What Lawrence had laid out on the green baize table was the vlet game.

Sam said: “Can you play this one with the grid—” And lowered an eyebrow at Bron—“or are you beyond that now?”

Bron said: “Well, I don’t know if—”

But Lawrence reached for one of the toggles in the card drawer. Across the landscape, pin-points of light picked out a squared pattern, thirty-three by thirty-three. “Bron could do with a few more gridded games I expect—” For advanced players (Lawrence had explained two weeks ago when Sam was last in) the grid was only used for the final scoring, to decide who had taken exactly what territory. In the actual play, however, elementary players found it helpful in judging those all-important 0’s. Bron had been contemplating suggesting that they omit it this game. But there it was; and the cities had been placed, the encampments had been deployed. The plastic Sea Serpent had been put, bobbing, into the sea. The Beast leered from its lair; Lawrence’s soldiers were set up along the river bank, his peasants in their fields, his royalty gathered behind the lines, his magicians in their caves.

Bron said: “Sam, why don’t you play this one. I mean I’ve had the last two weeks to practice ...”

“No,” Sam said. “No, I want to watch. I’ve forgotten half the moves since Lawrence explained them to me anyway. Go on.” He took a meditative step backward and moved around to view the board from Bron’s side.

“Bron has been fretting over a new-found friend,” Lawrence said. “That’s why he’s being so sullen.”

“That’s just it.” Bron was annoyed at having his preoccupation labeled sullenness. “She didn’t seem very friendly to me at all.” He picked up the deck and shuffled, thinking: If that black bastard stands there staring over my shoulder the whole damn game—And resolved not to look up.

The hand Bron dealt himself was good. Carefully, he arranged the cards.

Lawrence rolled the dice out over the desert to begin play, bid five-royal, melded the Juggler with the Poet, discarded the three of Jewels and moved two of his cargo vessels out of the harbor into open waters.

Bron’s own throw yielded him a double six, a diamond three, with the three-eyed visage of Yildrith showing on the icosahedron. He covered Lawrence’s meld with the seven, eight, and nine of Storms, set the tiny mirrored screen, with the grinning face of Yildrith etched on it, four spaces ahead of Lawrence’s lead cargo ship, bid seven-common to cover Lawrence’s six-royal, discarded the Page of Dawn and took Lawrence’s three of Jewels with the Ace of Flames; his own caravan began the trek upriver toward the mountain pass at the Vale of K’hiri, where, due to the presence of a green Witch, all points scored there would be doubled.

Twenty minutes into the play, the red Courier was trapped between two mirrored screens (with the horned head of Zamtyl, and the many-tongued Arkrol, reflected back and forth to infinity); the scarlet Hero offered some help but was, basically, blocked with a transparent screen. On the dice a diamond two glittered amidst black ones and fives, and Lawrence was a point away from his bid; which meant an astral battle.

As they turned their attention to the three-dimensional board which dominated higher decisions (and each of the seven markers which they played there bore the frowning face of a goddess). Bron decided it was silly to sit there fuming at Sam’s standing behind him. He turned, to make some comment—

Sam was not at his shoulder.

Bron looked around.

Sam sat at one of the readers, in the niche with Freddie and Flossie, sorting through some microfiche cards. Bron sucked his teeth in disgust and turned back to Lawrence with a, “Really—”

—when the common room lamps dropped to quarter-brightness. (Lawrence’s wrinkled chin, the tips of his fingers, and the base of the green Magician he was about to place, glowed above the vlet board’s light.) A roaring grew overhead.

The lamps flickered once, then went out completely.

Everyone looked up. Bron heard several men stand. Across the domed skylight, dark as the room, a light streaked.

Sam was standing too, now. The room lights were still out and the lights on all the room’s readers were flickering in unison.

“What in the world—” someone who had the room next to Bron (and whose name, after six months, Bron still did not know) said.

“We’re not in the world—” Lawrence said, sharply even for Lawrence.

As the room lights went on again, Bron realized with horror, excitement, or anticipation (he wasn’t sure which), the skylight was still black. Outside, the sensory shield was off!

“You know,” Sam said jovially—and loud enough for the others in the room to hear—“while you guys sit around playing war games, there is a war going on out there, that Triton is pretty close to getting involved in.” The joviality fell away; he turned from his reader and spoke out across the commons: “There’s nothing to worry about. But we’ve had to employ major, nonbelligerent defensive action. The blackout was a powercut while energy was diverted to our major force. Those streaks across the sky were ionized vapor trails from low-flying scouting equipment—”

“Ours or theirs?” someone asked.

A few people laughed. But not many.

“Could be either,” Sam said. “The flickering here was our domestic emergency power coming in; and not quite making it—the generators need a couple of seconds to warm up. I would guess ...” Sam glanced up—“that the sensory shield will be off over the city for another three or four minutes. If anyone wants to go out and see what the sky really looks like from Tethys, now’s your chance. Probably not too many people will be out—”

Everyone (except three people in the corner), including Bron, rose and herded toward the double doors. Bron looked back among the voices growing around them. The three in the corner had changed their minds and were coming.

Coming out onto the dark roof, Bron saw that the roof beside theirs was already crowded. So was the roof across the way. As he glanced back, the service door on the roof behind them opened; dozens of women hurried out, heads back, eyes up.

Someone beside Bron said, “Lord, I’d forgotten there were stars!”

Around him, people craned at the night.

Neptune, visibly spherical, mottled, milky, and much duller than the striated turquoise extravaganza on the sensory shield, was fairly high. The sun, low and perhaps half a dozen times brighter than Sirius, looked about the size of the bottom of the vlet’s dice cup. (On the sensory shield it would be a pinkish glow which, though its vermilion center was tiny, sent out pulsing waves across the entire sky.) The atmosphere above Tethys was only twenty-five hundred feet thick; a highly ionized, cold-plasma field cut it off sharply, just below the shield; with the shield extinguished, the stars were as ice-bright as from some naturally airless moon.

The dusty splatter of the Milky Way misted across the black. (On the shield, it was a band of green-shot silver.)

The sky looks smaller, Bron thought. It looks safe and close—like the roofed-over section of the u-1—yes, punctured by a star here and the sun there. But, though he knew those lights were millions of kilometers—millions of light-years away, they seemed no more than a kilometer distant. The shield’s interpenetrating pastel mists, though they were less than a kilometer up, gave a true feel of infinity.

Another light-line shot overhead: It pulsed and diffused color across the dark like a molten rainbow.

“They’re flying so low—” That was Sam, calling from near the roof’s edge—“that their ion output is exciting a portion of the shield into random discharge: that’s not really their trail you’re seeing, just an image, below it, on the—”

Someone screamed.

And Bron felt suddenly light-headed; his next heartbeat reverberated in his skull, painful as a hammer. Then, at a sudden blow to the soles of his feet, his stomach turned over—no, he didn’t vomit. But he stag-geied. And his knee hit someone who had fallen. Somewhere something crashed. Then there was a growing light. His ears ceased pounding. The wash of red dissolved from his eyes. And he was on his feet (Had he slipped to one knee? He wasn’t even sure), gasping for breath.