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Five tiny fighting craft, no two alike, except in general size, range, and firepower. They drew on the battle-cruiser engine, restoring their own power even as it pulled them through the nightmarish void.

Well, each of the men had known from the beginning what he faced: a cruel and cunning enemy; a being that took delight in human misery; a creature willing to sacrifice whole cultures, entire planets to satisfy whatever unknowably evil objectives it set for itself.

And each had understood, when he had assembled them in his home system from the ragtags of a dozen armies, how little chance there was of surviving the quest. To them, it had been worth it.

Five out of twenty-four.

It still was.

Bohhuah Mutdah lounged in a gel-filled recliner, watching a performance of surpassing obscenity. On the lawn before him, all manner of sentient beings mingled, progressing through every permutation of activity possible to them. He had hired them—over three hundred of them—for that express purpose. They were following his detailed instructions.

He found it boring.

Bohhuah Mutdah found very nearly everything boring. There was little he cared to participate in directly, owing either to security considerations—even now he was surrounded by an unobtrusive force field to protect him from potential assassins among his employees—or to his physical condition. He had seen too much of life, had too much of life. Still he clung to it, although he didn’t know why.

To say that Bohhuah Mutdah was obese would be to engage in understatement. He had begun, a hundred years ago, with a large frame, a little over two meters tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged. That had been only the beginning, an armature on which he molded a grotesque parody of heroic sculpture. He was heroically obese, monumentally obese, cosmically …

On a genuine planet, with a real gravitic pull, he would have weighed three hundred kilos, perhaps three-fifty. He hadn’t entered such a field for a quarter of a century. He was bigger around the waist than two large men could reach and working on three. His own arms looked stubby, his legs like cones turned over on the ends into absurdly tiny baby feet. His face was a bushel basket full of suet, dotted with impossibly tiny features: a pair of map-pin eyes, a pair of pinprick nostrils, a miniature blossom of a mouth.

He hadn’t used his own hands for any purpose for five years.

He could afford to use the hands of others. He had no real notion of what he was worth. No truly rich man does. He’d heard it said he was the wealthiest human in the known galaxy. He wasn’t sure about that, either, and didn’t care.

He didn’t care about anything at all—except, perhaps, lesai.

Maybe it was the drug that kept him going, maintained the mild interest he experienced in remaining alive. Everything else, the world, the entire universe, resembled a bleak gray plain to him. The Flamewind, lashing and snarling above his heavily shielded dome, seemed colorless to him, although the hirelings on the lawn paused long enough, now and again, to look up in awe at the display.

It wasn’t being rich that had done this to him. As long as he could remember, since he was a child in rather ordinary circumstances, he’d puzzled over the phrase “will to live” and wondered what drove others to the bizarre extremes they sometimes reached while struggling merely to remain in existence. Mutdah’s wealth had been the casual result of a decade’s desultory application of his incredible intelligence, directing his modest substance toward a path of inevitable, automatic growth.

Nor did that intelligence provide him with an answer to his real problem. He knew submorons, many of them working for him, whose capacity to enjoy life was infinite compared to his. He simply lived on, whether he cared to or not, like a machine—no, even the machines who worked for him appeared to relish the mockery of life they possessed with greater fervor and satisfaction than their master.