When the four of them reached the car, Harry jumped right into the driver's seat, and no one tried to dispute it with him; he was the expert pilot, even though he'd never driven one of these vehicles before. Lily, Alan, and Kloskurb jumped into the vehicle right after Harry. In moments, the pedicar was moving.

Hoping that the mental map he had been forming of the nearby terrain was accurate, Harry immediately turned away from the route they had followed coming out here, choosing instead a shortcut across country. Instinct suggested they might regain the main road a little faster going this way. Faint wheel tracks seemed to indicate a road, or at least a trail, ahead of them.

"Where does this lead?" Alan wondered aloud from the left rear seat.

"How the bloody hell should I know?"

Harry kept steering, and all four sets of pedals were turning briskly. Now they were deep in breakdown zone, and seemingly safe from immediate berserker attack. The idea of berserkers concocting an elaborate plan to attack Maracanda still made no more sense to Harry than it ever had. The vast breakdown zones of the habitable area were naturally protected against any invasion from space, more secure in that regard than almost any other world that Harry had ever seen. Well, sometimes berserkers did strange things, even counterproductive things, just for the sake of remaining unpredictable. At the moment, that seemed the only explanation.

Having been given a little time to think, Alan had a suggestion: "Maybe we should split up?"

Harry vetoed that at once. "No. If I understand this buggy we're riding, four active people can go faster, longer, in it than one or two or three people can. Pretty soon, if there's nothing chasing us, we'll ease up from this sprint. Two of us can pedal while the other two rest, then we'll change off. All four pedaling again if we need a burst of speed."

Kloskurb said, "Whatever you people saw back there, I missed it. I mean, apart from the humans shooting at us. Are you sure what you saw was a berserker?"

"I am," Harry answered at once. If the look of that machine the people were dragging hadn't totally convinced him, the looks on the faces of the people who did the dragging had. "But even if I wasn't, if all I had was a good suspicion, I'd be here pedaling."

Lily, sitting in the right front, made a small, throat-clearing sound. "Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"Maybe it was goodlife who tried to kidnap you, a couple of days ago, and not smugglers looking for a pilot."

Harry nodded. "I can believe that, though I still don't quite understand it. Goodlife, mistaking me for the good doctor here. Wanting to nab an expert astrogeologist, just like they took his colleague a couple of months ago. So now the question becomes why?" Alan had been looking back, and reported. "There's another pedicar, coming after us."

"Chasing, or just running away like we are?"

"Can't tell. But I don't think we ought to let them catch up." Harry saw no need to urge his companions to greater efforts. He did his best to look back through the small rearview mirror, along the curving, steadily vanishing line of telegraph poles. There was the other car, all right, but at the moment it did not seem to be gaining. If this was a pursuit, with goodlife pedaling the chase car, they might be slowed by the presence in their vehicle of an inert mass of metal. Would a berserker spring back into activity spontaneously on emerging from breakdown zone? Harry's imagination showed him that scene in painfully vivid detail. The instant the enemy vehicle rolled into a free zone, the berserker would slide out of the cab, in a motion as fluid as that of any living snake. Then, running on two legs or four, it would pull the cab and its load of goodlife with it. It was going to need them as soon as it hit a breakdown zone again.

Would a berserker machine's memories be adversely affected passing through a breakdown zone? Probably not the basic programming, he assumed. No such luck. But maybe the short-term memory? Imagination pictured a berserker forgetting just who and where it had been fighting before the curtain of breakdown descended to conk it out. Or which of the human forms in sight might be goodlife, and which bad.

The speeding cars were swaying on the turns - and the car with Harry steering was pulling slightly, slowly, into a greater lead.

Here came a couple of pedicars going in the other direction, narrowly missing a sideswipe on the constricted road. Harry shouted a warning without slowing down. "Berserkers!"

One approaching vehicle stopped as soon as the chorus of yells rang out, then began to turn in a tight circle, getting ready to retrace its path.

Another hesitated briefly, stopped at last, then after a few irresolute moments went on east. Harry wished them well.

"How did you know that they weren't goodlife, too?"

"Because they didn't steer into us head on."

Kloskurb was counting seconds, under his breath. An estimated minute passed, and then another, without a sighting of the car that might have carried pursuers. All in Harry's vehicle began to breathe a little easier.

"There are so many turns in this damned road, I can't see if they're still after us or not."

"At least they're not gaining."

Harry waited for what he judged was another minute, then took a chance. "All right, sprint is over. Front seats keep pedaling, rear seats rest. Alan, keep a sharp lookout to the rear."

