government building. "I am not to be questioned," he said. "You are." He pressed the passenger-side door switch, and I got out. "In there," he pointed, aiming his fur-gloved finger at the iron grill which shut off the building's entrance from the street. He and the sledge were gone from the slush-ruts of the curb before I might utter a syllable of protest. I turned around completely, as a man will who has no idea where he might be, or why. Subconsciously, of course, I was looking for a place to hide, or more likely to flee to; but at four o'clock in the morning, in Novo Tobirsk, Siberia? Preposterous. Yet why had I been shepherded so carefully all the way from my cozy political graduate's quarters in Moscow to this last outpost of recognizable civilization, only to be deposited without any guard whatever on an Arctic street-corner in the eerie cold gut of a northern Siberian night? Then a cruel fang of the wind caught at my flank beneath my cheap foshkan greatcoat, and I remembered.

This was Novo Tobirsk. In this place of shadowed reputation, there was no installation which was not of the government. There were no personnel here who were not of one apparat or another, connected not only with the central state, but with its specificAdvanced Siberian Studies Center, a group so classified that even we graduate robots for "Politik" spoke of its existence with, well, let us say, only the very best of comrades. Sergeant Chukova may not have known that Old Buryat, as distinct from modern Mongolia, lay well within the physical geographer's Siberia. He may, or may not, have heard of Kuluk Nor, my native village. But Sergeant Chukova knew where Novo Tobirsk was, and what it was; he well understood how free I was to run and hide, standing there upon the crusted ice in front of the iron-grilled "District Four" building. Sighing, I turned and started up the concrete stairway. I was conscious, suddenly, of surveillance. Glancing upward, I noted but two windows in the entire front of the structure. Neither aperture was lighted, but the left one, nonetheless, was occupied. I cannot say, even now, how the figure was made so visible without apparent source of light. But I clearly saw the man's face, and its peculiar luminescence made an impression upon the plate of my mind which has never faded. It was the most quietly evil countenance I had ever beheld. Its menace was neither overt, nor covert, but inherent. It was the face of malevolence incarnate, yet it was calm and still and, well, one cannot rationally add, pleasant, but that is precisely the thought which registered in my reaction to my silent watcher in the window. I continued toward the grill, which slid open at my approach. Conditioned as I was to the tensions of political intrigue, my classroom experiences and working field assignments had not prepared me for the apprehensions which now seized upon me. It was not alone the ivory-yellow face in the window above; this entire place reeked of evil. There was an air about its lifeless facade not made chill by the Siberian night. At the door I hesitated, staring at the oddly old-fashioned knocker which centered the heavy planking. Anachronisms, I thought, the story of my nation's struggle toward light and the higher life. Taking the great bronze ring of the knocker, I banged it, for some absurd reason, angrily, against its base. Even as I stood cataloguing my senseless defiance for a pure fear defense, the door swung wide. Its bleak opening framed a young woman. Not just a young woman, either. "You are welcome, Yuri Suntar," she said. "Will you come in, please." I remained rooted, hand raised in mid-gesture of the greeting I had planned for whatever house-ugly met my knock. I don't believe I had a demonstrable pulse for five seconds. Neither, since my larynx was spastic, could I utter a sound. "Uh, uh, uh," I finally managed, then surrendered and just gaped. "Comrade," she said reasonably. "It is cold out there. You are letting the wolf in." The expression, a colloquialism of the old Mongol herdsmen, unlocked my limbs, if not my tongue. I entered and helped her close the heavy door against the whistle of the nightwind. We were for a heady moment very near one another. I smelled her, and grew weak. Seeming to sense my problem, she quickly moved away. "Come," she said. "You are expected." I looked at her. "I have never seen a woman," I said, "nor scented one, like you. You will forgive me." "I might," she shrugged. "He will not. Are you coming?" That voice. It uttered the words in a sibilant, alien manner I could not at once identify. But it produced instant excitement in the male breast, and elsewhere. "You must excuse me," I pleaded. "I intended no awkwardness. But I am a Mongol."

Now, for one swift moment, she was interested. "You do not say?" she murmured. "Yes, yes," I rushed on. "Naturally, I understand I am not your typical specimen, but the blood is pure." She regarded me with a maddening sidelong measurement of her lilac-gray eyes. "I, too, carry this blood," she said. "Nor do I look it entirely." "True, you do not. There is another lineage." "Negro. My father was a Masai." "And your mother born not far from Buryat. Am I correct?" "Yes. You gathered that from the old saying—the wind is a wolf." I loved her. I knew in that instant that no power above or below the earth could ever change that. For this woman I would die. I would even live for her, an infinitely more difficult prospect "Comrade," I breathed. "We are both Mongols. I must tell you, then. If no one has brought ponies to the tent of your father, I speak now for—" "You speak now for the honor of all idiots," she interrupted. "My father was chief protocol officer for the World African Assembly. The closest he ever came to a tent was the sidewalk awnings of Paris." The moment was gone. I could not account for it in retrospect. Eight years of schooling in feigning the reasoned exterior in all situations. Then a darkskinned woman with violet eyes and a sway of figure to make the lioness of her sire's veldt seem clumsy opened a door and spoke to me and my world ended. Or had it only begun? I was soon to find out the answer to that. My guide now pressed a wall-button and, somewhere off in the recesses of the concrete pile, I heard a muffled gong. Almost at once, a panel of the foyer slid open and a most impressive black-uniformed D-4 man issued forth. "Yes?" he said. "There is a matter of some question?" He was addressing the young woman but I believed it in my own selfish best interest to reply for her. "No question, whatever, comrade," I smiled. "The young lady and I only discovered a mutuality of blood. A thing of passing interest only. No problems." "One problem," corrected the young woman. "Yes?" said the D-4 man, moving in. "He has refused an order." "I see. What order, comrade?" "To follow me." The fellow glided toward me, seized my arm and since I am so slight, had little trouble doubling it behind me. "Follow her," he directed without animus. Equally without animus, I put a hip into him, spun out of his armlock, threw him over my hip and onto the paved floor. As he weighed well over two hundred pounds, the resulting thud was memorable. The young woman glanced around. "Well," she said. "It would seem I did let in a wolf. Even if but a very small one." "Your wolf, Madam," I bowed. "Lead him where you will."

"Mongols!" she sighed. "All alike. All crazy."

THREE We went by stairway to the second floor of the squat building. No more conversation ensued. Weary as I was, I made note of the odd decor of the place, but it was not until we reached the upper ball that I realized what it was. Oriental. The motif was definitely Eastern. Chinese to be specific. The impression was not at once related to the demonic face in the outer window for, as noted, I was now tiring. I wanted only to meet the director—D-4 cadres always had directors—and get on with the disposition of my case. Either that, or be permitted to go to bed. We were at the end of the hall. My willowy dark guide opened the door and we went through into a reception-type anteroom. Again, as with the outer hallway and the downstairs foyer, the illumination was some sort of very low-key blue light which I could not designate either as to identity or source. "Wait here," instructed the Afro-Mongol girl, and disappeared the way we had come. There was a single chair in the room, an obvious viewing rest positioned before a wall-panel intercom TV screen. "Sit down, please," said a voice of remarkably deep richness. It was gentle and without notable trace of accent, except for a certain terminal "s" sounding not familiar to me. One was reassured by the voice. It was paternal, professorial, almost priestly. As the wall screen sparked into life, it was impossible to avoid a certain leaning forward in relieved anticipation of having, after all of the statist nonsense of my custodial transportation across half of Asia, the pleasure of meeting a friend —well, at least a peer with whom one might expect a reasonable exchange of intelligences; that is, to be at last told something. As with my student record in the Academy For Politics, the Suntar achievement level was strictly median. The screen revealed neither the face of a friend nor the features of a peer, but the electronic portrait of the same watcher who had greeted my arrival with Sergeant Chukova in the motor sledge. "Yuri Suntar?" the beautiful voice said. "The fraternal twin of Yang Suntar, the Packmaster of Kuluk Nor?" I had heard, through an aunt at home—Yang would not write a letter—that my giant brother had been promoted by the Game Control people into some meaningless compartment of their bureaucracy having to do with, my aunt gathered, some particular study of behavioral responses of the wolf. This meant absolutely nothing to me, beyond the general awareness of any Siberian to the animal, per se. Wolves, as they say, were "of the country" where we were born and reared. But now I felt impelled to be quite cautious with my answer concerning Yang, or, rather, my knowledge of his title. "Yes, I am Yuri Suntar, brother of Yang Suntar. As to the qualification of 'packmaster,' I fear my information is not current. Kuluk Nor is our home village, of course." "You did not know your brother was an authority on wolves? That he had been granted permits and funds in this area?" "Oh, yes, in a small family manner. An aunt had written me something of this nature. I myself am no game hunter, no frontiersman like Yang. I'm afraid I made but little of the news at the time."

The Oriental face on the screen stared at me. It was a Chinese face, I decided, during the interval of our silence. Not just Asiatic, but straight Mandarin Chinese, a purer scion of the Yellow Khans than I of the Mongol. The face was now joined on the screen by a slender hand, holding a document. "Electrosim copy," announced the voice, "of the aunt's original communication. It is well you recalled it." I thanked him ritualistically, but felt more like addressing the gratitude to God. A slip on that leadpencilled note from a poor old Buryat lady who wouldn't know a D-4 director from a Moscow streetsweeper, and I might have stayed in Siberia as quite another type of guest. The unfairness warmed my desert temper. Moreover, my questioner continued to bring pressure upon my controls. He accused me of owing him the thanks. He catalogued my errors: I had not identified myself by code. Had not identified him by code. Had not even inquired if he was, in fact, the D-4 director at Novo Tobirsk. Had not required identification of the person admitting me. Had not done any of the several routines automatic to a trained agent "I suspect," he hazarded pleasantly, "that you should be re-programmed." That was the straw. To have been kidnapped as I had been, fed bony fish on bad bread, treated by my D-4 guards like some petty bourgeoisie profiter, then to be threatened with re-programming; with, in a word, being made to disappear, was entirely too much. I boiled over at once. I spouted at him that it would seem to me that the original mistake in the matter lay with whoever had punched the computer to provide D-4-B Yuri Suntar as the answer to whatever problem existed at Novo Tobirsk. The memory tape of my four years at the Academy would replay as poorly as any graduate's. I had already been relegated to the obscurity of a village post suiting the low level of my achievement. The one who should be re-programmed was that genius who had come up with my name for the present project. To this ill-advised speech the director merely replied that my selection had not been made by electronic methods alone, but by simple genetic adducement as well. A smile suffused the parchment of the disturbing face. It was attractive, friendly, disorienting. "As for the genius who brought you here," he said, "permit me: I am Dr. Ho Wu Chen." "The Dr. Ho?" I gasped. "Of District Five?" He only stared at me once again, watching, waiting. The national government consisted of four major superstructures', or districts. Each of these had its clearly delineated worldwide responsibility. War. Peace. Existence. Politics. District Five did not officially exist. Mention of its name was expressly a capital offense. Now I had said aloud and to its dreaded Executive, a human being who, until that unguarded moment of Mongol rashness, had not even been a substantial rumor but only the whisper of an unspeakable menace. "Forgive me!" I pleaded. "Destroy the memory tape, Doctor. I am but a simple man. One hears these tales." "Be still," he said. "Of course you are a simple man, and stupid. Your people have been no different back to the time of Timur Lenk." "Thank you, oh, thank you," I muttered inanely. The yellow face moved again to smile, beguilingly, terrifyingly. "Be easy, Yuri Suntar,” said Dr. Ho. "I would rather trust one hundred times the stupid man, than once the brilliant. Return to the foyer. Your orders will be there. Remember the Motherland." I saluted his image on the screen, which then sparked off, fading to black.

"Remember the Motherland,'' I repeated vacuously to the silent room about me, and went out into the empty hallway. Pausing an instant, I looked up and asked the guidance of a forbidden God. Then I went on down the corridor. It was a long walk but there was no need to hurry it. When one has been dispatched to nowhere, it will wait.

FOUR The communiport lay beneath the D-4 building, letting me understand the abnormally massive outlines of that structure. From the port operated the air communications system linking the last post on the outer frontier with those installations, of whatever experimental or military nature, which lay beyond the frontier proper. This place beneath the Novo Tobirsk HQ of District Four was the nerve center for, let it be thought only, not spoken, D-5. The port itself was of concrete and dural, its tubes and locks of titanium alloy. In the parking stalls along the takeoff flight path, that is, that "airstrip" which led the taxiing craft into the staging funnel of the launch tube, I noted six medium and three two-place Skaks, together with no less than four of the large personnel-carrying Petzamov VII's, a truly astonishing underground fleet. Novo Tobirsk was more than the rumors said it was. Small wonder that such a political legend as Dr. Ho Wu Chen commanded it. But I was wrong again, and Dr. Ho did not oversee this staging settlement for the "Out Beyond." I was waiting with two D-4 black-clad troopers, who had brought me down from the foyer, for one of the medium Skaks to come up to the flight line for boarding. Turning on its generator before the larger craft, and nosing out ahead of it, a two-seater Skak now whined softly up to the line. I at once recognized Dr. Ho in the passenger side, nearer me. He spoke to the pilot, who slowed the craft and opened Ho's porthole. "It is not farewell, Yuri Suntar," the yellow-faced man called out. "We shall see you at your destination, which is also our destination, and my district." He made a sign to the pilot. The port sealed itself, the small Skak whined toward the launch funnel. But that "we shall see you" of the Doctor's had alerted my Mongol's awareness. Since the craft held but two persons, "we" had to be someone I knew, or had met. It was. Seeing my belated squinting after the departing Skak, the pilot turned directly toward me, so that the faceplate of the pressure-mask was full-on. I ought not to have been startled, but was, to see that Ho's pilot was the Afro girl with the lavender eyes. Well, what next? Also a female pilot for the medium Skak, now pulling up to load? My labored cynicism, a Mongol's substitute for Humor, returned me my usual due in deduction—the second pilot was indeed a woman; not the equal for excitement of the first, but hardly a quince or persimmon, either. "Colonel Shikolin," she nodded to me, as I stepped into the craft's capsule. "You're Suntar, I suppose." "I was when I left Moscow. What's a career officer like Colonel Shikolin doing on the skim-milk run to nowhere?" "What is your district core, comrade?" "Four. Politics." "Some advice. Stay in it." "Many thanks, my colonel. May one inquire what it is that we wait for?"

"Cargo," she replied. "And General Ket." We were interrupted by the whirring arrival of the large freight elevator from above. I watched as its burden was discharged, a troop of some thirty men in a fatigue uniform I did not know. But these, of course, could not be our cargo, since the medium Skak carried only a crew of two and eight passengers, or equivalent in equipment weight The men indeed marched by our idling craft to the first of the large Petzimov VII's. I saw their faces, recognized the blank expressions and the robotlike movements of the limbs. "Medicated," I said to the pilot-colonel. "Chloropromobede. Or Reactin." The pilot would have answered me, but I saw her fine gray eyes widen a bit in the same tightening which compressed her very interesting mouth. The craft sank an inch or two to the boarding weight of a considerable bulk. Turning, I found myself being eyed by a great ball of hard fat, with not one, or three, but five red stars on his shoulder-strap. "Ah, General Ket," I smiled. "We meet again." Observing the October ice which at once scummed the waterholes of his tiny eyes, I hastened on. "Of course, you won't remember me. I was your guide, sir, when you spoke at the Academy For Politics. Graduate Student Suntar, General. Y. U. Suntar. The brother of Yang," I added hopefully, and was rescued by the afterthought. The Slavic cement of the face eased one trowel stroke toward mercy. "Yes. All right, Suntar." He took his seat in the center chair, immediately behind the pilot and capsule engineer. I began to sink into one of the six double seats behind him, that is between his chair and the bulkhead at the rear of the compartment. But he waved his thick hand without moving to turn around. "Up here," he ordered. "Use the engineer's bucket. He is a dolt in any case. Pilot, what are we waiting for?" The engineer who was a dolt in any case, exchanged seats, and comradely looks, with me. He was a man with the outward élan of a basset hound, and I imagined that here indeed might be the seedbed for my first friend north of the Moscow monorail. Flight Chief Officer—capsule mechanic—N.O. Koltzmanyev would bear further testing. Pilot-Colonel Ivanya Shikolin had, meanwhile, made some explanation about three more passengers showing on her flight-sheet, and Ket, irritated, turned to me. "Women are good for but one thing, Suntar. And most of them are not even good for that. Especially in this damned icebox up here. I haven't had anything unfrozen between my medals and my boottops since being rewarded with this filthy District Five assign—" He broke off, a touch gray beneath the suet of his jowls. "Strike that," he ordered. "My tour is ending in twenty-four hours. Next flight back will bring me out. Moscow will see me within the following sun." "Moscow is very cold, too, just now, my general," I remarked, seeing that he needed some cover. "I am not so sure that something on the Black Sea might not be more, shall we say, politic?" "Of course, of course. Shut up," he said. "In fifteen seconds, pilot, we go into the tube, passengers or no passengers. I am looking at my watch." Shikolin did not reply to him, except with a movement of her slim gloved hand. She was spared further discussion by the hurried arrival of three plainly scientific types, no doubt brought up, with me, on the 5:09 from Moscow. These thickly-spectacled gentlemen swung aboard. The entryport was sealed. The Skak hummed into the funnel and was entubed and fired underground into the familiar pressure-launch for such vehicles of but Mach I and II airspeeds. We left the pressure-seal with the usual sucking-ly explosive "zssooooshh!" and were in free flight at about three thousand feet altitude and some one-half that indication in miles per hour, ground-rated.

"What's the hurry?" I asked innocently of pilot Shikolin, perhaps trying to impress her with my knowledge of the Skak. "Aren't you pushing this antique?" She turned her face toward me, and I made note that the mouth was even more luscious than I had imagined. There is something about fruit which has been on the tree beyond the tart-sweet stage of virginity. "Comrade Suntar," she said quietly. "You ride; I'll fly. Otherwise, I remind you that you occupy an ejectable seat. Selectively ejectable." I caught the gray eyes, full-stare, and held on to them three heartbeats. "I thought I was in love with Dr. Ho's pilot," I told her, as quietly. "Now, I'm not so sure." "Be sure," she said, and I knew that it was not a hint of sexual return, but a cryptic warning. I looked straight ahead, watching the sun come up over the far rim of Siberia, through the near port, seeing it stain blood-red the echoingly lonesome vastnesses of the tundra streaming beneath us. Something moved down there, and I saw it. "Reindeer," I announced. "A small herd. About eighty head, I would say." General Ket rolled one eye toward me. "Suntar," he said, "you are a hopeless fool." I looked about the capsule for either support or denial of the military position, but found nothing save an almost automated nodding of the three scientific heads in the rear seats. Casting about for some Mongol riposte with which to relieve the strain of silence, I came up with, "Yes, perhaps; but then I am the brother of Yang Suntar!" General Ket nodded affirmatively. "Precisely," he said.

FIVE From the air, at fifteen hundred miles per hour, there seemed nothing there at all; only what appeared to be a typical Arctic pressure ridge in the eternal sea-ice below the Pole. But, Ket being asleep, Colonel Shikolin told me in a low voice that the ridge was not made by random sea-ice pressures, but by an island. "Okatrai," she named it. Then, checking again to see that Ket was still snoring, "Uncharted, even by us." "You must know, Colonel," I muttered, "that, being a political specialist, my programming lacked science. Physical geography, in a certain elementary way, I recall from the lower forms. But, from what I do remember, there cannot be any land in this place." "Quite correct," she nodded. I looked down again at the slight elevation in the otherwise unbroken sameness of the blinding white land, or rather, excuse me, polarscape. "But there it is, eh?" I asked the pilot-colonel. "Okatrai Island, hmmmm? Is one permitted to inquire the significance to us, or to anyone, of this unmapped blemish on the ugly chin of the Pole?" "One is not," answered the tired voice of General Ket

Glancing back at him, I discovered the flesh-buried pellets of the gross officer's pupils bearing on me like some air-to-air missile-firing device. Ket enjoyed my discomfiture. "One would expect more composure in a D-4 man," he announced musingly. "But there are no competent people today. It is a good thing for the Motherland that we were able to complete the revolution when we did. I would not want to attempt the same campaign with the dolts and morons available nowadays." He broke off, seeming to realize he was once more treading the edge. "Colonel," he said abruptly to the woman pilot, "please continue. Forgive the intrusion." Shikolin, unbending in her slender grace, put the Skak into its approach glide toward the groundlock beam. "I was disclosing nothing," she said defensively. "Comrade Suntar, according to my flight dossier, is a D-4-B." She hung the Skak beautifully into a right-hand slide away, as the landing beam broke red, indicating a priority craft incoming. Safely in her traffic delay arc, she gave Ket the blacklashed reprimand of those gray eyes which seemed incapable of wavering, either on, or off duty. "In case," she said briskly, "the general has forgotten the D-4 gradients, it might be permissible to review their security-code rankings. They are: A,Police; B, Propaganda; C, Pacification." "Yes," I smiled, seeing that once more the retiring five-star fighter for the Motherland had gotten himself into a position needful of cover. "You see it might have been much worse. I could have been gradient C." "God help us," sighed Ket. "I suppose you are right." Shikolin, in response to a monitorvox instruction from the ground, widened the pattern of her delay-path for yet another priority arrival. Now, beneath us, I saw the small Skak, presumably of the Afro girl and Dr. Ho, flash by and hit the hover beam vertical catch, and become stationary in mid-air at the standard five hundred feet. I made note that the approach and contact with the ground-descent guide was somewhat rough. In fact, it was downright poor, and I said to Shikolin, "Now I am less certain than before, which of my two pilots to pursue. That was a rotten job. I wonder that Dr. Ho would not have the best at his controls." Before our pilot-colonel might reply to this, the second incoming craft lumbered into view on the southeast quadrant of the horizon behind us. We swung lower and slower still, to permit this transport to huff up at its tortoise-best of some eight hundred miles per hour, and to lock on to its own delay pattern, inside ours. Quickly, the groundlock beam guided the Skak of Dr. Ho to earth, and on beneath ground-level, into the buried communiport which I assumed to be the ordinary installation of its type. We waited then, yet further, for the incoming transport to lock on the grounding beam. As we did, I noted, simply because of Academy training to note all overt signs in mission situations, that this craft was the same Petzimov VII, which had been loading the Reactinized work troops at Novo Tobirsk. Its pilot, too, did a less than efficient job of putting his vehicle into the beamlock, and I said to my grayeyed companion, "It looks as though the pilot were on the stuff, also. Are you the only good airman on the D-5 service?" She ignored me. Ket, however, asked me what "stuff” I was speaking of. I told him simply Reactin— that the passengers of the Petzimov transport had been put on board under control of a behavior drug, possibly Chloroproniobede, but more probably Reactin. I suppose I was feeling the bit in my teeth a little too much, for Ket reminded me that observation was one thing and editorial, particularly gratuitous editorial comment, was quite another. He thought, on balance, that perhaps he and I were quits for the journey; that Colonel Shikolin might also be included in the understanding, with the flighttape being erased and all parties landing at Okatrai clean for maximum security.

I glanced anxiously rearward, thinking of the three scientists we had aboard, who might have overheard. But I was traveling with an old pro. Ket had run up the sound-shield "window" separating the pilot's and passengers' compartments of our medium Skak. The invisible decibel interrupter was as good as a shield of reactor lead. Unless the three apostles of tomorrow, or patient capsule mechanic Koltzmanyev, were adept at reading lips through the backs of incautious human heads, our indiscretions would not land with us at Okatrai. Something else would, however. In our last wide circle, Shikolin had taken the Skak inland of the island complex. We were thus over the mainland Polar mass looking eastward across the frozen scape of sea-ice, beyond which lay the open water of the Arctic Ocean; and somewhere beyond which, off there in the haze of ice-crystalled eternal gloom toward Bering Strait, Cap Lisbume, Point Barrow and far Alaska, lay that continent with the alien name and ideology, America. Something of my concentration was evident to Shikolin, who, unknown to me, was watching my face at that moment "What are you thinking, comrade?" she asked quietly. "Something you would dare to share?" I did not trust this slim pilot-colonel and did not care for the possible implications of her query. Casting about below for some object or phenomenon of the Okatrai approach-scape which would serve the purpose of innocent excitement to a country boy of my Siberian heredity—say, for instance, something akin to the reindeer herd noted north of Novo Tobirsk—my Mongol's exceedingly keen eyesight picked up a hint of surface life which was indeed odd enough to have caused any degree of attentive reaction from a Yuri Suntar. I nodded my head in belated response to Shikolin, who was frowning now, as she stared at me. "You may not believe it comrade Colonel," I said, "but I was thinking something impossible. I don't know if I would dare to share the thought, or not, since I am sure you already consider me at least the fool General Ket described. Or was it dolt?" Ket, not seeming to hear the remark, kept watching our approach to the groundlock beam, above Okatrai's principal complex. Shikolin, however, was still after the rat of deviation which she believed she had scented in my unguarded reaction to the moment's view, over the curvature of the Arctic earth, toward America. "I think, comrade," she insisted, "that you had better share this thought. I would not want to suggest a re-programming in my flight report of your conduct." "I thought we had only now concluded a treaty of mutual embarrassments," I smiled, employing my best Buryat dolt's expression of emptiness. "What of the erased tape?" "Erasing a tape of small talk is hardly a security matter, Comrade Suntar. Covert longings, however, can lead to defection. We are required to enter everything in the D-5 report on landing, either of overt or covert conduct aboard. Please make your decision quickly." This was the sort of statist devotion which I well knew led to erasures of a more important nature than tape scrubbings. But my mother's blood was heating. "Well then, comrade," I told her between gritted teeth, "you had better enter it upon your landing report that, in the last delay circle, D-4-5 Y. U. Suntar observed an evidence of fauna heretofore unknown to these latitudes. The sighting was immediately inland of Okatrai, between that island and the Pole. Comrade Suntar comments upon the matter that he is competent by a circumstance of native origins to identify this fauna beyond reasonable doubt, yet enters it into the record that its presence here is impossible."

"What is that?" said Ket, leaning forward suddenly. "Yes, comrade," demanded Pilot-Colonel I. Shikolin. "What is that?" "Very simple," I replied, returning their proper state hostility with a Mongol stare which belied the careful quiet of my words. "I have just seen wolves, where there are no wolves."

The Cages of Contentment

SIX The subterranean communiport at Okatrai was like none I had seen. It was circular, with a great hollow bore centering its gleaming metal floors and cylindrical walls. I said nothing as Shikolin brought our craft down on the groundbeam to the first level. Here, the pilot-colonel took the ship out of the air column of the center-bore, landing it with consummate skill on the floor, or deck, of the level. Here, the layout was more familiar. I recognized the same catacombal structure of housing ports for various-sized craft, the taxi-paths interconnecting the side-spokes of parking "cells" that obtained at Nobo Tobirsk, and other outlying base ports of the type. There was no time for further study, however. No sooner had Shikolin shut down the power than we were all taken off the Skak by waiting black-uniformed guards. These were similar to the D-4 men at Novo Tobirsk, and elsewhere, who were in turn the carbon copies of the ancient NKVD of the Central Old Soviet, or the SS men of historical Germany. But these D-5 troopers had lavender flashings and shoulder-straps which were completely strange to me. Moreover, they were, at least those who received us, Asiatics. So were the workers on Level One, who were visible in the near vicinity. I did not see, there, nor on our way off the deck, into the inner works of the complex, a single European or hybrid Eurasian or Eurafrican face. Descending to the sixth level in a compressed-air elevator lift—I counted the levels by the monitor lights in the lift's control panel—we came out into another corridor of the whitish metal which seemed to compose most of the structure. In a few more feet we were at a sort of foyer, or opening-out, which plainly heralded the quarters of important people. Here, our guard detail separated us. Some hurried off with the three mouse-quiet braintypes who had flown up with me on Shikolin's Skak; another pair accompanied General Ket in yet another direction. Pilot Shikolin and capsule mechanic Koltzmanyev had not been detained and were presumably making their routine reports elsewhere. My particular fellow, a squarish Tibetan with stainless steel front teeth, one eye and a shaved head, touched me upon the shoulder. There was in the contact something almost of respect, surprising me. "In there," he said, as a wall-panel door slid open in front of us. "Go straight ahead and turn left. There will be a comrade at the desk." There was, indeed. And, finding the desk and its occupant, I also found my first mixed-race face: it was the Afro girl with the lilac eyes. "That was quick," I said. "You must have taken a faster shaft than we. Of course, any friend of Dr. Ho's would be so entitled." She looked at me a moment, rather nervously, I thought. "What do you mean by a friend of Dr. Ho's?" she asked, flicking off the monitor switch on her desk-top. "Go ahead, speak freely. We are clean."

"Thanks," I sighed. "It's nice to be unmonitored, even for what, unhappily, must be less than a compliment." "If you wish to say something to me," she instructed, in that voice which went directly to my Mongol loins, "please be quick. I can't keep this switch off." "Well, you're a perfectly atrocious flyer," I said. "Ergo, you must be a friend of the good doctor's; and, I would hazard, a rather fond one, or close." "Close," she nodded. "He is my grandfather." I stood back very slowly, straightening. "I am grateful for the switch-off," I murmured. "And I apologize. I have said it before; I am a Mongol. Good manners are not the gift of a yakhide tent." "Nor useful brains, either, it would seem," she replied. "Dr. Ho will see you. Time is a factor, Comrade Suntar. No more delay, please." She reached for another switch, but I threw up a pleading hand. "Wait, listen—tell me your name!" "No, comrade, I really cannot. Switch is on." She pressed the control. To the left of her desk, an ornate oriental screen slid up into the curve of the brightly polished ceiling. Beyond loomed a dark and warmly scented room. It was indistinctly lit, almost as though by some luminescence inherent to the metal of the walls. Certainly, it was not of a source familiar to me. "Come in, Yuri Suntar," ordered a voice which, if instantly recognized for its transcendent beauty, was also remembered with a shiver of instinctual revulsion. "Walk directly ahead, into the darkened area. Nothing will harm you. Come, now; time presses us here." I moved into the room. Behind me, the screen slid down, locking into its milled grooves with a distinctly unpleasant clicking solidity. Waiting where I was, I did not move. Gradually the room became visible to me. Or perhaps it was that my eyes became adequate for the strange light of the place. Then it was that, out of a still greater darkness beyond a raised dais before me, came Dr. Ho Wu Chen. "Ahhh," he smiled, seeing my uncontrollable slight shrinking back at his appearance. "The simple one is here, eh? Good. Let us then be at once about our business, Mongol. Apply your attention. I do not repeat myself. We find that he who does not listen does not learn, and he who will not learn must be reprogrammed." I merely stood more erect, nodding my comprehension. "Good, good," he said. "You are rather keener than I had imagined." He regarded me through a long pause of heavy stillness. "Or can it be," he wondered softly aloud, "that you have been deceiving me?" Moving my hands slightly in protest, I shook my head from side to side in the subconscious reaction of denial, of instinctive honest bewilderment. "Soooo," murmured the storied head of Genesis District Five. "We shall see." With that, and no other qualification, he detailed the critical need which had led to the transportation, without arrest or record, of Y. U. Suntar from the Academy For Politics, in Moscow, to the nonexistent Island of Okatrai, somewhere north of known Siberia in the deepest-frozen hell of the Polar ice cap.

SEVEN It was necessary that Dr. Ho give me some of the background of Okatrai. Had he not, the point of my summoning could not have been made with complete emphasis. Viewed professionally, this meant that Buryat agent Y. U. Suntar was being briefed on an installation of the Advanced Siberian Studies Center, of whose work not ten central government officials had a hint. In the beginning, said Dr. Ho, the entire idea had its origins in the depopulation studies begun by the Red Chinese state. During the investigative errors of these experiments, taken with the inhuman need which produced them—a motherland then facing the starvation of its nearing two billion chemicallyfed inhabitants—much had been learned of the mechanisms for man's survival. It was no different in its scientific conditions or inspirations, really, from the researches of the Nazi laboratories at Buchenwald, Dachau and the other so-called horror chambers of the Third Reich. When the bodies were available and going to waste through no original fault of the medical directors in residence, then it was an even sheerer madness than the misrule which had created the camps, to permit the opportunity for experiment to pass into the cremation pits without fullest use. "You are thinking of the Nürnberg trials at this moment," Ho interrupted his narrative to inform me. "I would remind you that the principles of human conduct —their terms as applied to what was then called genocide—were reversed in the Decisions of the People, at the great courts for universal redressage held in Peking, Moscow, Paris, Rome and Havana." I nodded, the only safe reply, and he continued. In the proposed quieting of one and one half billion Chinese lives, he said, the need became acutely obvious to undertake some research into the long-delayed area of the superman. Unquestionably, Dr. Ho contended, Hitler and his "Thousand-year Reich" had planted the seed for this most ennobling of human goals. That the German leader was a genius, the Chinese accepted. That he was, equally, an insane genius, they sadly realized. However, he had established the Aryan Breeding Farms, had begun a concrete program of selective mating to produce the man of tomorrow's better world. The problem with that approach for the Chinese, however, was that it required too much time; and Peking had run out of time. A new thinking which might lead to the same end in, say, tenfold, or a hundredfold, swifter pace, was plainly demanded. Here, the Chinese government had recalled Dr. Ho from his fieldwork in, of all places, the old Buryat Mongol country. "Ah!" smiled the doctor, seeing my homely face light up at mention of the homeland. "This surprises you?" "I don't know," I replied carefully. "I know," he said watching me. "You are not surprised but definitely interested. You attend suddenly what I am saying because you are what you are, a Mongol scrub; and there is no breeder so busy as a scrub-stud." "Sir," I said. "I'm at an actual loss to understand your reference in the personal sense: we were discussing humanity's grimmest problem—overpopulation." "Understand this then, Yuri Suntar," he warned, blending the subjects with oriental ease. "I am aware of your yak-tent hungering after my granddaughter, and I must advise you that she is no Mongol, as she may have led you to believe; you must comprehend the meaning of this for you." I shook my head stubbornly, and he frowned.

