Part 2

They hit the Break a thousand light-years from Van Maanen's star. Travis could see it through the thick, curved window: an oval of darkness somehow shades deeper than the black of space. The pointed prow of the spacer steadied, then sped on. The slit grew larger.

"Pray Grock that Rudra is amusing himself with some new form of life," Nuala whispered, white hand gripping the lever of the speed control. "If he suspects we're entering his little world, he'll scatter our remains across the cluster."

Travis prowled restlessly around the small room. He felt useless beside Nuala. He glanced at the dials and levers she had improved, at the racked disintegrators that the girl, with a hellish cunning, had out-moded by making them into larger replicas of the pencil-guns. His hard palms slid down his leather jacket, restless, eager to come to grips with something.

The Break was on them, and they were in it. Darkness shrouded the ship, but the rockets thundered through the insulation-sheets. Travis upped the lights with a flip of his hand. Even at full brilliance, he saw Nuala through a pale haze.

"The Break is a barrier that Rudra threw up around his worlds after he smashed Flormaseron. He has three planets all to himself. One is his laboratory, one his armory, one his palace. We'd have no chance at all by attacking the first two. Only on his palace-planet--where he retires to his kinds of pleasure--can we surprise him."

The darkness went away and they were back in space again. Far ahead of them a star glittered with blue shimmerings. Faint and distant from the star, tiny gray balls in space, were three planets.

Nuala touched a stud on the steel wall. "A force-sheath," she smiled. "We'd never get close enough to the planet to land if we didn't have it." A whiteness swept up before the windows, hiding the star and the three planets. Nuala moved forward, past Travis. With a touch of her finger, she slipped on the automatic pilot.

"There. Now we can do nothing else but--wait."

They did not wait long. The humming alarm of the warning buzzer drove Nuala to the controls. With speeding hands, she upped the force sheath stud, depressed the landing lever. Travis was at her side, staring down at rolling grasslands, at the distant peak of a snow-topped mountain. He muttered, "It looks like Earth!"

The space-ship rode on its belly across the grass. Travis went to the curved door and flung it open. Sweet cool air drove inside the room on the wings of a breeze.

Something clanged against the metal doorlock. Hooves drummed on the grass. Another pellet dented the hull of the ship, blew into a thousand splinters. Travis got his face out of the way just in time. His hand dropped to his holster, came up with the ringed _stil_-gun that had been changed over by Nuala. Horsemen were approaching, fast.

He slammed a finger down on the trigger. Green flame blasted from the muzzle, swept like a cloud across the grasses.

The horsemen came up the side of a hill, heading for the ship. Before the green light reached them, Travis had a quick look at the heavyset, white-skinned men who kneed their mounts, long tubes at their shoulders. They looked like barbarians, but they held those queer tubes in their hands.

Nuala screamed, "Atholiners! Quick--jump for it!"

She was at his side, clutching at his hands. "Those little pellets--they'll eat everything they hit. Quick! By Grock ... be quick!"

Travis had a confused glimpse of her flashing eyes, of a gaping hole rapidly spreading along the smooth, metallic side of the ship. His legs tensed, and he was jumping. Ahead of him the green light was bathing the horsemen in its verdant flame. A man screamed. The scream gurgled, died abruptly.

He landed and rolled. He came to his feet, _stil_-gun in hand. The horsemen were just particles of lazily floating dust. Travis turned to his ship, saw it eaten before his eyes, as though an invisible beast were champing on it, taking huge mouthfuls.

Then the ship was gone, and he and Nuala stood alone on the grassy knoll.

"Some surprise party," he said, and laughed harshly. "We have one gun--which doesn't mean a thing, if Rudra is anything like you think he is."

"Rudra? Yes, we must think of him. He may or may not know we are here." She looked about at the windswept knoll, at the gnarled pine trees standing straight and tall, bleak and stern. She glanced away, toward a tier of flattish rocks. "Sometimes his horsemen take care of--intruders. Sometimes he lets visitors--wander. Never has he let them escape him for very long."

Something of the menace of the man beat at Travis, as though a cold wind moaned above the pines and blew past his ear with mocking words. _Rudra will get you if you don't watch out. Rudra has never let a visitor escape him for very long._

He put his hands on his _stil_-gun and stroked its rounded grip. "We can't just stay here. We'd starve to death in these wilds." His hand indicated the windbent oaks below, the gaunt pines, the rolling grasslands that lifted toward distant hills.

