Book One

THE HIGH SEINERS

 

One: 3049 AD

The Main Sequence

 

The death cry of an exploding sun illuminated a starfleet the likes of which few men had ever seen. There were six great starships in the convoy. The smallest was forty kilometers long.

No drive glow enveloped those ships. No ion wake marked their passing. They were drifting. But they met the flash front of the nova with an inherent velocity approaching three tenths the velocity of light.

Each of those starships looked like a mobile created by a sculptor, looked like someone had visited a planetary junkyard, had welded scraps together, and then had flung the results at the farthest star. Those ships were all angles, tubes and planes, globes, cubes, and what appeared to be silver sails. Whole forests of antennae bristled on the humped mountains of their backs.

Random chunks of debris accompanied the ships, thrown out from jagged wounds in their flanks. Wisps of atmosphere leaked from those great rents, twinkling in the nova light. Smaller ships, like blowflies, fluttered around the rawest injuries.

There had been a battle. A battle at Stars’ End. Its fury and magnitude would have beggared the imagination of men who hadn’t ever been out among the stars.

These limping, crippled starships were the survivors.

The great lens of the Milky Way sprawled before the starships, cold and silver and bright. Their noses were aimed toward its heart. Like a dying man crossing a desert, the starfleet was dragging itself toward healthier climes.

A patch on the smallest ship began to glow, throwing color back into the ocean of night. It was not a happy color. It was the dull, dark red of venous blood, the red of senescent suns. It brightened, became more intense.

The other ships drifted away. Fate had overtaken their little sister. She was about to lose control of her fusion plant. They did not want to be too close to the explosion. The smaller blowfly-vessels flitted away, carrying evacuees.

For a moment the smaller starship yielded a light which rivalled that of the nearby nova. Fragments as big as pyramids hurtled outward, adding to the clutter traveling with the fleet. The remainder of the ship began tumbling slowly, now little more than a disemboweled corpse. The little ships darted in again, swarmed around the remains. Signals leapt across the ether. Any survivors? Anyone at all? There was no answer from the wreck. But the little ships went in anyway.

 

Moyshe benRabi slapped the withdrawal switch beneath his left hand.

Agony smashed into his head. A demon slapped a pair of icehooks into his temples and yanked. He screamed. “Clara! Shot!”

He did not feel the needle bite his arm. Its prick was too tiny a pain. He knew it had happened only because blessed relief hit him seconds later.

Hans pulled his helmet. The youngster’s face was drawn. Clara patted sweat from his face with a towel. “Bad, Moyshe?” she asked.

“The worst. I can’t reach him anymore. He’s out there without protection... And we just lost Jariel. They couldn’t contain the anti-matter leak. The Service Ships went back... I don’t think they’ll find anybody to evacuate.”

Hans asked, “Drink, Moyshe?” The youth’s voice was tremulous. He had had a sister on Jariel.

“Something. Please. I must have sweated a couple of liters. They get through to Gruber yet?”

Clara shrugged. “I haven’t heard.” She was a plump, grandmotherly, graying woman with rosy cheeks. Her appearance reflected her personality. She was a book which could be read by its cover. BenRabi was in love with her, in a filial way.

“We’ve got to have help. We can’t hide in this nova storm forever. The particle wave is on its way. It’ll shred our screens.”

“Payne says we’re going out. Soon as Jariel is evacuated. The sharks will have to take their chances.”

“Oh, damn.”

“What do the starfish say?” Hans asked, returning with a fruit drink. He was putting on a brave face. He had been in the fleet long enough to learn how to wait for good news or bad. They would let him know about his sister.

BenRabi swung his feet to the deck. “Like I said. I couldn’t get through. Too far.”

“Maybe somebody else did.”

“Somebody with more experience? I don’t think so.”

Hans was just nineteen, hardly out of creche. He had not yet hardened to all the realities of the harvestfleet.

“Well just have to do it Payne’s way. Fight our way through.” BenRabi began shuddering as his body reacted to the massive dosage of anti-pain drug. Clara swept a blanket around his shoulders. It did not lessen the chills.

They still did not know for certain that they had won the battle of Stars’ End. They knew only that Payne’s Fleet had held the battle space, had survived, and had begun making its way home. They had not been attacked again, yet, but it was only a matter of time till the struggle resumed.

“Look at me,” benRabi whispered. “I can’t stop shaking.”

“Go home,” Clara told him. “Get some sleep.”

“We might break through. They might need me to go on minddrive. Just let me stretch my legs.” He picked at his arm where the needle had broken his skin. The strain of the emergency had begun to show on his flesh. He was getting tracks.

He collapsed when he tried to stand.

“Take him home, Hans,” Clara told the youth. “Lester. Help Hans load Moyshe onto a scooter, will you?”

“What’s going on?” benRabi demanded as Hans halted the flatbed electric truck outside his quarters. For a moment he did not know where he was. “Why did you?...”

“What happened?” a woman demanded. Worry strangled her voice.

“He passed out,” Hans replied. “Just needs rest.”

“I told him...” A thin, pale, nervous face outlined by the short blonde hair entered Moyshe’s vision, peered down into his eyes. “What’s the matter with you, Moyshe? You think you’re a superman? Give me a hand with him, Hans. I’ll tie him in bed If I have to.”

“Somebody’s got to...” benRabi protested.

“You aren’t the only somebody on Danion. There’s nobody like a new convert. I love him, but sometimes he drives me up the wall.”

“Take care of him, Amy.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got too much invested in this idiot.”

They dropped benRabi into his bed. It surrounded him with a womblike comfort. He felt vaguely guilty. He shouldn’t be sleeping while other mindtechs were still trying to make contact.

Amy sat on the edge of the bed. He was asleep long before she finished cussing him out for not taking better care of himself.

She was still hovering around when, six hours later, the cabin comm buzzed. She answered, “Amy Coleridge, Security.”

A grey-framed face appeared in the little screen. “Good morning, Lieutenant. Is benRabi there?”

“Commander. Sir. Yes sir.” Her voice dropped an octave and seemed to snap to attention. “He’s sleeping, sir. But I can wake him if you really need him.”

“No. Don’t. I wanted to speak to you, Lieutenant. I’m on my way down to see you.”

Two minutes later there was a knock on the cabin door. The Commander must have been on the way when he’d called her.

“I’ve just read your report on benRabi.”

“You did? Why? It was just a routine report.”

The Commander brushed her question aside. “We may need him for something more than Contact. Coleridge, I want to ask you a question. I want a considered answer.”

“Sir?”

“Is your report honest? Did you let your feelings affect it?”

“No sir. Yes sir. I mean, it’s honest, sir.”

“You’re sure he’s become a Seiner without reservation?”

“He has a few. He grew up different. But he’s committed, sir. Almost too much. That’s the way he is.”

“Will he stay committed? Under pressure? He’s changed allegiances before.”

“Before? When, sir?”

“When he left Old Earth.”

“That’s not the same thing. Earth is part of Confederation. He just joined the Navy.”

Danion’s commander reflected. “True. But, considering the way Old Earthers look at these things, it indicates a flighty nature. All right. Enough about benRabi. What about his cohort?”

Amy’s colorless eyebrows crinkled over her pale blue eyes. “That’s more difficult, sir. Mouse is more complicated.”

“Are you sure you’re not projecting a lack of understanding? His psych profiles make him look pretty simple. Almost black and white. He seems to have hung his whole existence on his hatred for the Sangaree.”

“Then why did he stay here? He could’ve gone back to Confederation with the others. He can’t fight Sangaree out here.”

“I’ve been wondering. That’s why I asked.”

“I can’t tell you, sir. He’s all facade to me. All charm and silliness. I can’t tell when he’s serious and when he’s joking. The only feeling I get is that the man I’m seeing isn’t the real Masato Storm.”

“Are you involved with him, too, Lieutenant?”

“Sir!”

“Answer me.”

“No, sir! I am not involved with Mr. Storm.”

“Makes you part of a vanishing breed, then. Seems he’s bedded half the single women on Danion.”

“He attracts a certain kind of woman.”

“Oh?” The caller smiled. “But not you?”

She was a long time answering. “The temptation is there. He has an animal magnetism. There’s curiosity about what everyone else sees in him. But nothing is going to happen. I don’t like him very much.”

Her answer seemed to satisfy the Commander.

“We’re entering a new era, Lieutenant. A time of changes. Our isolationism is under attack. The sharks are wearing us down. The Stars’ End idea was a debacle. We’re going to have to adjust. Either that or bend over and kiss our tails good-bye. Those two might be useful. They have unusual backgrounds. We don’t have a secret service to speak of. They could build one. But that would mean trusting them. And they weren’t born Starfishers.”

“A lot of us weren’t, somewhere along the line. My father...”

“I know. We’re all refugees. Thank you, Lieutenant. Consider this discussion exclusive. Don’t mention it to anybody. And if you learn anything that might have a bearing on the matter, call my office. I’ll have your name red-tagged to my personal recorder. I’ll call you back.”

“Yes sir.”

The Commander left as quickly as he’d arrived. Amy sat and stared into the shadows of the room.

After a while she lifted her thin frame and drifted into the room where benRabi was sleeping. She stared down at him with an expression approaching awe.

She had never seen or met the Ship’s Commander before, except in public address announcements.

Her Moyshe, her last chance man... He might amount to something after all.