"Let us digress a bit then. When we undertook our experimental work in depopulation methods we faced certain hazards of exposure. If the nature of the project became public knowledge, the dangers to our own lives, and those of our families, need not be dwelt upon to a D-4 of Propaganda. "Accordingly, I sent Chana with her mother to Buryat. There I believed daughter and granddaughter would be safe, but only if passing as women of the countryside. "This was arranged: a certain course of plastic surgery for my daughter, eyework and darker skin grafting and a programming under Chloropromobede—the best we had then—to speak a flawless Buryat dialect, as ugly as your own nomad's tongue, did what needed doing. As for the child, she was yet upon the breast, no more of a bastard than you and your brother Yang, should any old woman inquire." He paused, still eyeing me. "It was necessary," he continued, "to remove the father, since no surgery and no programming of obedience might alter that pagan Masai blackness, either of heart or outer hide. It was arranged. Chana never knew her sire. Only knew of him. The mother, my daughter, died of grief in Buryat. An old couple adopted the child and, until it was safe for me to redeem her, she believed herself a Mongol. Even today, there is some residual confusion. The earthy influences of primitive peoples penetrate with remarkable tenacity of residence." I nodded without thinking. Ho, if he noted my agreement, made nothing of it, but returned to his original theme, save for one last warning. "As Chana is not of your low blood, I will not be crude in my postures as her grandfather, and only present kinsman. Let the story of her Mandarin heritage be advice sufficient She will wed a Chinese." He stared into my round blue Western eyes. "Most certainly," he said, "she will not mate with a whiteskinned mutated son of a Mongol double-egg fertilization. Even her father, if you are thinking of his black skin and pagan grassland lineage, was bred a king of his people." At this, I bridled indignantly. "You may recall, sir, that the Suntar tent's lineage does not trace to just any yak-buttered peasant! We are the sons, by direct descent, of Timur Lenk!" "A barbarian and a murderer," shrugged Ho, and resumed his briefing on Okatrai Island. As he talked, I wondered anew at the peculiar dogmatica mathematica by which our leaders arrived at the peaceful cancellation of their deeds. What a remarkable arithmetic it was, which would permit a Tamerlane to be a barbarian and a murderer, and a Dr. Ho to be a benefactor of all mankind.

EIGHT The shrinking earth surface, said Dr. Ho, made Okatrai necessary. Depopulations were not practical economically. The ideal solution to a better world lay in the creation of a better man to inhabit that world. Once the superior life-form was in being, and exhibiting the necessary adaptiveness for survival, including reproduction, then the final depopulation of the old type of mankind could be realistically and profitably carried out.

Given the immutable fact that time did not permit breeding a superior race in terms and under conditions of normal human gestation periods and maturity-cycle sexual rates, then the scientific mind was forced to a single possible conclusion. "Was your political education at the Moscow Academy so rudimentary in its science," Ho asked, "to preclude a guess at the solution?" There was an urgency showing in his attitude, now, and I did not care to test it. "Mutation," I replied. "Correct, Yuri Suntar." Ho seemed pleased. "We had to achieve some mutant result, and not by natural selection or natural methods. We of course knew where, or rather with what, to begin." "Of course," I said. "Irradiation." "Ah," said the Chinese, "that is interesting." I knew I had fumbled badly. "No, no, not really, nothing really," I begged. "It is only that I knew a fellow in the Lysenko Institut. Another low achievement case. He was a Lapp, who had transferred from the Lysenko to the Moscow Academy, thinking that politics might prove simpler than the creative biology. He told me of this research in nuclear genetics. It was nothing; I remember only the impression of the thing; I've even forgotten the fellow's name. Please, go on, sir." Dr. Ho nodded in that indescribably frightening, pleasant manner. "The fellow's name was Komuli. He was re-programmed. Another student at the Academy, more loyal to the state than some, reported his, ah, unwiseness." "Yes, of course. That is the way it should be." That was not at all the way I would have wanted it, naturally. Kano Komuli had been the most cheerful and warmest of men. A wonderful unspoiled human being, from a cultural beginning even more simplistic and free than my own Mongol desert pastures. They had told me at the Academy that he had gone home, merely another student failure due for local reassignment in community work, much indeed like my own scheduled return to Kuluk Nor. My spirits commenced to descend, even as Dr. Ho Wu Chen resumed his disclosure of the secret of Okatrai Island. One could not escape the premonition that, given fulfillment of whatever duty he might perform, the future of Y. U. Suntar had already been decided. Yet the evil of Ho's continuing words was so compelling that one's immediate concern for self-survival was swept away into the cavern of the greater calamity which yawned for humanity, itself, in the humming Hives of Okatrai. Yes, the hives. For what Ho had wrought here upon Okatrai was an immense human incubator fashioned precisely upon the organization of the honeybee. With a singular chilling exception. In place of a queen-mother, from whence stemmed every fertile larva in the subterranean womb-cells far below, there was at Okatrai a king-father, whose genius lit the spark of life in each enoapsuled creature. His name was Ho Wu Chen.

NINE

Stunned by the nature of Ho's revelation, I listened in silence. How the Master's biochemically synthesized gene mutations were utilized in the regenesis of the humanized larvanoids being cultivated in his monstrous apiary was not explained. "I provide the merest hint of the magnitude of this miracle," he said. "Just that amount needed to secure your enthusiasm." The hives, consisting of sixteen levels one hundred feet apart were drilled into the solid rock of the earth's crust. Nuclear reactors furnishing power for the entire complex were buried a thousand shielding feet beneath the last hive level. Air in constant fresh supply was drawn from the polar surface, heated by atomic furnaces, passed through every crevice of the vast structure, then exhausted upon the outer Arctic icelands. Level One, of course, was the communiport flight deck. Levels Two through Six housed the administrative personnel, the worker corps, technical and police facilities, and the operative machinery for the vast electronic web which was the hives' live support system. Levels Seven through Fourteen contained the hive-comb complex, the heart of Okatrai. Only Level Fourteen, however, was presently ready to hatch. The remainder of the comb was held in reserve for the terminal or "total swarm," which was the end-goal of the Ho Plan. Levels Fifteen and Sixteen contained the giant furnaces and generators which gave the light, energy and warmth of life to the complete subterranean system of the hival levels. "Try to comprehend only the staggering implications of the project, Suntar," the Chinese biochemist advised. "Do not attempt to stretch your ordinary mind to encompass its detail." Actually, he estimated, there were no more than three other men in the world, besides himself, whose mentalities might grasp the scientific revolutions involved. It all had to do with the genetic management of cells. I was to accept this management at Okatrai as a breakthrough of hard fact, a biological fait accompli. Phase One of the project, that part of the gene-control related to the great Maeterlinck and his incredible bee, was already completed. The apianoid factor was programmed beyond possibility of any break. Phase Two had proved more difficult. There had been failures. Mistakes, Ho called them. But, he countered, in any work so advanced, so overwhelming in the technical aspects of its final adventure, one could not anticipate a textbook experience. The obsolescence rate of the basic comb-cell material—human beings—remained willful. Stabilization of cell maturity rates within the postulates of the plan had been a basic problem. Viable results were disappointing. But this would be solved. Indeed, it already had been solved to the Phase Two level. Here, Dr. Ho detoured a bit. The hives had been activated five years ago, he explained. The present fifth year was drawing to its close and no working larvanoid had been produced which he would care to show the funding authorities of the state, in this case the famed Lysenko Committee. The Chinese doctor was understandably concerned for a renewal of his five-year grant, inasmuch as the Lysenko group was due at the hives tomorrow noon, and he had to gain its approval to continue his absolute experiment in mankind's achievement of that sun of the higher happiness. "I shall have you shown, before you return to the surface," he said, "examples of the progress to date. This is, again, to impress upon you some reasons to suggest your cooperation in the great adventure." I nodded, no doubt whatever in my mind of my cooperation. The goal of the Ho Plan, the Chinese continued, was presently within grasp. One could not permit the stupid Russian Lysenkoites to imperil the victory. "Yes, Yuri Suntar," he said. "I can tell you that Phase Two is finally controlled, the break factor as reliably guarded against, as with the Phase One apianoid."

In itself, he went on, Phase Two represented the most singular achievement of biological pioneering. He had, he claimed, and here the hooded eyes glittered unsteadily, succeeded in growing the culture of human intelligence in an animal host. This without in any external way altering the appearance or animal capabilities of the natural brute. In a word, he had produced a mutant beast with the mind of a man. He waited for my startled reaction to abate, then swept on. It was, however, Phase Three which he dared not put before the Lysenkoites. Not yet. They were ordinary men. They could not possibly envisage Dr. Ho Wu Chen's concept of a superbeing. Instead, they would stodgily insist upon a return to the original project of generational time telescopy—the mere production of accelerated growth cycles through nuclear mutation. And in that elemental field, the work was done. "We speak of human generations, Suntar," Ho said, the Asian face impassive. "Thirty years. We have reduced them in our latest accelerated sector of the comb to a complete human cycle, egg to adult, in thirteen weeks." Head spinning at this monstrous statistic, I inquired why, with Phases One and Two sosuccessfully concluded, the Committee would object to Phase Three. Its members would not do so, Ho replied, were he permitted to complete the Phase Three work as he had programmed it. But a potentially catastrophic hitch had developed and upon its speedy solution depended the fate of the Hives of Okatrai. "We have come down to the final twenty-four hours!" he cried, showing rare emotion. "Only to find everything hanging upon the whims of a Mongol madman!" Composing himself, he explained that the experimenting in Phase Two had been done with a group of laboratory animals imported from Siberia. These animals had been placed in the charge of a uniquely qualified person, an individual whose inherent skill it was to be able to control these particular creatures with inhuman success. Now, to be bluntly honest about it, the problem had become to control the controller. "Your brother Yang Suntar," he said, "has chosen to become drunk and mutinous at the very time when we must have his animals under control to complete the mutation of the present swarm—the swarm which the Lysenko Committee must approve, or Okatrai is done." The slant eyes searched my puzzled face. "You understand there is one more crucial implant to be made on this hatch," he said. "It must be done tonight at twelve o'clock, no leeway whatever. If the implant is performed on schedule, the hatch will suceed. The Committee, and the victory, will be mine. But if the crucial countdown implant is delayed, or its serums taken from aroused animals, then all is for nothing and the Ho Plan, with its hopes for a brighter world of serene law, is forever aborted." When I could gather my battered wits, I carefully inquired of Ho the elemental nature of Phase Three, that its conclusion was so chancy a thing both as to science and Committee acceptance. Phase Three, he answered, was the natural complement to the Phase Two transfer of the human mind to the body of the beast. In Phase Three those life-forces of the brute which determined behavior and animal vitality would be gene-introduced into a human host. Antibody reaction was avoided because the agents of transmission had been passed through the humanized minds of the animal hosts, neutralizing the impurities. The Ho Plan was thus able to create the ultimate being. "Ultimate, Doctor?" I could not help challenging. "Penultimate, Suntar," he said.

The Plan would produce a being with all the intellectual force of a superior human, plus the organizational genius and enormous social mentality of Maeterlinck's hival bee, the combination overlaid upon the utter moral abandon —under control—of the Siberian brown wolf. The key word was control. Canis lupus had not been chosen by lot. Of all nature's militantly carnivorous brutes, the wolf was the most instinctively obedient to pack law, to social discipline. For untold millennia it had been programmed by a benign creation to do what its leaders directed. Realization of this basic biological order was what had taken Dr. Ho to the Buryat area in the beginning. And it was why, subsequently, he had sought out Yang Suntar for his packmaster at Okatrai. It was why, finally, and as well, that he had sent for the fraternal twin of Yang Suntar. "For you, Comrade Yuri," he concluded softly. Incredulous, I demanded to know if he meant that the Ho Plan proposed to create, upon an original base of apianoidal mutant human genes, what must in the end be called a wolfman? That peasant myth of our own motherland's Steppes? That loup-garou of central Europe folklore in the Dark Ages? Surely I had not heard him correctly. Such a pathetic, such a patently absurd creature, could not be the end and the all-thing of the great Ho Plan. The Chinese biochemist regarded me unblinkingly. "No," he said evenly. "What we shall create here is the flawless shell of the human species programmed genetically for pack law behaviorism." "Programmed for what, Doctor?" "To kill without conscience, hence without memory." My mind absorbed this. "That is all, sir? Merely to kill? Come, you are insulting the limitations of even a moderate intellect. We already have men programmed to kill without memory. May I remind you of the Homocidin kits we issue as standard equipment in—" Dr. Ho was familiar, he icily reminded me, with the pharmacodynamics of our various control drugs. Indeed, he had compounded most of them. His point was to indicate a conscious, hence voluntary act, without memory. No drugs involved. The wolf, an animal which killed for sport, or in anger, or merely through some urge unknown, not connected with protecting or feeding its young, performed its lethal work with no residual drains of conscience upon efficiency. Ergo when the Ho Plan succeeded in producing what would be for my level of conception a man with the morals of a wolf superimposed on the work habits of the honeybee, it would have brought forth the worktroops of the new world, the builders of Genesis Five. "Worktroops, sir?" I could not help my unguarded astonishment. "Of course," he shrugged. "If we have learned nothing else of mankind's betterment in our hival research, it is that one begins with workers." It occurred to me that this was where we had begun in the present misery—with the workers of the world. But I said nothing, and Ho spoke on. "After the fifth swarm will come the masters of the sixth swarm. Its larvanoid candidates are all Asiatics. You have noted the present candidates to be mixed in race. One experiments with expendables."

Now I could not remain still. "One would also seem to be creating the oldest form of human social failure here, as well," I broke in. "Are you not describing a pure master or ruling class served by a neomixed-breed class of slaves? Is this not a Polar Egypt? An Arctic Fourth Reich?" He did not care for this probe. The Hives of Okatrai, he contended tersely, owed more than elementary debt to Count Maurice Maeterlinck's genius. Yes, there would be a king class derived from the hivequeen concept. Also, these masters would be protected by soldiers, waited upon by drones, served constantly by ordinary workers. The hival design was not idle at Okatrai, but essential. As best it might, my inferior mind rallied. I returned him forcefully to the beginning question and his seeming denial of it. That is, to the matter of the wolfman, or manwolf, not being the project's aim. Except of course, I granted, that it was understood there would be those unfortunate viral breaks common to all laboratory propagation work, such as with the ordinary germ warfare culture studies; those necessary accidents of the test tube en route to a better world. Dr. Ho pursed colorless lips, his habit when annoyed. The bony fingertips made tapping contact. "Breaks will occur in any clinical procedure, Suntar. You know that. But no, the wolfman or lupunoid human in terms of European mythology or American cinematography, is not the aim of my plan. As I have told you, I shall produce a superbeing programmed to obey any order, beginning with kill." "Ah yes," I said witheringly. "Back to murder." The hooded slits of the eyes narrowed, then widened. For an instant the obsidian pupils glittered, cobralike. "Murder, my dear Suntar," Ho said, "is simply to research standard for perfection. Thelupus gene virus returns to man that primal vitality lost through eons of guarded living. That is all." The Chinese head of D-5 paused, transported by his visions of the New Genesis. "If—no—when the fifth swarm is successfully delivered of the comb," he concluded exultantly, "it will present before the distinguished delegation from the Lysenko Institute, not the preposterous wolfman of the Transylvanic stereotype, but the most sublime form of mutant humanity suffused with the feral survival factor of the genetic bodies of Canis lupus,the most potent life-force virus in nature's biology, the whole mutantly inbred upon the dominant rationality, hence social benignity, of Maeterlinck's immortal honeybee!" The slender taloned hands spread above me almost as if in Papal blessing of the final miracle. The whirl of his words, the sheer lunacy of their content, defied cogent reply. But Ho was waiting for me, and at last I nodded cautiously. "And I, Doctor? I am to be the instrument of fate in this epochal hour of man's history. Is that not it, sir?" He seemed not to have heard me. "The mutated human gene has done its work," he intoned. "So with the synthesized genetic king jelly of Apis mellifera. Only the wolf-to-man implant remains." Now he turned upon me, face contorted. "But the cretin who controls the wolf pack and who can so destroy all in one instant of Mongol idiocy— one brutish whim—is your cursed brother, Yang Suntar; that giant misbred bastard of Buryat!" "Yes, and I, Doctor?" I repeated stubbornly. Again the cobra stare, the glitter of the hooded pupils, the hypnotic swaying of the lean yellow head. "Why you, Yuri Suntar," he said, in that softest of deadly soft voices, "you are your brother's keeper."

TEN Before returning me to the surface for the confrontation with my brother Yang, Dr. Ho suggested a tour of the hives. He believed, he said, that it would be useful in impressing upon me the need to, shall we say, succeed, in my efforts to bring about a state of control over my rebellious twin. "Your guide," he concluded, "has been instructed to answer any questions. After all, what is the need for security? I have already told you enough to guarantee your future loyalty to the state." I asked if one might be permitted a question at this point, and Ho nodded in the affirmative. "Sir," I said. "Was there any original question of that loyalty?" "None at all, Yuri Suntar. But it is the future, not the past, which engages us here at Okatrai." "Yes sir. May one inquire one's likely position in such a project?" "That is not exactly the point I was making. You really are of ingenuous outlook, Mongol. All that I intended to convey was the fact of your situation which I would have thought you understood." "Sir?" "Ah, be reasonable, you Buryat ponyboy." The Chinese doctor regarded me benignly. "Surely it must be evident to a student of politik, that no one who enters such a district as D-5 ever leaves it. There is no other adequate method of security." I tried to accept this without external flinching. But it tied my roving Mongol spirits into hair-knots. "What about the shuttle pilots, sir?" “Chana,

you know about. She has the privilege of blood to any house I occupy. As for the others, they are confined to the communiport at Novo Tobirsk, or wherever." I belatedly realized that I had not seen Shikolin above-ground at the D-4 headquarters, nor had I seen any of the D-4 police who were also at the Novo Tobirsk base, here at Okatrai. "Yes sir, of course, Dr. Ho," I said. Then, carefully. "Can you say, sir, in connection with my mission aboveground, whether or not my brother Yang has been given this information regarding freedom, which you have just now imparted to me?" The long face grew less benign. "What do you mean, information regarding freedom?" "The security condition, Doctor. Does Yang Suntar know of this? Does he understand, or have reason to suspect, that he will never see Siberia again?" "It is of no importance. These are ideological terms. This is your province, your problem." He put the hypnotic gaze upon my plain Buryat face. "Perhaps you can tell me what freedom is, Yuri Suntar." There was danger in the challenge; I accepted it nonetheless. "When the term needs to be defined, sir, it cannot be understood." Dr. Ho nodded, calm again. "You are saying that I do not know what freedom is?" "No sir," I said quickly. "I am only saying that Yang Suntar knows what freedom is." Ho smiled, having missed the point entirely. "Your brother," he said, "is a giant fool. He could not define 'cat,' or 'dog.' Let us concern ourselves with his game hunter's primitive concepts of physical liberty."

"Of course, Dr. Ho," I said. "I understand." "Good. You show a certain native instinct for survival, Yuri Suntar. Not wisdom, precisely. Perhaps cunning. We shall see." He touched a button on the lectern behind which he stood upon the dais. I noted the sound, produced in some anteroom off to the left, was the same oriental gonglike tone remarked in the Nobo Tobirsk building. Anachronisms again. They plagued the Asiatic mind as they did that of the Caucasus Russian. An electronic Chinese gong? A sound out of the palaces of the Khans of Kublai's century, activated by a Mandarin biochemist who could create and transfer the very keys of life in the Twenty-first Century. It confused the orderly processes of even a simple Mongol's thinking. But it did something else, too. Something which that simple Mongol understood was of singular importance to him. It revealed the heel of Achilles which every human organism carries somewhere in its heritage. Dr. Ho Wu Chen, the most brilliant and formidable creative thinker in science of his time, had emotional limitations placed by pride of ancient race upon his enormous intellect: he was the mental captive of his own high Mandarin heritage and history; the captive of a past which did not carry with it the simple comprehension of the importance to man of individual liberty. Dr. Ho summoned his lackeys with a sound-system four thousand years old, and he did not understand the plain and basic meaning of personal freedom. I had learned something in that little wordless wait for my guide to appear, something which gave me a weapon I had not formerly possessed. Dr. Ho was the archetypal, the pluperfect example of the ungifted's lament: God protect us from the experts. There was some gene-linked destruct button built into the structures of their great brains, which gave the common mind its fair chance at survival in the deadly game to see which would inherit the earth, the mental or the meek. Here, at Okatrai, it was Dr. Ho Wu Chen against Yuri Suntar. The teeming mind against the tiny one. The sublime intellect versus the very average man. For a heady, breathless moment, I felt myself as tall as the Chinese director of D-5. He must have seen the instinctive straightening of my five-and-one-half foot body, for he smiled without looking at me, and said, "Be at ease, Yuri Suntar. Hope is the opiate of the antheap." Had he read my thoughts? Did he know that the eternal seed had just sprung to life again within my Buryat Mongol's heart? Or was his comment one of those oriental, no, state generalities, designed to apply to whatever of rebellion might be brewing in the backbrain of any comrade citizen, at any hour, in any day, within any prison of the people's paradise? My torment was interrupted by the arrival of my guide, an ironfaced Asiatic in the black and lavender uniform of Ho's D-5 "palace guard." "Inspector Shen," Ho waved. "Your companion for the indoctrination to the Hives of Okatrai." Shen bowed stiffly. "D-4-B, Y. U. Suntar," I said to him. "You will find me an attentive, if somewhat proletarian, charge." "The proletariat," said Shen, "is the prophecy." It was the exactly correct thing to say. Ho nodded, pleased. "Comrade Suntar has been informed of his right to question. Please humor his Mongol roughnesses, without undue expenditure of time. He is here to, ah, see his brother, who is our respected packmaster, Yang Suntar." "It shall be as you say, Comrade Director," Shen said, bowing once more. "Remember the Motherland." Ho merely nodded. The lighting about the dais went to blackness, taking the tall form of the Chinese doctor with it. Shen turned crisply to me.

"Come, please," he ordered, and went quickly out into the reception bay. Behind us, the slide-screen of Ho's office clicked ominously into place. I was restored in spirit to see the Master's shapely granddaughter was still at her desk, even if assiduously trying to avoid my ogling glance. "Ah, comrade beautiful!" I called to her, in passing. "A wonderful day; I have learned your name!" Then, with that ineradicable gene of blithe wrong-headedness which is the birthright of every true son of the Mongolian grasslands, "Remember the Motherland, Chana my love."

ELEVEN Dr. Ho's mistakes, as he referred to them, were housed upon Level Thirteen, the next-to-last level of the hiving section of the Okatrai underground. The chambers reminded one of nothing so much as a stainless steel hospital zoo where the occupants were kept at the total will of the operators; that is to say, that the splendid conditions of keeping were what they were in order to protect the state's investment. It is from its blunders that science learns, and hence it treasures them. And if the blunders upon Level Thirteen of the Hives of Okatrai were an example of this truism, frightening things had been learned there. Inspector Shen received passes from a corridor lock-gate commander and from inner cellblock captains of sealed sectors in turn. The visitor was put at once and uneasily in mind of certain state institutions for correction that were visited by the classes of the Moscow Academy to impress upon the student for politik just what his guaranteed reward would be for deviation. In a word, we were inside the unsafe ward of a sanitarium for the state-made insane. In a republic, even a mongrel socio-fascist republic, such as America, the situation would have meant that the unfortunate creatures were true accidents of nature. Either that, or victims of social pressures and mental breakdowns. Viewed even so, the sight of mindless men and women and little children is one of the most unhinging of human experiences. But when the inmates of such state zoological parks are the deliberately damaged result of state-prepared experiments, the impact is shattering. Imagine, then, the normal unease of a bona fide home for the emotionally broken. Add to its pathetic revulsions the unspeakable refinement of a state's manufactured vietims. To this, if the normal mind be able, try to visualize the incorporation of an aseptic, absolutely optimum physical environment, displaying every advanced condition for the safety and good health of the human corpus, and occupied by stainless cell after stainless cell of mutant animal-humans in every conceivable form of gene-warped monstrosity. Only then will any picture whatever be drawn of the nightmare which was my tour with Inspector Shen. The word of a Suntar is given that these are not the foulest memories which appear here. There is a limit to what the normal mind will accept, and remain normal. The entire conscious effort during the Shen tour was to retain one's own sanity. It follows that, no matter what horror is remembered, far, far worse agonies were forgotten. In one room-sized metal pen, the occupant paced the front of his "retainment"—Shen's euphemism for the prison-barred display pens—panting and whining. Occasionally he would throw back his head and howl. He was a handsome young man, no more than my own age. Mindlessly nude, he trotted behind the bars of his cage—back and forth, back and forth, back and forth—his eyes fixed on some distant horizon. When I forced myself to speak to him, being kind, trying to encourage some confidence upon his part, he snarled, bared his teeth, leaped away.

Recovering, he resumed his nervous pacing behind the bars. Shortly he broke away to go to the center of the cell-cage. There an artificial fir tree of the evergreen, low-growing variety found in Siberia's eastern ranges had been placed. The young man leaned down and sniffed at this tree, walking around it stiff-legged. Satisfied, he lifted his right leg and urinated upon the branches. At once a buzzer sounded and an automated sprinkler system came on quietly to wash the little tree clean, the waste running down into a rustproof catchbasin and sewer trap beneath the artificial fir. Inspector Shen looked at me, obviously inviting comment No, expecting it, demanding it. "Remarkable," I said. "Nothing," he answered proudly, "is overlooked of comfort or cleanliness." We went on. In another "retainment," we found a middle-aged man and woman who were not apparently affected by the animal mutative processes. "An interesting variation on Dr. Ho's theme," said Shen, noting my reaction. "We do not always get results which will be explained by the particular programming. In this case, as you can see, there was no lupus virus involvement." I nodded, and Shen continued. “Nevertheless, here we have a couple which cannot be later than Neanderthal, and Dr. Ho suspects much earlier. Note the brow ridge and, particularly, the center ridge of the male's skull. That is pure Pithecanthropus astralapus. A beautiful reverse mutation; we are very excited about it, but of course it has no useful bearing upon our immediate program. Dr. Ho likes to think of these two as his good pets." "That is quaint," I said. "And kind." I stared at the cave couple, squatting on their hams and gnawing on the plastic bones of some prehistoric small game animal. There was no furniture in this "retainment," but only the artificial bottle-gas campfire before which they crouched. Now and again, the female would clamp a new bone in the crotch of a synthetic stick, and hold it to the unvarying flame. When the succulent morsel was done, she would diffidently hand it to the male. "The ersatz bones," I said, "would seem a clever substitute. I am reminded of the pacifiers which were given suckling infants in the old days. Excellent" "They are more than pacifiers," explained Shen. “These cases would not eat normal food and were starving to death when this method of feeding was conceived. You see, the bone is hollow and filled with an excellent protein soup. They are able to break the outer shells of the plastic and suck the contents." "Wonderful. Reconstructed marrow." "Exactly. As I told you, nothing, absolutely nothing, is overlooked here in reference to the well-being of the people." I looked at him. "You still call them people?" The Inspector of D-5 police went cold in face, stiff in limb. "What would you call them, Comrade Suntar?" I thought about it. Very hard. "People," I decided. "Good," said my guide, and we proceeded to the next exhibit. Mercy insists on brevity. There was a young woman, plainly one of the wolf virus miscarriages, who went about upon all fours. She did not speak a word, according to Shen, but understood several commands, and was not vicious in any way. When we saw her, she was crouching in the canine posture of bowel evacuation and, as she

completed the action, she straightened and scraped at the excrement with her feet, precisely as a dog or wolf might. Seeing my wide eyes upon her, the creature paused, panted appreciatively, and smiled. "My God," I said to Shen. "Yes," said the Chinese officer of security. "I told you; they are happy here." "Well, I am not," I muttered wanly. "I want to leave." "You have not seen some of the more interesting mutations," he objected. "I wanted particularly to show you a mutant nonwolf variant with no features. The head is of clear tight skin, unbroken. The case communicates by a tactile system and has a normal intelligence, indeed, Dr. Ho says, above average. "There is another case where the reverse is true; the perfect head and flawless Caucasian features of a thirty-year-old-woman—completely beautiful—but lacking all four limbs. "Still a third specimen has no upper vertebrae. The head is situated between the scapulae, the normallyhaired scalp being a bump about where the neck column would issue in the normal event. The nose, eyes and mouth are entirely correct. The ears are in the armpits, and it lifts its arms to hear. "Then, there is—" "Inspector Shen," I broke in upon him. "1 have seen enough. I know your orders. And I order you to take me out of this place immediately." I turned to go, with or without him. "You will recall Dr. Ho's parting injunction about the press of time." Shen bowed from the waist, smiling, gracious. "Of course, Comrade Suntar. Guard," he called. The ward attendant, who had been shadowing us at a discreet distance, came up on the trot. "Tell the commander we are ready to depart," Shen instructed him. "And pressed for time." "Instantly, Comrade Inspector!" saluted the attendant, and spoke into his lapel microphone. Buzzers sounded, electronic bells tinged softly. The cellblock gates slid open. We passed quickly through. We did not see the commander at the mainlock. The heavy metal disk merely swung open to permit our exit, closed as swiftly behind us. In the outer corridor, I drew my first free breath in thirty minutes. "You are relieved, comrade?" asked Shen, solicitously. "Partly, you might say," I answered. "Ah, no," he smiled in correction. "Prematurely." "What the hell are you saying?" I demanded angrily. "There is one more case to see. Dr. Ho's express direction. I am sorry." "You are, indeed," I agreed. "As sorry as any specimen it has been my experience to observe." Shen's slant eyes probed my round blue ones. "You make a Mongol joke?" he inquired. "No, never. A Chinese joke. The one your mother played on you." Again the security inspector studied me intently. "What joke is that?" he finally asked, yellow face as bland as a wooden bowl of boiled rice. "A bad one," I decided. "Please, let us continue, Comrade Inspector Shen. Dr. Ho is waiting." "Yes, of course, comrade. This way, kindly."

Nodding obediently, I followed him. That is to say my limbs bore my body in his footsteps. My mind, and my tortured heart, were with the vacant-eyed creatures in the stainless cages of contentment on Level Thirteen.

TWELVE The Hives of Okatrai were connected not only by the great central air shaft, and the main level elevators, but by a spiderweb of pneumatic transportation tubes. These operated exactly on the principle of the ancient department store money-changing tubes. Except that the capsules were of a size to hold human beings, one could almost hear the old money-bells ringing in the basement of Krepotnik's, in Moscow's historically preserved Red Square shopping center. I had not yet been in one but was alert to their possibilities. Noting a control panel on the wall at the arrival and departure station for our particular tube, I carefully watched Inspector Shen select our travel course. The panel was not complicated, being a keyboard punch system very like the antique adding machines. Shen depressed three buttons, or keys, but did not include a vertical one among them. Make a memory, I ordered myself, that whatever we now go to, it is on this same Level Thirteen. As our capsule arrived in response to Shen's signal, the Chinese security inspector volunteered the information that certain combs of the hives were sealed off. Rather than go through the complex main entering system of corridor locks and gates, the air-tunnels of the vacuum tube complex were employed. This, for the casual official visit, where an officer of police, or other authorized person, was on the rounds of his ordinary duty. "The workers," said Shen, "do not use the wall-tubes." We seated ourselves in the cramped body of the metal capsule. Shen closed the hatch. When he touched the "go" control, the sensation was that of having the entire viscera sucked out of the bodyshell. Then, before the anxiety of this state might manifest itself in any hysteria, the ride was over. We were out of the rock womb of the tube, into the gleaming aseptic light of another installation. Shen activated the hatch—I noting how he did so—and we climbed out into as eerie a world of utter silence and lifelessness as the human eye might conjure, or the brain accept. Somewhere in my youth, I recalled having seen, in the lower form, or high school, section of my political preparation, a decadent American film exposing the wormy-sick greed of the Capitalist undertaking industry. Among the scenes was one which took the viewer into an enormous "Hall of the Hallowed." This was nothing save a marble and bronze vault with the sides literally jammed with small metal doors, each with its own lock and nameplate in bronze. Upon being unlocked by an attendant, the grieving family might then slide out of the wall the embalmed remains of the departed, to the letter in the same fashion as some grisly filing system of useless dead humanity. This memory of the American film now became the reality of the present. I knew, simply from my experience of the Capitalist necrophiles, that we were standing at the threshold of Dr. Ho Wu Chen's personal and private Hall of the Hallowed. I looked at Shen. "More mistakes?" I asked. "Further Mongol jokes?" he countered. "I've seen this cinema before," I told him. "You do not need to show it to me again."

