Riyannah looked at the ground for a moment and Blade saw the slow darkening of her cheeks which was her blush. Then she said. «I suppose there is no reason not to tell you the truth. It will perhaps make you think badly of the Kananites, but there is no help for that.»

«If the Kananites can travel among the stars and are all as brave as you are, I will never think badly of them,» said Blade. «So what is the awful truth about Kanan?»

The Kananites made most of their discoveries about energy more than a thousand years before. Since that time they'd abolished war and poverty, controlled their population, and shaped their whole planet to suit their tastes.

The one billion Kananites lived in twenty gigantic cities of mile-high towers, enjoying every possible luxury. Around the cities were the spaceports and the factories which made everything the Kananites needed, including their food.

The rest of the planet was nearly uninhabited. Part of it was real wilderness, like the land where Blade and Riyannah were now. The wild animals roamed there, the glaciers crunched down the mountainsides, the snow fell and the flowers bloomed as if there wasn't a single intelligent being on the planet

The Kananites never went into the true wilderness. They hiked and swam and hunted in areas closer to the cities, equipped with shelters, free of wild animals-in short a «tame» wilderness. Few Kananites ever spent a night in the open, picked berries for food, or built their own shelters. Their «wilderness» was fine for getting healthy exercise, fresh air, and sunshine, but not for learning to survive outdoors.

The Kananites were not decadent. They understood both the pleasure and the need for the outdoor life. At the same time they weren't willing to give up the comforts they'd known all their long lives.

Kananite medicine was as advanced as the rest of their science. Riyannah was over a hundred Home Dimension years old and she could expect to live to nearly three hundred. That made Blade think even more highly of her courage. She'd been willing to give up two hundred years of life for whatever cause brought her here. It also made him realize why most Kananites were so cautious and conservative. How had they managed to build an empire among the stars in spite of this?

«An empire?» said Riyannah when Blade raised the question. «You mean-many planets settled by Kananites?»

«Something like that, yes.»

She laughed. «Why should we want to do that when we have everything we could hope to need at home? Besides, some of the other planets might someday have their own people. So we should leave those planets alone.» Her face hardened. «The Targans think differently. They would take Kanan itself if they could.»

The Kananites traveled, explored, studied the geology and wildlife of the planets they discovered, but seldom stayed for more than a few years. When a planet was settled for longer than that, it was usually the Menel who settled it.

The asparagus-shaped Menel were the only other advanced race the Kananites had discovered in their star-traveling. Although the Menel were more warlike than the Kananites, it turned out to be possible to win their friendship and support.

«We gave them some of our solar-energy converters and power cells,» Riyannah said. «They quickly learned how to make more themselves. After that they would not fight us, we gave them the hurd-ray projectors and other weapons.»

That was more than five hundred years ago. Since then the Menel worked with the Kananites as scouts, explorers, and sometimes guards or soldiers. The Kananites hadn't met any other space-traveling races, but they'd met several primitive ones. Not all of these were friendly, and sometimes the hurd-ray in the claws of the Menel had to be turned loose.

The Menel were ingenious, handy with machinery, physically rugged, brave, and loyal to both their own people and the Kananites. «We have never had a serious fight with them,» said Riyannah. «Sometimes a Menel leader will go mad and try to make his followers turn against the Kananites. But other Menel will always stop him before much harm is done. They know that a war between our two peoples would cripple or destroy both. And you know how bravely they fight.»

«Yes. The Menel in the two ships were very brave» This wasn't the time to ask too many questions about the Menel. Riyannah was sharp enough to suspect he'd encountered the Menel before, and then she might be asking more questions about his travels than he could safely answer. She appeared to assume he'd come to Targa in another starship. Very good. As long as she went on assuming that, the Dimension X secret was safe.

«Life seemed good for all the people of all the stars,» said Riyannah. «We and the Menel were at peace with each other and wished no one else any harm.

«Then we discovered Targa and Loyun Chard.»

Targa was also a planet very much like Home Dimension Earth. Many centuries ago its civilization reached the point of nearly exhausting the planet's resources. A series of small conflicts grew into a thermonuclear war which killed half the people of Targa. Many of the survivors died of famine and disease. Civilization collapsed completely for over a century.

The Targans were tough, though. Enough of them survived to start up civilization again. Generation after generation, as the radioactivity died away, they rebuilt the cities, rediscovered lost science and technology, resettled the waste lands.

The one thing they could not do was recreate the resources the old civilization had used up. So the cities remained small and dependent on the countryside for food. The city people grew to hate this dependence and the farmers grew to exploit it, ruling the cities like tyrants. It was a situation which could only end in another war.

«At least there would have been another war, except for Loyun Chard,» said Riyannah. «He was good luck for the Targans.»

Loyun Chard began as an officer in the air force of one of the cities. He overthrew the city's government, then led a brilliant airborne campaign against the farmers around the city. The farmers were routed, their lands were confiscated, and the city became truly independent.

With the prestige of his victory and his battle-hardened fighting men behind him, Loyun Chard was well launched on a career of conquest. One city after another came over to him and snatched its croplands from the men who farmed them. In ten years the farmers and country people were broken and Loyun Chard ruled most of Targa.

He was not only a conqueror, he was a farsighted statesman-at least from Targa's point of view. He gathered the most brilliant scientists and engineers, then turned them loose. Within a few years they discovered or invented practically everything necessary for spaceflight, including antigravity. Then someone playing around with the theories behind antigravity went on to discover the faster-than-light drive.

Suddenly the galaxy and all its resources lay open to Targa-and the Loyun Chard. «If he hadn't already been ambitious for further conquest, he certainly would have become so now,» said Riyannah. «No one in the history of the old civilization had even conquered as much of Targa as he had. Now he could go on and make both his people and his name immortal.»

Now there was a real prospect of unlimited resources and prosperity for all, or at least of new and rich planets to settle. It was obvious that no one who continued to fight against Loyun Chard would share in any of this. So opposition to Chard rapidly shrank. Within a few years he was able to disband much of his military strength and devote the resources to building his space fleet.

To be sure, he still kept some men under arms. An air force of jets patrolled the skies. Soldiers kept order in the conquered farmlands and occasionally rode the troop carriers into the wilderness on lightning raids.