She would not have become involved with the foreigner at all had her self-image not been pit-deep. She could not make herself believe that she deserved a good man, a real Starfisher. She had expected to watch her life drift away from the foot of a social and career ladder.

The Commander’s call changed everything. She would have to get Moyshe moving. And make sure his friend Mouse did not lead him astray.

The differences between the Confederated life that benRabi had chosen to leave and the lives of the Starfishers were deep.

The Starfishers, the High Seiners, spent their adult lives aboard these vast harvestships, drifting the deep-space hydrogen streams, gleaning the droppings of an almost intangible spacebeast they called a starfish. A whole ecology existed in the interstellar rivers. It was vast and slow, in keeping with the low random collision of the molecules from which their type of life had gradually evolved. That life was invisible to the eye or radar. The atoms constituting the “bodies” of the interstellar creatures could be scattered over cubic kilometers.

Starfish were more vast than harvestships, yet the matter in them could be compressed into a volume smaller than that occupied by the body of a ten-year-old. The atoms were as much foci for forces as part of the life process itself. And most of the creatures of the ecology existed, in part, in hyperspace and another, congruent universe.

At the starfish’s heart a tiny fusion flame burned.

Starfish swept up hydrogen and random molecules and occasionally passed a node of hard waste. The nodes were incalculably precious.

The Starfishers called them ambergris. Ambergris was the foundation of their economy.

The nodes were used in instel communicators. There was no substitute. The Seiners controlled the only supply, and, consequently, the market and price.

Countless were the organizations which would pay almost any price for near-instantaneous communication across interstellar distance.

Moyshe benRabi and Masato Storm had been sent among the Seiners to try to find a way for their employers, Confederation Navy, to seize the harvestships and ambergris industry. They had succeeded and failed. They had found the information...

And had elected to become Starfishers themselves.

The hydrogen streams boasted a complex ecology. It included the predatory “shark,” which subsisted principally upon starfish. Evolution had equipped starfish with only one truly credible defensive weapon. Intellect.

Deep-space evolution had begun eons before the condensation of Old Earth’s sun. The modern starfish species had a remembered history spanning billions of years. They had seen countless planet-born races come and go. They knew the value of their waste.

Over the past thousand Terran years, an eye’s blink in the life of a starfish, shark numbers had exploded insanely. A new species was coming into being. It reasoned feebly, bred obsessively, and hunted in cooperative packs which now, sometimes, numbered as many as a thousand predators. The survival of the starfish species had come into sudden doubt.

Their Old Ones had deliberated with almost immoderate haste. A decision had been reached. They turned their intelligence to finding a means of contacting the tiny, hard, warm creatures who lived in the metal shells questing around their wakes.

They had struck a bargain with the original Starfishers. Ambergris in return for the protection of human weapons. It had been a good bargain. The sharks had been kept at bay for two hundred years.

Another mere blink of Time’s eye.

Then the ever more numerous sharks had developed the tactic of assailing the protectors before the protected.

Danion had enlisted landsmen as emergency replacements for heavy casualties suffered during one such attack. Her leaders had hoped to draw high quality technicians who might be seduced away from their lives in Confederation. Instead, they had attracted scores of spies sent in hopes of capturing control of a harvestfleet. Confederation’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence had sent senior field agents Moyshe benRabi and Masato Igarashi Storm.

The two had found what promised to be a home.

Sirens wailed throughout Danion.

Amy jerked out of her seat. “Moyshe! Battle stations! We must be coming out of the flash wave.”

BenRabi surged out of the bedroom, climbing into his jumpsuit as he came. “Let’s go, honey.” He dragged her into the passageway outside, where a pair of electric scooters nursed charger sockets. He seized one, she the other. “See you, love,” he said as he sailed away.

He pulled to the center of the passage and opened the scooter up. The walls blurred past. People were running in the pedestrian lanes. Scooters hurtled at him from the opposite direction. There were near collisions at every cross corridor. A voice like that of a god kept booming, “Battle stations. Battle station.”

Damn, damn, damn, Moyshe thought. I shouldn’t be going back under so soon.

Five vast and tangled ships began nosing out of the intense nova light. The blowfly vessels still swarmed around their wounds, and between them and the derelict tumbling along in their midst, guarded by their shell of fire. One by one, the five great ships rolled to present their heaviest weapons outward from a common center.

 

Two: 3049 AD

The Contemporary Scene

 

A ship came into being slightly below the surface of a dust lake rilling a crater on a nameless moon circling a world far in toward the center of the galaxy. The most centerward world of Ulant lay a thousand light years rimward. No human being had traveled this part of space before.

Astronomers on the primary, had they been watching, would have been astonished by the geyser which exploded from the crater’s flat dust face.

No astronomers were watching. They, like soldiers, wives, derelicts, and children... like everyone who lived on that world, were engaged in a death struggle so demanding they had ceased caring whether their satellite existed.

The ship that bobbed to the dust’s surface looked like a giant doughnut with a beer can shoved through the hole and held in place by thin straws. One tall vane, like a shark’s fin, rose from the torus, leaning away from the cylinder. A globe surmounted it.

The whole vessel was dead black. Not even a hull number broke its lack of color.

It was a tiny ship. The beer can was just sixty meters tall. The outer diameter of the doughnut barely spanned sixty-five meters. The curves of the vessel were broken only by a handful of antennae, two missile launch bays, and the snouts of laser and graser batteries. She was a deadly little beast, designed solely to kill.

She was a museum piece. Literally. And the nastiest little shark of a warship ever conceived by the mind of Man.

She was a Climber left over from the Ulantonid War. She had been dragged from the WarMuseum at Luna Command and reactivated especially for this mission.

She was the first Climber to space since the war’s most desperate days — because Climbers were almost as deadly to their crews as to the enemies they stalked. Only the absolute imperative of racial survival would see them used in combat again.

Luna Command had that much heart. The Climber Fleets had been too destructive of the minds and bodies of their crews.

The little ambushers had changed the course of the Ulantonid War. And had filled the sanitariums of Confederation with walking wounded, the few survivors of service within their sanity-devouring fields of concealment.

The Climber generated a field in her torus which drove her into a dimension beyond hyper-space, called Null, where she remained virtually undetectable till she returned to Hyper or Norm to attack.

Climbers in schools had destroyed whole Ulantonid fleets.

This Climber had the most remarkable crew of any Navy had ever spaced.

Her Ship’s Commander was Manfred, Fleet Admiral Graf von Staufenberg, First Deputy Chief of Staff of Confederation Navy. He had seen Climber duty toward the end of the war. The ship’s First Watch Officer was Melene Telle-eych Cath, Defender Prime of Ulant, or Minister of Defense. Her Operations Officer was Ulant’s Principal Peacemaker, or Chief of the General Staff, Turone Wahl-chyst Forse. Her Gunnery Officer and his leading mates were Star Lords of the Toke. One was the Star Lord who commanded Confederation’s Marine Toke Legion. The others ranked him in the Caste of Warriors.

There was no man or woman aboard, of any of five races, who ranked below the equivalent of Admiral or General, and none of them were not decision-makers.

A well-placed missile could have crippled the defenses of humanity and all its neighbors.

Admiral Wildblood, the lady who directed Navy’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Beckhart, who ran her department of dirty tricks, had two of the more menial assignments in Operations. One watched the hyper detection gear, the other the passive radar scans.

Star Lords and all, they slept in hammocks slung from the Climber’s central structural member, or “keel.” They shared the one toilet and did without the shower that had never existed. In Climb they used portable chamberpots and smelled one another’s stinks as had the Climbermen of an age gone by.

One and all, they had come to see for themselves the growing disaster Ulantonid explorers had been bemoaning for years.

They had seen film. They had questioned witnesses. In some cases they had begun to act. But they had had to see with their own eyes before they could finally believe.

They had to watch the war going on below. On the primary of the moon.

A race from farther in toward the galactic core was systematically exterminating every sentient creature it encountered. The natives of this world were their latest victims.

The people aboard the Climber came of races which had fought bitterly in the past. There was little love among some of them now. But never, in the most desperate, heated days of their contention, had any considered eradicating their enemies. Their wars had been tests of racial wills, with territorial causes.

This world was the fourth assailed by the centerward race since its discovery by Ulantonid explorers. The first three worlds were lifeless now. The aggressors even shunned their use as bases.

Even the Warriors of Toke could not comprehend the destruction of intelligent life simply because it was intelligent.

The Warriors believed battle to be a crucible for purification of the soul, a road to honor and glory, grimly majestic and godlike. For them combat was almost an end in itself. They fought one another when there were no outsiders.

They were perfectly aware of the distinction between victory and obliteration. They were as appalled by the excesses of the centerward race as were any of their shipmates.

They had come to see for themselves. And the grim truth burned in the Climber’s display tank.

The world’s atmosphere was alive with spiderwebs of coherent light. Energy and particle beams hacked air and space like the flailing swords of a thousand ancient armies. The planet people had the technological edge. The exterminators had the numbers and determination. Their ships clouded the stars.

They had overwhelmed the world’s off-planet protection months ago. Now they were pounding the on-world defenses, and were making their initial landings.

Star-bright, short-lived pinpoints speckled the world’s surface.

“They’re using nuclears!” Ulant’s Defender growled. Even during their war’s bitterest hour, neither human nor Ulantonid had violated each other’s worlds with nuclear weapons. By tacit agreement those had been confined to vacuum.

“They know we’re here,” Beckhart called out. “Seven destroyer displacement ships are headed this way.”

