Newlin ran and tried to lose himself in the shadowy fastness of Monta Park. He was not surprised that the girl had not troubled to wait and meet him.

He was not even angry. It was part of the game.

The Protection Police radios were carrying the alarm. Soon the Security Police would take up the hunt. If the girl had turned him in, she would be able to give a detailed and accurate description. Newlin guessed that he would be lucky to last even the few hours till daylight—or what passes for daylight on cloud-shrouded Venus.

Long before then, his career might end suddenly in a wild network of blaster or heat beams. By dawn he would very likely be crumpled among the ashcans and refuse in any dark alley.

But still the city would be his best bet. No use beating his way to the spaceport landing stages. Space Patrol units must have been notified, and would already be searching all outgoing units.

For the moment, he had a brief interval of grace in which to think things over and try, if only for his own satisfaction, to figure out what had happened. It—whatever it was—had writhed hideously when the blaster beam drove home. Part of it vaporized instantly, and the organs revealed did not even look animal. Eery, geometric, but not the naked electronic symmetries of a mechanical robot. Not metal. But what? Collapsed like wet sacking, it had lain half-inside and half-outside the screen. He could not recall clearly its rapid mutations of form after that.

Did it matter? The alarms were out. Blaring metallic clangor, and the uncanny banshee wailing of the hunting sirens. Police care little who is murdered in the nameless dives of Venusport, but let one of the lordly rich men die, and all Hell is loosed on the killer.

If the girl had turned in the alarm, it was only a matter of time. They would have his name and number; his ident-card would be listed and reproduced, sent everywhere. They would probably have the robot trackers out, those hideous electronic bloodhounds which can unerringly sort out a man's trail from the infinity of other scents and markings, following not smell, but a curious tangle of electrical impulses left by his body like static electricity or intangible magnetism. No layman could even guess how such a robot worked, but fugitives had learned to dread its infallible tracking ability.

Newlin fled, and as he went, he cursed himself for getting involved in such a nightmare.

Figures moved and blundered about him in the darkness of the park, but none got in his way. None seemed to notice him. Since it was not a man he had killed, perhaps others hunted him; other remote, alien beings he could not see, or sense.

The girl would know, of course. If he could find her. But she had vanished before he ever issued from the strange tower, and it was highly unlikely that he would ever see her again.

Chance, and a sudden rush of blue-clad figures across a street ahead of him, turned Newlin back toward his own, familiar part of town. The scant shelter of shadows in deserted alleyways was a comfort, but little real protection. He had friends, of a peculiar sort, in the old native quarter, and the Spacebell lay just outside the fringe of the mutants' district, where the half-human natives laired up. These friends might hide him, for a while, although such refuge was of little use against the robot-trackers.

By daylight, he could be smuggled outside the domed city, and once into the wastelands, there was a chance. Not a good one; but there, even the robot-tracker could hardly come upon him without his knowledge. A lucky blaster shot would leave a blank trail and a shattered robot for his pursuers to follow. He wondered if they would risk another such expensive machine merely to hunt down a murderer in the wastelands. Scarcely, when the wastelands would kill the fugitive sooner or later anyhow.

His first task was to reach the Spacebell and collect his pay. Then to get protection-armor, against the peril of sandstorms and the radioactive sinks that spot the old sea-beds outside Venusport. After that, the native quarter, if he lived to reach it.

Shortly before daylight, he turned the last alley-corner and came in sight of the Spacebell.

A shadow stirred with movement. A lithe, loosely draped figure hurried to meet him. It was the girl—Songeen.

"Don't go in there," she said. "They know who you are, and the police are waiting for you."

Newlin felt numb all over. "How did they know? Did you tell them?" he snapped.

"Of course not. Don't be a fool. Would I inform, then wait to warn you? I did not know he had automatic alarms, and automatic cameras to make records of anyone who came into the—the place. It was the pictures. They were identified with your ident-card at the Central Police Bureau. And the robot-trackers are out."

Newlin and Songeen studied each other for a long moment of silence.

"I guess it doesn't matter now," Newlin said finally, "but I'm glad you didn't turn me in. I might almost as well give up and get the thing over with. There's no place to run. Not without money."

