Description: Chapter 1 Pain. A torment of fire raced along Gilbert Gosseyn's nerves as he stood on the promenade deck of the great space liner Spirit of Liberty. The next moment: darkness. A moment before, the calm voice of the captain echoed from the annunciators, warning passengers that the distorter-shift from orbit to the ship's berth on the planet below was about to take place. Through the cool armored plastic of the transparent hull, the planet Nirene hung like a black pearl in space, her ice caps a dazzling azure crown in the light of her blue-giant sun. Then next moment . . . Gosseyn's body jerked in agony, but before he could draw breath, the darkness and the scalding pain were gone. He landed on his feet in a crouch. There was carpet, not metal deck, underfoot. He blinked. His eyes adjusted to indoor gloom. He was in a small, well-kept apartment. Behind him was a kitchenette, outfitted with the latest in electronic appliances; before him to the left, a retractable door was slid half-open to reveal a greenhouse filled with orchids. Steamy, hot air came from that door. What little light there was came from that doorway. Before him to the right was a closed door. Directly before him were a desk and chair made of lightweight plastic-steel. The chair had toppled. Here was a corpse. The corpse was distorted, blackened, as if the once-human body had been twisted by unthinkably powerful forces. Here and there a white bone fragment peered through the dark, dry mass. The bones were subtly curved, but not fractured, warped out of alignment. The mental picture formed was one of subatomic wrongness. The man had been of a wiry build, lean but not tall. Few other details survived. The face of the corpse was an indistinguishable blackened mass. The head was burned free of hair. The right hand was a fleshless black claw; the left hand had been burned down to a stump. Concentric stains of decayed matter surrounded the left stump, as if the murder-energy, whatever it had been, had lingered at that spot after the man's death. Tiny glimmers of gold formed teardrops at the center of the halo of stains: Gosseyn assumed it was the remnant of a wedding ring. Gilbert Gosseyn gently probed the corpse with a pulse of energy from his double brain. There was no return signal: He could not "memorize" or mentally "photograph" the cellular and atomic structure of the corpse. The man's clothing, strangely, was not burnt or marred. He was dressed in the somber, loose-fitting garments favored by citizens of the central worlds of the Galactic League. This raised the question of what planet Gosseyn was now on. How many light-years had he been carried by distorter? The gravity seemed the same as it had been aboard ship, which had been adjusted to match that of the planet Nirene. The sensation of momentary darkness was familiar to him. Distorter matrices were able to form an electro-nuclear similarity between the atomic composition of one area of space-time and another, in such a fashion that the interval between the two points became mathematically insignificant. During that moment of distortion, objects, energy, people, even giant space vessels, could be moved across the gap between the two points as if there were no gap. The lesser always moved toward the greater. Gosseyn knew the phenomenon better than anyone else. Except for Gosseyn Three, his "twin brother" (that cell-duplicated version of himself created in the same fashion he had been), no other living person was known to have the extra neural matter, a secondary brain, tuned to the energy flows of the continuum in such a fashion as to allow him to act as a living, biological distorter machine. Someone had acted during the moment of distorter uncertainty. While the ship moved to her home-station receivers to which she was attuned, something had attuned Gosseyn . . . here. Alert, he stepped into the orchid greenhouse. The room was hot and wet but unlit. A shawl hung on a peg near the door, emitting cool air. Gosseyn assumed the thermostat on the shawl was turned down to compensate for the close warmth of the room. Something tickled his memory. Where had he seen this before? The light came from a second door beyond, half-open. Gosseyn was through it in a moment. It was a bedroom. First, he stepped to the window, turned it on. The window was bolted to what seemed a wooden wall, but Gosseyn's secondary brain could detect the residual magnetism of the armor beneath the wood veneer, nine inches thick or more. The window was a fixed-direction model, able to bring in images from beyond the armored wall but not to peer into neighboring apartments. The view showed a giant blue-white sun glaring down on a metropolis of superskyscrapers. Despite their height, the buildings were squat, cylinders as wide as they were tall; many were crowned with rooftop gardens of vivid blue plant life. One building, a stepped pyramid half a mile high, had acres of garden and park at every balcony. But the scene had a grim aspect to it. Each building was surrounded by a slight haze like a heat shimmer: electromagnetic force shields heavy enough to dissipate the heat and radiation of orbital bombardments, nor did modern windows need to pierce the massive armor of their surfaces to bring in light. Air traffic was conspicuously absent, as were energy-bridges leading from roof to roof. Flying cars, or pedestrians strolling atop a solid streamer of force, made vulnerable targets. Gosseyn amplified the window image. As a precaution, he selected a spot on a nearby rooftop and memorized it. Specialized ganglia in his extra brain felt the "tug" of awareness of that little portion of space less than a mile away. He set the trigger in his mind to jump him to that spot if doubt or pain struck him. Then he focused the window on the posters and signs of the few street-level shops he saw. Some writing was in the script of Gorgzidi, which Gosseyn could not read but which he recognized. The automatic methods of learning spoken languages at a subverbal level did not have a means of teaching writing systems. Writing on the older buildings was Nireni, which he had learned in preparation for his voyage. He had also studied maps; he recognized place names. This was the city New Nirene of the planet Nirene, the second city of that name. Before the throne had been removed to Planet Gorgzid, this world had been the capital of the Greatest Empire. The first city called Nirene, once a metropolis of some thirty million souls, was now a burnt, radioactive wasteland. The military aspect of the architecture of New Nirene was merely one more legacy of the decades of iron rule by Enro the Red. The great dictator was gone, but the events the tyrant set in motion continued in their remorseless way under the vast inertia of social habit and thought. The years of conditioning by police and military propagandists left a visible stamp on the scene below, and, Gosseyn reminded himself, an invisible stamp in the minds of Enro's subjects. To call the world a League protectorate was an abstraction, an incomplete statement. On a fundamental level, by habit and custom and all the neurotic behaviors of the untrained minds of Enro's subjects, this was still a world of the Imperium. There was a high dome in the distance, possibly the very starport where the ship he'd traveled on was now berthed. The dome seemed solid: Distorter technology did not require the ship launching or landing stations to be open to the sky. But there were antennas atop the peak that suggested X-ray radar-photography arrays able to examine ships in orbit for weapons before bringing them to the surface, in the heart of the city. So Gosseyn had been carried a few miles, at most. Why? And by whom? Gosseyn turned from the window. The sense of familiarity was stronger now. There were two separate beds, with a nightstand between them. Next to one of the beds was an electric shoe rack, with several pairs of women's shoes, kept clean by the silent, invisible vibrations of the rack. Beyond, a beige suit of feminine cut was visible through a gap in the closet door. On the vanity, next to a small jewelry box, was a slender platinum cigarette case of the automatic kind. Everything on that side of the room bespoke taste, wealth, and elegance. Next to the other bed was a bookshelf, neatly organized. The spines were lettered in English. Books of psychology, neurolinguistic philosophy, atomic theory, forensics, and other scientific works. The books were of the type that recorded spoken thoughts and notes by the reader, and were locked at his fingerprint. Atop the bookcase were several small scientific instruments, folded into black leather cases. Gosseyn picked up two of them: The first was a unit for detecting atomic vibrations at a fine level; the second was a camera whose special lens arrangement could reconstruct photons absorbed into ordinary substances, glass or wood, and show recent events. Gosseyn stepped to the closet, opened it. The man's portion of the closet had four suits of clothing of similar cut: One of them was an Earthman's dress suit, jacket and tie. A transparent plastic case built into the side of the closet hel

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