It seemed that last night's telegraphic messages sent out by the stationmaster had not been too badly garbled. Some local official, wearing a vague smile and a uniform that Harry could not recognize at all, was waiting to escort Harry and his companions to the Tomb Town central hospital, where the battered and unsuccessful kidnapper had been hauled by pedicar last night.

The official nodded pleasantly to Kul. "Mr. Bulaboldo, good to see you again. We hear you had a little difficulty on the trip."

"You might say that, old top."

"Well, sir, we'd like you to take a look at the man who was injured at the caravanserai last night. You and your companions who were there, of course." And the official fixed his eyes uncertainly on Harry.

Harry would have expected Bulaboldo to protest at this distraction, but on the contrary he seemed eager to come along. Lily came also, with an attitude of wanting to get the business over with as quickly as possible.

The hospital, in easy walking distance from the caravan terminal, was a low, typically Maracandan building, built of slabs of local rock. Inside, electric lights glowed with gentle efficiency; it was a relief to be back in a free zone. The seriously injured victim of last night's brawl, now unmasked and looking about as harmless as patients in beds generally do, lay folded in pastel sheets with the thin, shiny tentacles of a modern medirobot still attached to his head in several places. When one of the tentacles occasionally moved, he looked as if he might be trying out for the part of Medusa. A youngish woman wearing physician's insignia stood by the patient as if on guard.

The man in the bed gazed back at Harry stoically, his face showing not a trace of recognition.

Studying the would-be kidnapper in turn, in the full light of day, Harry could only shake his head.

"You sure you've never seen him before, Mr. Silver?"

"'Never' is a big word. Maybe as a face in a crowd, somewhere, sometime. But I don't think ever on this world. Not until last night. Who is he?"

The official gave a name, one that meant no more to Harry than the unfamiliar face. He added: "Been working as a miner here for about a year. No criminal record."

Taking his turn at the foot of the bed, Bulaboldo glanced briefly at the patient, then turned away shaking his head.

Lily in turn took a quick look, as if the sight were painful, and said that she had never seen him either. Apparent sympathy in her face and voice, she asked the attendant doctor if the man was going to recover.

The doctor standing at bedside said that treatment had been effective, and a full recovery was eventually to be expected. But the victim remained totally clammed up, refusing to say anything about the events of the night before.

"Can he talk now?" Lily asked.

The woman physician said: "He can, but he hasn't said much."

Speaking slowly and distinctly, and pointing at Harry, the official asked the man in the bed: "Do you recognize this man?"

"I can't remember anything." The responding voice was an awkward croak, his unfamiliar face was wooden.

"I know one thing he remembered," the local official said. "He's asked for a lawyer."

As soon as the three of them were out of the room, Bulaboldo, operating in his won't-take-no-for-an-answer mode, announced firmly that Harry and Lily were of course going to stay with him as long as they were in town. "Believe me, dear friends, temporary housing is not that easy to come by in this city. The hotels generally have long waiting lists."

Harry and Lil looked at each other. Harry said: "I accept, but I want to do one other thing first. Those people were after Dr. Somebody, and I still think the name was Kloskurb."

The hospital's information desk seemed a logical starting place. The local roster of physicians listed no Kloskurb or anything like it, but a check in the city's professional directory came through. Emil Kloskurb, with an advanced degree in physics, worked in the astrogeology research lab. The address shown was almost in the center of town, close to the Square of the Portal.

A pedicab conveyed the travelers swiftly to Bulaboldo's residence in Tomb Town. This turned out to be a large and elegant townhouse, in what was clearly an upscale section of the city.

Harry found that he had about given up on trying to keep an eye on Lily. Whatever time and effort this saved him, he could now spend on worrying about some way to get his spaceship back.

Bulaboldo had repeatedly pledged Harry his help to do just that. (Of course, Templar Robledo Pike had also promised something along that line, but Harry didn't want Bulaboldo to know anything about Templar Pike.)

Bulaboldo had practically promised that he could arrange to pry the Witch away from the authorities back in Port City. But so far he had refused to discuss any details of the plan. When they were in the house and could presumably talk freely, Harry brought the subject up again.

Kul shook his head. "I just wish you'd leave that to me, old chap."

"It's my ship. I want to know."

Bulaboldo started to say something, took a look at Harry, and said something else instead. "I can assure you of this much. Very delicate negotiations are in progress."