Songeen produced a small sack of platinum coins which jingled as she offered it.

"That's one reason I tried to find you. After the alarms, I knew I would only handicap your flight. I hid. Then I came here, because I thought you might come back. I'm sorry I have no more money, but the rest is all in credits. It would be no help to you in the wastelands."

"I see," muttered Newlin. "Why did you care? Were you afraid I'd talk if the Police caught me?"

Songeen shrugged coldly. "No, I hadn't thought of that. But I think I owe you something. Murderer's wages. I knew you couldn't fulfil your bargain when you made it. But, in a way, I am responsible for you."

"In a way," agreed Newlin bitterly. He snatched at the bag of coins. "This will do. Thanks for nothing."

"Don't blame me too much. I had no choice, and I did not know it would work out like this."

"Perhaps not, but next time do your own killing. It's rough on both your victims."

Songeen was crying, tearless wracking sobs that shook her frail body.

"I'm sorry," she moaned. "But I couldn't even get in to see him. He knew the exact vibration level of my body, and had set supersonic traps to kill me if I tried to enter. Even my bones would have shattered. I would have died painfully and horribly. I would rather have died myself than cause his death. Believe that. There is always a third victim. He was my husband, and I loved him. You can't understand, of course—"

"I understand less than ever now." Newlin knew that it was madness to remain so close to the Spacebell. But he could not force himself to leave Songeen. She seemed near collapse.

A thought struck him. "Say, is there anything there to tie you up with this business?"

Songeen gave a wry thrust of her thin shoulders. "Much—but does it matter? It was my—our home. Before he tricked me outside and would not let me return. They don't know what happened—yet. But there will be enough evidence against both of us. Part of what you saw was illusion. His body is still there. Changed—but the trackers can identify it. The charge is murder, and they will want both of us. Not just you."

"Come with me." Newlin spoke harshly—sharply.

The girl's eyes flickered. "Are you threatening me?"

"No. It's just that I've led them to you. We're in the same boat now. With the mechanical hounds on our heels. They will connect you through me, now that our trails have crossed. And they'll follow both of us. How will you manage?"

Songeen smiled wearily. "One always takes risks. I came here prepared for—anything."

"Don't be a fool! Protection Police don't stop to ask questions. They're hired Killers."

"I suppose not. What do you suggest?"

"Run and hide. Come with me, if you like. But suit yourself. I'm getting out of here. Out into the wastelands. It's almost dawn now. In the city, we're lost. Outside, there's a chance. A poor one, but—"

Light was that gray ugliness that precedes the smeary glare of dawn on Venus. The girl seemed very slight and young and helpless. Again, Newlin felt that impulse to save and protect her. He could see no details of feature, even her face was shadowed, and not quite human; but her body was beautiful, and trembling.

"Are you coming?" he asked, savagely.

"I'll go with you," she said. "You're kind. Perhaps I can help you. If they corner us, please kill me. I don't like—being hurt."

Newlin laughed grimly. "It's a promise. But I'll kill some of them first."

"Please," she begged. "No killing—not for me."

Ten hours later, far out in the wastelands, Spud Newlin called a halt. The girl had trudged wearily behind him, uncomplaining and with patient determination. They wasted no precious breath in words, and walking had been doubly difficult for her. The protection armor was twice too large, and very cumbersome for such a slight figure; but such garments never come in half-size. Children and women are forbidden to venture into the wastelands, except in special vehicles.

Actually they had started out by vehicle. But it was old, cranky and ready for the junkyard. In the first flurry of sandstorm, it had clogged, burned out and died. Nothing very reliable was available in the black market without more notice.

Newlin accepted the inevitable and proceeded on foot. Perhaps they could reach the Archaeological Station at Sansurra. He was not certain if it would be inhabited at the Sandstorm season, but there was a good chance of stored food and water. Turning back to Venusport was impossible. So they went on.

