Harry was looking around.

Ixpuztec had rushed on its way, taking with it a trivial amount of recently ingested mass.

But the pulsar was once more comparatively close. A long way below the suited man, at the center of whatever convoluted orbital path his body was now following, Avalon still rolled on about its business, gobbling megatons of infalling dust and gas, not in the least perturbed by whatever nearby antics some microscopic beings and machines might be up to.

When Harry's suit's faceplate adjusted itself to filter out most of the glare from the hungry neutron star, he could just make out a tiny object moving uphill against the distant streaks of glory, and the more distant stars beyond - here came his lifeboat, still on autopilot, clawing itself up out of the well after him. Tracking down suited human bodies in strange spaces was one of the jobs at which lifeboats had been designed to excel.

Still Harry kept looking around. After a time it dawned on him that he must be still trying to spot his ship - some part of his mind was unwilling to concede that the Witch was gone, taking with her Dr. Kochi and the medirobot.

And Lily, too.

And Lily.

He hung there in his orbit numbly, watching the lifeboat slow down as it approached him, not thinking much, not trying to move. His body seemed to have come through this last fight virtually unharmed, though for some reason his ears were ringing. At some point he became aware that his little suit communicator was overhearing a radio conversation, among people who were sure that he was dead. People in other ships, friends and foes, who were now ready to swear, quite accurately, that they had seen his ship destroyed.

The little thrustors on Harry's suit still worked - one of them did, anyway, and that was enough to get him going. With a little practice, he found that he could even get himself moving in the right direction, toward his approaching boat. He thought a little time might pass before someone on some other ship noticed the cruising lifeboat, and started to untangle its automatic distress signal from the howling background noise.

Harry drifted, watching the boat get closer, and pondering how strange it was that he was still alive. What an infinite gift someone had given him. Even as he thought things over, and almost without realizing it, he was working the little technical routine that allowed him to bring one of his arms in from its spacesuit arm, and reach into a pocket of his inner coveralls. Extracting a small object, he worked another little trick that let him pass it out through his spacesuit, where his gloved hand waited carefully to receive it.

By now people on and near Maracanda were beginning to realize the dimensions of the disaster that their world had just escaped. Their first comments were coming through on radio. Some of the scientists down on the habitable surface were awed at even the best-case scenario, had the antimatter gone where the berserkers wanted it: a gamma ray burster that over the next hundred standard years or so would have sterilized a thousand systems scattered over hundreds of cubic light-years - not a major event in the Galaxy's existence, affecting not much more than one millionth of its volume. But of supreme importance to certain living things. Experts on the ground in Port City, refining their calculations, had come up with some chilling scenarios, speculating on the creation of dark antimatter, and the creation of an antineutron star, had the berserkers had their way.

But Harry was no longer listening. Holding the little message cube in armored fingers, he turned it on.

Floating in space beside him there appeared the holographic ghost image of a narrow-shouldered young woman. She was sitting up in a bed, her body supported and half covered by large hospital pillows, holding a baby to her breast. The diapered infant was very small, and still had that unfinished newborn look. Its head was fringed with dark hair, disorganized and short.

Some aspect of the recent turmoil in space must have affected the message cube's presentation of its image, so when Becky materialized, she was upside down from Harry's point of view. But he wasn't going to complain.

Her partially revealed body looked frail, as it so often did, making Harry marvel that sometimes it could be so tough. If you looked at her dispassionately - not that Harry could - Becky had never been a tremendous beauty. And childbirth, in the very-nearly natural mode, was not the finest beauty treatment.

But no woman had ever looked better to Harry than this one did right now.

He had to fiddle briefly with his suit's communicator before he could hear what she was saying, drifting out there in the cold vacuum just about an arm's length away. But then her soft, familiar, and beloved voice came through.

"... gods and spirits, Harry..."

Becky paused, running the fingers of one hand through her hair, a familiar gesture. The hair was indeed a different color, and curlier, than Harry remembered from a few months ago. That was one thing about his girl that she was always changing.

