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For Students
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viii Preface

Acknowledgments
The genesis for this book and its approach reflect the oral tradition of my colleagues, past
and present, at the University of Rochester. William Meckling and Michael Jensen stimu-
lated my thinking and provided much of the theoretical structure underlying the book, as
anyone familiar with their work will attest. My long and productive collaboration with
Ross Watts further refined the approach. He also furnished most of the intellectual capi-
tal for Chapter 3, including the problem material. Ray Ball offered transformative ideas.
Clifford Smith and James Brickley continue to enhance my economic education. Three
colleagues, Andrew Christie, Dan Gode, and Scott Keating, supplied particularly insightful
comments that enriched the analysis at critical junctions. Valuable comments from Anil
Arya, Ron Dye, Andy Leone, Dale Morse, Ram Ramanan, K. Ramesh, Shyam Sunder, and
Joseph Weintrop are gratefully acknowledged.
This project benefited greatly from the honest and intelligent feedback of numerous
instructors. I wish to thank Mahendra Gupta, Susan Hamlen, Badr Ismail, Charles Kile,
Leslie Kren, Don May, William Mister, Mohamed Onsi, Stephen Ryan, Michael Sandretto,
Richard Sansing, Deniz Saral, Gary Schneider, Joe Weber, and William Yancey. This book
also benefited from three of my other textbook projects. Writing Management Accounting:
Analysis and Interpretation (McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997) with Dale Morse, Manage-
rial Economics and Organizational Architecture (McGraw Hill Education, 2016) with
James Brickley and Clifford Smith, and Management Accounting in a Dynamic Environ-
ment (Routledge, 2016) with Cheryl McWatters helped me to better present key concepts.
To the numerous students who endured the development process, I owe an enormous
debt of gratitude. I hope they learned as much from the material as I learned teaching them.
Some were even kind enough to provide critiques and suggestions—in particular, Jan
Dick Eijkelboom. Others supplied, either directly or indirectly, the problem material in
the text. The able research assistance of P. K. Madappa, Eamon Molloy, Jodi Parker, Steve
Sanders, Richard Sloan, and especially Gary Hurst contributed amply to the manuscript
and problem material. Janice Willett and Barbara Schnathorst did a superb job of editing
the manuscript and problem material.
The very useful comments and suggestions from the following reviewers are greatly
appreciated:

Urton Anderson William M. Cready Robert Hurt

Howard M. Armitage James M. Emig Douglas A. Johnson
Vidya Awasthi Gary Fane Lawrence A. Klein
Kashi Balachandran Anita Feller Thomas Krissek
Da-Hsien Bao Tahirih Foroughi A. Ronald Kucic
Ron Barden Ivar Fris Wikil Kwak
Howard G. Berline Jackson F. Gillespie Daniel Law
Margaret Boldt Irving Gleim Chi-Wen Jevons Lee
David Borst Jon Glover Suzanne Lowensohn
Eric Bostwick Gus Gordon James R. Martin
Marvin L. Bouillon Sylwia Gornik-Tomaszewski Alan H. McNamee
Wayne Bremser Tony Greig Marilyn Okleshen
David Bukovinsky Susan Haka Shailandra Pandit
Linda Campbell Bert Horwitz Sam Phillips
Jane Cote Steven Huddart Frank Probst
Preface ix

Kamala Raghavan Henry Schwarzbach Clark Wheatley

William Rau Elizabeth J. Serapin Lourdes F. White
Jane Reimers Steve Shively Paul F. Williams
Thomas Ross Norman Shultz Robert W. Williamson
Harold P. Roth James C. Stallman Peggy Wright
P. N. Saksena William Thomas Stevens Jeffrey A. Yost
Donald Samaleson Monte R. Swain S. Mark Young
Michael J. Sandretto Heidi Tribunella Mustafa Younis
Richard Saouma Suneel Udpa
Arnold Schneider Robert Wesoloskie

To my wife, Dodie, and daughters, Daneille and Amy, thank you for setting the right
priorities and for giving me the encouragement and environment to be productive. Finally,
I wish to thank my parents for all their support.
Jerold L. Zimmerman
University of Rochester
 Brief Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 The Nature of Costs 21
3 Opportunity Cost of Capital and Capital Budgeting 84
4 Organizational Architecture 124
5 Responsibility Accounting and Transfer Pricing 156
6 Budgeting 211
7 Cost Allocation: Theory 273
8 Cost Allocation: Practices 319
9 Absorption Cost Systems 384
10 Criticisms of Absorption Cost Systems: Incentive to Overproduce 439
11 Criticisms of Absorption Cost Systems: Inaccurate Product Costs 473
12 Standard Costs: Direct Labor and Materials 527
13 Overhead and Marketing Variances 563
14 Management Accounting in a Changing Environment 597

Solutions to Concept Questions 644

Glossary 654
Index 658

x
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
A. Managerial Accounting: Decision Making and Control 2
B. Design and Use of Cost Systems 4
C. Marmots and Grizzly Bears 7
D. Management Accountant’s Role in the Organization 9
E. Evolution of Management Accounting: A Framework for Change 11
F. Vortec Medical Probe Example 14
G. Outline of the Text 17
H. Summary 18

2 The Nature of Costs 21

A. Opportunity Costs 22
1. Characteristics of Opportunity Costs 23
2. Examples of Decisions Based on Opportunity Costs 23
B. Cost Variation 27
1. Fixed, ­Marginal, and Average Costs 27
2. Linear Approximations 30
3. Other Cost Behavior Patterns 31
4. Activity Measures 32
C. Cost–Volume–Profit Analysis 33
1. Copier Example 33
2. Calculating Break-Even and Target Profits 34
3. Limitations of Cost–Volume– Profit Analysis 38
4. Multiple Products 40
5. Operating Leverage 41
D. Opportunity Costs versus Accounting Costs 43
1. Period versus Product Costs 45
2. Direct Costs, Overhead Costs, and Opportunity Costs 45
E. Cost Estimation 47
1. Account Classification 47
2. Motion and Time Studies 48
F. Summary 48
Appendix: Costs and the Pricing Decision 49

3 Opportunity Cost of Capital and Capital Budgeting 84

A. Opportunity Cost of Capital 85
B. Interest Rate Fundamentals 88
1. Future Values 88

xi
xii Contents

2. Present Values 89
3. Present Value of a Cash Flow Stream 90
4. Perpetuities 91
5. Annuities 91
6. Multiple Cash Flows per Year 92
C. Capital Budgeting: The Basics 94
1. Decision to Acquire an MBA 94
2. Decision to Open a Day Spa 95
3. Essential Points about Capital Budgeting 96
D. Capital Budgeting: Some Complexities 97
1. Risk 97
2. Inflation 99
3. Taxes and Depreciation Tax Shields 100
E. Alternative Investment Criteria 102
1. Payback 102
2. Accounting Rate of Return 103
3. Internal Rate of Return 105
4. Methods Used in Practice 108
F. Summary 108

4 Organizational Architecture 124

A. Basic Building Blocks 125
1. Self-Interested Behavior, Team Production, and Agency Costs 125
2. Decision Rights and Rights Systems 130
3. Role of Knowledge and Decision Making 131
4. Markets ­versus Firms 132
5. Influence Costs 134
B. Organizational Architecture 135
1. Three-Legged Stool 135
2. Decision Management versus Decision Control 138
C. Accounting’s Role in the Organization’s Architecture 140
D. Example of Accounting’s Role: Executive Compensation Contracts 143
E. Summary 143