"What is that?" "Isn't there a good ballet going somewhere in the hives? Perhaps some acrobats, or a dancing bear? Even an old Swedish film? I know all about mausoleums; after all, we were taught from the highest examples of the art." Shen shook his head, Asiatic features showing just the rewarding trace of annoyance. "You are a Mongol. One must remember this. You need not apologize. Come." He walked down the center of the brooding cathedral. Perforce, since not even a Mongol cares to be left alone in a burial crypt, I followed him quickly. He stopped at a bank of metal doors which stared like the eyes of a housefly in ten hundred reflections from every prism of the catacomb's flanks. Here, he told me, was what Dr. Ho had wished that I observe before my return to his office. "Read the inscription on number 30743, comrade," he urged me. I bent down, peering at the burnished plate. Josef Maringa Age 39, African Stage One Hold Straightening, I said that I had read the plate's legend. My companion then asked if I had any questions, to which I replied that I did not. "Ahhh!" said Inspector Shen, and pushed the release button for number 30743. The crypt door swung open and an oblong transparent plastic container slid out upon a stainless steel frame. In the container lay the body of a male African at least six and one half feet in height. The state of preservation was incredible. Lifelike would scarcely have been adequate to describe the apparent state of pleasant sleep which marked the naked corpse. "Now any questions?" suggested Shen. I shook my head obstinately, informing him that I failed to comprehend why I should be expected to demonstrate any undue curiosity over this departed comrade. Morbidity, I frowned, had never been the special weakness of the Suntar personality. As I had told him previously, I would vastly prefer to see one of the good old Ingmar Bergman motion pictures. Shen nodded, obviously relishing my pique, and added that Dr. Ho had thought my interest in the occupant of 30743 might be aroused by some pertinent genetics. To this, I returned his nod watchfully. I had to quit game-playing with this Asiatic stick. His sense of liveliness was as atrophied as a ninetyyear-old man's amorosity. Carefully I told him that he must understand that I was in Dr. Ho's service and that any native levity displayed was not deliberate but the inevitable result of my nomad beginnings. "Genetics again," I explained. Shen bowed, accepting the apology. He went on to inform me that the Stage One Holdwe were examining was in the primary state of suspension or, as described in hival terminology, "on hold." The condition was used for those comrades who, while not precisely enemies of the state, must still be silenced. Such exhibits were put on hold, rather than into the deeper keeping states of Stage Two and Stage Three, until that time when the authorities might have arrived at some final disposition of the case. Dr. Ho's hope and expectation was that these Stage Ones might be held indefinitely. This particular one was an original candidate of the program; indeed, a specimen case, and something special even beyond that. "Ah," I interrupted. "How special, Inspector?" Shen then said that Josef Maringa would have been in Stage One Hold for five full years upon the impending occasion of the funding committee's visit. Dr. Ho had determined that a five-year survival,

undamaged, indicated total success for this advanced form of, well, Inspector Shen did not care to phrase it in just such an unadorned manner, but let it be said right out, this advanced form of caring for the state's special problems. I remarked here that it was indeed less expensive than live care and that Dr. Ho was not only a remarkable chemist but an eminent economist. Shen said graciously that he was certain Dr. Ho would be pleased to hear the compliment but that the return of Josef Maringa to the normal state for the benefit of the Leningrad Committee was not the essential purpose behind our visit to the Hall of Crypts. I caught the warning note, and tensed. "We are back to genetics then, I suspect," I said. "Yes. Specifically the granddaughter of Dr. Ho." "Chana?" I said, surprised. "Chana Maringa," he corrected quietly. Ah, now it came, like a knife blade between the ribs, quietly but not with pleasure. Shen, delivering the thrust, merely bowed in the slight Chines way, knowing an agrarian peasant of the outer grasslands must react to such a brutal probe with unguarded emotion. I determined I would not support the psywar statistics for rudimentary Mongol behaviorism. "Comrade Inspector," I said. "You have now shown me the allegedly suspended corpus of Josef Maringa, African father of Dr. Ho's granddaughter, Chana Maringa. Was there anything else in our tour?" Shen actually frowned. "You are not impressed? Dr. Ho believed that, due to your physical interest in the girl, you might comprehend that the continued safekeeping of her father could be jeopardized by any rash conduct upon your own part. He wanted you to know that Maringa was here." "Blackmail, eh? Be a good boy, Yuri, and the father of the girl you hunger after will be unharmed. Extortion with a catatonic kidnap victim? Exquisite. Even for a Chinaman." Shen recoiled. Chinaman was the "nigger" of opprobrious names to the sons of Old Cathay. "You dare," he hissed between clenched teeth. "You actually dare." "On the contrary, I do nothing of the sort," I assured him. "As long as one is in the service of Dr. Ho, what risk is involved from other minions of the same glorious master?" Inspector Shen was himself again. Yellow ice all the way. "In your report, which I shall file with Dr. Ho, it will be remarked that you are not of the ponyherd mentality which you affect. It is obvious to the eye that you are no true Mongol by blood. Neither is your mind that of a peasant yakboy of Buryat. Dr. Ho was correct: you will bear watching." I nodded, despising the humorless churl with a depth of sincerity he could not possibly return. "Speaking of heredity," I said, "have you met my fraternal twin, Yang Suntar? If you have, may I remind you that the woman who produced that gentle lovable mass of Mongol sweetness also gave life to this milk-faced, blue-eyed weakling who trembles before you." "But Yang Suntar is a Mongol!" Shen protested. "Then remember," I said, "that I am his brother." "Ahhhh," said Comrade Inspector Shen, slant eyes glittering. "I believe that I had better show you something e\se, before we return to Dr. Ho. There would appear to be more of a problem of control here than that involving your cretin of a twin above ground. Perhaps, if the welfare of Josef Maringa means so little to you, another, ah, what may we call it?—another case specimen?—will have more useful memories for you. Come."

At the walltube opening, I held back. "One thing you will understand," I insisted. "It is not that I remain callous to the welfare of Chana's father. It is not even that I doubt the body you showed me is Chana's father. One can see the unquestionable beauty of feature, the cast of highblood, which relates the two. What I cannot accept is the claim that the body which I saw is redeemable into the normal princely being it once housed." "How is this? Upon what basis do you doubt?" "It is well known, Comrade Inspector, that even a few minutes of life's absence results in irreparable damage to terminal blood vessels, nerve tissues, and the like. This damage cannot be repaired by any known technique even today." "True. And not true. Dr. Ho's process does not involve life's absence, but its true, instantaneous suspension. You have heard of cryogenics?" "Of course. But that body was not frozen." "No. In Stage One, we produce the desired suspension with a drug, which is, should Dr. Ho's previous experiments at Peking continue to be borne out, reversible by another drug. Stage Two is still reversible, but with more elaborate procedures, involving some slight risks, surgery, restarting of the pulse, that manner of thing. Stage Three is the deep frozen condition, the true cryogenic descent into ice-death. Restoration here is still quite hazardous." "But you are saying that in Stage One a simple hypodermic injection, and the case recovers?" "Completely and virtually at once. We who have seen it marvel at each new demonstration. Dr. Ho is the greatest biochemical brain in the history of humanity." The marvel in this demonstration was not Dr. Ho's undoubted brilliance, but the fact that a simple Mongol peasant ponyherd had gotten the doctor's number one security officer, and a Chinese, to talking freely. I had no intent of squandering my own little brain's small triumph. "He may be what you say," I admitted, as Shen opened the capsule's hatch. "But it would seem still to be a primitive procedure, where one must trouble to repair to some distant lab to procure the syringe and the drug, then program himself into the walltubes, back to the hall of crypts, open the plastic seal, prepare the case for intravenous, measure the amount of the injection—" "In the name of the state!" complained Shen. "Be still! Can you possibly believe such crude nonsense? A syringe is built into each of the crypt's plastic containers. A simple button on the slide-frame activates needle and dosage. The case is sitting up within fifteen seconds." I bowed to him in an image of the Mandarin protocol. "Since you have taken the name of the state," I murmured, "you leave a loyal D-4 man no alternative than to obey. Please consider me your servant." "Get in the capsule," he ordered abruptly. "I am weary of your sheepdung smell and yakbutter wit. You could not be the servant of any master." "Be careful, comrade," I warned. "You are talking about a treasonable matter, and contagious." "What matter is that?" he asked, eyes slitted. "Freedom," I said, and climbed into the capsule.

THIRTEEN

"We shall find no requirement for debarkation in this case," said Shen, slowing the capsule. We came abaft a thick porthole of submarine crystal in the wall of the new section, through which we might view the project room in its full scope. "This is the service laboratory," my companion continued. "Here we manufacture the various control drugs and appliances, not only for the adjacent Hall of Crypts, but for the entire hive complex. This is our pharmacy, our master medical room." He paused. "The creatures you note doing the maintenance are standby larvanoid candidates. We employ them in such drudgery to expend energies, to make them more at ease, happier. You will observe all are happy. Eh?" "Yes," I said. "I noted this delighted mood of theirs at Novo Tobirsk, where I saw a contingent boarding ship for Okatrai. If you wish to call them happy, that is your right." "And what would you call them, comrade?" "Medicated." "Ahhh. Interesting. Very interesting." "Of course, Inspector. Is it Chlorophomobede or Reactin? Let me guess. Reactin. The muscle tone and coordination is better than with CPM. However, we were warned in school that the depth of control is not as great nor as reliable, as with the older drug. What is the experience here?" "We find Reactin to be preferred. These cases do not require deep sedation. And, as you point out, the use of the body is much superior with RT." "Have you had any breaks with it, comrade?" "Why do you ask?" "We were advised that it happened with improper dosage." "Yes, that is so. We have had no breaks, however. Dr. Ho has given the amounts. He does not err." "Strange," I said, looking full at him. "I can still hear that handsome boy in Retainment 37 howling dolefully. And that young woman moving her bowels like a dog sticks in the eye of my recall." "That is not error, but calculated experimental risk. There is a difference, Comrade Suntar." "Of course. I am sure the prehistoric couple by the artificial cave-fire would be glad to know that." "Yes; they are all comrades who gave their part to the greater whole; heroes of the state, all." "Every one, to be sure." I gestured to the shining metal work of the lab beyond the viewing port. Here and there a uniformed Asiatic technician was at work with the bio-mechanical tools of his trade. Half a dozen Reactinized workers shuffled along the aisle nearest our viewport. Ahead of them they pushed the dustmops of modern technology. All were turbaned and masked to protect the sterile air of the room. Sarcastically, I advised my capsule companion to look at the fellow who led the work squad. Study the bowed legs, the squat physique, the plainly ugly lines of the anthropoid form, I suggested. How could such a grotesque phenotype be a candidate for encellation as a larvanoid of tomorrow's superbeing? He appeared to me more of a nominee for the waxworks of London or Paris. Motherland! I hoped my comrade would excuse my bemusement. Before Shen might reply to my comments, the poor fellow of whom I had been making state fun, almost as if he had overheard the rude estimate, turned his leathery face upward to stare at us. I recognized him in the same instant that I prayed he might recognize me. And indeed there was that momentary poignant expression of joy upon the homely face which could not be masked by the

swathing of the turban nor the vile enslavement of mind and body, and which said to me past all doubt that my old friend had not failed to remember; he had recognized me. Nor was this all: he was not under Reactin control, or CPM, or any control whatever. By some miracle of indomitable will, superb acting, or access to the counter drug known to every student of the Academy For Politics, this larvanoid candidate was a normal man; and more. To cover his shock at seeing me in the viewing port, he made some fumbling gesture over his eyes, as if the brilliant lighting of the lab had bothered his vision. In the same motion, he managed to make a secret sign known only to two men, a gesture of recognition as sacred as the heart of our sworn brotherhood. "Look at that poor rutabaga," I laughed. "It cannot even understand that its eyes are being strained by the light. It paws at its face like an insect. Or perhaps it only wants to be friends, and is waving to us. Hello there, hero of the state!" I waved. "That's a good larvanoid boy. Push your anti-air-particle mop. Do not get any dirt motes in the fission soup!" With the foolish words, I made the return sign to the larvanoid candidate of our secret recognition signal. The creature turned away, groping with its swathed mop, ignoring us. But I saw the limbs straighten, the spine become fleetingly erect. It knew; and Comrade Inspector Shen did not know that it knew. The security chief now nodded, much pleased. "A better demonstration could not have been arranged," he said. "Dr. Ho wanted you to appreciate our controls; he thought that seeing your former D-4 associate in our care would impress you best." He paused. "The state puts its ultimate trust in D-5, comrade. Remember it." "Of course. Who would know that better than a D-4? Come, Inspector. I am eager for my assignment." I did not lie to him. If Kano Komuli could endure what he had endured and still send our old sign immediately upon recognition—we against all—then Yuri Suntar could return the countersign—hope! —and mean its promise in every letter of that dangerous, illegal, treasonous and unmentionably disloyal word. Comrade Inspector Shen, watching me, seemed to suspect something of my spirit's ignition. "Your attitude is commendable. Be certain that it does not alter." I laughed, the inspired worker for the state, the essentially happy warrior of the people. "You have convinced me, dear Shen. I am rededicated. Forward!" "Good, good," smiled the Chinese hive-guide. "No reward exists except in the service of mankind." "Motherland—!" I cried, completely overcome. Shen nodded, and put the capsule car on program. We eased out of the air lock of the viewing port, into the gut-sucking velocity of the walltube. "Perhaps you are more progressive than you seem, Suntar," he grudged. "I will admit I thought you were a subversive. Something behind the eyes. A restless thing. A searching thing. You seem to look for what is not there." "You mean for what is not here, comrade." "Eh?" "Space, comrade. Openness. The freedom of the Mongol grasslands." "Oh. I wish you would not use that word all the time. You know that it is subject to misunderstanding." "I demonstrate my trust in the Comrade Inspector," I replied humbly. "We are professionals. Of course I referred to the claustrophobic problem in the hives."

"Exactly. I was born in Sinkiang, myself." "I knew it! There is something about the outlander people. A look of eagles. A grace of snow leopards." "Ah, naturally. You know, Suntar, you are really not such a bad fellow." I said nothing. But Shen was wrong. I was a worse fellow than he might comprehend. And much, much less progressive. As the capsule eased into downspeed for its entry into the exit port, I was thinking of my own meaning for the forbidden word: I was thinking of Kano Komuli and Yuri Suntar against them all; I was thinking of our possible escape from the Hives of Okatrai, and daring to hope that we might make it—to freedom.

The Packmaster

FOURTEEN Shen left me in the anteroom, where Dr. Ho kept me waiting a God-given minute or three. Chana Maringa did not seem friendly to a conversation, nor did I dare one. But some chance must be taken. I made a hasty note on the scratchpad all students for politik carried—its paper destroyed itself thirty seconds after exposure to the air—then commenced some inane banter with the Afro girl which, if monitored in Ho's quarters, would sound typical of my Mongol preoccupation with the female as a female. I paced about as I talked, working, as by accident, closer to the desk of the lavender-eyed receptionist. "What I am suggesting," I said to her, "is that we leave all of this and find some small desert tentcommunity where we can discover ourselves. You understand? No disloyalty to the state is involved, naturally. It is just that I propose we declare ourselves inferior to the needs of the people, and request retirement." "What you are suggesting," she snapped, "is that you are disorganized mentally. I don't care to hear more of your pagan philosophies of tentlife. I was not born to be the pack animal of some Mongol yak herder. The culture of the grazing tribes is scarcely my cup of kumiss." "Ah! You know of our fermented mare's milk?" "As frequently made from the milk of the camel," she answered. "From an old Tatar recipe." "Yes, and very intoxicating." "No doubt. I think you must have a secret source of supply with you at all times." "Chana," I said. "I love you." "You are drunk!" She actually laughed. The sound was as musical as sheepbells in the twilight, when the wind is sweet from the south. I caught her eye, and held it. In the same enchanted moment, I slipped the plastic airtight cover from the note I had written her, and passed the paper to her in the act of a sudden impish handshake. Surprised, she accepted the proffered grip, and laughed again. But when she realized the exchange had left her with an illegal note in her soft-scented palm, the haunting beauty of her face showed panic. "Thirty seconds," I mouthed the words for her silently. "For God's sake, be calm."

To my vast relief, she made some pointless comment for the monitor and, under guise of checking some papers in a lower drawer, leaned down and read the note. Your father is alive and here at Okatrai. If you ever hope to see him, do not betray me. I will be in your Skak—no— the Skak of Col. Shikolin—Twelve Midnight, Flight Level One. . . .

Slowly, a look of benumbed disbelief on her dark face, Chana straightened from behind the desk. She still clutched the note. I was counting the seconds. She continued to stare at me. Then, she arose, taut as the lioness arising from cover for the kill. "Traitor!" she breathed, and started for the wall-screen of Ho's inner office. She touohed the control. As she did, the destruct chemical burst into flame, and the paper disintegrated in her clenched hand. The screen slid up and the vibrant basso of Dr. Ho Wu Chen issued. "Yes?” Chana stood there holding the hand which had held the note. Her great lilac eyes swept back to me. I smiled, managing my customary small Mongol joke. "We who are about to die—for love—salute you." With the words, I threw her a proper old-fashioned flourish of fingertips to forehead, and straightened. The lavender eyes darkened with some emotion which was not hate. She turned again to Ho. "Comrade Suntar to see you," she said, and let the clenched hand go open, and fall to her side.

FIFTEEN I waited in Ho's inner room. For effect, he was permitting the blackness to persist. One could barely make out the silhouette of the dais and lectern, which formed his pulpit, or the mount of his oracle. But the suspense did not have its undoubtedly planned effect. I was not nervous now. The stimulus of Chana's decision not to betray me was working through my veins like a firewine. It was this elation, I am certain, which led to the rash gamble that formed in my restless mind while I waited upon Dr. Ho's Chinese pleasure. Here, I thought, is the place and the time to determine the importance of Yuri Suntar. Either they needed the brother of Yang in a degree of urgency not yet delineated, except in vague allusions, or the reduction of the headstrong twin was not of the order of great importance hinted, and would not bear the full weight of what I intended placing upon it: I was impelled, suddenly, to seek from Ho a general pass to the Hives of Okatrai; to blackmail the oriental genius into permitting me free access to the security areas of the complex. And I must indeed gain such mobility, or any thought of a conspiracy of escape would be sheer fantasy. What argument might be advanced for such concession? Well, I was a D-4-B. Even though perilously near to last in my class, I was not your average comrade. I had been taught the niceties of thought control, brain conditioning, psychic persuasion, the entire gamut

of mental and moral perversion essential to the maintenance and advancement of the state whose aims and ideals were so many light years ahead of the laboring intellects of its citizen soldiers. Where your oaf in the street, or upon the tractor seat, or beside the assembly line, could not comprehend what was in his own best interests—would insist, instead, upon coveting Capitalistic trash, such as color television, flying-belts, personal undersea scuba cars, public games of chance, nonstate movies, dish dryers, fly-in open sky theaters and the like—well, when the dolt came to this pass, he simply had to be redirected. That was the name of the game they played at the Moscow Academy For Politics. And, slow or not, I knew how to play it. That was for openers. Then there was the real clincher. If I was supposed to influence my giant brother to behave, to come around and stop his obstructionism and get back to work for the future of the state, then I had better understand, from personal impression and conviction, just what it was that Okatrai's rise or collapse meant to the net gains of the Supreme Peoples Union. In brief, Yuri Suntar had to be convinced before he might hope to convince Yang Suntar. When Dr. Ho at last turned up the illumination and revealed himself upon the dais, I was ready for him. In the beginning, I said, in making my application for a general pass to the hives, the good Doctor must understand that the suggestion was offered only within the very broadest frame of state reference. By no means was it to be inferred that a snooper's privilege was sought, or that any leaning upon my D-4B classification was implied. However, were the pass to be granted and the recipient made free to wander the marvelous complex of Okatrai, it would seem that one might thus most speedily absorb that necessary inspiration for the coming confrontation with the recalcitrant packmaster, Yang Suntar—a confrontation which, by the clocktick, seemed to become more critical. Through all of this blather, Ho regarded me without change of expression. When I had achieved the fine dramatic climax, he nodded in approval and observed, in his best avuncular tones, that he had always thought of the Mongol as a taciturn individual, given to stating himself tersely. My speech could easily have won me an ambassadorship to the old United Nations. I made haste to remind him that I was not a true Mongol, but a whey-faced bastard of Buryat. Perhaps some foreign seed had lain on the wind which impregnated my Mongol dam. Ho nodded. "One is led to imagine the possibility," he said. "I once had an outstanding assistant, a Californian from the University of Berkeley. He spoke in the identical patternless jargon you employ. Interesting." "A Chinese exchange student, sir?" I asked. He shook his head. "A defector, an American." "Oh." I would happily have abandoned this trail but for a reason of his own Dr. Ho clung to it. "Interesting," he said again. "Is one permitted to inquire as to what the Doctor finds interesting?" "The American was blond and memorably blue-eyed," he answered. "A small man but extremely able. Pity." "Pity, sir?" "He turned out to be an agent of the CIA."

"Ahhh," "Ah, indeed, Yuri Suntar." He continued to study me. I was inspired to try a little Mongol levity to break the tension. I employed some innocuous remark about my relief at the fact I was twenty-four years old and thus safely in the same generation with his late assistant from the U.S. Otherwise, I smiled, one might be inclined to suspect, really almost to believe, that an allusion had just been made to some—jokingly, of course— possibility of parentage. After all, it had been remarked before, and not in humor, that a western wind had blown into our tent, rather than that southern one from Lake Baikal. But American? I had to laugh, and did so, without thinking. At this, Ho frowned slightly. "You are amused? Perhaps we can amuse you yet more." He was watching me. Testing me with his strange eyes. "This agent," he went on, "fled before we were ready to accost him. He sensed, or was warned, that he had, ah, what is the expression, the vulgarism?" "Blown his cover," I submitted helpfully. "Yes, precisely. But of course he could not escape in the final situation. It was only a matter of time and distance, and we would come up with him. We did, and naturally you can guess where it was we made the last location." "I am afraid not, sir. Hong Kong, I suspect. Or on that road somewhere short of the gate." "No, it was just outside Kuluk Nor, in Buryat He had ridden the Siberian line in a manner peculiar to Americans. Hobo-ed, I believe he called it. He had been hidden by a woman, really only a girl, of the grasslands. He looked as Mongol as the next yakherd. Had it not been for that yellow hair and the very blue round eyes, well, you can understand." "No sir," I insisted. "I am afraid I cannot. Not to this point, at least." "Try, Yuri Suntar," he smiled. "Use your Mongol imagination." I was doing just that, unfortunately. Mongol girl. Desperate American agent in flight for his life. Nomad people always moving. Place of Buryat in the old empty Mongol country. Vicinity of the historic Trans-Siberia Railway. Scenes of my own youth and boyhood. Ahhh! "You have found something?" Ho inquired solicitously. "A hint? A clue of happenstance? Anything at all?" "Nothing," I perspired. "I swear, absolutely nothing." The reptilian gaze followed the course of one great bead of sweat rolling down and off the end of my nose. "Nothing? You are certain?" Oh, I qualified belatedly, of course I understood what it was that Dr. Ho was composing here. But that was merely his manner of playing with a foolish Mongol mouse. One was not able to entertain the obvious implication of possible American parentage, due to chronology. "Ah. Then you are assuming that my little story relates to a time within the quite recent past?" "Yes, of course, Doctor. Definitely." "And I did not tell you, expressly, that this American was an agent of the CIA?" "You did, sir; yes, indeed."

"Then you will now tell me, Comrade Suntar, speaking as a student for politik, just how many years have passed since America disbanded the CIA? How long ago was it, please?" I was certain my features grew even more curdish in that moment of silence, but Dr. Ho merely touched the tips of his bony fingers together, nodding pleasantly. "Twenty-four years, ten months," he said, answering for me, "since the WPO confirmed the matter." The WPO, World Peace Organization, was the successor to the past century's defunct and discredited United Nations, and the predecessor to the present PWC, Peoples World Court. WPO documentation was still accepted evidence, however, among Eastern members, including, of course, our own Master State. Hence, there was no escape for me from Ho's quiet dating of the time of the capture of the American CIA operative in my Buryat homeland. "What are you thinking, comrade?" asked the Chinese. "What you have programmed me to think, Doctor," I told him. "That the American was old enough to have been my father." "And nothing else?" "Nothing of which I am consciously aware, no, sir." The eyes in their slitted pouches were almost completely closed but they did not leave my face. Ho seemed in a trance. Presently, he eased himself, and his eyes reopened. "Behind you," he said, "an oscilloscopic accelerator has been tuned focally upon your brain. I detect no undue peaks on the graph. Very good. You have been telling the truth. You do not know your own father." I felt the weight of a thousand pounds of anxiety lift from my meager body. I was safe for the moment. Yet, true to my heritage of hard head and family devotion, I burst out unthinkingly with the natural human query to which his devilish game had led me: Did Dr. Ho know who my father was? The tall biochemist shook his head. The deep voice and benignly evil face appeared for one passing instant to show compassion. The Chinese, he said, understood the importance of blood ties, of a man's lineage, his cultural heredity. Ancestry was the common god of all men's relationship. But the answer to my question was no. The security forces were not so fail-proof in those older days. Ho's agents had made an assumption that the American fugitive was too briefly with the Buryat people to effect a liaison. Whether the Westerner had, or had not, lain with my Mongol mother was not a matter of Peking record. By the time the Russians had recorded a blue-eyed white child brought in for education from the pastures of Suntar, it had been too late. Old Mongols had denied everything. Young Mongols had admitted everything but knew nothing. Was my question thus satisfactorily answered? I had to admit that it was. I was only grateful, I said, that the Peking record did not accuse me of the alien American bloodline. Fortunately I was able to add that, throughout their history, the Mongol people had produced a variety of throwback types. These were the returning heritages of their warlords and the hordes of hard-wenching riders who followed them. Thus there had always been blond Mongols, those of red hair, of freckled skin, of many eye colors other than black or brown and, of course, even those occasional "white bastards," such as myself. Nonetheless, it was high reward for Yuri Suntar to know that Dr. Ho and the D-5 dossier on the Suntar twins held brother Yang and me to be clean of the American taint. Ho accepted this. But time pressed. It was urgent that I now go aboveground and see my brother. The funding committee was due on tomorrow's first flight up from Novo Tobirsk. It was presently twelve

noon. Two hours would be allotted to the first Yang visit. Then four hours of sleep for me under restorative Endurin dosage. After that, at six p.m., Dr. Ho would hear my report. "For your safety and convenience meanwhile," he smiled, "I have assigned you a companion. Lo-Tsi!" In response to Ho's summons, the same square bear of a Tibetan brigand who had brought me down from the flight deck of Level One, upon my arrival at Okatrai, moved out of the shadows of the room's far side. The fellow grinned to show his fine stainless steel partial plate, winked his one bloodshot eye, and saluted. "Command me, comrade," he suggested. I looked him over. "I'll think about it," I nodded. "Very carefully." I turned to take final instructions from Dr. Ho, but the dais had gone to blackness again. Taking a deep inhalation of the close-scented air, I was ready. Whatever waited above, I knew what lay below was worse. And, up there, always, was giant brother Yang Suntar; the man who had never been born in the first place, and so could not die in the second. "Come on," I said to Lo-Tsi. "Let's go see the Mongol packmaster of Okatrai." "By the Great Prayer Wheel of Lhasa," grumbled the fellow, "I would as near welcome a visit with his cursed wolves. That Yang! He is a demon. A reincarnation." "He has harmed you?" I said, surprised. "Never." "What then?" "It's that damnable kumiss." "What? They let him have kumiss?" "They don't let him have if, he makes it himself." "Out of what, in God's name? Bitch-wolf milk?" "No, no. He gets them to send him in powdered mare's milk from Siberia. Tells them the wolves must have it to compensate for lack of sunshine vitamins. As men of science, they never question him. He gets all he wants. A big drum of it every week from Novo Tobirsk. They bring it up on the Petzimovs, with the larvanoid candidates." "How do you know about them?" I challenged. "The larvanoids?" I eyed him. "That's not your district." "I don't! Did I say that? You are crazy, like your brother. You are trying to make trouble." "I am joking," I smiled. "As a Mongol will. Forget it. Tell me more of this kumiss swindle. How has it harmed you?" "Terribly," he groaned. "It has ruined my stomach and etched out the inside of my skull." "You drink it with him?" "He insists!" "Ahhh." I could not help this smile, and it was genuine. "And. when Yang Suntar insists?" I suggested. "One drinks kumiss!" cried the Tibetan. "Or else." "Nothing changes," I said thankfully. "He is still that Yang."

We were now in the outer office, having had to wait for Chana to activate the wallscreen for our exit. She avoided my glance. I started on, then stopped and smote my hand against the rockhard ridges of my forehead. "Damn it!" I virtually yelled. "I forgot the godda—, ah, excuse me, Comrade Chana," I smiled with deserved difficulty. "It is only that I neglected to get from your venerable ancestor what I went in there to cajole him out of." "Ah, yes." The lavender eyes weakened me with one deep probe. "But Dr. Ho does not forget." She held out the most slender and dusky-pink of tapered hands. "Your general pass, Comrade Suntar; with a conditional stamp." "Conditional?" I murmured. "Of course. The control personnel will let you know the conditions. Don't worry about it." "Thank you." I bowed and took the pass. At the touch of the slim fingers, I felt the other object held beneath the laminated pass, and nearly dropped from surprise. "Pin the pass to your blousefront," she instructed. I did so, managing to palm the note she had given me with the pass. "Remember the Motherland," I said to her, with the state salute. She returned the sign and Lo-Tsi and I went out into the corridor. In the elevator to the surface, I distracted him with a question about the air-induction installation in the lift. As he went laboriously into his explanation, I cupped my palm to the toplight. The note was in exquisite Mandarin script, yet simple as the Masai straightness of her sentiment. Four words, no more. But a Mongol heart leaped high. And the shadow of a hope took substance. "I shall be there," read the note of Chana Maringa.

SIXTEEN On Level One, which was itself one hundred feet underground, we left the main elevator and went to a walltube heading. Here, Lo-Tsi pushed a combination of buttons, which I memorized carefully. Getting in the capsule, we closed hatch and threw the go switch. I felt the capsule angle sharply upward, knew we were going surfaceward. One was scarcely prepared for what surface, however. Motion ceased, as the capsule corrected to horizontal plane and I could see a green light through the crystal port on my side. Lo-Tsi released the hatch. Debarking, I saw we were in the roundhouse of pure green sea-ice, or rather ice as green as sea-ice. A snow sledge was parked near the only exit from the ice room. We boarded this vehicle and the Tibetan turned on its motor. "Run up your viewshield," he told me. "It is too cold outside to breathe." "Ha!" I laughed. "You're talking to a Mongol." "And you're talking to a Tibetan," he said. "We can go naked in cold that would icicle your testes with a thermal G-string on. Do as I say, Comrade Suntar. I would not want to deliver Yang his baby brother with his lungs pasted together with frost-glue." I slid up the viewshield, not wanting to alienate this possible ally, or, at least, fellow outlander.

We drove from the tubehead ice room, up a slightly inclined ramp to the actual surface. We were struck by an Arctic galewind that blew the heavy sledge sideways twenty feet. Lo-Tsi corrected for the drift, kept the motor revving. Drawing near a low structure that seemed built of mother rock removed from the deep shafts, which rock one could see through the transparent green coating of ice over the entire building complex, we entered a tunnel which looked for all the world like the old Eskimo entrance crawlways to the igloos of the past century. At the end of this, we halted in a widened area and parked the sledge. Before us stood an ordinary metal door. Now I must say something quite odd. In the times when I was only a boy, first in the settlement of Buryat, my old aunt took me on a visit to a kennel outside the city, where a good childhood friend of hers raised sentry dogs for the state. This kennel had a speaking tube alongside the door. You pulled it out of the wall and spoke into it to let the proprietor know your business. That is, you did this after you had jangled the springhung brass bell mounted above the speaking tube's holding hook. I believe in those days this was called a "doorbell." In any event, and this was the odd part, there before us on this door was precisely the same arrangement of ancient speaking tube, spring and brass bell. "Don't tell me; I know," I said flippantly to Lo-Tsi. "You give this bell a jangle and then pick up the tube and tell the resident what you are selling. But first," I added, "you wait until all the dogs stop yowling which were aroused by the bell." The Tibetan was looking at me in a peculiar way and I thought to spur him some more. "You didn't know I had occult powers of divination, did you? Lhasan dolt, do you imagine that Chinese madman down there below is the only one with the ability to read thoughts? To foretell events? Let me advise you that we Mongols are second to no race in our connections with the darkworld." Lo-Tsi actually gulped and drew a bit apart from me. I took immediate pity on the poor fellow and told him I was only indulging in a bit of ponyplay with him. "I am no more able to predict what will happen when we jangle that old bell than you are," I reassured him. "Yes," he muttered. "But I have been here before. How did you know they would all start howling when they heard the bell? That is, if it is not so that you have the evil one's power to see and foretell?" "Wait a minute," I scowled. "What do you mean they will start howling?" "Yang Sumtar's pets in there." "You mean he has the wolves in there? Beyond this door? A kennel of those brutes?" "I did not say that. There is no use playing more jokes on a simple security guard. Pull the bell." "Well," I said, "I don't know who is joking with whom at this point. I'll ring for the butler, and ask him." I reached for the bellcord and gave it a hard tug. Off in the innards of the low building could be heard a relayed echo of the brass jangle. Instantly, a yammering of howls went up more hideous than any dog or wolf might voice. I recoiled from the bell, as if bitten. "It is a kennel!" I yelled angrily at Lo-Tsi. "It's you who are being funny." "I didn't say it wasn't a kennel, Comrade Suntar. I only said it did not house wolves. Ha, prepare yourself. I hear him coming in there. Listen to that; he's on the mare's milk again." The sound from within was a species of hybrid cacophony bred from mule lungs, bear's larynx, wild boar's grunts and the bugling of the European moose in rut. It was, in a word, my brother Yang Suntar singing.

The words were worse than the noises of the aborted notes and I thought, my God, he may kill us before we can advance and be recognized. He is not only full of kumiss, he must be inhaling it, as well. "Listen," I warned Lo-Tsi. "You better back off, until I get him quieted down. Hide under the sledge. I'll signal you when it's safe." Oh, in the days when Jenghiz rode It was not a horse he bestrode But a woman at every branch Of the road; and mounting a Queen As quick as a toad—Ah! those were The saddles that real Mongols rode And I'd rather be dead than— Yang broke off the atrocious ballad to fumble and curse at the door's lock, which seemed frozen, or jammed. Lo-Tsi, losing his nerve completely, broke and scuttled for the parked sledge. As he did, I pounded on the door and shouted at lungtop. "Do you now hear me in there, Yang Suntar, you drunken yaksteer from Buryat! Stop that foul cursing, or I'll tell auntie." A noise like a bull choking on his own cud issued from within. This was followed by a bellow of loving rage, and the door was literally bent away from its hinges, the lock sprung, and the entire panel simply twisted out of the way. Yang stood, spraddle-legged, staring down at me like the Giant at Jack at the bottom of the Beanstalk. He couldn't speak. The tears sprang to blur his slant green eyes. He reached out to touch me as though I were some fragile Arctic edelweiss. Then he plucked me up in the same way and held me to his heart and wept like a seven-foot child, silently, from the soul.

