"Are you wounded, Harry?"

"It's not for me." He explained in a few words, and Lily crisply acknowledged. The Witch's own soft voice came on, promising to have the medirobot ready.

Emerging from the cave, carrying the rescued prisoner in his suit's tireless arms, he could think of no real alternative to bringing her aboard the Witch. The only other choice would be to leave her with Bulaboldo's smugglers. Harry's ship at least had a medirobot aboard, and it would afford the victim reasonable care. As soon as the Witch was back in space, in contact with the world, Harry meant to put the scientist on radio, to transmit her message of warning directly to the Space Force and Templars, and whatever scientific experts might be available to listen from Port City. Harry was hoping that the patient would not pass out entirely until he had learned more. "Tell me about it as we go," he urged her. He was walking quickly past the casualties, human and otherwise, of the recent skirmish. The burden of one thin woman scarcely slowed down the armored suit at all. He said: "Tell me more about this plan of theirs that's going to destroy about half the Galaxy."

The woman's face looked horrible in the flat, overcast Maracandan daylight. She lay limp in the embrace of Harry's metallic arms, but her eyes were still open and she was shaking her head slowly from side to side. "No joke. I'm not crazy. You still don't understand. They mean to dig out a mass of several tons of antimatter, lift it into space, and drop it into the pulsar. If they can do that, the result will be worse than a simple supernova, much worse."

"How can it be much worse than destroying a whole solar system?"

"It can - it is." Dr. Kochi broke off, choking in her eagerness to speak.

"More? What more? There are no other habitable bodies in this system."

A shake of the head. "Worse... worse... much worse... everything within a hundred light-years. Almost a thousand solar systems."

Harry took his next few strides in stunned silence. He could hope that the goodlife had made it up, just trying to drive her crazy, and succeeding.

She told him: "I'm no astrogator, I'm not sure how many populated worlds lie within that volume. But the goodlife seemed to think there could be as many as a hundred. They named some of them, gloating, and for all I know they were right." Dr. Kochi went on to repeat some of the names that she had heard. "They told me about Meade, and Nisur, and Esmerelda. And - "

"What was that last one?"

"Esmerelda."

Harry walked faster.

Dr. Kochi was still talking, murmuring at least, but Harry wasn't really listening. He was thinking that Twinkler's world-blasting detonation, the stellar explosion that had indirectly caused him to be here, had been a small show indeed compared to what this lady was describing.

He found one hope to cling to. Maybe the goodlife and the bad machines, and their ghastly display inside the cave, had only been describing something they would like to do, not a project actually under way.

But then why had they kept her alive?

Dr. Kochi, ill and exhausted as she was, struggled on with her explanation. "The idea is to carry this mass of antimatter somehow out into space, somehow keeping it intact - carry it, or project it, until it strikes the surface of the pulsar. In that gravity, the velocity of a falling mass will be thousands of kilometers per second..."

Her voice was running down, like a tired recording. Some kind of reaction was overtaking her, and she sounded faint. "You've got to... tell people..."

"Tell them to do what? How can we stop this?"

"I watched them build a kind of vehicle in the cave - really a small spacecraft. They mean to launch it into space from the other side of Maracanda - then propel it into the pulsar somehow.

"And one berserker, a kind of commensal machine, will go with the launch device out into space. Not one of the anthropomorphic models. Multiple limbs. It can withstand a lot of gravities, manipulate small objects and controls, effect simple repairs. Provide redundancy, in case some of the other systems fail, or are damaged. When they got word of the alert, they had to hurry."

The scientist went on to describe how, as soon as the infernal machine had started down the tunnel on its mission of destruction, the goodlife and the remaining machines had gone out of the cave at the ground-level entrance, headed on a sortie into the nearest town, where they meant to kill and die. At that point, the machine that had tortured her, and all the other berserkers, had totally ignored their prisoner, while the goodlife had hurled their last bitter taunts at her.

"They told me they were going to Tomb Town and Min-ersville, people and machines alike. The machines just to kill, the goodlife to fight and die, and make sure the badlife all knew what was about to happen. That's what they said. That's what they said."

That outburst had ended on a questioning note, and Harry answered. "That's just what they did. But that's not our problem now."