5 Responsibility Accounting and Transfer Pricing 156

A. Responsibility Accounting 157
1. Cost Centers 158
2. Profit Centers 160
3. Investment Centers 161
4. Economic Value Added (EVA®) 165
5. Controllability Principle 168
B. Transfer Pricing 169
1. International Taxation 169
2. Economics of Transfer Pricing 171
3. Common Transfer-Pricing Methods 175
4. Reorganization: The Solution if All Else Fails 180
5. Recap 180
C. Summary 182
Contents xiii

6 Budgeting 211
A. Generic Budgeting Systems 213
1. Country Club 213
2. Large Corporation 217
B. Trade-Off between Decision Management and Decision Control 220
1. Communicating Specialized Knowledge versus Performance
Evaluation 220
2. Budget Ratcheting 220
3. Participative Budgeting 223
4. New Approaches to Budgeting 224
5. Managing the Trade-Off 226
C. Resolving Organizational Problems 226
1. Short-Run versus Long-Run Budgets 227
2. Line-Item Budgets 229
3. Budget Lapsing 229
4. Static versus Flexible Budgets 230
5. Incremental versus Zero-Based Budgets 233
D. Summary 234
Appendix: Comprehensive Master Budget Illustration 235

7 Cost Allocation: Theory 273

A. Pervasiveness of Cost Allocations 274
1. Manufacturing Organizations 276
2. Hospitals 277
3. Universities 277
B. Reasons to Allocate Costs 279
1. External Reporting/Taxes 279
2. Cost-Based Reimbursement 280
3. Decision Making and Control 281
C. Incentive/Organizational Reasons for Cost Allocations 282
1. Cost Allocations Are a Tax System 282
2. Taxing an Externality 283
3. Insulating versus Noninsulating Cost Allocations 289
D. Summary 292

8 Cost Allocation: Practices 319

A. Death Spiral 320
B. Allocating Capacity Costs: Depreciation 325
C. Allocating Service Department Costs 325
1. Direct Allocation Method 327
2. Step-Down Allocation Method 329
3. Service Department Costs and Transfer Pricing of Direct and Step-Down
Methods 331
4. Reciprocal Allocation Method 334
5. Recap 336
D. Joint Costs 336
1. Joint Cost Allocations and the Death Spiral 338
2. Net Realizable Value 340
3. Decision Making and Control 344
xiv Contents

E. Segment Reporting and Joint Benefits 345

F. Summary 346
Appendix: Reciprocal Method for Allocating Service Department Costs 346

9 Absorption Cost Systems 384

A. Job Order Costing 386
B. Cost Flows through the T-Accounts 388
C. Allocating Overhead to Jobs 390
1. Overhead Rates 390
2. Over/­Underabsorbed Overhead 392
3. Flexible ­Budgets to ­Estimate Overhead 395
4. Expected versus Normal Volume 398
D. Permanent versus Temporary Volume Changes 402
E. Plantwide versus Multiple Overhead Rates 403
F. Process Costing: The Extent of Averaging 406
G. Summary 407
Appendix A: Process Costing 408
Appendix B: Demand Shifts, Fixed Costs, and Pricing 413

10 Criticisms of Absorption Cost Systems: Incentive to Overproduce 439

A. Incentive to Overproduce 441
1. Example 441
2. Reducing the Overproduction Incentive 444
B. Variable (Direct) Costing 445
1. Background 445
2. Illustration of Variable Costing 445
3. Overproduction Incentive under Variable Costing 448
C. Problems with Variable Costing 449
1. Classifying Fixed Costs as Variable Costs 449
2. Variable ­Costing Excludes the Opportunity Cost of Capacity 451
D. Beware of Unit Costs 452
E. Summary 453

11 Criticisms of Absorption Cost Systems: Inaccurate Product Costs 473

A. Inaccurate Product Costs 474
B. Activity-Based Costing 479
1. Choosing Cost Drivers 479
2. Absorption versus Activity-Based Costing: An Example 485
C. Analyzing Activity-Based Costing 489
1. Reasons for Implementing Activity-Based Costing 490
2. Benefits and Costs of Activity-Based Costing 491
3. ABC Measures Costs, Not Benefits 493
D. Acceptance of Activity-Based Costing 495
E. Summary 498

12 Standard Costs: Direct Labor and Materials 527

A. Standard Costs 528
1. Reasons for Standard Costing 529
Contents xv

2. Setting and Revising Standards 530

3. Target Costing 533
B. Direct Labor and Materials Variances 535
1. Direct Labor Variances 535
2. Direct Materials Variances 539
3. Risk Reduction and Standard Costs 543
C. Incentive Effects of Direct Labor and Materials Variances 543
1. Build Inventories 544
2. Externalities 544
3. Discouraging Cooperation 545
4. Mutual Monitoring 545
5. Satisficing 545
D. Disposition of Standard Cost Variances 546
E. The Costs of Standard Costs 548
F. Summary 550

13 Overhead and Marketing Variances 563

A. Budgeted, Standard, and Actual Volume 564
B. Overhead Variances 567
1. Flexible Overhead Budget 567
2. Overhead Rate 568
3. Overhead Absorbed 569
4. Overhead Efficiency, Volume, and Spending Variances 569
5. Graphical Analysis 573
6. Inaccurate Flexible Overhead Budget 575
C. Marketing Variances 576
1. Price and Quantity Variances 576
2. Mix and Sales Variances 577
D. Summary 579

14 Management Accounting in a Changing Environment 597

A. Integrative Framework 598
1. Organizational Architecture 599
2. Business Strategy 600
3. Environmental and Competitive Forces Affecting Organizations 602
4. Implications 603
B. Organizational Innovations and Management Accounting 604
1. Six Sigma/Total Quality Management 604
2. Lean/Just-in-Time Production 609
3. Balanced Scorecard 613
4. Big Data/Data Analytics 619
C. When Should the Internal Accounting System Be Changed? 621
D. Summary 622
Solutions to Concept Questions   644
Glossary  654
Index  658
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Chapter One

Introduction
Chapter Outline
A. Managerial Accounting: Decision Making
and Control
B. Design and Use of Cost Systems
C. Marmots and Grizzly Bears
D. Management Accountant’s Role in the
Organization
E. Evolution of Management Accounting:
A Framework for Change
F. Vortec Medical Probe Example
G. Outline of the Text
H. Summary

1
2 Chapter 1

A. Managerial Accounting: Decision Making and Control

Managers at Hyundai must decide which car models to produce, the quantity of each
model to produce given the selling prices for the models, and how to manufacture the auto-
mobiles. They must decide which car parts, such as headlight assemblies, Hyundai should
manufacture internally and which parts should be outsourced. They must decide not only
on advertising, distribution, and product positioning to sell the cars, but also the quantity
and quality of the various inputs. For example, they must determine which models will
have leather seats and the quality of the leather to be used. Similarly, in deciding which
investment projects to accept, capital budgeting analysts require data on future cash flows.
How are these numbers derived? How does one coordinate the activities of hundreds or
thousands of employees in the firm so that these employees accept senior management’s
leadership? At Hyundai, and at other organizations small and large, managers must have
good information to make all these decisions.
Information about firms’ future costs and revenues must be estimated by managers.
Organizations’ internal information systems provide some of the knowledge for these pric-
ing, production, capital budgeting, and marketing decisions. These systems range from the
informal and the rudimentary to very sophisticated, electronic management information
systems. The term information system should not be interpreted to mean a single, inte-
grated system. Most information systems consist not only of formal, organized, tangible
records such as payroll and purchasing documents, but also informal, intangible bits of
data such as memos, special studies, and managers’ impressions and opinions. The firm’s
information system also contains nonfinancial information such as customer and employee
satisfaction surveys. As firms grow from single proprietorships to large global corpora-
tions with tens of thousands of employees, managers lose the knowledge of enterprise
affairs gained from personal, face-to-face contact in daily operations. Higher-level manag-
ers of larger firms come to rely more and more on formal operating reports.
The internal accounting system, an important component of a firm’s information
system, includes budgets, data on the costs of each product and current inventory, and
periodic financial reports. In many cases, especially in small companies, these accounting
reports are the only formalized part of the information system providing the knowledge
for decision making. Many larger companies have other formalized, nonaccounting–based
information systems, such as production planning systems. This book focuses on how
internal accounting systems provide knowledge for decision making.
After making decisions, managers must implement them in organizations in which the
interests of the employees and the owners do not necessarily coincide. Just because senior
managers announce a decision does not ensure that the decision will be implemented.
Organizations do not have objectives; people do. One common objective of owners of
the organization is to maximize profits, or the difference between revenues and expenses.
Maximizing firm value is equivalent to maximizing the stream of profits over the organiza-
tion’s life. Employees, suppliers, and customers also have their own objectives—usually
maximizing their self-interest.
Not all owners care only about monetary flows. An owner of a professional sports team
might care more about winning (subject to covering costs) than maximizing profits. Nonprof-
its do not have owners with the legal rights to the organization’s profits. Moreover, nonprof-
its seek to maximize their value by serving some social goal such as education or health care.
No matter what the firm’s objective, the organization will survive only if its inflow of
resources (such as revenue) is at least as large as the outflow. Accounting information is
useful to help manage the inflow and outflow of resources and to help align the owners’
and employees’ interests, no matter what objectives the owners wish to pursue.
Introduction 3

