Later, Harry could never remember the exact words with which the fateful contract had been concluded, but at some point he had found himself agreeing to carry Lily where she wished to go. Then, having committed himself, he thought he might as well bring the businessmen along. Now all four of them were walking briskly toward Harry's ship.

Calm-voiced messages, meant to be reassuring, were being broadcast almost continuously over the public communication system. There were plenty of ships available, and so forth. Few people seemed to be paying much attention. One of the details being casually mentioned in passing, though certainly not emphasized, was the fact that berserkers were known to be in an adjoining sector of the Galaxy. No problem. The evacuation ships would be taking everyone in the opposite direction.

Both Templars and Space Force were doing more than simply commanding and enforcing evacuation, carrying refugees away. Several billion kilometers from here, they were also deploying fighting ships to try to intercept the anticipated berserker attack.

Even as Harry and his new clients trudged along, they could watch one of the big evacuation vessels lifting off, looking huge though it was kilometers away. It was packed, Harry was certain, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human beings, and whatever personal belongings they were being allowed to take.

At that moment, some anonymous Templar with an imperious voice, made all the more commanding by amplifiers in a passing groundcar, was ordering all owners of private ships to stand by, delaying liftoff until further notice. All cargo space aboard ships still on the ground was being commandeered for priority freight salvage.

Harry's arm snapped up in a crisp salute, acknowledging the order, the suggestion of instant obedience somewhat spoiled by the gesture's being delivered left-handed. Otherwise he kept moving without breaking stride, shepherding his three clients with him.

"How much of a problem is that going to be?" Dietrich asked, looking back over his shoulder at the groundcar as it slowly cruised away.

Harry kept going. "None at all, as long as we ignore it."

Prophets One and Two, once more arguing fiercely with each other, had vanished in the passing throng. Everywhere heads were bobbing up and down as people kept looking up at the gradually darkening sky, as if they might be able to see the great doom coming before it got here. Pointless, of course, but Harry caught himself repeatedly doing the same thing.

Here on the balmy surface of Hong's World, it was still a warm, clear evening. A well-dressed woman, trudging along with her children in the same direction, was trying to explain to her young teenager that yes, all the stars would continue to look just fine, until the star in question started to look a little strange, about an hour before the arrival of the blast front.

The children all nodded, wide-eyed. They were ready to be taken care of, as they had been for all of their short lives.

Then abruptly the young girl turned to Harry, who happened to be walking beside her, because, he supposed, his boots and coveralls might make him look like some kind of an authority. He hoped it wasn't simply the way he walked that would give people that impression.

The girl asked: "Are the berserkers doing it?" Her voice, her look, held a hint of fear.

Harry needed a couple of seconds to decide that the question wasn't really all that crazy. "Even berserkers can't fire up a nova at will. Though they're probably working on it."

The mother was looking at him now. "But other people say the Twinkler is actually going to explode."

"Not 'going to,' lady, it already has." Let someone like the recent demonstrator get to this woman, and she might refuse to leave. Her choice, but the threat to the children bothered Harry.

He said: "What you now see in the sky is like a recording of Twinkler's last few hours of peaceful life. Get your kids on that ship. Don't let any of these loonies talk you into staying."

Over the next few years, here in this relatively crowded stellar neighborhood, the blast wave of Twinkler's nova was going to totally wipe out several solar systems, purge them not only of existing life but also of seedbed planets that could conceivably produce new generations. All of their orbiting rock would go, everything that was smaller than the stars themselves. When the coming wavefront really hit, planets as massive as Jupiter would disappear, like seeds blown off a thistle in a gale.

That thought brought lines of poetry popping into mind. When Harry had first heard of the disaster, he'd talked to his ship about it, and the Witch, as she sometimes did, had come up with an appropriate quotation:

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?

It was supposedly from some ancient work called "The Secret Rose," by one William Butler Yeats. Harry wasn't sure just what a "smithy" was supposed to be.