Nuala brooded at him. Her red mouth quirked, almost angrily. She snapped, "I've been thinking! We still can surprise him if we could get into Kovokod, the main city."

"Why not go disguised as some of his people?" Travis wondered. He grinned, "You could be my wife--"

Nuala sniffed her contempt. She lashed at him, "I am above emotions. I am almost pure thought. Don't distract me from my planning."

Travis chuckled, "A couple of barbarians. We'd look pretty good as nomads, wouldn't we? Well, what do you say? What's to stop us?"

Nuala snapped, "Our features! They are too delicate, too finely formed. Rudra hastened the evolution of his people, speeded up their ascent in time. They are still brutish, thick of nose, of lip."

"If we had some of the celluvalin. I could do a pretty fancy job on our faces. I've moulded life forms in clay often enough for Solar Museum."

Nuala eyed him wonderingly. "You are a young race, but you Earth-things do come up with some good ideas. There will be medical centers on Rudraline. If we can find one, there will be celluvalin there."

They set out under the pines, walking for the windbent oaks, side by side.

* * * * *

For three days they moved southward. Here and there were farms, sprawled across the land. Travis walked with his eyes on them, studying the architecture, the terrain. Already, he told himself, he could do a few panoramic windows for Solar--if he ever got out of this thing alive.

Once Nuala caught him by the wrist, dragged him back to the shelter of a dwarf bush. She whispered, "A caravan. The Rudraldians are taking their produce to market at Kovokod!"

Travis watched, fascinated. The horsemen in plain leather harness rode with the ease of Cossacks in the saddle, far ahead of the slower-footed pack-animals, giant sloth-like creatures in rich trappings. They bore ornate palanquins on their backs, or pulled huge wagons by gilded reins. In the middle of the caravan rode the nobles, draped in cloth-of-gold, glittering with jewels.

Nuala shook his shoulder. She hissed. "We can't waste time. Quickly, now. They are almost past--"

They scrambled unseen onto a wagon....

They found a medical station in the dawn of the fourth day. There was a nurse inside, asleep at the table. Nuala crossed the room with long strides, bent over her from the rear, did something to her at the base of the skull with her fingertips. The nurse pitched forward, sprawled along the edge of the table.

Travis scooped handsful of _celluvalin_ from an earthern jar and went to work on his face before a mirror. With steady fingers he altered his nose, broadened and widened it, gave it a snoutish look. He modeled his mouth to brutish slackness. He lowered his forehead. When he was through he was a step above the ape.

Nuala was watching him with wide eyes. She whispered, "I do not like you--like that."

He stood over her, toweling his hands. He said, "I feel different, too. Almost like a--beast."

She was near him, blue eyes uplifted, red mouth quivering. He put his hands on her arms, lifted her against him. He bent and kissed her. For a single instant she yielded to him and her mouth was a honeyed fire. Then she thrust him away, stood panting. Her anger crackled in her eyes, in the rise of her pointed breasts.

"You are a beast! You--"

Travis chuckled, "I just had to do it, honey. I wanted to see what it was like."

He scooped _celluvalin_ in a hand and slapped it down on her cheek. He worked swiftly, moulding and shaping the cell-jelly before it hardened and adhered to her skin. By the time he was finished, her rage was spent. He stepped back, eyed her calculatingly. He nodded. "You look just like the nurse, now. Not a bad job, if I do ring my own alarm-bell."

Nuala lifted the mirror and looked into it for a long moment. Once she lifted her eyes and stared enigmatically at Travis. Then she casually lifted a hand and undid the fastenings of her translucent gown. Calmly she stepped from it, ignoring Travis's sudden, "Hey!"

She lifted the white uniform from the prostrate nurse. Deftly she hooked it about her and stood back. "Now the resemblance is complete. I will be a nurse. You--my amorous Earth-thing--will be my patient. A mental deficient. You look the part perfectly."

Travis went, "Ouch!" and followed her out into the sunlight.

