Montrose said in a weak voice, “Took you by surprise, didn’t it?”

“I’ll say. To me it looked as if you damaged all your near-surface Tomb facilities to no purpose. I had sort of assumed you found some other way of getting information from the upper world, because not a single periscope of yours would exist anywhere. Now, I am not saying it did not damage me! I lost radio contact with the whole planet for ten years. I was in a Hohmann transfer orbit to Jupiter, and I missed the rendezvous. No one on Earth could send up a craft because no one on Earth existed. You had completely wiped out human civilization. Ah! But I know your cunning! I knew it was a fake, that there were still people somewhere. (And I was right; you hid them in your depthtrain system.)

“I knew it was you, Cowhand, because, well: you are the cause of all my setbacks—and you do nothing without a plan ten steps ahead!

“I could look out at the blue wonderful world, but it was too far to touch. Had I rode the landing craft down, where would I splash down? In some ocean red with volcanoes? And then how get back up again?

“No, I had to return to Jupiter, and wait years and years for the planets to be in proper position to attempt again. So you put me to a lot of trouble. I have been waiting patiently to discover the reason.”

Montrose stood, face blank, blinking. He said, “Is that your one question? I thought that you had something from an earlier period in mind.”

Del Azarchel chuckled. “Embarrassed, are we?”

Montrose did not answer. He and Del Azarchel had talked for so long, the sun had risen. The strange and hollow twilight that seemed so unnatural had passed. The sunlight was bright and clear, but the landscape was still cratered and inkstained with endless debris, and not a single tree was still standing, but all were charred or blasted.

There was a glint in the distance. Montrose increased the number of nerve firings to his eye, and a crisp picture came into his head.

The glint was a metal plaque.

It had been ripped out of the ground, bent, battered, and charred by molten iron. Only a few words were visible. —M. I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—THESE LANDS UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER—HOSPITALIER OF ST. JOHN—NO SOLICITING

Montrose, who had been feeling a considerable sense of fellowship, pity, admiration, and even a twinge of friendship for Del Azarchel suddenly felt a hardness and a burning coldness in his heart, as if somehow flame could be made of ice and ignite a man’s soul. —M. I. MONTROSE, PROPRIETOR—UNDER THE PROTECTION—TRESPASSERS KILLED—

He reminded himself of everyone who had been robbed, coerced, humiliated, or killed by the Blue Men, had so been because of the orders, or the indifference, of this handsome, dark-haired man before him. A man who committed all these crimes and more, because a Swan Princess had once, innocently, trustingly, used her understanding of Cliometry to manipulate historical forces and push him onto a throne. And then she, seeing his growing ambition and corruption, had turned those same forces to give him a stark choice: to abdicate or else, by clinging illegitimately to power, to cause a world war and a total economic collapse. It was a choice no man with a conscience would have even paused to consider: certainly the Anchorites just mentioned would have jumped at the chance to flee the burdens of power, and the dangerous lure of corruption.

And all of history for roughly eight thousand years had been a turmoil of one insanely failure-ridden and unworkable social and legal scheme after another, exaggerated caricatures of misery, not one of them having been naturally evolved to serve the needs of the current and coming generations.

All because Blackie could not say farewell to a girl whom he should not love. A girl who had chosen another. Mrs. Montrose. Had Menelaus actually had a moment of pity for his wife’s father because that father still had a disgusting and unlawful romantic attraction for a married woman? Menelaus wondered if his coffin sessions last night and early this morning had indeed healed all the damage from the various blows to the head or the side-effects bouts of paralysis and petrifaction may have left.

As suddenly as a snuffed candle, all friendliness and fellowship departed from Montrose’s face. The look of wrath was so clear on his features that Del Azarchel thought the other man might on the instant leap at his throat and tear with his teeth like a dog. Many another man would have backed up, seeing the glint of death in the eyes of Montrose. Del Azarchel hefted his dirk and stepped forward, eyes like flint, teeth white in a stiff grin, as if daring him to try his luck.

They found themselves standing with noses almost touching, staring into each other’s eyes with gazes of superhuman vigor that no man, aside from them, could long hold. But both knew each other’s mystic sense of honor too well. Neither would be the first to break the rules of the code of duels.

Through clenched and smiling teeth, Blackie whispered:

“Are you going to tell me why you dropped the asteroid, Cowhand? Even for you, it seemed rather clumsy, and very brutal. I lost all contact with the Earth for years.”

The pattern jumped into place in the mind of Menelaus. He understood the reason for the asteroid drop, the destruction of the surface world, why the Melusine dwelled in buried lakes and subterranean seas—and where the Anchorites had gone.

“Is that going to be your one question, Blackie? I ain’t much in the talking mood no more.”

“Or the grammaring mood, I see. No. I will learn of all these things at my leisure, once you are dead.”

“We both know that if I kill you, Blackie, your Jupiter Machine seedling must self-destruct, and all your plans die with you.”

“No matter. My pain will end.”

Menelaus grunted, unimpressed.

“You will survive,” said Del Azarchel with an inclination of the head. “You will defy the Hyades, and provoke them to destroy our race. Our world, a tiny cinder circling a minor star in one of the smaller arms of the galaxy, will spin and spin, and the universe will never know nor care that two such men as the Judge of Ages and the Master of the World met and were matched in strength.

“But”—and now the grin of Del Azarchel looked almost boyish, so bright was it—“if I prevail, and I do not ask of you this one question tormenting me, there is no other source I can ask, and it will remain a mystery even after I become the Master of the Stars. So here is my question. I need not remind you that you are honor-bound to answer.”

“Shoot. Sorry. Bad choice of words, considering. I mean, uh, ask.”

“It concerns your long-term strategy during our match. Even from the very earliest days. When did you plant the seeds to grow Pellucid, your world core Xypotech? 2401? Long before the Day of Gold in 2525. At any time, during any of these millennia, you could have let society fall, install yourself into an emulation of your own at the Earth’s core, and then have your own self-replicating iron logic crystals pour out of all the volcanoes of the world. I kept expecting it. I dreamed it and feared it and never once came up with a possible counter-strategy that might have worked. You would have won the game at any time. But the volcanoes never opened.”

“What is the question again, exactly?”

“What is the ques—what? I mean—” Del Azarchel was at a loss for words.

He stared at Montrose, his eyes full of wonder, thunderstruck, dumbfounded.

And then he began to laugh with relief. He roared and wept with laughter, the gales of mirth of a man who had lived with one particular fear for countless thousands of years, only to realize the fear had been a shadow, a boogeyman, a nothing.

Hiccoughing, Blackie said, “Y—You never even toyed with the notion, did you? You are sentimental. You are so stupid. You let me win. Just like that. I win. And you did it to save them! The humans. The hoi polloi. The hylics.”