the world's -edge were more beautiful to him than the settled places he had seen on his flight.
After the open simplicity of the Foke, ironwrought human cities seemed oppressive-and after the bold glassy architecture of Rhene and the gravityfree jumpships and flyers of the zotl, human science seemed puny.
What did grip Carl's attention was the revelation that this earth was not the earth he had come from. Finding out where he had arrived was the reason he had gone to the university. Its computer was patched into WEB, the World Educational Board, and the imp had absorbed its encyclopedic data.
At Carl's leisure in no-time, he learned about earthtwo.
History was skewed, but only in recent times. World War Two never happened. World War One was so terrible with air torpedoes of nerve gas and rocket-launched germ bombs that the Twenties were putrid with global plague. The world population was halved.
Political boundaries collapsed. What was left of the Bolshevik Revolution and the League of Nations unified in the early Thirties.
Ideology was abandoned, and medical and agricultural technology became the necessary focus of civilization. Power brokers still ran the world, but the disruption of nationalism and the emergence of a planetary identity initiated a peaceful and creative era in human history.
Earthtwo was smaller in population by over a billion, but it was larger in extent. The moon had been colonized for mining and research purposes since the Fifties. Two manufacturing centers in cislunar orbit had been producing a third of the earth's steel from lunar rock since the late Sixties. And now in the Eighties, the planet was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of famine and the fiftieth anniversary of the World Union.
Problems were no longer political but class-based.
Robots were replacing the working class and computers the managers. The greatest problem facing the Union was how to handle the riots of the many who wanted more than the standard provisions they were allotted.
The struggle for money and power was the same as on the world Carl knew, but the context was safer. Without nuclear weapons and international boundaries, the planet was a more secure place, and Carl anguished in his brief spells out of no-time that he had poisoned the earth with zotl.
In no time, he monitored the aliens, feeling their sinewed fusion with their hosts and hearing the clicks and whistles of their thoughts. Work on their lynk was going well. No one in the community had yet suspected the zotl's existence, and there wasn't the slightest alarm among the residents of Ridgefield.
Most of the possessed citizens' relatives and friends were pleased with the changes they detected in their loved ones, a few were exuberant, and none thought the worse for the cordial behavior these people displayed. The zotl had to be liked by their prey until the lynk was done.
Carl waited, dreamstrung in no-time. Question was asleep. He did not question. He did not think. The drumbeat of his life lolled him peacefully until he felt that the zotl had completed their work.
That instant, his armor surged, and his eyes jumped open to see talons of icebergs clawing far below him. Dawn had come to the south. The horizon was rubyrimmed with the seasonal change.
Autumn leaves the colors of firecrackers whirled through the streets of Ridgefield. Evening's pumpkin light glimmered over the town, and the streetlamps mixed hazily. Gareth Brewster was one of the last to leave the bank. He waved to another manager still at
her calculator and joked about late hours with the security guard at the door.
A silvery abalone Might flashed through the plateglass windows. The lock on the revolving door snarled a spark, and the door whirled with a cold fire. The figure of a man garbed in light stepped into the bank's marble foyer.
He held up a gold rod circuited with black lines, and with a loud pop Brewster erupted into sparkling silverblue flames. He was kicked backward by the force of the blow, and his flame-jetting body careened over the glossy floor and hit the tellers' wall with a splash of fire.
The manager, who had seen this from her desk, screamed, and the security guard crouched with fear at the appalling sight of Gareth's blackened body hived with wormy energy.
When the guard reacted, spinning about, his pistol drawn, the figure of blinding abalone light was gone.
The light lancer armor had done the killing. Carl moved with it, knowing the fire-gusting body had been zotl- infected-possessed because of his return-but not feeling that knowledge. Nothing reached him at a feeling level. Not until after he arrived at the toolshed on the backlot of Brewster's land where the lynk was being built.
The remaining two zotl were there with the females. One had already been sent back to Galgul through the lynk, a chrome parabola enclosing a crystal light iridescing with movement. After the female had crossed, the light went out.
An explosion shook the air, and Carl came through the wall.
A side of the shed collapsed, bruising the night with the glaring hues of the lynk's frame.
A woman with gray bobbed hair and black marmoset eyes stood before him, shaken with fear. She was zotl, Carl knew. The other zotl, a bald, jowled man in a T-shirt was loading a female onto the wood ramp sloping to the lynk.
'Rimstalker!' the woman awed.
Carl willed himself to finish these two and be done, but the armor did not respond.
'Rimstalker, we are zotl.' The old woman stepped closer.
'We are not here to fight. Don't provoke us.'
While she spoke, the man edged toward the workbench at the side of the lynk. He jumped, snatched an object off the bench, and rolled toward the lynk in a blur of inhuman speed. The crystalline light jumped brightly inside the lynk.
The armor, which Carl had been urging with all his mental powers to react, moved suddenly. A flare of energy squashed the man and a second burst kicked the woman into a blazing husk.
