"I killed myself once in Macpherson Tower. Once is enough."

The first-aid unit and survival kit were intact. I wrapped the parts of his body that I could reach in mylar foil blankets. Did my best to inspect his shattered legs without removing the remnants of his envirosuit. It was still producing warmth.

"There's bound to be a medic in the Rampart SWAT team coming up from Toronto. It should arrive soon. I'll put up the survival tent to keep the snow off you. Would you like a drink of water?"

"Go to hell."

He turned his head away and didn't say anything else. His eyes were closed. There was a pulse in his neck, so I figured he'd either fainted or gone into shock.

Time to move along. I flicked the emergency beacon, erected the tent, and turned on its heater. Then I hiked back down Creek Trail to my own machine and returned to the lodge.

Joanna and I were still trying to find a cutting torch in the shambles of the workroom, which was in the damaged staff wing, when five blue Rampart ExSec hoppers landed in the compound. The team leader was an Amazonian black woman named Captain Sarah Marcus.

She had the medical personnel and the equipment necessary to free and evacuate Drummond. She had the good sense not to argue when I said I was going along.

Two aircraft landed in the creek bed, the only open space available. Captain Marcus supervised loading the gear on AG totes, but I was the one who led the way as we snowshoed through the cold white woods to the place where Alistair Drummond awaited rescue.

"What the hell is that stink?" Marcus said.

I said, "Oh, shit," knowing.

We found the tent torn to bits and bloody snow trampled by clawed feet and a body with its throat torn out, defiled with foul-smelling musk.

"There it is, Cap!" one of the troops cried, whipping out his Kagi sidearm and taking aim. "Looks like a goddamn bear!"

I knocked his gun arm up and the blast went harmlessly into the trees. A bulky dark form bounded out from a tumble of rocks and dashed downhill with surprising speed. In a moment it had vanished into the storm.

"Not a bear," I said. "A wolverine. Leave it alone."

Captain Marcus said, "It killed this man. We can scope it out and burn it later, when we're airborne."

"No," I told her firmly. "We'll let the animal be. It's a wild thing. It acts naturally, following its own rules. It has a right to do so. Do you understand?" "Yes." She turned her back on me and began giving orders to the others, and I tramped away downhill into the clean white falling snow. Epilogue

The scout ship that Adam Stanislawski had sent to Amenti, in the Sagittarius Whorl, reported that the asteroid was the home base of an estimated two hundred Haluk corsairs.

Shortly after the incident at the Haluk embassy was reported by the media, the Macrodur chairman dispatched a fleet of Concern cruisers to clean out the pirate nest.

Following the destruction of their starships, the Haluk declared war on the Commonwealth of Human Worlds.

A force of consisting of eighty heavy warships and 160 light starfighters lifted off from Haluk colonial planets at the tip of the Perseus Spur and headed for Seriphos, Rampart's local headquarters. The attackers were intercepted in deep space by Rampart starships and Zone Patrol. Eventually they were annihilated, although the outnumbered defenders suffered heavy casualties. Seriphos itself was left unscathed.

Immediately after this engagement, a second enemy fleet of equal size left the Haluk worlds and began to encircle Cravat, sole source of the genen vector PD32:C2. Rampart forces had been siphoned away from Cravat to defend Seriphos, and the tide of battle began to turn toward the aliens.

At the same time, Rampart's powerful Fleet Scanner Satellite at Tyrins detected nearly four thousand alien vessels en route from the Haluk Cluster to the Perseus Spur.

I consulted with the Rampart Board of Directors, then ordered the Rampart defenders to incinerate every landmass on Cravat with antimatter bombs.

Virtually every armed Concern and Commonwealth star-ship in the galaxy, including that of Captain Guillermo Bermudez Obregon, based on Kedge-Lockaby, was mobilized to defend the Milky Way Galaxy. I drove Makebate.

After sixty-one days of righting in intergalactic space outside the Perseus Spur, the aliens surrendered.

Mimo, who was once again in excellent health, personally accounted for eighty-four ship-kills. He threw a celebratory luau at his Eyebrow Cay home, and some three dozen lowlife starship commanders who had distinguished themselves in the late conflict attended.

So did I. I was still blue, but no one minded. I had popped 166 of the bastards.

The defeated Haluk deposed the Servant of Servants and imprisoned him in a monastery of Anointed Elders, where he was to undergo corrective meditation for the rest of his life.

The surrender agreement was eyeballed by Locutor Ru Kamik and the Council of Nine. In it they abjectly disavowed the Grand Design and begged the Human Commonwealth to have mercy on the Haluk people.

Magnanimous in victory, the Commonwealth agreed to sponsor a massive research program-contracted out to Rampart Concern-synthesizing the vector virus PD32:C2.

If, after five years, the aliens demonstrated that they embraced peace and abandoned the pernicious philosophy of uncontrolled population growth, the vector manufacturing process would be made available to them, gratis. Human inspection teams and family- planning counselors were to be welcomed in the Haluk Cluster, as well as the Haluk colonial worlds. Normal trade relations would be reestablished. If all went well during the five-year period, the Commonwealth would consider systematically granting limited numbers of Milky Way planets to the Haluk, until their population pressures eased.

Until then they were stuck with allomorphy and the worlds they already inhabited.

The flawed alloeradication therapy developed by the late Emily Blake Konigsberg would be studied by human experts during the interim, and tweaked to eliminate the relapse factor. Fortunately, treated Haluk individuals who had reverted to the testudomorph state did emerge from their chrysalids as healthy allomorphic graciles.

