“How well you’ve performed! But not well enough! Don’t you know I have only to press a button on this transceiver, and all four vehicles will explode, along with the remaining missiles in your truck?”

I froze. Caliban had been listening in, perhaps even watching, and I did not think that he was lying.

I said, “If you blow me up, you also blow up Wilfred.”

“Too bad!”

Behind me, Wilfred groaned. He rose unsteadily, one arm limp, his eyes as red as if his brain had burst.

He said, “Not you, Doc! You were the only good man I ever knew. I trusted you, Doc, even if you were a honky. I loved you, Doc, like I never loved a man before!”

“You always did flap your big lips too much,” Caliban said. “Well, my lord, are you leaving peacefully, without pressing that button, or do I have to end it all now and cheat both of us?”

“He means it! He’d kill us both!” Wilfred moaned. “Old Rivers and Simmons were right. Doc has turned evil! He’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde!”

“Shut up, Wilfred,” Caliban said emotionlessly.

“My lord, I have to blow up the trucks and jeeps in any event. One of my black colleagues, Ali

Hamidu, has shinnied up a tree and scanned the scene with binoculars the power of which would astound even the scientists of this progressive century. He reports that the Albanian and his Arab mercenaries are sneaking up on you. They pulled the same trick you did, apparently. I think they spotted you when you came back down. Shame on you. Are you losing your touch? In any case, they see the light shining from the open roof of the camper.”

I got out of the camper. Caliban’s voice said, “Get back here! They’ve got the camp surrounded. You couldn’t get two feet without being chopped down! I’m going to explode the two jeeps first, and then the supply truck! You stay in the camper until then, and take off under cover of the smoke! When you do, run like hell! The camper will be the biggest explosion by far!”

An automatic rifle began firing about fifty yards away. The bullets stitched the dirt and then ran across a jeep. Somebody shouted in Arabic; I thought it was a command to hold the fire. Probably, it was

Noli shouting, because he wanted to take me alive.

I had no choice. I got back into the camper, the roof of which was closing up. Wilfred secured the door and the windows, and when the camper was tight, he said, “We’re protected by double walls with fiber glass and steel wool insulation. It’d take a direct hit from a shell to get us.”

He was watching the screen, which showed about thirty armed men slowly advancing through the bush. I said, “Didn’t you see me when I was sneaking up on you?”

Wilfred curled back his lips and clenched his teeth. Then he said, “You were born under a lucky star, bwana honky. I was watching a leopard over the next hill and I didn’t see you at all. When you got inside the camp, I couldn’t use the beam to sight you then. You were too close. Otherwise ...”

He paused, and then said, “I got orders not to kill you, anyway, unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

The first explosion rocked the camper, but the noise was muffled. The second came almost immediately after. And the third two seconds later. The last must have been the supply truck. The camper seemed to lift up and tilt at the same time, and the blast half-deafened us. If it had not been for the thick insulation, our eardrums would have been blown out.

Wilfred leaped up and opened the door and plunged out into the heavy smoke and the flames. He turned just before he disappeared and shouted at me. I could not hear him, but I could read his lips.

“Split, mother!”

I ran after Wilfred, but our courses diverged. My goal was to get down the slope of the hill as far as possible and to put as many trees behind me as possible. Wilfred had said there were ten missiles in the truck yet with a total explosive force equivalent to 400 pounds of TNT. There would not be much left of the hilltop after Caliban pressed the button.

I was about forty yards down the hill, out of the direct path of the blast, the greater energy of which would go upward. Then I felt the pressure; I did not hear it. I flew forward; a tree sprang up; I became unconscious.

When I regained my senses, I was still deaf. I could, however, hear the messages of pain in my eardrums, my head, and all my muscles.

The smoke was just beginning to clear away. The hilltop was gone. Most of the trees, branchless, splintered, uprooted, were halfway down the hill. One lay a foot from me. A little more force behind it would have dropped the trunk, heavy as a great boulder, on my head.

I rose slowly against the current of my pain. The moon was out behind the clouds now, and the sky seemed to be a peculiar shade of dark-blue. No doubt, I was furnishing the color, not the sky. The leaves of the trees were a sinister green, and the earth was a repulsive yellow-green. Everything was stretched, elongated, as if the world were a taut rubber band. The energy gathered in this band was waiting to be released when my hearing returned.

I was unarmed and naked except for the belt with its sheath and the knife.

Forty feet to my left, Wilfred lay face down. I turned him over. He had no visible wounds, but when

I tore off his shirt, I saw on his lower back a bruise the size of a dinner plate. The bruise may have been caused by a truck wheel which lay about eight feet up the hill from him.

He opened his eyes and said something. I could not hear him, and it was too dark to read his lips. I found a match-folder in his pocket and struck a match. It may have been a foolish thing to do, but I did not think there would be any living men around for some time, and I wanted to know what he was trying to say.

The light was just enough for me to read his lips.

“... not with a whimper but a bang, man ... ain’t life the shits ... tell that bronze cat ... no fucking good ... God’s a honky, you better believe it ...” and then, “Mother!”

The last was not, I’m sure, a truncated pejorative. It was the final appeal to one who had answered his first appeal.

At that moment, I felt sad. If I had been able to know him under other circumstances, and if he could have abandoned all the masks, the mannerisms, the cliches which humans adopt for a group identity, then he and I might even have liked each other. But that was asking too much of most humans, and, moreover,

I find that most humans have trouble being completely at ease when they’re with me.

This, I suppose, is my fault.

I left him with mouth and eyes open. Before noon, the flies would be buzzing in and out of the mouth and the vultures would have plucked the eyes from the sockets.

The hilltop gave me nothing in the way of a weapon. I set off at a trot with the intention of going back up the mountain diagonally. I suspected that Caliban was even now racing down the mountain to check on my survival, unless he was able to see me through those super-binoculars. If I did lose him, I would do so only for a while. Eventually, he would be on my trail, for the simple reason that he was going where I was going. The two old men had told me that, although they probably did not know themselves. I doubted that Caliban would have said anything about the Nine to them, since it was forbidden. Also, he could take them only so far and then would have to go on alone. It was also forbidden to bring outsiders any closer than fifty miles to the caverns of the Nine.

I was thinking about this, and wishing that my deafness would clear up soon, when a piece of bark flew off a tree about a foot to my left. If I had not been looking in that direction, I would have been unaware of it, and the shooter might have been more accurate the second time.

So I thought at that moment. I dived to the ground and rolled beneath a bush in a slight hollow.