misunderstood, that Bob had the best interest of Heli-
con at heart, and had only meant that her parents'
lives might be endangered, as we are all endangered,
by this continuing nomad siege. I recommended that
she agree to the secret mission, for surely (if it were
not a product of her own lively imagination) it was
merely a device to get her safely from the scene of
action before another crisis occurred. 'We value our
children most of all,' I informed her fatuously.
Now she is dead, and I deplore my hopeless naivete.
Bob sent her to Mt. Muse, to engage in physical com-
bat with the nomad champion, and of course the brute
killed her. The nomads are celebrating; we can over-
hear their foul carousing. 'Var the Stick!' they cry—
but I don't believe they realize that their precious
barbarian champion, shielded from their view on the
flattop mesa a dozen miles south of here—was pitted
against an eight year old girl.
Confound the promise of secrecy I made! I have
told Sosa what Soli told me. I had to, for Sosa is more
the mother of that dear girl than her nomad dam
could ever have been. Sosa would have learned of it
soon enough, less sympathetically. I am sure she will
relay it to Sol, and I do not speculate what will develop
now. Were I a warrior-type in such a situation I am
sure I would not be gentle. But I am only a futile
old man.
I am taking poison.
There was a pause.
"Var the Stick—he was the nomad champion? He killed
Sol's child?"
"So it would appear. If you were Sol—"
"I am a warrior-type! I would have put Var's head on
a spike in the forest for all to see. And Bob's. And all
others responsible. And—"
Dr. Jones steepled his hands in a way he had.
"And . . . ?" -
"And accomplished nothing," Neq said slowly. "Ven-
geance is not the answer. It is only vengeance. Only more
sorrow."
Dr. Jones nodded. "I believe you are in a position to
comprehend Sol's motives, then and later. He was a
thorough nomad, despite his residence in Helicon for
those years. Would he have ignited the incendiary stores
there?"
• "I don't know about that," Neq said, not understanding
one of the words. "But I think there was gasoline down
there. And other stuff that would burn. I think he fired it
all. In the name of vengeance. Those bodies were
scorched!" And more than scorched.
"And later—would he have returned?"
"To view the destruction, after he knew it had accom-
plished nothing? No, he would not return. . . ."
"Yes. Yet if we were to rebuild Helicon, how could we
be certain that such a thing would not happen again?"
"I do not know," Neq said honestly.
"Go and find out," Dr. Jones said.
"But you agreed to help if I brought you these people!"
"And we shall. But of what use is it to rebuild Helicon
if it remains liable to destruction by the forces that
brought it down before? The human forces."
Neq had no answer for that.
"Forget the remaining names on the list," Dr. Jones
said kindly. "The nucleus is almost sufficient now. Look
instead for Sol and Sosa and Var, should he somehow
have survived Sol's quest for vengeance. Learn whether
Sos the Weaponless was more directly involved; perhaps
his disappearance is relevant. Ascertain the truth—and
suggest how we may prevent any conceivable recurrence.
Only then will we be assured that our endeavor is secure."
CHAPTER TWELVE
The six year old spoor of both Var the Stick and Sosa had
to begin at Helicon. The one had been with the nomads,
the other with the underworld. Both had vanished in that
but then his quest for information was dead, too. Sol and
the Weaponless had much better chances of survival—
but neither would have been party to the heart of Heli-
con's failure: the inner workings of Bob's mind. For had
Bob not sent an innocent child to her death, both he and
Helicon might have weathered the siege. The underworld
defenses were certainly formidable enough. Why had Bob,
by all accounts a capable leader, erred so brutally and
calamitously? Would the next leader err the same way?
There was the key.
Helicon was as he had left it: tight and clean. He re-
explored its several exits, pondering whether a woman
might have used one to escape. Certainly she might! To
this extent Sola's intuition must be correct: Sosa, with
forewarning of Sol's intent, was the most likely of all the
underworlders to have escaped cleanly. Sol could have
been trapped in his own conflagration—and the Weapon-
less, outside, could well have entered Helicon in a desperate
attempt to find Sosa . . . and failed, and died.
He scouted the exterior again, and made a^trek to Mt.