Toward noon they were overtaken on the broad highway by an advance guard of horsemen for another caravan. One of the horsemen shouted at them. Nuala screamed back. Not understanding their language--Nuala had always spoken spaceenglish to him--he said, "What'd they want to know?"

"If my _babuvol_ was too poor to buy me a horse," she snapped.

"_Babuvol?_"

"Husband to you, Mate. I told them you weren't my husband." She added sweetly, "I said you were crazy, that you suffered from the delusion of having glass toes, among other things."

Travis scowled at her as she swung along blithely. He thought of a remark, but ignored it.

The caravan crept up to them, engulfed them. Travis stared rudely at the sleek horses, at the handsomely wrought designs on saddle and stirrup. He eyed the monstrous pack-sloths carefully, making sure that he was nowhere near the flat, gigantic paws when they tromped down on the road. He caught sudden glimpses of foodstuffs, of silver jars, of priceless tapestries.

Once a nobleman reined in his mount and spoke to them. Nuala did not raise her eyes but she murmured, "He is a feeble one, lordship. There is a sickness in his mind. If you could hear him speak--"

She nudged Travis with an elbow, hissed into his ear, "Say something for the man, idiot!"

Travis babbled, "Intry-mintry, look so sly--spaceman, spaceman, in your eye!" from the words of a song currently popular on Mars.

The nobleman made a pitying sound with his lips, ignoring Travis's glare. He tossed a ring to Nuala. "The protection of the Lord Railan, nurse."

Nuala hid the ring in a pocket. Eyes straight ahead, she said to Travis, "It was a happy thought, your passing as a lunatic. It is a part that comes easily to you."

The ring was a talisman that hired mounts, servants. The engraved seal on the circlet opened men's eyes, and when Nuala whispered suavely, "The Lord Railan will pay double ..." the charm was complete. Soon they left the caravan and went on ahead.

* * * * *

The twin towers of Kovokod were banded white and black. They dozed in the sunlight above the walled city. Outside the walls were sloped launching cradles for stratosphere fliers and spacers. Like toys, pilots and passengers moved from stationhouse to ladders, crossed back and forth. Occasionally a police flier spiralled slowly over the ramped buildings and arched levels of the city. Travis could see tri-wheeled vehicles speeding back and forth on the raised streets.

Nuala gestured and Travis saw a huge gate swarming with men and women on foot, on horse, or seated luxuriously in the tri-wheelers. "We'll mingle with the crowd. That way, and with the ring, we can get in easily enough."

Travis gawked at the throngs. Nuala spoke occasionally, and Travis knew she was calling attention to his mental state. She was mocking him, but Travis added to her words by singing ribald ditties that were famous from Earth to Centauri. He even made up one about Nuala. Only her sudden hiss and pinch brought remembrance that she could speak any tongue.

The guard at the gate eyed the ring and Nuala. He licked his lips at her words and let them through. They faded into the crowds, Nuala walking swiftly, not giving Travis a chance to stare at the straight, many-windowed buildings, the ornate balconies, the several roads that were like lattices linking the city together.

"We must get into one of those towers!" Nuala hissed. "They are Rudra's laboratories. There he houses his discoveries, the rarest weapons, the finest engines."

"Maybe the ring--?"

"Not for the towers. I know this world, from the crypt. I have spent too many years spying on Rudra."

Travis rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully. He murmured, "I wanted something to come to grips with. Maybe I can get you into the tower."

The tower entrance was like a halved egg, bulging out from the straight wall of the black-and-white structure. There was no visible means of entry. It seemed a sheer rounded oval of stone. Travis stared at it uncertainly, walking past.

"Are you sure?" he asked Nuala. "That doesn't look like a door to me!"

"What do you know of doors?" she snapped. "It opens to vibratory impulses. Walk close enough and it will open--and a blast of power will turn you into smoke."

Travis fingered his jaw. "If I walk toward it and just as the thing opens I dart aside ... it might miss me."

"A crude approach," observed Nuala, but her eyes were thoughtful.

Stung, Travis snarled, "Sometimes you accomplish more by crudeness. If the other guy isn't expecting it."

He would not have done it, if he hadn't felt so helpless and useless beside Nuala. He knew it was foolhardy, even as he ran, right hand going for the _stil_-gun. In a soberer moment he would have waited, have let her figure out the answer, as she had figured out the other answers.