Now he was confused. Directions are difficult at best on Venus, and his radio-compass proved faulty. He had only the vaguest idea where they were, and none at all where they were headed. But if he stopped too long, the shifting dunes would cover them. And if they tried to go too fast, it would be fatally easy to blunder into one of the open sink-holes of molten, radioactive metal.

He stopped and motioned the girl to rest.

She sank down, exhausted.

Newlin adjusted the throat microphones and headsets in their plastic helmets to make for easier conversation. But for a while, neither could talk. They sat and gasped, yearning for a breath of fresh, unreclaimed air. Water supplies were low, and already Newlin had established iron rations. Drinking by tubes was difficult in the helmets and the water was warm and foul.

"You're lost?" Songeen asked at last.

Newlin nodded. He produced a wrinkled, battered map. "I can't even trust the compass. I don't know where we are."

The girl took the map in her gloved hands and peered intently through her face-mask. One finger traced a tiny circle in the film of dust.

"I know," she said. "We are somewhere about here. And over there—" she indicated a direction behind Newlin—"is the city from which my people came."

Newlin was startled. The directional instinct with which all Venusians are endowed was familiar enough, yet he would have sworn the girl was not from the enfeebled and mutant races of the veiled planet. She was, at once, more human—and more remote. Songeen guessed his doubt. Through the fused quartz faceplate, her angular features wore a curious, faint smile.

"No, not Venusian. This was an—an outpost. A colony and a quarantine station. The city was abandoned long ago. Long before the atomic holocaust my people fled. Eons have passed. Everything is now in ruins—if even ruins remain. See, it is not marked on the map. Not even as ruins. But we have unusual race-memory. I can see the fabulous towers and arsenals, the terraced gardens and the palaces—as if they still stood today as they were in that vanished yesterday. And we have the homing instinct. It was my people who gave it to the Venusians. The one thing of value that still remains to them."

Newlin was still dubious. "Unless you're dreaming."

Her finger jabbed at the map. "We are here," she insisted. "And if you care to search and dig, the city is probably still there, as it was a million years ago."

"Would there be water in your ruined city?" Newlin asked.

"Who knows? The wells are probably all filled with sand now. Or gone dry, or become contaminated. There is always much radioactivity near the ruined cities. They were primary targets when the peoples of Venus destroyed themselves. Even this desert is mute evidence of the holocaust; if one needs evidence. My people fled before that madness, because they anticipated it."

Newlin snorted. The pre-holocaust Venusians were purely legendary. No written records could exist, amid such conditions as must have followed the ancient wars. Science knew that at least half a million years had passed since Venus was a fair green planet peopled with hearty, beautiful, ease-loving races. Half a million years since the surface people had even looked upon the sun.

"If you're right about where we are," Newlin growled, "I'm still interested in that city. We can never make Sansurra with the water we have. Ruined or not, there may be wells. Is there a chance?"

"Not a good one," Songeen replied. "But better than none."

"Whenever you're ready," Newlin said. "You lead."

Wearily, man and girl struck off across the seas of shifting sand. Great dunes blocked their way. Some they circled, others must be climbed laboriously.

From the top of a huge, wind-ribbed billow, Newlin stared at a pale flickering in the dust ahead. In all other directions stretched endless humps and hollows. But before him lay a great wind-scoured hollow of bare rock. Beyond that, crowning a series of low hills, which must have thrust above water line in this shallow part of the ancient, vanished sea, were ruins.

Even as ruins, the city was spectacular. Massive columns had eroded slowly into stone toothpicks. Walls crumbled into formless heaps resembling the dunes. A few outlines of smoothed blocks and shattered lintels huddled the ground, half hidden by the encroaching sand. Details had vanished eons ago, but something still remained to tantalize imagination. The few buildings that still stood, and the soaring, fragile towers evidenced an engineering civilization of staggering proportions. Surface dimensions were still tremendous, and the city itself must have been of first importance, covering hundreds of square miles.

"Our city," said Songeen.

Newlin glanced quickly behind. Still distant, but moving very rapidly was the string of dark objects that could only be sandsleds of the pursuit. One tiny figure, scarcely visible, was far in advance of the others. The robot tracker.

