now-crystal design, and
he realized that it was a ceiling and that he was lying on his back.
He couldn't move his head, but by shifting his eyes he saw that he
was completely naked and surrounded by a tangle of tubes and wires,
which puzzled him briefly. Then he knew that he was not on a bed,
but on a robomedic, and the tubes would be for medication and
wound drainage and intravenous feeding, and the wires would be
to electrodes imbedded in his body for diagnosis, and the
crown-of-thorns thing would be more electrodes for an encephalograph.
He'd been on one of those robomedics before, when he had been gored
by a bisonoid on the cattle range.

[Illustration]

That was what it was; he was still under treatment. But that seemed
so long ago; so many things--he must have dreamed them--seemed to
have happened.

Then he remembered, and struggled futilely to rise.

"Elaine!" he called. "Elaine, where are you?"

There was a stir and somebody came into his limited view; his
cousin, Nikkolay Trask.

"Nikkolay; Andray Dunnan," he said. "What happened to Elaine?"

Nikkolay winced, as though something he had expected to hurt had
hurt worse than he had expected.

"Lucas." He swallowed. "Elaine ... Elaine is dead."

Elaine is dead. That didn't make sense.

"She was killed instantly, Lucas. Hit six times; I don't think
she even felt the first one. She didn't suffer at all."

Somebody moaned, and then he realized that it had been himself.

"You were hit twice," Nikkolay was telling him. "One in the leg;
smashed the femur. And one in the chest. That one missed your heart
by an inch."

"Pity it did." He was beginning to remember clearly, now. "I threw
her down, and tried to cover her. I must have thrown her straight
into the burst and only caught the last of it myself." There was
something else; oh, yes. "Dunnan. Did they get him?"

Nikkolay shook his head. "He got away. Stole the _Enterprise_ and
took her off-planet."

"I want to get him myself."

He started to rise again; Nikkolay nodded to someone out of sight.
A cool hand touched his chin, and he smelled a woman's perfume,
nothing at all like Elaine's. Something like a small insect bit
him on the neck. The room grew dark.

Elaine was dead. There was no more Elaine, nowhere at all. Why,
that must mean there was no more world. So that was why it had
gotten so dark.

He woke again, fitfully, and it would be daylight and he could see
the yellow sky through an open