His thoughts jumped back to the protester's plan of somehow recording the disaster. Humanity, of course, enjoyed the advantage of having ships and robotic couriers that could effectively move much faster than light, were capable of jumping out of harm's way in a small fraction of a second. Still, it would be very hard to record the advancing wavefront, or even look at it, this close to its source, so soon after the explosion. There were only a few premonitory signals. The thing propagated so fast that there was no seeing it until it had arrived. Only later, months or years later, would it be possible to stand off and watch from a safe distance.

Even though no human eye had yet beheld it, the wavefront of destruction was rushing on at the speed of light, engulfing every second a vaster volume of space. With the advantages of superluminal travel, people would still be able, for years to come, to see those ruined stars and planets as they had been, when life swarmed in their systems.

The trick, thought Harry, would be to have your robot ship emerge from flightspace immediately behind the blast front, in an area of normal space through which the front had just passed - except that, when things got as bad as it seemed they were going to get, the continuous outpouring in that region of several kinds of radiation would quickly overwhelm even the most heavily shielded ships, first smothering the sensors and then vaporizing them, so that little or nothing could be seen or recorded. But still it was likely that someone would send a robot ship to try.

Running an eye over his new customers, as they all kept moving on, Harry once more took note of their small packs. "You people have any additional baggage you want to bring?"

Redpath and Dietrich shook their heads no. Lily said, "I have everything I need, thank you, Mr. Silver. How long will the flight to Maracanda take?"

"Can't say until I consult with my ship's data bank. But with a little luck, I'll get you where you want to go."

"Actually," Lily observed, "Alan would tell you that what you call luck will have little to do with our prospects of success."

"Oh?"

"No, he'd say that our fates are in the hands of great Malako." She walked in silence for a few strides. "Alan's been looking all his life for something - something real and permanent. Maybe he's found it at last."

Harry looked at her sideways. "A great truth provided by his kidnappers."

Lily shook her head. "Every system of belief has its fanatics, people who carry things too far. I'm hoping that most of the people in this Malako thing will be comparatively sane."

"You can always hope." Harry kept walking, but turned his head. "Haven't heard of the great Malako. Is she - or he - the one in charge of seeing that the stars burn steadily?"

"If I were already a believer, Mr. Silver, I would find your flippancy offensive. If my husband were here, I don't know what would happen."

Harry blinked at her mildly. "I'm not trying to be offensive. It just comes naturally."

She gave him a brief and thin-lipped smile. "In any case, the answer to your question is actually yes. My husband, according to the note he left me, is now solemnly convinced that Malako is in charge, as you put it, of all the stars and all the worlds and all the life within the Galaxy." She paused. "Maybe I will come to believe also."

In fact, Harry had heard the name of Malako before. About all he knew about it was that there was a cult, or religion, whose members deified and worshiped the Galaxy - just as, in olden times, there had been those who found Earth's little sun to be god enough, and more than enough, for them.

Whether any god could be blamed for it or not, Twinkler's great explosion had already happened, there could be no argument about that.

Now another huge ship was lifting off from the nearby field, and shortly after it yet one more. Harry was thinking that most of the towns, the settlements, isolated estates, all across Hong's World, would be deserted now. A lot of work and planning gone for nothing.

" 'All that calm Sunday, that goes on and on,' " said Harry in a musing voice.

Lily was crisp. "That sounds like some kind of quotation, Mr. Silver."

"Blame my ship. She likes quoting poetry at me. I've heard so much of it, I'm starting to do the same thing."

He could feel his clients all looking at him, trying to decide whether the man about to take them on his ship just might be crazy as a loon.

Harry found himself beginning to be intrigued by the woman and her quest. He asked her: "Does your Alan have more than one name?"

"Alan Gunnlod."

"He took your name when you married? Or - "

"Does it matter? Actually, I took his."

According to this young woman who evidently doted on him, Alan was also young, and just about his only flaw seemed to be that he was dangerously impressionable.

"He tends to become - very enthusiastic about things. And then he frequently becomes disillusioned, months or years later, and changes his mind. But when he does, sometimes it's too late."