"Right."

Kloskurb had a suggestion. "It seems to me we've got an alternative to simply running. We look for a good spot, and then loop around somewhere and ambush the bastards."

Alan said: "Here, in a breakdown zone?"

Harry said: "In breakdown would be the only place, if we were going to do it. Our guns won't work, but little popguns like these won't do us any good against a functioning berserker. But we're not setting any ambush. We're getting on as fast as we can to the spaceport, to my ship."

"Wish a man could bottle this breakdown stuff and take it into space for a defensive shield."

Alan brightened at that thought. He was only slightly discouraged when it occurred to him, as it soon did, that a couple of hundred other people must have already considered that idea and found it unworkable.

"Trouble is, the phenomenon doesn't seem to exist anywhere else in the universe, only on certain portions of the surface of Maracanda. Not even on any of the other half dozen azlarocean bodies."

Alan worked as hard at pedaling west as everyone else. But he wasn't going to allow shortness of breath to stop him from talking about the great opportunities this world offered, and his own unfortunate lack of investment capital.

At first, though he was talking to all his fellow riders in the car, his words seemed to be directed especially to Lily, telling her how tired he was of the business of praying at the Portal, and putting up a pretense of trying to make converts to Great Malako.

After a minute or so his voice grew enthusiastic, as he proclaimed to all his companions how the truth, the real truth, had come to him in the form of sudden revelation. His own future - and Lily's, too, if she would only open her eyes to see it - depended not on anything in the Galactic Core, tens of thousands of light-years distant, but on the mineral wealth of Maracanda, right here beneath their feet.

There followed many kilometers of relative silence, with no one in the car having much to say to anyone else. A brief stop allowed people to stretch and change positions, but Harry kept the driver's seat.

"I'm sorry if you can't see it, Lil." Alan wasn't looking at her, but out through the window. As the terror of the first minutes of flight receded into the past, he came back relentlessly to his new enthusiasm. He sounded cool and remote, as if he and Lily had never been close.

At last she gave him a kind of answer. "I'm sorry for you, too, Alan." Her voice was tight. "You're right, I can no longer see any of the crazy things that you see. Not anymore."

Of course, the speedometer on the pedicar was not functioning here in breakdown, any more than their various timepieces were; but Harry, just by looking at the passing landscape, estimated that the four of them, pedaling determinedly two at a time, and relieving each other at frequent intervals, had so far been able to sustain a cruising speed of about thirty kilometers an hour. At that rate, ten hours should see them gone west as far as the caravanserai. By the time they got there, they were going to be in serious need of food.

Not that it was easy to tell time. When darkness fell, they lighted the pedicar's dim combustion lamps, smaller versions of those used on the caravan, and pressed on.

Currently, Harry and Dr. Kloskurb were laboring at the pedals, while Lily and Alan rested.

It seemed that husband and wife had less and less to say to each other, the more time they spent in each other's company. Lily had made a bitter comment or two about her husband. But then she quieted and concentrated on the job at hand.

Alan said something showing that he thought his wife and Harry were having an affair. But his chief reason in mentioning it seemed to be to show that he did not really care.

"On Maracanda, the only important resource is mineral wealth."

Harry said: "The only resource we have to worry about right now is breath. Let's not waste it."

Kloskurb tried to be a peacemaker. "Arguing can wait. But Harry's right. What we have to do is just keep breathing, and keep moving."

Silence reigned in the cab for a short time. But soon Alan was muttering again; it seemed impossible for him to keep silent on his latest means of salvation. Compared to the torment he felt at his lack of investment capital, the breakup of his marriage was only an annoyance.

Oh, they mustn't misunderstand him; he wasn't going to be selfish. He was generously willing to share his new treasure (as soon as he had it in hand) with his friends, and especially with Lily. But he now saw himself as having gone beyond Lily, advancing into realms of ideas and accomplishment where she could not follow.

There had been no further sightings of their theoretical pursuers, and Harry was beginning to think it likely they had given up the chase. Not that he could take that for granted. For all he knew, more of the berserker's playmates might be somewhere ahead, preparing an ambush of their own.

Whatever else might happen, he had to get back to his ship. He had to get back to his ship.

Weary from endless hours of pedaling, from many hours in the pedicar - they had no way, except the cycle of darkness and light, to tell how many - with only the briefest of stops, to stretch their weary legs and answer calls of nature, they at last rounded a turn between two hills and came in sight of the faint beacons of the caravanserai's oil lamps.