Throughout this book, we assume that individuals maximize their self-interest. The
owners of the firm usually want to maximize profits, but managers and employees will do
so only if it is in their interest. Hence, a conflict of interest exists between owners—who,
in general, want higher profits—and employees—who want easier jobs, higher wages, and
more fringe benefits. To control this conflict, senior managers and owners design systems
to monitor employees’ behavior and incentive schemes that reward employees for generat-
ing more profits. Not-for-profit organizations face similar conflicts. Those people responsi-
ble for the nonprofit organization (boards of trustees and government officials) must design
incentive schemes to motivate their employees to operate the organization efficiently.
All successful firms must devise mechanisms that help align employee interests with
maximizing the organization’s value. All of these mechanisms constitute the firm’s control
system; they include performance measures and incentive compensation systems, promo-
tions, demotions and terminations, security guards and video surveillance, internal audi-
tors, and the firm’s internal accounting system.
As part of the firm’s control system, the internal accounting system helps align the
interests of managers and shareholders to cause employees to maximize firm value. It
sounds like a relatively easy task to design systems to ensure that employees maximize
firm value. But a significant portion of this book demonstrates the exceedingly complex
nature of aligning employee interests with those of the owners.
Internal accounting systems serve two purposes: (1) to provide some of the ­knowledge
necessary for planning and making decisions (decision making) and (2) to help moti-
vate and monitor people in organizations (control). Preventing fraud and embezzlement
is the most basic control use of accounting. Maintaining inventory records helps reduce
employee theft. Accounting budgets, discussed more fully in Chapter 6, provide an exam-
ple of both decision making and control. Asking each salesperson in the firm to fore-
cast his or her sales for the upcoming year generates useful information for planning next
year’s production (decision making). However, if the salesperson’s sales forecast is used
to benchmark performance for compensation purposes (control), he or she has incentives
to underestimate those forecasts.
Using internal accounting systems for both decision making and control gives rise to
the fundamental trade-off in these systems: A system cannot be designed to perform two
tasks as well as a system that must perform only one task. Some ability to deliver knowl-
edge for decision making is sacrificed to provide better motivation (control). The trade-off
between providing knowledge for decision making and motivation/control arises continu-
ally throughout this text.
This book is applications oriented: It describes how the accounting system assembles
knowledge necessary for implementing decisions using the theories from microeconomics,
finance, operations management, and marketing. It also shows how the accounting system
helps motivate employees to implement these decisions. Moreover, it stresses the continual
trade-offs that must be made between the decision making and control functions of accounting.
Chief financial officers (CFOs), responsible for their company’s accounting system,
identify “managing costs and profitability” as their most important goal. Other top priori-
ties include setting budgets and measuring performance. These findings indicate that firms
use their internal accounting system both for decision making (managing costs and profit-
ability) and for controlling behavior (setting budgets and measuring performance).1

1
S. White, “How CFOs Can Support the Transformation to a Digital Business Model,” Financial
­Management, November 4, 2015, https://www.fm-magazine.com/news/2015/nov/how-cfos-can-support-
digital-business-model-201513323.html.
4 Chapter 1

The firm’s accounting system provides much of the fabric that helps hold the orga-
nization together. It contains knowledge for decision making, and it provides information
for evaluating and motivating the behavior of individuals within the firm. Being such an
integral part of the organization, the accounting system cannot be studied in isolation from
the other mechanisms used for decision making or for aligning incentives. A firm’s inter-
nal accounting system should be examined from a broad perspective, as part of the larger
organization design question facing managers.
This book uses an economic perspective to study how accounting can motivate and
control behavior in organizations. Besides economics, a variety of other paradigms also are
used to investigate organizations: scientific management (Taylor), the bureaucratic school
(Weber), the human relations approach (Mayo), human resource theory (Maslow, Rickert,
Argyris), the decision-making school (Simon), and the political science school (Selznick).
Behavior is a complex topic. No single theory or approach is likely to capture all the ele-
ments. However, understanding managerial accounting requires addressing the behavioral
and organizational issues. Economics offers one useful and widely adopted framework.

B. Design and Use of Cost Systems

Managers make decisions and monitor subordinates who make decisions. Both manag-
ers and accountants must acquire sufficient familiarity with cost systems to perform their
jobs. Accountants (often called controllers) are charged with designing, improving, and
operating the firm’s accounting system—an integral part of both the decision-making and
performance evaluation systems. Both managers and accountants must understand the
strengths and weaknesses of current accounting systems. Internal accounting systems,
like all s­ ystems within the firm, are constantly being refined and modified. Accountants’
responsibilities include making these changes.
Internal accounting systems:
1. Provide information to assess the profitability of products or services and to
­optimally price and market these products or services.
2. Provide information to detect production inefficiencies to ensure that the
­proposed products and volumes are produced at minimum cost.
3. When combined with the performance evaluation and reward systems, create
incentives for managers to maximize firm value.
4. Support the financial accounting and tax accounting reporting functions.
5. Contribute more to firm value than it costs.
Figure 1–1 portrays the functions of the accounting system. In it, the accounting
system supports both external and internal reporting systems. Examine the top half of
Figure 1–1. The accounting procedures chosen for external reports to shareholders and
taxing authorities are dictated in part by regulators. In the United States, the Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
regulate the financial statements issued to shareholders. The Internal Revenue Service
(IRS) administers the a­ ccounting procedures used in calculating corporate income taxes. If
the firm is involved in international trade, foreign tax authorities prescribe the accounting
rules applied in c­ alculating foreign taxes. Regulatory agencies constrain public utilities’
and financial institutions’ ­accounting procedures.
Management compensation plans and debt contracts often rely on external reports.
Senior managers’ bonuses are often based on accounting net income. Likewise, if the firm
issues long-term bonds, it agrees in the debt covenants not to violate specified
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Shannach—
The Last
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Shannach—The Last

Author: Leigh Brackett

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller

Release date: December 12, 2020 [eBook #64026]

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANNACH—THE

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SHANNACH—THE LAST
 By LEIGH BRACKETT