"Conducted how? By telegraph?"

Kul looked right and left, as if making sure they could not be overheard. "Not the sort of business one would ever want to trust to even a private wire. The telegraph has been known to give up information to the wrong parties, besides keeping it from the proper ones. No, the details have been delegated to a certain associate of mine, back in Port City."

"Who?"

"His name would not mean anything to you."

"Who says?"

"Trust me, lad, I know what I'm about."

Harry answered quietly and slowly, as if he were weighing every word. "I hope you do, Kul. I really hope you do."

The other looked a shade uncomfortable. He licked his lips. "Old times' sake, and all that."

"You're going to want some kind of a payback, sometime."

"Glad to be of service, Harry. Of course, one never knows when one will indeed need help in turn."

Harry gave him another look, but that was all he could find out for the moment. All right, so Bulaboldo would try to arrange to get the Witch unsealed and released, just out of the goodness of his heart.

Harry was sitting in the common room of Bulaboldo's elaborate house, sipping coffee brought by an elegant robotic servant and reading a pamphlet he had just picked up. "A lot of people come to this world on pilgrimage because the Tomb of Timur is here. What I want to know is, does this Timur have anything to do with the founding of the Malako system? Or is he separate?"

"As far as I can figure this out, most Malakos believe the two have no connection." Lily, on a nearby sofa, was studying a larger Malako guidebook, one she pulled from a nearby library shelf. She had announced her intention of setting out very soon for the Square of the Portal, which seemed to be in easy walking distance.

Harry hadn't got the whole story of Timur yet, and it seemed he wasn't going to get it from the turgid prose of the little pamphlet. Only that the man had been an important prophet or leader, or both, who was supposed to have been buried in some exotic way.

Lily was suddenly worried about the religious details, as if it might be important for her to have them right. "On the spot where the spirit of the Galaxy first spoke to him?"

"Something like that. Does it matter?"

"It might. I want to be able to talk about these things with Alan." She sighed. "I guess I'm ready. Harry, are you coming with me?"

"Said I would, didn't I? Provided we can stop in at the research center on the way. I still want to talk to this Dr. Kloskurb if I can." He looked at her and added softly: "It should only take a minute."

The doctor wasn't hard to find. The first thing Harry noted, while introducing himself and Lily, in a computer-intensive laboratory at the research center, was the man's general resemblance to himself. No one seeing them together would have mistaken them for twins, but in size, coloring, and apparent age the match was close.

Lily agreed. "The two of you could easily be brothers. Only you're just a little younger, I think, Harry."

The scientist listened to the story, and agreed on the fact of the likeness. "But what you tell me about an attempted kidnapping seems absurd. I can't think of any reason why anyone would want to abduct me." He paused. "Are you sure it was my name he spoke, and not just something that sounded like - "

Harry said: "People have called me a lot of things, but usually not by any high academic titles. No, one of these people called me by your name. And here we have the resemblance, as supporting evidence. You stayed in the caravanserai just a night before I did, and somehow they got their timing wrong."

Kloskurb was still incredulous. "Why would anyone want to kidnap me?"

"Possibly you've got something they want. Or someone close to you has got it."

"Ridiculous. I'm not a wealthy man."

"Maybe what they want is not necessarily money."

"Then I can't imagine what. Revenge? But I have no enemies."

Harry, crunching a chewing pod between his teeth, looked at him thoughtfully for a little while. Then he said: "People in your field seem to lead hazardous lives on this habitable body. The scientist who disappeared a standard month or so ago - what was her name?"

"Yes, of course. Dr. Kochi." Kloskurb nodded soberly. "We were colleagues, worked on the same project for a time."

"Maybe Dr. Kochi did not fall down a subduction zone. Maybe it was people who pulled her away."

"Well." The doctor looked around him, at his computers and other busy machines. Obviously he wanted to get this intrusion over with as quickly as he could. "What would you suggest I do, Mr. Silver?"

"First, talk to your local law people - though they'll probably say there's nothing they can do. Then keep your eyes open. I don't know how you feel about hiring bodyguards, or what they cost here, or if they're any good, but it might not be a bad idea."

"As, for instance, possibly yourself?"

"Me? No!" Harry hadn't been trying to give that impression. "I've got a different career, one that keeps me very busy."