He gestured. "They're covering three miles to our one," he told her grimly. "We'll try to reach the city before they catch up with us. Perhaps we can hide out among the ruins, and—with luck, booby-trap the tracker. If there's water, we can hold out for quite a while."

Songeen nodded crisply. Her voice was strained with emotion and fatigue. "As fugitives my people abandoned this city. Now, as a fugitive, I return."

Then she was off, running awkwardly, the cumbersome suiting of her protection armor giving her bounding strides the laughable appearance of a lumbering teddy-bear.

Descent into the hollow was riding a series of miniature sand avalanches. Each step buried the foot deep, but the sand gave way and slipped in loose spills. His boots struck hard on rough, bare rock. He grunted, fought for balance, then sprawled heavily. She helped him up, then took off again. Newlin followed.

Over the wind-carved rock, they made good time. Ascent of the long, jagged slopes to the city was heart-killing work, delicate and treacherous. The surface was like sponge-glass, brittle and deadly with knife-edges when broken.

Sheltering from wind-driven sand under the cover of a great monolith, Newlin and Songeen watched the racing figures of pursuit top the crest of the opposite ridge and start down. Man and girl were too winded and weak even to get up. They dared rest only a moment, then plunged on into the maze of tumbled ruins. Ultimate exertion had taken toll of their energies and rapidly burned up air reserves. Both were cruelly thirsty. The heat, even inside their insulated suits, was stifling.

There was no time to take stock of manifold discomforts.

The race was neck and neck. Death sniffed at their heels in the guise of mechanical trackers. On Venus, life is to the swift and cunning. To Newlin, life was perilous, but sweet.

Their helmet microphones picked up and amplified a curious droning buzz. It was the deathsong of the electronic tracker and it seemed closer than it was.

Slowly, inexorably, it grew louder. Sound swelled steadily, and it was a whiplash to their flagging energies. They fled in panic through the streets of the dead city.

It was no real refuge to them, but its megalithic precincts gave some lying illusion of safety. They chose a twisting, tangled route into the very heart of the ruined city, with the instinct of a hunted animal to confuse its trail. They doubled back to cross their own trail twice, in the vain hope of baffling the electronic enemy.

Newlin had been hunted before, on Mars, but by live bloodhounds. Pepper, oil of mustard, and perfumes had saved him then. But this hound followed not scent, but something intangible, electrical, and as mysterious as the soul-aura itself. It sorted two life-complexes from all other impulses and followed its own prime-directive—hunt down and kill.

The end was inevitable as death.

Newlin laid ambush for the mechanical monster. Crouched in a nest of rubble, he waited for it, blaster gun ready. Around a corner of shattered stones, it appeared. It moved like a whipping shadow, like part of the gathering twilight.

Silent, save for the high, nerve-tearing drone, it came warily across the courtyard paved with eroded stone. It was low, not animal in appearance, with the form of a fat, ugly snake. Fading light of the Venusian day cast a glint of metallic gray from its scaling of interlocked rings.

Newlin waited for a close shot. How vulnerable was such a soul-less, mechanical monster to even the shattering-heat-forces of a blaster gun?

Songeen lay quietly beside him, her body quivering as much from strained muscles as from fear. Behind the face-mask, her thin features were pale, ghostlike.

With elaborate caution, the tracker circled their hiding place. Its froglike head, with a ruff of exposed filaments lifted, like an animal scenting blood. It edged slowly closer, its movement a glide, sinuous, crafty, with no suggestion of mechanical action.

Newlin pushed the girl's form roughly away, lest her trembling foul his aim. Sighting, he pressed trigger. Bright flame leaped from the weapon, crackling.

The beam lashed at the tracker, which stopped suddenly, threw back its monstrous head, and burst into hideous uproar of sparking, electrical discharge. Like a live thing, it twitched, jerked, and flung itself in mad spasms. Convulsions stopped as short-circuits flared in both head and body. Molten, flowing, its metallic carcass glowed eerily in the dimness. Dying, it blazed up in a fireworks display spectacular enough to attract half of Venus to the terrified fugitives.

But the drone continued.

From behind the same corner came a duplicate of the first metal monster. Another tracker.