SEVENTEEN Yang soon enough brought himself around to booming shouts and gigantic thumpings of chest, pacings, oaths, roaring laughter, all the simple honesties which were his normal condition of Mongol spirit. He told me little of himself I did not already know from the dossier D-5 kept on him. Nor did the details of his four years since last we met matter a great deal to our situation now. What was essential was that work he was doing with the wolves, and even here Yang seemed not too certain of the relationship of his duties as packmaster to the product of the hives. "Oh," he said, "I know well enough what I do, brother, and what my little ones out there beyond the barrier do; but I really cannot say what that Chinaman does down there in the bowels of the earth, nor do I know what happens to all those people I see brought in by the airships. All I know is that I am homesick. I must get out of this place. Must be free to roam again, to go where I please, and where the gametrails and the night sky and the morning sun and the south breeze lead me. It's a bad place here. It smells of decay and rot and evil things. I want to go home." "And where is home now, Yang?" I asked him quietly. He peered at me. "I started to say Buryat, old Kuluk Nor, Lak Baikal. You know. But maybe that isn't what I mean. Old auntie, she's dead, Yuri. Did you hear that? Did they tell you?"

"No, brother; they never tell you. I'm sad to hear it. She was the last of the Suntars; the old line." "Yes, sad. I'm sad, Yuri. Sad all the time. It's why I make the damned kumiss and guzzle it. I don't know if it's this place, or me." "It is us, Yang," I told him. "We both want the same thing. What we were born for. To be free." "Yes, yes." He fell silent, staring at the tin cup of kumiss in his huge hand. I told him rapidly why I had been summoned, what was expected of me—to bring him under control, to prevent disturbance to the wolf pack—and asked him if he would help me in this regard, or fight me, too. He said, frankly, that he did not know what he would do. If they would promise to let him go home, he would obey whatever they said. But he had rebelled because they had already lied to him a hundred times about letting him go home. No, he did not think he could defeat the power of Dr. Ho and the Okatrai project. Yes, he understood he would be killed the instant they no longer needed him. No, he could not tell me what they used his wolves for. Yes, it was true the wolves were mutants. But, no, it was not true—not really true—that his pack had human minds. It was more that they thought in a way like no wolves before them in nature's eons of time. The way they behaved, it was as though they were thinking human thoughts. But it was a long way from as though to really were. To him, Yang Suntar, they were still wolves. He spoke to them in their own tongue and they answered him in their own tongue. But he had done that with the wolves in Siberia, and they with him. No, they weren't humans in wolf bodies. Dr. Ho lied if he said he had transplanted the gene for a human brain into these beasts. That was not the way that it had happened, at all. Yangknew better than that. "But what about the human things down there in the hives?" I asked. "They do have the wolf genes in them." "I know nothing of that," he answered. "I have not been down in the hives. They come up here to me." I knew suddenly and with a great sense of despair that my giant brother was not going to help me. It was not that he would refuse, if he knew how. It was that he did not know how. Nothing had changed. It was still the mind of a vast child in the body of a muscular behemoth. It was still Yang Suntar looking to Yuri Suntar to get him out of trouble. I had to have known it all along, too. In Yang, I had not found an ally, but a liability. "Brother," I said, "do you remember our secret oath we had when we were hiding from auntie, or from the elders when it was our turn to herd?" "Yes, of course I remember it. Ulan Kutor Vod." "That is right. You must apply the oath to all that I now tell you. Understand? Everything. It must be as though I had not been here. All right?" "Why do you press me on this? Have I ever lied to you, Yuri?" "Never!" "All right, there's my word on it; Ulan Kutor Vod." I then lyingly told him that Ho's plan would undoubtedly do away with the wolves, and with Yang Suntar, when the fifth swarm of larvanoids, now ready to hatch, were brought forth for the funding committee's arrival tomorrow. It was also pointed out to him—which was no lie— that where he went, and his pack went, his small brother Yuri also went. "Include in that doomed number," I finished grimly, "any friends you may have made in this place."

"What?" he said, frowning. "Who told you I had any friends here?" "No one told me. I am only telling you that Dr. Ho is insane. I am convinced he means to destroy every non-larvanoid person on this base, the moment that fifth swarm comes out of the combs—if they come out successfully." "Well, I don't care," shrugged Yang, pouring himself another cup of kumiss. "He won't harm the pilots." "Your friend is a pilot?" "I have no friends!" "Which pilot is it?" "The slim one. Never smiles. Gray eyes. Flies a middle-sized Skak. Sometimes, when I am out with the pack, she comes in low overhead, and I wave up to her. Do you know, Yuri, that I can see those gray eyes all the way from up there?" He shook his huge head sadly. "She never waves back, though. Only looks down and salutes. I wish I could know her name, Yuri. She—" He broke off, realizing I had tricked him. "You have done it again," he accused. "You are no more fair than you ever were, skinny little white bastard. Always running ahead of me like a snow hare. One day I will catch you." "The girl's name is Ivanya," I told him soberly. "I flew up with her from Novo Tobirsk. She's a colonel with D-l. Ivanya Shikolin. And say, do you know what she said? She said she knew you. Waved to you almost every flight. She said you were good friends." "Waving? She called that waving! And friends? She said friends?" He seized my hand, holding it in his two great paws. "Ah, Yuri! You are a brother!" "Ah, Yang," I said. "I am a bastard."

EIGHTEEN The tour of the kennels of Okatrai was something upon which Yang insisted. It was also obligatory were one to learn all he might about the entire complex. And this one had to do that, and to make his new move within the following twenty-four hours. Once the Committee met and was sold on the performance of the fifth swarm, then the seal would be clamped on the base and an ice-mouse would not get out of it alive. There was more in my mind than that, too. Dr. Ho had hinted only at the results of a successful experiment. What if he failed? What if the fifth swarm of larvanoids was no better than the fourth? Or first, or third, or second? Inspector Shen had pointed out some of the members of these earlier crops of the combs in the cages of contentment on Level Thirteen. No committee of any state would fund a program producing a multibillion-ruble monster as its end fabric. If Ho's present hatch of larvanoids did not come off, that committee would not give him ten chervonets for his next adventure in genetics. Indeed, I thought, as I followed Yang out of the front office of his domain, if the Leningrad group could be convinced of the madness of the Chinese scientist's actual experiment—to put the souls of wolves into the bodies of human beings—its members must immediately vote to revoke the whole hideous business. Ho would be charged with high treason, the hives would be shut down, or destroyed, Genesis Five would probably be dissolved. Even the Russians had to understand that God still ran his own hives and designed his own bees, when confronted, as these Russians would be—if Yuri Suntar could arrange

it—with the terrible evidence of Ho's treachery to his original assignment—to produce a benignly perfect human being. So I went with Yang into the kennels of Okatrai. Nothing I had seen belowground had prepared me for what waited there. The kennels were precisely that, cages or runs laid out with a long central aisle for the use of the attendant in cleaning and feeding the human inmates. The latter were fed from shiny pans shoved under the bottom bar of their run doors. There were not one but several in each run. I recalled being sent with a fellow student one day to the city dog pound in Moscow to secure some specimens for a demonstration in Reactinization. These kennels under brother Yang's care were in the same pattern as the pound. The runs were holding pens only. No design for comfort, only for keeping the brutes confined until they were doled out to the various research groups, or simply destroyed to make room for incoming new captives. Yang informed me that my analogy was sound. Except that the research had already been done on these poor impounds. Now they were of no further use to the state and were sent up to Yang for disposal. I looked down the shining rows of runs. The occupants stared back, or paced, panting and whimpering but watchful of the packmaster and his guest. Yang had not prepared me for them. He said no more now, either, waiting for me to speak. I could not. The runs were filled, not with animals, but with human beings. The same pitiful, heart- and stomachwrenching creatures that Shen showed me on Level Thirteen. With one exception: these were all obviously the wolf-transplant breaks; the unfortunate larvanoid candidates in whom the virus lupus had spread beyond lab control: the "mistakes" which Dr. Ho must hide at committee time, and which at any time occurred too numerously, by his own admission, to be granted the dread sanctuary of the cages of contentment on Level Thirteen. This packed kennel-room was the storage bin for the overflow of the human waste of the Hives of Okatrai; the garbage pit, the disposal unit, of the private subterranean hell of Dr. Ho Wu Chen. "My God," I said softly to Yang, at last. "These are still human beings, brother. Mindless or broken or tortured as they may be, they are our own flesh and blood, our own kind. They're human, Yang!" My companion grunted something in Mongol. He picked up a feed pan from a stack nearby. Stepping to the nearest cage door he drew the metal container across the bars, banging and clanging it repeatedly. Instantly, pandemonium broke out among the runs. The creatures howled, snarled, yelped, yammered, bayed and began fighting among themselves, for all the world like hungry, angry, strange dogs— no, not dogs, dogs barked. These things did not bark. They only howled and bayed and cried out in that piercing, fearsome high whine uttered by no other creature than the great brown wolf of my native Siberia. "You still say human?" asked Yang Suntar. He returned the feed pan to its pile, and the noise in the kennel-room subsided to the panting and endless low whimpering of its level upon our entrance. "These things are not human, brother Yuri. I can talk to my wolves better than to these whatever-theyares. They come in here so full of drugs it is impossible for them to think. They don't know where they are going, and when they get there, they don't care." The way that he said it brought my glance swiftly to his dark face. There was no emotion there, no pained look of the need to do a job that was admittedly monstrous. Was it possible that the packmaster, himself, was under medication? Or was it, perhaps, that my Mongol's vivid imagination was leaping ahead to its usual conclusions of the very worst, where something less than that condition might obtain? Surely this rough giant, who would never knowingly harm a fieldmouse or bend the pinfeather of a fledgling bird, could not be overseeing this operation if it were anything beyond the unspeakable impound he had already shown me.

I don't know why, at this time, it did not occur to me automatically that it had to be something else. That Dr. Ho could have disposed of his unwanted evidence down in the bowels of the Arctic Circle in a dozen easy ways. The nuclear furnaces on Level Sixteen, for instance. A body, or a thousand bodies, dropped in their atomic maws, would circle the earth forever as hydogen dust. But at the moment of my brother's seemingly callous acceptance of his guardianship of the human-bodied wolfbreak experiments, I simply did not think in any way save my normal Mongol's emotional response to the cause of anything unable to defend itself, or fend for itself, where I might try. "Brother," I said to Yang Suntar, "what do you mean, exactly, when you say, 'where they are going'? That expression, somehow, tingles the spine unpleasantly." I paused, looking up into his face. "Where are they going?" Yang shrugged, returning my suspicious demand with a grin which bared every tooth in his wbitefanged head. It was the expression which he had employed since earliest boyhood, when he believed he had at last trapped his smaller, much smarter twin, and could not wait to rub the Yuri nose in the Yang triumph. "You know what the Chinamen say, brother," he told me. "One demonstration is worth a million orations." "You mean," I said sharply, "one picture is worth a thousand words." "That's it, sure enough. Come on." We returned to the office and to a locker room, where we donned thermal suits. Then Yang went back into the kennel and made some arrangements which he said were necessary. Next, we went into another locker room, this one a garage of sorts, housing a snowsledge with a heavy plastic vanbody. In the rear of the van, which would normally accommodate about ten persons, were two of the kennel inmates. They were stark naked, as were all of those in the runs, but seemed to be protected by some heating qualities of the plastic. They showed no apprehension. I noted unavoidably that one of them was a female. Both seemed quite youthful. Perhaps in their early thirties. The female, forgive me, the woman, except for an obvious development of the canine tushes and a rudimentary tail-stump of long gray guardhairs, was not bad looking. The man seemed in every way normal other than for the eyes, which burned with that phosphorescent luminosity typical of Canis lupus, and a furry sheathing of the genitalia equally distinctive. When I tried to get the glance of either, to engage it, that is, they would only pass over me with their eyes, as though I were not there. "Yang," I said. "I am trusting you." "You can trust me, brother Yuri," he replied. We drove on. Before long, buffeted by the polar winds which apparently never ceased, we came into the lee of an ice-wall. Yang pointed to it, as we cruised along its base. "The barrier," he said. "We built it and mother nature keeps it up for us. I don't need it," he grinned. "But if it broke down, there would be plenty of fun for everybody else aboveground. Ha, ha, ha!" The cannonade of his mountainous laugh shook the cab of the sledge. I frowned, not amused. "The barrier?" I said. "To what?" Again, I do not know what I was thinking. It ought to have been plain to me. But my word on it that it was not. When the mind is fed so much fearsome material in so little time as mine had been at Okatrai, then the point comes when mere ingestion registers nothing. Room is made in the stomach of the mind to hold the information, but no juice is extracted from it.

"Ha!" said brother Yang, in the normal shouting level of his conversation. "You shall see, my puny twin. Did I not say I would show you a picture? You don't think this stupid frozen fence is worth all this wind and ice-bumping, do you? Ho, ho!" I winced. The boom of his laugh had always plagued my hearing. I used to put yakwool in my ears when we went hunting together, or stood ponyherd. "Look," I said. "Do me a favor. Don't laugh any more as long as we are cooped up in the cab of this damned thing." He looked at me, features softening, or softening as much as smoked leather and skullbones can soften. "Ah, Yuri, Yuri, Yuri," he sighed thunderously. "Always the poor little whey-faced bastard. The wonder is that you have survived at all, without me to look after you." "The wonder," I denied grittily, "is that I survived you, at all. I had forgotten the strains of being your sibling. But you return them wondrously swift. Drive on, for God's sake." "Patience," he grinned. "It's worth the wait."

NINETEEN Yang drove the sledge up a ramp of ice to the top of the barrier. There we parked in a small level room, roofed over with the ice of the barrier, and with viewing slits cut in the material to give a panoramic outlook over the leeward half of the Island of Okatrai. Yang grinned. "That's my pasture out there," he said. "Excuse me." He backed the van to a port-door set in the ice-wall of the lookout level. The opening of the door matched the hatch at the rear of the van. Yang pushed a button on the sledge's instrument panel. The van hatch slid up, activating the ice-wall port, which also opened. My brother depressed another switch on the dashboard. In the plastic passenger cubicle, a section began moving from behind our cab, toward the rear of the van. Its progress necessarily pushed the two unclad creatures ahead of it. To avoid being crushed, they made for the only escape possible, into the yawning black tunnel behind the wall port. As soon as they had entered the chamber, its door slid clickingly shut behind them, and Yang moved yet a third lever on the control panel of the sledge. Almost instantly, the nude couple slid into view at the insidebase of the barrier, seeming to have been shot out into the inner area from a chute. Indeed, my giant brother informed me, in response to my startled comment, this was exactly the case. "Just like putting a ruble in the old gum machine at Kuluk Nor," he said. "You put in your money and you pull the lever, and out comes that which you have paid for." I looked back at the creatures below. Now they were in the full blast on the wind moving from the polar icecap, and their discomfort was intense. "Don't worry," said Yang. "They won't suffer." "What do you mean?" I cried indignantly. "They are suffering. For God's sake, is this your employment? Is this the solution for the overflow of Dr. Ho's mistakes?" Yang went to a panel on the wall and flipped a switch. I heard the crackle of a p.a. system heating up. He pulled a microphone from a small recess, grinned over at me, uttered into the instrument a perfect imitation of the pack-gather howl of the Siberian brown wolf. Before I could catalogue this act, he reversed the p.a. switch to the outside pickup. "Listen," he said.

Far off, I heard the answer to his call. I knew it well, and had, unlike Yang, always shivered to it. "The wolves," I breathed. "Yes," nodded my brother, delighted. "Watch them come." I drew back. Now my mind at last had cleared. I stared at my brother, putting out a hand toward him, rejecting the terrible thing he had ordered, and rejecting my brother with it. "No!" I said. "Oh God!" "Yes," he answered, slant green eyes glued to the ice field before us. "Here they are." They appeared like wraiths of brown smoke silvered with ghostly ice and hoar-frost crystals encrusted in their thick coats, ghost wolves from another dimension, another genesis in the disordered brain of a Chinese biochemist, as insane as the pack-yammer which now went up at the sight of the two creatures huddled below us. I saw, incredibly, the man look up at our watchtower, shaking his head. Then I saw him take the hand of the woman and both of them face the wolves. It was over in seconds, so far as the dying went. The couple simply disappeared, pulled down into the common belly of the ravening pack. When the animals drew apart only moments later, there was no evidence the couple had ever existed, except for some smears of crimson upon the snowcrust—and these were scooped up and mouthed and swallowed, ice, snow and blood, in snapping gulps by the unfortunates who came late to dinner. I looked, sickly white, at my brother Yang Suntar. The giant merely shrugged. "They felt nothing," he said. "They were nothing." I moved back yet farther from him. "Yang." I said. "You are a liar." Now his dark face went darker still. To call Yang Suntar a liar not even a twin brother might dare. He took one long crouching step toward me. "You didn't say that, little brother. I didn't hear you." I shook my head. "You never frightened me, Yang. Never. I know what I saw. That creature who looked up here just before he died was not a creature. That was a man, Yang Suntar. The last buried instinct of the primeval human breast broke through all the controls, all the vile drugs, all the filthy programming —that was a man, Yang Suntar, and he wanted to live. And did you see him take her hand? You bastard. You foul, filthy bastard." He was towering over me now, wild rage consuming what small brain he had. He was a thing from the pits. "Go ahead," I said quietly to him. "Your pets are waiting. Put another ruble in the machine. Who will ever know? Ulan Kutor Vod, brother." He was reaching for me, when the old boyhood words penetrated the inflamed motor cells of his Mongol brain. The great clawed hands stopped. The muscles of the thick forearms coiled and froze. The crazed fire burned out of the slitted green eyes. The cavernous chest heaved, the deep voice broke. "Ah, Yuri, Yuri, Yuri," he said thickly, and began to weep.

TWENTY

I knew now that Yang was unstable. I could use him only as a device to buy time. But what time? The Leningrad Committee sat tomorrow. Its members were stern men, and rational. Dr. Ho's madness must be evident to them. Only the fact the Chinese biochemist had literally sealed off the Genesis District for its entire five years of life had protected him from exposure. It had permitted him to deviate from the aim of the state, which was to produce a benignly superior human by mutation, and, instead, in his beehived lupustransplant and king jelly insanity, to produce a malignant but absolutely controllable superbeing. Now, when the official Lysenko Institut group met, regardless of what grotesqueries the hatch of the fifth swarm brought forth, or what beautiful things, indeed, Ho's day was done. It must go like that, and Dr. Ho must know that it would —he would never get another five-year grant, never. The Lysenkoites were scientists, not mere political citizens of the state. As of high noon tomorrow, the shining larvanoid new World of Dr. Ho Wu Chen would end. All right; suppose my postulations were correct? The answer was ominously simple: given the absolute certainty that the visiting committee's review of the fifth swarm would result in a terminal "Nyet" vote, Ho would be prepared in advance; before he would accept defeat, the Chinese director of Genesis District Five would see the committee and every other living soul on Okatrai Island in hell. Nor was this some idle figure of speech. Any installation of the nature of Ho's hiving complex, such advanced and super-secret research of the state, had its destruct system built in. Somewhere in the Hives of Okatrai was the switch. That Ho would pull it when he must, I had no doubt whatever. And I must operate upon what I believed. All right again. Now what? There were, as I saw it, two ways to go. I could continue with my present plan to free Kano Komuli and make good our escape, with or without Chana Maringa, by simply stealing the latter's two-place Skak and getting out of the central landing shaft the best way we might. Or, with Chana's cooperation, we would elaborate the flight plan to include her and her father, using Shikolin's larger Skak, but otherwise the same fundamentally desperate gamble to take off up the landing bore under our own power, shortcutting the standard launch-tube firing. For a graduate student of Realpolitik, this was the hardcore extent of it. Cut and run, save Number One. But for a stupid Mongol of the Buryat grasslands, who was also in his unprogrammed native heart loyal to homeland and mother country, as distinct from politcal state, there was a third, more honorable way: go before the funding committee, prior to its high noon meeting with Dr. Ho, and appeal for a preswarm arrest of the Chinese head of D-5. Yet if one were to contemplate that madness, he must have a representative of some weight to speak for him. A mere D-4 for Propaganda, only hours on the ground, could not hope to sway the stern Lysenko delegation. The spokesman must be a person of some importance and tenure within the project. But who, in the name of God? Comrade Inspector Shen? Pilot-Colonel Shikolin? General Ket? Nonsense. Shen was a fanatic. So was Shikolin. Ket? Fat Ket? The five-star hero of the Peoples Permanent Revolutionist Military? Well, Ket had the weight, if the poor Mongol play upon the word be permitted. But he was only one day away from retirement, the longed-for obscurity of every high state official. One might as well pray for a hard rain in the heart of the Gobi. The mind turned of course to the last chance—Chana Maringa. But, as quickly, it turned away.

The Afro girl, regardless of the success or failure of our coming midnight rendezvous on Flight Level One, could not be used. Naturally, she had the position, the very most sensitive and elevated in the hives. But she was not a trained agent. She had no official status; no state record of service to impress the men from Leningrad. Then the thing seized upon me. It came stalking into my mind on savage black feet through winnowing yellow Sudan grasses: Chana Maringa was the daughter of Josef Maringa. Josef Maringa, code name "Simba." The warrior chieftain turned WPO protocol officer. Simba Maringa. Fighter for African justice. Josef Maringa, Hall of Crypts number 30743, Age 39, Stage One Hold. The traduced black man. The duped victim of the racial conflict fired by Red Chinese heirs of Chairman Mao. Josef Maringa, son-in-law of Dr. Ho who had blueprinted the abortive Negro pogroms of Central Africa. This man, this Simba Maringa, was my salvation, the gift to me of his lovely daughter Chana. With God's and Kano Komuli's aid, I would restore him. Then there would be three of us fighting men to appear before the funding committee: Simba Maringa, Kano Komuli, Yuri Suntar. Given our following entreaties and our exposures of the madness of Dr. Ho Wu Chen, and given our subsequent just hearings, what select board of rational men would deny the evidence which the African and the Lap and I were prepared to bring to light? In my rising élan there remained no least thought of failure. Naturally a representative of importance to press our case would still have been the preferred risk. But one harnessed the horses he had when the devil drove the troika. Oh there were two rather vexing problems. One black, one white. And both buried thirteen hundred feet in the catacombed rock of the Polar ice cap. But, bending to the Arctic blasts which howled at me as I staggered across the dooryard of Yang's kennel toward the parked sledge of Lo-Tsi, I laughed aloud. "Open up!" I shouted at the startled Tibetan. "We against all! Hope—!" Lo-Tsi forced back the hatch cover so that I might squeeze into the electric warmth of the motor sledge beside him. His look for me was one of pity. "You Mongols," he said understanaingly. "All crazy." I settled into my co-driver's bucketchair, vision fastened on a farther star than this poor Lhasan might imagine. "Get this thing in gear," I instructed him curtly. "I'm late for my Endurin class." He kicked the sledge's motor into life, spun the vehicle on its snowtreads, aimed it back across the open icefields to the shaft house of the Level One walltube. Reporting below to Shen's office, I was assigned a bunk and given my injection. When I awakened, the corridor chronogongs were striking the muted hour of six. It was halfway to midnight and the meeting with Ho's granddaughter. Trying not to appear anything but utterly bored with the Hives of Okatrai, I washed up and presented myself for passout at the corridor guard desk. "Have a most pleasant evening," bowed the guard captain, stamping my pass. "Thank you, sir; remember the Motherland," I saluted smartly. Then, in the unintelligible Buryat Mongol dialect, deeply returning his bow. "Go to hell, you ugly bastard."

TWENTY-ONE I failed to note Lo-Tsi come up behind me. But when I arrived at the corridor lift, there he was displaying his stainless steel grin. "You move light in the foot for a fellow your heft," I told him. "I am just as glad that we are friends." "You think so?" he said, surprised. "Friends, eh? One doesn't hear that word too often at Okatrai." The lift came sliding up from below. We got in. Lo-Tsi pressed the button for Six, Ho's level. The big Tibetan was nervous. "Listen," he said. "Be sure of one thing. You are not my friend." He glanced up at the ventilator grill, and I knew he was indicating where the bug was. "The state is my friend." "You are eminently correct, guard Lo-Tsi," I answered, pitching my words at the ventilator. "Surely you misunderstood me. I said comrade, not friend." "Oh yes, of course. Here's our level, comrade." We got out. The lift returned upward, toward Shen's corridor on Level Two. Lo-Tsi sighed with relief. Feigning professional care, he searched the empty metal corridor. Then he turned over his tunic lapel and depressed the off-switch on his bodymike. "Thank you, comrade friend," he said soberly. "I praise the gods of my people that these are my final days here. After tomorrow I am to go home. My five years are served. Did you guess that I came here from the beginning, comrade?" "Ah, is that a fact? No, I hadn't guessed it. One of the real old-timers, eh?" We began to walk down the long shining bore of the corridor. "Very old old-timer," Lo-Tsi said, still holding down the bodymike switch. "I was born into a Tibetan guerrilla band loyal to the Dalai Lama. My father was fighting the Chinese Reds of Chairman Mao in the outpeaks beyond Lhasa. That was even before Mao's crazy Red Guards. Do you remember those idiot children? Well, the whole world was mad then. Anyway, one doesn't forget what it's like to be free, even when hunted night and day." "That's a dangerous word, oldtimer friend," I warned. Lo-Tsi's one eye showed the fire which had smoldered in his heart since he had been captured as a small child. "I know it is a dangerous word," he told me. "That's why I say it." "Free!" I murmured. "Isn't that a strange sound?" "It could kill a man," said the burly Tibetan. "I understand," I assured him. "Do not be concerned. I shall forget you ever said it." "No, no!" he protested. "I want you to remember that I said it." At once, he let the bodymike switch pop back on and, in another few strides, we were at Ho's foyer door. "Well, here we are, Comrade Suntar," he said loudly. "Sure enough we are," I said. "It's been a wonderful day, Comrade Security-guard. Thank you so much. No, no, please don't bother. I shall let myself in." I did, too, separating myself from Lo-Tsi by slipping through the foyer door into the receptionist's bay, before he might object. I could almost hear his sigh of relief follow me out of his sight, however. Chana Maringa was not at the desk. Instead, one of Shen's black-and-lavender troopers sat in her place. I was not enraptured by the change. "Ahh, Comrade of Propaganda, Y. U. Suntar," the D-5 man greeted me. "You are prompt, comrade."

"Six p.m., comrade," I answered, saluting him. "A good citizen of the state is always punctual." He did not appreciate the salute, knowing that I knew his classification did not rate even a bow. "Dr. Ho will see you presently," he said. "Sit down." I moved to the desk. "I would prefer to chat with a fellow soldier of the peoples' war," I smiled. "Our districts are close eh? Four as to Five? One feels a real brotherhood. Besides, what is genesis but a form of propaganda, eh? You and I know, comrade," I winked. At once he was upon his feet, demanding to know what disloyalty, what deviationism, I was suggesting. I reached over and lifted his pack of contraband American cigarettes from inside his tunic pocket, where I had marked the telltale bulge. Selecting a smoke, I lit it and blew the fragrant cloud into his pouchy eyes. "Ah, the noxious weed," I said. "What will we not do for it? What is the penalty in D-5 these days? The last time I checked regulations in the D-4 manual, it was six months for possession, five years for passing. Would you say you passed me this pack?" I put the cigarettes in my own pocket, and the Genesis District man nodded. "I would say I never saw the pack," he answered. "Then I would arrest you for possession." I now noticed he was holding down the intercom switch, but he was already releasing it again before I realized his oriental loveliness of intent. "Comrade Suntar," he proclaimed heroically, "I arrest you in the name of the state. Possession of contraband tobacco. Subject American-made Dromedary-brand cigarettes. Section E-3-09." He rang another of the gonglike inner bells, and two huskies in the house uniform of his service sprang out from a sliding panel, saluting. "Arrest the Mongol," the man at the desk instructed the newly arrived security men. "Enemy of the state." The two moved in to take physical possession of me and, in the natural course of the attempt, both of them wound up on the polished stone of the floor. One, the one whom I took first, landed without a break in his journey and I feared would never do to serve again in any man's security force. He might, indeed, be dead. The second fellow, whom I had had a bit more time for, and whose trajectory I was better able to plan, landed with a walloping thump in the lap of the lad behind the desk. In fact, the deskman was still sitting there gasping for his breath, the fellow comrade of the D-5 Security shaking his head groggily in his lap, when the roll-up screen to Ho's dark sanctum slid open and three men emerged in some state of agitation. Their condition was not allayed by the sight of one D-5 man cuddling another to his bosom, in front of a lowly D-4 of propaganda from Moscow. "All right, Comrade Corporal," said Inspector Shen to the deskman. "I am waiting for your explanation." I moved forward. "Inspector Shen, sir," I pleaded. "It is my fault. I burst in unannounced. I didn't know they cared, sir." "Shut up, you Mongol oaf!" snapped Shen. He wheeled back to the desk. "What are you doing sitting in the corporal's lap?" he hissed at the groggy security guard. "Is this some flagrant new deviation?" He came over to me quickly. Glancing over his shoulder to be sure the screen had slid down again, and Dr. Ho was not a witness, he apologized. "It is deplorable, of course, comrade. But I am sure you will not find it necessary to report this to D-4. I have told Ho repeatedly that it was a basic error to deny the base here to all normal, er, that is, to women workers. You cannot outlaw heterosexual outlet without inviting these sorry things."

"Sir!" The outraged deskman leaped belatedly to his feet, spilling the security guard to the floor. "This is not what it seems! Comrade Suntar will vouch for my sincerity. He knows how to explain this bizarre appearance." "I suppose you are going to tell the Inspector that I bodily picked up that bully and flung him across the foyer into your lap," I said, good-naturedly. The deskman froze. The slitted eyes went blank. "Blue-eyed white devil!" he snarled, and turned and saluted Shen and stood ready for his punishment. But the Comrade Inspector had other troubles. "You," he said to the guard. "Pick up your friend and get out of here. Take him to the infirmary. You, corporal, sit down at your desk and shut up." He wheeled again to me, waving up his two companions. They approached with some dignity. One was an older man of fifty, quiet in face and manner, dressed in the smock of a scientist. The other fellow was perhaps forty. He did not wear the black and lavender security uniform but held himself in that unmistakable posture of the police. "Comrade Suntar," said Shen. "It is proper that you should meet Doctor-Professor Zomatar and Provost Marshal Rodion." I bowed. "Gentlemen." Both nodded, studying me. I assumed I had been a subject of the meeting inside, or my mission here had been, and I became extremely watchful. "I understand you are from Buryat," said Rodion. "My father was born in Barguzin." "Ah, one sees the Mongol in your bearing, Comrade Provost. The blood is proud." "Prouder in some than others," he noted humorlessly. "True, too true," I smiled. "But you see in me a mean example of my line. Now I have a twin brother above-ground—" The Provost Marshal scowled. "We know of this twin brother," he said. "We shall come to him in time." He bowed curtly. "A pleasure, comrade." "Yes," said his companion, the mild Zomatar. "A pleasure here, as well. Another time, comrade." He made a little perfunctory gesture. "Motherland—" They wished obviously to leave but for reasons of his own Inspector Shen said to me, "Rodion is in charge of security for the Leningrad Committee. He feels better to be on the ground early. Just this past hour flew in. Guess who went down to pick him up at Novo Tobirsk? Your shapely friend Shikolin." I nodded, not committing myself, and he went on. "Zomatar here is the project director. He is next only to Dr. Ho himself. You might say that he is the Doctor's good right hand." "And Marshal Rodion?" I said. "Which hand is he?" "Oh, Rodion." Shen laughed. But it was a Chinese laugh, and the marshal flinched and paled angrily. "I suppose you might say that Rodion was the funding committee's good left hand—kept hidden in the pocket." I bowed carefully to the head of military police. One cannot overdo obsequiousness with the military. Particularly when in mufti, as was Marshal Rodion at the moment. "I have the greatest admiration for the control forces, Comrade Provost," I said, ignoring Shen. "I have just spent a trying afternoon in this

area myself. I trust you will excuse me. I fear I am keeping Dr. Ho. Unless, of course, Inspector Shen wishes to supersede. It is his privilege, naturally." Now Shen turned a poor color. "For the State's sake!" he snapped. "What are you trying to do to me? You are worse than a weasel in a rabbithole. Gentlemen—" He bowed his charges past me. I drew back. "Professor," I called after the preoccupied chief scientist. "I remember your Kremlin seminar on 'The True Humanities.' It was the high point of my school life. Good health, sir. Happiness." He hesitated, looking wistfully into the past. "Ah, yes," he said softly. "Thank you, young comrade. Those days, those days." Shen herded him out quickly, but not quickly enough. I watched the corridor door close behind them, incurable Suntar spirit restored. I had found my contact in Dr. Ho's power structure, my person of importance to go before the funding committee. He was Doctor-Professor Zomatar.

TWENTY-TWO Dr. Ho greeted me in his quiet, completely unsettling manner. We had a few words on my enjoyment of the Endurin nap, my treatment in the hives, my compatibility with my Tibetan watchdog, Lo-Tsi, my impressions of the packmaster's aboveground domain, and of his mutated sanitary corps. In all cases I kept my replies minimal. I felt something was being prepared here. The uncomfortable point was that it would prove to be me. But my questioner played coyly. Apparently satisfied with the initial skirmishing, Ho put his taloned fingertips together. "Very well," he said. "What did Yang Suntar say? What was his complaint? Why has he rebelled? What does he want?" I hesitated. It was the wrong time to do that. The stillness moved Dr. Ho to press a switch on his lectern. There was no audible or visible change at this gesture, but I knew something not healthy for Yuri Suntar had been activated. Making awkward recovery with one of my well-known Mongol jokes, I attempted a curtailed report of partial success. "Promise of control would seem guaranteed from this initial contact," I concluded. "Most encouraging." Ho nodded. "Excellent. Now, comrade, would you care to listen to another report? I am going to play you a mentogram tape of your brainwaves made this moment, while you paused. What you hear is not your voice but your thoughts flashing back to Yang Suntar at my queries. It is interesting." He pressed the switch again and I heard the skirl of a tape spool reversing. Then the auto-voice began: ". . . Before leaving Yang, I was able to get his promise—Ulan Kutor Vod—to stand behind the report I intended making to Dr. Ho; that Yang Suntar had agreed to desist in his obstructionism and to ready the wolf pack for committee visiting purposes, under certain terms. These were that he and I might continue our talks, unmonitored, till the committee had departed. At that time Yang would render his answer to Dr. Ho, freely and in good heart. "Naturally this is risky stuff. But in the circumstances of Ho's preoccupation with bringing off the fifth swarm, and placating the funding committee, the tenuous arrangement could pass temporary inspection. "The real crux and reason for Yang Suntar's rebellion, however, did not come out until I had probed him mercilessly and from a knowledge of his carnal appetites.