The scientist muttered something. He still looked yearningly at his machines. Harry asked him: "Onto something good?"

"There are discoveries of really major importance waiting to be made." Once started on his favorite subject, Kloskurb tended to keep going. It seemed that the deeper layers of the mass called Maracanda, starting at a depth of a hundred meters or so, contained many nodules of exotic matter. There was a note of wonder in the scientist's voice: "Even nodules of antimatter are a theoretical possibility."

Lily was showing signs of restlessness. Harry nodded. "That's what the techs at the caravanserai were telling me, only they made it definite. How in all the hells can you have chunks of antimatter buried in the middle of a normal world?"

"That, of course, is what we hope to discover. I assume some kind of natural force shielding, probably magnetic, would have to be in place." Kloskurb smiled. "Of course, it's probably a mistake to ever think of Maracanda as a normal world."

When the two of them came out of the research lab, Lily said impulsively: "The square is only one short block from here, if the maps are right. I've got to take one quick look." Her breathing was heightened, and there was more color in her face.

"Sure." Harry stayed right with his client, playing his promised role of escort. Alan or no Alan, having come this far, he had an urge to see the thing.

Only about fifty paces, on a walkway crowded with others seeking the same destination, and they were in the Square of the Portal. Vehicular traffic was forbidden here, and the whole space was thronged with people. The square was fifty or sixty meters on a side, and three of the sides were more or less ordinary Maracandan buildings, of two or three stories each, housing a mixture of stores, offices, and apartments. The fourth side of the square was the nearly vertical face of a Maracandan landform about the same size as the buildings, striped with a converging pattern of natural grooves and ridges that looked very artificial. The pattern converged in the middle of the ridged surface, four or five meters above the ground. At the center of it was something that at first glance seemed to be the entrance to a cave, filled by the glistening transparent surface of a bulging bubble.

Days ago, when he'd still had his ship, Harry had called up from his ship's data bank a holostage image of the miraculous Tomb of Timur, and this was basically how it had looked: a clear, transparent bubble. But, as often happened, the thing itself was much more impressive than any image. Looking at the reality somehow suggested that the mouth of a tunnel might lie behind the glassy smoothness of the bulging surface.

Lily had given the marvel one quick look on entering the square, and that was about all. Now she was scanning the faces of the surrounding crowd, her own face eager.

Harry was watching her. He said: "You know, he may not be here just at this very moment."

The young woman didn't answer. So intent was she on her search that Harry wasn't sure that she had heard him.

"Well, give it a little time." He couldn't be sure that she had heard that either.

Lily seemed to be drooping, and at last she spoke. "He'll either be here or at the Malako temple. That's only a block away. But I want to get some rest before I go there. And I must look like hell."

"You do look kind of worn out."

"I feel kind of worn out. Last night was not exactly restful. And when I confront those people at the temple I may have to do some arguing."

"I hope he's worth it, lady," Harry surprised himself by saying.

She gave him a twisted little smile. "He is to me."

Back at Bulaboldo's house, his two guests were assigned adjoining rooms, following their preference at the caravanserai. No rickety cots in these bedchambers, but high-tech sleeping platforms, along with the latest in other types of modern furniture. The windows in these high walls were sturdily protected. The modern, high-tech partition between Lily's room and Harry's discreetly displayed a faintly visible outline where, with the cooperation of people on both sides, a communicating door could be readily dialed into existence. Just beyond it, Lily had quickly plunged into a regimen of rest and revitalization, a few hours' respite that she thought she needed before undertaking the final push in the Great Husband Search.

Harry, having decided that a nap might not be a bad idea, lay sprawled on the bed in his own room. Looking drowsily at that potential doorway on the wall, he couldn't help being somehow reminded of the sealing Rovaki had said he was slapping on the Witch's main hatch. Harry had never laid eyes on that outrage, which was probably just as well. He could picture it, though: probably some kind of damned plastic that would be nastily hard to remove completely. It was as if some friend of his was locked up with tape slapped over her mouth.

Before Harry knew it, he was dreaming about berserkers again.

This time he knew that the bad machines were coming to kidnap him, not just to kill him, and he was terrified. For once, it was not their impersonal robotic efficiency, their mechanical certainty, that frightened him. This time it was their anger and their hatred, because he knew that something had happened to arouse their metal spirits, and at long last they were enraged.

