and most of the planted mines will remain to check any advance—”
Forgetting all caution, all planning, I charged him. He turned and ran like Dondromogon’s outer winds.
But I had taken no more than half a dozen steps in pursuit when all the thunders and lightnings of the universe seemed to burst around me.
I fell, swiftly and deeply, into black nothingness.
I was able to establish which way was up, which down, and that I lay horizontally, as if floating in liquid or upon clouds. My ears hummed a trifle, and a voice spoke.
“He will be all right.”
Dr. Thorald! I opened my eyes, and they were blurred. I lifted a hand to them, and moaned despite myself.
“Were you killed, too?” I muttered.
“Killed? Not me. Nobody was killed, except that fat pig you met in the cavern. Not enough of him left to make a funeral worth while.” Thorald looked behind him. “Ahoy, Parkeson! Cross! Barak’s going to be all right.”
The other two heads of the Newcomer expedition pushed into view, and looked down upon me where I lay.
“High time,” grumbled Parkeson. “They’re yelling for him—both sides. Barak, you’ll have to drop all your weapons and take up political economy. I greatly fear you’ll have a world to run.”
“World?” I echoed stupidly. “What world?” My head cleared a bit. “Where’s Doriza?”
“The fighting’s over,” Parkeson soothed me. “Just as you forced it to be. I’m still trying to decide whether you were an epic hero or an epic idiot, there at the crossways of battle, making us all stop, or fight you! But your hunch paid off. The entire Council of Dondromogon is dead, and—”
“Doriza,” I said again.
“Somebody named Klob, a sturdy soldierly chap, is taking charge. An old sneak named Sporr tried to foment a counter-rising, but Klob disintegrated him. However, the army of Dondromogon still holds an inner defense—says it doesn’t trust us quite. Wants only you to assure it that we mean peace. Feel like getting up, Barak?”
Dr. Thorald leaned over. “You’ve engineered this yourself, Barak, or maybe you didn’t engineer it—maybe you only bulled it through. So I won’t put words in your mouth, or thoughts in your head. But tell those deluded people to start by trusting us. And you know that they can. Nobody wanted war less than I. Peacetime endeavor on Dondromogon is quite difficult and exciting enough.”
“Doriza,” I said yet again, and then, “All right, gentlemen. You won’t tell me about her. Maybe you don’t dare. But how did I survive?”
“Oh, that?” put in Captain Cross. “Don’t you know? The explosion was set off prematurely, to trap and destroy Gederr. It blew him to atoms, but you were clear of it. You had a bad tumble into the lower chamber—”
Now I sat up. “Never tell me that he bungled it that badly! Gederr was a tyrant and coward and murderer, but not a bungler!”
“He was to some extent. Is your head clear? Now we can begin to explain.”
Cross subsided, and Dr. Thorald took up the tale: “We sent a spy among them, a long time back, a spy that would pretend to be renegading from us. The spy was good, but got a rather visionary idea, like your own—that peace was better than war between us.”
“Practically treason,” opined Parkeson sagely.
“We might have held a court-martial and an execution,” went on Dr. Thorald, “but for you. Because you seemed to plan out all this Horatius-at-the-bridge coup. And just when we thought it had achieved success—we thought you were failing.”
“And up bobs our ex-spy, and sets off the explosion,” chimed in Cross. “Sets it off to destroy Gederr and save you. And that left them without a leader to order battle, and they were more than glad to talk peace.”
“What,” I growled, “has all this to do with Doriza?”
“Why,” grinned Dr. Thorald, “they’re yelling for her, too, to lead in the final peace talks. Because, you see, she was our spy, our pseudo-renegade, who set off the explosion!”
Doriza came forward to where I had sagged back on the pillows. At sight of her smile, I thought no more of strife and wounds and worries.
Half Around Pluto
Their glassite space helmets fogged, and their metal glove joints stiffened in the incredible surface cold: but the two men who could work finished their job. In the black sky glistened the little arclight of the sun, a sixteen-hundredth of the blaze that fell on Earth. Around them sulked Pluto’s crags and gullies, sheathed with the hard-frozen pallor that had been Pluto’s atmosphere, eons ago.
From the wrecked cylinder of the scout rocket they had dragged two interior girders, ready-curved at the ends. These, clamped side by side with transverse brackets and decked with bulkhead metal, managed to look like a sled.
At the rear they set a salvaged engine unit. For steering, they rigged a boom shaft to warp the runners right or left. For cargo, they piled the sled with full containers, ration boxes, the foil tent, what instruments they could detach and carry, armfuls of heat-tools, a crowbar, a hatchet, a few other items.
Moving back from the finished work, one of them stumbled against the other. Instantly the two puffy, soot-black shapes were crouched, gloved fists up, fierce in the system’s duskiest corner.
Then the moment passed. Warily, helmets turned toward each other, they went back in the half-stripped wreck.
In the still airtight control room, lighted by one bulb, their officer stirred on his bedstrip. His tunic had been pulled off, his broken left arm and collarbone set and splinted. Under a fillet of bandage, his gaunt young face looked pale, but he had his wits back.
“The appropriate question,” he said, “is ‘What happened?’ ”
The two men were removing their helmets. “Conked and crashed, sir,” said Jenks, the smaller one, uncovering a sallow, hollow-cheeked face.
Lieutenant Wofforth sat up, supporting himself on his sound arm. “How long have I been out?”
“Maybe forty hours, sir. Delirious. Corbett and me did the best we could. Take it easy, sir,” he said as