“Very well,” Graf von Staufenberg replied. “Melene, most of that looks like it’s happening in the troposphere. They’re probably not pushing one in a thousand warheads through to the surface.”

The Star Lord who commanded all Star Lords boomed, “Every one through destroys. The defense net weakness. Soon it will be two of a thousand. Then four.”

“Not to mention what the radioactivity will do in the long run. Makes you wonder why they’re forcing it with landings. Here. This south tropic archipelago. They’ve punched an open corridor down there.”

“Hell of a defense,” someone muttered. “Damn near as tough as Stars’ End. I wouldn’t want to try breaking it.”

“How long till those destroyers are pushing us?” von Staufenberg asked.

“They’re humping it in Norm. Four or five minutes for the closest. Looks like some other stuff starting to move, too.”

“Can’t we do anything?” the D. N. I. demanded.

Von Staufenberg replied, “We could bloody a few noses. It wouldn’t change anything. We couldn’t do that with a hundred Climbers. There’re just too damned many of them. Okay, let’s give the people in the other compartments a look. I want everybody to see it. We’ll have some decision to make on our way home.”

“The Warriors have decided,” said the Star Lord of the Marine Toke Legion.

“He speaks for Toke,” his non-Service superior added. “For Toke there can be but one decision. We will come to them here. Alone if we have to.”

“It’s not that easy for me, Manfred,” Melene said. “We’re an adventurous species but I’m handicapped by democratic traditions and faith in peace. We don’t organize quickly or well.”

Von Staufenberg chuckled. “You did before.”

The Defender was older than he. She had been a soldier throughout the Ulantonid War.

“I expect we will again. We can do anything when we decide to pull together. It’s the decision process that’s so abominably slow.”

“Your decisions were made years ago, Melene,” Beckhart growled from his radar boards. “Don’t try to snow us. I can give you the names and hull numbers of a hundred new construction ships you’ve got tucked away in places you never thought we’d look.”

“Admiral Beckhart?” von Staufenberg queried.

“I have my sources, sir. They’re rearming as fast as their shipbuilding industry can space hulls. They come off the line looking like commercial ships, only they’ve got drive potential up the yang-yang, and they never get delivered to any of the transport outfits. They disappear for a while, then turn up somewhere else with guns dripping off them.”

“Why wasn’t High Command informed of this, Beckhart?”

“Because my sources are in the Defender’s office. And I knew why they were rearming. You wouldn’t have bought it. Half of High Command is still trying to refight the Ulantonid War. I let it go on playing that game because people were seeing enough of those new ships to get nervous and start us a secret building program of our own. So we’re on our way too.”

“Beckhart... Your logic baffles me. Totally baffles me. I have the distinct feeling that you’ll have to explain it to a Board of Inquiry. What else have you hidden from us?”

“You want an honest answer, or one that will please you?” Beckhart did not make many friends. He retained his position principally because no one else could do his job as well.

“Beckhart!”

“Several things, sir. Ongoing operations. If they work out, we’ll be in good shape for meeting these monsters.”

“Monsters?” Melene demanded. “There’s no evidence...”

“Melene, the Admiral is a xenophobe. In fact, he doesn’t like people very much. Tell me what you’re doing, Beckhart.”

“There’s a chance I’m on the threshold to the solution of the Sangaree problem. Some new data was on its way in before we left. I’ll probably want to borrow von Drachau again.”

“What else?”

“Still too tentative for discussion. A possible breakthrough in communications and weapons technologies. I won’t discuss it now. Not here.”

“Beckhart...”

“Security privilege. Sir. Log it if you like.”

Von Staufenberg wheeled on the Director of Naval Intelligence. She shrugged. “You won’t get anything from me, either, Manfred.”

“Damn! All right, let’s get moving. Time’s running out, and everybody’s got to have a look at this.”

Cumbers were the most cramped vessels since Gemini. Circulating the forty-odd beings aboard was a slow, uncomfortable process.

“She’s about to start shooting,” Beckhart said of the nearest destroyer. “She has. Missile swarm. We have four minutes to hide.”

“How do you like that? Didn’t even try to find out who we were or what we wanted.”

“This is the Ship’s Commander,” von Staufenberg said into the public address system. “We’re under fire. Engineering, stand by to go Null.” Thirty seconds before the swarm arrived, he ordered, “Take her up to ten Bev. First Watch Officer, a gesture is in order. Program me an attack approach on the vessel shooting at us.”

The Ulantonid’s feathery antennae stirred, quivered. The action was comparable to a human’s pleased chuckle.

The Star Lords were in Weapons Department already, hoping they would be allowed to play with their deadly toys.

“One missile,” said von Staufenberg. “Right up her wake.”

It was the classic Climber attack strategy. Drives were a warship’s soft spot. They simply could not be designed so that thrust apertures could be shielded as well as the remainder of the vessel.

The dust in the crater flowed together suddenly, smashing in like the Red Sea on Pharaoh’s chariots. The doughnut ship had vanished.

“Take her all the way to forty Bev,” von Staufenberg ordered. “I doubt they know enough to look for our Hawking Point, but let’s get that cross-section down anyway.” One of the curiosities about the Climber was that no other race known to humanity had ever developed it. And for humans it had been an accidental by-product of other research.

Twenty-three minutes passed before the First Watch Officer reported, “Attack position, Commander.”

“Weapons, Ship’s Commander. One missile. Stand by. Detection, when we go down I want you to get the ranges and vectors on everything you can see. We’ll do what we can. And I want the tape rolling. Ship’s Services, vent heat while we’re Norm. All right. Everybody ready? Take her down, Engineering.”

Heat accumulation was the biggest weakness of the Climber. There was no way to shed heat in Null. And a Climber often had to stay up for days while enemy warships hunted her.

The Climber was no warship in the slug-it-out sense. She was a hit-and-run fighter dependent on surprise for her effectiveness.

The Defender Prime brought them down just four kilometers behind the destroyer. The Climber rocked. The missile accelerated at 100 g. It arrived before the destroyer knew it was coming.

“One for the good guys,” Beckhart grumped as the Climber went up again.

“What was that?” von Staufenberg demanded.

“Admiral, you’re giving them valuable information just by blowing them out of space. You’re telling them we can do it. You’ll get them wondering how. Head home before we give them any hard data. Let’s save the surprises for when they’ll do some good.”

Von Staufenberg reddened. There was no love lost between him and Beckhart.

“He’s right, Manfred,” the Defender Prime interjected. “You almost wasted the Climber advantage by committing them piecemeal during the war. They would have more effective if whole fleets had appeared suddenly. We would not have had time to adapt.”

“Of course. Of course. I was thinking with my guts. Program a course for the mother, Melene.”

Climbers did not have a long range. A mother ship awaited this one a hundred light-years homeward. A small armada protected her.

This Climber’s crew regarded themselves highly.

 

Three: 3049 AD

The Main Sequence

 

BenRabi slammed his scooter through the entrance to Control Sector. Seconds later the massive shield doors rumbled shut behind him. The section was totally self-contained now. No one could come in or leave till those doors lifted.

Moyshe stopped in a long, squealing slide. He jumped off, slammed the charger plug into a socket, ran through the hatch to Contact.

“You made it,” Clara said. “We didn’t think you would. You live so far away. Here. Catch your breath.”

“My scooter was smoking. Better have it checked, Hans.” He settled onto a fitted couch.

“Ready?” Clara asked.

“No.”

She smiled at him. Hans started massaging an odorless paste into his scalp. Clara slipped her fingers inside what looked like a hairnet.

“You never are. I thought you liked Chub.”

BenRabi chuckled. “Chub, I like fine. He’s good people. But I’d like him a lot better if he could walk in the door, stick out a hand, and say, ‘Hey, Moyshe, let’s go grab a couple of beers.’”

Chub was the starfish with whom benRabi usually linked.

“Xenophobe.”

“Crap. It’s not him. It’s that out-of-body feeling...”

“Wrong, Moyshe. You can’t fool old Clara. I was babying mindtechs before you were born. And you’re all alike. You don’t want to go out because it hurts so much to come back.”

“Yeah?”

“Ready,” Hans said.

Clara slid the net onto Moyshe’s head. Her fingertips were soft and warm. They lingered on his cheeks. Momentary concern clouded her smile.

“Don’t push yourself, Moyshe. Get out if it gets rough. You haven’t had enough rest.”

“Since Stars’ End there isn’t any rest. For anybody.”

“We won,” Hans reminded.

“The cost was too high.”

“It was cheaper than losing.”

BenRabi shrugged. “I guess you people see things different. I never would have gone in the first place.”

“You took your whippings and smiled, back in Confederation?” Hans asked. “I never heard of that.”

“No. We calculated the odds. We picked the right time. Then we ganged up. We didn’t just go storming around like a rogue elephant, getting hurt as much as we did hurt.”

“Oriflamme,” Hans countered.

“What?”

“That’s what they call Payne sometimes. It’s something from olden times that has to do with not taking prisoners.”

“Oh. The oriflamme. It was a special pennon that belonged to the King of France. If he raised it, it meant take no prisoners. It had a way of backfiring on him.”

“Hans,” Clara said, “Moyshe is an Academy man. He can probably tell you how many spokes in the wheel of a Roman war chariot.”

“Take Poitiers, for instance...”

“Who?”

“It’s a place. In France, which is on Old Earth...”

“I know where France is, Moyshe.”