He, Harry, had hidden something from them, something they dearly wanted. And the bad machines were also seeking an accounting from him, for all the harm he'd done them through the years.

The members of this particular berserker horde were all the scarier, because they cunningly remained just out of visibility, concealing their shapes and sizes from him. But Harry knew with all the certainty of dreams that they were there, moving about just under the surface of the Maracandan land, like children playing ghosts under a sagging sheet - and it was, as it always would be, his, Harry's, duty to warn the world about them.

And, of course, he found it impossible to move -

Harry awoke with a sudden wrench of mind and body. He wasn't screaming, but he had the feeling that he'd just cried out. There were no berserkers to be seen, and not even any kidnappers. Only the unfamiliar lodging of Bulaboldo's house in Tomb Town. Kul's business, and Harry didn't want to know just what it was exactly, must be good. His house, or mansion rather, was equipped with a solid roof, in contrast with most Maracandan buildings. Maybe, Harry thought, he was not the only one who feared the unknown dropping from the sky.

He got up from the elaborate sleeping platform, stretched, and went to his room's window to look out. He gazed on houses, mostly high walled and lacking roofs, built on a slightly lower level than Kul's fortress, along nearby streets and zigzag alleys.

Surveying the strange world outside Bulaboldo's one-way viewing wall, he could tell that, sure enough, the local day was progressing on schedule, with a vague brightness spread through the multiple layers of energy and odd matter making up the Maracandan sky. Maybe in a few more standard years the place would manage to generate an apparent sun.

Checking on the lady in the next room he found her up and about. A few minutes later, cleanly dressed and fresh from his own shower, Harry descended from his room to join Lily and Kul downstairs. They were just sitting down to lunch. Lily looked rested and refreshed and had garbed herself in new, attractive clothes.

She looked up as he appeared on the stairs. "You know what, Harry?"

"Tell me what."

"None of those children being born and raised on this world are ever going to see a star. Not until they go out into space."

Harry grunted. He always enjoyed looking at the stars - provided he could see them safely dimmed and filtered through a few miles of Earth-like atmosphere, or, better yet, through the elaborate optics of some stout ship's ports. From that secure position it was rather like being snug and warm inside your cheerful house, while rain or snow came pelting down outside.

On the sideboard in the dining room awaited hot dishes holding tempting food. Harry went for some kind of eggs and thin, crisp, meaty slices, all artistically synthesized.

When the three of them were seated, Kul added: "I suppose you're heading for the square again this afternoon, old thing?"

Harry glanced at Lily. "I suppose we are." He thought, Bulaboldo's keeping me under close observation, and he's going to do that until I'm needed. Whatever it is he wants, he's not ready to tell me yet. When he tells me my ship is ready, that's when he'll let me know.

Serving machines rolled and reached discreetly around the three people as they ate, tending and tidying and pouring. Harry hadn't yet seen another human being, besides Kul and Lily, since entering the house; though once a woman's distant, silvery laugh had suggested there were some around.

Since the attempted kidnapping had already been reported to the local authorities, Harry supposed that the Templars must have heard of it, too. Of course, it would give him something, a bit of real content, to put in a report to General Pike. He would first have to find the Templar communication terminal here in Tomb Town and then see if the secret key he was carrying really allowed him to use it.

Harry thought the general would probably be pleased if he could find some way to blame the attempted kidnapping on goodlife, though that theory would seem quite a stretch. Members of that morbid cult were occasionally active as suicide bombers, but not, as far as Harry was aware, as kidnappers.

But the Templars could wait; first Harry was going to escort Lily back to the square.

Having disposed of a quick lunch, the lady eagerly shouldered her small pack and graciously thanked Kul for his hospital-ity. If she found Alan, or maybe even if she didn't, there would be no need for her to come back to Bulaboldo's house.

"And thank you for the flowers, also." She had gathered, at Kul's invitation, a few sprigs from the carefully cultivated pots in the mansion's roof garden and was wearing them as decoration on her fashionable but inexpensive broad-brimmed hat, just ordered from a nearby shop.

"My pleasure, m'dear. Harry, you won't dally too long, will you?"

"I expect I'll be home for dinner, Daddy." Suddenly Harry was sure that the fat one was going to have him followed and watched by some robotic gadget or clever human. All right. All right. Just so he somehow gets my ship back for me.