"The giant wants a woman; or wanted one. "He did not hunger for affection or attention to creature comforts, the goal of most men in a mate; he wanted the animal services, and was near-wild for them. And he knew the female he would demand. "She was, of course, the gray-eyed pilot-colonel whom I had lied to him about. "When I told him Ivanya Shikolin had noticed him on the ground and waved to him and thought of him as a friend, I unleashed demons undreamed before by Yang Suntar. Love. My brother was in love. More realistically, he was in the Mongol rut. And the she-creature of his desires was to hand. "The fact of the matter—that primly military, punctilious Colonel I. Shikolin was the last woman imaginable who might qualify as Mongol bait—would never deter that Yang. Neither would it disturb Ho Wu Chen. "Indeed, the Chinese biochemist would sacrifice Shikolin the instant he might learn that his disobedient packmaster slavered after her sleek flanks. The Asiatic devil is above nothing. He would offer his own granddaughter to secure the control of the Hives of Okatrai until the crucial hatch of his fifth swarm. "But the grief which must follow any deliverance of Ivanya to Yang will be disastrous. "After the rape, when the sensitive, cultured officer would certainly inform the animal what she felt for him and his brute kind, brother Yang would certainly come unhinged. He is the absolute victim of fierce, unreasonable, Mongol pride in the mastery of women as the primary fruit of conquest. His emotional reaction to being spurned by an educated woman who he had assumed would requite his studhorse assault—had she not waved to him?— would be cataclysmic. "He will simply tear his part of Okatrai apart at the seams. And, if there were any way, is any way, for this to be done afterward, he will turn loose his wolves into the shafts and lifts and corridors of Okatrai on the kill. "Like all pagans, my giant brother is not capable of faulting himself. Whatever happens to him is always the work of the enemy. He has never made trouble for himself. If he becomes inebriated on his own bad kumiss and stubs his own toe upon his own other heel, he will instantly spring up and commence searching for the foe who tripped him. It is an outlook typical of those who idealize war as a way of life, a solution to difficulty. The enemy, where is the enemy? Ah, there he is. Destroy him. Good. Now there will not be any more trouble. Until, of course, another enemy be required to expire for the next new sin of the warrior thinker. "The fighting man. History's darling and mankind's despair. The hero of the state. My twin brother Yang K. Suntar incarnate. Show me the enemy; let me see his face! "And so Dr. Ho knew very well what he was doing when he sent for me to soothe my savage sibling. And I know just as well what hell will be set afoot if word gets to the Chinese overlord of Okatrai that the allegiance of his simple-natured packmaster can be secured at the bagatelle price of a mere pilotcolonel of War District One. Yang Suntar will be given his flying lady-love forthwith, and Dr. Ho Wu Chen will have no further requirement for the earthly services of Yuri U. Suntar............." The tape squealed and respooled. Dr. Ho and I stood staring at one another. "It has its imperfections," he apologized. "The odd changes of tense, for example. But basically it is a remarkable instrument. Fidelity is a virtue in man or machine. Wouldn't you agree?" I spread my hands in the universal gesture of nonplussed surrender to circumstances. "Of course," I said. "You have nothing to add?"

"What can I say, sir, when the machine speaks so faithfully for me? Ask the mentogram." The slitted eyelids moved fractionally. "Once a Mongol, always a madman," he said. "Your humor avoids me, Yuri Suntar, and your spirit is dangerous. But you are a fool, and I have a weakness for fools." "But, Doctor," I frowned. "Surely I have convicted myself out of the thoughts of my own mind." "Not at all," he smiled. "You have only supplied me with that thing you were sent to supply; the weaponry of control for the Packmaster of Okatrai." He opened the intercom. "Desk," he said. "Please summon Pilot-Colonel Shikolin. And, Desk, cancel all of her flight schedules to Novo Tobirsk." "No!" I protested aloud to fate. "This is part of a nightmare. I am still under Endurin." Dr. Ho shook his head slowly. "Narcotics," he said, "are not required for the brain which has been drugged by nature." "Ah, yes," I sighed. "Born stupid." "No, Mongol, merely simple." "Of course." I bowed. "May I go, Doctor?" "You may—wherever Lo-Tsi takes you." I bowed again and went out through the anteroom into the corridor and to the waiting Tibetan guard. I had time, on the way, to look at my watch. It seemed to be ticking furiously. And it was. For me. In seventeen hours the fifth swarm would be history. Yuri Suntar would be a statistic of the Hives of Okatrai. And mankind would be facing the new-world wolfhorde of Dr. Ho Wu Chen.

The Larvanoids

TWENTY-THREE "What's the programming?" I had said acidly to Lo-Tsi. And he had replied, in his easy Lhasan way, "Why, back to Inspector Shen's level, I suppose, since those are my orders." There had been more and acrimonious dialogue on the way from Ho's to Shen's level, but in the end Yuri Suntar went right back into his sleeping cubicle, just the way that Shen had commanded it. Lo-Tsi was sad about the whole thing, but committed. "The state," he had said, switching off his bodymike, "has ten thousand ears. Let us not offend a single one of them." Now I lay in my bunk awaiting the attendant with the Endurin dosage. This much advantage Lo-Tsi had given me, in disclosing that he imagined I was programmed for what he called, "another bite of the sleepbug." He had also advised me to tell the foyer-guard, upon our return, that I had lost my hive pass. In this way, should it eventuate that I might, by some remote accident of Mongol cunning, escape the cubicle, the matter would not be charged against Lo-Tsi. The latter would have been party to the guardreport, thus exonerated for whatever followed of Buryat nonsense. "You see, comrade," he had told me soberly, "I don't trust you."

Smiling at the Tibetan's sheer honesty, I arranged myself for the attendant, whom I now heard at the door. As the latter entered, I left my bunk. "Here," I said cheerfully. "Permit me to help you with that." I reached for the medic's tray with my loaded syringe of Endurin upon it. As quickly, the man withdrew the tray from my clumsy grasp. The move caused me to lose my balance and I tumbled to the floor, taking him with me. Somehow—I shall never imagine exactly—his head managed to strike the wall. While he was out cold, I emptied the drug from the syringe into my bunk's bedding, replacing the potent fluid with straight tapwater from the cubicle's lavatory. Pleased with myself, I drew a fresh glass from the same source and emptied it over the fallen comrade. Soon enough he was reviving. My Mongol's natural compassion was aroused. "That's quite a nasty bump on your skull, comrade," I said. "Do you wish me to call the desk for first aid?" "No, no!" he protested, alarmed. "Please, it won't be necessary." I had known very well it would not be. State management abhors bumblers, perhaps because it breeds so many of them. "Of course," I said gravely. "I am ready." I lay down on the bunk and he gave me the injection. Asking if it were permissible to inquire the dosage, I was told, "Eight hours, comrade." I had gauged the drug beforehand by its obvious height in the syringe's barrel, but needed to program the fellow as to my ignorance, or innocence, not wanting at this delicate stage to arouse his curiosity. It was inevitable, I imagined, that he should eventually wonder at how he came to accompany me to the floor in just that way which knocked him momentarily senseless. My conduct was designed to prolong the period of his mental suspension. His reaction fortified my faith. "You will not be disturbed, comrade," he promised. "I am going off duty now and will tell the new man to be certain not to intrude. Inspector Shen has told us that you require this privacy." "One appreciates the Inspector's kindness," I said. "We all do," assured the fellow, and departed. Leaving the bunk, I listened at the door, and was satisfied to hear his footsteps retreating properly. A moment more and I turned my eyes upward and whispered the forbidden name. "We thank thee, oh Lord, for this small courtesy. It is wondrous how eight cc's of pure wall-fountain water stimulates the circulation. I hope the eight cc's of Endurin will not seriously impair the mattress of the bunk. I would not wish D-5 to think they had hired away a bedwetter from District Four." Do not imagine I was standing at the door pronouncing all this sudden contrition and gratitude. I was, all the while, on my way across the cubicle to the air-vent grill. And unscrewing its plate clamps. And hoisting myself up into the duct, replacing the grill behind me, and inching easily along the bore of the pipe, toward its corridor intake. I had, in fact, time to add a notation of extra thanks for the foresight of this same Creator in releasing my Mongol mother's eggs so imprecisely that one should be a giant, and one a human ferret-worm. Safely out into the corridor, the intake screen set back in hasty place, my conditional pass pinned once more to admittedly fluttering breast, I even was able to work in a hurried, "Amen!" After that, it was Yuri Suntar and the luck of the meek, against Genesis District Five.

TWENTY-FOUR Unchallenged, I rode the lift down to Level Thirteen. There, my original euphoria evaporated. About me the night-life of the hives pulsed steadily. It was apparent that the first hope, to find the traffic lessened from that of the day, was negated. Plainly, the operation went forward on a twenty-four-hour basis. Well, more Maeterlinck, I thought. The bees never cease fanning their wings to aerate and control the temperature within their combed empire. Nor, in nature, did the feeding of the human larvae tune itself to sun or dark. Still, there was a certain falling of a nocturnal hush not ascribable to any reduction of work. Pausing at the corridor's first intersection to scan the optional directions, I was aware of this eerie muting. Below my feet the very mother rock of the corridor's floor transmitted the never-ending hum of the nuclear furnaces and generators housed on levels Fifteen and Sixteen. It was the same effect as the vibration in a huge office building caused by the central air-conditioning pumps; a thing denied by system installers and government architects with equal insistence, but obvious to the poor prisoner of any of the suites in the structure, first floor to hundredth. And a sensation which, again regardless of official reassurances to the nth factoring, produced in the perceiver the uneasy feeling that something was not running as it should. To my right the intersecting corridor gleamed off into endless dwindling perspective. Left, the same thing. Ahead, across the intersection, my own corridor continued a hundred feet, then made a T ending, with a crossing corridor. At stations along all the views, monitor panels winked and glowed. Electronic bells and beepers made soft noises. In the corridor ahead, an aircar came around the T, heading for me. It rode on its cushion of pneumatic force with a muted sound like the gentle hissing of an unlit stove. Passing me, the driver took no more note of my existence than if I had been carved from the stainless metal of the walls. Rather than restoring one's confidence, this proved unsettling. It was better to be noticed than ignored, when one knew he had been seen. Programmed, I suppose, I said to myself, like everything else in this monstrous apiary. But programmed to do what? Report my position and pass number? An airtruck, lumbering softly, bore in from my left. A larger vehicle, it carried heavy cargo and a crew of two, driver and stock handler. Determined to test something, I stepped out in front of the approaching truck. The driver stopped short of me, staring through me. Reaching, he pressed a button on his dash. A light in arms, moved me aside, deposited me, got back into the latter's face. The fellow straightened, as if aroused from sleep, although he was plainly wide awake. He got down from the truck, came to me, lifted me easily under the arms, moved me aside, deposited me, got back into the truck, which then drove on. Neither driver nor passenger looked back. Not one word passed between them. Nor did any sign of recognition of having performed a service in consort. Again, the reaction to this robotlike behavior was hardly one of complete relief. Yet I had learned something: the ordinary workers of the complex were not programmed for anything outside the literal execution of their assignments. It was safe to assume that avoiding them in the simple physical sense would be precaution sufficient against being detained or even questioned. As to the odd condition of their mental function levels, it was a new control dimension to me. Deeper than anything we had been shown in D-4, yet with a much higher achievement range, it was something which plainly was a part of Ho's overall approach to that higher problem of total take-over to be triggered by the hatch of the fifth swarm. But now I was being pressed by other elements.

A group of white-smocked scientists emerged from a bay to my right and turned my way. At the same time, two black-and-lavender-clad D-5 inspectors came out of the corridor beyond the intersection. Above them, a phospho-gas corridor-sign announced, Infirmary L-13. When in doubt, attack. That was the Mongol way, not the burden of my D-4 training, and this did not seem to be a textbook situation. I had entered myself into the war zone. All right. Forward. "Ah, good evening, comrades." I smiled and saluted. "How is our friend? You must understand that his injury was an accident. Deplorable. I hope that Comrade Inspector Shen has explained this." The two gave me the standard boiled-rice stare of the Chinese police. "You came to see the man?" one of them asked me. "By what authority?" "No authority. Inspector Shen and I are old friends. Shall we call him? My own recommendation, if one be permitted, would be negative. The last I saw of the comrade inspector he was, well, not happy. You understand." "Of course." The second man took over, bowing. "We are not happy, either, with such nonsense. Please to go on in, comrade. You will find comrade trooper Chat Lo in Cube Seventeen, left; comrade trooper Pung with him. Do not overstay." He saluted. "Remember the Motherland." "Motherland—" I murmured, and went into the infirmary. Chat Lo was not in the lotus mood. His head was in fact killing him, and the color X-rays of his left hip had shown some hairline fractures which were going to keep him walking like a Pekin duck for many semesters. "Damn you, Mongol," he greeted me. "When I get out of here, I am going to look you up." "Comrade," I said, "when you get out of here, grass will grow downward and rain will fall upward. The ward intern tells me you're going to die." "What! What ward intern? We saw no ward intern." "Oh, well; in that case, perhaps you won't die." "Ahhh," said the fellow. "I am really going to find you for that, Mongol." "Comrade Trooper Pung," I said to the other man, ignoring the sufferer. "Our friend being in no apparent danger, sub-inspector Ju Hong, whom I just met in the outer corridor, has suggested that you accompany me." "What ever for, Comrade Suntar?" Pung was frowning. "In the nature of a guide, I think. But of course, comrade, we both know how to spell guide, eh? G-u-ar-d, what? Yes, yes. I see you are a man of humor, as well as competence. One regrets the incident in Dr. Ho's reception room. What was that desk corporal's name?" Pung scowled harder still. "Ling Po, the bastard." "Yes, well, you are right. He nearly had us all in real trouble. It was only your quick thinking which saved the whole affair. You were so clever to say nothing when he leaped up and spilled you upon the floor." Comrade Trooper Pung expanded. "Well, comrade, you know how it is. One does his best." "Of course. Only most aren't able to supply a best to equal yours. Shall we go, comrade trooper?" Pung bowed. "At once."

Chat Lo began to growl and threaten at this desertion, but Pung silenced him with a reminder that it was the wish of the sub-inspector that D-4-B Suntar be shown about. "If you would like," he told his irate friend, "I can tell Ju Hong that you require verification of the order. It is your right to object." "Go to hell," grimaced Chat Lo. "And take that Buryat goatherder with you." We departed, soldier of the new order and Mongol nomad goatboy, together, stranger companions than the Chinese might pause to think, or have reason to imagine. I had remarked in the fellow a strong physical resemblance in squat body-type and flat-faced, squareheaded skull-structure, to my dear Laplander schoolmate, Kano Komuli. The thought which this similarity put into my simplistic Mongol mind was a very far fetchment, indeed. But it was the only inspiration I had managed so far; and my time was telescoping. When we paused in the corridor beneath the phosphogas infirmary sign, the nearby intersection chronogong was striking. Checking it against my watch, I counted eight mellow pingings. Correct. On the nose. Eight gongs, post meridian. Minus sixteen hours, and counting, to the hatch-out. "Where shall we go, comrade?" asked Pung. "Wherever my pass will take us," I laughed. "One is fascinated by all this great work going on in Dr. Ho's district. Here," I pointed carelessly down the right-hand corridor. "Let us try this one. Agreed, comrade?" "Of course," the fellow bowed, and led the way around the corner and down the luminous bore, toward a walltube control panel which I had seen before. It was the input station for the com-cap personnel carrier, leading to Service Lab, Crypt System, L-13; the only hope I had for locating Kano Komuli.

TWENTY-FIVE I brought the tube capsule to a jolting halt in the viewport. Beyond, the sterile maze of equipment in the Level Thirteen Lab glittered beneath the cold sodium rayex rods which illuminated every crevice and corner. The place was deserted. Not even a janitor drone moved. "I told you the laboratory was locked by night," Pung said. "There is nothing here for us." I said that I had not disbelieved him but had wanted to go on to the next stop-port in this particular tube —which I understood to be the Hall of Crypts—and had merely made a mistake in operating the vehicle. "You must remember that I am a learner. This is only my second trip in the operator's bucket of a tube-cap." I fussed with the control panel, ostensibly programming our next stop. "Oh, by the way, Comrade Pung," I said idly. "Where do the workers retire at night? A dormitory close by, I suppose." "What do you mean?" Pung seemed suspicious. "Precisely what I say, comrade trooper. If you are going to cross-examine me at every turn, we shall have to return to Inspector Shen's office. I was told I would be shown every courtesy within the limits of my pass. The same assurance was reiterated by sub-inspector, uh, what was his name?" I picked up the intercom mike. "May I have your badge number, comrade?" I asked calmly. "The inspector's name, please. Or his station code."

Pung's complexion worsened under the already sallow brush of the sodium lights. "Please," he waved. "You are correct, comrade. What made you think otherwise? I am at your disposal. Command me." He bumped his elbows saluting, and I relented. "Very well. You know of course that my admiration for the Chinese is high. I am not a pure Mongol, as you can see." "Yes. Command me, comrade." I hoped he did not note the extent of the breath I now released. "Nonsense!" I snorted. "We are brothers." "Thank you." "Ah, about the workers, comrade; their dormitory?" "Oh, why as a matter of fact, it is only through die far gate. There, that grillwork beyond the heatpump." "It's locked at night of course. Routine security." "No. Since the entire lab section is sealed when the dayshift leaves, there is no need. They make no trouble anyway, as you know. The drug keeps them quiet." "I should like to see how you arrange it," I said casually. "Your name will be in my D-4 report. I find your mental level entirely too sensitive for the routine assigned you here. If D-5 does not appreciate its men, D-4 does." I took out my note pad. "How do you spell your name, comrade?" "No, no!" His modesty moved me. "It will not be necessary, Comrade Suntar. No names, please!" I nodded. "Very well. We understand in Propaganda." I ran the cap-car out of the wall to its parking Y in front of the viewport. "Will you wait or come along?" I asked, getting out. "I shan't be a minute." Pung was nervous, no question of it. I was pushing him. "I'd better go along," he decided. "But wait." He slid along the wall and flipped the controls of a big wallbox. "Electronic trapbeam," he explained. "It shuts off the sleeping quarters, just in case one of the inchworms crawls out of its box at night." "Excellent! I really must put you in my report, comrade trooper. Are you sure you would not agree to a transfer to Moscow?" I saw the poor devil's slit eyes open, and was sorry for him. He, or any of his fellows, would undoubtedly give a year's pay to transfer to the Sahara Desert or the backside of our Lunar Ninety Space Colony, let alone to the lights and fleshpots of the mother city. "We shall see," he decided. "Please hurry, comrade. There is a patrol." "Oh?" I saw him looking at his watch. "Need we concern ourselves over it?" I scowled reprovingly. "If you have taken me off-limits of my pass, comrade—" "Never! Just hurry. My God, you Mongols talk!" "It's one of the two things to do in the desert," I smiled. "As for the other, well, I don't see—" "Don't say it!" Pung pleaded. "You cannot imagine how the loins ache up here after a few months. By the Lord Buddha, but a man hungers like a beast. Were I not a follower of the Eightfold Path, I could not bear it." "One understands," I said, bowing my head. "I, too, follow that path."

"No, you're lying. You, a Buddhist?" "May the Lord Gautama repudiate me, if I lie," I protested. "Gautama?" he frowned, clumsily testing me. "Gautama Siddhartha," I murmured, touching fingertips in the lotus position. He looked around the lab. We were echoingly alone, but he was sweating. "And the Eight Rights of the Path?" "Right belief, right resolve, right word, right act, right life, right effort, right thinking and right meditation." I cadenced the ways of escape to Nirvana and saw that Pung was nodding at each waypoint of the path. "My father was not a Mongol," I concluded. "It is his faith which I cling to in my secret heart. A vow to his immortal soul upon his deathbed. Forgive my emotion." "For God's sake," muttered Pung. "Come on." He took my arm and we virtually fled across the silent lab, to the worker's dormitory. The Chinese was visibly affected. To find a fellow religionist in such a place as Okatrai, the very pit of a state which made the profession of a belief in God a twenty-year offense, was too much for the simple peasant. Again I felt sorry for Comrade Trooper Pung, but he was on the other side. We went into the rudimentary sleeping quarters of the drugged larvanoid candidates. There were forty bunks built against the wall of a narrow tube, twenty to a side. I tried not to appear tense, but I was having trouble. It was not until bunk thirty-nine that I drew an easy breath. "Kano, you bastard!" I hissed. "Why didn't you sing out, or make a sign?" "What?" he grinned. "And flag down that ugly rice-head you've got behind you? Watch it!" He lay back on the bunk and Pung came trotting up. "Here, what is it?" he demanded. "You cannot disturb the sleepers, comrade. Come away. It is not permitted to try and talk with them. Please, quickly!" "Ah, Comrade Pung!" I sighed, patting him on the shoulder. "May Buddha forgive me." With the hope, I hit him a kung-hodo chop at the neckbase, which stretched him in front of Kano's bunk like a yellow bearskin rug. "Nice," laughed the squat Lapp. "That's the only thing you ever did learn to do right." "You!" I whispered. "You, talking? I don't know how they ever hoped to program you, even with Reactin. There must be a brain for any drug to seize upon." We stood looking at one another through the longest two heartbeats of our lives. Then we embraced and began to laugh like babies. That did not last long. Pung was stirring. And there was that patrol due through the lab. "Listen, you Lapp reindeer farmer," I said. "The only reason I'm risking my Mongolian backside to get you out of here is that I need your help to get the African, Simba Maringa, out of the wall in the Hall of Crypts. He's going free of this hell-hive with us. Can do, comrade?" He grinned and saluted and made some insulting reference to my ancestry, which I accepted happily. "For a beginning," I told him, hurrying on, "it was my idea to exchange this beauty—" I gave Pung a kick "—for you. You both have the same ugly frogbody construction. Come on, comrade, start divesting; and I hope to God you know this waxworks as well as I've assumed you must!"

While Kano stripped, I peeled Pung. The switch in uniforms was made. "What drugs have you?" I snapped. Kano, who never snapped for any cause, grinned again. "What drugs would you care to have?" He whipped back his straw-and-plastic pallet to reveal a medic's fieldkit full of every conceivable standard packaged syringe, as well as God alone knew what exotics of our advanced pharmacopoeia. "Name it," Kano said. "The more things change, the more they are the same," I breathed. "Once a thief, always a thief." "How about Amnesil? Never mind the ancient saws of the Tent of Suntar." "Amnesil?" "Excuse me, I forgot you are a yakherder. It's a memory inhibitor. Better than the old Blotticin." "Will it work with Reactin? We've got to Reactinize him. That is what they have your crew on?" "Yes and yes, both ways. Into the hay with him." We threw poor Pung into Kano's bunk, and gave him the two needles. "We're really doing the state a favor," nodded the powerful Laplander. "These coolies are much better workers than we reindeer jockeys. You ready, Yuri?" "Ready, Comrade Kano Komuli," I said. He looked at me a moment, lips compressing. "We Against All," he whispered, and I saw the tears. "Hope!" I said, and we fled in utter silence from the sleeping room of the drugged dead.

TWENTY-SIX Safely back across the lab, we reactivated the trapbeam which Pung had switched off. In case Kano's drugs were stale, or the dosage light, Comrade Trooper Pung would be fried should he leave the dormitory and reenter the lab. "Now, back into the cap," I said, and Kano broke his broad Lapp face into the hundred wrinkles of his sunrise grin. "Hope!" he said. We both climbed into the machine. I closed the hatch and backed the vehicle off the parking Y and into the walltube. Here, just as the crystal port sealed itself behind us, and before its "busy" light winked off in the lab, the patrolman entered the room and saw the flashing of the walltube warning panel. As I jammed the cap into ease-out gear, we saw the man grab his body-mike excitedly. Then we were out of the airlock, into the main tube. "At a moment like this," said Kano, "one is pleased to have lifted Comrade Pung's stungun. At least we won't be without a weapon." "The man is thrice-armed who labors in faith," I told him. "But if you've got another of those little shock pistols handy, I'll accept it." "You pray; I'll shoot," answered Kano Komuli. We rode a moment in silence, then I noted an illumination in the tube which did not stem from our capsule's dome light. Dim at first, it swiftly grew brighter. Just before we reached the walltube exit into the Hall of Crypts, the entire tube behind us seemed ablaze with red light. "About those prayers," said Kano, "let us begin them. Something is amiss, comrade."

I tossed him my D-4 pocket scanner, a sort of jeweler's loupe fitting into one eye and resolving light and distance conditions to the distance of one mile, day or night. Sighting with it, Kano whistled softly. "The law," he said. "Step on it." "For God's sake, no jokes. What do you see?" "Two sub-inspectors of D-5 in a following cap-car." We were into the slowdown for entering the crypt airlock. The cap behind came up at once onto our tail, so close I could distinguish the face of the driver. It was Ju Hong, the inspector who had cleared me to see Chat Lo in the infirmary, and whose authority I had misused to employ stout comrade Pung. I could assume his companion was the same lout who had wanted to check my security. In no case was this good news. And in the least of translations it spelled arrest and disclosure. "Listen," I said to Kano, "when we get out, you bluff it fast and loose. There may be just enough first resemblance between Pung and yourself to give us the edge. Here we go." Our cap popped into the airlock, then out of the wall-tube onto the parking shell in rotation, the cap of Inspector Ju Hong followed, bumping our cap hard as we hit the end of the Y. All four of us were out of the machines simultaneously. Landing on the floor by design in front of Kano, I held my arms elevated. Neither of the inspectors had his weapon in hand, but behind me good and loyal soldier of the state Comrade Pung the Second waved his stungun and informed his superiors that all was well, the prisoner was a prisoner. "Is that you, Pung?" demanded Ju Hong irritably. "What the devil are you doing here? I thought we left you watching Chat Lo." "I borrowed him, Inspector," I said, smiling. "I can't imagine what has gotten into him that he puts a stungun in my spine and starts crying prisoner. Prisoner for what? I have my pass." Ju Hong, a careful man where guests of Dr. Ho Wu Chen were involved, shrugged. "Of course, comrade. Put up the weapon, Pung, you fool. It is you who are under arrest." At this point the other fellow, all the while staring at Kano, who was trying desperately to hide his two hundred wide pounds behind my rodlike frame, said icily, "A moment, please. Step out, Pung." Kano stepped out. He did so with the stungun in front of him and operating. He was a fine shot and the two D-5's straightened up almost in the same instant. They went limp next moment, crumpling to the floor, Ju Hong atop the other fellow. "Fine," I said. "Now what the hell are we going to do with them?" "Well," said Kano, grinning, "I know a place for one of them. We can put him in the same crypt slot we take the African out of, eh?" "Not bad," I grudged. "Now what about the other one?" "Ah, let's see; maybe the African will have a friend. Let's go find out." Nothing better to do, I took Ju Hong by the arm and dragged him over the polished floor toward the crypt of Josef Maringa. Behind me, Kano brought the second inspector by the same route, but using a leg to pull by. At the crypt, I checked the number. It was correct. "Here goes everything," I nodded, and pushed the slide button. The oblong plastic box slid out of the wall. In it Josef Maringa lay as perfectly asleep as before. "The lid simply releases," said Kano. "A pressure fit. Go ahead, pry it off."

"You've janitored in here, too, eh?" I said, and he grinned and admitted that he had, indeed; and also wherever else needed mopping in the Hives of Okatrai. "You'll remember," he said, "that I disappeared over two years ago. I've been cleaning up after Dr. Ho and his Chinese playmates ever since." "Playmates, eh?" I said, prying off the lid of the plastic sarcophagus of Josef Maringa. "Is one to understand that, in spite of your hard life in the hives, you still refuse to take your work seriously?" "One is to get on with that damned hypodermic auto-needle switch," he answered. "Right there under your left hand, Fumbles. Easy. Don't hit the second button. It contains the return-to-hold drug. Here, for God's sake," he said, pushing me aside. "You never could take orders. I'll do it." I stepped back. Kano pressed the switch and I saw the hypodermic pop out of its casement, insert its needle into the waxen black arm of Maringa, and inject the drug from its barrel into the African's vein. It was an eerie time there in the Okatraian mausoleum of sleeping death. I glanced at Kano, but he was watching the African. Nor could my own eyes remain away from this magnificent creature who, if Dr. Ho's science were faultless, would be within the next few moments raised from the dead. "What if it doesn't work?" I pointlessly inquired of Kano. "That's your department, oh master spy," he told me. "I only mop up around here. Besides, shut up. It is working." I saw the blush of life return to the black corpse beneath the aseptic glare of the phosphogas cryptlight which had come on at the sliding-out of Maringa's container. It was like watching water seep swifter than the serpent's tongue can flick into the dry sands of a long-dead streambed. One moment the form was arid, stark, hostile. The next instant, it was a human being. The eyes opened and looked up at us. There was a fractional hiatus of focusing, of pupil contraction and eye-corner muscle twitching, then the entire facial structure became mobile. From the face, the muscle-activant phenomenon spread over the entire body. Josef "Simba" Maringa sat up in his plastic coffin, and was alive. Emotionally, I seized his black hands in mine. "Friends," I told him, squeezing hard. For a heartbeat he looked at both Kano Komuli and myself, then the leonine head moved, the dark lips opened, the voice issued forth deep and vibrant and sane." "Thank God," was all that Simba Maringa said.

TWENTY-SEVEN Kano touched the black man on the arm. "We need another box to put this second security man in, comrade. We hoped you might have a friend you would like to take with you from this pit of despair." "No, there is no one." "We will pick one, then." The Lapp peered quickly at the adjacent crypt legends. "Here," he said. "How about this one? 'Lev Dayan Eshman, Age 20, Israel.'" "Those Jews were tough," I said. "He'll be a fighter. Take him."

Kano slid the Israeli's box out of the wall, pried off its lid, activated the restorative drug injection. We waited, and saw the second miracle. If anything, Lev Eshman's resurrection was even more dramatic than Josef Maringa's. "Where the hell are we?" was his first comment, and he was climbing out of the plastic coffin before we could move to assist him. He was a little wobbly, then, but recovered and seemed normal in every way within seconds. We told him briefly the situation, and he accepted it. He gave us a terse review of his background, and, with a hard-lipped grin, concluded, "I made this club in the first place by shagging Arabs around the Sinai. So I'm ready." "Captured?" I asked. "And taken to Cairo, then Moscow," he replied. "I did a year in that Ural Mountain reorientation center, but they couldn't program me. Lucky they didn't make that pogrom, I guess. Anyway, Ho decided to put me on ice. Something about a bank of Jewish genes." "Yes," nodded Simba Maringa. "The same thing he told me. He didn't completely believe in his Asiatic supermen. He wanted stock of cells from every race." "Is the Chinaman still in charge?" asked Lev Eshman, irreverently. "Man, I want to check in with him." "He's the head of D-5, now," said Kano. "Say, that name of yours. Are you any relation to the one-eyed general who fought the second Sinai campaign in 'sixty-seven?" Lev Eshman nodded. "Moshe Dayan was my great-uncle. He fought the first campaign, too, I'll remind you. There was one tough Jew. A real Sabra." "You, too, we hope!" I grinned wryly. "Try me," he said. Lev Dayan Eshman was about five-ten, weighing perhaps one hundred sixty-five pounds. His dark beard made the long muscular jaw black with its stubble. Eyes of a pale gray burned like fire-ice in the swart face. His hard body was muscled like a serpent's and he moved about with snakelike nervousness and speed. Here was a fighting man and no three ways about it. With the tall and powerful Simba Maringa, he made a pair of crypt-wall aces to be welcomed in any Mongol idiot's wild game to break free of the hell-hives of Okatrai. "All right," I said, grin widening with the quick assessment. "Let's start with stripping Ju Hong and friend. You take Hong's uniform, Simba; he's the taller. Come on. You two look ridiculous standing there in the black-and-white buff. Get a move on." When we had the two sub-inspectors naked and ready to go into the wall, Kano made a belated request. He wanted to put the security police away without using the holding drug injection. He said that the plastic crypt cases were not hermetically sealed, and that fresh air was part of the holding process. If they didn't panic when they recovered consciousness, they might stay alive for days in there. And the thought of two such old friends being where they could look out upon the lowly larvanoid inch-worms who each day mopped up the place made the Laplander's heart warm. Besides, it was not in his Lapp nature to do violence to any fellow creature. Just put Ju Hong and his pal away without further mistreatment, as a favor to Kano Komuli, the butterhearted ex-larvanoid mop wielder. "Wonderful," I said, moved. "One cannot help loving a comrade who will not harm a sand flea but will happily slide two perfectly good security policemen into a burial vault wall, alive." "Amen," said Lev Eshman. "In they go." "Uhuru!" grinned Simba Maringa, and both men banged their plastic slides back into the blackness of eternity.