His dark hair whipped in the wind that came up the street when he slid to a halt. The egg-shaped adit was lifting, disclosing black depths behind it, glittering metal, a running figure.

Nuala screamed, but Travis moved before he heard her. The _stil_-gun belched green mist into the darkness. Travis was sliding, scrambling aside.

Light--dazzling, blinding light--shot out of the glittering metal engine just before the green mist touched it. The light was hot. Crouched against the wall, face turned away from its brilliance, Travis felt the heat of it. His brow beaded with sweat. The black hairs on his forearms stank where they crisped.

Nuala went by him, crying, "Now! Now!"

Staggering, he followed her. She went into the blackness, was a pool of whiteness for an instant. He came low and fast on her heels. The closing doors scraped his leg, it was that close.

The engine that spit the light beam was gone. There was just a gaping hole in the metal floor, a bent armature pulled loose from its housing, a glob of red flesh....

Nuala was on the staircase, going up. Travis saw a Kovokodan face leer at her, saw a tube lifted. He showered the face with green mist, watched it explode, blow into powder. Then he was beside her, thrusting her back.

"I'll take the lead," he growled.

He used the _stil_-gun twice more before they reached the big chamber at the top of the tower. Facing death, taking risks, using the muscles of his space-hardened body, Travis felt the elixir of battle pound in his veins. He was a person again, not just a thing dragged along by the last woman of the Nekkalad.

Nuala went by him as he stood in the doorway. She raced to banks of buttons spread across the western wall of the room. Her fingers slammed down, played like the digits of a Venusian pianist across the complicated keyboard.

She was just in time. The floor shuddered under their feet as the tower rocked. But the floor held. And the tower stood. Nuala threw back her head, flung wild and eerie laughter at the flat ceiling.

"By Grock, I've won! I've _won_!"

She put trembling fingers to her face, clawed at it, tearing strips of flesh away. Travis opened his mouth, closed it. Bit by bit, she pulled the _celluvalin_ loose and cast it from her. She swung about, faced Travis. Once more her face was lovely, mouth warm and kissable.

"You helped me, Earth-thing. You helped me get here! I'll reward you for that!" She lifted her arms, did a girlish pirouette.

Travis growled, "What about Rudra?"

She laughed. It was like tuned glass tinkling. "Rudra himself discovered the warp-sheath. I've pulled this tower into another dimension. He can't harm us because he can't find us! Oh, Travis, my dear...."

Her hands touched his nose and mouth. Gently she removed the _celluvalin_, cleansed his cheeks until he stood tan and grim-lipped, the Clark Travis she first had seen in the pink barrier outside the calyx chamber.

"Now, Clark Travis ... you may kiss me!"

He stretched out his arms, caught her warm and soft against him, bent his mouth--

"Charming," sneered a cold voice. "Of the _kovokodans_, this I would have expected, but you two are from a higher race--"

* * * * *

He stood in the center of the room, tall and lean; his height and spareness emphasized by the black cloak he pulled about him as though against the cold. His thin lips sneered. The narrow brows above black eyes were upraised to form two living insults.

Nuala whimpered. She thrust a hand to her mouth. "Rudra!"

The dark man moved forward. Now Travis could see a circlet of tiny stars, revolving and shimmering, coruscating light, that swung like a fallen halo about his head. As the man went, so went the ever-turning stars.

"You know me? But you must, to be so familiar with my sciences. I do not know ... you. Or do I?"

The black eyes touched Travis, slid away. Travis growled low in his throat at the blank dismissal of those eyes. He was less than a slug, not given as much courtesy as a canal-minnow. Nuala was shrinking back against his chest as the eyes drove into her.

Rudra whispered, "But--_you_! You are familiar. Something from out of the past ... the dead past ... centuries ... eons ... ages ago. A woman--a queen--Nuatha of the Yellow Hair. Queen of the Nekkalad!"

"I am Nuala. Her daughter."

Rudra looked interested. Nuala went on, "Before you smashed Flormaseron, my parents and the Nekkalad scientists imprisoned me in your own crystal crypt. They fed me energy ... and the thought-waves of all living things. I know of you, Rudra, of your plans...."

The dark man laughed. "By my beginning! I am knowing the first interest I've had in a thousand million centuries. You've set yourself up against--me? Against the eternal one? The Werwile?"