The dread that a metal shape might come bursting out to kill them was quickly laid to rest. The stationmaster, looking far more haggard than when Harry had seen him last, came to greet them at the main entrance. This time he had a pistol stuck in his belt. "You're from the east? What word?"

"No one's chasing us, as far as we know. And we need food." Harry remained slumped in his seat for long seconds, realizing that he was close to exhaustion.

The caravanserai was empty of guests at the moment, only the stationmaster and a small handful of other employees remaining at their posts. There was the telegraph to be defended, the stationmaster explained, and the caravanserai's small central island of free zone.

The telegraph instrument, when Harry approached it, was sounding a steady clatter that gave an impression of urgency, even though he was unable to interpret the code.

The operator on duty interpreted. Serious righting had broken out in Tomb Town and Minersville. Both settlements were under attack by a small force of berserkers. Where the machines had come from, how they had managed to materialize on the remote east side of Maracanda, no one knew. Casualties were substantial, but the battle was not hopeless. The enemy was few in number and seemed to lack any heavy weapons.

In the west, Port City and the spaceport had still seen no sign of the enemy, though of course both remained under full alert. The signals precipitating the alert, from the early warning units on the distant approaches to the system, had not been repeated.

It would take some time for the authorities to discover evidence that the original alert had been a hoax, but by then there would be even better evidence that the berserker presence on their world was all too real.

The recycler was still turning out enough food to feed a hungry caravan. Chewing on a crude sandwich that tasted like a gourmet treat - at the moment almost anything would have done so - Harry did his best to use the telegraph to get a message through to General Pike. He wanted to tell the Templars that Harry and Lily were on their way west and that nothing must delay Harry getting back into his ship.

Kloskurb, after waiting impatiently, had a message of his own to send: a private communication to his family, who were in Port City at the moment, and who must be wondering what had happened to him.

Alan, pacing restlessly in the common room, wistfully wished aloud that it might be possible to register land claims by wire.

The four travelers gobbled food and packed more in the pedicar. Sleep turned out to be another necessity, and Harry and his crew were soon stretched out, fully clothed, on four cots that had been pulled into the common room. This was where the sta-tionmaster and his helpers also rested between tours of duty.

Acting on an inspiration, Lily ransacked the station's emergency medical kit and came up with some finely calibrated morsels of chemistry whose labels promised that they would put an adult man into two hours of deep and intensely restful sleep, followed by an indefinite period of high-energy wakefulness.

Just to make sure, Harry left instructions with the caravanserai worker currently on duty. "Wake me in two hours. No more than that."

A new day had dawned by the time Harry and his companions reboarded their car and pushed on west from the caravanserai.

When they reached and passed the place where spheres were kept in a corral, they knew they were on the very edge of free zone.

Moments later, the pedicar's engine purred into life, and four voices rose in a hearty cheer.

Harry still drove. The speed of powered movement was intensely gratifying. Kloskurb, to the surprise of all the others, announced that he was working on a poem, to be called "Ode to the Moving Chair."

Now and then Harry's thoughts strayed back to Bulaboldo and his cohort. It seemed very probable that the smuggler would be doing just what he'd said he'd do: keeping whatever people he still had with him under control, remaining hidden in the vicinity of his prize diggings, as long as berserkers prowled the land nearby. Guarding his treasure, and his available landing spot. Clinging to the hope, however forlorn it must appear at times, that Harry would soon be setting down his ship nearby. When that happened, Bulaboldo and his loyal people - if he still had any - would leap out of concealment, ready to load as much of his dirty stuff as he could aboard Harry's ship.

Well, they'd have a surprise coming, if matters ever actually got that far.

The talk in the pedicar kept coming around to legitimate minerals and claims for prospecting. Dr. Kloskurb said: "Don't worry, Gunnlod, berserkers aren't going to cave in all the mines."

Alan couldn't wait, berserkers or not, to take the first step toward filing the claims he meant to establish. He persisted in trying to pick the astrogeologist's brain for tips on where the valuable minerals were to be found and how to get them out.

Kloskurb, irritated, at last grumbled that he expected to be paid for consultations.

Alan admitted that he was moneyless at the moment, having given practically everything he owned to the temple of Malako. "But we can work out some other kind of arrangement, some share of the profits. After this berserker scare, some people will be dropping out, but money will be rolling in."

Lily said to her husband: "Too bad berserkers don't care about wealth. You could make a deal with them." Then she suddenly looked wary, as if she thought she might have gone too far.