Her manner did not soften when she talked about her husband, and Harry began to wonder if Alan would get a spanking when she caught up with him. It began to seem more probable that anyone married to this lady might earnestly consider the idea of going on an extended vacation from her, or getting away entirely. Of course, if you really had been grabbed by kidnappers, Lily could be a good one to have in charge of rescue operations. She might not be the smartest or the strongest one around, but she wasn't easily discouraged.

"I'll show you what he looks like," she was saying now. "I've got a holo of him here." And she brought a little cube, about a centimeter on a side, out of a pocket and twisted it to turn it on. "I'll set the image for life size," she added.

Lily retained the recording device on her small palm, but the glowing, life-sized image of a man, wearing what might have been the uniform of some athletic team, and carrying a wooden stick or bat, sprang out of it and kept pace with her as she walked. The image didn't walk, but just glided ghostlike beside her, tracking the cube still held in Lily's hand. Alan Gunnlod was making a fifth member of their group. Alan had a pale face, and a small black mustache.

Redpath and Dietrich looked on stolidly as they kept walking, a captive audience. None of this mattered to them, as long as they could get where they were going. When Harry had asked them casually what their business was, he'd got a two-word answer. "Mineral rights."

Evidently he was not going to be invited in on the ground floor of a new business opportunity that absolutely could not miss. That was something of a relief.

Alan wasn't saying anything, so it seemed that this was not his goodbye note to his wife. Harry supposed that might have been too personal to be exhibited to strangers.

Lily was looking at the object her husband's image was swinging gently back and forth, a specially shaped wooden club that Harry supposed might be used to hit some kind of ball. She said: "There was a time when he was all excited about sport rituals."

Harry grunted. He wasn't sure just what Alan's sport rituals might be, and he thought he could contentedly live out the rest of his life without finding out.

It was often very hard to tell the true age of anyone who was determined to look young, in this era when health and strength could often be prolonged for centuries, new teeth grown in as needed, and living skin preserved unwrinkled. Listening to Lily and looking at the holograph, Harry got the impression that Alan must be young indeed. And the more he looked at Lily, and listened to her, the younger she got, too.

"This was taken a few years ago," she admitted. "But he hasn't changed that much."

Harry nodded. "How long since you've actually seen him?

"It's been months. I'm beginning to lose track."

"But you say he left you some kind of message when he took off."

She sighed. "One thing that worries me is, I don't know if he's eagerly expecting me to follow him or not. Maybe I've lost him. But I don't give up easily. I couldn't tell."

After a pause she went on simply: "The message he left wasn't about us, at all - it was just about Malako, and how he had finally found what he'd been seeking all his life, and how wonderful it was."

Fiercely she squeezed the little message cube between her fingers, and Alan's ghost, still holding his game bat, obediently flew back into it.

Harry and his three paying passengers had turned off the main thoroughfare onto a side road, where they joined the steady flow of people to the landing field through one of the regular gates, which this evening was standing permanently open. The guard booth at the gate was deserted, and from a speaker on top of it a robotic voice was endlessly repeating some inane command having to do with the proper places to deposit surplus personal property. As far as Harry could tell, no one was paying the voice the least attention. In a few hours, all the depositories and all the property on this planet were going to be turned into a sleet of atoms.

These recorded orders were interlarded with warnings that the field was closed, and that people wanting to use it should make alternate arrangements. Harry supposed that the robots were doing the best they could when abandoned by all human supervision. He tried to derive what comfort he could from the thought that Twinkler was at least going to wipe out all this residue of recorded orders and advice.

Now the four people were walking a plain, narrow road across the field itself, passing one broad, empty landing pad after another, each with various connections, and all for fairly small craft, like Harry's. The big ships were normally assigned to another portion of the field.

There were notably fewer ships of any kind on the ground than there had been the last time Harry had passed this way, only a few hours ago. Those remaining were widely scattered, separated by hundreds of vacant berths. Some had queues of people standing before entrance hatches, in the process of an unhurried loading.

