xml:lang="und">paraine at Silenus? You can get a good price for
paraine from Medical Center, but you can get six times the price from the drug ring on Silenus. Yeah, Ts’ss told me. He’s been on Silenus.”
“Oh, shut up,” Danvers said.
Hilton tilted back his head to stare through the dome at the vast darkness above. “Even if you’re losing a fight, it’s better to fight clean,” he said. “Know where it’d end?”
Danvers looked up, too, and apparently saw something in the void that he didn’t like.
“How can you buck Transmat?” he demanded. “You’ve got to make a profit somehow.”
“There’s an easy, dirty way, and there’s a clean, hard way. The old lady had a fine record.”
“You’re not a deep-space man. You never were. Beat it! I’ve got to get a crew together!”
“Listen—” Hilton said. He paused. “Ah, the devil with you. I’m through.”
He turned and walked away through the long steel corridor.
Ts’ss and Saxon were drinking highballs at the Quarter Moon. Through the windows they could see the covered way that led to the Refitting Station, and beyond it the crags of a crater-edge, with the star-shot darkness hanging like a backdrop. Saxon looked at his watch.
“He isn’t coming,” Ts’ss said.
The Transmat man moved his shoulders impatiently. “No. You’re wrong. Of course, I can understand your wanting to stay with La Cucaracha.”
“Yes, I’m old. That’s one reason.”
“But Hilton’s young, and he’s smart. He’s got a big future ahead of him. That guff about sticking to an ideal—well, maybe Captain Danvers is that sort of man, but Hilton isn’t. He isn’t in love with hyper-ships.”
Ts’ss turned his goblet slowly in his curious fingers. “You are wrong about one thing, Saxon. I’m not shipping on La Cucaracha.”
Saxon stared. “But I thought—why not?”
“I will die within a thousand Earth hours,” Ts’ss said softly. “When that time comes, I shall go down into the Selenite caverns. Not many know they exist, and only a few of us know the secret caves, the holy places of our race. But I know. I shall go there to die, Saxon. Every man has one thing that is strongest—and so it is with me. I must die on my own world. As for Captain Danvers, he follows his cause, as our Chyra Emperor did, and as your King Arthur did. Men like Danvers made hyper-ships great. Now the cause is dead, but the type of men who made it great once can’t change their allegiance. If they could, they would never have spanned the Galaxy with their ships. So Danvers will stay with La Cucaracha. And Hilton—”
“He’s not a fanatic! He won’t stay. Why should he?”
“In our legends Chyra Emperor was ruined, and his Empire broken,” Ts’ss said. “But he fought on. There was one who fought on with him, though he did not believe in Chyra’s cause. A Selenite named Jailyra. Wasn’t there—in your legends—a Sir Lancelot? He didn’t believe in Arthur’s cause either, but he was Arthur’s friend. So he stayed. Yes, Saxon, there are the fanatics who fight for what they believe—but there are also the others, who do not believe, and who fight in the name of a lesser cause. Something called friendship.”
Saxon laughed and pointed out the window. “You’re wrong, Ts’ss,” he said triumphantly. “Hilton’s no fool. For here he comes.”
Hilton’s tall form was visible moving quickly along the way. He passed the window and vanished. Saxon turned to the door.
There was a pause.
“Or, perhaps, it isn’t a lesser cause,” Ts’ss said. “For the Selenite Empire passed, and Arthur’s court passed, and the hyper-ships are passing. Always the Big Night takes them, in the end. But this has gone on since the beginning—”
“What?”
This time Ts’ss pointed.
Saxon leaned forward to look. Through the angle of the window he could see Hilton, standing motionless on the ramp. Passersby streamed about him unnoticed. He was jostled, and he did not know it. Hilton was thinking.
They saw the look of deep uncertainty on his face. They saw his face suddenly clear. Hilton grinned wryly to himself. He had made up his mind. He turned and went rapidly back the way he had come.
Saxon stared after the broad, retreating back, going the way it had come, toward the Refitting Station where Danvers and La Cucaracha waited. Hilton—going back where he had come from, back to what he had never really left.
“The crazy fool!” Saxon said. “He can’t be doing this! Nobody turns down jobs with Transmat!”
Ts’ss gave him a wise, impassive glance. “You believe that,” he said. “Transmat means much to you. Transmat needs men like you, to make it great—to keep it growing. You’re a lucky man, Saxon. You’re riding with the tide. A hundred years from now—two hundred—and you might be standing in Hilton’s shoes. Then you’d understand.”
Saxon blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Transmat is growing now,” Ts’ss said gently. “It will be very great—thanks to men like you. But for Transmat too, there will come an end.”
He shrugged, looking out beyond the crater’s rim with his inhuman, faceted eyes, at the glittering points of light which, for a little while, seemed to keep the Big Night at bay.
Dream’s End
The sanitarium was never quiet. Even when night brought comparative stillness, there was an anticipatory tension in the air—for cyclic mental disorders are as inevitable, though not as regular, as the swing of a merry-go-round.
Earlier that evening Gregson, in Ward 13, had moved into the downswing of his manic-depressive curve, and there had been trouble. Before the orderlies could buckle him into a restraining jacket, he had managed to break the arm of a “frozen” catatonic patient, who had made no sound even as the bone snapped.
Under apomorphine, Gregson subsided. After a few days he would be at the bottom of his psychic curve, dumb, motionless, and disinterested. Nothing would be able to rouse him then, for a while.
Dr. Robert Bruno, Chief of Staff, waited till the nurse had gone out with the no longer sterile hypodermic.