"Except eventually I realized that they had left one machine to stand guard. Looking out from one side of my cage, I could just see a slice of the cave mouth in the distance - and twice I saw a berserker walk past.

"I thought perhaps that it was running on some timed program, and that after their scheduled time of launch had passed, when there could be no more possible need to question me again - that their sentry would come back into the cave and kill me."

"But it didn't. Now you're safe."

"None of us are safe."

"So, you think it's possible that the time of launch, from this supposed deep cave, has not yet passed."

"Possible, yes. But I fear - "

"Sounds utterly crazy," Harry told the woman hopefully.

Her sunken eyes glittered at him. "I would love to believe you're right, but I know you're not."

"Tell me again. How are they going to get this huge lump of antimatter up into space, from the surface of Maracanda? They can't, we can't, lift off any kind of vehicle through a breakdown zone."

Feebly the woman was shaking her head. "Don't have to. You don't lift off from the habitable surface. Instead you avoid hitting breakdown by burrowing all the way through Maracanda and coming out the other side. In effect, this world's much thinner than any habitable planet."

Harry kept coming up with objections, scrambling for reasons to hope that this was all a fever dream. "That would mean burrowing through hundreds of kilometers of solid rock, wouldn't it?"

She nodded weakly. "In normally dimensioned space, yes. Inside an azlarocean body, there are almost certainly drastic shortcuts. I think they looked for one and found it. They spent months digging."

Until, at a depth of perhaps no more than a hundred meters or so, they had encountered a layer of substance, of the land, that would be very dangerous to penetrate.

The rescued scientist told Harry: "If you go any deeper than that, conditions will swiftly become - well, uninhabitable. The researchers I know who've tried couldn't find any way to protect themselves. Our field generators won't work down there, at least not well enough to compensate for the transverse surges in gravity waves. If we powered the generators up enough to compensate - well, something would have to give way. Our whole little almost-Earth-like zone up at this level would probably evaporate pretty quickly."

Even before he got back to his ship, Harry made an effort to bring his copilot up to speed on what was going on. Lily seemed to take the bad news calmly enough. Harry figured that probably she just didn't quite understand it yet.

It was no longer possible to doubt that Dr. Kochi's night-mare vision was the truth, no longer possible to hope that she was simply deluded in her fear and pain. Harry's first impulse was to find a way to use his ship, to reach the cave with the Witch's weapons, blasting everything inside it. But an impenetrable wall of breakdown zone protected that target from the approach of ship-sized objects.

If the Witch was going to play any active role at all in coming events, it would have to be out in space.

Getting her back through the labyrinth, up and out into free space near Port City, must be his first priority. Once there, he could begin to do his best to overtake the berserker vehicle, assuming it had already been launched but had not yet dropped its cargo. If humanity was lucky and the killer device had not been launched, Harry would try to pot it as soon as it appeared. Whether his own ship would survive the comparatively nearby blast of several tons of antimatter, combining with an equal mass of ordinary matter in the form of the berserker vehicle, was something he would find out when it happened.

Harry was thinking that it must have taken the enemy considerable time, probably several years, to get a useful number of reliable goodlife in place on this world where they were wanted. Many of the warped people who chose that road were tried and found wanting, judged to be disastrously undependable and kept on the outer fringes of the group, knowing nothing of its serious projects and inner secrets.

As Harry had more or less expected, he encountered two or three smugglers, lightly armed but suitless, at the foot of his ship's landing ramp. Behind them, the pile of dark bags of grit had grown as tall as a man. At least it was good that no one seemed to be trying to load. This time Bulaboldo was not in sight. Harry vowed that if the fat one was aboard his ship, he would not be there long.

Bulaboldo's people took one look at Harry as he approached and stepped back slightly. They had nothing to say as he carried the former captive up the ramp and through a doorway that opened with perfect timing to receive him.

Lily raised her helmeted head and waved to him from the copilot's chair. When she saw the condition of the woman in Harry's arms, she put the ship on autopilot and jumped up to help.

Meanwhile, the Witch acknowledged her master's homecoming with a repeated verse, spoken as usual in tones of elegance:

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die ?

