Imperial Earth

Then there was only the sighing of the wind, even lonelier than before.

For a long, delicious moment, Duncan savored the unique pleasure of fear without danger; then he reacted as he always did when he encountered something new or exciting. He tapped out Karl Helmer’s number, and said:

“Listen to this.”

Three kilometers away, at the northern end of Oasis City, Karl waited until the thin scream died into silence. As always, his face gave no hint of his thoughts. Presently he said: “Let’s hear it again.”

Duncan repeated the playback, confident that the mystery would soon be solved. For Karl was fifteen, and therefore knew everything.

Those dazzling blue eyes, apparently so candid yet already so full of secrets, looked straight at Duncan. Karl’s surprise and sincerity were totally convincing as he exclaimed: “You didn’t recognize it?”

Duncan hesitated. He had thought of several obvious possibilities-but if he guessed wrongly, Karl would make fun of him. Better to be on the safe side .

“No,” he answered. “Did you?” “Of course,” said Karl, in his most superior tone of voice. He paused for effect, then leaned toward the camera so that his face loomed enormous on it screen.

“It’s a Hydrosaurus on the rampage.”

For a fraction of a second, Duncan took him seriouslya-which was exactly what Karl had intended. He quickly recovered, and laughed back at his friend.

“You’re crazy. So you don’t know what it is.”

For the methane-breathing monster Hydrosaurus rex was their private joke-the product of youthful imaginations, inflame by pictures of ancient

Earth and the wonders it had brought forth near the dawn of creation.

Duncan knew perfectly well that nothing lived now, or had ever lived, on the world that he called home; only Man had walked upon its frozen surface.

Yet if Hydrosaurus could have existed, that awesome sound might indeed have been its battle cry, as it leaped upon the gentle Carbotherium, wallowing in some ammonia lake … “Oh. I know what made that noise,” said Karl smugly. “Didn’t you guess?

That was a ram-tanker making a scoop. If you call Traffic Control, they’ll tell you where it was heading.”

Karl had had his fun, and the explanation was undoubtedly correct. Duncan had already thought of it,

et he had hoped for something more romantic. ho ugh it was perhaps too much to expect methane monsters, an everyday spaceship was a disappointing anticlimax. He felt a sense of letdown, and was sorry that he had given Karl another chance to deflate his dreams. Karl was rather good at that.

But like all healthy ten-year-olds, Duncan was resilient. The magic had not been destroyed. Though the first ship had lifted from Earth three centuries before he was born, the wonder of space had not yet been exhausted. There was romance enough in that shriek from the edge of the atmosphere, as the orbiting tanker collected hydrogen to power the commerce of the Solar

System.

In a few hours, that precious cargo would be falling sunward, past Saturn’s other-moons, past giant Jupiter, to make its rendezvous with

one of the fueling stations that circled the inner planets. It would take months-even years-to get there, but there was no hurry. As long as cheap hydrogen flowed through the invisible pipeline across the Solar System, the fusion rockets could fly from world to world, as once the ocean liners had plied the seas of Earth.

Duncan understood this better than most boys of his age; the hydrogen economy was also the story of his family, and would dominate his own future when he was old enough to play a part in the affairs of Titan. It was now almost a century since Grandfather Malcolm had realized that Titan was the key to all the planets, and had shrewdly used this knowledge for the benefit of mankind-and of himself.

So Duncan continued to listen to the recording after Karl had switched off.

Over and over again he played back that triumphant, cry of power, trying to detect the precise moment when it was finally swallowed up in the gulfs of space. For years it would haunt his dreams; he would wake in the night, convinced that he had heard it again through the roof of rock that protected Oasis from the hostile wilderness above.

And when at last he fell back into sleep, he would always dream of Earth.

DYNASTY

Malcolm Makenzie had been the right man, at the right time. Others before him had looked covetously at Titan, but he was the first to work out all the engineering details and to conceive the total system of orbiting scoops, compressors, and cheap, expendable tanks that could hold their liquid hydrogen with minimum loss as they dropped leisurely sunward.

Back in the 2180’s, Malcolm had been a promising young aerospace