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effect neither will any mutterings about some great unnameable terror. You are not going to scare me that
way. In fact you are not going to scare me at all, not in the way you seem to want."
"I think I can. I think I know what a man like you is truly afraid of."
"What?"
"Perhaps I can do it by saying to you only one word." Andreas clapped his hands together playfully.
Schoenberg waited.
"The one word is his name."
"Thorun. I know that."
"No. Thorun is a toy. My god is real."
"Well, then. Utter this terrible name." Schoenberg lifted his eyebrows in almost jaunty inquiry.
Andreas whispered the three syllables.
It took Schoenberg a little while to grasp it. At first he was merely puzzled. "Berserker,' he repeated,
leaning back in his chair, his face a blank.
Andreas waited, confidently, for his god had never failed him yet.
Schoenberg said: "You mean& ahhh. I think I begin to see. You mean one has really been here for five
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hundred years, and you-serve it?"
"I am going shortly to offer to the god of Death a special sacrifice, consisting of some people we no
longer need. I can show you. You will be convinced."
"Yes, I believe you can show me. I believe you. Well. This puts a different face on things, all right, but
not in the way you intended. If I wouldn't help you in a local war, I'm not going to help you in a mass
extermination."
"Schoenberg, when we have done with this planet what we will, when it is moribund, my god assures me
that the ship's drive can be restored sufficiently to take it out into space again and after a voyage of many
years to reach another star whose planets also are polluted by the foul scum of life. I and a few others,
members of my Inner Circle, will make this voyage, continuing to bear the burden of hideous life on our
own bodies that we may free many others of it on other worlds. There are emergency recycling systems
on your ship that will nourish us adequately for years.
"The voyage, as I have said, will be many years in duration. Unless you agree to cooperate with me from
this moment on you will be brought with us as a prisoner. You will not die. There are ways of preventing
suicide, my master assures me, things he can do to your brain when he has time to work on it.
"You will be useful on the voyage, for we will have need of a servant. You will not be tortured-I mean,
not much at any one time. I will see to it that your sufferings never become sharp enough to set one day
of your existence apart from another. I may die before the voyage is over, but some of my associates are
young men and they will follow my orders faithfully. You Earthmen are very long-lived, I understand. I
suppose you will-what did the old Earthmen call it?-go mad. No one will ever admire your exploits.
There will be none to admire. But I suppose you might continue to exist to an age of five hundred years."
Schoenberg had not moved. Now a muscle twitched in his right cheek. His head had bowed a very little,
his shoulders were a little lower than before.
Andreas said: "I would much prefer to see you make a sporting finish, myself. Go out with a noble
gesture. If you cooperate in my plans, a different future for you might be arranged. You will only be
helping us to do what we are going to do anyway.
"If you cooperate, I will give you"-Andreas held up a hand, thumb and forefinger barely separated-"just
alittle chance, at the very end. You will not win, but you will die nobly in the attempt."
"What kind of chance?" Schoenberg's voice was low and desperate now. He blinked repeatedly.
"Give you a sword, let you try to hack your way past one of my fighting men, to get to the berserker and
cut it into bits. Its cabling would be quite vulnerable to such an attack."
"You wouldn't really do that! It is your god."
Andreas waited calmly.
"How do I know that you would really do that?" The words burst out as if involuntarily.
"You know now what I will do if you do not cooperate."
The silence in the little room stretched on and on.
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Only three men, not counting a slave or two, now remained on their feet under the pleasant trees of the
gods' otherwise deserted park. Farley and Thomas stood facing each other, their eyes meeting like those
of two strangers encountering each other by chance in a wilderness both had thought uninhabited. In the
background the priest was giving orders to the slaves; there was the chunk of a shovel starting a new
grave.
Farley looked down at what lay on the ground. Jud had not smiled at his wound and gone off on a blithe
stroll among the trees. Kelsumba was not laughing on his way to an eternal feast with gods. Farley did
not care to stay and watch them rolled into a little pit. Feeling a slow emergence from his sensation of
invulnerability, he turned and started on the uphill road once more.
Thomas the Grabber, still wiping at his spear, came along silently and companionably. They left the priest
behind. Here the pavement of the road was very smooth and well maintained, and it was neatly bordered
with stones in a pattern that put Farley in mind of certain formal walks on his father's large estate.
Now, with what seemed to Farley stunning ordinariness, they were coming through the last trees of the
forest and around the road's last curve. Vistas opened, and gardens and orchards were visible in the
distance to either side. Ahead, the road ran straight across thirty or forty meters of well-tended lawn, and
then it entered the citadel-city of the gods. The gate by which it entered, of massive timbers banded with
wrought metal, was tightly closed just now. The high wall of the city was a blinding white in the sun, and
Farley was now close enough to see how huge and heavy its stones were. He wondered how they had
been stained or painted to make them look like bone.
But nothing happened inside him when he beheld their goal, the place where Thorun dwelled.
Immortality was draining from him rapidly.
"Thomas," he said, slowing to a halt. "The whole thing is too-ordinary."
"How's that?" asked Thomas, amiably, stopping at his side.
Farley paused. How to explain his disappointment? He could not understand it well himself. He said
what came to his tongue, which was only: "There were sixty-four of us, and now there are only two."
"But how else could it have worked out?" Thomas asked reasonably.
A few weeds grew through the rocks beside Thorun's gateway. Lumps of the dried dung of some pack
animal lay at the roadside. Farley threw back his head and closed his eyes. He groaned.
"What is it, friend?"
"Thomas, Thomas. What do you see here, what do you feel? Suddenly I am having doubts." He looked
at his companion for help.
Thomas shook his head. "Oh my friend, there is no doubt at all about our future. You and I are going to
fight, and then only one of us is going living through that gate."
There was the gate, tough ordinary wood, bound with bands of wrought metal, its lower parts showing a
little superficial wear from the brushing passages of countless men and women, slaves and animals.
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Behind such a gate there could be nothing but more of the same world in which Farley now stood, in
which he had lived all his life. And if he reached the gate of the Temple inside, would it be any different?
The priest Yelgir, whom they had left behind, came on now to pass them, giving Farley an uneasy smile
as he did so. Evidently some unseen watcher within the walls noted the priest's approach, for now the
gate was opened slightly from within. Another priest stuck out his head and sized up Farley and Thomas
with an impersonal look. "Is either of them wounded?" he asked Yelgir.
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