The autopilot was nursing the Witch back out toward the periphery of the Thisworld system, seeking a lane of normal spacetime sufficiently empty of particles and gravity to furnish a good, safe springboard for a c-plus jump. If Harry had melded his mind into the thoughtware and applied his judgment, the process would doubtless have gone a little faster, but it seemed to him that he had earned a rest.

There had been silence in the cabin for a couple of minutes, not even a background hum of anything at all, when Lily spoke up suddenly, asking if they could have some music.

"Sure. Probably the Witch has got a hymn to Malako somewhere in storage."

"All right. But no, on second thought, make it something totally secular. I'll probably be hearing more hymns than I can stand after I catch up with Alan."

" 'Secular' covers a lot of territory."

"I'll leave the choice up to you. Or to your Witch."

Harry felt safe in leaving the choice of music up to his ship, which by this time knew pretty well what he liked and what he didn't. The result this time seemed to him satisfactory, as usual.

With a light tune playing in the background, the Witch's pleasant voice cut in, providing some information on the music - not singing it. Once Harry had told her that recorded human voices did a much better job of that.

But then the voice just cut off in midsyllable, and in the same instant the music stopped in midnote.

A second later, Lily looked up, mildly startled.

Harry didn't look up. He was already gazing intently at the holostage that stood beside his pilot's chair. His moment of surprise had come in silence, a few seconds earlier.

Lily looked at Harry, then back at the display, the little stage on its pedestal positioned almost between them. She shifted her position in her chair. There was something on the stage that she had never noticed before.

When she spoke, there was the start of a quaver in her voice.

"That little bright red image. Is that another ship, or - "

Harry didn't respond, or move, until he had spent another fifteen seconds steadily watching the little image. When he answered, the best he could find to tell Lily was: "No, it's not a ship. It's just what you're afraid it is."

The young woman let out a preliminary kind of gasp, as if she might be going to scream. But quickly she got herself under control and huddled silent in her chair.

"It's not going away," Harry added in a calm voice. "Which I take to mean it's probably spotted us."

Since the moment when the berserker had appeared, Harry had been very busy doing several things. Among his other activities was a steady and methodical swearing, at the subvocal level, at the small blur on the holostage. That served to relieve his feelings, while the more practical part of his mind was riffling thoughtware in a blur, much faster than a cardsharp's fingers.

By all the tests of logic and technology, the cancerous little blur that had just shown up on his stage could hardly be anything but a berserker machine - but at least, thank all the gods of all the planets, there was only one of them.

"Can't we jump?" Lily was asking, her voice gone up in pitch. "Get out of here?"

"If we tried to jump right here and now, we'd kill ourselves." By interstellar standards this region on the outskirts of a system was a virtual dustbin, space choked with deadly dust and gas, maybe as much as a hundred trillionth of the density of the air inside a spaceship's cabin. A few more minutes, and he would have had the Witch in cleaner emptiness, then quickly into the comparative security of flightspace, where the likelihood of any enemy locating them would be enormously reduced. But there was no use crying or cursing about lost chances.

As matters stood, they were just on the point of getting clear of the Thisworld system, and the berserker was no more than eighty thousand kilometers away, so optelectronic pulses could leap from the Witch's hull to the enemy's, then bounce back again, bringing information, in less than a second.

Harry already had his ship well into a routine of evasive action, while at the same time working to increase their distance from the killer.

Lily needed less than a minute to recover from her shock sufficiently to fasten herself into her chair, which, like Harry's, had automatically changed its shape to become a true acceleration couch. Its built-in pads and extra forcefields might or might not be enough to do her some good if the ship's artificial gravity should stutter during the stressful maneuvers that now seemed inevitable.

As soon as Harry had a moment free of intense mental concentration, he gave Lily what he hoped was a reassuring grin and made his voice relaxed and careful.

"That object hanging just above your right ear is a gunner's helmet, and it's connected to a couple of modest weapons we have that might be useful. But don't put on the helmet unless you've had some training. If the answer's no, for God's sake tell me now. We're at a point where one good lie on your part will probably kill us both."

"No gunnery training, no." The young woman put up rigid fingers and thrust the helmet farther away. "I did go to pilots' school for six weeks - and I was pretty good. That was where I met Alan. At one point we were both going to be professional spacers."

