Moments later, having successfully invoked the secret entrance code, Harry was back in his familiar control room, snug in his combat chair, his helmet on and melding with his thoughtware, powering up equipment of all kinds, and running through a series of checklists.

He asked the Witch if the Space Force had done anything else to her in his absence and got a negative reply.

The ship assured him in its imperturbable voice that no one else had entered while he was gone. She remarked that there had been eleven unsuccessful attempts to uncode the software down-locks.

"I missed you, too, baby," he said to his dear ship, patting an arm of his familiar chair. He didn't expect any answer to that kind of remark, and he didn't get one - at least not from his ship. Certainly the Witch had not missed him.

Lily had no comment to make, but one of the Templars did. "Think she was faithful to you, captain?"

Harry only grunted. He was wishing he could get out his mail and read it, but the chances seemed hopeless at this point.

Curtly, Harry assigned combat stations, installing Lily in the chair immediately to his right. Two other chairs, these lacking any controls, he awarded to the pair of Templars. Whether he was officially under military authority or not, while his ship was under way he was going to be its captain.

Maybe now, Harry thought, would be the best time to dump the damned useless cargo of machinery that he had already hauled, to no purpose, over so many light-years. Six big crates of some kind of food-processing gear. But no, he could do that anytime, and there were people watching, the Space Force in particular, who might decide the action was suspicious. Rovaki might even manage to use it as an excuse for inflicting further delay.

The two Templars exchanged some banter between themselves, on the surface confident but naturally nervous underneath. What they said confirmed Harry's impression that they were both new to Maracanda, too, maybe even newer than he was.

"Going to find us a place to land and look around on the east side, captain?" Corporal Teagarden sounded cheerful.

Harry nodded. "That's the plan."

Even in the midst of his flight preparations, running the checklists as rapidly as possible, he was pondering privately whether he should take time out to unpack his one suit of heavy combat armor from its special locker and put it on. He had little doubt that it would soon be needed, provided he was able to land at Bulaboldo's claim.

Despite his satisfaction on having Lily aboard, he wasn't anxious to leave the controls to her, not until he had seen her work, or conditions forced him to it.

But about three seconds' thought convinced him that getting on his own armor could wait till after he had seen whether Bulaboldo's maze chart was any good or not. Right now he couldn't spare the couple of minutes he would need to get into his meeting-with-berserkers outfit, and run the checklist on it and his carbine. But he decided it would be wise to allot a few seconds just to take a look at it.

When he did see the suit, calling up a video view of the compartment where it was kept, he was jarred by getting a look at the scars from the last time it had seen action. That had been several standard months ago - no, almost a year - on Hyperborea. Harry stared unhappily at the ugly marks. He could clearly remember the time, not that many more years in the past, when the suit was new. Now it looked like it might be time for a replacement, another expensive undertaking.

He hadn't realized that he was muttering aloud, but Lily had a question: "Will you get a new one?"

"Good suits cost a lot."

"I would think that bad, worn-out ones cost even more. Yours has evidently seen some use."

"You're right about that."

The cuirass of Harry's heavy-duty armor had once displayed a painted motto, long since totally obliterated. There had been an image also, but only the outline of a winged shape was faintly visible. The symbols once so clear had been so drastically defaced by fire and impact that no one could read them anymore. Next time he had a design, a decoration, put on anything - if he survived long enough for there to be a next time - he was going to keep it simple.

He could tell that Lily in her nearby chair was looking at the display. But she made no comment.

Harry said; "I once had some high-flying ideas."

"And now you don't?"

Harry grunted. "Can't afford 'em."

Lily said: "I think high-flying ideas are like good suits."

Harry didn't answer that. His hand strayed, as if unconsciously, to the coveralls pocket where he had stowed away the message from Esmerelda. But right now there was no time to spare for interruptions.

One of the gung-ho young Templars had turned his chair around and was looking curiously at the small display. "I never saw armor like that."

"Count yourself lucky," Harry grunted.