Muse, to see where a warrior might have gone after slay-
ing a child. But he could not climb to the mesa—and
anyway, Var had returned to the nomad camp to be feted
for his barbarism. There was no answer there. Tyi himself
had seen Var after the "combat of champions" but had
only known that Var disappeared shortly thereafter, and
then the Weaponless. Neither had given any advance hint
of what was to happen. There had been no evidence of
foul play.
There were outlaw tribesmen w this region. Some Neq
and Dick had encountered before; no one had known of
Var or Sosa. Of course there was considerable turnover
here, for the outlaws warred constantly with one another
in this land of no honor, and few lived long.
The locals were not eager to answer more questions.
Neq's uncovered sword convinced them. Still he learned
nothing.
He moved out, making great circles around Helicon,
searching out men and tribes he had not met before.
Many balked—but as the blood dripped from his sword,
his questions were answered. Negatively. Only six years
had passed, but many of these men did not know what
he meant by "Helicon."
Months passed, his circles widened, and he accom-
plished nothing. But he would not stop. Instead he became
more devious in his questioning. "Six years ago, perhaps
seven—did a stranger pass through your territory? A lone
sticker? A small woman? Someone masked or hidden or
mysteriously wounded?"
And finally he got a meaningful response, from an old
warrior of the defunct empire, who had drifted to this
region before the siege and remained, retired. "I saw a
stranger then—a pale, slender man who spoke no word."
This did not sound like Var the Stick, who was a large,
grotesquely mottled youth. "What was his weapon?"
"I did not see it. But he hauled a barrow with a staff
protruding, and he reminded me of—"
"Of whom
?" Neq prodded, remembering a man who
had hauled a barrow.
"Of Sol of All Weapons. But that could not be, for Sol
went to the mountain half a dozen years before."
So he had looked for Sosa, but found Sol! But that was
almost as good, for surely they had escaped Helicon to-
gether. His long search had been rewarded . . . perhaps.
Suddenly the trail was hot. There were passes where a
man would normally travel, places where he might camp.
Neq traced Sol's course, finding many who had seen the
barrow-man pass. Some had challenged him to the circle,
for that was before the effect of Helicon's fall had been
felt in the nomad society and honor was strong, but the
man had avoided all such contacts. No one Neq met
claimed to have fought the barrow-man in the circle.
That proved they were speaking honestly. Sol had been
the greatest circle warrior of all time, except for the
artificially forged juggernaut of the Weaponless—and the
battle between the two had been so even as to be merely
chance in the decision. Sol might have lost his edge during
six years in Helicon—but not much, if he were training his
daughter regularly. Any man who brought Sol to combat
against his preference must have paid the obvious penalty.
Only those who had failed to fight him could have survived.
And why had Sol avoided encounters? Obvious, now:
because he had more important business. He was going
somewhere.
But not, it seemed, with Sosa. No one had seen her. Sol
was traveling alone. Why should that be?
Neq knew. Sol was following the man who had killed
his daughter. Var the Stick.
Vengeance.
A lone warrior would not have been remarkable. That's
why Var himself hadn't been remembered. But the barrow
—that stuck in many minds, because it was unusual.
Because it brought to mind the one warrior everyone
knew about. Now that Neq inquired about that specifically,
the long faded memories returned.
Sol had departed Helicon and traveled northwest, de-
touring around badlands and avoiding established tribes.
Why northwest? Because Var the Stick must have fled
that way.
And he had! Neq picked up the memories now—the
skin-mottled man, also no talker, deadly with the sticks
... and his boy companion.
Boy companion?
And abruptly—the Weaponless. He was on this route
too, incredibly. Was he following Var—or Sol? To protect
the first from the second? What a battle of titans, if Sol
and the Weaponless should meet again!
Yet none of them had returned. All the key figures had
vanished, and not in the Helicon conflagration. Where
had they gone?
And where had the boy come from—the boy with Var
the Stick? Had he had a little brother? After months of
finding too little, Neq had found too much!
He continued the chase doggedly. His hopes for the,
restoration of Helicon were somehow bound in with this
mystery, and he would not stop without the answer. His
cast of characters remained set: three men and a boy, not
together, traveling northwest. The riddle of Helicon's
demise ... perhaps.
But the trail faded near the northern limit of the former
crazy demesnes. Neq cast about for a month in the increas-
ingly bitter winter, but the natives knew nothing. He had
either to give up, or to leave the territory of the nomad
society, as his quarry seemed to have done.
