it.

The thick growth of trees looked unfamiliar to Barton, ,? but not alien-mottled grayish brown bark, straight

sturdy trunks that branched above, leaves like dark

evergreen but wider and thicker. Pulpy-looking, Barton : thought, but a fallen leaf picked from the ground was r tough and springy to his touch. Barton found its pungent, It spicy smell rather pleasant.

:'. Gradually the slope increased. The climb was tiring;

-^ their pace slowed. Bartob called a rest stop. "We're on ^: the mountain now, all right. Snack time, if you want to."

t "How much farther, do you think, Barton?"

i? "No way of knowing, Limila, until these trees thin 'y out a little-or we walk smack into the thing. We've been

S going straight up-slope, near as I can manage it, so we .s^, shouldn't miss by much." He turned to Eeshta. "You 1^ tired?"

"Not badly. Barton. I grew for the most part on Dem- mon, where gravity pulls more strongly, before going to Ashura."

"To where?"

"Ashura-the planet of the research station, where you were."

Barton laughed. "You know, that's funny-I never t^ -ight to ask the name of the place."

"I thought you knew. The questioning teams, on Earth, asked me such things."

"I guess I had my head into too much other stuff, then." He rose. "Okay-everybody ready to move on?"

Snacks were finished; the three sipped water and re- sumed the climb.

As they proceeded, the forest grew less thickly. The change was not great-Barton remembered that the mountain was tree-covered to its peak-but now he could see that they were on a ridge with sides that dropped away more steeply as it rose. It vexed him, for the ridge slanted about ten degrees to the right of his

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chosen course, but he had to follow it-the alternative was a steep descent and steeper climb to regain lost alti- tude.

Where the ridge ended, the major mass ahead rose sharply from a talus slope of broken rock. "Must we climb that?" Limila said.

"Not here. We'll follow along the lower edge, as far as we can. To the left-the ridge brought us quite a bit the other way, and it looks like it might not be quite as steep above, over there. And at least there's no trees di- rectly above us, for a while. Maybe .... "

Picking their way along the tumbled fringe of the talus, they continued. Now Sisshain's sun was hot; sweat flowed under Barton's robe. Reaching a point at which the ridge began to drop off steeply, they bad to leave it, and began to clamber up and along the loose rock.'

On the treacherous footing, progress was slow. Barton cautioned the others, and saw to it that no one was ever directly in line below another. He paused frequently, not only to rest but to squint, uphill and at an angle against the sun, through binoculars Limila had carried.

The side of the talus petered out at the edge of a bare wash-a gully-that cut almost directly up-slope. Stand- ing at that edge, Barton looked up-and saw the mono- lith.

"Holy ^Christ!" Showing at the immediate left of the gully's top was whal he guessed to be the upper third of the thing. "If that's what I think it is-t

"Let's get to moving." '

Climbing the gully took the party into afternoon, but until they reached the top, they made no midday meal.

Above them, the mountain-forested once more-rose less steeply. And from their vantage point they could see, above the trees, almost the whole of the' dazzling, iridescent tower.

Now Barton would speak. "It's a ship! It has to be the biggest goddamned granddaddy-starship ever built; it can't be anything else. I wonder who. , . ."

"Who but the Demu, Barton?" said Eeshta. "Now I understand."

"Understand what, Eesbta?"

"From things Hishtoo said. Barton, and from talk among the young as I was growing. We are not told. so we fasten onto chance hints and make ideas-theo-

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ries- We believed-and thought the grown believed also

-that Sisshain is our home world, the source of all Demu.

"When Hishtoo said to me, on the ship before TUara, 'the Demu came,' I thought it was from Sisshain he meant, to the other worlds. Remember, Barton-when I told you what he said?"

Barton remembered-Eeshta's chant. His spine prick- led.

"But now you think differently?" He knew what she would say.

She did. "Sisshain is not our origin. This is the kind of ship that brought the Demu to Sisshain. It may be the ship-one of the ships-that burned away the worlds.

Further down the Arm, where none are now to be found."

Slowly, Barton nodded. "Yes-it might be, at that.

Certainly, you're not related to what we've seen of the local fauna. But take a look through these binoculars- they adjust, like this- Then you too, Limila."

They looked. "See?" he said. "That baby's been out of commission-or at least, not used-for a long time.

See those gouges? Deep ones. The cameras blurred that detail when I made the pass at it, landing-we were Just plain going too fast-but some of those marks must be a meter deep, or more. And notice how the colors, and the way they nicker, go all the way into the metal, if it is metal. Hell, it has to be-or something just as tough.

From here, I don't see any holes that go through the hull-I wonder how thick it really is.

"See the vegetation growik in some of the dents? It doesn't look like much, from here, but some of those are good-sized trees. Lower down, the ship's covered with vines, something like ivy. It grows almost halfway up- how many centuries would that take?

"Most of all, look at the little marks. Erosion patterns

-erosion patterns in metal. We're looking at a lot vr time."

Eeshta looked at him. "You say, then, the ship is dead."

"Not dead. Something around here has enough whammy to lay a field on us at several kilometers that kills our own drive. So, not dead-but not flown for a long, long time. Maybe not in shape to fly. Or maybe kept idle for some reason we don't know.

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"Yet," he added, "Well-I don't know about every- body else, but I'm hungry."

"Yes," said Limila. "We had forgotten of our lunch, had we not?"