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And the thing was gone, blanking instantly from sight with nothing left behind to show its presence but a bit of black dust stirring restlessly on the tiling as a breeze came in off the desert and moved down the long corridor.

"Poor Lunol," whispered Flaith. "Oh, the poor old man!"

The McCanahan lifted his harp and stared dumbly at its glittering surface of polished silver. "The string from my father's wrist broke the tube in the machine. It summoned up Noorlythin from—from wherever he was hidden."

"How can you use that knowledge?" wondered Flaith.

Kael shook his head. "I don't know yet. But I will. Somehow, I'll find out the truth." He lifted his head and peered about the great tower. "And where better to begin than here?"

They ate dried meat plucked from Flaith's girdle-pouch, chewing on hard black bread. And then they slept, with Flaith cuddled against the McCanahan's length, with his own head pillowed on an arm, both of them stretched at the foot of the great metal machine.

It was the McCanahan who stirred first, rising from the soft body of the girl, carefully so as not to disturb her. He wandered about the tower, studying the strange machines that glistened at him from the shadows. A man would need a dozen lifetimes to understand these things, he told himself. He would find no help from them.

He tried to fight the pall of bitter despair that lay across his shoulders. He was the servant of the gods of space, caught up by them to hunt out and punish another god.

Laughter touched his lips; but the bitterness in it stung like acid.

How does one fight a god? How does one go about killing a thing that is made only of white, radiant energy? A thing that by a mere touch of the blazing brightness that comprises it, can blast him and all his kind to a black dust that shifts restlessly across a floor, flung by an errant breeze!

His fists were clenched until the knotted muscles of his forearms ached. "I can't do it," he told the machines. "I'm only a man. I can't fight against a god!"

Deep within him, he knew that someone had to make this fight, that someone from one of the thousands of Terran worlds had to face Noorlythin, had to stand to him and his awesome power, or the human race itself would go down, crushed and torn and flung into nothingness, as a sand castle went down before the relentless roll of the ocean.

When that happened, the sfarri and the Senn would expand, would lift their faery castles and their monstrous, monolithic palaces, where now Terran buildings stood. And those of the Senn would have their pick of the women of Earth.

Of women like—

Flaith!

He turned to find her stretched on her back, her eyes regarding him wistfully. A shred of her gypsy costume was caught over one shoulder, falling away from the push of her nearly bared breasts. The thin stuff at her waist hugged round hips and full upper thighs. The breath caught in the McCanahan's throat as his eyes ran over her.

She was a woman to steal the breath of a man from his lungs, and send his senses running in a saraband. She was the dream of every lonely spaceman at his battle station, of every thul-prospector hanging to a wandering asteroid with fingers and a suction clamp. With her red hair frothing over the witchery of her cream-skinned shoulders, she was Deirdre herself, the perfect woman.

Something of his tangled senses came to Flaith and she laughed, with the throaty womanness of her pleased at the worship in his eyes.

In the middle of her laughter, a shadow came and lay on the yellow flooring between them.

A sfarran officer stood tall and lean in the open doorway of the tower, a glittering Thorn blaster in his right hand.

* * * * *

The officer regarded them coldly. It came to Kael as he stood dumbly returning that hard glance, that he had never seen a sfarran smile.

"You will come with me at once."

He stood sideways to the green marble doors, giving them room to pass him. Flaith scrambled to her feet; eyeing the gesture with which the officer moved his blaster. The McCanahan bent and lifted his harp, and thrust it into the black sack that had once belonged to dead Lunol the peddler.

Then he was walking with Flaith out the pylon gateway of the tower, across the hot sands toward the black hull of a sleek sfarran cruiser.

He was midway through the hatch when he paused, staring.

There were sfarran men and officers inside the ship, but they were slumped over queerly, in distorted postures and attitudes. He had seen the sfarri like that in Clonn Fell, when he had plucked at the strings of his harp. But here he had not struck those strings!