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  Avery sat in the pilot's chair, watching through the shaded port. He swung around as Falken got up. The exhaustion was gone from his square young face, but his eyes were still veiled and strange. Falken couldn't read them, but he sensed fear.

  He asked, "How long have I slept?"

  Avery shrugged. "The chronometer stopped. A long time, though. Twenty hours, perhaps."

  Falken went to the controls. "Better go back now. We'll swing wide of Mercury, and perhaps we can get through." He hoped their constant velocity hadn't carried them too far for their fuel.

  Relief surged over Avery's face. "The size of that Sun" he said jerkily. "It's terrifying. I never felt. . . ."

  He broke off sharply. Something about his tone brought Sheila's eyes wide open.

  Suddenly, the bell of the mass-detector began to ring, a wild insistent jangle.

  "Meteor." cried Falken and leaped for the 'visor screen. Then he froze, staring.

  It was no meteor, rushing at them out of the vast blaze of the Sun. It was a planet.

  A dark planet, black as the infinity behind it, barren and cruel as starvation, touched in its jagged peaks with subtle, phosphorescent fires.

  Paul Avery whispered, "Good LordI A planet, here? But it's impossible!"

  Sheila Moore sprang up.

  "No! Remember the old legends about Vulcan, the planet between Mercury and the Sun? Nobody believed in it, because they could never find it. But they could never explain Mercury's crazy orbit, either, except by the gravitional interference of another body."

  Avery said, "Surely the Mercurian observatories would have found it?" A pulse began to beat in his strong white throat.

  "It's there," snapped Falken impatiently. "And well crash it in a minute if we . , . Sheila! Sheila Moore!"

  The dull glare from the ports caught the proud, bleak lines of his gypsy face, the sudden fire in his blue eyes.

  "This is a world, Sheila! It might be a world for us, a world where Unregenerates could live, and wait!"

  She gasped and stared at him, and Paul Avery said:

  "Look at it, Falken! No one, nothing could live there."

  Falken said softly, "Afraid to land and see?"

  Yellow eyes burned into his, confused and wild. Then Avery turned jerkily away.

  "No. But you can't land, Falken. Look at it."

  Falken looked using a powerful searchbeam, probing. Vulcan was smaller even than Mercury. There was no atmosphere. Peaks like splinters of black glass bristled upward, revolving slowly in the Sun's tremendous blaze.

  The beam went down into the bottomless dark of the canyons. There was nothing there, but the glassy rock and the dim glints of light through it.

  "All the same," said Falken, "I'm going to land." If there was even a tiny chance, he couldn't let it slip.

  Unregeneracy was almost dead in the inhabited worlds. Paul Avery was the only recruit in months. And it was dying in the miserable outer strongholds of independence.

  Starvation, plague, cold, and darkness. Insecurity and danger, and the awful lost terror of humans torn from earth and light. Unless they could find a place of safety, with warmth and light and dirt to grow food in, where babies could be born and live, Gantry Hilton would soon have the whole Solar System for his toy.

  There were no more protests. Falken set the ship down with infinite skill on a ledge on the night side. Then he turned, feeling the blood beat in his wrists and throat.

  "Vac suits," he said. "There are two and a spare."

  They got into them, shuffled through the airlock, and stood still, the first humans on an undiscovered world.

  Lead weights in their boots held them so that they could walk. Falken thrust at the rock with a steel-shod alpenstock.

  "It's like glass," he said. "Some unfamiliar compound, probably, fused out of raw force in the Solar disturbance that created the planets. That would explain its resistance to heat."

  Radio headphones carried Avery's voice back to him clearly, and Falken realized that the stuff of the planet insulated against Solar waves, which would normally have blanketed communication.

  "Whatever it is/' said Avery, "it sucks up light That's why it's never been seen. Only little glimmers seep through, too feeble for telescopes even on Mercury to pick up against the Sun. Its mass is too tiny for its transits to be visible, and it doesn't reflect."

  "A sort of dark stranger, hiding in space," said Sheila, and shivered. "Look, Eric! Isn't that a cave mouth?"