"But you can't do gunnery."

"I can't. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. It's all right, we'll manage." Harry nodded, smiling. "As long as I know." Wishing he could feel as confident as he was trying to sound, Harry mentally flipped the thoughtware switches that brought the Witch's nominal armament, such as it was, under the pilot's control.

He could tell from the berserker's darting movements on the stage that it had certainly detected the Witch's presence and was coming after them. The damned thing seemed to be gaining ground with every heartbeat of its prey; yes, it was small, thought Harry, almost certainly not as big as the Witch, but equipped with a powerful drive. Even at this distance, he thought he could tell that it had a different shape than any spacecraft ever fashioned by Earth-descended humanity.

How soon would there come a reasonable opportunity to jump for flightspace? Studying the configuration of the clouds around him, it seemed to Harry that the course he had begun to follow toward Maracanda was taking them in the wrong direction, but how could he have known? While the artificial gravity held everything rock steady inside the hull, the Witch was speeding, lurching around the fringe of some kind of nebula. They were heading almost straight away from the berserker, and space around them was thickening with each second of their flight, growing dense enough with dirt and gas to make direct superluminal jumping virtually suicidal.

Bad luck.

Or was it luck? Had the machine already scouted out this territory? Was it deliberately maneuvering to drive them into a zone where the overtaking and killing would be easier?

The berserker was closer now, and the Witch's sensors could form a clearer image of it. According to what Harry's instruments were trying to tell him, the killer machine was actually smaller than his ship. There might be some advantage to the human side in that, but there was a downside, too - the smaller object could be driven faster in this gassy, dusty environment. And it needed to waste no space or energy on lugging along a peaceful cargo or keeping a human crew alive.

Harry considered jettisoning his valuable freight, but the benefit would be minimal; and right now carrying the extra load was less dangerous than risking even a millisecond of distraction.

The range was getting so short that it was even possible to make out some details of the enemy's shape - not that it mattered very much. On one end there stuck out a protrusion like the head of a rooster, holding some kind of crossbar in its beak. Just what the significance of that might be, Harry could not guess. A beam weapon blasted from the enemy, flicking after his ship at the speed of light.

The Witch's shields, which Harry was particularly proud of, glowed fiercely for a moment, managing to protect the ship and its passengers from the berserker's weapons. The only effect perceptible inside the cabin was a strange sound that reverberated through shields and metal, like a handful of fine gravel tossed against a thick window.

Lily stiffened in her chair. "What was that?"

"Nothing to worry about, no harm done." Harry's words were slow, almost drawling - trying to make things as easy as possible on his passenger's nerves. "I'll slug him back."

It was worth a try. But the berserker's shields were also, as expected, very tough, and the modest projector on Harry's ship could do it no harm. Dust and gas in the berserker's vicinity flared into incandescence, but that was all.

There followed a brisk exchange of missiles, also ending in a scoreless draw, and subjecting the two humans to nothing worse than one more strange noise.

Lily had begun making her own peculiar noises; on a merely human scale, they sounded insignificant. Harry didn't look at her. He wasn't far from the stage of making strange little noises himself.

The Witch wasn't going to be able to outrun this killer in normal space, that was growing discouragingly obvious. What worried Harry most immediately was missiles at point-blank range, or an actual ramming.

"Here the son of a bitch comes," said Harry. Then he added rhetorically: "Hold on."

Within the next minute or so, at a range of only a few hundred kilometers, the berserker almost succeeded in snaring the Witch in a deadly forcefield entanglement. Harry's thoughtware awoke a resonant image in his brain, drawn from some historical drama, or purely his imagination: that of a gray net hurtling, the weapon of some ancient gladiator.

Meanwhile he had made a smooth and practical adjustment in the deployment of his ship's own shielding fields, so that the attacker's could find no purchase on them, and the harsh but immaterial net slid away. The human mind, when born with sufficient talent and properly trained, then melded with the right machines to make up for the excruciating slowness of organic nerve signals, could under the right conditions outperform in the dance of combat any mere computer - most of the time.

Harry kept twisting the Witch's tail, doing his best to get out of there.

