see fit. And that should convince the other tribes they can count on me."

"Should," said Sweetbriar, nodding. "Now we'd better reckon up our distance. As I see it, this'll work out something like a big beat, and if we don't all get there together, we might better have stayed home."

They settled all the details, the forced marches by night, the meager weight of food each man was to carry. Price managed to get an hour's sleep before he took off in the pre-dawn gloom to rouse the other tribes. When he slept he dreamed of an iron mountain, impregnable, crowned with destruction, watching incessantly with a thousand eyes. In the dream, he knew that no mere men could ever take it.

The aerodyne flew high in the black night, toward the Citadel. Above there were clear stars. Below there were heavy clouds laced with lightning, hiding the earth. Hiding the Belt, and the lines of men who moved in it, among the dark trees, in the wind and the rain.

One full night had passed, and another was drawing to its close. Before the sun went down again it would be all over, one way or the other.

Price was in that state of exaltation that comes at a certain point of prolonged tension without rest, where you move a little bit outside your body and above the ground, detached from every normal consideration, and everything seems to go with a clear headlong rush, as though a single initiating act has set an inevitable series of reactions going, and all you have to do is keep pace with them. He had not slept much, but he was not tired. The aspect of the Citadel roof, the round red circle of the lift and the controls thereof, the symbol marking the proper level, the shape and size and position of the fire-control center, burned brightly in his mind. Their set and proper sequence did not permit of any obstacles.

Sweetbriar sat beside him in the co-pilot's place. He held the shocker in his gnarly hands, and from time to time he turned it over or stroked its smooth and unfamiliar shape. So far he had not had any occasion to use it. He had stood beside Price in a dozen wooden-built towns, helping him harangue a dozen doubtful chiefs, or sub-chiefs, around the perimeter of the Belt. He had not slept much, either, but his eye was brilliant and steely as a hawk's. If the sensation of flight frightened him, he had not shown it in any way.The six men of his picking sat quietly in the cabin. They might have been the same six men Price had first met when he landed in the Belt, woods-rangers, hunters of deer 

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