“All right. One of the big battles of the Hundred Years War was fought there. And you could say that the French lost because of the oriflamme. See, they caught the English in a bad spot. Outnumbered them like ten to one. The Black Prince decided to surrender. But the French raised the oriflamme. Which pissed the English, so they proceeded to kick ass all over the countryside. When the dust settled, the French were wiped out and Louis was in chains. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, if you want to look. Namely, don’t ever push anybody into a corner where he can’t get out.”

“You see what he’s doing, Hans?” Clara asked.

“You mean trying to educate us until the all-clear comes through? You’re out of luck, Moyshe. Lift your head so I can put your helmet on.”

BenRabi raised his head.

His scalp began tingling under the hairnet device. The helmet devoured his head, stealing the light. He fought the panic that always hit before he went under.

Hans strapped him in and adjusted the bio-monitor’s pickups.

“Can you hear me, Moyshe?” Clara asked through the helmet’s earphones.

He raised a hand. Then spoke: “Coming through clear.”

“Got you too. Your boards look good. Blood pressure is up, but that’s normal for you. Take a minute in TSD. Relax. Go when you want.”

His, “I don’t want,” remained unspoken.

He depressed the switch beneath his right hand one click.

The only senses left him were internal. Total Sensory Deprivation left him only his aches and pains, the taste in his mouth, and the rush of blood. Once the field took hold, even those would go.

In small doses it was relaxing. But too much could drive a man insane.

He flicked his right hand again.

A universe took form around him. He was its center, its lord, its creator... There was no pain in that universe, nor much unhappiness. Too many wonders burned there, within the bounds of his mind.

It was a universe of colors both pastel and crisp. Every star was a blazing jewel, proclaiming its individual hue. The oncoming storm of the nova’s solar wind was a rioting, psychedelic cloud that seemed to have as much substance as an Old Earth thunderhead. Opposite it, the pale pink glimmer of a hydrogen stream meandered off toward the heart of the galaxy. The surrounding harvest-ships were patches of iridescent gold.

A score of golden Chinese dragons drifted with the fleet, straining toward it, yet held away by the light pressure of the dying star. Starfish!

BenRabi’s sourness gave way to elation. There would be contact this time.

He reached toward them with his thoughts. “Chub? Are you out there, my friend?” For a time there was nothing.

Then a warm glow enveloped him like some sudden outbreak of good cheer.

“Moyshe man-friend, hello. I see you. Coming out of the light, hello. One ship is gone.”

“Jariel. They’re still evacuating.”

“Sad.”

Chub did not seem sad. This fish, benRabi thought, is constitutionally incapable of anything but joy.

“Not so, Moyshe man-friend. I mourn with the herd the sorrows of Stars’ End. Yet I must laugh with my man-friends over the joys of what was won.”

“The ships-that-kill weren’t all destroyed, Chub. The Sangaree carry their grudges forever.”

“Ha! They are a tear in the eye of eternity. They will die. Their sun will die. And still there will be starfish to swim the rivers of the night.”

“You’ve been puttering around in the back rooms of my mind again. You’re stealing my images and shooting them back at me.”

“You have an intriguing mind, Moyshe man-friend. A clouded, boxy mind, cobwebby, atticy, full of trap doors...”

“What would you know about trap doors?”

“Only what I relive through your memories, Moyshe man-friend.”

Chub teased and giggled like an adolescent lover.

By starfish reckoning he was a child. He-had not yet seen his millionth year.

BenRabi simply avoided thinking about starfish time spans. A life measured in millions of years was utterly beyond his ken. He only mourned the fact that those incredible spans could never touch upon worlds where beings of a biochemical nature lived. The stories they could have told! The historical mysteries they could have illuminated!

But starfish dared not get too near major gravitational or magnetic sources. Even the gravity of the larger harvestships felt to a starfish much as rheumatism to a human being.

They were terribly fragile creatures.

While Chub teased and enthused, Moyshe turned a part of his mind to his private universe again.

Red torpedoes idled along far away, across the pink river, against the galaxy.

“Yes,” Chub said. “Sharks. Survivors of Stars’ End called them here. They will attack. They starve. Another feast for the scavenger things.”

Smaller ghosts in a mix of colors shadowed both dragons and torpedoes. They were Chub’s scavengers.

The great slow ecology of the hydrogen streams had niches for creatures of most life-functions, though their definition in human terms was seldom more than an approximation. A convenient labeling.

Moyshe yielded to nervousness. Chub reached into his mind, calming him...

“I’m learning, Chub. I can see the river this time. I can see the particle storm coming from the sick sun.”

“Very good, Moyshe man-friend. You relax now. Sharks come soon. You watch scavenger things instead. They tell when sharks can’t wait anymore. They get dancey.”

Moyshe laughed into his secret universe. Starfish believed in doing things with deliberation, as might be expected of creatures with vast life spans. Young starfish tended to be restless and excitable. They were prone to flutter impatiently in the presence of their elders. The Old Ones called it “getting dancey.”

Chub was dancey most of the time.

The Old Ones considered him the herd idiot. Chub said they regretted exposing him to human hasty-think while he was still young and impressionable.

“Is a joke, Moyshe man-friend. Is a good joke? Yes?”

“Yes. Very funny.” For a starfish. The Old Ones had to be the most phlegmatic, humorless, pragmatic intelligences in all creation. They couldn’t even grasp the concept of a joke. With the exception of Chub, benRabi found them a depressing mob.

“I was lucky to become your mind-mate, Chub. Very lucky.”

He meant it. He had linked with Old Ones. He compared it to making love to his grandmother bare-assed on an iceberg, with a crowd watching. Drawing Chub was the best thing that had happened to him in years.

“Yes. We half-wits stick together. Venceremos, Comrade Moyshe.”

BenRabi filled the universe with laughter. “Where the hell did you get that?”

“Your mind full of cobwebby memories, Moyshe man-friend. One time you play revolutionary on hard matter place called Dustball.”

“Yeah. I did. About two weeks. Then it was duck bullets all the way back to the Embassy.”

“You live much in few years, Moyshe man-friend. Ten times anyone else linked by starfish Chub. Many adventures. Think Chub would make good spy?”

“Who would you spy on?”

“Yes. Problem. Very difficult to disguise as shark.”

“That’s another joke, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You still spying, Moyshe man-friend?”

“Not anymore. I’m not Thomas McClennon anymore. I’m Moyshe benRabi. I’ve found me a home, Chub. These are my people now. You can’t spy on your own people.”

“Oh. Saw shadows in your mind. Thought maybe secret spy-stuff lurked. So. Hey! Maybe someday you go spy on hard matter place people? Be double spy.”

“Double agent?”

“Oh. Yes. That right words.”

“No more spying, Chub. I’m going to be a mindtech.”

“Dangerous.”

“So is spying. In more ways than you’ll ever understand.”

“Hurts-of-the-heart dangers, you mean?”

“I don’t know why they tell you you’re stupid. You’re a lot smarter in a lot of ways than most people I know. You see things without having to have them explained.”

“Helps, being starfish. People can’t look inside, Moyshe man-friend. You have to tell. You have to show. You not the kind of man to do that.”

“Yeah. Let’s talk about something else, huh?”

“Running out of talk time, Moyshe man-friend. Scavenger creatures getting dancey. You not paying attention?”

“I still haven’t got the hang of seeing everything at once.”

That was one of the beauties of the mindtech’s linked universe. He was not subject to the limitations of binocular vision. But he did have to unlearn its habits.

Blind people made better techs faster. They had no habits to unlearn, no preoccupations to overcome. But blind people who suffered from classical migraine were scarce.

Scarlet torpedoes edged toward the fleet. They were not yet wholly committed. Hunger still had not banished good sense.

Sharks were slow of wit, but they knew they had to get past the harvestships to reach their prey.

That was the whole point of the starfish-Starfisher alliance.

“Can’t visit anymore, Chub. We’re not going on mind-drive, so I’ll have to help fight.”

“Oh, yes, Moyshe man-friend. Shoot straight. I help, putting right vectors in your brain.”

“All right.” Aloud, into his helmet, benRabi said, “Gun Control.”

A second later his earphones crackled. “Gun Control, aye.”

“Mindtech. In link and free to assume control of a sector battery. Sharks will attack. Repeat, will attack.”

“Shit. All right, buddy. But never mind the sector battery. Master Gunner says he wants you to feed the main battle tank. Think you and your link can give us good realtime input?”

“Yes,” Chub murmured deep in benRabi’s hindbrain.

“Yes,” Moyshe said. And wondered why. It was not something he had ever tried.

“Monitor?”

“All go, Gun Control,” Clara’s voice interjected. “Green boards all across, I’ve just keyed the translator. You can bring the computer on-line whenever you’re ready.”

“Stand by for draw, Linker.”

“Moyshe,” said Clara, “don’t take any chances. Key out if it gets rough.”

“Drawing, Linker.”

For an instant benRabi felt as though some intangible vacuum were sucking his mind away. A smatter of panic quickly yielded to Chub’s soothing.

Moyshe relaxed, became a conduit. He became an almost disinterested observer.

The scavengers suddenly grew dancey with a vengeance.

“Attack imminent,” benRabi muttered.

Those pilot fish were excited because they would feast no matter what the outcome of battle. They would be perfectly content nibbling dead shark or dead starfish.

A dozen crimson torpedoes suddenly misted, stretched into long, fuzzy lines, and solidified again near the starfish herd.

A hundred swords of light started carving them into scavenger food. Sharks were easy meat for particle beams.