In another condition of the surrender, the Haluk agreed to round up all Haluk-human demiclones, toss them into dystasis tanks, and change them back into normal Haluk. A few genetic transforms, including the woman known as Dolores da Gama, eluded the dragnet and are said to be blissfully enjoying the human condition on obscure freesoil worlds.

Nearly ten thousand human DNA donors were rescued from the Haluk colonies, in addition to the higher-status individuals imprisoned in Macpherson Tower. Some of the former had floated for years, and had had five or six alien copies made of themselves.

After memory reprogramming, over half of the donors regained their mental health, found employment, and resumed their interrupted personal lives. The others were cared for by the Commonwealth at Haluk expense.

The Haluk promised to eschew mining transactinides with convict slave labor. In another CHW-sponsored project-contracted out to Sheltok Concern-human mining engineers traveled to the Haluk Cluster to instruct the aliens in more civilized technology.

The Haluk were apt pupils. In time Sheltok would find itself purchasing more efficient machinery for the Sagittarian mines, designed by Haluk-just as Bodascon Concern would adopt certain Haluk starship innovations.

The aliens were hardware hotshots but abysmally unskilled in biotechnology and computer science. The new trade treaty allowed them to buy all the human goods they wanted, with the exception of certain armaments.

Julian May 375 Enormous quantities of Macrodur computers were sold to the Haluk. The manufacturers of ticklesuits and Japanese kimonos also did a roaring business.

Meanwhile, back on the planet Earth, a political upheaval was in full swing.

Many Conservative Delegates were recalled and Reversionist candidates elected to take their places. Geraldo Gonzalez matured into a statesman of major stature. Together with Efrem Sontag, he sponsored Assembly bills that eventually eliminated the longstanding domination of CHW politics by the Hundred Concerns.

Pocket Delegates disappeared into oblivion. Syndics found other jobs. Corporation finks were immediately purged from the Secretariat for Xenoaffairs, the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat, and Zone Patrol. Over the next decade, legislation was enacted that reformed many areas of the human governmental structure.

The Conlegius statutes, which had given Concerns far-ranging independent police powers, were abolished. At the suggestion of Delegate Sontag, Karl Nazarian was appointed to a new CCID task force overseeing Concern security reorganization.

The Commonwealth Correction System was also revamped, eliminating the penalty of disenfranchisement except for capital crimes. Throwaways were invited to reapply for citizenship and carefully screened. The scandal-ridden Coventry penitentiaries were closed down. Corporate ownership of the stars would persist for a long time, as the Assembly slowly whittled away at the entrenched hegemony of Big Business and enacted new tax measures to finance the reforms. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was a galactic democracy.

Nonstargoing Insap races were granted just wages and given educational options.

They did not become corporate stakeholders and share in the profits of their exploited worlds. Their consciousness raised, some of the natives became predictably restless.

But the majority didn't give a damn, so long as the human invaders brought in plenty of trade goods.

Beer was an especially big hit among carbon-based life-forms.

After the brief Haluk War, I spent time in dystasis and emerged with my previous body, buffed up a little here and there. Joanna was present for my rollout, and so were Simon-healthy as a horse-and Eve and Beth and even Cousin Zed. Karl Nazarian and his Over-the-Hill Gang were on hand, along with Mimo and my old comrades Ivor Jenkins and Ildiko Szabo.

Daniel Frost pleaded a previous engagement with his psychotherapist. He now lived quietly with his wife in a secure house in the Ontario Cottage Country and steadfastly denied that he had done anything wrong.

Fulfilling my promise to Simon, I now serve as a part-time Rampart executive. Most of my work is tedious troubleshooting. I have moments when I sincerely wish I were a beach bum again.

I did manage to implement Reversionist principles on many of the planets in the Perseus Spur, but the ex-Galapharma worlds in the Orion Arm fought my radical notions tooth and nail. Their reform may have to wait until the Commonwealth Assembly does the job for me.

I myself have no desire to seek public office, although I still give generous donations to the Reversionists. A political cowboy is a sorry thing.

One of the charitable foundations that I manage is dedicated to alleviating the lot of the denizens of the Dark Path. Sadly, numbers of them want nothing more than to continue on exactly as before; the trogs are always with us. A sizable majority have been assisted by my foundation to make new lives under one sun or another.

Mama Fanchon Labrecque became head of the Visiting Practitioner Service of Kedge- Lockaby's new Katje Vander-post Memorial Hospital.

Mohammed al-Wazan is in medical school and hopes someday to join Mama. The sadistic executive creep who used him as a boy-toy was mysteriously shanghaied and is now a permanent maroony, in charge of toilet-cubicle maintenance in the asteroid Phlegethon.

Santa Claus still lives beneath Toronto. If there is profound symbolism there, I haven't been able to figure it out.

The rest of the Grange Place Tribe have returned to their families and are doing as well as can be expected.

Professor Joanna DeVet teaches political science at Commonwealth University for three terms each year. Her book was a popular smash and provoked unseemly jealousy among certain of her academic colleagues, even though she donated the proceeds to charity. We were remarried a week after I emerged from the tank. We have a house in the Kawartha Lakes region and an apartment in Rampart Tower. Neither one has domestic robots.

We vacation at the Sky Ranch and on Kedge-Lockaby. She loves my yellow submarine. I love the way she sits a horse.

Joanna is still trying to understand me, and claims that the natural history of the wolverine offers significant insights into my character. I call that piffle.

She has also tells me that she sometimes misses Helly the Haluk.

I don't.