"Hi, Harry - Hi, Daddy, I should say. Gee, we can call you Daddy now. See who's here with me?" She slightly jiggled the tiny bundle in her arms. "Look at him, just look at him, the little...

"Everything went well, the doctors were right, it was best in our case not to go with the artificial womb.

"Little Ethan's fine and healthy. Oh, look, see the way he waves his hand? He's waving to his Daddy, aren't you, sweetheart? And I'm fine, too, just kind of sore. Look at him nurse. We're both so anxious for you to finish peddling your machines and get home from your silly business trip. We don't care whether it makes you rich or not. We just want you home, so you can be with us. Right, Ethan? Tell Daddy you want him back on Esmerelda."

Ethan was intent on his own business.

The robotic lifeboat had kept homing in on Harry steadily, and it was getting very close. Harry had to fold up the woman and her baby and put them back in his pocket, so that he could concentrate on the next task.

In another minute Harry was settled in the lifeboat, ordering its expert autopilot to cruise him back to Maracanda's one and only spaceport. The trip would take a good many hours, unless someone came in a real ship and picked him up, which he supposed was likely. He wanted to take off his heavy helmet, but if he did, he would have to breathe lifeboat air, sniffing Bulaboldo's spilled drugs. He should probably flush the cabin air out thoroughly, before his rescuers arrived.

It seemed that he had slept, or passed out, for a short time. The keep-you-going stuff that he had dosed himself with back in Port City must be starting to wear off. What woke him was the next voice coming on the boat's radio. A gauge told Harry he was less than a light-minute from Maracanda now.

The voice was indeed Bulaboldo's, who seemed to be bearing up well under the impact of his secret financial losses: After offering effusive congratulations, he reminded Harry obliquely that there was a little bonus benefit associated with the loss of his ship.

"Well, as you know, old sock, there are all the problems that old ships accumulate. At least you'll now be free of those."

"The what? Oh, yeah." Bulaboldo of course was sending a hint of felicitations on Harry's being rid of the c-plus cannon and its associated problems.

"Did you know, old thing, that at first you were reported missing, and then you were presumed dead?"

Harry reacted quickly. "Well, squash that! At least keep it in system. Don't let it get out on the interstellar news. No use scaring anybody."

"Of course, old chap. I'll see what I can do. And by the way, things have also worked out rather well for yours truly."

"Oh?"

"May I quote from a very recent dispatch? It names me as 'a prominent Maracandan miner and philanthropist,' and goes on to credit your humble servant with great cleverness in discovering the berserker presence and finding a way to trigger an alarm - certain details are being withheld for security reasons - thereby alerting Port City to the berserker presence on this world."

"So. You probably wrote that yourself."

"Of course I wouldn't want to claim more credit than I'm due..." Bulaboldo's voice went on. He was enjoying this.

With no trace left of any of Harry's ship, or its cargo either, he saw no point in reporting to anyone the fact that someone had stuffed a few containers of grit into the Witch's hold.

Kul went on to inform his listener that the first elements of relief forces were now in system. Strong ground forces would soon be landed, and the berserkers still active in the eastern section of the habitable zone would be hunted down and destroyed.

At first the reports of the number of willing, active goodlife were greatly exaggerated; when it came to an actual body count, no more than twenty-two had so far been tallied. And it seemed that there had never been any more than about a dozen machines, a majority of them still active.

And then, without warning, Alan Gunnlod was suddenly on the communicator.

"I hear you did a great job up there, Silver. All we're getting down here is garbled reports from distant observers, but it sounds like you performed some real heroics." The prospective prospector sounded elated. "I took a chance, when things looked iffy and other people were getting scared about Maracandan property values. I was able to sign a great land contract. But I'm still going to need capital. Is Lily all right?"

Harry thought a moment. Then he reached for a manual switch and severed the radio connection.

"She's great," he told the silent equipment, after contact had been broken. "She's absolutely great."

At that moment Harry discovered in himself an urgent need to think of something else. He was having some kind of reaction that left his vision blurred, and to deal with the problem he reached into his pocket, groping for a message that he couldn't wait to see and hear again.