“Teach them to try end run through hyper,” Chub whispered.

The starfish herd had not bothered to dodge. They would not begin maneuvering till the protection of the human ships began breaking down.

It might not hold, benRabi reflected. Five vessels could not establish a sound fire pattern. There would be blind spots. Big holes. To fill them would mean risking hitting your own people.

The shark packs milled. They had not yet found workable tactics for assailing a fleet of harvestships.

Their intellectual slowness was the only hope for starfish and starfishers alike. Something had happened to the sharks. Their numbers were expanding almost exponentially. They were becoming ever more desperate in their quest for something to eat.

Their prey, historically, had been the stragglers of the great starfish herds. The feeble and injured and careless. But now they assaulted the strong and healthy as well, and had even begun turning on their own injured. Even the firepower of a harvestship could not hold the massed packs at bay when hunger heterodyned into a berserk killing rage.

“Not look so promising as you thought, Moyshe man-friend. All going to come at once, from everywhere, crazy. Just killing and dying.”

There was dread in Chub’s thought. Moyshe was dismayed. Even in the hell that had been the battle at Stars’ End the starfish had not lost his good cheer.

The starfish’s prediction proved correct. The red torpedoes suddenly exploded in every direction. Moyshe had seen the same reaction among humans. The first had been by a band of fair-weather revolutionaries who had heard the police were coming. Another time, a terrorist had lobbed a hand grenade into a crowded theatre.

But the sharks were not fleeing. The instant-insanity had seized them. They were spreading out to attack.

They arrowed in on the harvestfleet. Laser and particle beam swords stabbed.

Danion’s fire was deadly. The realtime simulation from the minds of a man and a starfish linked gave the weapons people a fractional second’s advantage over their brethren in ships relying on normal detection systems.

The shark wave rolled round Danion like a breaker around a granite promontory.

They could have worn her down in time, had they had the patience of the sea, and the sea’s resources for endlessly sending in another wave. They had hurt her bad at Stars’ End. It only took one shark getting through, with its multi-dimensional fires, to ravage a whole section of ship. But this horde was more limited in its numbers and more driven by hunger.

“Oh, Christ,” benRabi swore as an explosion ripped a huge chunk from a sister ship. A shark had gotten through there. The service ships, still evacuating Jariel and trying to plug the holes in the fire pattern, swarmed toward the fragment. Clouds of frozen water vapor boiled round it as atmosphere poured out.

A shark flung itself into the starfish herd.

The great night beasts were not defenseless. One burped a ball of the. nuclear fire that burned in its “gut,” flung it with Robin Hood accuracy. The shark perished in the fading flash of a hydrogen bomb.

One predator was gone. And one starfish was disarmed for hours. It took the creatures a long time to revitalize their internal fires.

BenRabi had seen the peaceable starfish use the same weapon against Sangaree raidships at Stars’ End.

“Fur is flying now, Moyshe man-friend.” Chub was straining for humor. “We doing all right, you and me. Maybe your Old Ones decide you not stupid after all.” Left unthought was Chub’s hope for the same reaction from his own Old Ones.

By way of support benRabi replied, “This is a new era, Chub. It’s going to take hastiness and danciness to survive.”

“Sharks coming again.”

Once more Danion’s weaponry scarred the long night. Moyshe wondered what some alien would think if he happened on its unconcealable mark, a thousand years from now, a thousand light-years away.

Both sides had used retrospective observation techniques during the Ulantonid War. A battle’s outcome might be fixed, but it could be studied over and over from every possible angle.

The second assault was more furious than the first. BenRabi stopped trying to think. He had to give his whole attention over to following the situation.

More sharks dropped hyper, drawn by no known means. The rage took them, too. They attacked everything, including wounded brethren floundering around the battle region.

This was the root of Chub’s fear. That more and more sharks would be drawn till they simply overwhelmed everything.

It was the future foreseen by both starfish and Starfishers. The terror that herd after herd and harvestship after harvestship would be consumed was the force that had driven the maverick commander of this fleet to hazard the defenses of Stars’ End.

The arrivals slowed to a trickle. Chub thought, “We going to win again, Moyshe man-friend. See the pattern? The glorious pattern. They waste their might devouring their own injured.”

BenRabi searched his kaleidoscopic mind-link universe. He saw nothing but chaos. This, he reflected, is the sort of thing Czyzewski was thinking about when he wrote The Old God. So much of Czyzewski’s poetry seemed reflective of recent events. Had the man been prescient?

No. He was far gone on stardust when he did the cycle including The Old God. The drug killed him less than a month after he finished the poem. The images were just the flaming madness of the drug burning through.

“Don’t you get tired of being right?” he asked when the first sharks fled.

“Never, Moyshe man-friend. But learned long ago to wait till event is certain, predestined, to make observation. Error is painful. The scorn of Old Ones is like the fire of a thousand stars.”

“I know the feeling.” For some reason the face of Admiral Beckhart, his one-time commander, drifted through his universe. Here on the galactic rim, fighting for his life against creatures he had not suspected existed two years earlier, his previous career seemed as remote as that of another man. Of another incarnation, or something he had read about.

The assault collapsed once the first few well-fed sharks fled.

The starfish had suffered far less than their inedible guardians. Not one dragon was missing from the golden herd defended by the harvestships. But another ship had been injured severely.

A traitorous thought stole across Moyshe’s mind on mouse-soft feet.

Chub was less indignant than he expected.

On a strictly pragmatic level, the starfish agreed that getting out of the interstellar rivers would be the best way to conserve Starfisher ships and lives.

“They’ll never go, Chub. The harvestfleets are their nations. Their homelands. They’re proud, stubborn people. They’ll keep fighting and hoping.”

“I know, Moyshe man-friend. It saddens the herd. And makes the Old Ones proud that they forged their alliance so well. But why do you say ‘they?’”

“We, then. Part of the time... Most of the time I’m an outsider here. They do things differently than what I learned...”

“Sometimes you miss your old life, Moyshe man-friend.”

“Sometimes. Not often, and not much, though. I’d better tend to business.” He had to focus his attention to force his physical voice to croak, “Gun Control, Mindlink. The sharks are going. They’ve given up. You can secure when the last leaves firing range.”

“You sure, Linker? Don’t look like it in the display tank.”

“I’m sure. Let me know when I can stop realtiming. This is my second link in eight hours.”

“Right. Will do.” The man on the far end seemed impressed.

Clara’s voice broke in. “Are you all right, Moyshe? The strain getting heavy? We can bring you out.”

“I’m okay. For a while. I remember what I am. Just be ready to hit me with that needle.”

At Stars’ End Danion had lost half her native, trained mindtechs because they had stayed in link too long, or had been mindburned by sharks breaking through the defensive fire screen. The best guess was that the former had become lost in the special interior universe of the linker. Dozens occupied a special hospital ward where doctors and nurses had to handle them like newly born babies.

Their bodies lived on. Their minds, it was hoped, might sometime be retrieved.

In all the history of the High Seiners no lost linker ever had been recalled.

The Starfishers were living on hopes these days. Stars’ End had been one, for weapons capable of shattering shark tides.

BenRabi did not understand how the Seiners had hoped to accomplish what generations of madmen, fools, and geniuses had failed to do. Stars’ End was a fortress unvanquishable.

It was a whole world, Earth-sized, that was a fortress. Or planetary battleship. Or whatever. It could be approached by nothing. The technologies of its defenses were beyond the imaginations of any of the races aware of its existence. Its builders had long since vanished into the abyss of time.

Generations of men had lusted after the weapons of Stars’ End. Thousands had died trying to obtain them. And the fortress world remained inviolate.

Why had the Seiners been convinced that they would have better luck?

“You were right, Linker. Computer says they’re pulling out. Going to let you off realtime now. We can handle it from here without.”

“Thank you, Gun Control.”

The sense of drain stopped abruptly. BenRabi’s universe reeled. Chub reached in and steadied him. “Time to break, Moyshe man-friend. You losing sense of reality and orientation in space-time.”

“I’m not lost yet, Chub.”

“You all say so. No more you can do here, man-friend.”

The crackle of reality beginning to fall into shards rose from benRabi’s hindbrain. It pushed a wave of terror before it. Chub did nothing to soothe him.

“Clara! The needle. I’m coming out.”

He slapped the switch beneath his left hand.

They were waiting for him. The agony persisted for only a few seconds.

That was bad enough. He screamed and screamed. It got worse every time.

 

Four: 3049 AD

The Main Sequence

 

They put him into Hospital Block this time. He was under sedation for three days.

Two people were at his bedside when the doctor came to bring him out. The thin, pale, blue-eyed woman with the nervous hands was Amy. The little oriental with the presence of an iceberg was benRabi’s friend Mouse.

Amy would sit for a minute, picking at her jumpsuit, shifting this way and that. She would cross and uncross her legs, then would rise and pace around for a minute before sitting again. She did not speak to Mouse. Most of the time she deliberately tried to distance Storm from herself and Moyshe. It was almost as if she saw Mouse as a competitor for benRabi’s affection.

The men had shared missions under fire. Sometimes they did not like one another much. Their backgrounds were day and night. Centuries of prejudice had erected walls between them. Yet an indestructible bond had been forged and hammered on the anvils of shared peril. They had guarded one another’s backs and saved one another’s lives too often to let go.

Mouse waited without moving, with the patience of a samurai.