Alan took no offense; he was shaking his head, lost in some inner calculation. Harry was thinking that the only treasure that berserkers ever sought was life itself, just so they could kill it, to satisfy their programming. As fanatical as any human being who ever searched for gold.

Sometimes Harry wondered: supposing that the death machines could some day be sure they had succeeded, and all life had been expunged from the Galaxy, what would they do then? Spontaneously turn themselves off? Or possibly settle into an endless vigilance, ready to stamp out any recurrence of the disease? A third alternative might be to find some way to launch themselves successfully out into the intergalactic night, trying to go where no normal superluminal drive could ever carry them. Perhaps a couple of hundred thousand light-years to the Magellanic Clouds, or a couple of million to the spiral in Andromeda, looking for a new infection there.

Berserkers, of course, cared nothing for grit, or any other marketable treasure, in itself. But Harry wasn't so sure that they'd ignore the mines. They had learned the potential value of such stuff, as a resource useful in buying the services of certain marginal members of humanity. In the course of the long war there had been plenty of evidence that it was generally safe to depend upon human greed.

Cruising at several times the speed they had been able to make on the power of their own muscles, the refugees could take turns napping while one of them drove. Harry even relinquished the driver's position for a time. The endless passing of the road was insidiously hypnotic, even if the drug taken at the caravanserai had sharply boosted their reserves of ready energy.

There wasn't much in the way of other traffic, and almost none going in the other direction.

Now and then they passed a few frightened people walking west, some of whom tried to hitch a ride. Harry snarled that they were stopping for no one. He had to get back to his ship, and that was the only thing that counted.

When at last the outlying buildings of Port City appeared in the distance, Harry looked about sharply for a human presence, realizing that he might still stand in some danger of being arrested by the Space Force.

Sure enough, just outside the city they came to barricades across the road. These were ineffectual barriers that would hardly slow a berserker down, assembled from a mix of random materials, and defended by an irregular gathering of worried volunteers, armed with an odd assortment of weapons. Harry assumed the few professional military around would be busy in or with their ships.

The approaches to the city from the east looked practically defenseless, but the people present assured the new arrivals that so far it had not been attacked. They were beginning to allow themselves to hope that it never would be.

The haggard, irregularly armed people guarding the barricade were hungry for every scrap of news from the interior. They had heard wild rumors from other refugees who had come trickling in, and the new arrivals could confirm or deny some of them.

There were no Space Force people at the barricades, and none of the volunteers were going to try to arrest Harry, or even question him.

To match its second-rate early warning system, Maracanda probably had comparatively little in the way of man-made defenses. There were some robots in orbit, though here, as elsewhere, with the example of the berserkers constantly before them, Earth-descended humans refused to build fully automated fighting machines. There were also some ground defenses, all near Port City, sighted in on the main approaches.

Considering the wealth of natural peculiarities in the space surrounding this habitable body, and in the higher layers of what passed for this world's atmosphere, it would not be at all surprising that the local defense headquarters in Port City failed to keep a good watch on what ships might be maneuvering nearby.

The quartet of refugees were surrounded, at least for the time being, by science, sanity, and the illusion of safety.

"I'm getting off here. Coming, Lil?" It was as if all the talk of her leaving him had been forgotten, dismissed as some temporary aberration. "We'll take out a claim in your name, too. We can do that, can't we?"

"Legally?" Kloskurb was thinking it over slowly. It was as if his mind had to come back from some great distance before it could consider such a question. "Yes, I don't know why not," he said at last.

"Good." Alan was looking silently at his wife.

"I'm not coming with you, Alan."

"Oh." Alan looked from her to Harry and back again. "Well," he added finally.

"No, Alan, understand me. I'm not leaving you for Harry. It's because I've finally figured out what you are. You keep demonstrating it over and over, and at last I can't deny it any longer. And you're not going to change."

Alan stared at her a little longer, a man confronting a knotty problem. Then he turned his gaze worriedly to a nearby clock, checking the time.

One more try with another prospect. "Harry, you must have some money in your pockets. Can I interest you in a promising investment? I know I've asked you this before."

"Ask me just once more and see what happens."

Alan sighed. "I'll be seeing you around then, people." He gave his wife one last look. "I want to talk to you about this later, Lil." Then he turned and hurried away, still carrying his small collection of samples, in the direction of the Administration Building.

"Goodbye, Alan." Lily got in the last word, waiting until her husband was already too far away to hear.