Its drone rose into shrill crescendo. Like a dog, it approached the wreckage of its fellow. And like a dog, it summoned help. Then, without pausing to examine the mechanical casualty, it turned its electronic attentions back to the hunted.

Hopelessly, Newlin urged Songeen to her feet. They fled, and the game began all over again.

It was a madman's dream. Desperate flight, the haunted ruins of an unknown city, deadly pursuit closing in, slowly, patiently inevitably. The familiar hare and hounds pattern of nightmare.

They fled through vague, littered streets, treacherous with the rubble of lost centuries. Buildings were lighter patterns upon the gathering darkness. Stone flagging underfoot was rough, eroded, rotten.

A pinnacled precipice rose suddenly to bar their way. Immense, sheer, buttressed by spills of loose rock, it towered above them and lost its heights in gloom.

Within a massive, deep-carved archway of stone, set an oval of polished red granite. A doorway, barren of carving save for one, scrawled and monstrous hieroglyph. Uneasiness stirred in Newlin, for something in his buried race-memories recalled that symbol with supernal dread. Ice formed about his spine and melted in trickling terror-drops. Instinct cringed, but his conscious mind rebelled at even the effort of memory.

Songeen stopped and stared at the hideously marked doorway, as if tranced.

"I remember this place," she said in swift excitement. "But I had thought it vanished—eons ago."

Newlin swerved on her angrily. "This is no time for experiments with your subconscious," he growled, savage with strain.

"It is—sanctuary," she replied softly. "Come!"

Boldly she stood before the oval door. Her finger traced its complex symbol, and the symbol responded with a glow like moonfire.

Again, as it had been with that oval door in Monta Park, there was baffling suggestion of unmechanical movement.

The stone block did not slide, roll, or swing open. It gave a slight quiver and dissolved.

Songeen stepped through its aperture and the inner darkness of the building claimed her. Reluctantly, Newlin followed—caught as much by curiosity as driven by the yelping spectres of pursuit.

No light entered the building from any source. It was dark as the pits of Ganymede or the under-surface laboratories of Pluto. It was dense and tangible as a block of black crystal. Newlin could see nothing, not even Songeen. And there was an alien feel to the interior.

He was aware that Songeen operated some hidden mechanism, and that the door, though he could not see it, was replaced.

"Now, for the moment, we are safe," she said slowly. "They cannot enter here."

Newlin shrugged bitterly. "It's all one. They can't enter and we don't dare go out. So we stay here and die of thirst. If you were really a top-rung witch, you'd think of details like air, food and water."

Songeen's laugh was a ripple of eery crystal in the darkness.

"How did you guess I was a witch?" she asked whimsically. "But we need not die here. Not unless you prefer to die among surroundings familiar to you. There is another way out. If we dare take it. For me, it will be simple. For you—"

"Not so simple, eh? You paint an interesting picture. Like one I once saw on Mars, in the Gneiss Gallery. 'Nocturne—Venusport,' it was titled. Beautiful. Dark purple background, the city seemed like fountains of flowering stars. It's not like that, not from the places I've seen it. Filth and dirt, people dying from poverty, disease or violence. Just a comparison. How close does your picture match the reality?"

"Close enough. You're a strange man, full of contradictions. I think you're only slightly mad. But for anyone, the way I could take you would be difficult. The pathway leads to my own world. To you—or anyone, not native—it will seem madness. Something of it you saw in the tower."

Around him in the darkness, he was conscious of her swift movements. She seemed untroubled by the lack of light. Neither by vision or hearing could he distinguish anything, but he sensed activity.

Then, suddenly, as if she had uncovered a cache of implements and struck a fire, radiance spread around her. Its source was not definite, and it spread slowly, like a stain through water. But something illuminated a vast, vaulted interior, Gothic in a sense, with a church-like air of gloom and mystery. It was Gothic, but of spiderweb delicacy, soaring arches, vague fretted ceilings, walls intricately carved into lacework of stone. Everywhere were echoes of that same eery symbolism in the door hieroglyph, and Newlin's folk-memories were oddly disturbed.