He was a dedicated Archaicist. He had just encountered his own ancient heritage and, in imagination, was trying the samurai role for size. The code and conduct suited the warrior within him.

But it did nothing for the libertine. And Mouse was a classic of that genre, at least with the opposite sex.

Masato Igarashi Storm did nothing by half measures.

The doctor coughed softly.

“Will he be all right?” Amy demanded. “He’ll come out okay? I know what you told me, but...”

Mouse’s facial muscles moved slightly. His wan expression spoke volumes about his disgust at her display.

The doctor was more patient. “Just an enforced rest, Miss. That’s all it is. There’s nothing wrong that rest can’t cure. I hear he did a hell of a job feeding realtime to Weapons Control. He just pushed himself too far.”

A look flickered across Mouse’s stony face.

“What’re you thinking?” Amy demanded.

“Just that he’s not usually a pusher.”

Amy was ready for a fight.

The doctor aborted it by giving benRabi an injection. He began to come around.

Mouse seemed indifferent to Amy’s response. But not oblivious. He was an astute observer. He just did not care what she thought.

“Doc,” he said, “is there any special reason for sticking with this kind of medical setup?”

The woman held benRabi’s wrist, taking his pulse. “What do you mean?”

“It’s primitive. Almost Archaicist obsolete. They had sonic sedation systems before I was born. Easier on the patient and staff both.”

The doctor reddened. Mouse had been out of the hospital only a few weeks himself. He had spent a month recuperating from a severe wound received from a Sangaree agent who had tried to seize control of Danion. He was not pleased with the quality of medical care, and made no secret of it. But Mouse hated all doctors and hospitals. He could find fault with the finest.

BenRabi had tracked the Sangaree woman down, and had shot her...

Mouse had the nerve to stand toe-to-toe with the Devil and tell him to put it where the sun doesn’t shine.

“We have to make do with what we can afford, Mr. Storm.”

“So I’ve been told.” Mouse did not pursue it, though he thought Seiners pleading poverty was on a par with Midas begging alms on a street corner.

BenRabi opened his eyes.

“How you doing, Moyshe?” Storm asked, trampling Amy’s more dramatic opener. His presence there, betraying his concern, embarrassed him.

The fabric of centuries takes the stamp; they mark the children indelibly. Their legacy remains as invisible and irresistible as the secret coded in DNA. The young Mouse had learned that Old Earthers were pariahs.

Mouse’s family had been in Service for three generations. They were part of Confederation’s military aristocracy. BenRabi’s forebears had been unemployed Social Insurees for centuries.

Neither man considered himself prejudiced. But false truths sown in the fallows of childhood, planted deep, continued to sprout unrealistic real-world responses.

BenRabi had begun bridling his prejudice early. He had to survive. There had been only two Old Earthers in his Academy battalion.

He needed a minute to get his bearings. “What am I doing here?” he demanded.

“You needed rest,” Amy told him. “Lots of it. You overdid it this time.”

“Come on. I can take care of myself. I know when...”

“Crap!” the doctor snapped. “Every mindtech thinks that. And then they turn up here, burned out. I change their diapers and spoon feed them. What is it with you people, benRabi? You all got egos two sizes too big for a small god.”

Moyshe was fuzzy. He tried to say something flip. His tongue felt like it was wrapped in an old sock.

He saw tears in the doctor’s eyes. “Did you lose someone at Stars’ End?”

“My sister. She came out of creche just before you landsmen came aboard. She was only seventeen, benRabi.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a mindtech. Anyway, sorry doesn’t help. Not when I have to take care of her every day. She was just like you, benRabi. She knew she could handle it. She wouldn’t listen either. None of them would. Not even the controllers, who should’ve known better. They put her back in with only four hours’ rest.”

BenRabi kept his mouth shut. What could he say? He had been introduced to Contact during the battle at Stars’ End. The main Contact room had been a shambles. Dozens of mindtechs had given everything to save Danion.

He never would have seen Contact, or even have discovered its existence, had those linker casualties not been cruel. In those days he had been a distrusted landsman, a convicted enemy spy who was screened from all Seiner secrets. They had drafted him into Contact only because he might give Danion a millimeter’s better chance of surviving.

He had made his decision to cross over after Stars’ End, virtually in the hatch of the ship designated to return the landsmen contractees to Confederation.

He had waited too long. Half of his personal possessions had departed with the ship. He had not recovered them. The service ship crew had gotten into a row with Customs. The bureaucrats had retaliated, seizing everything not bolted to the ship’s frames.

BenRabi took Amy’s thin, cool hand. “How’ve you been, darling? You look tired. How long has it been?” She felt so cold... She was a spooky woman. Why had he fallen in love with her?

He always fell for the strange ones, the neurotic and just plain rotten ones. Alyce, in Academy... What a loser she had turned out to be. And the Sangaree woman, Marya, who had been a vampire in the midst of his last two missions.

“I’m all right now that I know you’ll be okay. Moyshe, please be more careful.”

She seemed unusually remote. BenRabi glanced at her, at Mouse, and back again. More problems with Mouse? Her dislike for his friend had taken a quantum leap recently.

Mouse did not talk much. The inevitable chess board had accompanied him, but he did not offer to play. Amy’s presence restrained him. Chess was one of his great passions, rivaling his passion for seducing a parade of beautiful women.

“Hey, Mouse. Ever wonder what Max is doing these days?” Referring to someone they had known before coming out here was the only way he could think of to pull his friend into the conversation.

“Probably getting richer and wondering why we don’t come into her shop anymore. I don’t think Beckhart will bother giving her our new address.”

“Yeah.” BenRabi laughed. “He should have heard the news by now, don’t you think? Or pretty soon. He’ll foam at the mouth.” For Amy’s benefit, he explained, “Max was a friend of ours in Luna Command. She ran a stamp store.”

“Best hobby shop in the moon,” Mouse said.

Amy did not respond. She simply could not comprehend what these two got out of accumulating small bits of paper that were ages old and required jeweler’s grade care.

And stamps were not the only thing. Between them they seemed to collect everything. Coins. Stamps. All kinds of ancient miscellania. Mouse had little wrought-iron trivets and other old-time dohickeys all over his quarters. The one collection she could appreciate was Moyshe’s butterflies. He had a frame of exotics on his wall. They were incredibly beautiful.

The Seiner ships were ecologically sterile. Only their zoos contained nonhuman life, and that the large, well-known mammals.

Amy had no hobbies of her own. She read for relaxation. She had acquired the habit from her mother.

Mouse even managed passably with a clarinet, an antique woodwind seldom seen anymore. He claimed to have learned from his father.

“What about Greta?” Mouse asked. “You think the Department will take care of her?”

Amy jumped at the name. “You never did tell me about Greta, Moyshe.”

“That was in another life.”

They were lovers, but they did not know one another well. BenRabi did not like stirring up the snake pit of people’s pasts. There was too much chance of finding something nasty. It was there in every life.

But he answered Amy’s question. “I told you before. She’s a kid I met the last time I was on Old Earth. The last time I visited by mother. She wanted out. Her friends wouldn’t let her go. I arranged it for her. And ended up sponsoring her.”

“Sort of like being a foster parent,” Mouse explained.

“Guess she’d be eighteen now. I haven’t thought about her in ages. You shouldn’t have mentioned her, Mouse. Now you’ve got me worried.”

“Hey, don’t. Max will look out for her.”

“Maybe. But that’s not right, putting it on somebody else. Is there any way I could send her a letter now and then, Amy? Just to let her know I’m all right and thinking about her? I’d let you or Jarl write it if you wanted. You could even run it through the crypto computer to make sure it’s innocent.”

“This’s just a kid?” Amy demanded.

“Yeah. She reminded me a lot of me when I came off Old Earth. Awful lost. I thought I could help out by sponsoring her. And then I kind of ran out when the Bureau sent us out here. I told her we’d be back in a couple of months. It’s been almost fourteen.”

“I’ll ask Jarl. He lets a little mail go out. Some of us have relatives outside. But it’s slow.”

“That doesn’t matter. Amy, you’re a jewel. I love you.”

“Well, if you’re going to get mushy,” Mouse said, standing. “I’ve got to run. A citizenship class. It’s from hunger, Moyshe. Me and Emily Hopkins and this fascist bastard of a teacher... Maybe I’ll hurt the arm again. Get back in here so I can miss a few too. Behave. Do what the doctor lady says. Or I’ll wring your neck.” He made his exit before Moyshe could embarrass him with many thanks-for-comings.

“You’re awful quiet today, honey,” benRabi said after a while. Perhaps if the doctor had not been there...

“I’m just tired. We’re still doing double shifts and barely keeping our heads above water. We’re going to be in the Yards a long time. Assuming Danion doesn’t fall apart before we get there. Assuming the sharks don’t knock us apart.”

“You’ve mentioned these Yards about fifty times and wouldn’t tell me about them. Do you trust me enough now?”

“They’re what the name sounds like. Where we build and fix our ships. Moyshe, you’re not going anywhere for a while. Tell me about you.”

“What?”

“I met you the very first day. Way back on Carson’s, when you signed your contract. We lived together for months before I even found out you’ve got a daughter. I don’t know anything about you.”

“Greta isn’t my daughter, honey. I just helped a kid who needed somebody...”

“It’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Legally, I guess. On paper. They’d have trouble making it stand up in court.”

“Tell me. Everything.”

There was little else to do but talk. He talked.