Turning off the image of the suit, he buried himself in an intense concentration on his current task of astrogation. For the first time in days Harry felt at home. He was at home, and just being there put him a long step closer to feeling that all might yet be made right with the world.

But the process of making things right had a long way to go. There was no time to waste.

There was a big question that hadn't been answered yet: Just what big idea did the berserkers have in their warped optelec-tronic brains when a nasty knot of them went swarming to the far end of Maracanda? Their presence couldn't, it absolutely couldn't, be just a casual intrusion. However they had got there, it must have cost them and their sick-brained human helpers a considerable effort, and a lot of planning. They wouldn't have run such an elaborate operation just to pot a few small towns.

Harry got out the message cube holding his copy of the pilot's chart that Bulaboldo had so thoughtfully provided. By concentrating on printed matter, while he and the ship were sharing the right thoughtware mode, he could transfer the content directly to the Witch's own data banks.

Harry needed only a few more moments to get the Witch's bottom up and off from the Port City field, where not a single ship now remained. Lifting off, he noted how odd the broad expanse appeared when it was absolutely empty.

The Witch had not broken any speed records getting off the ground, but gauges showed that the breathable atmosphere had fallen away below the ship with what seemed unnatural suddenness, compared to the slow thinning that normally occurred when you lifted off from a planet.

Up into space, on a comparatively short arc, only a few hundred klicks, the shape of the orbital curve being very close to that of one end of an ellipse. Then back down, approaching the strange mottled sky from above, it looked almost like a layer of normal cloudy overcast, aiming more or less by instinct and estimate at where he supposed Tomb Town and its environs to be.

Now to find the unmarked and practically invisible entrance to the free-zone passage he required.

The approach system bombarded him with insistent warnings to stay away. He ordered the Witch to suppress that kind of message until further notice.

Getting his ship quickly up into space, at an altitude of about five hundred kilometers, he found himself well clear of the habitable body's more obvious peculiarities. By comparison, the local pulsar, and even the flame-fringed ebony of hurtling Ixpuztec, the black hole, looked refreshingly normal. More to the point, none of the Witch's probing senses, generally keen at this kind of work, could detect any sign of any enemy presence within ten million klicks or so.

Both Ixpuztec and Avalon, the neutron star, were visibly in motion. Each body was tracing out a curving passage, in a movement that looked stately and slow. It was hard to escape the illusion that both were no more than a few kilometers away, moving at no more than a few kilometers per hour.

Scattered here and there throughout the inner system were elements, including General Pike's scoutship, of the modest defense force that had got off the ground.

Pike came on the communicator, the light-speed signal delayed by less than a minute, to tell Harry that the system's early warning apparatus, a largely automated setup, was still reporting no intrusion.

Rovaki had perhaps been listening in, for now a message came in from the Space Force commander, ordering Harry and the Witch to take over patrol duties in a certain region, in expectation of a strong berserker attack from space.

"Do you copy, Witch of Endor?"

"I seem to be having some trouble reading your transmissions" was Harry's answer.

The two Templars in his control room smiled faintly at seeing the rival authority thwarted. They trustingly had taken their helmets off, and for a moment Harry toyed with the idea of gassing them to sleep, just to get them out of his hair for a few minutes. Put them to sleep, then out the airlock with them. He'd put their helmets back on before throwing them out, being the nice guy that he was. Someone with a portable air supply might survive being thrown out into that strange sky, if tossed at slow speed and low altitude, bouncing from pseudocloud to pseudocloud, eventually down to the surface.

Lily's voice interrupted his ruminations. "I have the feeling you'd like to get all these authorities out of your hair, and just deal with berserkers in your own way." It seemed that she could almost tell what he was thinking, and there weren't many who could do that.

Harry shook his head. "The idea's tempting, but I'm not sure I'm big enough to handle them all by myself."

"The authorities?"

"No, I meant the berserkers."

"At least you don't have them right here on your ship."

"The berserkers?"

"No, I meant the authorities."

Looking at each other, they shared an almost silent chuckle.

