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but already it was too deep. Then the air was only a few silver patches on the ceiling, and the seawash was turning him over and over.
    A big dark shape brushed past him, fantastically agile in the roiling currents, gone before his sword-arm could react. Rordray had escaped him. He swam toward one of the smashed ballroom windows, knowing he wouldn’t make it, trying anyway. The faint glow ahead might be King N i hilil, guiding him. Then it all seemed to fade, and he was breathing water, strangling.
     
    Rordray pulled himself over the top step, his flippers already altering to hands. He was gasping, blowing. It was a long trip, even for a sea lion.
    The returning sea had surged up the steps and sloshed along the halls and into the rooms where Rordray and his family dwelt. Rordray shook his head. For a few days they must needs occupy the next level up: the inn, which was now empty.
    The change to human form was not so great a change, for Rordray. He became aware of one last wisp of fog standing beside him.
    “Well,” it said, “how’s the King?”
    “Furious,” Rordray said. “But after all, what can he do? I thank you for the warning.”
    “I’m glad you could stop them. My curse on their crazy rebellion. We’ll all f-fade away in time, I guess, with the magic dwindling and dwindling. But not just yet, if you please!”
    “War is bad for everyone,” said Rordray.

SPIRALS
with Jerry Pournelle
    There are always people who want to revise history. No hero is so great that someone won’t take a shot at him. Not even Jack Halfey.
    Yes, I knew Jack Halfey. You may not remember my name. But in the main airlock of Industrial Station One there’s an inscribed block of industrial diamond, and my name is sixth down: Cornelius L. Riggs, Metallurgist. And you might have seen my face at the funeral.
    You must remember the funeral. All across the solar system work stopped while Jack Halfey took his final trek into the sun. He wanted it that way, and no spacer was going to refuse Jack Halfey’s last request, no matter how expensive it might be. Even the downers got in the act. They didn’t help pay the cost, but they spent hundreds of millions on sending reporters and cameras to the Moon.
    That funeral damned near killed me. The kids who took me to the Moon weren’t supposed to let the ship take more than half a gravity . My bones are over a hundred years old, and they’re fragile. For that young squirt of a pilot the landing may have been smooth, but she hit a full gee for a second there, and I thought my time had come.
    I had to go, of course. The records say I was Jack’s best friend, the man who’d saved his life, and being one of the last survivors of the Great Trek makes me somebody special. Nothing would do but that I push the button to send Jack on his “final spiral into the sun,” to quote a downer reporter.
    I still see TriVee programs about ships “spiraling” into the sun. You’d think seventy years and more after the Great Trek the schools would teach kids something about space.
    When I staggered outside in lunar gravity—lighter than the 20% gravity we keep in the Skylark, just enough to feel the difference—the reporters were all over me. Why, they demanded, did Jack want to go into the sun? Cremation and scattering of ashes is good enough for most spacers. It was good enough for Jack’s wife. Some send their ashes back to Earth; some are scattered into the solar wind, to be flung throughout the universe; some prefer to go back into the soil of a colony sphere. But why the sun?
    I’ve wondered myself. I never was good at reading Jack’s mind. The question that nearly drove me crazy, and did drive me to murder, was: why did Jack Halfey make the Great Trek in the first place?
    I finally did learn the answer to that one. Be patient.
     
    Probably there will never be another funeral like Jack’s. The Big Push is only a third finished, and it’s still two hundred miles of the biggest linear