For the time being, he had to give up even trying to strike back. He parried a missile, parried a projector beam, eluded another forcefield grab. Again a missile blast that did no harm. Under his skillful piloting, the Witch managed to slide away somehow, again and again, just in time.

Over the next twenty seconds, he even managed to gain a little ground in the pursuit.

The gain was illusory, for quickly he was losing ground again. The chase dragged out for a full minute, then another. Still he was constrained to hold his ship in normal space, working deeper and deeper into the brier patch of a gradually thickening dust cloud.

Harry could feel how his whole body had gone wet with sweat over the last few minutes. He was also feeling intensely naked without his armor. He hated the computers that drove his enemy; they were secure in the certainty of their programming, they never had to sweat or tremble. The berserker's brains, of course, did not hate him, or anyone. They just went ticking on about their job without feeling, without true thought. No animosity, just business. Planning the next move without fear or hate or triumph, dead things fixated on their wired-in purpose of creating yet more death.

Contrary to what Harry had more or less expected, his passenger seemed to be gaining better and better control of herself as the strain dragged on.

After several minutes she spoke again. "Harry?"

"What?"

"Is there anything I can do?"

"Talk to me. It might help. Just don't worry if you don't always get an answer."

"Talk about what?"

"About things on Maracanda."

"Never been there."

"That's right, you told me that. Then about something else. Anything but your favorite subject."

A brief silence ensued while Lily tried to find some cheerfully soothing remark that would have nothing to do with Alan. The best she could come up with was: "Harry, are we - Do we have a chance?"

"We do."

It took Lily a moment or two to decide what else would be good to talk about. Then she offered: "I suppose you're wishing you still had that c-plus cannon?"

He muttered to himself, coming to a decision. Not that it had been all that difficult to reach. Then he said: "That's what I meant when I said we still have a chance. Now is when we have to use it."

"What?"

"The cannon. The one you suppose I wish I had." He flipped on the autopilot and got up from his chair. A moment later, shaking somewhat with ongoing strain, he was stuffing his reluctant body back into his space armor. He hated the process, but few people could have managed it more quickly.

The fact that he had just, only minutes ago, taken off his armored suit didn't mellow his mood or his attitude toward the berserker that was forcing this distasteful task upon him.

He pointed out to Lily the locker from which he had taken his own suit. "There's another suit in there. One size fits almost everyone. It's self-adjusting. It might possibly save your life.

Hope you know how to put it on. If not, do the best you can with it, I'm busy."

She jumped from her chair and got busy, too.

Lily had the spare suit out of storage and was struggling nervously to get it on over her coveralls - fortunately, she seemed to be managing unaided. She was also talking to him again, as he had encouraged her to do. Alan had rejoined the conversation, and she was telling Harry something about how much fun she and her husband used to have when times were peaceful and they had been starting out together in pilots' school.

Meanwhile Harry, back in his chair (which had readjusted itself to fit the shape of the heavy suit), was lost in concentration on his task and heard only snatches of what she was saying.

In response to Harry's gentle mental touch upon the thoughtware, the Witch was once more making incremental gains in her flight from pursuing doom. The only thing wrong with making this kind of progress was that, in order to pull away, the ship kept driving deeper and deeper into gas and dust. If they kept on, they would quite soon find themselves in a region of space in which the pursuing berserker, being smaller, would enjoy a clear advantage.

In a few truncated sentences, he communicated the gist of this unhappy situation to Lily, who had conquered the suit and was back in her chair.

Probably she at least felt a little better protected now. Her response was: "What can we do?"

"We're down to about one chance. Don't bother me!"

Maybe, he thought to himself, we have three minutes. Quite possibly somewhat less.

"Only one thing we can do now," he repeated, muttering more to himself than to her. "No choice now, no choice at all."

He was going to have to somehow unlimber the cannon that he had taken such pains to conceal in his vessel's prow, not that long ago, in a different sector of the Galaxy.

If his current enemy had ever bothered to compute the likelihood of such a mule-kicker of a weapon appearing on such a small ship, the answer must have come out at very nearly zero. For the simple reason that using it in this fog of dust was going to put the gun platform in almost as much danger as the target. But if Harry failed to fire it now, and quickly, the odds against survival would be even worse.