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

After a momentary pause, with a sound like modest throat clearing, came the announcement of attribution: "William Butler Yeats, 'The Secret Rose.' "

"Can it," Harry commanded. "Not now." Some day, if he lived long enough, he was going to have to find out what a smithy was.

"Order acknowledged."

As Harry had ordered, the medirobot, a coffinlike receptacle with a glassy lid, had been brought out and installed in the control room, while a couple of chairs had been put away. Lily was quick and gentle, and Emily Kochi seemed to appreciate the presence and touch of another woman as she was being helped immediately into the medirobot. As soon as she was flat on her back, probes like thin snakes appeared and began to seek out several places on her anatomy.

When they had done all they could for Dr. Kochi for the moment, Harry said to his new crew member: "Now may be your last chance to get off the ship; I doubt that I'll be landing at the spaceport. Of course, the way things are, I don't know that you'll be any safer on the ground."

Lily was already back in her copilot's chair. "If you're staying aboard, Harry, then so am I."

Harry said: "Try to make sense. How the hell could I not be staying aboard?" He started to add something to that, but then he broke it off and said: "Right. Put her on autopilot and get her up. Let's see how you work." He was in his own chair, holding his helmet in his lap.

Watching Lily and the Witch run the brief checklist, Harry remembered a conversation he'd had with a stranger back in Portal Square at the center of Tomb Town. Looking back at the incident now, he realized he had been talking to an authentic specimen of goodlife.

The goodlife had expressed a feeling of great reverence toward black holes - seeing in them a welcome negation of light and life.

Berserkers and goodlife were both servants of an Infinite Emptiness.

Harry recalled some of that conversation. "Is there a black hole at the heart of everything?"

"At the end of the Galaxy, it will claim everything - everything."

As the Witch worked her way back through the smugglers' ingenious maze, a process occupying several minutes, Harry and Lily had time to talk and think.

Now that Emily Kochi was in the medirobot, the pain of her hand already blocked, and food and medicines and fluids already flowing into her bloodstream, she was able to tell them more.

Once the berserkers got their super weapon out into space, they would need to exercise great care not to send it accidentally into the path of swiftly moving Ixpuztec. Their work would be wasted then, because any black hole of that class could swallow almost anything. Even a few tons of antimatter would disappear into that maw without provoking so much as a hiccup or belch.

To make sure the packet reached its intended destination, the berserkers would have to work their trick at exactly the right moment in the three-body orbital dance. But probably the right moment repeated every few hours.

Harry had about given up all hope that the woman was totally deluded about the berserkers' plan, flat out of her mind after what she had been through, but he could see no evidence at all to support that comparatively happy conclusion.

And if the berserkers were successful in accomplishing their task today, they were going to wipe out, at the very least, this entire solar system, together with all the ships in nearby space.

That would mean half a million dead, or thereabouts; but that would be only the beginning.

During her months of captivity, Dr. Kochi had heard enough conversation between goodlife and berserkers to understand some of the details of the enemy plan.

She told Harry: "When their vehicle emerges into free space, it'll be on the other side of Maracanda. Believe it or not."

He sighed. "At this point, you can tell me just about anything about this place and I'll believe it."

Goodlife scouts must have carried out the first reconnaissance on Maracanda. Then, playing the part of prospectors and miners, they had claimed land and established the necessary base for digging.

Whether human or machine had been first to realize the possibilities of destruction inherent in the Maracandan system, it was impossible to say. For the killer computers to verify the opportunities available, and then to devise a plan to set the disaster in motion, it had been necessary for a few of the machines to land on the surface and operate clandestinely. The entire project, from early planning to finishing touches, was far too difficult and delicate to be entrusted to mere goodlife, who frequently proved unreliable, sometimes downright treacherous.

So much mining and processing machinery was being brought on world by so many people, that no one took any particular notice of the imports required to dig the necessary tunnel.

Each time Dr. Kochi explained another detail of the enemy's plan, Harry's reaction had been to say, "But that can't possibly work. Can it?"

And each time he got essentially the same response. "I'm afraid it's all too likely that it will. Even if they are compelled to launch before making their final tests, before the precise alignment of the three bodies comes about."