Followed the briefest of councils of war. It was determined that we would take the two capsule cars back into the wall. Each was a two-man model. Kano would drive the first one, as he knew the walltube maze from two years of study of arrivals and departures in nearly every department of the hives. With him, as passenger, would go Lev Eshman. I would take the second cap-car, with Simba Maringa. There was agreement by Kano to my idea of reaching Doctor-Professor Zomatar and trying to persuade him to serve as our front before the funding committee. Kano thought we might arrange this pre-hatch appearance very well, timewise, as the committee was due in on the first flight of the morning from Novo Tobirsk. This gave us nearly three hours before the high noon deadline for release of the fifth swarm. "The only bitch," the broadfaced Lapp now announced blandly, "is in the getting. Do you know which tube to program for Zomatar's office, Yuri?" This forced me into an unhappy "nyet," which provided Kano with his chance. He had, he admitted modestly, the gift of total recall. In his two years at Okatrai he had seen the melancholy Moscow scientist enter and leave every level. The Doctor-Professor had his own private programming code, as did Dr. Ho, the only two such in the wall-tube web. When Zomatar pushed his buttons, all other lines were cleared. Of course Kano Komuli had committed the code to his remarkable memory. Into the capsule cars we all clambered, while Kano punched keys on the programming panel as though he were playing with an old-fashioned cash register. The abandon of his facility concerned me. "I hope we get the right change from whatever you've rung up," I told him cynically. "That depends," he replied cheerfully. With a wave, he settled himself in the driver's bucket of his capsule. "I always have difficulty remembering which code is Ho's and which Zomatar's." "Lapp bastard," I said. "Close the hatch." Instants later we were in the wall, hurtling with blind-black speed through the living rock of Okatrai.

TWENTY-EIGHT The experience with Zomatar was singular. He was not in his suite when we arrived by cap-car. Someone else was, however. It was Lo-Tsi. The Tibetan explained that the scientist had a secret vice. He used it to reduce the tensions of the day. Not caring to have Ho, or his peer group colleagues privy to his simple tastes, he employed faithful off-duty security guard Lo-Tsi as his opponent in the nightly checkers game which served as his sleeping powder. "Even as you called me friend," the one-eyed watchdog said to me, "so Doctor-Professor Zomatar needs someone to call him friend." I quickly decided to play the Tibetan straight for the moment. Even though he was eying Simba Maringa and Lev Eshman askance—since when were Negroes and Jews added to the Okatraian security force?—it was a sound gamble that he would not break on us. Something about Lo-Tsi boded good. "Listen," I said. "These two are up from Novo Tobirsk with Provost Marshal Rodion. Security for tomorrow's committee meeting. Understand?" The Tibetan nodded. "I do. Others may not."

"Just the problem. Are you with us?" "I am but a lowly guard. A poor Tibetan mastiff which must do as ordered. Dr. Ho assigned me to you. Command me, comrade." "Thanks; where's Zomatar?" The professor had just gone below with Dr. Ho to check the hiving room in preparation for the twelve midnight wolf serum implanting. From there, as far as Lo-Tsi had been told, Ho would go to the Level Thirteen lab to draw the material from the specimen wolves, already sent down from above by Yang Suntar in grateful exchange for a gift of appreciation sent up by Dr. Ho. "Pilot-Colonel Shikolin?" I said grimly. Lo-Tsi did not know. But he had seen the slender woman in the custody of Inspector Shen and two other D-5 men an hour earlier. That was on Level Two, when the Tibetan had left the security barracks to come down and play the nightly game with the doctor-professor. Yes, he believed they had taken the lift up to Level One. Yes, the woman seemed pale and frightened. No, she had not shown any hysteria. After all, she was a Russian. The state was her life. Whatever her orders, she would carry them out. "And Zomatar? What of him now? Will he return here, or go on with Dr. Ho to the laboratory?" Zomatar had said he would return to finish the game, before assisting the Chinese with the midnight lupus serum implant. Lo-Tsi knew no more than this, nor was more required. We had no sooner finished the swift exchange when the tube control lights began to wink and the professor's cap-car came out of the wall to bump into our two parked vehicles. Only slightly bemused, the gentle man of science climbed out of his capsule, peering at his visitors through the corneal transplant lenses I now noted that he wore. Straightaway, I told him who we were, and why we had come to him. Would he help us before the committee? It was then the bomb dropped. Doctor-Professor Zomatar was sorely puzzled as to our motivation. It would be tragic to alarm the committee, the approval of which meant so much to the wonderful work going forward at Okatrai. There was every chance, as the fifth swarm stood in relationship to previous swarms at this late hour, that the hatch would be a complete triumph for Dr. Ho and the revolutionary theories of cell mutations through nuclear genetics which Genesis District Five had been created to achieve. Kano and I exchanged stricken glances at this. We did not need to speak. Both understood what had happened. Doctor-Professor Zomatar, dear old gentle mild-hearted man of benign science, had been programmed. Ho had him under some drug the effects of which were not apparent, but the results of which were profoundly other than those which either the Lapp or I could have foreseen. The worst had happened. But it had not. Another and more terrible conclusion was rapidly forced upon us. Zomatar was speaking with positive rapture, now, getting into his subject. When the world saw, he told us excitedly, the escape of those beautiful creatures from their shining larval cocoons, it would have witnessed the New Genesis, the birth of the actual hyper golden image of mankind which/the Creator had envisioned when fashioning the original garden of love. Yes, yes, he could say to us now, having only returned from the hives, that the hatch was superbly on time. It was ready. The lupus implantation was being arranged. In less than two hours, its wolf virus would have been added to the circulatory plumbing which attached each larvanoid to the wall of its

comb-cell. Then all would be over. At high noon of the next day, the fifth swarm would be reality, the funding committee would be totally won over, Dr. Ho Wu Chen would be proclaimed the greatest living genius of science and Okatrai Island would become the shrine of the new mankind. "My God," said Kano Komuli softly. "He believes it. He's not drugged. He's mad." "Or worse," I said. "He may be right." Almost as though by instinct, Simba Maringa and Lev Eshman drew closer to Kano and myself. The Tibetan guard, Lo-Tsi, edged uneasily from the exultant Zomatar. But the little scientist was not reached either by startled whisper or embarrassed shrinkings away. Eventually, I had to take him forcefully by the arm to get him stopped, to make him listen. What about this shining new world, I demanded. Was it not a fact that the Ho Plan called for a terrible corollary? Did it not postulate that, when the perfect swarm of mutant humanity was brought forth, be it the fifth or fiftieth attempt, the remaining habitants of our crowded planet must, at that golden hour, be put to death? "What? What is that you are saying? All of the people, comrade? What about them7" He seemed dazed. Hearing me, he had not comprehended. Or, comprehending, had not wanted to hear. I seized his lapels with both hands, fixing him in place. "Dr. Ho told me all present races must be removed; the new world must belong to the Okatraian larvanoids, alone." I pulled his face closer yet to my own. "Is that the way it really will be, Professor? Answer me. In the name of God, sir, we are talking about globicide!" "No," he insisted. "No. I know nothing of such insanity. Racial extermination? Worldwide genocide? I have never heard of this blasphemy at Okatrai." "You are hearing it now," I said, shaking him. "If this swarm succeeds, Dr. Ho intends to depopulate the earth. That is the absolute of the entire plan." Somehow, by some remote touching of a chord of sympathy unplucked by Academe, my frightful message made its way into the simple emotional braincenter of the human being who once had been plain citizen Zomatar. "Depopulate the earth? Madness, madness," said the Professor-Doctor thickly. "I will not believe it; I cannot believe it The swarm, the swarm, it must—" History was not to know what it was the swarm must do. For before its gentle caretaker could complete his impassioned prayer, he was interrupted by a more compelling courier of fate than Yuri Suntar. Across the room, on its wall mounting beside the capsule car parking area. the directline control panel of the hatching sector was blinking red and beeping a panic series of electronic alarms. Zomatar's thin face froze into a mask of disbelief. "Impossible," he breathed. "Surely a mistake in circuitry, a defective monitor switch, something in the relay. We were just there. I left last. The room was sealed. Utterly sterile and empty." He was like a man in mild shock, and I touched his arm again, trying not to yield to my own fears. "What is it that's so impossible, Professor?" He turned to me, a man completely shaken. "Someone—or something—is loose in the combs," he said.

TWENTY-NINE Zomatar ran for his capsule car. I grabbed Lo-Tsi, who started after him. "You stay up here," I shouted. "We'll go with the old man." There was room for but four in our two cars, and I knew which four I wanted. The Tibetan grumbled but obeyed. Kano, Lev and Simba raced with me to our caps, and we went into the walltube on the same code with the scientist's single-place vehicle. All three cap-cars piled up in the hatching room viewing port next moment. Beyond, all seemed in order. The hundred-eyed bank of testcomb cell doors winked silently in the cold sodium light. Utter emptiness and sterile isolation stared back at us. Then we saw it. A single comb cell door swung ajar. It was still moving on its burnished time lock hinges—just that single fractional movement to net the searching eye and hold it apart from the surrounding total stillness. "God deliver us," we all heard Zomatar whisper over the intercom. "I did not refasten it securely after the ten o'clock test check." Before any of us might react to this, the scientist geared his cap-car out of the wall, into the comb room. Shouting belatedly for him to leave parking space, Kano and I drove our cars after his. Inside, we climbed out. Instinctively, the rest of us paused to again search the empty reaches of the comb sector. Nothing. We saw nothing. Zomatar was meanwhile at the still-swaying comb-cell door. I heard him mutter something to the effect that it would be all right, we were undoubtedly in time—whatever that meant—and the hatch would not be harmed by this oversight Each cell, he reassured himself, was sealed off from the other. For a reason I could not fathom, I felt compelled to run for his side. I reached him just as he peered within the cell before reclosing it upon its contaminated larvanoid. The cry he uttered was as though from a stabwound. "Empty! It's empty!" My comrades had gathered up behind us, but did not hear these words. When I whirled about, they were watching Zomatar and me, unsuspecting. "Behind you!" I yelled. "There it is!" There indeed it was. The first larvanoid of the fifth swarm. The first candidate citizen for Dr. Ho Wu Chen's shining new world. We all pressed back, shielding Zomatar. There is no use to call it any other name than a thing. It had not yet shed its glistening, translucent covering, its larval cocoon. This casing was now coming away from the body of the creature beneath. Each emergent motion, with its attendant nameless mouthing sound, was repelling, obscene. And each movement, revealed something under the milky covering which was, if manlike, also of no natural animal form familiar to modern zoology. "Do not touch it," said Zomatar. "Stay away from it Let it come forth." "Stunguns," I ordered, ignoring him. We had three of the weapons now, and Kano, Lev and Simba Maringa each drew his energy pistol without question. Beyond our grim circle, the creature was casting off the last of its comb sheath. In the pitiless glare of the rayex rods overhead, it glittered as though made of slime. Anthropoidal in erectness of posture, its basic structure was recognizable—a head, two arms, legs, torso—the anatomical silhouette of Homo sapiens in grotesquerie. But the impression was all. It was true that Dr. Ho Wu Chen had created a shining new larvanoid life-form. But he had not made it in the image of man, nor the hope of a Heaven beyond.

This thing was from the womb of Hell.

The Fifth Swarm

THIRTY The creature stood swaying, regarding us. Its face held no hostile nor any friendly expression. It was an alien. It had not arrived at an attitude yet. But we had. Imagine a thing of perhaps five feet in height, of buglike humanoid structure, loathsomely naked of hide above the loins, the lower limbs clothed in some harsh hairlike sheathing, the hairy part running up the torso center to enclose and grow most bushily about the navel. Visualize the swollen head of a bee, yet snouted and fanged in canine mockery, with the stubby short erect ears, lying flat one moment, alertly pricked the next, exactly as those of the Siberian brown wolf. Then add to the nightmare six digital extensions on hand and foot, all alike, all tactile and in motion constantly, yet each digit terminating in hornlike pads and a blunt nail like a dog's foot. Put in the bulging head the gleaming eyes of the wolf, but each compartmented in a dozen octagonal sections, insectlike. Add a restless canine tongue which panted continually, then realize what had happened here, and let the flesh crawl as the belly shrank with terror—Dr. Ho had scored a stunning double victory: the apianoid factor, controlled from the first crude swarm, had broken through in the fifth hatch; and in the same mutation of genetic distortions the wolf break had occurred simultaneously. What faced us was a thing part Apis mellifera, part Canis lupus, and a desecrated God alone knew what part human being. "It may be friendly," said Doctor-Professor Zomatar into the void of our fear. "Do not make sudden movements or loud noises. Let me approach it." He had moved out from our midst before I might stop him. Kano made to go after him, but I held him back. The creature did not move when Zomatar came up to it. Then, incredibly, it smiled. "Jesus," said Lev Eshman. "It is friendly." Out by the creature, Zomatar turned excitedly to us. "You see, you see!" he said. "The apianoid gene for social benignity has held. It is all right." I shook my head. "Whatever it is, is not all right," I warned him. "Stand aside, as you treat with it. We want a clear field of fire." "No, no!" he protested vehemently. "There must be no force, no violence. This lovely thing is not bred for such gross manifestations." "Spread out," I ordered Maringa and Lev Eshman, disregarding the scientist. "Kano, move up with me." My two stungunners from the Hall of Crypts slid along the comb front, one to the right, one to the left. Kano Komuli followed me slowly forward. The instant we started toward Zomatar, however, the creature commenced vibrating over the entire surface of its body, and a notably loud, high-tension

humming buzz broke upon our ears. There was only one sound like this in our world, that of an aroused and angry bee. We stopped dead. The level of the creature's buzzing dropped several decibels, and Zomatar called over his shoulder that we should now stay where we were and permit him to placate the larvanoid. The problem was purely one of communications, no more than that. Once intelligent exchange was established, the friendly creature would be a fund of the most sensational information and reward. The doctor-professor was certain that what had occurred here was a premature maturing of the hatch. The larvanoids had "come ready" precisely twelve hours sooner than their biological clocks had been set for; and hence had entered the emergent phase before the last lupus implant. Hence, again, a condition had been set up where the apianoid factor, uninhibited by the lupunoid neutralizing materials, had broken through. It was simply one of those things with which the soldiers of science had to contend. If the rest of us would now obey his directions, he would make the most of the new creature's potential, before, that is, inducing it to go peacefully back into its comb-cell, and summoning Dr. Ho from the Level Thirteen lab and his now-useless preparations of the lupus serum. Please, now, if we would all stand back quietly. That was it. Thank you, thank you. I felt we were helpless. That is why I did not argue his urgings. Moreover, he might be able to control the thing. It was swaying again, now, almost rhythmically, and the humming had dropped to the faintest level of constancy. When Zomatar spoke to it, it smiled again and swayed more pleasantly than before. The scientist reached forth and stroked it on the glistening head. The buzz rose in volume, then dropped again. The creature smiled for the third time and swayed ever so slightly in Zomatar's direction. The latter opened wide his arms in the gesture of human embrace, and the creature slid silently into his arms, adding its own embrace of entomoid upper limbs in a return of the scientist's emotional acceptance. For one fine, and final, instant Doctor-Professor Zomatar was happy. Then his suffused face contorted into a gutpit gasp and he doubled over, hands going to his middle, like a soldier bellyshot on the battlefield. He staggered back from the creature, twisted about to face us, tortured hands pulling away from his body. With a last effort of supreme will, he pointed soundlessly but eloquently to what his hands had covered; it was the unmistakable, if six-inch-long, black-barbed stinger of a bee. He fell without uttering a word, and was dead almost in the instant of his collapse.

THIRTY-ONE The stunguns, set at "full shatter" power, went off behind me. I saw and heard their impacts hit the creature as it came over the dead body of Zomatar, grinning, toward me. It was struck hip and flank, and also from directly on, this last shot from Kano firing within five feet of me. The maximum force setting turned the thing this way and that, and drove it back, but did not stop it. Neither did the cumulative effect of the hits stun the larvanoid. The truth dawned upon me within the handful of seconds that my comrades blasted it physically away from me. The thing's nervous system had mutated from that of the insect world. Its order was too low to be shocked by impacts that would have rendered senseless any ordinary warmblooded carnivore three and four times the size of this fivefoot freakish genetic break.

Shouting for a retreat to the capsules, I was astounded to see the creature obey my words more quickly than my comrades. It moved staggeringly to cut off our path to the walltube parking Y. Behind me Kano yelled for me to hit the deck. Down I went and the three stunguns burped over my prostrate body, into the legs of the larvanoid. Struck repeatedly, it went down. Instantly, I leaped up and led the race for the capsule cars. The creature was up again and humming vibrantly, furiously. Also, now, the canine tushes were chopping and the wolfish snout was flecked and roped with a yellowish-white saliva. Somehow it came on again for me, selecting me from the others. Unnerved, I slipped as I was scrambling up into my car. Lev and Kano were already in their capsule, the hatch down. Simba was likewise into the passenger bucket of my cap-car. He was still hammering the thing with stungun fire, literally keeping it knocked back. Then, as my foot gave way and I fell down under the ramp of the Y, I heard Simba's gun pip and go into the characteristic burble of an exhausted zeon chamber. Instantly the larvanoid was upon me. I remember thinking that at least it had used its sting on Zomatar, and that I would need only to fend it off physically for the few seconds it would take my comrades to get to me. Rolling on my back, I gave it both feet in its abdomen, lifting with might and main to jam its shining body up under the heavy titanium rails of the parking Y. It went into the metal like a ball of Duralumin, braced with ribs of saucer steel. There was no give in its body and both my knees were impacted with the excruciating collision. My God, I thought. It's indestructible. Built like the bony carpal bugs, the armored beetles, roaches. Then it was back at me and I felt its soft six-fingered hands seize me and bring me into that torso of steel, and now the body was as mushy as an old melon, and I sank into it as into a suffocating pillow, half hair and half slick cold skin. I panicked. Its prehensile feet were now groping for my lower body and I realized with horror that it was attempting to emasculate me. This, I think, gave me that final burst of the madman's strength with which I broke free of its noisome embrace and rolled out from under the Y. Simba Maringa, just leaping to the floor, literally threw me up into the cockpit. But the instant of his action brought the thing onto Simba's powerful legs. With a single incredible jerk it swept the big African off his feet. He landed on his back and hard. The larvanoid literally sprang at him. It was snarling now, nothing beelike nor entomological in the sound, but the pure ravening, in a frighteningly subdued tone, of the wolf. It was trying for Simba's throat but the muscular Masai had it by the throat also, straining to hold it off. He was saved by the distance the thing had thrown him, the space bringing both into the line of fire from Kano and Lev Eshman. Their last shots pounded the creature away from Simba, who made it into the capsule behind me in a tremendous running bound. Even so, our hatch had no more than slid shut before the thing was upon the car, biting and slashing at the unbreakable pressure plastic above our heads. Afraid its immense strength might derail the capsule car, I called to Kano on the intercom advising him to get the hell into the wall, so that my car might move after his. He waved acknowledgment and shot his vehicle into the airlock of the viewport; The larvanoid was still prying and biting at our pyrovex canopy when I whipped our cap-car into the wall. Scraped off and battered by the impact of the capsule's disappearance into the solid rock, the creature was slow arising, as both Kano and I held our cars in the viewport compelled to know what it would do next. It stood outside the walltube entry port, swaying and buzzing, looking up at the viewport crystal, and at us. Distinctly the mouth moved to form words. Of what language none of us might say, but they were words, and we did hear them as words—meant for us. And the last thing that it did, before turning away, was to smile.

Fascinated and revolted, we sat and watched it go back toward its vacant comb-cell. Suddenly, it was no longer vital, suddenly we all understood that it was dying—was going back into its birthplace to die. "By God!" I sang into the intercom. "We've finally done it in. That last crack into the rock of the wall must have been too much." "No, wait!" It was the voice of Lev Eshman. "Do you hear that change in sound it's making? Hear it? A minor key, almost a keening noise. I know that sound. I kept bees when I was a kid. That's the noise they make when they die from losing their stings. It killed itself when it stung old Zomatar. Christ, what vitality!" "Worse than the Cape bull in the tall grass," rumbled Simba Maringa behind me. Kano Komuli, able to see good cheer in any tragedy, laughed suddenly. "Do you realize that damned thing very nearly killed four strong men, three of them armed with late model, high impact, force pistols? Hoo, hoo! Thank God there was only one of them, comrades!" Again his wild Laplander laugh crackled over the intercom, but as suddenly he broke off its gusty staccato. My friend Kano had laughed too soon. Across the hiving room, at the combfront, the larvanoid was truly dying. But it wasn't going back into its aborted cell to die; it was staying outside the comb, and, as it did so, it was fighting its way down the lower row of comb-front cell doors—opening door after door after door.

THIRTY-TWO Returning through the walltubes to Zomatar's suite on Level Six, we held a second war council. We tried to add up our strengths, never fearing our weaknesses. "No use," said Kano Komuli, "discussing what is obvious." Firstly, we had unity. There was no question of a possible defector in our ranks. Secondly, we were trained agents. Thirdly, we were ready to die. Lastly, we had three used-up stunguns. We had also a guide who knew the hives, and all of their labyrinthian mazes. That was Kano. We had two cap-car drivers, Kano and myself. We had a young Israeli soldier who said he was an explosives expert, and a middle-aging African diplomatic attaché, who believed he could carry his weight in any fight, or flight. And we had my general pass, until revoked, and the loyalty of the stout Tibetan freeborn man, Lo-Tsi. We all agreed there was but one possible way out of the hives. We must steal a medium Skak and bolt with it for the great central airbore. All right. Now who, other than the five foregathered in Zomatar's rooms, would we take with us? Who would be able to augment the escape in payment for becoming party, to it? Well, what did we absolutely have to have? The very first requirement: a pilot. Chana Maringa? Possibly. One could not imagine the beautiful and so young daughter of Josef Maringa opting to stay with grandfather Ho, in the hive of evil. And Chana had not been reared by the state. All those Mongol years of her youth, plus the others of pampering by the indulgent Ho, gave solid promise of a spirit that would soar, with ours, and damn the comrades. But we could not depend entirely upon reasoning which might prove specious at the very worst time— on the flight deck of Level One.

A back-up pilot, then. Who? Could the engineer Koltzmanyev fly a Skak? Did any capsule engineers have this rating? None of us knew. But Lev Eshman had a lead which surprised everyone. "I will tell you one thing about Koltzmanyev," he said, gray eyes twinkling. "I flew into this damned place two years ago on one of his flights. I wasn't drugged and he and I discovered one another." "Discovered?" I wasn't following the meaning. "That's the word. He's a crypto-Jew." "No!" Lev shrugged. "You say no, I say yes. Take a position, comrade." I still wasn't quick enough in the mind for this keen Israeli youth. "Eh, what are you proposing?" I said. "And be quick. God knows when Ho will discover that the swarm has been aborted." That was part of his idea, Lev Eshman admitted. The rest of it was that while he went with Lo-Tsi to find Koltzmanyev and recruit him to our cause, Simba, Kano and I should return to Level Fourteen and let loose the entire hatching swarm into the outer corridors. This would make it certain that Dr. Ho would discover the miscarriage of his fifth brood of brainchildren. Which should result in just about the most hellish diversionary tactic for the good doctor and his D-5 security forces that might be readily fashioned by our slender troops. "By God," said Kano, "that's admirable, Lev. I couldn't think of a more wicked thing myself." "Yes," chorused Lo-Tsi. "Excellent. And while Lev and I go for Koltzmanyev, we can detour a few steps to the Level Two Armory and recharge the stunguns. Koltzmanyev's barrack is just around the main corridor corner from the armory, and Shen's offices." The Tibetan's simple act of faith in throwing in with us affected us all. It gave us real heart. "It will work," said Kano. "Lev wears the D-5 uniform well. He fools you until you're right up to him. He and the Tibetan could bring it off. And we must have the guns." "I don't know, comrades," I said grimly. "Except that it is plain we must act, and act very correctly and very accurately, and we must have another pilot." "Listen," said Simba Maringa. "If Koltzmanyev doesn't fly, he will know another who does, and who may want freedom, too. People, men, who love liberty better than life, always know the other men who do likewise. Try it, Yuri." He smiled. A flashing wonderful white-toothed smile, like his daughter's. "After all, we've nothing to lose but ourselves." It was decided, then, in a moment. We would do it. Kano, also able to pass for a legitimate security trooper, would guide me to the timelock corridor which opened into the hatching room. He must go with me in any event because only he understood how to operate the complex mechanism of the corridor locks. This left tall black Simba Maringa, who could not safely be seen in any corridor in his too-small borrowed D-5 uniform of Sub-inspector Ju Hong. "I will stay here," he quietly volunteered. "You will need a good man here. There may be a visitor while you're away. If the break is broadcast before you free the hatch and return for me, I can hold here, securing your rear. Also, should anyone come summoning Doctor-Professor Zomatar, I will be able to, ah, detain them. Hostages were always good meat in my days as a warrior. Or even as a diplomat." Kano, no diplomat ever, shook his broad Lap head. "I can't see you in a striped set of pants, or a cutaway coat," he said. "But there is no trouble at all visualizing you in a lion-mane headdress drinking

blood through a sipping straw out of the jugular vein of a live cow. By the waves of Lak Inari! you're a fearsome sight, Simba." Here, Lev Eshman, a youth short on words, said we all made careers of speaking. "Let's get a move on," he suggested. "Those beautiful new citizens of Dr. Ho's down there are bound to trip some alarm bell sooner or later." "Right," I nodded. "We will all meet, all who can, on Level One at Chana's small Skak, midnight sharp. The other Skak, Shikolin's, is parked next to Chana's ship. If God wants it that way, we'll make it out." "Motherland," saluted Kano Komuli, thumb to nose. "Let's hear it for Haifa High!" grinned Lev Eshman. "Uhuru," rumbled Simba Maringa. I nodded once more. "Don't joke, you bastards," I said. "Pray." "In reindeer Lap-Lap?" "Haifa Hebrew?" "Harvard Swahili?" I surrendered, and we all laughed. But when we next moment went out of the quarters of the dead Doctor-Professor Zomatar, the laughing was no longer in our hardened minds. Not even Kano Komuli was smiling. What lay ahead could only make a skull grin. Or a Level Fourteen larvanoid.

THIRTY-THREE We came up to the heading of the side corridor down which lay the locks of the hatching room sector. So far no trouble. We had not used the cap-car but the regular elevator for fear of a general alarm being set off while we were in the wall. In such cases, Kano said, all cars which were en route at the moment were stopped where they were, then programmed out under inspection. Now the Lapp surveyed the main corridor, found it all clear, signalled me to follow on after him at an interval. I nodded my understanding and he started down the side corridor. Counting five slowly, I stepped out and called for him to wait a moment—a thing of importance had just been sent down from Level Six on Dr. Ho's code. At this, of course, faithful apprentice security man Comrade Trooper Kano Komuli saluted me vigorously and then, when I had hurried up to him with my urgent message from the Chinese overlord —which was, of course, no message at all —he reacted with great dramatic effect, and we both dogtrotted toward the side corridor lock-guard who, obviously, was watching this excitement with commendable intensity. He had better, the Peking dolt, we were staging the entire charade for his benefit. "Message from Dr. Ho!" cried Kano, saluting the fellow. "By special courier to the lock-captain, er, what the hell is his name, comrade?" The fellow told us and Kano clapped him on the shoulder for a good lad and ordered him to call the captain at once. And if he did not wish to do that, if he wanted to question the authority, that was fine, also. He could make his report to D-4-B Suntar, the gentleman with him wearing the general personal pass of Dr. Ho Wu Chen's own code.

Naturally the poor devil was not going to make trouble for an agent from the Propaganda District, much less for a passbearer out of Ho's office. He rang up the lock-captain who, informed of the status of the messengers, came out of his inner lockroom on the double. "You see," said Kano calmly to me, "it was necessary that we draw this coolie out, as well. It is a dual interlock, and the second seal does not open without the first being clear. Don't fret, though. Think of it this way; we get two comrades for the price of one." I thought he was making a thinnish tundra joke but he was not. I learned this literally seconds later. And with it I learned what two years in Okatrai could do to the kindness and good heart of a jolly reindeer herdboy. Now the lock-captain was nearly up to us. Kano was beautiful. The captain was jabbering at him in a thick Suchow dialect, not pleased with this irregularity at such a crucial brief hour before hatchtime, and Kano, the thief and rascal, was answering him back with a pluperfect imitation of the Suchow argot. And, in the same devious mouthful, the damned Laplander was switching to Buryat Mongol to advise me that he would take the lock-captain, while I handled the corridor-guard. "The timing,'' he grinned, "must naturally be just so." Then, happily, he yelled out, "Just so!" I gawked a startled and stupid moment. Not Kano. He delivered a kung-hodo groinkick into the captain, doubling him forward into a following uppercut of the raised knee, cruuunnchh! I was in time with my recovery to grab my man's arm as he went for his stungun, and to pull him into my turning hip and floor him with a thud that made the rayex rods blink overhead. He was just getting to his hands and knees when Kano finished him with a kick in the side of the head. His own man wasn't moving. Getting their guns was the next business and we did that without thinking. But Kano now wedged the corridor-guard against the lock, then shouldered his own victim and shouted for me to come on, and to hurry. Not arguing, I followed him to the second lock. This was the last one before the sterile glass door of the inside third seal. Dropping the captain's unconscious body into the tracks by which the second lock ran in and out of the solid rock to close off the corridor, the Lap now yelled for me to stay where I was. Grabbing the second stungun from me, he sprinted around the bend which hid the thick pyrovex sterile shield. Unable to bridle my curiosity, I followed disobediently to the bend—and drew up in sudden, sheer disbelief. Beyond the pyrovex shield the combfront was plainly visible. It seemed at the glance as though every cell door was wide open, every cell-comb empty. And outside, upon the gleaming floor of the sterile hatching room, were scores —it looked like hundreds—of the revolting slimelike larvanoids in every stage of emergence from the milky larval sheaths. No sound penetrated the thick plastic shield but the crawling and vibrating activity of the arousing brutes was electric in its effect upon the nervous system. Every one of them which was in a sufficient state of shedding was swarming over the surfaces of the hatching room, walls, floor, combfront, prying and seeking and clawing for a way out. Without warning, Kano cut loose at the pyrovex partition with both stunguns. The tough plastic bent visibly to the repeated impacts, then gave shatteringly. Turning to flee, Kano saw me. He began to curse luridly in Lapp, as he got into gear. Behind him, I saw the larvanoids clotting up to tumble through the ruptured pyrovex shield. Wheeling, I ran him a dead heat around the bend and to the inner corridor lock.

Dashing through this barrier, we headed for the outer one. "My God," I yelled. "How about that poor devil of a captain?" But Kano knew what about that captain, and he did not answer me except with a curse to run harder. As the outer lock loomed ahead, a sudden blinking of the sodium rods heralded a major drain on the power system. A wall panel outside the lock flashed red. Electronic beepers and bells were ringing up and down the corridor, and workers and security appeared to be springing from every rock cranny in the hives. Also, and instantly upon the first blinking, both corridor locks slid out of the walls to seal off the hatching room. But the skillfully wedged bodies of the two attendants rode ahead of the locks and jammed them. There was time enough, and room enough, for Kano and me to slip through into the outer corridor, and race for the main corridor of Level Fourteen, shining in the distance. We made it in time to run squarely into a squad of security police on the run for the hatching room, stunguns drawn. I had sense enough to palm my weapon into my tunic and Kano immediately pushed the muzzle of his gun into my spine and began to shout at the sub-inspector heading the squad that he had a prisoner here and needed help to take him up to Level Two, Security HQ. The sub-director detailed two troopers to help him. The fellows took over for Kano, seizing me with very little respect "Follow me, lads!" ordered the Lapp impostor, and set out on the dogtrot for the lift up to higher ground. In the lift, however, we rode only so far as Zomatar's level. There we fed our two friends a brace of kung chops which passed them out perfectly. We then programmed the lift to carry the unconscious troopers back down to their duty station on Level Fourteen, and set off on the run for the late DoctorProfessor's suite. There a nice surprise awaited us. Simba Maringa had indeed had a visitor during our absence. Very important visitor. Very agitated visitor. A man who had only just now expressed up from the service lab on Level Thirteen in response to the general alarm. Come to collect his good right hand, Professor Zomatar, to help him quell whatever of mischief the fifth swarm was making in the hatching room. In place of Zomatar, however, the visitor had found Josef Maringa. And he was presently gripped in Maringa's good right hand. Very firmly in it. And furiously. The tall Masai held his enraged prisoner virtually paralyzed, permitting him only enough slack to breathe. ... It was Dr. Ho Wu Chen. "Gentlemen," bowed the black African. "I don't know if you've met. May I present my father-in-law." He paused, as did we. Then he hissed into the silence, slowly, deliberately. "Before I kill him."

THIRTY-FOUR We never discovered if Simba would have murdered Dr. Ho. Or if we would have killed Simba to prevent the African from destroying this God-given Chinese ticket out of the Hives of Okatrai. For, even as we all paused, disoriented by this crusher of a decision, and before Simba might close his black hands to break the skinny neck of the madman, the intercom panel above Zomatar's workdesk lit up and the familiar foxbark of Inspector Shen's voice came pleading over the wires. "Zomatar? Zomatar? For the State's sake, comrade, will you answer!" Zomatar did not answer. Kano, who could imitate any voice in any dialect, did so, and using the dead Doctor-Professor's best nervous diffidence told Chief Inspector Shen that he knew nothing of Dr. Ho's

whereabouts except that he should be in the L-13 laboratory. He, Zomatar, would repair at once to the hiving room and take charge until Ho might be located. "No!" yelled Shen. "It is a purgatory down there. The things have broken loose. I've lost at least fifteen men and Level Fourteen has now been sealed off to keep the larvanoids confined there. We have got to find Ho in order to get the seal-off permission for that entire level. We will destruct that level. Repeat, Professor. Destruct Level Fourteen. Do not go down there, or to Level Thirteen. Over." "Wait," cried Kano. "At least activate the walltubes on Ho's and my private codes. I must get to the laboratory. We will anesthetize the swarm over the destruct gases system. They have to be saved for study. Dr. Ho would insist. That is an order, Comrade Inspector. Over." We watched the tube control panel. After a bad moment's heartskip of delay, the panel flashed on. The bright light cleared my flagging brain. I saw the parts of Okatrai's collapse come together in a wild jigsaw design. We had Ho as hostage. Shen, in control until the larvanoids could be put down, believed Ho to be either dead in the hatching room, or caught in the walltube system by the general alarm halting of all capsules en route. Now Shen would assume that Ho would be freed of the tubes and would report shortly. Otherwise, he could be certain the Chinese Master was done for. In either case we had a few precious minutes. How we used them would decide our fates, and perhaps the fate of Okatrai Island. Think hard, think fast, think straight, Yuri Suntar. All right, first fact; the Chana rendezvous on Level One was now aborted. The hope had to be that this obvious truth would carry as clearly to Lev Eshman, wherever he was, as it must to us in Zomatar's suite. The immediate problem was to alert Chana Maringa. It was already past eleven o'clock and she was expecting me at the Shikolin Skak on Flight Level One, at midnight. But where was I to find her, meanwhile? Damn. Then it came to me. Of course. Ho lived-in at his office suite down the corridor on this same Level Six. Where else would his precious granddaughter live than with grandfather? There was no other course in any event. The general alarm would have sealed off the corridor approach to Ho's rooms. But the gamble was good that we could handle what security police would be on guard outside the offices, if we could get inside them without the knowledge of those police. What we might find inside the offices, in addition to sweet Chana, was something God could provide answers for. "All right," I said to Kano and Simba Maringa. "We've one way to go. Ho's way. His office by walltube. Private code. You're a genius, Kano." "No," he insisted honestly. "Only a coward." We smashed the controls and the intercom in the single-seat cap-car of Zomatar, and put Ho in that vehicle ahead of the other two caps. Kano came directly behind Simba and myself in the last cap, being the programmer who would ram us all through the web into what we prayed— each in his own way— would prove to be Dr. Ho's parking annex on Level Six. We prayed well. Seconds after entering the system, we hurtled out the other end into an anteroom of no less than three parked capsule cars. Simba seized Ho once more and we began our search for Chana's quarters. The girl found us, instead. And only just in time.