Then on impulse Harry said: "If your husband was still here, I might gas him."

Lily wasn't sure just how to answer that. But she wanted to laugh, and finally gave in. "Should I lie down on the deck, captain? Save myself a fall?"

"This time, kid, you'll get the nose spray first."

The pair of Templars, hearing only the laugh, looked suitably mystified.

Then for a time Harry had to forget everything else, and, with the help of Bulaboldo's patented Smuggler's Guide, concentrate on weaving a tricky course through the topmost layer of the spectacular Maracandan "sky," gradually working the Witch closer to the ground. From this altitude, the habitable area was still optically invisible, hidden beneath the mounded grayish matter of the sky.

What could be seen of the uninhabitable regions looked every bit as inhospitable as it truly was, while even the overall shape of Maracanda seemed to change, depending heavily on the observer's distance.

Instruments told a somewhat different story, and there Harry saw some indications that the ground defenses, such as they were, were tuning up for action.

Seen from this altitude and position, Maracanda was like something from an evolving dream, a dream that might sometime develop into beauty, and not necessarily evil. There seemed to be no pinning it down, as to what was really there. Not only the colors and contours, but the very size of the habitable body varied, moved, and shifted, even while Harry watched. He could no longer be sure which end of this turning object humanity called east and which end west. He had to trust that somewhere in the Witch's vast opt-electronic brain were circuits somehow capable of keeping track.

It was Harry's job to guide his snip away from the designated and approved flight paths, while trying not to provoke any nervous reaction by the ground defenses. While an alert was on, special rules might be in effect - or some routine rules might be relaxed.

Harry's next task, even more difficult, was to nurse the Witch through the nearly impossible passage back to the vicinity of Tomb Town. To simply grope his way along, without the guidance of Bulaboldo's plan, would have been hopeless. He was going to have to trust the chart worked out by the insatiable curiosity of little flying robots.

Maracanda seen from this distance in space was not as flat as the habitable region below the clouds. Instead, the whole body was rather football-shaped. He couldn't see the expanse of habitable surface, which seemed so flat when he was on it, nor could he guess just where it might lie.

Harry would have liked to send a little flying probe, like the one Bulaboldo had used to chart the passage, ahead of the Witch to mark her way. But he had nothing of the kind available.

Under these strange conditions, a flight of a thousand or two thousand kilometers, only a few minutes' quick cruise in ordinary atmosphere, might keep a pilot busy for an hour or more.

Maneuvering his ship through the small apertures in the various atmospheric layers had to be done with excruciating care, even if Bulaboldo had somehow managed to provide him with a kind of guide.

There were places where the ship's movement had to be accomplished in centimeters rather than meters. Once Harry made a wrong choice, and had to back the Witch very slowly out of a tight spot, feeling his way like an elephant performing on a high wire. Once the ship's flank just brushed the sharply defined, invisible boundary between zones. Through the pilot's thought-ware, Harry sensed the tremor of irresponsibility go shivering through programming and hardware alike. Half a meter more in the wrong direction, and the Witch could have gone plunging down, systems cascading into failure, her engines as well as her optelectronic brain totally disabled.

Minutes passed, the time elapsed since leaving the spaceport dragged out to an hour. How many more people could ten or twenty berserkers kill in an hour?

But meter by meter, minute by minute, the real habitable surface was creeping closer. The lowest layer of the sky was breached, and the eerie landscape where humans worked and fought came into view at last.

Harry swore a heartfelt oath. "Got it. Got it at last." And Lily said: "All right!"

Through cleared ports Harry could watch a broad expanse of the peculiar hills, bathed in the strange light that was only natural on Maracanda, but never did look quite natural to an Earth-descended human. It was almost impossible to judge by sight the distance of the alien landscape. First the hills were a little bit below, then they came gently up on all sides as the Witch, on autopilot, straightened out her slow descent to come down precisely on her tail.

Looking out through cleared statglass ports, Harry could see the stripes Bulaboldo had drawn on the ground to mark the landing spot for him.