Chapter 21: Closing In

"We've shut down all of his contacts back on Earth," Neal told them. Once again the six of them, Neal, Amy, Jewel, Phil, Luana and Charley, were assembled in his off- world base. The room they were in could have been the boardroom of any large Earthside company. A large mahogany table was surrounded by comfortable chairs, and large windows looked out over an expanse of woodlands. "We located seven installations there, some in the USA, others in South American countries, and we believe that we've found and secured all of them. Four of his offworld bases have also been closed down, and my experts figure that he doesn't have more than one or two left. Luana, your idea to look at lower-gravity planets has paid off, but we won't count on it too heavily."

"How far out have you been looking?" Charley looked up

from where he had been doodling on a scratch pad.

"Eight settings each way on each factor. None of the portals we've found so far could reach any farther than five, so we figure that's far enough."

"Yeah, that's, lemme see, almost twenty-five million dimensions to check out." Charley sat back with an air of satisfaction. Shouldn't take too awfully long to do that little thing."

"There are only some twenty suitable worlds that we've found," Neal agreed. "None of them are ones we've done business with, but they are at least somewhat livable. Most of them are too hot, too cold or have some other drawback to exploitation, and none have any native intelligences that we have detected."

"We have a portal opened at an orbital distance circling each one," Amy added. "If a portal is opened on any of them, we'll be able to zero in on it."

"What will you do with Steve Jordan when you do catch him," Luana asked. "Will you turn him over to Earth authorities?"

"And have some judge turn him loose in a few years?" Phil shook his head. "Not the best idea in the world... the worlds."

"We'll decide that when the time comes," Neal told them. "We may just strand him on some really far-out world,

some place non-technical where he won't be able to get back and give us any trouble."

"I imagine that he's feeling pretty desperate by now," Phil mused. "He's got to know that we're closing in on him."

The tension mounted as they waited for word from their searching portals. Finally, as the local day wore on toward evening, a buzzer by Neal's chair startled them into alertness.

"Marten here." He pressed a button set into the edge

of the table.

"Magnetic pulsations on world nineteen," a voice from the room's speakers informed them. "Closing in on the site now."

"We'll be right there." Neal pushed his chair back abruptly. "All right, let's go see what kind of fish we've caught."

A silent elevator took them swiftly to the building's lower level where the mighty portal machines were housed. Most of the hundred or so mechanisms that sprawled across the expanse of floor were silent, unattended for the moment to reduce any possible interference. Only occasional mechanisms scattered about the room were active.

"Over here," a technician waved her arm to attract their attention. "Nothing's happening right now, but I've

got the location spotted."

Looking down at the planet from space, Phil was strongly reminded of pictures sent back from Mars in the latter days of the US space program. The globe he saw had the same reddish cast, though other colors were hinted at. The polar caps were larger, and hints of greenery traced fragile lines down from the ice toward the equator, as though water from the melting ice sustained a few hardy remnants of vegetation.

"You call that livable?" Phil wrinkled his nose in disgust. "I'd sure hate to try living there."

"It's livable, all right," Neal answered somberly. "Not very, perhaps, but definitely borderline livable. Where did you spot the magnetic pulses?"

"Close to the equator," the technician answered. "Just to the north of it. Right about where you can see what looks like a deep canyon. It was more noticeable when the sun was lower in the sky. There! More pulses. It looks like someone is testing a portal installation. It must be a big

one, the pulses are stronger than they should be."

"Drop down about half way, " Neal commanded. "That

should still be far enough away so that they can't detect us."

The image expanded, as though their eye in the sky was swooping down on its prey. They could see now that the

canyon held a trace of greenery, and Phil thought that he made out a tiny sparkle, as of sunlight reflected from open water.

He watched with grudging approval as clumsy fingers bolted the final connections to the massive iron framework. The worker, a satisfied expression on his brutish, loose- lipped features, turned to face him.

"Wurrk iss finn-ish. Harnash go-o ho-ome now?"

He nodded reluctant assent. The creature's fellow workers, their tasks completed to his satisfaction, had already passed through the smaller portal that had brought them here. Their clumsy paws with their stubby fingers had proved amazingly dexterous under his tutelage, finishing his master project well ahead of schedule. He had sent them home earlier this day, laden with the packets of hard candy he had given them as bonuses in addition to their eagerly sought wages.

No, they certainly weren't anything like slender, swift-footed, blue-scaled servants he'd been accustomed to in his father's realm. These workers were thick-bodied, crudely fashioned excuses for humans with their clumps of bristly hair sprouting irregularly from between horny plates that covered their hulking bodies. They were merely muscle, sentient enough lumps of flesh that obeyed his commands.

The silence of an empty planet closed in around him. His planet! His to do with as he alone willed. His planet to change from a barren, unpeopled desert to a green and fruitful paradise. Or else, to strip away whatever traces of water and air that still clung to its empty wastes, leaving it forever dead if his pursuers did manage to catch up with him.

He was no longer merely Steve Jordan, a hunted fugitive living under a name that wasn't his own. He was once again St'Charn nzu Y'Charn, son of heroes, born of a line of warriors and destined from birth to be a leader of warriors. He had come a long way from that lost child who had been taken in from the streets of an alien city, burdened with a meaningless name by strangers who refused to recognize his royal heritage, cast out from his own world by the failed experiment of his father's resident wizard. For years he'd clung stubbornly to the belief that his father's followers would find him, rescue him from that alien land, but they had never arrived. Then he'd tried to find his own way back, stealing that idiot Neal Marten's rediscovery of a trans dimensional interface, only to learn just how many universes there were, so many that it could take centuries of searching to discover the world that had given him birth.

He had been a child, gifted with a child's eager curiosity for the world about him. He had wandered into the

old wizard, Forbish's tower, secure in the knowledge that none would dare to offer the King's son any harm. Hearing strange sounds echoing down the steep stair to Forbish's tower, he had crept up the steps as silently as he could manage.

He'd always been fascinated by the myriad stinks, bright lights and colored smokes that Forbish could produce, seemingly at will from the billowing sleeves of his multi- colored robe, but the sharp smell of lightning that rolled out of the wizard's chamber was something new. The muttered words that emanated from behind the tattered screen across the doorway didn't seem to be part of a spell, merely the disjointed phrases uttered by an old man who was caught up wholly in whatever it was he was doing.