Even in this grip of alien horror a man could not

throw away his lifetime goal ... not stand idly by as
endless rows of alabaster shapes, seated in their
chairs of stone, thought-ruled this gargoyle planet
from the dead blackness of deep Mercurian caverns.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Planet Stories November 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It was dark in the caves under Mercury. It was hot, and there was
no sound in them but the slow plodding of Trevor's heavy boots.
Trevor had been wandering for a long time, lost in this labyrinth
where no human being had ever gone before. And Trevor was an
angry man. Through no fault or will of his own he was about to die,
and he was not ready to die. Moreover, it seemed a wicked thing to
come to his final moment here in the stifling dark, buried under alien
mountains high as Everest.
He wished now that he had stayed in the valley. Hunger and thirst
would have done for him just the same, but at least he would have
died in the open like a man, and not like a rat trapped in a drain.
Yet there was not really much to choose between them as a decent
place to die. A barren little hell-hole the valley had been, even
before the quake, with nothing to draw a man there except the hope
of finding sun-stones, one or two of which could transform a
prospector into a plutocrat.
Trevor had found no sun-stones. The quake had brought down a
whole mountain wall on his ship, leaving him with a pocket torch, a
handful of food tablets, a canteen of water, and the scant clothing
he stood in.
He had looked at the naked rocks, and the little river frothing green
with chemical poisons, and he had gone away into the tunnels, the
ancient blowholes of a cooling planet, gambling that he might find a
way out of the valleys.
Mercury's Twilight Belt is cut into thousands of cliff-locked pockets,
as a honeycomb is cut into cells. There is no way over the
mountains, for the atmosphere is shallow, and the jagged peaks
stand up into airless space. Trevor knew that only one more such
pocket lay between him and the open plains. If he could get to and
through that last pocket, he had thought....
But he knew now that he was not going to make it.
He was stripped to the skin already, in the terrible heat. When the
weight of his miner's boots became too much to drag, he shed them,
padding on over the rough rock with bare feet. He had nothing left
now but the torch. When the light went, his last hope went with it.
After a while it went.
The utter blackness of the grave shut down. Trevor stood still,
listening to the pulse of his own blood in the silence, looking at that
which no man needs a light to see. Then he flung the torch away
and stumbled on, driven to fight still by the terror which was greater
than his weakness.
Twice he struck against the twisting walls, and fell, and struggled up
again. The third time he remained on hands and knees, and crawled.
He crept on, a tiny creature entombed in the bowels of a planet. The
bore grew smaller and smaller, tightening around him. From time to
time he lost consciousness, and it became increasingly painful to
struggle back to an awareness of the heat and the silence and the
pressing rock.
After one of these periods of oblivion he began to hear a dull, steady
thunder. He could no longer crawl. The bore had shrunk to a mere
crack, barely large enough for him to pass through wormlike on his
belly. He sensed now a deep, shuddering vibration in the rock. It
grew stronger, terrifying in that enclosed space. Steam slipped
wraithlike into the smothering air.
The roar and the vibration grew to an unendurable pitch. Trevor was
near to strangling in the steam. He was afraid to go on, but there
was no other way to go. Quite suddenly his hands went out into
nothingness.
The rock at the lip of the bore must have been rotten with erosion.
It gave under his weight and pitched him headfirst into a thundering
rush of water that was blistering hot and going somewhere in a
great hurry through the dark.
After that Trevor was not sure of anything. There was the scalding
heat and the struggle to keep his head up and the terrible speed of
the sub-Mercurian river racing on to its destiny. He struck rock
several times, and once he held his breath for a whole eternity until
the roof of the tunnel rose up again.
He was only dimly aware of a long sliding fall downward through a
sudden brightness. It was much cooler. He splashed feebly, because
his brain had not told his body to stop, and the water did not fight
him.
His feet and hands struck solid bottom. He floundered on, and
presently the water was gone. He made one attempt to rise. After
that he lay still.
The great mountains leaned away from the Sun. Night came, and
with it violent storm and rain. Trevor did not know it. He slept, and
when he woke the savage dawn was making the high cliffs flame
with white light.
Something was screaming above his head.
Aching and leaden still with exhaustion, he roused up and looked
about him.

He sat on a beach of pale grey sand. At his feet were the shallows of
a grey-green lake that filled a stony basin some half-mile in breadth.
To his left the underground river poured out of the cliff face,
spreading into a wide, riffling fan of foam. Off to his right, the water
spilled over the rim of the basin to become a river again somewhere
below, and beyond the rim, veiled in mist and the shadow of a
mountain wall, was a valley.
Behind him, crowding to the edge of the sand, were trees and ferns
and flowers, alien in shape and color but triumphantly alive. And
from what he could see of it, the broad valley was green and riotous
with growth. The water was pure, the air had a good smell, and it
came to Trevor that he had made it. He was going to live a while
longer, after all.
Forgetting his weariness, he sprang up, and the thing that had
hissed and screamed above him swooped down and passed the
clawed tip of a leathery wing so close to his face that it nearly
gashed him. He stumbled backward, crying out, and the creature
rose in a soaring spiral and swooped again.
Trevor saw a sort of flying lizard, jet black except for a saffron belly.
He raised his arms to ward it off, but it did not attack him, and as it
swept by he saw something that woke in him amazement, greed,
and a peculiarly unpleasant chill of fear.
Around its neck the lizard-thing wore a golden collar. And set into
the scaly flesh of its head—into the bone itself, it seemed—was a
sun-stone.
There was no mistaking that small vicious flash of radiance. Trevor
had dreamed of sun-stones too long to be misled. He watched the
creature rise again into the steamy sky and shivered, wondering
who, or what, had set that priceless thing into the skull of a flying
lizard—and why.
It was the why that bothered him the most. Sun-stones are not
mere adornments for wealthy ladies. They are rare, radioactive
crystals, having a half-life one third greater than radium, and are
used exclusively in the construction of delicate electronic devices
dealing with frequencies above the first octave.
Most of that relatively unexplored super-spectrum was still a
mystery. And the strangely jewelled and collared creature circling
above him filled Trevor with a vast unease.
It was not hunting. It did not wish to kill him. But it made no move
to go away.
From far down the valley, muted by distance to a solemn bell note
that rolled between the cliffs, Trevor heard the booming of a great
song.
A sudden desire for concealment sent him in among the trees. He
worked his way along the shore of the lake. Looking up through the
branches he saw the black wings lift and turn, following him.
The lizard was watching him with its bright, sharp eyes. It noted the
path of his movements through the ferns and flowers, as a hawk
watches a rabbit.
He reached the lip of the basin where the water poured over in a
cataract several hundred feet high. Climbing around the shoulder of
a rocky bastion, Trevor had his first clear look at the valley.
Much of it was still vague with mist. But it was broad and deep, with
a sweep of level plain and clumps of forest, locked tight between the
barrier mountains. And as he made out other details, Trevor's
astonishment grew out of all measure.
The land was under cultivation. There were clusters of thatched huts
among the fields, and in the distance was a rock-built city, immense
and unmistakable in the burning haze of dawn.
Trevor crouched there, staring, and the winged lizard swung in lazy
circles, watching, waiting, while he tried to think.
A fertile valley such as this was rare enough in itself. But to find
fields and a city was beyond belief. He had seen the aboriginal tribes
that haunt some of the cliff-locked worlds of the Twilight Belt—sub-
human peoples who live precariously among the bitter rocks and
boiling springs, hunting the great lizards for food. None of this was
ever built by them.
Unless, in this environment, they had advanced beyond the Age of
Stone....
The gong sounded again its deep challenging note. Trevor saw the
tiny figures of mounted men, no larger than ants at that distance,
come down from the city and ride out across the plain.
Relief and joy supplanted speculation in Trevor's mind. He was
battered and starving, lost on an alien world, and anything remotely
approaching the human and the civilized was better luck than he
could have dreamed or prayed for.
Besides, there were sun-stones in this place. He looked hungrily at
the head of the circling watcher, and then began to scramble down
the broken outer face of the bastion.
The black wings slipped silently after him down the sky.

