"But he is gone," I said. I didn't want eulogies, with or without a second copy. I could supply myself all the eulogies I wanted concerning Gar.

The solemn face gave way for a while to the remote official face as he said, "Colonel Whistler tells me you understand there's no job opening for you at the moment, now that your brother is no longer with the corporation."

No longer with the corporation. What a phrase. I said, "I realize that."

"Certainly. Certainly."

41

u

*Trn not here for a job. I'm here to find out what happened."

Goss got to his feet, looking away from me, saying, "Yes, yes, perfectly natural. Under the circumstances, perfectly natural." He was roaming around the room, peering here and there on littered tables, not looking at me, saying, "I can understand how you feel, the shock of it— Ah, there it is!" He picked up a pipe and showed it to me, the hail fellow grin finally flashing out at me unrestrained. "Never find this thing," he said. "Never find it."

I said, "I want to know the details."

"Only to be expected," he muttered, busy now filling his pipe. "Only to be expected. Anything I can do to help, anything at all—"

"You can tell me about it."

He stopped fussing with the pipe, looked sharply at me with a wary look I hadn't seen in his face before, then went back to the pipe. "I'll be glad to, glad to. Whatever I know."

"Maybe it would be best," I said, "if I asked you questions about the parts that interest me."

"Excellent. Just the thing." He came back with his pipe, trailing a thread of smoke, and sat in front of me again. "Ask away," he invited me. "Ask away."

I could hardly think which question came first, and finally selected one at random: "Where was he killed?"

, "Where? Yoroch Pass." He popped to his feet again, motioning at me with the pipe. "Come along, I'll show you the exact spot. Come along."

I followed him to one of the littered tables, and watched him clear it; stacks of papers went on another table, small lumpy specimen sacks went on the floor, pencils and rulers and compasses went anywhere they could fit. When the table top was at last clean, I could see inlaid in it a map of Anar-chaos done in black and white.

"You see what this is," Goss said unnecessarily. "It's day-side of the planet. Here we are here, at Ulik. There's Ni, where you landed, the center of dayside. Here's Moro-Geth way over here to the west. And north of Ni, here's Prudence, here, the mining town."

"I see it," I said, to stop him tapping each spot and telling me each name legibly printed beside his pointing finger.

42

But he couldn't be stopped. He pointed to Chax, the city to the south, and told me he was pointing to Chax, and that it was to the south of Ni. He told me again that Ni was situated at dead center of the dayside of the planet, where Hell stood permanently at zenith, and that the other four cities were at approximately equidistant locations from Ni, one to each of the four points of the compass, all of which I had already known and could plainly see for myself on the map. He went on to tell me that dayside was banded by a ring of twilight which, with few exceptions, was as far as man had explored the planet, and that this ring of twilight was for the most part contiguous with natural geographic boundaries of one sort or another. To the east of where we now stood reared the Evening Mountains, a north-south range, bleak and jagged and inhospitable, but dotted with important mining sites. To the west, past Moro-Geth, there stretched the broad cold Sea of Morning, the largest ocean on the planet, icebound on its farther coast. Northward, the barrier was the White Wall, a line of cliffs rearing upward, marking the polar plateau, and to the south the Black River wound from the Empty Ocean westward to empty into the the Sea of Morning. All of this was described to me, all of this I could see for myself, and none of this was relevant.

But at last he got to it, bending over the map table, pointing to Ulik, moving his finger eastward from the city toward the moutains, saying, "You see this thin line here? This is the road, the main road to the mountains, the one most of the trappers use. You see here where it goes into the mountains. You see?"

"Yes," I said.

"That's Yoroch Pass," he said, and tapped the spot with his finger. "Right there, that's it."

"Was he going out or coming back?"

"What? Coming back. Yes, he'd been on a survey and he was coming back."

"Alone?"

"Of course not. No no, naturally not. No one travels alone here, no one. He had a guide with him, an assistant. The post you would have had."

"Did this assistant know I was going to replace him?"

Goss looked at me in some surprise. "Did he know? You

43

mean, would he have— But no, not possibly. He didn't know, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. He would simply have been transferred to other guard duties. Just transferred, that's all. He would have been anyway when your brother died, if he'd wanted."

"He didn't want to stay?"

"No. He said the killing had frightened him; he wanted no more such work."

I looked at the map, at Yoroch Pass. I said, "Where is he buried? Was the body brought back?"

"That would have been impossible. Unfortunately impossible."

"So he's still there. Is the grave marked?"

"I wouldn't know. The guard buried him, he'd know."

"How was he killed?"

"Shot. Shot from ambush."

"What about the guard? Where was he?"

"Right there. Oh, right there. He was shot too, wounded, left for dead. But the wound was slight, he was fortunate."

"Very fortunate."

"He radioed, told us what had happened. We sent a ship for him. He buried your brother, and when our men got to him they brought him back to the city."

"He buried my brother before the ship got to him?"

"You must understand the conditions," he said. "The ship couldn't go directly to Yoroch Pass. No air vehicle of any type could possibly make a landing anywhere in the Evening Mountains or to the east of them. You can't imagine the jagged, broken conditions there, and never being sure which is solid rock and which is merely a flimsy superstructure of ice."

I said, "What about a helicopter?"

"Possibly. A one or two man vehicle, possibly. But those mountains are full of Anarchaotians, trappers, press gangs, all sorts, and an aircraft would be an incredible prize for them. A two man helicopter would barely touch ground before it would be attacked. No, we sent a large plane to a landing field here, two days' march from Yoroch Pass, and sent a party of five men in to get Lastus and bring him out."

"Is that the guard's name? Lastus?"

44

"Yes. Piekow Lastus." Suddenly he looked up and said, "Ah! Perhaps you've solved my problem."

"I don't understand."

"It has to do," he said, "with your brother's ring. His college ring."

"I remember it."

"It so happens your brother and I attended the same engineering university, though of course at different times. Just the other day I saw one of our door guards wearing a ring that looked very familiar, and which turned out to be your brother's. As I wormed the story out of him, Lastus had naturally robbed your brother's body before burying him, and that's standard practice here, and this guard, who had been one of the five sent to bring Lastus back, had seen the ring on Lastus' finger and had by threats and intimidation forced Lastus to give it to him. You understand, that's the way Me works here. Outside the towers, of course, outside the towers."