  Falken's heart gave a great leap of hope. There were caves on Pluto. Perhaps, in the hidden heart of this queer world. . . .

  They went toward the opening. It was surprisingly warm. Falken guessed that the black rock diffused the Sun's heat instead of stopping it.

  Thin ragged spires reared overhead, stabbing at the stars. Furtive glints of light came and went in ebon depths. The cave opened before them, and their torches showed glistening walls dropping sheer away into blackness.

  Falken uncoiled a thousand-foot length of synthetic fiber rope from his belt. It was no larger than a spider web, and strong enough to hold Falken and Avery together. He tied one each of their metal boots to it and let it down.

  It floated endlessly out, the lead weight dropping slowly in the light gravity. Eight hundred, nine hundred feet. When there were five feet of rope left in Falken's hand it stopped.

  "Well," he said. "There is a bottom"

  Paul Avery caught his arm. "You aren't going down?"

  "Why not?" Falken scowled at him, puzzled. "Stay here, if you prefer. Sheila?"

  "I'm coming with you."

  *A11 right," whispered Avery. "I'll come." His amber eyes were momentarily those of a lion caught in a pit. Afraid, and dangerous.

  Dangerous? Falken shook his head irritably. He drove his alpenstock into a crack and made the rope fast.

  "Hang onto it," he said. "We'll float like balloons, but be careful. I'll go first. If there's anything wrong down there, chuck off your other boot and climb up fast."

  They went down, floating endlessly on the weighted rope. Little glints of light fled through the night-dark walls. It grew hot. Then Falken struck a jog in the cleft wall and felt himself sliding down a forty-five-degree offset. Abruptly, there was light.

  Falken yelled, in sharp, wild warning.

  The thing was almost on him. A colossus with burning eyes set on footlong stalks, with fanged jaws agape and muscles straining.

  Falken grabbed for his blaster. The quick motion overbalanced him. Sheila slid down on him and they fell slowly together, staring helplessly at destruction, charging at them through a rainbow swirl of light.

  The creature rushed by, in utter silence.

  Paul Avery landed, his blaster ready. Falken and Sheila scrambled up, cold with the sweat of terror.

  "What was it?" gasped Sheila,

  Falken said shakily, "God knows!" He turned to look at their surroundings.

  And swept the others back into the shadow of the cleft.

  Riders hunted the colossus. Riders of a shape so mad that even in madness no human could have conceived them. Riders on steeds like the arrowing tails of comets, hallooing on behind a pack of nightmare'hounds. . . .

  Cold sweat drenched him. "How can they live without air?" he whispered. "And why didn't they see us?"

  There was no answer. But they were safe, for the moment. The light, a shifting web of prismatic colors, showed nothing moving.

  They stood on a floor of the glassy black rock. Above and on both sides walls curved away into the wild light—sunlight, apparently, splintered by the shell of the planet. Ahead there was a ebon plain, curving to match the curve of the vault.

  Falken stared at it bitterly. There was no haven here. No life as he knew it could survive in this pit. Yet there was life, of some mad sort. Another time, they might not escape.

  "Better go back," he said wearily, and turned to catch the rope.

  The cleft was gone.

  Smooth and unbroken, the black wall mock
ed him. Yet he hadn't moved more than two paces. He smothered a swift Stab of fear.

  "Look for it," he snapped. "It must be here."

  But it wasn't? They searched, and came again together, to stare at each other with eyes already a little mad.

  Paul Avery laughed sharply. "There's something here," he said. "Something alive."

  Falken snarled, "Of course, you fooll Those creatures. . .

  "No. Something else. Something laughing at us."

  "Shut up, Avery," said Sheila. "We can't go to pieces now."

  "And we can't just stand here glaring." Falken looked out through the rainbow dazzle. "We may as well explore. Perhaps there's another way out."

  Avery chuckled, without mirth. "And perhaps there isn't. Perhaps there was never a way in. What happened to it, Falken?"

  "Control yourself," said Falken silkily, "or I'll rip off your oxygen valve. All right. Let's go."

  They went a long way across the plain in the airless, un-echoing silence, slipping on glassy rock, dazzled by the wheeling colors.