About a hundred feet above the valley floor he came to an

overhang. There was no way past it but to jump. He clung to a bush
and let himself down as far as he could, and then dropped some
four or five yards to a slope of springy turf. The fall knocked the
wind out of him, and as he lay gasping a chill doubt crept into his
mind.
He could see the land quite clearly now, the pattern of the fields, the
far-off city. Except for the group of riders, nothing stirred. The fields,
the plain were empty of life, the little villages still as death. And he
saw, swinging lazily above a belt of trees by the river, a second
black-winged shadow, watching.
The trees were not far away. The riders were coming toward them
and him. It seemed to Trevor now that the men were perhaps a
party of hunters, but there was something alarming about the utter
disappearance of all other life. It was as though the gong had been
a warning for all to take cover while the hunt was abroad.
The sharp-eyed lizards were the hounds that went before to find and
flush the game. Glancing up at the ominous sentinel above his own
head, Trevor had a great desire to see what the quarry was that hid
in the belt of trees.
There was no way back to the partial security of the lake basin. The
overhang cut him off from that. The futility of trying to hide was
apparent, but nevertheless he wormed in among some crimson
ferns. The city was at his left. To the right, the fertile plain washed
out into a badland of lava and shattered rock, which narrowed and
vanished around a shoulder of purple basalt. This defile was still in
deep shadow.
The riders were still far away. He saw them splash across a ford, toy
figures making little bursts of spray.
The watcher above the trees darted suddenly downward. The quarry
was breaking cover.
Trevor's suspicions crystallized into an ugly certainty. Horror-struck,
he watched the bronzed, half-naked figure of a girl emerge from the
brilliant undergrowth and run like an antelope toward the badland.
The flying lizard rose, swooped, and struck.
The girl flung herself aside. She carried a length of sapling bound
with great thorns, and she lashed out with it at the black brute,
grazed it, and ran on.
The lizard circled and came at her again from behind.
She turned. There was a moment of vicious confusion, in which the
leathery wings enveloped her in a kind of dreadful cloak, and then
she was running again, but less swiftly, and Trevor could see the
redness of blood on her body.
And again the flying demon came.
The thing was trying to herd her, turn her back toward the
huntsmen. But she would not be turned. She beat with her club at
the lizard, and ran, and fell, and ran again. And Trevor knew that
she was beaten. The brute would have the life out of her before she
reached the rocks.
Every dictate of prudence told Trevor to stay out of this. Whatever
was going on was obviously the custom of the country, and none of
his business. All he wanted was to get hold of one of these sun-
stones and then find a way out of this valley. That was going to be
trouble enough without taking on any more.
But prudence was swept away in the fury that rose in him as he saw
the hawk swoop down again, with its claws outspread and hungry
for the girl's tormented flesh. He sprang up, shouting to her to fight,
to hang on, and went running full speed down the slope toward her.
She turned upon him a face of such wild, fierce beauty as he had
never seen, the eyes dark and startled and full of a terrible
determination. Then she screamed at him, in his own tongue, "Look
out!"
He had forgotten his own nemesis. Black wings, claws, the lash of a
scaly tail striking like a whip, and Trevor went down, rolling over and
staining the turf red as he rolled.
From far off he heard the voices of the huntsmen, shrill and strident,
lifted in a wild halloo.