"Stay in your chair," Harry advised. "I'm turning down the gravity." That was a necessary preliminary, to allow him to work up in the prow, a couple of meters above his combat chair, an area otherwise just about impossible to reach. He couldn't, of course, turn the gravity off altogether, or the next burst of acceleration called for by the autopilot, at a thousand gravities or so, would instantly accomplish the berserker's purpose.

In the dreamlike, underwater movements engendered by weak gravity he darted as swiftly as he could about the control room, hastily ransacking drawers and cabinets, collecting the special tools he was going to need. Then he launched himself in a slow and gentle, nearly weightless dive up to the cabin's arched overhead, clamping his suit to a featureless section, where he immediately got to work on the paneling.

With his helmet still keeping his brain in close touch with the Witch's circuits, he called up a projected view, on the inner surface of his faceplate, of a certain area of the Witch's outer hull. A spot about a meter wide in the featureless smooth surface was in the process of turning itself into a small hatch. Presently the hatch opened and a gun muzzle emerged. This protrusion was somewhat thicker than Harry's arm. It looked dark and crude, more threatening than effective, like some antique cartoonist's idea of a massive weapon.

The next step was to connect the weapon to the Witch's gun-laying system, which had already locked onto their pursuer.

Step one accomplished. Two coming up.

Following a recent skirmish on a world called Hyperborea, the supply of cannon slugs on board the Witch was down to a single projectile. The magazine containing it had been concealed behind a solid-looking panel on the other side of the control room, while the breechblock of the cannon was empty when it was folded away. Therefore it was now necessary to open both magazine and breech, and load.

The sole remaining missile was about the size and shape of Harry's fist and forearm, and very heavy, being formed of pure solid lead. Very pure though not so simple, a cunningly balanced mixture of lead's four stable isotopes, sealed inside a thin film of oxidation. The slug was machined and shaped down to the thousandth of a gram, and it looked as blunt and simple as the muzzle of the gun itself. All the weapon's computer-cleverness and power lay buried in its breech.

To get at the ammunition, Harry had to undo another set of secret fasteners. Then he opened the magazine and dragged out the remaining slug, grateful for the augmented strength the suit gave to his arms and hands.

Lily, with only the vaguest idea of what he was doing, couldn't stand the suspense. "Harry? Can't we try to run? What in all the hells - "

"No, that's one thing we can't do any longer. Not if we mean to stay alive. Now shut up." Yes, he knew that a minute ago he had been telling her to talk. That was then, this was now.

The next twenty seconds seemed an eternity, but at the end of that time, still working inside the inner hull, he had opened the breech of the weapon and slid the slug into the chamber. Now that the cannon's circuitry was integrated with the ship's systems, Harry was doing a quick, nearly weightless dive back to his combat chair. During the few seconds of his passage, the output of the hydrogen power lamps that drove the ship and everything in it was mounting silently, surging up rapidly to maximum, forging an insanity of coiled-up forces inside the cannon, a knot beginning to warp all nearby time and space.

Now Harry had himself clamped into his chair again, and none too soon, for the berserker was hardly fifty kilometers away, closing at six klicks per second on a quick countdown to ramming.

"Here goes," Harry announced to the universe in general. For just a moment he wondered if it would be worthwhile praying to great Malako. But he thought he preferred his old favorite, To Whom It May Concern.

The Witch's gunlaying system was not the finest in the Galaxy, especially when it had been hooked up by a semi-amateur to this brute of an odd weapon, but at this range he thought that he could hardly miss.

The real danger was not that he would miss. The real trouble was that firing a c-plus amid the natural gravitic haze of the surrounding sea of dust would be a move fraught with uncertainty, to put the difficulty mildly. Whatever else happened, whoever survived, the result ought to be spectacular...

The firing itself was invisible and inaudible, and it happened the instant Harry pressed the manual control to arm it fully.

It was an experience Harry Silver had had once before in his ship's cabin, and it was no more enjoyable now than it had been then. A jolt of physical recoil, felt on a natural and human scale, would have been something of a relief, but that was not what happened. Instead the world turned strange around Harry Silver, the energies released passing twistily through all his bones. Lily's, too, for he saw her suited body stiffen in her chair.

