Cerberus: A WOLF IN THE FOLD Read Online Free PDF Page B

opponent and the physical and intellectual effort needed to meet that challenge. Find out about the alien menace. The outcome no longer concerned me directly, since I would be trapped on a Warden world from now on. If the aliens won the coming confrontation, the Wardens would survive as allies. If they lost—well, it would only maintain the status quo. This reduced the alien question to an abstract problem for me and made my situation perfect.
      The other assignment created a similar situation. Seek out the Lord of Cerberus and kill him if I could. In a sense doing so would be more difficult, since I'd be operating on unfamiliar ground and would therefore require time and possibly allies; Another challenge. If I get him, I'd only increase my power and position on Cerberus. If he got me instead, then I wouldn't give a damn because I'd be dead. But the thought of losing is abhorrent to me. That set the contest in the best terms, from my point of view. Track-down assassination was the ultimate game, since you won or you died and never had to live with the thought that you'd lost.
      It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference that probably existed between me and this Lord of the Diamond was that I was working for the law and he—or she— against it But no, that wasn't right, either. On his world he was the law and I would be working against it. Perfect again. Dead heat on moral grounds.
      The only thing that really bothered me was the disadvantage of not having a psychoprogram with everything I needed to know all neatly laid out for me in my mind. Probably, I thought, they hadn't done it this time because they'd had me on the table in four new bodies with four separate missions, and the transfer process to a .new body was hard enough without trying to add anything afterward. Still, the omission put me in a deep pit. I sure hoped that the rest of that contact briefing recording hadn't wiped when I'd gotten up. It would be all I had.
      Food came—a hot tray of tasteless muck with a thin plastic fork and knife that would dissolve into a sticky puddle in an hour or so, then dry up into a talclike powder. Standard for prisoners.
      This being my first meal in some tune, it wasn't long before I had to go once again, and so I faced convincingly my moment of truth with the toilet that talked.
      "Now, as to this process"—Krega's voice, picking up right where we left off, gave me a tremendous feeling of relief—"we had to brief you this way because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Don't worry about it, though—it's permanent. We just prefer to allow as much tune as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock. Besides, we haven't the time to allow you to completely 'set in,' as it were. This will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel you have the trickiest task of the four."
      I felt the old thrill creep in. The challenge . . . the challenge!
      "As I said, your objective world is Cerberus. Like all the Diamond colonies, Cerberus is a madhouse. Third out from the Warden sun of die four Warden worlds , it is subject to seasons and ranges from a tropical equatorial zone to frozen polar caps. The most peculiar thing from a physical standpoint about the world is that it is a water world with no above-surface land masses. It is, however, a world abundant in life. The geological history is unknown, but apparently the sea covering was quite stow and the massive numbers of plants in its distant geological past kept their heads above water, so to speak. Thus almost half of the surface is covered with giant plants interwoven into complex networks, some with trunks tens of kilometers around—necessary support, since they are rooted in the seabed from a hundred meters to an impossible two to three kilometers below- The cities and towns of Cerberus are built atop these plants.
      "No additional physical descriptions will be adequate,