He hesitated to go farther north. His metal extremities
were excellent for combat and simple hunting, for he had
a bow he could brace on his sword and fire lefthanded
with the pincers with fair accuracy. But against true
wilderness and snow he was weak, and he knew that guns
were more common in the northern realm. He could not
use a gun himself, and had to be extremely wary in the
presence of such a weapon.
And so he continued his futile search in the land of the
nomads long after his real hope of success was gone.
One day Tyi of Two Weapons appeared, alone. "Are
you ready for help?" Tyi inquired as if this were routine.
Neq's pride had suffered with the winter. '"I welcome
it," he said.
Tyi did not clarify the obvious: the word had reached
him of Neq's futility. "I do not wish to bargain with a
comrade of empire, but the crazy has laid his stricture on
me as on you. My help is for a price."
Dr. Jones' peculiar yet subtly forceful hand again!
"What price?"
"I will name it when the occasion arises."
Neq knew Tyi for an honest man. "Accepted."
"We travel north?"
"Yes." With Tyi along, they could manage. The search
could resume. "Sol of All Weapons. The Weaponless. Var
the Stick. A boy. All went north, none returned. Find one
of these, and we may learn why Helicon failed. Var might
have learned the truth from Soli, before he killed her;
Sol might have gotten it from Bob of Helicon, before he
killed him. The Weaponless . . . may have his notions, for
he negotiated with Bob about the combat of champions.
The boy—I don't know."
Tyi considered. "Yes. The secret lies between Bob and
Soli. Too bad neither survived. . . ." He trailed off, ponder-
ing something; but he did not amplify his thought.
Tyi had a gun, and was competent with it. Tyi had hands.
Tyi had a way with strangers that Neq lacked. The trail
reappeared.
And disappeared. They followed it to the northern
ocean, where a forbidding tunnel went under, and there
it stopped. "If they went in there," the natives opined,
"they are gone forever. The machine-demon consumes
intruders."
Tyi distrusted it for a more practical reason. "I saw
strange things come from the tunnels as the mountain
burned. Animals with tremendous eyes and mouths, that
a sword would not stop. Rats with no eyes. Some of my
men died after merely touching such creatures. Jim the
Gun said they carried radiation kill-spirits; he heard them
on his click-box. I would not enter such a place without
an army, and then I would need good reason."
Neq agreed. He had seen strange corpses in the fringe
passages beyond the bum-zone of Helicon, and many
radiation markers, and at night he had heard the scamper-
ings of things that could have been similar to those Tyi
described. Had he not had strong motivation, he would
never have completed the long chore of cleaning the
underworld rooms and passages. It would be folly to brave
this unfamiliar tunnel as anything but a last resort. Rumors
of horror were often well-founded, these days.
So they quested north, along the coast—and the trail
resumed! Two men, one grizzled and huge, the other pale
and silent. No blotch-skinned sticker; no boy.
Then Tyi spied a nomad campsite. "See—they built a
fire, here, and pitched some kind of t
ent here, with guides
around it to lead off the water from rain. The locals don't
do that; they stay in square houses."
"But this is recent. Five, six days, no more. It can not
be our quarry."
"True. But what would nomads be doing here? We
should question them."
"Question the locals. Some would have seen the nomads
pass."
Tyi nodded thoughtfully. "Strange we have heard
nothing of these before."
They questioned, the locals, and learned that two
nomads, a man and a woman, had passed through, travel-
ing south.
"South?" Neq demanded. "Where did they come from?"
The people only shrugged, not knowing or caring what
the barbarians did or which direction they went.
Sol and the Weaponless had gone north; these others
were from the north. Their trails might have crossed.
They made a rapid excursion south again, tracing the
strangers, following a course that skirted dangerously
close to posted radiation zones. A large, gruff man and a
rather pretty woman who kept to themselves and made
swift progress. Tyi would question native villagers—a vil-
lage was a kind of stationary tribe, unique to this locale—
while Neq scouted the countryside for further traces.
Neq looked up one such afternoon to discover a gro-
tesque man watching him. Huge and shaggy, bunched-
backed, with grossly gnarled hands curled about home-
made singlesticks, and mottled skin showing under his