For just half a second, he thought that he saw certain old familiar faces in the cabin...

One in particular, that almost made his heart stop for a moment...

A second strange scene passed through his mind.

Another one followed.

He saw yet one more, including the image of a certain face that always made his heart beat faster.

Then the effect had passed, the nerve cells in Harry's brain returned to something like their normal activity, and the version of the world claiming to be reality was back again.

Lily's voice came to him through his helmet, saying something that showed she, too, had been strongly affected. "I've just seen Maracanda... but maybe it wasn't that."

Outside the ship, and in the image on the holostage, the result of the cannon blast was instantaneous. What the death machine ran into was not so much a hit as an obliteration, its image instantaneously transmuted into a sleet of particles and rays, a shotgun blast of dust that bloomed in radiant glory as its particles collided with those of the vastly thinner, slowly drifting nebular cloud. A swift cascade of secondary collisions produced a truly beautiful, utterly silent blast, a glorious and cataclysmic rainbow.

Actually, no mere collision with thin gas and dust could have achieved quite that effect. The culprit had been a slug traveling at de Broglie speeds. Only relativistic time retardation allowed the mass of stressed metal to survive until it reached its target.

By the time (and time, too, had been warped) it got there, its mass had been magnified awesomely by its velocity, one aspect waves of not much more than mathematics. The molecules of lead were churning internally with phase velocities greater than that of light.

Deep down in the Witch's lower hull, the hydrogen power lamps still surged, compelled to make up some of the energy they had so recently borrowed from long seconds in the future. It was all done in silence, and Harry could sense the roaring flow only through the Witch's circuits. Some large component of the energy could never be made up, and the deficit thus created went on chasing itself into the future in the form of an eternal negative. Or so the experts seemed to be saying when Harry listened to them. Just how the damned thing worked was more than he had ever been able to understand, but it seemed that as long as the ship's systems could stand the strain, the Witch and her occupants were going to be all right.

Harry Silver was lying back safe in his pilot's chair, gasping, about as safe at home as he ever got. Inside his armor, its micro currents of air were busy drying out his sweat.

One problem solved. But now that it was settled that he and his passenger were going to survive for the time being, returning life brought with it its own set of difficulties. He had been forced to reveal to his passenger that his ship was still carrying a monstrous weapon, strictly forbidden to any civilian vessel whose crew might be desperate or near suicidal enough to want to use it. The mere possession of it could conceivably be enough to earn him a year or two in prison, from some judge who made a strict interpretation of the law. Lily would hold a power of blackmail over him as soon as they came under Space Force jurisdiction again.

But at least there was no longer any red dot swelling on the holostage. And for the moment, that disappearance was all that counted.

"It's gone?" Lily's voice was barely audible.

"It's gone. We killed it." Harry got out of his chair and with shaking fingers started to take off his armor. He was looking forward to a good stiff drink.

Some time later, when they were smoothly under way again, and Harry was on his second drink, Lily surprised him. He had been expecting some question or accusation about the cannon. Instead she observed: "You don't have a regular partner." That was really a question, though she made it sound more like an accusation.

"Not right now."

"Except your ship, I suppose. Sometimes you speak of her as if she were a woman."

"Oh, I can tell the difference." Harry looked his human shipmate up and down. He had long experience of the way battle, terror, and destruction sometimes worked as aphrodisiacs. From the look on her face, the position of her body, he judged that she was in a kind of balance, ready to be tipped this way or that.

His passenger was looking steadily at him. He couldn't tell what might be going on inside her head. Could anyone ever really tell about anyone else?

Finally he asked: "Great Malako won't mind? Or Alan either?"

Her voice was faint and querulous. "I don't know anything about Great Malako. I try to read about it, but... and sometimes I think I don't know anything about my husband, either." She paused. "You have just saved my life. Again."

Harry grunted. "Right now you can be my partner in conversation. How come you dropped out of pilots' school? You said you only went for a standard month and a half."

"Alan was very enthusiastic about going into space work, back when we started school. Then he lost interest. So we both dropped out. If you are wondering whether he will be jealous, when he finds out you and I have been traveling alone together - "

"I wasn't wondering. Not particularly."

"The answer is that I don't know. I fear there are days when I am not one of his enthusiasms."