The doctor, lurking in the background watching suspiciously, had made it clear that he would be stuck here for a while.

“All right. Let me know when it gets boring.”

He had been born in North America on Old Earth, to Clarence Hardaway and Myra McClennon. He had hardly known his father. His mother, for reasons he still did not understand, had elected to raise him at home instead of burying him in the State Creche. Only a few Social Insurees raised their children.

His early years had been typical for home-raised S. I. children. Little supervision, little love, little education. He had been running with a kid gang before he was eight.

He had been trine when he had seen his first offworlders. Spikes, they had called them. These had been Navy men in crisp dress blacks diligently pursuing the arcane business of offworlders.

Those uniforms had captured his imagination. They had become an obsession. He had started keying information out of his mother’s home data retrieval terminal. He had not had the education to decipher most of it. He had started teaching himself, building from the ground up toward the things he so desperately wanted to know.

At ten he had quit the gang so he would have more time to study. Halfway through his eleventh year the revelation had come. He had to get into space. He had approached a Navy recruiter clandestinely. The man had arranged for him to sneak through the Academy exams.

He never would have made it had there been no special standards and quotas for Old Earthers. He would have gotten skunked had he been in direct competition with carefully prepared Outworlders, many of whom had grown up in the military life. Half the officers in Service were the children of officers. Service was a complete sub-culture, and one that was becoming increasingly less connected with and controlled by the over-culture. He had had motivation.

At twelve he had run away from home, fleeing to Luna Command and Academy. In six years he had climbed from dead last to the 95th percentile in class standing. At graduation he had taken his Line option and been assigned to the Fleet. He had served aboard the destroyers Aquataine and Hesse, and the attack cruiser Tamerlane, before requesting Intelligence training.

Following a year of schooling the Bureau had assigned him as Naval Attaché to the Embassy on Feldspar. He had had a half dozen similar assignments on as many worlds before his work attracted the attention of Admiral Beckhart, whose department handled dangerous operations, and tricks on the grey side of legal.

He had taken part in several tight missions, and had reencountered his former classmate, Mouse. They had shared several assignments, the last being to join the Starfishers to ferret out information that could be used to force the Seiners to enter the Confederation fold.

Some of it Amy had heard before. Some she had not. She was not satisfied. Her first comment was, “You didn’t say anything about women.”

“What do you mean? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Everything, as far as I’m concerned. I want to know who your lovers were and how come you broke up. What they were like...”

“You’ll shit in your hand and carry it to China first, Lady.”

He was still a little dopey. He did not realize that he had said it aloud till he began to wonder why she had shut up so suddenly.

After one stunned gasp Amy blew out of the room like a tornado looking for a town to wreck.

The lady doctor came out of the background, took his blood pressure. “She’s pushy, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know what’s got into her. She wasn’t like that before.”

“You’ve had an interesting life.”

“Not really. I don’t think I’d do it the same if I had it to do again.”

“Well, you could, couldn’t you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Rejuvenation. I thought it was available to everybody landside.”

“Oh. Yes. More or less. Some of the brass have been around since Noah landed the Ark. But Fate has a way of catching up with people who try to slide around it.”

“Wish we had it out here.”

“You don’t look that old.”

“I was thinking about my father. He’s getting on now.”

“I see. How soon can I leave?”

“Any time, really. But I wish you’d wait a couple hours. You’ll be weak and dizzy.”

“Mouse was right about sonic sedation.”

“I know. But I don’t write the medical budget. Good luck, Mr. benRabi. Try not to see me again.”

“I hate hospitals, Doctor.”

He did. His only stays had been at Bureau insistence, to modify him mentally or physically.

He did a few minor exercises before catching a public tram home.

Amy was waiting. “Oh, Moyshe. That was stupid of me. You were right. Those things aren’t any of my business.”

She had been crying. Her eyes were red.

“It’s all right. I understand.” But he did not. His cultural background had not prepared him for personal nosiness. In Confederation people lived now. They did not consider the past.

“It’s just that I feel... Well, everything’s so chancey the way it is between us.”

Here she comes, he thought. Hints about getting married.

Marriage was important to the Seiners. In Confederation it was more an amusing relic, an entertainment or daydream for the young and the romantic. He could not reconcile his attitudes with Seiner seriousness. Not yet.

The Starfishers had won his loyalty, but they could not make him a different man. They could not make him reflect themselves merely by adopting him.

Was Mouse having the same trouble? he wondered. Probably not. Mouse was a chameleon. He could adapt anywhere, vanish into any crowd.

“I have to go to work,” Amy told him. Weariness seemed to be dragging her down.

“You’d better get some rest yourself, honey.”

After she left he took out his stamp collection and turned the well-thumbed album pages. Mouse had opened a Pandora’s box by mentioning Max and Greta. After a while he pushed the album aside and tried to compose a letter to the girl.

He could not think of much to say.

 

Five: 3049 AD

The Contemporary Scene

 

Admirals and generals did not have to endure the usual waiting and decontamination procedures getting into Luna Command. The security checks were abbreviated. No staff-grade officer had gone sour since Admiral McGraw had turned freebooter following the peace with Ulant. Admiral Beckhart entered his office just three hours after his personal shuttle berthed a little south of the Sea of Tranquility.

He had not spared the horses, in the vernacular of another age. The mother had dropped hyper midway between Luna and L-5. The first message he had received had been code-tagged, “Personal presence required immediately. Critical.”

Either the bottom had dropped off of the universe or McClennon and Storm had come home with their saddlebags dripping delicious little secrets.

The Crew, as he called his hand-picked brain-trust, were in the office when he arrived.

He raised a hand. “As you were. What have we got?”

Jones asked, “You don’t want to shower and change?”

Beckhart looked ragged. Almost seedy. Like a derelict costumed as an Admiral.

“You clowns sent a Personal Presence, Critical. If I’ve got time to shit, shower, and shave, you should’ve said it was urgent.”

“Maybe we were hasty,” Namaguchi admitted. “We’d just scanned the crypto breakdown. We were a little excited.”

“Breakdown? What the hell’s going on?” Beckhart tumbled into a huge chair behind a vast, gleaming wood desk. “Get to the point, Akido.”

Namaguchi jerked out of his seat, flipped a square of manila across the gleaming desk.

“Numbers. Your handwriting hasn’t improved.”

“The Section’s doing up a printout. That, sir, is what Storm had for us.”

“Well?”

“Morgan Standard Coordinate Data, sir. A stellar designation. Took us two days to convert it from the Sangaree system.”

“Sangaree?... Holy Christ! Is it?...”

“What we’ve been waiting for all our lives. Where to find their home star.”

“Ah, god. Ah. It can’t be. Two hundred years we’ve been looking. Cutting and dying and generally carrying on like a gang of fascist assholes. So it paid off. I bet my butt on a long shot and it paid off. Give me the comm. Somebody give me the goddamn comm.”

Jones eased it across the desk. Beckhart punched furiously. “Beckhart. Priority. Hey! I don’t give a damn if he’s banging the Queen of Sheba. Personal, Critical, and I’m going to have your ass for breakfast if you don’t... Excuse me, sir.” His manners improved dramatically.

“Yes, sir, it is. I want a confirmation of our position on Memorandum of Permanent Policy and Procedure Number Four. Specifically, Paragraph Six.”

A long silence ensued. Beckhart’s cronies leaned closer and closer to their chief. The man on the other end finally said something.

“Yes, sir. Absolutely. I have the data in my hand, sir. Just decoded. Give me von Drachau and the First Fleet... Yes, sir. What I want is a blank check for a while. I can get started tomorrow.”

More silence.

Then, “Yes, sir. I thought so, sir. I understand, sir. Thank you, sir.” Beckhart broke the connection. “He wants to take it up with the Chiefs of Staff.”

“They’re going to back down now? After all the lives we’ve spent?”

“Commander Jones. Do you realize the enormity of what I just dumped on him? Let me draw you a picture. I interrupted him while von Staufenberg was briefing him on what we saw centerward. Which was about what we expected to see, and as pretty as a barge loaded with dead babies. Some psychopathic race is doing its damnedest to kill off anything sentient it can find. Then I horn in and ask for a confirm on Memo Four slash Six. Which is a vow to exterminate the Sangaree whenever we find out where the hell they’re hiding their homeworld. We’re supposed to be the good guys, Jones. The things he’s looking at right now kind of tend to put the damper on the fires of that good old-time anti-Sangaree righteousness.”

“I don’t see the problem, sir.”

“Pragmatically it doesn’t exist. Having seen what’s going on centerward, I’d say Four slash Six is a strategic imperative. We’ve got to get those bloodsuckers off our backs fast. They ate us alive during the wars with Ulant and Toke. Any time there’s a dust-up between non-Confederation worlds they come on like jackals. Raidships in swarms... Not to mention the price we pay in stardust addiction. Hell, half the fleet is tied up protecting shipping. Four slash Six would free those ships. And if we burned the Sangaree, the McGraws would close up shop. Those are the arguments in favor. Akido. Take the Devil’s advocate.”

It was an old game. Namaguchi knew his commander well. “Sir. How in God’s name can we go to the people of Confederation — not to mention our allies — with the news that we’ve destroyed a whole race? Just when we’re about to pump them up with moral indignation so we can justify a preemptive strike against a species we claim is guilty of the identical sin? Let me understate, sir, and say that the positions are inconsistent. Let me say, sir, that we’re on a quick slide down into a moral cesspool. We would, quite simply, be the biggest hypocrites this universe has ever seen.”