II

For some reason the assault steadied Trevor. He got to his feet and
took the club out of the girl's hands, regretting the gun that was
buried under a ton of rock on the other side of the mountains.
"Keep behind me," he said. "Watch my back."
She stared at him strangely, but there was no time for questions.
They began to run together toward the badland. It seemed a long
way off. The lizards screamed and hissed above them. Trevor hefted
the club. It was about the size and weight of a baseball bat. He had
once been very good at baseball.
"They're coming," said the girl.
"Lie down flat," he told her, and went on, more slowly. She dropped
behind him in the grass, her fingers closing over a fragment of
stone. The wide wings whistled down.
Trevor braced himself. He could see the evil eyes, yellow and bright
as the golden collars, and the brilliant flash of the sun-stones against
the jetty scales of the head. They were attacking together, but at
different angles, so that he could not face them both.
He chose the one that was going to reach him first, and waited. He
let it get close, very close, diving swiftly with its scarlet tongue
forking out of its hissing mouth and its sharp claws spread. Then he
swung the club with all his might.
It connected. He felt something break. The creature screamed, and
then the force of its dive carried it on into him and he lost his footing
in a welter of thrashing wings and floundering body. He fell, and the
second lizard was on him.
The girl rose. In three long strides she reached him and flung herself
upon the back of the scaly thing that ravaged him. He saw her trying
to pin it to the ground, hammering methodically at its head with the
stone.
He kicked off the wounded one. He had broken its neck, but it was
in no hurry to die. He caught up the club and presently the second
brute was dead. Trevor found it quite easy to pick up the sun-stone.
He held it in his hand, a strange, tawny, jewel-like thing, with a
scrap of bone still clinging to it. It glinted with inner fires, deep and
subtle, and an answering spark of wild excitement was kindled in
Trevor from the very touch and feel of it, so that he forgot where he
was or what he was doing, forgot everything but the eerie crystal
that gleamed against his palm.
It was more than a jewel, more even than wealth, that he held
there. It was hope and success and a new life.
He had thrown years away prospecting the bitter Mercurian wastes.
This trip had been his last gamble, and it had ended with his ship
gone, his quest finished, and nothing to look forward to even if he
did get back safely, but to become one of the penniless, aging
planet-drifters he'd always pitied.
Now all that was changed. This single stone would let him go back
to Earth a winner and not a failure. It would pay off all the dreary,
lonesome, hazardous years. It would....
It would do so many things if he could get out of this God-forsaken
valley with it! If!
The girl had got her breath again. Now she said urgently, "Come!
They're getting near!"
Trevor's senses, bemused by the sun-stone, registered only vaguely
the external stimuli of sight and sound. The riders had come closer.
The beasts they rode were taller and slighter than horses. They were
not hoofed, but clawed. They had narrow, vicious-looking heads with
spiny crests that stood up erect and arrogant. They came fast,
carrying their riders lightly.
The men were still too far away to distinguish features, but even at
that distance Trevor sensed something peculiar about their faces,
something unnatural. They wore splendid harness, and their half-
clad bodies were bronzed, but not nearly so deeply as the girl's.
The girl shook him furiously, stirring him out of his dream. "Do you
want to be taken alive? Before, the beasts would have torn us apart,
and that is quickly over. But we killed the hawks, don't you
understand? Now they will take us alive!"
He did not understand in the least, but her obvious preference for a
very nasty death instead of capture made him find reserves of
strength he thought he had lost in the underground river. There was
also the matter of the sun-stone. If they caught him with it they
would want it back.
Clutching the precious thing he turned with the girl and ran.
The lava bed was beginning to catch the sun now. The splintered
rock showed through, bleak and ugly. The badland and the defile
beyond seemed like an entrance into hell, but it did offer shelter of a
sort if they could make it.
The drumming of padded feet behind was loud in his ears. He
glanced over his shoulder, once. He could see the faces of the
huntsmen now. They were not good faces, in either feature or
expression, and he saw the thing about them that he had noticed
before, the unnatural thing.
In the center of each forehead, above the eyes, a sun-stone was set
into flesh and bone.
First the hawk-lizards, and now these....
Trevor's heart contracted with an icy pang. These men were human,
as human as himself, and yet they were not. They were alien and
wicked and altogether terrifying, and he began to understand why
the girl did not wish to come alive into their hands.
Fleet, implacable, the crested mounts with their strange riders were
sweeping in upon the two who fled. The leader took from about his
saddle a curved throwing stick and held it, poised. The sun-stone set
in his brow flashed like a third, and evil eye.
The lava and the fangs of rock shimmered in the light. Trevor
yearned toward them. The brown girl running before him seemed to
shimmer also. It hurt very much to breathe. He thought he could not
go any farther. But he did, and when the girl faltered he put his arm
around her and steadied her on.
He continued to keep an eye out behind him. He saw the curved
stick come hurtling toward him and he managed to let it go by. The
others were ready now as they came within range. It seemed to
Trevor that they were watching him with a peculiar intensity, as
though they had recognized him as a stranger and had almost
forgotten the girl in their desire to take him.
His bare feet trod on lava already growing hot under the sun. A spur
of basalt reared up and made a shield against the throwing sticks. In
a minute or two Trevor and the girl were hidden in a terrain of such
broken roughness as the man had seldom seen. It was as though
some demoniac giant had whipped the molten lava with a pudding-
spoon, cracking mountains with his free hand and tossing in the
pieces. He understood now why the girl had waited for daylight to
make her break. To attempt this passage in the dark would be
suicidal.
He listened nervously for sounds of pursuit. He could not hear any,
but he remained uneasy, and when the girl flung herself down to
rest, he asked,
"Shouldn't we go farther? They might still come."
She did not answer him at once, beyond a shake of the head. He
realized that she was looking at him almost as intently as the riders
had. It was the first chance she had had to examine him, and she
was making the most of it. She noted the cut of his hair, the stubble
of beard, the color and texture of his skin, the rags of his shorts that
were all he had to cover him. Very carefully she noted them, and
then she said in an odd slow voice, as though she were thinking of
something else,
"Mounted, the Korins are afraid of nothing. But afoot, and in here,
they are afraid of ambush. It has happened before. They can die,
you know, just the same as we do."
Her face, for all its youth, was not the face of a girl. It was a woman
who looked at Trevor, a woman who had already learned the happy,
the passionate, and the bitter things, who had lived with pain and
fear and knew better than to trust anyone but herself.
"You aren't one of us," she said.
"No. I came from beyond the mountains." He could not tell whether
she believed him or not. "Who, or what, are the Korins?"
"The lords of Korith," she answered, and began to tear strips from
the length of white linen cloth she wore twisted about her waist.
"There will be time to talk later. We still have far to go. Here, this will
stop the bleeding."
In silence they bound each other's wounds and started off again. If
Trevor had not been so unutterably weary, and the way so hard, he
would have been angry with the girl. And yet there was nothing
really to be angry about except that he sensed she was somehow
suspicious of him.
Many times they had to stop and rest. Once he asked her, "Why
were they—the Korins—hunting you?"
"I was running away. Why were they hunting you?"
"Damned if I know. Accident, perhaps. I happened to be where their
hawks were flying."
The girl wore a chain of iron links around her neck, a solid chain
with no clasp, too small to be pulled over the head. From it hung a
round tag with a word stamped on it. Trevor took the tag in his
hand.
"Galt," he read. "Is that your name?"
"My name is Jen. Galt is the Korin I belong to. He led the hunt." She
gave Trevor a look of fierce and challenging pride and said, as
though she were revealing a secret earldom, "I am a slave."
"How long have you been in the valley, Jen? You and I are the same
stock, speaking the same language. Earth stock. How does it
happen, a colony of this size that no one ever heard of?"
"It's been nearly three hundred years since the Landing," she
answered. "I have been told that for generations my people kept
alive the hope that a ship would come from Earth and release them
from the Korins. It never came. And, except by ship, there is no way
in or out of the valley."
Trevor glanced at her sharply. "I found a way in, all right, and I'm
beginning to wish I hadn't. And if there's no way out, where are we
going?"
"I don't know myself," said Jen, and rose. "But my man came this
way, and others before him."
She went on, and Trevor went with her. There was no place else to
go.
The heat was unbearable, and they crept in the shadows of the
rocks wherever they could. They suffered from thirst, but there was
no water. The shoulder of purple basalt loomed impossibly tall before
them, and seemed never to grow nearer.
For most of the day they toiled across the lava bed, and at last,
when they had almost forgotten that they had ever dreamed of
doing it, they rounded the shoulder and came staggering out of the
badland into a narrow canyon that seemed like the scar of some
cataclysmic wound in the mountain.
Rock walls, raw and riven, rose out of sight on either side, the
twisted strata showing streaks of crimson and white and sullen
ochre. A little stream crawled in a stony bed, and not much grew
beside it.
Jen and Trevor fell by the stream. And while they were still sprawled
on the moist gravel, lapping like dogs at the bitter water, men came
quietly from among the rocks and stood above them, holding
weapons made of stone.

Trevor got slowly to his feet. There were six of these armed men.
Like the girl, they wore loin cloths of white cotton, much frayed, and
like her they were burned almost black by a lifetime of exposure to a
brutal sun. They were all young, knotted and sinewy from hard
labor, their faces grim beyond their years. All bore upon their bodies
the scars of talons. And they looked at Trevor with a cold, strange
look.
They knew Jen, or most of them did. She called them gladly by
name, and demanded, "Hugh. Where is Hugh?"
One of them nodded toward the farther wall. "Up there in the caves.
He's all right. Who is this man, Jen?"
She turned to study Trevor.
"I don't know. They were hunting him, too. He came to help me. I
couldn't have escaped without him. He killed the hawks. But...." She
hesitated, choosing her words carefully. "He says he came from
beyond the mountains. He knows of Earth and speaks our tongue.
And when he killed the hawks he smashed the skull of one and took
the sun-stone."
All six started at that. And the tallest of them, a young man with a
face as bleak and craggy as the rocks around them, came toward
Trevor.
"Why did you take the sun-stone?" he asked. His voice held an ugly
edge.
Trevor stared at him. "Why the devil do you suppose? Because it's
valuable."
The man held out his hand. "Give it to me."
"The hell I will!" cried Trevor furiously. He backed away, just a little,
getting set.
The young man came on, and his face was dark and dangerous.
"Saul, wait!" cried Jen.
Saul didn't wait. He kept right on coming. Trevor let him get close
before he swung, and he put every ounce of his strength behind the
blow.
The smashing fist took Saul squarely in the belly and sent him
backward, doubled up. Trevor stood with hunched shoulders,
breathing hard, watching the others with feral eyes.
"What are you?" he snarled. "A bunch of thieves? All right, come on!
I got that stone the hard way and I'm going to keep it!"
Big words. A big anger. And a big fear behind them. The men were
around him in a ring now. There was no chance of breaking away.
Even if he did he was so winded they could pull him down in
minutes. The stone weighed heavy in his pocket, heavy as half a
lifetime of sweat and hunger and hard work, on the rockpiles of
Mercury.
Saul straightened up. His face was still gray, but he bent again and
picked up a sharp-pointed implement of rock that he had dropped.
Then he moved forward. And the others closed in, at the same time,
quite silently.
There was a bitter taste in Trevor's mouth as he waited for them. To
get his hands on a sun-stone at last, and then to lose it and
probably his life too, to this crowd of savages! It was more than
anybody ought to be asked to bear.
"Saul, wait!" cried Jen again, pushing in front of him. "He saved my
life! You can't just...."
"He's a Korin. A spy."
"He can't be! There's no stone in his forehead. Not even a scar."
Saul's voice was flat and relentless. "He took a sun-stone. Only a
Korin would touch one of the cursed things."
"But he says he's from outside the valley! From Earth, Saul. From
Earth! Things would be different there."
Jen's insistence on that point had at least halted the men
temporarily. And Trevor, looking at Saul's face, had suddenly begun
to understand something.
"You think the sun-stones are evil," he said.
Saul gave him a sombre glance. "They are. And the one you have is
going to be destroyed. Now."
Trevor swallowed the bitter anguish that choked him, and did some
fast thinking. If the sun-stones had a superstitious significance in
this benighted pocket of Mercury—and he could imagine why they
might, with those damned unnatural hawks flying around with the
equally unnatural Korins—that put a different light on their attitude.
He knew just by looking at their faces that it was "give them the
sun-stone or die." Dying at the hands of a bunch of wild fanatics
didn't make sense. Better let them have the stone and gamble on
getting it back again later. Or on getting another one. They seemed
plentiful enough in the valley!
Sure, let's be sensible about it. Let's hand over a lifetime of hoping
to a savage with horny palms, and not worry about it. Let's.... Oh,
hell.
"Here," he said. "All right. Take it."
It hurt. It hurt like giving up his own heart.
Saul took it without thanks. He turned and laid it on a flat surface of
rock, and began to pound the glinting crystal with the heavy stone
he had meant to use on Trevor's head. There was a look on his
lined, young, craggy face as though he was killing a living thing—a
thing that he feared and hated.
Trevor shivered. He knew that sun-stones were impervious to
anything but atomic bombardment. But it made him a little sick,
none the less, to see that priceless object being battered by a crude
stone club.
"It won't break," he said. "You might as well stop."