  Then Falken saw the castle.

  It loomed quite suddenly—a bulk of squat wings with queer, twisted turrets and straggling windows. Falken scowled. He was sure he hadn't seen it before. Perhaps the light. . . .

  They hesitated. Icy moth-wings flittered over Falken's skin. He would have gone around, but black walls seemed to stretch endlessly on either side of the castle.

  "We go in," he said, and shuddered at the thought of meeting folk like those who hunted the flaming-eyed colossus.

  Blasters ready, they went up flat titanic steps. A hall without doors stretched before them. They went down it.

  Falken had a dizzy sense of change. The walls quivered as though with a wash of water over them. And then there were doors opening out of a round hall.

  He opened one. There was a round halt beyond, with further doors. He turned back. The hall down which they had come had vanished. There were only doors. Hundreds of them, of odd shapes and sizes, like things imperfectly remembered.

  Paul Avery began to laugh,

  Falken struck him, hard, over the helmet. He stopped, and Sheila caught Falken's arm, pointing.

  Shadows came, rushing and wheeling like monstrous birds. Cold dread caught Falken's heart. Shadows, hunting them....

  He choked down the mad laughter rising in his own throat. He opened another door.

  Halls, with doors. The shadows swept after them. Falken hurled the doors open, faster and faster, but there was never anything beyond but another hall, with doors.

  His heart was gorged and painful. His clothing was cold on his sweating body. He plunged on and on through black halls and drifting shards of light, with the shadows dancing all around and doors, doors, doors.

  Paul Avery made a little empty chuckle. "It's laughing," he mumbled and went down on the black floor. The shadows leaped.

  Sheila's eyes were staring fire in her starved white face. Her terror shocked against Falken's brain and steadied it. "Take his feet," he said harshly, "Take his feet."

  They staggered on with their burden. And presently there were no more doors, and no roof overhead. Only the light and the glassy walls, and the dancing shadows.

  The walls were thin in places. Through them Falken saw the dark colossus with its flaming eyes, straining through the spangled light. After it came the hounds and hunters, not gaining nor falling back, riding in blind absorption.

  The walls faded, and the shadows. They were alone in the center of the black plain. Falken looked back at the castle.

  There was nothing but the flat and naked rock.

  He laid Avery down. He saw Sheila Moore fall beside him. He laughed, one small, mad chuckle. Then he crouched beside the others, his scarred gypsy face a mask of living stone.

  Whether it was then, or hours later that he heard the voice, Falken never knew. But it spoke loudly in his mind, that voice. It brought him up, his futile blaster raised.

  "You are humans," said the voice. "How wonderful!"

  Falken looked upward, sensing a change in the light.

  Something floated overhead. A ten-foot area of curdled glory, a core of blinding brilliance set in a lacy froth of fire.

  The beauty of it caught Falkens throat. It shimmered with a sparkling opalescence, infinitely lovely—a living, tender flame floating in the rainbow light. It caught his heart, too, with a deep sadness that drifted in dim, faded colors beneath the brilliant veil.

  It said, clearly as a spoken voice in his mind:

  "Yes. I live, and I speak to you."

  Sheila and Avery had risen. They stared, wide-eyed, and Sheila whispered, *What are you?"

  The fire-thing coiled within itself. Little snapping flames licked from its edges, and its colors laughed.

  "A female, isn't it? Splendid! I shall devise something very special." Colors rippled as its thoughts changed. "You amaze me, humans. I cannot read your minds, beyond thoughts telepathetically directed at me, but I can sense their energy output

  "I had picked the yellow one for the strongest. He appeared to be so. Yet he failed, and you others fought through."

  Avery stared at Falken with the dawn of an appalled realization in his amber eyes. Falken asked of the light:

  "What are you?*'

  The floating fire dipped and swirled. Preening peacock tints rippled through it, to be drowned in fierce, proud scarlet. It said:

  "I am a child of the Sun."

  It watched them gape in stunned amazement, and laughed with mocking golden notes.

  "I will tell you, humans. It will amuse me to have an audience not of my own creating. Watch!"