Slow-paced music, tuneful and familiar to the population of Hong's World, seemed to drift down out of the perishable sky itself. The robots again, doing what they could.

All in all, things seemed to be going as well as could be expected. Security in the usual sense was clearly at a minimum. Harry and his party were a couple of hundred meters into the field, almost at his ship, when a speeding groundcar stopped beside them and disgorged a Templar officer in battle dress - not the same one who had earlier tried to tell Harry where not to go.

He looked anxiously at Harry and his companions. Then he said: "I heard someone here was trying to complete a religious pilgrimage to Maracanda."

Lily stopped and turned. "My husband's gone there on pilgrimage, and I'm trying to catch up with him."

Harry had known a fair number of Templars over the years, and over various sectors of the settled Galaxy, and he had a lot of respect for some of them. In theory, and often in practice, they were a tightly run organization of dedicated people who devoted their lives and fortunes to battling berserkers. Sometimes the reality came close to the ideal. On occasion the Templars took the offensive. Other times, as now, they concentrated on protecting pilgrims and other travelers from the death machines. In practice this often meant trying to keep open certain lanes of space travel, organizing convoys and conducting evacuations.

Lily was telling the officer: "I don't know much about Templars."

Harry said: "All Templars I've ever met have been religious, in one way or another. Probably some are devotees of Malako. All of them tend to view berserkers as an actual disease infecting the Galactic body - and themselves as cells of the immune system.

"I've told the lady that I'll take her there," Harry reassured the officer. He had to raise his voice because the noise level had gone up sharply, with the passage of a caravan of groundcars conveying more refugees to another of the remaining ships. Some more or less organized group was loud in the background, singing, chanting as they marched to their evacuation ship.

"I'll come with you," the Templar promised, "to make sure there's no trouble about you getting off."

All around them the great retreat was going on. Even as Harry watched, another ship, smaller than the previous leviathan, went up, buoyed by invisible force in undramatic silence, only a couple of hundred meters away. And now there went another.

The four reached Harry's ship. She was built in the shape of a somewhat elongated football, about eight meters wide where her beam was widest. She was sitting on her stern, ready for liftoff.

Harry Silver had owned this ship for some years - actually, for more years than he liked to think about. She wasn't new by any means, but he had done what he could to keep her equipment up to date.

The Templar observer frowned at some faint markings on one side of the hull. The letters were in an antique script, and difficult to read.

"What's your ship called?" the Templar asked.

"Witch of Endor."

" 'Witch?'" The man seemed unfavorably impressed.

"It's just a name," Harry assured him.

Still, the officer gave Harry a long look. "Berserkers are reported out that way," the Templar observed at last.

"We know," said Harry. He was thinking that the next offi-cial who told him where to go or not to go would stand in some danger of being punched.

Instead, this officer rejoiced that Harry was going to take his coreligionist to join her husband on what amounted to a holy pilgrimage. He gave Lily Gunnlod a kind of benediction. "Blessings of Malako upon you!"

The physical sign of the blessing followed. Raising both hands, fingers curved, to one eye, as if miming the use of a small handheld telescope.

When it seemed that the benediction was being widened to include him, Harry said: "Thanks very much, I'll take all the blessings I can get." He saw the faces of the two businessmen turn slightly, looking at him.

As the Templar moved away, Harry turned to Lily. "Benedictions are welcome, but I still want half payment in advance. Bank credits are okay, hard coin as usual is best."

"Of course." She opened a seam on her coveralls and reached into an inner pocket.

Dietrich and Redpath were doing the same thing, digging into pockets and coming up with their shares. This was the kind of sacred ceremony they obviously understood.

Harry got his payment - hard coin, in a material virtually impossible to counterfeit. In another moment he and his clients were moving on, right up to the flank of Harry's ship, the Witch of Endor. He laid his hand on the main hatch, for identification purposes, and began to subvocalize the code that would let them enter.