Saul flung down his weapon so close to Trevor's bare feet that he
leaped back. Then he picked up the sun-stone and hurled it as far as
he could across the ravine. Trevor heard it clicking faintly as it fell, in
among the rocks and rubble at the foot of the opposite cliff. He
strained to mark the spot.
"You idiot!" he said to Saul. "You've thrown away a fortune. The
fortune I've spent my life trying to find. What's the matter with you?
Don't you have any idea at all what those things are worth?"
Saul ignored him, speaking bleakly to the others. "No man with a
sun-stone is to be trusted. I say kill him."
Jen said stubbornly, "No, Saul. I owe him my life."
"But he could be a slave, a traitor, working for the Korins."
"Look at his clothes," said Jen. "Look at his skin. This morning it was
white, now it's red. Did you ever see a slave that color? Or a Korin,
either. Besides, did you ever see him in the valley before? There
aren't as many of us as that."
"We can't take any chances," Saul said. "Not us."
"You can always kill him later. But if he is from beyond the
mountains, perhaps even from Earth—" She said the word hesitantly,
as though she did not quite believe there was such a place. "He
might know some of the things we've been made to forget. He might
help us. Anyway, the others have a right to their say before you kill
him."
Saul shook his head. "I don't like it. But—" He hesitated, scowling
thoughtfully. "All right. We'll settle it up in the cave. Let's move." He
said to Trevor, "You go in the middle of us. And if you try to signal
anyone...."
"Who the devil would I signal to?" retorted Trevor angrily. "Listen,
I'm sorry I ever got into your bloody valley."
But he was not sorry. Not quite.
His senses were on the alert to mark every twist and turn of the way
they went, the way that would bring him back to the sun-stone. The
ravine narrowed and widened and twisted, but there was only one
negotiable path, and that was beside the stream bed. This went on
for some distance, and then the ravine split on a tremendous cliff of
bare rock that tilted up and back as though arrested in the act of
falling over. The stream flowed from the left-hand fork. Saul took the
other one.
They kept close watch on Trevor as he slipped and clambered and
sprawled along with them. The detritus of the primeval cataclysm
that had shaped this crack in the mountains lay where it had fallen,
growing rougher and more dangerous with every eroding storm and
cracking frost.
Above him, on both sides, the mountain tops went up and still up,
beyond the shallow atmosphere. Their half-seen summits leaned and
quivered like things glimpsed from under water, lit like torches by the
naked blaze of the sun. There were ledges, lower down. Trevor saw
men crouched upon them, among heaps of piled stones. They
shouted, and Saul answered them. In this narrow throat no man
could get through alive if they chose to stop him.
After a while they left the floor of the ravine and climbed a path,
partly natural and partly so roughly hewn that it seemed natural. It
angled steeply up the cliff face, and at its end was a narrow hole.
Saul led the way through it. In single file the others followed, and
Trevor heard Jen's voice echoing in some great hollow space
beyond, calling Hugh.
There was a cave inside, a very large cave with dim nooks and
crannies around its edges. Shafts of sunlight pierced it here and
there from cracks in the cliff face high above, and far at the back of
it, where the floor tipped sharply down, a flame burned. Trevor had
seen flames like that before on Mercury, where volcanic gases
blowing up through a fissure had ignited from some chance spark. It
was impressive, a small bluish column twisting upward into rock-
curtained distance and roaring evilly. He could feel the air rush past
him as the burning pillar sucked it in.
There were people in the cave. Less than a hundred, Trevor thought,
not counting a handful of children and striplings. Less than a third of
those were women. They all bore the same unmistakable stamp.
Hard as life must be for them in the cave, it had been harder before.
He felt his legs buckling under him with sheer weariness. He stood
groggily with his back against the rough cave wall.
A stocky young man with knotted shoulder-muscles and sun-
bleached hair was holding Jen in his arms. That would be Hugh. He,
and the others, were shouting excitedly, asking and answering
questions.
Then, one by one, they caught sight of Trevor. And gradually a
silence grew and spread.
"All right," said Saul harshly, looking at Trevor. "Let's get this
settled."
"You settle it," said Trevor. "I'm tired." He glared at Saul and the
unfriendly staring crowd, and they seemed to rock in his vision. "I'm
an Earthman. I didn't want to come into your damned valley, and
I've been here a night and a day and haven't slept. I'm going to
sleep."
Saul started to speak again but Jen's man, Hugh, came up and stood
in front of him.
"He saved Jen's life," Hugh said. "Let him sleep."
He led Trevor away to a place at the side where there were heaps of
dried vines and mountain creepers, prickly and full of dust but softer
than the cave floor. Trevor managed a few vague words of thanks
and was asleep before they were out of his mouth.
Hours, weeks, or perhaps it was only minutes later, a rough
persistent shaking brought him to again. Faces bent over him. He
saw them through a haze, and the questions they asked penetrated
to him slowly, and without much meaning.
"Why did you want the sun-stone?"
"Why wouldn't I want it? I could take it back to Earth and sell it for a
fortune."
"What do they do with sun-stones on Earth?"
"Build gadgets, super-electronic, to study things. Wave-lengths too
short for anything else to pick up. Thought-waves, even. What do
you care?"
"Do they wear sun-stones in their foreheads, on Earth?"
"No...." His voice trailed off, and the voices, or the dream of voices,
left him.
It was still daylight when he woke, this time normally. He sat up,
feeling stiff and sore but otherwise rested. Jen came to him, smiling,
and thrust a chunk of what he recognized as some species of rock-
lizard into his hands. He gnawed at it wolfishly while she talked,
having discovered that this was not the same day, but the next one,
and quite late.
"They have decided," she said, "to let you live."
"I imagine you had a lot to do with that. Thanks."
She shrugged her bare shoulders, with the raw wounds on them
where the hawk-lizards had clawed her. She had that exhausted, let-
down look that comes after tremendous stress, and her eyes, even
while she spoke to Trevor, followed Hugh as he worked at some task
around the cave.
"I couldn't have done anything if they hadn't believed your story,"
she told him. "They questioned you when you were too far gone to
lie." He had a very dim memory of that. "They didn't understand
your answers but they knew they were true ones. Also they
examined your clothes. No cloth like that is woven in the valley. And
the things that hold them together—" he knew she meant the
zippers "—are unknown to us. So you must have come from beyond
the mountains. They want to know exactly how, and if you could get
back the same way."
"No," said Trevor, and explained. "Am I free to move around, then—
go where I want to?"
She studied him a moment before she spoke. "You're a stranger. You
don't belong with us. You could betray us to the Korins just as easily
as not."
"Why would I do that? They hunted me, too."
"For sun-stones, perhaps. You're a stranger. They would take you
alive. Anyway, be careful. Be very careful what you do."
From outside came a cry. "Hawks! Take cover, hawks!"