Nuala moved her white fingers in a queer pattern. They seemed to blur before Travis's eyes, become faint and shadowy. Her hand disappeared. Rudra moved suddenly, swore by a long-forgotten god. He said abruptly, "You'd pull my heart into a different space-time, would you? Leave me locked forever in some blackness?"

His own hands moved, but Nuala was quicker. Her body swayed, twisted in odd manner. She disappeared. Rudra cried out. He brought his hand back to view again. There were teethmarks and blood on it. Nuala formed, laughed softly beside Travis; blood on her ruby mouth.

"Am I a fit opponent, Rudra--not-long-to-be-eternal?"

Rudra nursed his bitten hand in the black cloak. His black eyes glittered dangerously above the beaked nose, the ruddy mouth. Travis thought he looked like a cornered Saturnian vampire at that moment.

Rudra laughed. It was, surprisingly, a pleasant laugh. He bowed, and there was no mockery in it.

"You are a worthy opponent, Nuala. None that I know of could have done that to me--but you. You say you know my plans? Good! You know my thoughts, my sciences? Good again. Two equal opponents--you with that creature beside you to aid you, me with my _kovokodans_. Let us see who will turn the tide....

"I had the Lord Railan and others ease your way to me. I was--curious. Now I am glad. I will enjoy our duel, Nuala. Good--hunting!"

He was gone.

The silence was cold, as though his passing had taken a fire from the room. Nuala shivered, looked dubiously at Travis. He said tactlessly, "I thought you said you'd won."

"I--underestimated him. I'd forgotten that Rudra smashed Flormaseron, that he has all the science that ever was at his fingertips. I thought that by taking his tower into another dimension I could strike at him before he knew where we were. Strike and annihilate! Now ... I do not know."

There was doubt in the blue eyes, and the old fear. Only the fear was stronger, now. It was a curiously tangible thing, beating out and around the room, running chilled tentacles down Travis's back.

He shook himself, said savagely, "So we can't surprise him. Then let's slug it out, toe to toe. It's him or--us!"

"But he has so many sciences ..." she wailed.

"Sciences you know just as well!" Travis snapped. "And before we're over it'll be the first law of nature all over again. The survival of--the fittest!"

"If I only knew what he meant to do--"

Travis choked. He put out a hand, vised it on her arm. "The crypt! By the eternal! If you could move this tower into another dimension--move it to Flormaseron! Enter the calyx! Tap his mind! Checkmate him!"

Hope dawned in the blue eyes. Hope stilled the shudder rippling down her back. She cried, "Yes, yes. That's our chance, our one big weapon--the calyx!"

Nuala moved her hands in that queer, flowing motion. Her eyes were wide and staring. She whispered, "It is easier to move the warping controls--this way. The distances in the dimensional flows are shorter."

There was a faint dizziness as the tower reeled. Travis had an odd instant of vision, where he saw whirling clouds of elfin dust, heard the discordant music of distorted space. In mind's eye, he glimpsed the tower as it swung through a blackness striped with red traceries. There was a jar, a sudden shock--

* * * * *

A wall of the tower shone with iridescent nacre. Through the pale pearl glitter, Travis saw the chamber of the calyx, the cones and globes circling endlessly and shedding their soft light, the great sculped-out hollow of the crystal.

"Step quickly," whispered Nuala. "Step through...."

She was a blur of movement, leaping for the nacre. Travis clutched for her hand and found it warm and soft as he hit the shimmer with her. A moment of cold, then they were inside the crystal crypt. Nuala went to the crystal, lay down within it, attached wires to grips, rested her golden head against the oddly wrought headpiece that was wired to the dynamos.

Travis watched her hands lift and blur as a faint, nauseous color came seeping up through the very stones of the floor. Travis knew that some light-colors could affect people physically, but this was sickening, overpowering. Much of that color, and he would go mad. His brain reeled. His stomach writhed--

The light went away, but Nuala's hands were still invisible, as she worked the forces hidden within the captured tower. Travis knew she was hitting back at Rudra, reading his mind, searching for and finding the counter-agent, the necessary checkmate. Her eyes opened a second, looked into his. She whispered, "Watch the screen, Travis. The screen...."