  A slab of the glassy rock took form before them. Deep in it, a spot of brilliance grew.

  It was a Sun, in the first blaze of its virile youth. It strode the path of its galactic orbit alone. Then, from the wheeling depths of space, a second Sun approached.

  It was huge, burning with a blue-white radiance. There was a mating, and the nine worlds were born in a rush of supernal fire.

  And there was life. Not on the nine burning planets. But in free space, little globes of fire, bits of the Sun itself shocked somehow to intelligence in the vast explosion of energy.

  The picture blurred. The colors of the floating light were dulled and dreamy.

  "There were many of us," it sighed. "We were like tiny Suns, living on the conversion of our own atoms. We played, in open space. . . ."

  Dim pictures washed the screen, glories beyond human comprehension—a faded vision of splendor, of alien worlds and the great wheeling Suns of outer space. The voice murmured:

  "Like Suns, we radiated our energy. We could draw strength from our parent, but not enough. We died. But I was stronger than the rest, and more intelligent. I built myself a shell."

  "Built itl" whispered Avery. "But how?"

  "All matter is built of raw energy, electron and proton existing in a free state. With a part of my own mass I built this world around myself, to hold the energy of the Sun and check the radiation of my own vitality.

  "I have lived, where my race died. I have watched the planets cool and live and die. I am not immortal. My mass grows less as it drains away through my shell. But it will be a long long time. I shall watch the Sun die, too."

  The voice was silent. The colors were ashes of light. Falken was stricken with a great poignant grief.

  Then, presently, the little malicious flames frothed to life again, and the voice said.

  "My greatest problem is amusement. Here in this black shell I am forced to devise pleasures from my own imagination."

  Falken gasped. "The hunters, the cleft that vanished, and that hellish castle?" He was suddenly cold and hot at once.

  "Clever, eh? I created my hunt some eons ago. According to my plan the beast can neither escape nor the hunters catch him. But, owing to the uncertainty factor, there is one chance in some hundreds of billions that one or the other event may occur. It affords me endless amusement."

  "An
d the castle?" said Falken silkily. "That amused you, too."

  "Oh, yes! Your emotional reactions. . . . Most interesting!" Falken raised his blaster and fired at the core of the light. Living fire coiled and writhed. The sun-child laughed. "Raw energy only feeds me. What, are there no questions?"

  Falken's voice was almost gentle. "Do you think of nothing but amusement?"

  Savege colors rippled against the dim, sad mauves. "What else is there, to fill the time?"

  Time. Time since little frozen Pluto was incandescent gas.

  "You closed the opening we came through," said Avery abruptly.

  "Of course."

  "But you'll open it again? You'll let us go?" The tone of his voice betrayed him. Falken knew, and Sheila.

  "No," said Sheila throatily. "It won t let us go. It'll keep us up here to play with, until we die."

  Ugly dark reds washed the Sun-child. "Death!" it whispered. "My creatures exist until I bid them vanish. But death, true death—that would be a supreme amusement!"

  A desperate, helpless rage gripped Falken. The vast empty vault mocked him with his dead hopes. It jeered at him with solid walls that were built and shifted like smoke by the power of this lovely, soulless flame.

  Built, and shifted. . . ,

  Sudden fire struck his brain. He stood rigid, stricken dumb by the sheer magnificance of his idea. He began to tremble, and the wild hope swelled in him until his veins were gorged and aching.

  He said, with infinite care, "You can't create real living creatures, can you?"

  "No," said the Sun-child. "I can build the chemicals of their bodies, but the vital spark eludes me. My creatures are simply toys activated by the electrical interplay of atoms. They think, in limited ways, and they feel crude emotions, but they do not live in the true sense."

  "But you can build other things? Rocks, soil, water, air?"

  "Of course. It would take a great deal of my strength, and it would weaken my shell, since I should have to break down part of the rock to its primary particles and rebuild. But even that I could do, without serious loss."

  There was silence. The blue distant fires flared in Falken s eyes. He saw the others staring at him. He saw the chances of failure bulk over him like black thunderheads, crowned with madness and death.