We had heard a sound of security police in what had to be the outer reception room of the Chinese doctor's suite. But just when we thought they were to stay out there, as my Mongol cunning had predicted, they began probing down the very hallway we were in. There seemed no way out until a doorway opened in the wall of our trap and a sleepy Chana Maringa wanted to know of her hostage grandfather what all the scuffling was about. Ho did not tell her but we did, including the identification of Josef Maringa as her long-lost parent. The shock of seeing her father was one of the most impressive human exchanges I had ever seen. Its effect was immeasurably greater than any concern for Ho's captivity. Only proving what the Western world had always contended about parental love and the ties of family over state. Maringa, for himself, hurled Dr. Ho into the arms of Kano Komuli and embraced the daughter he had not seen since birth. Chana, overcome, yielded with a flood of silent tears. But the emotion had betrayed us. Down the hallway came the squad of security police, no less a stalwart than desk-corporal Ling Po in command. "Your Code-Out coin!" whispered Kano. "You'd better have it on you, comrade. And pass it fast." I palmed the imitation coin—an issue-item to every graduate of the Academy For Politics—from its place in my hip pocket, slipping it to Kano. The Lapp in turn palmed the little device and placed the hand which held it upon Dr. Ho's shoulder. "Now, Doctor," he said. "Don't even say 'ah.'" Ho glared at him. But he was familiar with the Code-Out coin. One particular pressure from its holder and whoever it was being held against was put into medically irreversible paralysis. Ho, no less than any common man, valued his life and priceless limb. "You fool," he greeted Ling Po coldly. "Get out of here." "Don't you believe, sir," I suggested, "that it would be a good idea if Inspector Shen provided us with freedom from further interruption until this disturbance below is quieted? Really, this is unforgivable." "Please, Comrade Suntar." Kano was convincing in his selfless defense of D-5. "I have served Dr. Ho for six years, and never seen such a security break. This is definitely not Genesis Five work." "It doesn't matter. This installation is under alert. Let us proceed, Doctor," I said unforgivingly. "Tell Shen you saw the Master in his suite," Ho ordered the blinking-eyed Ling Po. "Report to him immediately, you Szechwan imbecile.'' Then followed, before any of us might comprehend the treachery, a short burst in the Szechwanese dialect. The instruction was as unintelligible to any of us as it was patently plain to the desk-corporal. Even so, we might have risked passing over the matter, had not I seen the way that Ling Po looked at me. He could not mask his hatred in the moment of his pending triumph. I saw it in his yellow face. I saw it in the straightening of his entire form. "Yes, Master," the corporal saluted, breaking his eyes from me. "At once, Master!" I caught the glances of my two comrades. "Battle stations," I smiled to them in English, a tongue as alien to the security forces, as Szechwanese to us. I was rewarded by nods from black Simba and broadfaced Kano. Nods and returned pleasant smiles. "A moment, Comrade Desk-Corporal," I called to Ling Po. "May I suggest another message for the Comrade Inspector Chief? Tell him you died in the line of duty." With the words, the stunguns which Simba and Kano had taken from the Level Fourteen escorts in the lift burped past me on either side. Ling Po's four men got their own guns into action, of course, shielded for the necessary time by the desk-corporal's staggering body. But their return fire went wild,

smashing into wall fixtures, rayex overhead rods, hallway furniture, whatever of stoppage was in the area other than our enemy forms. Rodglass spattered and showered down. Splinters of fractured chairs and wallstands ricocheted through the narrow corridor. But we were bit only with flying debris. On the opposing side, Kano Komuli and Simba Maringa were, by the very nature of their free manhood, sportsmen-hunters of tundra and veldt—and superb offhand shots. Their fire simply hammered the security men into the polished floor on top of their broken-bodied leader. In the tremendous burping and impacting of the force pistols' discharges, I did not note a single wasted shot by my mismatched very tall and very short soldiers. Nor was that all. None of the fallen would ever rise again. Simba and Kano had received the meaning of my remark to Ling Po about departing this life—they had switched the levers on their stunguns from "shock" to "shatter" velocities. We were free for another desperate handful of minutes. But were we? From the hallway p. a. box overhead the voice of Inspector Shen suddenly barked into our midst. "Dr. Ho. Dr. Ho. Acknowledge, acknowledge. Come in, Master. We must act. Repeat, we must act. If you do not hear me, I must move. My men are on Level Ten now. The larvanoids have gone back into the comb and through its ventilation ducts to Level Eleven. We are trying to hold there, but may have to fall back to Level Seven. Call me, Master. I must know where you are. Out." Kano alertly picked up the change from "over" to "out" in the broadcast. It meant that Shen was taking terminal measures of security. That he really did not know at this very moment if the creatures from Ho's honeycombed hell were on Level Eleven, or Seven, orwhere. Ho nodded to this intelligence, and spoke to us for the first time since his capture. His voice, peculiarly, was back to its ordinary evil calm. "If you and your comrades do not wish to die, Suntar," he said, "you will listen to me intently. In my darkroom axe the master-panels for the entire complex. There is a section system by which I can cut off all levels in any combination. This may be done, as well, without affecting the walltube system." "Meaning," I broke in, "that you can seal off the swarm and still get us out through the walltubes, eh?" "Precisely, Mongol." "How is it that Inspector Shen's controls cannot effect this same thing?" demanded Kano. "The master does not remain the master," answered the Chinese biochemist, "by sharing each meal with the dog." "Like the rest of us," growled the deep voice of Simba Maringa, "you throw what you will to which pit of desolation. Oh, I am still going to kill you, Master. But not like a dog; like a free man." He seized Ho by the throat and held him up off the floor. I thought all was over, then and there. But I had forgotten Chana. She put her soft hands to the tensing muscles of her powerful sire, and her voice commanded him not to kill her grandfather. Simba recovered. He said that he must kill this evil thing, but that he would yield the manner of the execution to another moment. Kano took over here, saying that we had better permit Ho to make his control seals, or we might have the larvanoids added to the security forces of Inspector Shen as obstacles to our scheduled takeoff up the air shaft. We saw the wisdom of this. At his control panel, Ho paused. What passed in that depraved great brain in the moment of its defeat, no man of lowly mental powers might know. But he knew that the fifth swarm was a monstrous failure. That much had to penetrate his

sick genius. The evidence was all about him in the constantly ringing and flashing general alarm system, together with the incessant operational orders of the D-5 offices above us. Moreover, Simba had told him of the terrible death of Zomatar, and of our freeing of the swarm from the hatching room into the corridors of Level Fourteen. He had to know in that moment of final silence, that he was beaten, and forever beaten. But again the folly of invading by presumption the mind of a madman. Ho was not beaten. We were. For when he had pressed the combination of control switches supposed to merely seal off the larvanoids below Level Seven, he turned to us with his bony fingers serenely pressed, tips to tips, and addressed me quietly. "You have thirty minutes, Suntar. That was the destruct com-code for the Hives of Okatrai."

THIRTY-FIVE As we were fleeing Ho's office for Level One and the flight deck rendezvous, Security Chief Shen and a squad of his bullies from Level Two burst without warning from the walltube. "I neglected to inform you," apologized Ho, "that the destruct relay includes an auto-alert in Shen's headquarters. That is, an alert to evacuate me." Shen's men covered us with drawn stunguns. The iron-faced inspector spoke with anxious, almost hysteric haste. Ordering one of the men to send up to Level Two for a prison capsule to be programmed down through the wall-tubes to Ho's suite, he informed the doctor that his office had lost contact with the last of its men in the lower hive levels. He had thus had no reports of the larvanoids since the last, interrupted one, saying that the creatures were loose in the ventilation shafts. Hence the order for the prisoner transport cap. Shen was frankly afraid to operate through the corridors, or by the corridor lifts. The walls were now the only safe means of movement in the hives. "And we cannot say how long these systems will remain operational," he concluded. "As the machinery shorts out in the lower levels, we are experiencing power fades throughout the complex. Engineering says they cannot effect any stemming of this and, in fact, they are abandoning offices on Level Four. We must hurry, Doctor. Into the wall, sir. There is no time." This last was spoken as the prisoner transport cap came banging out of the tubes into the parking bunker of Ho's service room. Shen's tough-looking sergeant of D-5 squad-men shoved us toward the cap, which I noted was plainly marked on its metal side with a big L-2 stencil, followed by the word Security. It was a six-place cap and all of us were ordered into it. There was some hesitation on the part of Simba Maringa, who was first in the line. At the delay, Dr. Ho spoke unhurriedly. "Do not concern yourself with time, son-in-law," he advised the big African. "We still have a sufficient number of minutes. You see, the destruction is wrought by the opening of seawater valves. The icy tide pouring into the Hives, seeking an ever-downward level, comes within twenty-four minutes to the last depth of the hives." "Level Sixteen?" I said, interrupting.

Ho nodded. "But then it requires the final six of the original thirty minutes for the water to penetrate the remaining one thousand feet and reach the thermo-reactors. When this collision occurs all is over within fractions of instants. You will all recall the old mushroom cloud photographs." Shen said, "Please, doctor. We must get on." But Ho waved him back, concluding to Simba. "Of course this disintegration of everything upon the final nuclear holocaust need not surprise you in your planning. It will be preceded at Minute Twentyfour by the blowing up of the furnace rooms, when the Arctic icewaters strike the heaters and generators on Fifteen and Sixteen." Simba, standing glowering at him all this tensely stretching time, crouched suddenly. Chana cried out for him not to move. Not to get himself broken apart by the "shatter" setting of the stunguns. The African controlled himself and in the interval I pleaded urgently for him to get in the prison cap, or not even God was going to be able to help us. "Time, Simba!" I said. "There is always hope while there is time. Hurry, hurry!" Now we tumbled into the big transport capsule, but as Shen went to program it into the wall, the incoming panel lit up, and the inspector leaped back out of the way. Out of the wall came a two-man capsule, and this one was not from Security L-2. Instead, on its gleaming flank, marked in glaring aseptic white, stood a large and ominous legend: Service Lab. L-13. As quickly, two more L-13 caps banged out of the wall and collided with the first one. Now, as we recoiled, the hatches began sliding back and out of the vehicles crawled, not the escaping security men we had assumed would be within, but six loathsome shiny larvanoids, smiling and swaying their ways toward us with a speed as shocking as their appearance. My God! I thought. They have super-intelligence. They not only understand what we say, but can do anything we can do, perhaps more, gaining as they must by the experience of each of the minutes of their new lives. Followed a close and frightful battle between the creatures and ourselves. In the process stunguns burped and ricocheted, the creatures hummed, buzzed and snarled, smiling all the while in between. Almost at once it was evident they were after the stunguns, for no sooner would one of them seize a security man and sting him to death, than he would pass along the fallen victim's weapon to another larvanoid which had not used its lethal sting and hence was not, as the original creature, moribund. The new creature would commence at once to fumble with the trigger and fire-control levers and attempt, with every chilling evidence, to learn the function and use of the stungun "on the run," as it were. Kano and I yelled this warning to all in the fight, D-5 man, or friend. This was human beings against larvanoids from the lower hell of Okatrai now, and no question of it in our combined forces. But we were losing. We could not hope to keep the creatures away from the weapons any longer. We must move out—and now! In the instant of the thought, I was at Chana Maringa's side, stungun shattering her out of the grasp of a closing larvanoid. I was near enough to the creature to smell the honey-and-formaldehyde odor of the hive upon its lusting stinking body and to see, to my horror, the secret of the fatal barb each creature hid. It was located, and retractably so, in what would be the human navel, and covered there as in an ambush of death, by the coarse hair which grew up from the loins and lower limbs to encircle the site. I saw the thing shoot out like a viper's fang, as the creature groped for Chana. I shot into its belly from two feet away with the shatter setting. The impact pulped the emergent stinger, spraying its venom harmlessly upon its own stiff hairing. Crying out like a bear or other beast shot vitally, the larvanoid

staggered away from us. "Kano! Shen!" I yelled, high-pitched. "Get it close up and blast the haired navel!" "I see, I see!" shouted Kano, watching another creature give security man his death from the embrace of the stinger. "My God, that's foul!" He ran to side me in protecting Chana. But at that instant, Ho made a treacherous move. Twisting free of Simba, who was fending off a creature with his stungun, the Chinese swept up a heavy vase from all overturned hallway table and struck the African from behind. Simba stumbled and would have been destroyed by the larvanoid, had not Kano and I leaped to his assistance, blasting the creature back from him. In that moment, Ho had gotten to Chana and put a stungun he had picked up from the floor to the girl's temple. I had only time to cry out to her to do as Ho was bidding her. To get into the capsule Ho was urging her toward, and go with the crazed doctor. We would follow them. We would find her again. Numbly, she obeyed, boarded the cap-car and vanished with Dr. Ho into the wall. Shen, Kano, Simba and I were all who were left now, and we four shrank together and somehow made it into the L-2 prisoner transport capsule and got the hatch closed before the mauled and bloodied but seemingly indestructible creatures were clawing and tearing with their wolflike tushes at our hatch cover. Again it took the smashing shock of our cap going full power into the wall to knock them off and to free ourselves for another desperate clutch of minutes in our flight for life from the Hives of Okatrai. "I thought it was only war and politics which made peculiar capsule pals," laughed Kano. "In the name of the State!" gasped Inspector Shen. "Don't you call this war?" "No," said Kano Komuli. "War is what men fight." "Surely we are men?" said the comrade inspector, never the quickest of intellects. "As surely," was all Kano nodded for reply, "those things back there are not." "Drive the damned capsule!" I pleaded. "All right, all right," said Kano. "Where would you like to go? Once around the park?" The tube we were in made a sharp left banking turn and Shen shouted to brace ourselves. It was not the course for the Level One flight deck which we had assumed Ho had taken, and whose same programming we had followed into the walls. "Level Two," said Shen. "My office." Next moment we were in the airlock of the Security Forces, Level Two. And it looked as though we were going to stay there for eternity. The exit into the inner offices—the escape and the only escape from the one-way pressure of the tubes —was blocked by the deliberately wrecked capsule of Dr. Ho Wu Chen. He and Chana Maringa were out of the cockpit, into the room beyond. The wrecked craft was virtually riveted into the opening of the exit port by the force of stungun pistol blows fired by Dr. Ho. We were free to look out from the airlock through the clear pyrovex hatch of Ho's machine. And free to watch helplessly, through that damnable viewhole, the Chinese biochemist forcing his granddaughter across the security offices toward the L-2 private lift of Inspector Shen to Level One and the communiport flight deck of Okatrai. "You should have let me kill him," growled Simba Maringa. "Hell," said Kano. "Nobody was stopping you during that fight back there. Why didn't you get it done then, black lion?" Simba grimaced, too honest to lie, to dissemble.

"I was fighting to save him for killing," he admitted. "I didn't want anyone else to cheat me." "Bastard! Bastard! Yellow bastard!" I screamed at Ho, pounding on the plasti-carbon of the jammed hatch, my face and fists bleeding from my frenzy to literally beat my way through the bullet- and impact-proof canopy. The Chinese looked across the room, eyes drawn by my frantic hammering. Just as the lift came down from above, and its doors slid open, he turned and bowed to me in the classic Mandarin pattern. Then, roughly, he shoved Chana into the waiting lift, stepped in beside her, pressed the controls. The last memory I had was of Chana's haunting face saying farewell to me—to everything. Then the lift door was sliding shut and the lift was shooting upward and was gone. It was the end. We were going to die like trapped rats in a wall. We were just going to have to vilely huddle there and count down the remaining minutes to the time when the icy seawater hit the redglowing reactor pile of Okatrai. But Kano Komuli didn't see it that way. "By God!" he suddenly shouted. "Wait a minute!" He wriggled forward and angled his long arms down into the crumpled body of Ho's capsule car, hands searching for something out of our sight, and of his. In another heartbeat he had found it and it was intact and when he pulled the toggle that operated it, it went "click" as clean as glass and the plasti-carbon pyrovex cover blew off as neatly as the top of a broken soda pop bottle. The Lapp had remembered the escape hatch switch. "Nothing," he said soberly, leading the way out of the gaping hole, "is a substitute for experience."

THIRTY-SIX Shen, following me out of the wall, sprinted for the lift doors across the room. There, he pressed a return button and the lift came sliding back down—with Dr. Ho and Chana Maringa still in it. The inspector bowed his apologies for recalling the machine, stepped into the lift with Ho and Chana. He kept his stungun covering Kano, Simba and me. But suddenly Chana leaped out of the lift and ran for our sides. Shen and the Doctor jammed open the closing door and came out of the lift with stunguns pointed. Chana was caught in the middle of the room. "Stay right where you are," said Comrade Inspector Shen. Ho, slant eyes blazing, waved his stungun. "If you move, granddaughter, you must be shot. Please stay." I understood that the tall Chinese would do it; he would do anything now. He had lost the Hives of Okatrai. Lost the work of his life in depopulation and repopulation. As he saw it, the world was finished already. Simba and Kano were tensing. The African would kill himself to kill Ho. Kano was forever unpredictable. I must move before them. "Chana," I said. "Obey them." The Afro girl nodded, and I said to Simba and Kano, "If you do anything, they will shoot. You know it."

"And if we don't do something," said the Lapp, "they will take her with them. And remember this, Yuri; she is our only pilot, too." I had forgotten. Thinking only of saving Chana, I had not considered our own real need for her. Reading my mind, Kano concluded. "That's right, comrade. Love won't lift any medium Skaks off the flight deck." "You have a better suggestion?" I rasped. "Considerably," he said. "Comrade Inspector," he called to Shen. "I have a compromise to propose. A good deal for both sides. But it is for you alone to decide it. Dr. Ho is not stable. If you will come over here, I think you will be happy." Followed a whispered conference across the room between Shen and Ho. Ho nodded in agreement. Shen started over to us. But Kano at once ordered him to circle the room, along the walls. In that way, should trickery develop, we could fire at him without hitting Chana. There was no argument, the security chief obeying promptly even with a faint smile. In another moment he was coming up to Kano, moving along the wall behind Simba and myself. In a glance I could see that the Lapp had positioned himself so that Shen must halt precisely in front of the intake port of one of the banks of walltubes before which we had taken our stand. I could not read the stenciled destination on the door of this port without turning away from Ho. I had only the continuing impression of the smiling Laplander bowing a grave greeting to the now plainly confident inspector. But I had a distinct understanding of the words with which Kano now bid adieu to the man whom he had only just greeted. "A promise is a promise, Comrade Inspector," he told Shen. "Be happy." Too quick for any response, the Lap whipped open the intake port of the walltube behind the security man. In the same motion he hit the vacuum switch. A moment of terror mirrored itself in the eyes of the doomed officer. Just for that instant of time he was held suspended in the maw of the tremendous whirlpool of induction pressure. Then his broken cry was cut off by the instantaneous spongelike compression of his entire body into the tube, and he was gone in a single, sucking gulp. Kano Komuli swung shut the heavy steel port. Its stenciled legend was visible now. Simba Maringa and I both turned without thinking to stare at it. And in the movement knew a little of the vanished agent's terror: Hiving Sector L-14, Hatching room. Comrade Security Chief Shen was on his way to his last inspection. But the diversion of his ending had an even more ominous sequel. While we gaped at Shen's startling disappearance. Dr. Ho did not. The ringing of the lift door's closing bell chimed from across the room. Wheeling, we were in time only to curse the emptiness of the place where the Chinese scientist had stood, and of our own lambfat heads. "Come on!" yelled Kano. "We'll have to use the main corridor lift outside. It's just down the hall!" Seizing Chana Maringa's dusky hand, I started after the Lapp. Behind us, loping in his lion's stride, Simba Maringa ran the rear guard. "Be swift, children," he said in his deep voice. "By the wrist chrono I borrowed from comrade Ju Hong, we have seventeen minutes. Do you fly the medium Skak, daughter?" "I will fly it!" said Chana Maringa. "Uhuru," boomed her father. "Run harder."

"What did he say?" she asked me pantingly. "You heard him. Run harder. There's the lift." "No, I mean the other." "Uhuru, freedom," I panted back. "You always have to run harder to catch that precious wind." "You're crazy, Mongol," she laughed bitterly. "There is no freedom." "Then why are you running harder, dark love?" "You're right, comrade!" The laugh was genuine this time. "Uhuru! Here we are." We piled up before the hallway lift, anxiously scanning the corridor down which we had just raced. There was nothing to be seen. We looked the other way, beyond the lift. Equally empty. By God, we had beaten the larvanoids. We were ahead of them here. They hadn't invaded this level. Kano kept his thumb bent cursingly on the "up" button. His profanity was potent. The lift came sliding from below swift and true and sweet to the ear, with its level bell striking pure silver, as the doors separated and rolled back to admit us for our continuing flight upward. We stood paralyzed in mid-gather for our leaps forward to enter the lift. We were caught like flies in a poisoned sea of Okatrai honey. Chana's scream struck like a knife into the hiatus of fear. The lift was crawling with larvanoids.

THIRTY-SEVEN We ran like squealing rats before a plague of cats. Behind us the larvanoids boiled out of the lift in pursuit. Their buzzing was high frequency, almost whining in its intensity. Also now, as they came in their peculiar loping gait, another sound was emanating from them; the panting cry of the wolf pack on the trail of game. Chana, terrified by the echoing clamor, tripped and fell. I was forced to stop and fire almost point-blank into the leading creature. By luck and nothing else, the impact of the shots hit within the target circle of the bushy navel. Screaming, the larvanoid fell. I yanked Chana to her feet and we fled again, only a leap ahead of the angry pack. Our retreat took the only path familiar to us, back toward the offices of Security headquarters. There was a prayer that the private lift might have an automatic return. It could be down from Level One again. We had no other reasonable chance. But as we reached the open door of Shen's office, a glance showed us that the lift was not down again and that an entrance into the police quarters would only prove a blind box, a cul-de-sac, from which there would be no retreat. If we ran on, there was always the chance of some opening, some sidepath, some better wall to stand against. Shouting to my fellows to press on around the near corner of the main corridor, I pushed Chana ahead of me, firing back at the larvanoids as they came slithering up. The delay at Shen's door had cost us. We rounded the corner with no more than a dozen feet to spare. But that better wall was suddenly in view. We all saw the phosphogas sign and took gasping heart. Armory L-2 Security, it read. Our speed increased with the hope. If comrades Lo-Tsi and Lev Eshman had not cleaned out the weaponry of the police, we might find something more effective against the

larvanoids than our stunguns. At least we might get fresh stunguns. At the last fusillade at Shen's door, our weapons had fired weakly. The creatures, seeming to sense this, had come on harder yet. Now they were at our heels as we dashed through the armory entrance. Indeed, they were so close that Simba Maringa wheeled and blocked the doorway, seizing one, then two and swiftly, three of the creatures in turn and hurling them bodily into the advance of their fellows. It gave us the instant we needed to get into the armory proper. There, thank God, we found our fresh weapons. But they were not stunguns. They were Lev and Lo-Tsi themselves, just staggering out of the supply bins loaded down with armament. Eshman shouted for Simba to leap clear of the doorway. The African obeyed. Lev charged into the breech, a gob of some puttylike clay in one hand, a stungun in the other. The first creature through into the armory paused fractionally to get its bearings, to see whence its prey had vanished. As it did, two things occurred. Its fellows piled into it from the rear, and Lev Eshman, dancing light-footed and lightquick, went in like a matador placing his own banderillas. Only for the Spanish sticks the Israeli substituted the gob of gray plastic. And for the high-crested neck of the black bull, he used the bare chest of the first larvanoid, smacking the gob of material onto the thing's slimy front. In the same dash, the Israeli youth peeled back toward us yelling for us to get down. We did and Lev whirled and fired his stungun at the lump of plastic, which the creature did not yet realize was appended to it. The impact of the stungun upon the plastic blob resulted in a blinding sheet of force and fire which would have blasted us all but for Lev's warning. He himself was covered by a bin-row corner, but was so close to the explosion of the atoplast explosive material that he was smoked black. It did not diminish his spirit. Nor ours. The entire entrance to the armory was a charnel-gate scene. Legs, arms, heads of larvanoids lay everywhere. Each dismembered part still jerked and writhed with independent life. Half of the creatures remained whole, but either blinded or in shock for the moment, so that it was impossible to distinguish these from the disjointed brothers of the comb. "Come on," said Lev Eshman, giving his load of plastic munitions an expert hitch. "We can make it back down the hall to the lift these beauties just came out of. With any luck, anyway. I wouldn't linger, comrades." We got out of there. Running for the waiting lift, I left Chana in Simba's guard, dropped back to where Lev Eshman was bringing up the rear. He told me in jarring sentences that they had found Koltzmanyev and enlisted him. He was even now on Level One trying to get the great central airbore hatch opened and jammed open, so that our escape by medium Skak, once launched, could not be closed off. "That Koltzmanyev only looks like a grieving beagle," Lev panted. "He's a kosher Doberman at heart. It was all I could do to make him leave us. He wanted to be where the atoblasting was." I nodded, fighting for breath. Ahead we could see the lift waiting, still there, still vacant. "Listen," I said. "We'd better try for Shikolin's Skak—I know that one flies right, and it's parked nearest the air-bore. Just beyond Chana's two-place job." Lev Eshman nodded, saving words. "Koltzmanyev says he can fly if he has to. He thinks." "Same with Chana," I answered. "Long on the think." I saw the Israeli's wry grimace. He was reading me. Even if we made it to Shikolin's Skak and even if Koltzmanyev had gotten the airbore groundhatch opened, we were scarcely up and away. "Well," he grinned in his tough-sly manner, "two pilots that can't fly are better than one ... I think."

We were at the lift now. Lev stood aside holding back the doors in case of a signal from another level. Our little band of refugees from Ho's purgatory crowded into the lift's cab. I yelled for Lev to let the doors go. He did so, and punched the "up" button. No more than a handful of seconds were required for the vehicle to negotiate the one hundred feet of solid rock shaft. Yet within that brief held-breath of time our various glances met and spoke a score of hails and farewells. Save for Kano and me, we barely knew one another. But we were comrades in the true sense. We had faced death together and held fast. I loved them all; and the lavender-eyed Afro girl, most of all, she would never know how my heart ached for her. Intensely moved, I suddenly cried out, "Hope!" And homely Kano Komuli for one time in his life did not laugh or grin, but banged the chamber closed on his stungun and answered, "We against all." The others only compressed their lips, understanding the sentiment, thankful for it. Chana shrank ever so slightly toward me. My arm went about her tiny waist. I sensed rather than saw her lovely eyes sweep up to my ugly Mongol face. "It's me that's crazy, not you, Mongol," she whispered. "It must be love." There was no time to answer. The lift stopped and the Level One light flashed on. Lev hit the door button and the panels slid open. We pushed out onto the flight deck, eyes instinctively shaded in a common upward stare. The pale, cold circle of the midnight sun floated far above. By the inflooding lumination we could see the cylinder of the airbore limned by the frost motes swirling downward with the rush and hollow booming of the Arctic wind. We felt our hearts rise to that distant circle and to those glittering Polar stars beyond it. By the Torah! Koltzmanyev had done it. The surface hatch was open.

The Shikolin Skak

THIRTY-EIGHT Behind us we heard the lift doors slide and, to our vast unease, the machine glided downward. Someone else, or something else, was down there on Level Two. Kano Komuli, running up just then from a swift sprint to check the control booth for the master hatch mechanism, told us that there was no sign of Koltzmanyev at the hatch station. That was bad. We had no choice, then, save to wait and greet the occupants of the corridor lift on its return to Level One. We had to know what enemy was to our rear. There were no more friends down there. These beings had to be either some desperate survivors of the engineering staff, or of Shen's cut-off lower level police, or another liftload of the creatures from Level Fourteen. We were nailed down, and our time was running more than short. I looked at Simba Maringa. The big African did not need to be asked. He looked at his wrist chrono. "Eleven minutes," he said. We divided forces to flank the lift doors. Swift glances about the flight deck showed, to our surprise, no life whatever. If Ho were up here, he was over in the airship parking area, or in another hiding place. No time remained to check.

The lift slid up from below, and we crouched back, stunguns at the ready. Out of the parting doors came, not the larvanoids from Ho's lower hell, but Provost Marshal Rodion and fat General Ket. Neither was armed. They had seen the larvanoids and escaped with their lives only because of the delaying action fought by a squad of stungunners in their behalf. The security men had come up from Level Seven, first of the hiving levels. Ket and Rodion had been housed next to Ho's headquarters on Level Six. When the stungunners were followed up from Seven by another liftload of larvanoids similar to the group of creatures which nearly trapped us, Ket had fled for the Chinese leader's quarters. He had found Rodion already there and trying to work the walltubes but not understanding their programming. Ket got them both into one of the L-13 caps and safely up to L-2 and Shen's office. There they had crawled out of the wallport via the hatch of the blown cap-car and raced out into the main corridor to take the lift to Level One in our wake. Ket, who got out the story, was fairly possessed by this time. Rodion was virtually incoherent. All of us had seen the shining, slimy creatures from the lower pits of Okatrai. All had heard their high singing hum, their lupine snarls, the slashing chop of their tushes and the monstrous cries of the victims of their bushy-haired, six-inch stingers. In the circumstances, when Lev Eshman tossed each of the Russian officers a spare stungun and told them they had just been demoted, that Comrade D-4-B Yuri Suntar was the battle commander and Lev Dayan Eshman his lieutenant, there were no arguments. In the ensuing silence, Kano said to Simba, "How much time?" "Nine minutes," answered the big African. "More for some, less for others," nodded Lo-Tsi, the taciturn Tibetan. "What will we do, Comrade Suntar? Abandon Koltzmanyev? Forget Dr. Ho Wu Chen?" Before anyone might answer, the high whine of a Skak reactor-jet broke into the murky quiet of Level One. "That's my craft!" Chana cried. "I would know its whimper anywhere." "By God," said Kano. "Ho's got Koltzmanyev. The Chinaman can't handle a Skak." "Yes," said Lo-Tsi. "Or else Koltzmanyev is fleeing on his own part. There comes the ship." We all saw it at the same time. The Skak was moving out, revving higher and higher. Darting forward, Simba and Lev made a wild try to get to it, to pinch in on it from either side of the taxi approach to the central air-bore. But they were too late, and the ship accelerated forward between them, knocking both of them tumbling like sowbugs with the tremendous exhaust of its atostream powerlift. We did not know if they were dead, badly injured, or only battered. We did know some other things, however. At the controls of the two-place ship sat capsule engineer Koltzmanyev. By his side, Dr. Ho Wu Chen held a stungun to Koltzmanyev's temple. They were so close now that we had to leap and scatter to avoid being struck by the taxiing craft. Koltzmanyev had evidently chased Ho into the parking area, only to be ambushed and commandeered to fly the demented Chinese biochemist out of the hell which he had created for himself—and for all of us. Then, as we were diving to escape the Skak's roll, my eyes went wide with horror. Chana Maringa had not run with us. And worse. She had dashed out into strip-center and was flagging the Skak down. Koltzmanyev, by superb controlling, skittered the little ship sideways and righted it, unharmed, not ten feet from Ho's granddaughter. Kano and Lo-Tsi and I spurted forward to closer stungun range, covering the craft. "Chana!" I yelled. "For God's sake come away. Get down, get down!" We wanted to fire over her, to knock out the Skak, to give Koltzmanyev some chance to get out of the craft. But the Afro girl was as fearless as the cub of Simba Maringa would be. And her single thought was to offer her grandfather the choice of surrendering poor Koltzmanyev, or running her down. We were never to know the Chinese scientist's decision. Brave Comrade N.O. Koltzmanyev lifted the option for him.

While Chana shouted and waved, and Ho was shaken badly in his passenger bucket, Koltzmanyev cut power on the Skak and bailed out on the pilotside. As he ran toward our group, Dr. Ho fired out of the pilotside escape port into the engineer's back. We could see Koltzmanyev's arms fly out and pinwheel from the impact, and his entire mid-body bulge forward, and we knew the stungun was set on shatter. The sadfaced "dolt," as General Ket called him, had given his life for us.