Turning to the woman at his side, he complimented: "Flowers look nice."

"Thank you. Alan likes this kind. We once planted some at home."

Lily was ready to march off briskly, but then she stopped, impatient as a child, waiting for Harry.

As the two of them walked toward the square, retracing the path they had taken earlier in the day, Harry asked: "Did you try the city directory?"

"Of course. No luck. But it seems that a lot of people who live here just aren't listed."

They had gone a few more strides along the busy walkway when she turned to Harry suddenly and said: "Thank you."

"What have I done now?"

"You got me here in one piece. It's just gradually sinking in on me what might have happened - probably would have happened - if you hadn't snuffed those hijackers."

"That's all right. When I contract to deliver a passenger somewhere, I like to see that she gets there." He paused, then went on. "You know, when I was tucking them in, there in the abandoned station, they admitted that they were smugglers, they wanted my ship for some kind of special operation. Said they had a real good deal going, here on Maracanda. Of course, some other people were in it with them."

He was watching Lily carefully while he pronounced that last sentence. He could have saved himself the trouble, because none of it mattered in the least to her. Harry wasn't sure she even heard it. Only Alan mattered, as always. Alan, Alan, Alan.

Since arriving on Maracanda, even while having his hands full with other problems, he'd been keeping his eyes open for some sign of illicit drugs for sale or in use. So far he'd spotted nothing. But it would be hard to find an inhabited world anywhere in the Galaxy where no trade of that sort was ever carried on. On the other hand, Maracanda didn't seem a very likely place for growing organic drugs or anything else.

Meanwhile, Lily was back again on subject number one. "For as long as I've known him, he's been pinning his hopes of - of salvation, I think it amounts to that - on one thing after another. I told you how we both went to pilots' school."

"You said something about 'sports rituals,' too."

"Oh. Oh yes, when I showed you the holo. Maybe he's been unconsciously looking for some kind of religion all along."

Harry grunted. He tried to make it an upbeat sort of sound.

"But this is the first time he's actually taken to a religion, in the conventional sense. I suppose he can't help it. Maybe there's some scientific, psychological name for his condition. But I don't care about that. I just want him back. If I have to take Great Malako with him, I can handle that."

On entering the square this time, Harry accepted a handout from a robed religious acolyte and found himself looking at a pamphlet printed on smartpaper, the words on the cover flowing into other words even as Harry looked at them. After a few seconds, text alternated with a holographic image of the Galaxy. The printed image on the white page moved in a swirling effect, which reminded Harry of nothing so much as the cycling of a certain kind of waste disposal device.

Before he could crumple the thing and throw it away, there was another change. On the paper appeared the face and voice of an anonymous lecturer, the appearance of the printed words lip-synched with the speaking image.

The burden of this silent monologue was that down through the years human investigators, human searchers, had somehow (unintentionally, by observing it and thinking about it) constructed the Tomb of Timur as a composite model of all the things that they were looking for. True believers, guided by their faith, would understand that the Portal was really the reason for the existence of Maracanda, and in fact it was pretty much the center of the universe, or at least the Galaxy, which to the true followers of Malako was pretty much the same thing.

The printed voice went on: There exists an ancient parlor game - maybe you've heard about it, maybe you've played it. The central player - or call him the victim of the joke - tries to determine the nature of an imaginary object by asking questions of the other players. But it is only the questioner who determines what the object is - not consciously, not deliberately, but by means of the questions that his imagination urges him to ask. The other players only answer yes or no according to some pattern that they have prearranged among themselves, without the knowledge of the questioner.

Interesting. But Harry stuffed the paper in his pocket; he wasn't going to take the time to read it now.

The square was even more crowded now than when they had seen it a few hours earlier. Some of those present probably lived or worked here, and appeared to be intent on business. Others were worshiping in a variety of ways, some quiet and some flamboyant. And it was plain that many more had come only to gape.

The people were worthy of study, but Harry's gaze kept coming back to the Portal itself. When he raised his eyes above it, he wondered whether there might once have been some gravitational anomaly associated with this spot. Because the sharp peaks of neighboring hills, just outside the city, all leaned in this direction, as if offering homage. Somehow, as if through a great magnifying lens, or a porthole looking into a wormhole, it provided a close but distorted look at the Core, the Galaxy's great glowing heart, which through the normal paths of space, or even flight-space, would be thousands of light-years distant, a journey occupying standard months, if conditions obtaining along the route would allow it to be made at all.