"And maybe you have days when he doesn't excite you so much either."

Lily flushed. "I love my husband very deeply."

"Yeah. This new religion he's got, it doesn't necessarily mean he's going to drop you. Does it?"

"I don't know." Then she shook her head. "No, I can't believe Alan would do that. But all religions have splinter groups, don't they? I think there are some followers of Malako who try to attain great holiness by being celibate."

"I guess all religions have splinter groups," Harry agreed.

"That's what really worries me, makes me afraid that when I get to Maracanda, maybe they won't even want me to talk to him. That there's usually one sharp, pointy little splinter that tends to become more and more fanatical."

"And you think that Alan might be attracted to that kind of thing."

She nodded. After giving Harry a thoughtful look, she said: "He's like you, in one way at least. He's not the kind of man who wants to do anything halfway."

Harry raised his glass. "Since you're madly in love with him, I'll take that as a compliment."

"It was meant to be. But I suppose you don't have a regular religion."

Harry grunted again.

Now she was annoyed. "Tell me, Mr. Silver, what do you have?"

He cast a glance around the cabin. "For one thing, I have this ship. It's all mine, free and clear, along with its attachments and its cargo. Which may not amount to much in the cosmic scheme of things, but a fair number of people would like to own it. Or at least want to ride in it." He turned in his chair. "Also I have something of a thirst. Join me in a drink?"

"From your inflection on the word, I presume you speak of alcohol? Malako has no objection to that either. In moderation."

"I'm all for moderation. Though some people carry it too far."

Half a minute later, savoring his first postcombat sip of scotch and watching Lily quickly swallow hers, Harry remarked: "Whisky is my favorite drug." The mention of drugs brought no particular reaction. At some point he meant to raise the subject of smuggling, too, but he hadn't yet thought of a good, smooth way to bring it up.

The subject of traveling seemed to come up naturally. Harry expressed his curiosity as to whether his remaining passenger had ever actually been within ten thousand light-years of the Core. Sagittarius A, the ancient and still somewhat mysterious radio source, was there. So were other, greater mysteries, among them the one that humans called the Taj.

"No, I haven't been anywhere near there." It sounded as though Lily really wished she might have been. "Have you?"

"Not close. Not really close. From all I hear, just getting into Core Sector's not easy, let alone exploring it." Over the years there had been several famous, partially successful expeditions organized to go probing at the center of the Galaxy. Each of them had brought back more questions than answers. "Normal space and flightspace both tend to get a little twisty there. Travel is sometimes possible, but never exactly easy or routine."

Lily said: "From all that I've been able to find out, believers in great Malako, or some of them at least, look forward to visiting the Core on a true pilgrimage. That's why Maracanda's a holy place for them."

"Maracanda's nowhere near the Core." Harry was gently sipping the refill in his glass.

"True, but it has something called the Portal."

"What's that?"

"Some kind of visual phenomenon, it seems. Sometimes it's described as if it were a giant telescope." She smiled lightly. "But anyway, I don't suppose your ship will ever go on any pilgrimage."

"Hard to say where the Witch will go." Harry sipped again. "If she brings me along with her, no doubt my presence near the Core would spoil any ennobling effect."

"But Harry, great Malako aside, don't you want to go there, too? Just to go there, just to see?"

"Well, yeah." After a while Harry added: "But the Taj is one thing I might be afraid to look at. There are a lot of wild tales about the Core, even among people who don't make a religion out of it."

Both of them had heard the stories about the Taj, and the legend of the boy Michel Geulincx, who was supposed to have gone there in an incredible way, and to have undergone an even stranger transformation.

Before long the subject of Alan came up again, as it always did with this lady. Harry thought that if they had to talk about the missing husband, he might as well try to make it interesting.

He suggested: "Maybe Alan won't be eager to come home. What then?"

Lily was shaking her head, slowly and forcefully. "He will be, he must be, willing to come home, when I have talked with him. He is a good man in his heart, and so he must."

"But if he doesn't. Sure you won't have another drink?"

She accepted mechanically. But when the drink was ready, she just held it in her hand, frowning at the glass. She said: "In the unlikely event that he doesn't want to come home... but no. He will. He will."