III
Instantly everyone in the cave fell silent. They watched the places in
the cave wall where the sunlight came in, the little cracks in the cliff
face. Trevor thought of the hawk-creatures, and how they would be
wheeling and slipping along the ravine, searching.
Outside, the rough rock looked all alike. He thought that in that
immensity of erosions and crevices they would have a hard time
finding the few tiny chinks that led into the cave. But he watched,
too, tense with a feeling of danger.
No sound at all came now from the ravine. In that utter stillness, the
frightened whimper of a child came with the sudden loudness of a
scream. It was instantly hushed. The shafts of sunlight crept slowly
up the walls. Jen seemed not to breathe. Her eyes shone, like an
animal's.
A black shadow flickered across one of the sunlight bars—flickered,
and then was gone. Trevor's heart turned over. He waited for it to
come back, to occlude that shaft of light, to slip in along it and
become a wide-winged demon with a sun-stone in its brow. For a
whole eternity he waited, but it didn't come back, and then a man
crept in through the entry hole and said, "They're gone."
Jen put her head down on her knees. She had begun to tremble all
over, very quietly, but with spasmodic violence. Before Trevor could
reach her, Hugh had her in his arms, talking to her, soothing her. She
began to sob then, and Hugh glanced at Trevor across her
shoulders.
"She's had a little too much."
"Yes." Trevor looked at the shafts of sunlight. "Do the hawks come
very often?"
"They send them every once in a while hoping to catch us off guard.
If they could find the cave they could hunt us out of it, drive us back
into the valley. So far they haven't found it."
Jen was quiet now. Hugh stroked her with big awkward hands. "She
told you, I guess. About yourself, I mean. You've got to be careful."
"Yes," said Trevor. "She told me." He leaned forward. "Listen, I still
don't know how you people got here or what it's all about. After we
got away from the Korins, Jen said something about a landing, three
hundred years ago. Three hundred Earth years?"
"About that. Some of us have remembered enough to keep track."
"The first Earth colonies were being started on Mercury about then,
in two or three of the bigger valleys. Mining colonies. Was this one
of them?"
Hugh shook his head. "No. The story is that there was a big ship
loaded with people from Earth. That's true, of course, because the
ship is still here, what's left of it. And so are we. Some of the people
on the ship were settlers and some were convicts."
He pronounced the word with the same hatred and scorn that
always accompanied the name "Korin." Trevor said eagerly,
"They used to do that in the early days. Use convict labor in the
mines. It made so much trouble they had to stop it. Were the
Korins...?"
"They were the convicts. The big ship crashed in the valley but most
of the people weren't killed. After the crash the convicts killed the
men who were in charge of the ship, and made the settlers obey
them. That's how it all started. And that's why we're proud we're
slaves—because we're descended from the settlers."
Trevor could see the picture quite clearly now, the more so because
it had happened before in one way or another. The emigrant ship
bound for one of the colonies, driven off its course by the
tremendous magnetic disturbances that still made Mercury a
spaceman's nightmare.
They couldn't even have called for help or given their position. The
terrible nearness of the Sun made any form of radio communication
impossible. And then the convicts had broken free and killed the
officers, finding themselves unexpectedly in command of a sort of
paradise, with the settlers to serve them.
A fairly safe paradise, too. Mercury has an infinite number of these
Twilight valleys, all looking more or less alike from space, half hidden
under their shallow blankets of air, and only the few that are both
accessible and unmistakable because of their size have permanent
colonies. Straight up and down, by spaceship, is the only way in or
out of most of them, and unless a ship should land directly on them
by sheer chance, the erstwhile prisoners would be safe from
discovery.
"But the sun-stones?" asked Trevor, touching his forehead. "What
about the sun-stones and the hawks? They didn't have the use of
them when they landed."
"No, they came later." Hugh looked around uneasily. "Look, Trevor,
it's a thing we don't talk about much. You can see why, when you
think what it's done to us. And it's a thing you shouldn't talk about at
all."
"But how did they get them in their heads? And why? Especially, why
do they waste them on the hawks?"
Jen glanced at him somberly from the circle of Hugh's arm. "We
don't know, exactly. But the hawks are the eyes and ears of the
Korins. And from the time they used the first sun-stone we've had no
hope of getting free from them."
The thing that had been buried in Trevor's subconscious since last
night's questioning came suddenly to the surface.
"Thought-waves, that's it! Sure!" He leaned forward excitedly, and
Jen told him frantically to lower his voice. "I'll be damned. They've
been experimenting with sun-stones for years on Earth—ever since
they were discovered, but the scientists never thought of...."
"Do they have the stones on Earth, too?" asked Jen, with loathing.
"No, no, only the ones that are brought from Mercury. Something
about Mercury being so close to the Sun, overdose of solar radiation
and the extremes of heat, cold, and pressure while the planet was
being made, that formed that particular kind of crystal here. I guess
that's why they're called sun-stones."
He shook his head. "So that's how they work it—direct mental
communication between the Korins and the hawks, by means of the
stones. Simple, too. Set them right in the skull, almost in contact
with the brain, and you don't need all the complicated machines and
senders and receivers they've been monkeying with in the labs for so
long." He shivered. "I'll admit I don't like the idea, though. There's
something repulsive about it."
Hugh said bitterly, "When they were only men, and convicts, we
might have beaten them some day, even though they had all the
weapons. But when they became the Korins—" He indicated the
darkling alcoves of the cave. "This is the only freedom we can ever
have now."
Looking at Hugh and Jen, Trevor felt a great welling-up of pity, for
them, and for all these far-removed children of Earth who were now
only hunted slaves to whom this burrow in the rock meant freedom.
He thought with pure hatred of the Korins who hunted them, with
the uncanny hawks that were their far-ranging eyes and ears and
weapons. He wished he could hit them with....
He caught himself up sharply. Letting his sympathies run away with
him wasn't going to do anybody any good. The only thing that
concerned him was to get hold of that sun-stone again and get out
of this devil's pocket. He'd spent half a life hunting for a stone, and
he wasn't going to let concern over perfect strangers sidetrack him
now.
The first step would be getting away from the cave.
It would have to be at night. No watch was kept then on the ledges,
for the hawks did not fly in darkness, and the Korins never moved
without the hawks. Most of the people were busy in those brief
hours of safety. The women searched for edible moss and lichens.
Some of the men brought water from the stream at the canyon fork,
and others, with stone clubs and crude spears, hunted the great
rock-lizards that slept in the crevices, made sluggish by the cold.
Trevor waited until the fourth night, and then when Saul's water
party left, he started casually out of the cave after them.
"I think I'll go down with them," he told Jen and Hugh. "I haven't
been down that far since I got here."
There seemed to be no suspicion in them of his purpose. Jen said,
"Stay close to the others. It's easy to get lost in the rocks."
He turned and went into the darkness after the water party. He
followed them down to the fork, and it was quite easy then to slip
aside among the tumbled rock and leave them, working his way
slowly and silently downstream.
After several days in the dimness of the cave, he found that the star-
shine gave him light enough to move by. It was hard going, even so,
and by the time he reached the approximate place where Saul had
tried to kill him he was bruised and cut and considerably shaken. But
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