Scientists who had seen this view thought it interesting, but not of very great value as a true window on the Core, because of the obvious distortion.

A bubble that always looked as if it might be about to pop, but never did, emerged from a gateway, an opening maybe three meters high, and equally wide. The exact shape of it kept shifting, so it was always nearly a circle, but never quite.

Harry divided his attention between the Portal and Lily, but she ignored the thing almost entirely. Generally, her eyes kept sweeping the crowded square, sweeping swiftly over a hundred faces, and then a hundred more, trying to keep up with the ceaseless flow.

Lily had found a better place to stand, slightly elevated, from which she could see more people. She was on the lip of the entrance porch of one of the office buildings. Harry stepped up beside her.

Looking at the wonder from a different angle, he got a different impression. The glassy bulge seemed perpetually about to burst out of the contorted land in a strangely inclined hillside. Directly in front of it, an area of about twenty meters across was fenced off by some low but solid barrier - maybe the artificial fence was starting to show signs of strain, as if it might be in the process of melting, not from high temperature but from sheer strangeness, the exotic forces that had created and maintained the Portal. Little icicles were protruding, all of them pointing directly toward - or away from - the Portal.

Hucksters of souvenirs, and religious chanters, cried out in their different voices. In this designated area, offerings of papers and coins, flowers and food, had been placed in honor of the god.

Guards in the strange uniforms of the local authority were standing by, evidently to keep people from actually trying to reach the Portal. He supposed that some arrangement must have been worked out to let scientists and other responsible folk have a turn at close examination. Harry assumed that protection was also necessary to deter the lunatics and violent demonstrators who would be drawn to any unique object as famous and mysterious as this.

There were also, of course, souvenir sellers of one kind and another, who had set up their shops or folding stands nearby.

Lily, who had lately been studying the subject intently, told Harry that time and again some people had tried to go through the Portal, or Tomb (the members of one small subsect insisted on calling it the Cromlech) or at least insert a hand or a foot. A few determined fanatics, hell-bent on finding union with the One. Some had even devised machines they thought would carry them in safety to their god.

Lily observed: "Several times plans have been drawn up to enclose the Portal entirely in a building. But there is always too much religious protest."

Harry was still intrigued. "What happens to the people who try to jump into it?"

"The very few who have actually managed to get in are gone, no one knows where. Every time someone succeeds, the authorities do something to make the feat even more difficult. Yes, I know what you're thinking. Alan may have done something like that. But I refuse to accept the possibility."

Harry actually hadn't been thinking that at all. Somehow what he had learned about Alan up to now didn't seem to qualify him for such gloriously irrevocable deeds.

And here came a pair of cultists of yet another kind, just what kind Harry had no clue. They were a man and woman wearing robes of black and working as a team.

Something about Lily and Harry must have caught their eye, for they stopped to harangue the couple, the man demanding: "What is really at the core of the Core of the Galaxy? An enormous black hole."

Lily just shook her head and turned away, her eyes searching, searching. She had no time for nonsense. But Harry felt a little bit like arguing. He said: "Opinions vary on that. Theories come and go."

The black-robed woman said: "Not anyone's tomb, not yet. But it will one day be the final resting place of all humanity, all our hopes and dreams."

Harry was still game. "Maybe. Some of us might have a different idea about that."

Crowd noise almost drowned out what the woman was trying to tell him: "... servants of the Black Hole... the Infinite Emptiness."

There Harry felt on firmer ground. He said: "You've got it wrong. Black holes are the very opposite of empty."

And the man chimed in: "What would you not give, what would any human not give, to be able to save some of the time and energy wasted on what is called life?"

"Yeah. I might go back five minutes, and not be standing here when you came by."

Harry had just turned away from the black-robed pair when his attention was suddenly caught by the figure of a youngish man in a white shirt, the kind a lot of the cultists favored. The fellow had just emerged from the milling crowd, ten meters or so away, and seemed to be staring at Harry with great intensity.

No, on a second look, he wasn't looking at Harry, but directly over Harry's right shoulder.

"Hello, Lil," the newcomer called softly. Alan had lost his little black mustache at some point, and he sounded tired.