and blasted into atoms.

Now, in a rush, fatigue welled up to claim me. I slumped, half-sick. By the time our craft came to rest on Rizal, I wasn't sure I even had strength left to climb out.

Then, at last, our hatches swung open. Aid parties swarmed aboard.

I moved back out of sight. Somehow, I couldn't face the excited flummery and fawning.

Celeste Stelpa, too, seemed to have vanished. No matter where I looked, I couldn't find her.

The first party into the globeship brought paraguns and proton blasters with them. Relentlessly, they cleared out what was left of the Kel crew, pushing past me almost without notice in the grimness of their work.

Wave Two hoisted Controller Kruze and the other prisoners up from their spherical scarlet dungeon.

It was a moment to remember. For if I couldn't stand the thought of obsequiousness and adulation, Security's chief had no such inhibitions. His heavy body seemed to swell. He beamed and puffed and pranced and strutted.

Conveniently, too, he made no slightest mention of me. Without saying so in so many words, he made it ever so clear that Controller Alfred Kruze himself had saved mankind from the Kel menace.

I smiled a small and twisted smile. That was the way of officialdom, it seemed—in this world or any other.

And what did it really matter?

Only then, without warning, someone said, "—and these people, Controller: the ones who received thrill-mills from the Kel and kept it secret. What do you plan to do about them?"

Kruze's heavy features grew dark. "What would you have me do—to traitors?" He wheeled like an angry mastiff; shook his fist. "They die, of course! All of them! The very fact of past or present possession of a thrill-mill be punished by summary execution, without trial, as collaboration with the Kel!"

I almost cried out, then, by instinct.

Only that could do no good. The thinking part of my brain knew it. So I stood silent, instead; immobile. This quick wave of approval from Kruze's adulators roused only numb shock in me.

Then the controller's aides moved him on out. The 

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