Protector

… he was in a smoothly flowing stream. Alice stood watching him with concern. She stood horizontally out from the side of a sheer cliff.

Currents around his feet made him wonder. He ducked under, into turbulence, and came out the other side of the stream, headed back. He ducked again, and rode the current to where it emptied onto the green ball in a kidney-shaped pond. The ship was just a few yards away.

He pulled himself out of the water, laughing and blowing. A stream that flowed two ways through the air!

The ship’s solar storm warning showed no sign of a disturbance in Saggitarius. It proved nothing. He didn’t know how much activity it took to set the instrument off.

He stowed clothing for both of them in another pressure suit, and added a couple of handmeals because he was hungry. He brought them back in the sealed suit. He had never looked at the weapons.

There was a Mobius strip forty feet across and six feet broad, made of some silvery metal, suspended almost horizontally in the air with part of the edge embedded in bare dirt. They studied it for awhile, and then Alice… tried it.

Gravity was vertical to the surface. She walked around the outside, negotiated the twist upside down, and came back along the inside. She jumped down with her arms raised for applause.

There was a miniature golf course. It looked absurdly easy, but Roy borrowed a putter from a rack and tried it anyway. He got several shocks. The ball drew strange curves in the air, sometimes bounced higher than it had fallen, and once it came back at his head as hard as he had hit it. He stuck with it long enough to realize that the gravity fields were changing from minute to minute, and then he gave up.

They found a lily pond studded with water sculptures, gentle shapes that rose and flowed out of the surface. By far the most detailed shape was a large sculptured head in the center of the pond. It changed shape as they watched, from the hard face and swelling skull of the Bre

— to a square face with deep-set eyes, and straight hair in a Belter strip cut, and a brooding look, as if the man remembered some ancient wrong. The lips curved in a sudden smile, and the face began to melt…

Kobold had turned. It was dusk in that region when they returned to the castle.

It stood up out of a rise of ground, a structure of rough-hewn dark stone blocks, with windows that were vertical slits, and a great wooden door built for giants. “Frankenstein’s castle,” said Roy. “Bre

“Meaning his story could be a put-on.”

Roy shrugged. What can we do about it?

It took two hands to turn the knob of the great door, and both of them pushing to open it.

Vertigo.

They stood at the edge of a vast open space. All through it was a maze of stairways and landings and more stairways. Through open doors they could glimpse gardens. There were faceless dummies, a score of them, climbing up and climbing down and standing on the landings and walking into the gardens…

But they stood at all angles. Two-thirds of the landings were vertical. Likewise the gardens. Dummies stood unconcerned on vertical landings; two dummies climbed a flight of stairs in the same direction, one going up, one down…

Bre

Neither of them answered.

“It’s Esher’s Relativity. It’s the only copied work on all of Kobold. I thought about doing The Mado

“Jesus,” Roy whispered. Then he shouted, “Had you thought of setting up a Mado

“Sure!” came the cheerful bellow. “But it would have scared a lot of people. I didn’t want to make that many waves. I shouldn’t even have done that duplicate Stonehenge.”

“We’ve not only found Vandervecken,” Alice whispered. “We’ve found Finagle Himself!” Roy laughed.

“Come on up!” Bre

They were exhausted when they reached the top of the tower. “Esher’s Relativity” ended in a spiral stair, and that seemed to go on and on, past slits of windows designed for archery fire.

The room at the top was dark, and open to the sky. By Bre

Bre

Alice was still staring at the altered sky. But Roy bowed low and said, “Merlin, the king commands thy presence.”

Bre

Alice said, “The whole sky?”

“Lie down, Alice. You’ll strain your neck in that position. It’s a gravity lens.” He read their puzzlement. “You know that a gravity field bends light? Good. I can make a field that warps light into a focus. It’s lenticular, shaped like a red blood platelet. That’s how I get my sunlight. Sol seen through a gravity lens, with a scattering component to give me blue sky. One fringe benefit is that the lens scatters light going the other way, so you can’t see Kobold until you’re right on top of it.”

Roy looked up at the suns burning close. “That’s quite an effect.”

“That’s Saggitarius, the direction of the galactic hub. I still haven’t found that goddamn ship, but it makes for pretty lights, doesn’t it?” Bre

Roy said, “What happens when you find him?”

“I told you that. I’ve played it out a hundred times in my head. It’s as if I’ve lived it all before, in all possible ways. My ship’s a duplicate of the one Phssthpok used, except for some refinements. I can get up to three gravities with the ram alone, and I’ve got two hundred years’ worth of weaponry developments in the cargo pod.”

“I still think—”

“I know you do. It’s partly my doing that you haven’t had a war in so long. So you’ve grown soft, and it makes you more likable, bless you. But this is a war situation.”

“But is it?”

“What do you know about the Pak?”

Roy didn’t answer.

“There’s a Pak ship coming. If the Pak in question ever finds out the truth about us he’ll try to exterminate us. He may succeed. I’m telling you this, dammit! I’m the only man who’s ever met a Pak. I’m the only man who could ever understand one.”

Roy bristled. The arrogance of him! “Then where is he, O All-Knowing Bre

Another might have hesitated in embarrassment. Not Bre

“Where should he be?”

“On his way to Alpha Centaurus. From the strength of the signal—” Bre

The stars jarred to a halt. “There. In the middle.”

“Is that where your fu

“More or less. It’s not exactly a point-source.”

“Why Alpha Centaurus?”

“Because Phssthpok would have gone almost in the opposite direction. Most of the nearby yellow dwarf suns are all to one side of Sol. The Centaurus suns are an exception.”

“So this second Pak would look around the Centaurus system, and if he didn’t find Wunderland he’d head on away from Sol.”