THIRTY-NINE In the parking area Lev Eshman and Simba Maringa tottered to their feet and began to run toward the halted aircraft. From behind Kano and myself, Lo-Tsi shouted sudden warning that the lift bell was ringing from below. We wheeled in time to see the doors close and the lift drop downward. Ket and Marshal Rodion, still standing in front of the departed lift, took alarm at its descent. Yelling something unintelligible, the Provost Marshal bolted for the idling Skak in which sat Dr. Ho Wu Chen, stungun still covering our huddled ranks. Ket, to our surprise, did not follow him; rather he said soberly to Kano and me, "One is never too old for a first experience," and slammed the loading port of his stungun. "We are now five against Dr. Ho's one, plus that damned Rodion." I was affected by his unexpected stand. "Welcome, Comrade General," I cried. "But make that six. Chana is as good as any man with this weapon." I shook the stungun, but Ket, staring past me, widened his eyes. "No!" he shouted. "Look!" We were too late with our look. Incredibly, Dr. Ho Wu Chen had gained another ally than any of us had imagined in the person of Marshal Rodion. The latter was now in the pilot's seat of the Skak and flexing its controls with obvious professional skill—he was a pilot, and Ho, for all his hell-making on Okatrai, was going to go free in the last agonizing instant of our own failure! Yet before Rodion could maneuver the small two-place craft up to the edge of the takeoff bore, the charging Simba Maringa, outdistancing Lev Eshman in the race from the parking area, was upon the Skak. In the hiatus of time between Rodion's throttle push and full fire from the turbodrive engine, and even as the slim craft lifted from the flight deck, Chana's powerful sire leaped and seized the rear parking handgrips used by flight line mechanics in moving the craft with power off. His great weight was carried forward and out over the lip of the airbore. There its effect was immediate, the two-seater Skak being extremely sensitive to load imbalance and gross weight lift It nosed up at once, full power screaming, yet only hanging staggeringly in mid-airbore. The vertical attitude of the tiny ship brought the gyrating form of the African into view of both pilot and passenger. In that instant Dr. Ho leaned out the passenger-side port and fired three times into the swinging body. Simba held on a last breath, great body literally broken apart, then his grasp gave way, as the Skak control-flap to which the handgrip was attached ripped away from the craft's rear. As one, except for Lo-Tsi who remained on guard at the lift, we rushed to the brink of the airbore Far down, already doll-small with distance, the dark body cartwheeled and spun into the fearsome depths of the central air shaft of Okatrai. The first landing was sixteen hundred feet below, and the solitary mercy in the ending of Josef Simba Maringa was that his friends were spared its witness. The lower lights of the hives were going out now. We could all see, churning below the falling, broken form, the icy green seawater thundering in corridor-volume torrents from the mid-levels into the bowels of Okatrai. The spume from this deafening cascade rose in sprayclouds shot through with exploding phosphogas and rayex rod lights. Simba fell into these mists of forever and was seen no more.

It was that brief, that brutal. Speechless we drew back, Chana, Kano, Ket, Lev and I, our stopped hearts beating again, our eyes leaping once more to the faltering Shak. In the Skak, Rodion's desperate skills were devoted to piloting the crippled Skak back to the flight deck. To accomplish this, he was forced to wing over the faltering aircraft and crash it upside down, under speed, on the taxi strip. There was a long sliding grinding burn of titanium along the deck, then the slow lazy spinning out and halting of the inverted craft. Moments later, when we rushed up to the wreckage, neither occupant seemed alive, and smoke was coming from the cabin. In the next handful of seconds we had righted the craft, pried open its ports, dragged out Rodion and Ho. "Rodion is dead; Ho is still alive," I heard Kano say. "Well enough," nodded the cynical Israeli. "But we better worry about us. Look at this." He held out an object I recognized as the wrist chrono of Ju Hong, last worn by Simba Maringa. "Picked it up over there where the Skak blasted Simba and me," he said. "If it's still on time, we aren't." Seizing the instrument, my eyes went wide. "Seven minutes?" I breathed, unbelievingly. "And counting," said Lev Eshman. In the silence, we distinctly heard the pretty, silver-soft ringing of the lift bell behind us. Wheeling about, we saw faithful Lo-Tsi still on guard before the doors. Next moment the lift had stopped and its twin doors slid open to reveal the dreaded larvanoids within. The creatures hesitated a fateful second to orient themselves. During this reprieve, we all saw Lo-Tsi's stainless steel teeth flash in his grave smile. Then he was waving to us and booming out in thick Tibetan, "Motherland, comrades!" With that, he swung the stungun in his right hand, cradled the bandoleer of atoplastic charges to his broad belly, turned and backed into the midst of the packed creatures. Before they might seize or sting him, he fired the stungun into the plastic explosive of the bandoleer and into himself. The entire shafthead of the lift disintegrated and fell in upon itself. To his ancestors, with the rock of the elevator shaft and the metal mechanisms of the lift, went venerable Lo-Tsi and the last liftload of larvanoids from any level in the hives of Okatrai. "Shalom, Tibetan," we heard Lev Eshman say softly. And all of us, crypto-Christian, Russian Orthodox and state atheist, quietly echoed, "Shalom." Kano Komuli, first to recover, commenced shouting for us to blast shut all the walltube exit ports on the flight deck. If Lo-Tsi's sacrifice for us was not to have been in vain, we must seal off these last evident means of larvanoid transportation from below before taking off. General Ket, too fat for such swift work in any event, was left to guard Ho, who was now sitting up. Chana was ordered to race over to the parking area and warm up the Shikolin Skak. Lev and Kano and I sprinted for the walltubes, hammering one after another of them shut with full shatter setting of our stunguns. No less than three of them, those from levels Ten, Seven and Two, were flashing the red lights of upcoming capsules when our fire fused them shut and for eternity closed off their avenues to the swarming creatures of Ho's underworld. But it was another walltube's exit red alert which took us in the rear and without warning. This was a tube which I knew, and upon whose route I had been, both coming and going. I knew it did not lead to the lower levels, and so had passed it on the run. Now its alarm beeper was crying out its peculiarly insistent dissonance. And Kano, cursing in Lapp, and Lev coloring the close air with Israeli army endearments, were both charging up to blast what I had not. I shouted them both back. "Look at the destination!" I said. "In God's name, you don't expect me to fuse the tomb of my own twin brother!" They both halted, stunguns dropped to hip.

The legend above the incoming capsule's port winked clear and ominous through its blinker of red light: Surface Stockade Disposal—Packmaster. Lev Eshman banged a fresh charge cylinder into his stungun. "Is your twin brother a pilot?" he said. "No," I answered hopelessly. "He's a bastard." 'Well," said the darkbearded Sabra, "some of my best friends are bastards. But we need a medium Skak pilot." "Stand clear," said Kano Komuli. "Here comes the cap." We saw the white light of the view port come on, briefly limning the capsule in the airlock of the walL Then the light went off and Kano raised his stungun. "There's two in there, not one," he said.

FORTY The capsule came out of the wall. It struck the parking Y with derailing force. We thought its passengers had been badly injured, but you do not harm a lineal son of Timur Lenk so easily. Yang uncramped his huge body from the small cabin of the cap-car and stepped out. The rear hatch slid open and the second occupant followed. My simple heart leaped with gladness. It was Pilot-Colonel Shikolin, and she was patently in good health. Yang Suntar, that brutal Mongol scion of Attila the Hun, had not ravaged her. I was forgiven my part in delivering her slight form to his love appetites. And even more importantly for my comrades, we now had the original skilled pilot of the medium Skak. We did not need to depend on Chana, and I at once shouted after her to leave the Skak alone and return to us. We were, all of us, as good as saved. My greeting shout to the slim colonel carried more than personal relief. "Ivanya!" I cried. "Thank God, thank God!" Her first look and first four words denied everything. The lovely face, suddenly as polar as the upper wastes from whence she had just come, turned upon me. "There is no God," she said flatly. Then, moving quickly past us, toward Ket and the two victims of Marshal Rodion's abortive landing, "What have you done to Dr. Ho?" I started after her. The giant hand of Yang Suntar at once fastened upon my shoulder. "You don't do anything, twin. Not until Ivanya says." Whirling about, as best I might, I commanded him in the old-time mastery of our boyhood years to release me. But his gargoyle's face showed no recognition of our former relationship. And most certainly no acknowledgement of my past domination over his simple mind. The crushing thought came to me that Shikolin had somehow programmed him; had been given some drug key by Dr. Ho, with which to subdue the savage beast that I had thought would sacrifice the pilotcolonel upon the lustful altar of his animal love. I pleaded with Shikolin, now bending over Dr. Ho, who was standing up, recovered. I entreated with her to understand that Ho had pushed the com-code destruct button and that Okatrai was going skyward. She only wheeled upon me to inform all of us that she plainly understood the situation and

that she would go and run up the medium Skak at once. Meanwhile should any of the comrades think to further imperil Dr. Ho Wu Chen, Yang Suntar would simply snap the neck vertebrae of his whey-faced twin brother, Yuri. "Yang!" she charged. "See that it is done." My giant brother seized me instantly. Wriggling violently, my only reward was Yang's immense hairy forearm barring itself across my throat in an iron vise. "Kick one more time, small brother," he rumbled. "That will be your last kick." Kano and Lev Eshman, however, were not accepting the apparent disaster. "Well, Comrade Gray Eyes," the tough-jawed Israeli told Shikolin, "this is a game I understand very keenly. The Lapp and I shall go with you to the Skak, in the event you are not entirely pure in your programmed heart to us. If harm befalls the neckbones of little comrade Mongol while we are bringing the ship over, then the big comrade Mongol must comprehend that I personally and happily will blow out your fair belly with this stungun which I now shove into it." He had the weapon into the soft front of Shikolin before Yang could react, and then Ivanya was tensely ordering the huge man not to break anything on my body while she was fetching the Skak. "I love you, Ivanya," Yang Suntar said. "I am your slave." Shikolin stabbed me with the fine gray eyes. "He means it, too, comrade. In your ignorant deviationist mind, do not imagine he has been drugged. We made our bargain up there, I as gladly as he." "My God, you can't mean it! You and this hairy-bellied ape of the past? You and Yang Suntar?" "He has told you," said the slim pilot-coloneL "We found love. The first for both of us." Here Lev Eshman barked over his shoulder to me that, should Shikolin and I opt to continue our seminar on the mating of Mongol studs to Russian bitches, with all its attendant tender joys of meaning for us all, I had better consult the chrono of Simba Maringa, which he had given over to me as troop commander. "You might," he said acidly, "find that we'll get our community backsides blown off before you finish." My glance shot to the instrument on my wrist. "Minus six minutes and fifteen seconds," I said. "It is enough," interrupted Shikolin. "March, comrades." Supporting Dr. Ho, she started on the double for the parking area. With them went Kano and Lev Eshman, Lev holding the stungun on Ivanya Shikolin. Ket remained with Chana, who had just now returned from the parking area. "For the memory of our old aunt in Buryat," I pleaded with my lovelorn brother. "Put me down, Yang. As the old ponyherd days bear me witness, would I turn upon you? I give you our old oath, brother: Ulan Kutor Vod." This reached him. "Ulan Kutor Vod?" he asked, as if this changed everything. "Well, in that case." He put me down and released me, following me as I rushed to Chana's side. Over in the aircraft park, we heard the cough and catching burst of a Skak motor. Chana said to me, "That's the medium Skak." Ket and I nodded anxiously. Behind us Yang Suntar was humming some kind of a Mongol obscenity of a love song. From the parking area we could see the medium Skak of Pilot-Colonel I. Shikolin approaching at a slow taxi-speed. But as the craft came up to us, something else came also upward from the tortured bowels of Okatrai.

For a terrible instant we thought it was the end, that the seawater had reached the nuclear pile at twenty-six hundred feet. But an instinctive look at the wrist chrono showed precisely minus six minutes, and I knew what had happened. "It's the furnaces on Level Sixteen!" I shouted. "The water has reached them. Get back from the bore!" We ran, even Yang impressed enough by the violent shudder running through the rock of Okatrai, to join us without stupid dissent. Flinging ourselves flat to the deck, we were just in time. The cataclysmic steamhead exploding up the central shaft struck and spat outward, fanwise, over Level One. We were seared by the wet heat but not seriously burned. In an instant it had vaporized and cooled beyond the bore. But in the column proper of that channel it still fountained upward out of sight into the outer Arctic. Below, in the guts of Okatrai, vast upheavals earth-quaked the entire island for a full thirty seconds. In this time the column of steam pressure continued to boil skyward up the bore to the outer surface, a steaming Vesuvius, red with the fire of the blown furnaces, hissing with the vaporized icy tide of a thousand times ten thousand gallons of molten Arctic waters. Then, as suddenly, and like some colossal fount of primeval gas shut off as instantly as released, the column of vapor fell back dissolving into the bore again. We ran to meet the taxiing Skak, one thought spurring us: We had our multi-place aircraft and our skilled pilot to fly it and a long five minutes of time remaining to blast safely up and out of the airbore of Okatrai.

FORTY-ONE Pilot-Colonel Shikolin brought the medium Skak whining up to our group, halting it there while the turbulences caused by the furnaces going up still roughened the air of the flight deck. Lev and Kano, in one terrible moment of carelessness, both swung down from the craft, holding open the boarding hatch for the remainder of us. Instantly, Shikolin touched the interior switch, closing the hatch and cutting them off outside. Her voice came over the intercom. "Dr. Ho's granddaughter will board alone." Dumbfounded, we all stared up at the Russian pilot. Dr. Ho took the mike from her and said, "Chana, it is your one chance. I wish you to take it. If you do not, Colonel Shikolin is under orders to take off at once." Yang Suntar blinked slowly, the frownlines of honest doubt furrowing his craggy face. "What of me?" he roared at Shikolin. "You leave me here, gray-eyed girl?" Shikolin shook her head, spoke urgently. "Never, big Mongol. But the others will stay. Dr. Ho's orders." "My brother, too? My little twin?" "He is an enemy of the state, Yang Suntar. As are the others. Ket, Kano, the Israeli. We cannot trust them aboard the ship with us. We must reach Moscow, at least reach Novo Tobirsk, with the story of their treachery, with the truth of the destruction of Okatrai. Dr. Ho must be free to build again, to go on with the great work. That is the law of the state. I obey it, and you obey it, also, or there is no love between us."

Yang blinked again, shaking his head stubbornly. I thought for an instant he was wavering. But then he looked down at me and announced sorrowfully, "It's a bad thing, Yuri. It doesn't seem right. But my woman knows what is best for me. She speaks for the state." "My God!" I cried out. "What has the state ever done for you? What loyalty do you owe a system which sends you to a living death in the icy hell up there above? That makes you feed fellow human beings to the foul wolves of Okatrai? That sucks the guts of your good sense and your Mongol honor out of your body with this programmed pilot-colonel's soft form? Think!" I shouted. "If you never thought before, do it now!" Yang growled and shook his huge head again, savagely, like a cornered bear. Shikolin, sensing the strength of the blood-tie, left the controls of the Skak and came running from the craft. Confronted with her fanatic person, I could see big Yang falter. At the same time I could see Lev and Kano closing behind the Russian pilot. They were not swift enough. Shikolin had a small pocket model stun-pistol buried in Chana Maringa's back. “Tell your friends to fire," she sneered at me. "And both pilots die together." Kano and Lev knew this; they did not have to overhear the precise words. They slowed, beaten. "Yang Suntar," said Shikolin, "take your brother to the airbore." For the final time my giant twin blinked. "Why is that?" he demanded. His answer came from the idling Skak, over his intercom, and from Dr. Ho Wu Chen. "Your brother is the chief enemy of the state," said Ho. "It is he who has destroyed the work of the new world which I had completed here for mankind. He must be executed, Yang Suntar. Motherland, comrade." Shikolin threw up her hand in the state salute. "Motherland," she echoed. "Now, Yang." To my horror, Yang picked me up. His great arms crushed me to him. He began to walk, and to weep. But, tears or no, he was walking toward the central airshaft of the hives of Okatrai. I had only the control of my terror, and the actual breath, to cry out to Kano and Lev Eshman to hold fire, to save Chana and themselves. Then Yang had me at the lip of the yawning abyss and lovely gray-eyed Shikolin, not waiting for his obedience to her order, or the obedience of my comrades to my commands, turned and fired her stun pistol into both Kano and Lev. The shock of the small weapon's impacts knocked them down, temporarily helpless to arise, or to more than jerk their limbs in spasmodic weakness. Fat General Ket, standing with Chana, was of one possible use. If he tried to assault or disarm the slender pilot-colonel, it would only mean another neuro-struck casualty sprawled upon the flight deck. But he could make a final contribution; he could save Chana's life where there was no earthly chance to do the same for comrade Yuri Suntar. I now shouted this plea to him and he trapped Chana in his thick embrace before she might move to join me, or to rush the steely-eyed Shikolin. It was now Ivanya and Yang Suntar against the last of the disloyalists. In that moment the voice of Dr. Ho came over the intercom. "Minus three minutes, seventeen seconds," it said. "Please to be brief, Colonel." Shikolin was up to us now. "Put your brother into the airshaft, Yang Suntar. The state commands it"

Yang stood stiffly erect. I understood that he was going to obey his state love and his Russian mistress. As calmly as I could, I said to him, "All right, brother. We Mongols know of these things. It is no blame to you. But we are brothers. We should grip the hands. It is a long goodbye, this last one." He sat me upon the flight deck at the very edge of the noisome pit. In the movements of straightening my tunic and standing straight for the farewell clasp, I palmed the silver disk of the Code-Out coin from an inner pocket. When our hands came together in the next moment, it was not the pallid flesh of his brother which Yang Suntar squeezed, but the cold metal of the Code-Out coin. His great body spasmed, and froze into rocklike rigidity. Only his slant green eyes moved, following my lips. "Ulan Kutor Vod," I said, and took my hand from his stony fingers. He was still trying to break through the granite flow of the drug through his huge bulk when Ivanya Shikolin ran up from behind us, and past me to seize the same ice-hard fingers I had but the moment before abandoned. "Yang!" she cried, a woman for one last moment. "Yang, my Mongol; answer me!" My giant brother, by some inhuman strength called up from the superwill by the voice of the only woman he had loved, obeyed Ivanya Shikolin. His great muscles spasmed, broke through the paralysis, activated in their one flashing the fingers of the hand which Ivanya clung to. The fingers closed upon the pilot-colonel's hand, answering her, and trapping her; whatever awaited Yang Suntar, faithful servant of the state, he would not face it alone. Whither he went, there went also his programmed mate. Ivanya's piercing scream announced her belated realization of this dread troth. Hysterically, she pleaded with Yang to release her hand. But the giant could only move the slant green Mongol eyes, for the paralysis was total in its possession of his vast body now, and Ivanya Shikolin somehow sensed this immutability. Whimpering with fear, she threw her slight weight against that of the stone giant in a final lunging effort to escape. The only effect of the surge was to rock Yang's great bulk off balance. He teetered a moment on the lip of the chasm, then fell slowly and like a great forest tree over the edge, backward, taking Ivanya Shikolin with him.

FORTY-TWO For an instant I stood rooted at the edge of the great air-bore. Then Ket and Chana were shouting at me to come on, to hurry, that time was telescoping. To buttress their plea, the voice of Dr. Ho Wu Chen came urgently over the intercom of the Shikolin Skak. The Chinese offered amnesty to us all. In the name of the state, he abjured me. For the love of his Afro-Asian granddaughter, he implored me. Gather my comrades and come swiftly. Yes, yes, the amnesty included the impact-shocked Israeli and Lapp rebels. Only get them aboard, and board the craft ourselves, and in the service of that golden world which still might be made to rise upon the ashes of Okatrai, direct the daughter of Josef Maringa to take the controls and lift the medium Skak from flight deck Level One. "Mark the countdown, Yuri Suntar," he hissed into the crackling microphone. "One minute fifty-nine seconds, now." I was running then with fat Ket and Chana. Reaching the Skak, I roared at Ho to release the hatch and boarding port. He did so and we boosted Chana into the craft.

I went next, guiding the Afro girl to her pilot's bucket and helping her strap in. She at once turned up the engine. The throttle response lagged a frightening moment, then caught and bellowed properly. Racing back to the boarding hatch, I seized first Kano and then Lev Eshman as they were handed up to me by General Ket. Stowing them in the nearest seats I turned to help the fat Russian through the narrow port. But Ket was not there. He was out away from the ship with his stungun burping on full shatter. And yelling at me to go on, to close the hatch, lift off. Instead, I went out of the hatch with my own weapon blasting, and the two of us stood, flank-to-flank, spraying impact shot at the circle of larvanoids moving in on the halted Skak from every angle of the flight deck. In the instant I noted their course of arrival: the air vent exhaust outlets which dotted the perimeter of the takeoff strip like the scuppers of some ancient ocean liner's maindeck. The lift plugged, the walltubes fused, the creatures had still found their ways upward. Now they were sliming out of the vents like the endless hatching of fish roe. "Fall back, fall back!" I screamed at Ket "They'll cut us off." Chana heard me and saw the danger simultaneously. Swinging the tail of the Skak away from Ket and me, she revved the engine, spewing its molten exhausts across the flight deck behind us. We could hear the screams of the cremated larvanoids and, next panting breath, smell the burnt tissues of their exoskeletons and the putrid hair of their lower bodies. "Come on!" I yelled to Ket. "Dive under the plane!" The Russian and I slid the last twenty feet on our bellies, and were beneath the Skak. Chana instantly swung its glowing jet around the second half of the flight deck's perimeter. Again the unearthly cries of the stricken, the loathsome odor of their incineration. Ket and I were granted a respite of ten seconds. We used it to claw our ways through the Skak boarding port, slam it behind us, shout up to Chana Maringa to pour on the full fire. Several of the creatures actually reached the craft before lift-off. Several dozen others of them began firing liberated stunguns. But the latter were all set on shock, rather than shatter, and all that the ship took from them was a series of severe buffeting thumps. The few which clung to the Skak could not retain their grips and were shelled off in our trail. Just as Chana brought the straining craft to liftoff at airbore's edge, a wave of larvanoids crested over that edge. As we rose veeringly upward into air shaft center, we could see the sides of the great cylinder itself swarming with upcrawling creatures, clot upon shining clot of them, seemingly without number or ending as far down into the abyss of the bore as our eyes would penetrate. "I think,'' said General Ket weakly, "that I shall become a Christian." "Don't 'amen' yet," advised Chana, fighting the controls. "This thing is full of fuel and laboring." "I can feel it," I said between my teeth. "It seems out of trim." "It is," nodded Chana Maringa. "What's the time?" The query jolted me. I had forgotten the flight of our final seconds, the mastery of Dr. Ho's irreversible com-code destruct signal. I looked at Simba's wrist chrono. The face was smashed, the hands bent and motionless. My eyes returned to Chana's. I nodded palely. "It's the time to pray," I said.

FORTY-THREE Chana Maringa was not the total pilot that Ivanya Shikolin had been. Neither had the medium Skak the same agility or featherlight responses as the light skimmer. Yet somehow the Afro girl coaxed and kicked the big craft up through the increasing snow-whirl of the great central air-bore of the hives. We wobbled and veered. We rose and fell away. We recovered and skittered again to this side and that. But in the end, and with a last full-throated burst of the powerlift, we shot free of the surface hatch and were airborne over the hell island of Okatrai. Chana brought the Skak over on a left turning bank skirting the wolf pastures of my late brother in a power-on climbing circle to gain both altitude and a good berth from the venthole of the airbore. Inland, over the Polar cap, she swung the craft south of the shaft. "What heading, Yuri Suntar?" she asked, leveling the Skak at fifteen hundred feet. "Western Hemisphere," I answered. "Take a due heading for Bering Straits; your line from magnetic north through the island's center. And full throttle if you please, Miss Maringa. We may have fifteen seconds remaining to get clear." "Time enough," said the Afro girl. "Are you comfortable, Grandfather?" she asked softly of Dr. Ho, immobile and silent in the co-pilot's seat of the Shikolin Skak. "There is a slight detour which we must make. I would not wish to take this Mongol's command without your blessing." There was, to me, a warning thread of steelwire in the lovely voice, the respectful if tense words. Dr. Ho did not receive the same reading. He said that his granddaughter was a true descendant of the Mandarin blood and that her obedience to her elders would not be forgotten when we reached our destination. Her rewards would be great. And our rewards, those of her companions in the flight from his aborted hives, would be unimaginable. The ceremonies which followed our safe arrival at Novo Tobirsk would be somber and full of sorrows for the lost swarm. But the golden tomorrow stretched on. Dr. Ho Wu Chen lived; and so the new world would live again—thanks to slender Chana, the granddaughter of his Mandarin heart, the flower and the seed of his supreme dream for the coming world. By his side the lavender-eyed and dusky daughter of Josef Simba Maringa nodded her piety and accord. But I was still watching her lovely face, and I understood that Ho's elation was not hers. She gunned the big Skak straight downward with a suddenness that put my head into the top of the forward compartment. Leveling out at five hundred feet she slowed the craft very nearly to hover speed. It was only then that I saw that for which she had been searching the snows of Okatrai, and which comprised the object of her detour: it was the mutant pack of ravenous brutes which ranged the ice behind the barrier wall in Yang Suntar's wolf pasture. Ticking the elevation control, she dropped the Skak another three hundred feet. Below, the pack took note of the maneuver and commenced to follow along the ground in the wake of the Shak's slow drift. The animals peered upward. Chana touched the outside communications mike, letting us hear the whistle of the Polar wind and the distinctly eager whimpering and crying of the green-eyed mutant wolves below. Now, stunningly, it came to me. It came as well to Dr. Ho Wu Chen, and in the same awed moment—but it came too late. Ho's face went gray. The slant eyes turned pleadingly to the dusky girl by his side. But Chana Maringa was not the granddaughter of Dr. Ho Wu Chen; she was the daughter of the lion, black Simba.

"Grandfather," she said, "a man must live with his dreams. He must never leave them. For truly they are the monument to his life." "No!" cried Dr. Ho Wu Chen. "No!" "Uhuru," answered Chana Maringa, and pulled the selective ejection lever. Ho's seat and its auto chute sailed upward and outward in a graceful arc. The chute popped at one hundred feet, and so it was that the Chinese biochemist's final descent among the mutant wolves of Okatrai was unhurried, of courtly nature and Mandarin restraint. I could not watch it, but Chana did. Only when the slobbering snarl of the closing rush of Yang Suntar's pets had savaged up from below, did she shut off the outside microphones and give the Shikolin full thrust. We accelerated through complete power range and were speeding away at maximum velocity within seven or eight seconds, nor was there a solitary one of those seconds to spare: as we flashed over the yawning black vent of the airbore of the Hives of Okatrai, the seawater reached the nuclear pile at twenty-six hundred feet beneath the Arctic Ocean. Behind us, Okatrai went up with a sucking spume of atomized rock, water, ice, all of living and nonliving that had been the vanished Island of Genesis Five. The entire Polar ice cap behind us appeared lit with a fire brighter than a thousand suns. Even at our constantly increasing distance, the very air seemed to boil and burst itself apart. The Skak rode like a ricocheting artillery missile at half again its normal maximum speed, or over two thousand miles per hour—and for ten minutes. Chana, and all of us, believed the ship would disintegrate, but it held together. In another five minutes we were free of the fission's monstrous turbulence and, we prayed silently, its radiation. Followed now the final council of the comrades. It consisted of Kano Komuli and Lev Dayan Eshman, the five-star Soviet General Vasily P. Ket, Chana Meru Maringa, half-Masai daughter of Josef Ganyika "Simba" Maringa and, of course, myself, D-4-B Y. U. Suntar, the whey-faced white bastard of Buryat. Five against whatever was to come. Five who were pledged by the very nature of their experiences and survivals to do all in collective and individual ranges of ability to warn the world of the evil which had been Okatrai, and the greater evil which had permitted— no, spawned and demanded—that island of Hell, whereon Dr. Ho Wu Chen had dreamed to hatch a super race to inherit the world from those simple ordinary men who would have died in the tens of millions, under the forward-looking Ho Plan, to make gracious-living room for the chosen people of Genesis District Five. It seemed prophetic to all of us that our number matched that of the wicked district of Dr. Ho. Certainly our salvation came through some higher power than our own, or than that of any state, or any society of the visionary tomorrow, no matter how great that society, or how overwhelmingly democratic that state. If we five believed in God—and there were no longer any protesting atheists in the cabin of the Shikolin Skak— then we must believe that He had selected us to some higher purpose than merely to survive. It was in this spirit that we decided to record this history of Okatrai. My choice as narrator was dictated by my more general viewpoint and less personal connection with the hives or the vested authorities of

Okatrai. Moreover, as the only student for politics among our number, and an agent for the division of propaganda as well, it was believed the Suntar purview, or version, of our nightmare experiences might be the more precise and comprehensive. It was not foreseen in the thankful moment of the taking of this vote of confidence in myself that any press of time was a factor. The preparation of this company journal, these "Suntar Papers," as tough-thinking Lev Eshman promptly, and with good-natured cynicism, dubbed them, would be a project of calm recall undertaken after our present flight to freedom was safely concluded. Accordingly, we turned our attentions to agreement on course and destination, a decision in which General Ket was at last able to make a personal and professional contribution. Our ship, the Shikolin Skak, he now reminded us, was in fact his ship. Ivanya had been his personal pilot on loan with him to District Five, and the craft was outfitted in more than a routine manner as befitted the flag vehicle of one of Ket's rank. It carried every modern instrumentation, both aerial and organizational. In Ket's office behind the bulkhead which separated passenger section and what would commonly be cargo hold, were navigational charts of both hemispheres, both poles, all prevailing jet streams, commercial strato lines, simply everything. To his obvious delight, fat Ket was able to route us swiftly and with precision toward that landing we now quickly agreed was the indicated choice. When we took the vote and I counted the ballots and spoke the winning name, it was America. There was discussion and dissension naturally. But in the main there was sober and thankful agreement that with all its faults, America had somehow lived on as the ultimate refuge for those who believed in the individual human being's inborn right to be an individual human being—a free man. Ket gave us a course bearing upon Wrangel Island, Point Barrow and the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and the Canadian Klondike. Striking the North American land-mass in the vicinity of the headwaters of the Yukon River, we would turn southward for British Columbia and, thence, coasting Oregon, Washington and California, descend at Los Angeles' International Airspace Port. Upon Ket's charts and in the breasts of each of us it loomed as a beautiful and swift voyage. The Shikolin Skak cruised at its optimum unstrained fifteen hundred miles per hour. Her flight was steady, the air of millpond quality, no turbulence, no headwinds, nothing whatever to disturb ship or passengers. In the aft cabin Ket, Kano and Lev Eshman dozed in the tranquil half-slumber of the exultant, the exhausted and the victory-worn. I sat with Chana in the pilot's compartment, luxuriating in the exotic profile of the Afro girl's slim figure and planes of feature to rival those of Nefertiti. Wrangel Island fell astern. We made landfall at Point Barrow, Alaska, sailed on in smooth air out over the Beaufort Sea for our last south-turning flight-leg. At first, of course, there had been nothing within the glistening walls of that snug cabin but the enormity of our joyful exhilaration to be free of the horror that had been Okatrai. But now, as our comrades dozed behind us, Chana and I touched hand and eye and heart there in the swift-winging Skak, needing no other pledge. Neither she nor I were talkers. We simply knew, as both had known from that first moment at the opened door of the headquarters building in Novo Tobirsk, that we were mated. When she had swung wide that forbidding panel to fix me with the wild sweep of those strange lavender eyes, and to mutter in that husky voice, "You are welcome, Yuri Suntar," the shaft had been notched and let fly. When she had then added, "Come, comrade, it is cold out there; you are letting the wolf in," and had said it in my own Buryat Mongol dialect, well, the arrow had not only been winged but embedded forever. The wonder was how my ponyherd's homeliness had stricken her likewise. In my recall I saw again her sidelong smile, heard once more the excitement of her low words, "Well! It

would seem I did let in a wolf; even if but a very small one!" And, remembering, I aroused, laughed softly aloud and happily, and reached to take again her slim warm hand in mine. But our fingers never closed together. In the instant of their touching, the engine of the Shikolin Skak broke the rhythm of its firing pulse. Chana's hands went to the controls, her eyes to the fateful gauges of the instrument panel. The craft lost airspeed, fell off to the right, levelled again after a very bad moment, but moving now only at half-throttle, and unevenly. "Eh?" said fat Ket, coming awake behind us. "What is it? Turbulence, comrade pilot?" The comrade pilot shook her close-cropped shapely head. The curving lips compressed to straight lines. "We're going down," she said. "Something has happened to our fuel."

FORTY-FOUR There was aboard the Shikolin Skak, among Ket's personal prerogatives of equipment, a machine known as the transograph. This instrument, spoken into, transcribed the human voice and delivered its words in a printed, sheathed manuscript. This machine was now the medium of fate. I began to speak into it, as Chana fought the Shikolin Skak to hold it in the air for every mile of southward running which a merciful God might now provide. Our airspeed was reduced to a limping two hundred miles per hour, barely enough to make it in off the Beaufort Sea, to the Arctic beaches of North America. Adding to our dilemma, Ket announced that the craft's instrumentation was not functioning properly and that his navigational charts did not match his readings. In a word, he had no least idea whether we were heading in upon American or Canadian territory or where, even, we were in the Beaufort Sea. Chana flew on, navigating by that instinct of the pilot which cannot be usurped. Whatever of takeoff damage had caused the belated failure of our fuel supply and instrumental reliability—we all felt it to have been the result of the stungun hammering by the larvanoids upon takeoff— that same force of evil fortune had not impaired the spirit nor diminished the desperate skill of our comrade pilot. She held the wounded aircraft above the earth's uprushing surface not for one but for over three hours. We made landfall and several hundred miles farther into the interior of the continent of North America before we knew the end was waiting only so far beneath our staggering flight as the dark pine trees now beginning to fringe the desolate tundras over which we descended so closely we could see the smoke of the groundsnow whipping past our pyrovex viewports. And in all of the time, or all of it that courage and control of nerve would permit, I spoke into the transograph knowing that its printed record would be all that might survive the crash of the Shikolin Skak. For the sake of those who will follow us in time let it be stated that the story contained in the pages of this voiceprint transcription, whenever and wherever it may be found, is the full story; and that it was completed only as Chana Maringa turned to me and said quietly, "We're going in, Yuri. Pray with me." I nodded, bracing myself. "Uhuru, Chana," I said. The lavender eyes searched mine for the last time. The soft lips curved into the final smile. We knew it then and we knew it forever. We were free.

"Uhuru, Mongol," she whispered. And the Skak was into the trees and I knew this was the moment beyond which waited only that stillness lit by strange lights and tolled by mute sounds of darkness, and for a space of time unknown.

The End