"How come they didn't finish you off before they left?"

"I can only think of one reason... because they thought they might have to come back and ask me more questions."

"So what happened when the alert was called? How'd they find out about it? There must have been people in the back country who didn't get the word right away."

Emily Kochi had no reason to suspect that the alert had originally been a fake. She reported that the alarm had actually posed a great threat to the enemy's plans - a pair of goodlife sent on a routine trip to Minersville for supplies came back early, greatly upset and babbling of the news. Confirmation was soon provided by an official messenger, a Paul Revere sent out from Minersville or Tomb Town, pedaling his way through the back country at top speed, alerting all he met.

Some of the goodlife had argued that it was probably only a false alarm, or had been called for practice. But the berserker machine in command of the operation had quickly overruled these optimists, announcing that the operation must go forward at once. All truly essential preparations had been completed.

The berserkers had been concerned that some badlife warship, patrolling through the inner system on alert, would sight their machine and shoot it out of space before it could deliver its deadly cargo to the surface of the neutron star. But conditions in the inner system were such as to make any space combat, in the normal sense, extremely difficult.

Harry had another question. "What does this packet of antimatter, wrapped up in magnetic force, look like? Are we going to know it when we see it?"

"Very difficult to say. Indistinguishable from normal matter, perhaps rock... but you won't see it, only the shielding. Otherwise, on the least contact with normal matter, a great explosion..."

Dr. Kochi thought it probable that besides the berserkers themselves, only the goodlife, who were willing to take any risk with their own lives and the population of Maracanda, had so far been able to get close enough in the deep mine to look at the antimatter capsules.

It would seem that releasing the packet, separating it from the launch device, would be unnecessary, and also a less reliable delivery method. The plan should work just as well if the launcher, still carrying its awesome burden, simply plunged right into the maelstrom of Mailing matter surrounding the pulsar.

Dr. Kochi babbled that several goodlife had volunteered to ride with the burden of destruction on its final trip. What a way to go, knowing you were carrying death to billions of human beings! But the machine had rejected all their pleas. The vehicle lacked any artificial gravity, so the first time a serious acceleration was required, the goodlife would be crushed to pulp or flung off into space, their presence having contributed nothing to the cause. She said: "Most of their digging went on a long way from the cave you saw. But the tunnel between was all in free zone, and I could watch on holostage."

The berserker flyer, mounting a standard drive unit of the type generally used in normal space, probably carried the lump of antimatter in an aft compartment, to minimize the chance of its contacting normal matter and prematurely detonating. It would be necessary to pass at high speed through a thin haze of normal particles when approaching the neutron star. The commensal machine stood by, helping somehow to maintain the necessary shielding.

All of the berserkers that had not gone into space were quickly mobilized for fighting. These were mostly digging machines; Emily thought there were no more than three or four devices designed primarily for fighting, one of these having been detailed to guard the prisoner remaining in the cave.

Harry could picture in his mind's eye what would have happened then: machines concealing themselves in pedicabs, or on freight wagons drawn up to the entrance to the cave. The band of perhaps two dozen goodlife throwing their minds and bodies into the task of secretly hauling berserkers through the intervening kilometers of breakdown zone to the very gates of the nearby towns.

Harry nodded. Except, he thought, for one pedicar load that had scared the smugglers back to their hideout and then had tried unsuccessfully to catch up with Harry and his party.

Reanimated on coming out of breakdown at the gates of Minersville and Tomb Town, the machines had deployed themselves in an all-out attack, intent on the methodical destruction of all life that came within their reach. Whether or not their great space project succeeded, at least some killing would be accomplished.

The goodlife who had served this project faithfully for months were all truly dedicated. Certain that death by hypernova must overtake them in only a few hours, they plunged joyfully into a state of murderous frenzy.

Harry had his own helmet on and was monitoring Lily's work. With the ship running on full autopilot, she kept a close eye on progress, as the Witch's own optelectronic intelligence eased her up and through the mazy free-zone channels that wound their way through breakdown zone. The retreat from east to west followed in precise reverse the charted course that had brought her safely to a landing. With human hesitancy removed from the equation, the return journey was going considerably faster.