* * * * * She was here at last, at arm's length, laughing. The others stayed at bay, eyeing the flame-gun in the crook of Flane's arm, but the girl walked toward him, calling out, "Flane! You got away that night!" He touched her hands with his, gently, and chuckled. "You are real, then. There were times since then that I thought you something my brain made up in the fury of battle. Real. You are real." "Of course, I'm real! And alive, too--though how much longer I'll be alive, I don't know. Flane, the Darksiders are grown bold. They attack in the daytime, now. They kill our--my people. No one has learned the key to the Machine. Without it, the Klarnva will perish." Flane patted the gun, grinning, "With this, the Darksiders will be no threat. Just a few blasts of the violet light, and they will run for shelter." He told her how he found it. When he concluded, he discovered that the others had come nearer, listening in amazement. But as they made no hostile gestures, Flane did not worry. He was once again with Aevlyn. "You must come on board the ship," she told him, walking toward the spaceship with him. "You can hold the Darksiders off while the others continue their search for the key." Flane showed her around the great vessel, pointing out the machines that worked through some energy other than the Machine. He dropped into the hole in the ship and reappeared with an elaborately carved scabbard into which he slipped the darkly hilted sword. "What a strangely beautiful weapon," she said when he showed it to her. They studied the runes engraved on the blade, which told in frieze form the tale of Norda the genius, of how he and the Klarnva came first to the planet, of their struggles with the Darksiders, and the erections of the city-states, and the building of the Machine. With a long fingernail, Aevlyn traced the outlines of the tiny forms on the blade. "They stand out from the shaft," she said slowly. Flane held it to the light that filtered through a cracked window. His eye went along the keen edge. "It forms a diamond shape through the middle. If we were to break it clean, those friezes would form the outer edges of the diamond, and the two sword-edges, the upper and lower points." Flane shook his head wonderingly, staring at the blue hilt of the sword. Glitterings like the sky at night stared back at him, the buried points of light in the haft winking and twinkling like stars. Like a beam of silver light, the blade sprang from the star-shaped guard, a shimmer of deadly steel. "A sword like this would be famous," he muttered. "People would talk of it. And yet--and yet I have never heard of any such a sword." "Nor have I," sighed red Aevlyn. * * * * *