“Shit,” Jones responded with no great force. “There isn’t one in a thousand of them would ever see the inconsistency. They’ll cheer about the Sangaree going down, then go sign up for the war against these centerward creeps. Akido, you’re giving Mr. Average Man too much credit. He can’t even follow his credit balance, let alone weigh a moral one.”

“Charlie, that attitude is going to destroy Luna Command. And when we go, Confederation goes. When Confederation goes, the barbarians come in. In the words of the Roman Centurion Publius Minutius, speaking of the legions, ‘We are the Empire.’”

“Just a minute,” Beckhart interjected. “Akido. Come over here.” He pushed the comm across the desk. “Punch up the library and get me an abstract on this Minutius.”

“Uh...”

“I thought so. Another one of your out-of-the-dark authorities.”

Namaguchi chuckled. It was a favorite trick. His boss was the only man who caught him every time. “Actually, old Publius probably said something more like, ‘Which way to the nearest whorehouse, buddy?’ But I’ll stake my reputation on the fact that some Roman soldier said it somewhere along the way. It was true. The army was the Empire.”

“You don’t have any reputation to stake, Akido,” Jones quipped.

“The army got a lot of help from the fact that everybody in the provinces went along with a lot of tacit rules, Akido,” Beckhart remarked. “We’re getting off the subject. What about McClennon’s report?”

“They’re still working on it. First abstracts should be up any time now. The key thing we’ve gotten is that the Starfishers did go after Stars’ End. So you guessed right on that one, too.”

“I didn’t guess. I had inside information.”

“Whatever. That’s where Storm came up with the Sangaree data. Raidships hit the harvestfleet there. They came out on the short end. The point is, the Seiners were sure they could pull it off. The battering the Sangaree gave them is what kept them from trying.”

“How soon will those boys be done de-briefing? I want to see them.”

Silence hit that room like a cat jumping on a mouse. It stretched till it became an embarrassment.

“Well?”

“Uh...”

“Not one of your more endearing traits, Akido. I don’t need protecting. Out with it. Who got hurt? How bad was it?”

“It’s not that. Sir, they didn’t come back.”

“They’re dead? How did they?...”

“They’re alive. But they crossed over.”

“They what?”

“Remember, McClennon was programed for it.”

“I know that. It was my idea. But he wasn’t supposed to make a career out of it. He didn’t de-program? What the hell was wrong with Storm? What’s his story? Why didn’t he bring Thomas out?”

“We’re working on it, sir. Interrogating returnees. When we can lay hands on them. They scattered after they hit Carson’s, before we knew we had a problem. Near as we can tell, Storm stayed behind because he didn’t want to leave McClennon there alone. The programming must have broken down. McClennon asked to stay. They kept Storm from bringing him out.”

“I see. That would be like Mouse. Don’t leave your wounded behind. He’s too much like his father. I knew Gneaus Storm. When you get to the bottom line, it was his sense of honor that got him killed. Well, I’ve got my honor too, even if it’s a little discolored around the edges. I don’t leave my wounded behind either. Akido, I want those boys brought out.”

Jones snorted.

“Charles? What’s biting your ass?”

“I was just thinking that anybody who cared as much about his troops as you put on wouldn’t have thrown them back in the furnace before they’d cooled off from The Broken Wings. And you hit them with that one before they’d cooled off from...”

“Hey! Charlie, it’s my conscience. I’m the one who’s got to live with it.”

“Storm could handle it. He didn’t get the deep Psych-briefings. But McClennon... You probably overloaded the poor bastard. He was goofy at his best times.”

“That’s enough. Right now, right here, we finish crying about Storm and McClennon. That understood? We start figuring out how to get them back. And in our spare time we worry about the Four slash Six. And come bedtime, if you get tempted to waste time sleeping, start figuring how we’re going to get a hammerlock on the Starfishers before they get their hands on Stars’ End.”

“Sir?” Namaguchi inquired.

“One of you clowns told me they were sure they could get in. You know what happens if they do?”

“Sir?”

“We bend over and kiss our asses good-bye. Because we’re dead. We can hope, but we’ll still be in the line to the showers.”

“I don’t follow your reasoning this time.”

“You’re not looking at the whole picture, that’s why. The gestalt, if that’s the right word. Look. If they get those weapons before we do, they can tell us to go pound sand and make it stick. We won’t get control of ambergris production, meaning the Fleet will have to do without adequate instel communications, meaning its chances against those centerward things will go down to zit. They aren’t your candy-ass Ulantonids, planning to give us a fair shake after they whip us.”

“On the other hand,” Namaguchi suggested, “if we get the Fishers under the gun in time, we’ll not only be able to equip the Fleet, we’ll have the potential of the Stars’ End weaponry. Assuming it’s adaptable.”

“There,” Beckhart told the others. “You see why Akido is the Crown Prince around here. You take a stick and whack on him long enough and he actually starts thinking. Let’s do a little brainstorming, gentlemen. Along the lines of turning our liabilities into assets.”

Jones suggested, “Regarding the Four slash Six paradox. The right leak of the right info at the right time at the right place might give Luna Command a public opinion base that would make the kill a matter of popular demand. There are some real pros in the Public Information Office. They’ve done a hell of a job creating a climate of trepidation with hints about trouble in the March. Suppose they let a little truth wriggle out now? Just enough so people start asking what kind of horror we’re covering up by giving our friends from Ulant a bad press. There isn’t anything the public won’t swallow quicker than a good conspiracy theory. Especially a cover-up conspiracy.”

Beckhart chuckled. “What is this? Two brains working in one room? At the same time? Gentlemen, that’s a first. So. We’ve got a couple of things to work on. Will they let us orchestrate the show?”

“Why don’t we just do it? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“But it could be the last. We’ve reached a crossroads. We — and I mean everybody in Luna Command — are going to have to fine-tune the Luna Command machine. It won’t have the internal tolerance for playing games with each other. We don’t have much time to get ready for this centerward race... That plan is simple. We’re going to hit them first, hit them hard, and keep hitting them with everything we’ve got.”

“The way Ulant did us?”

“Exactly. The Prime Defender’s General Staff is doing the planning, based on their intelligence. She’ll modify it daily, keeping as close to the realtime situation as she can. We come up with something, it’ll be programed in. If the centerward crowd do something unexpected, that’ll go in too. They’ve sent out a whole fleet of self-destruct equipped, instelled scout ships to keep track of what’s happening.”

“Sir, that strategy didn’t work for Ulant before.”

“It may not work this time, but it’s the best shot we’ve got. Ulant’s intelligence analyses paint a pretty grim picture. The numbers... You’ll see the tapes. While you’re watching, remember that you’re only seeing one battle fleet. Ulant has identified another four. They just seem to skip from star to star behind a swarm of scouts, coming out the Arm, scouring every inhabited world of any sentient life.” The comm hummed. Beckhart stabbed it with one finger. “Beckhart. Yes, sir.”

The sound was uni-directional, the picture flat-faced television. The others could not hear, nor could they identify the caller. After listening awhile, Beckhart said, “Very well, sir,” in an unhappy tone. He punched out.

“That was the C. S. N.. They’ve decided to go with Four slash Six. But they’re not going to let us run it. He said they’ll use von Drachau, but R and D will have operational control.”

“R and D? What the hell?”

“What have they got going over there? What don’t we know?”

The comm hummed again. Beckhart answered, said, “This one’s for you, Charlie.”

Jones sat on the edge of the vast desk, turned the comm his way. “Go ahead.” In a few seconds his tall, lean, black frame began quivering with excitement. “Good. All right. Thank you.”

“Well?” Beckhart growled.

“One of my Electronic Intercept people. They just picked up a message from the Starfisher Council to Confederation Senate. Routine request for clearance to hold an ambergris auction. They asked for The Broken Wings. Usual rules and mutual obligations. The same request they send whenever they hold auction on a Confederation world.”

“The Broken Wings is close to Stars’ End. Any other reason to be excited?”

“Payne’s Fleet is going to sponsor.”

Beckhart stared at his hands for more than a minute. When he looked up his expression had become beatific. “Gentlemen, the gods love us after all. Cancel all leaves. Cancel any computation capacity loans we have out. Pass the word that we’re going on overtime. Everybody, including the janitors and shredder operators. I’ve got a feeling we’ll find a rose in this dungheap yet.” He laughed demoniacally. “Eyes open and ears to the ground gentlemen. Everything that comes in from now on — and I mean everything — goes into the master program for correlation. And have the programming teams start working backward. I want the biggest and best goddamned model outside the High Command Strategic Analysis. Let’s see if we can’t do this all up in one big, pretty package.”

Beckhart departed his desk and unlocked his personal bar. He took out glasses and the half gallon of genuine Old Earth Scotch he saved for occasions of millennial significance. “A toast to successes and victories. Hopefully ours.” He poured doubles.

 

Six: 3049 AD

The Main Sequence

 

The five great harvestships barely moved. Their velocity relative to the debris was a scant three kilometers per hour. Gnatlike service ships flitted before the head and flanks of their line, nudging any flying mountain that threatened collision.

It was almost an embarrassment, the way those swift monsters of the spatial deeps had to crawl. Elsewhere they could have sprinted off and left light lagging like a toddler behind an Olympic runner. Here they could not match the pace of a lazily strolling old man.

Those battered survivors of Payne’s Fleet had been making the passage for a week.

The dense boulder screen gave way to a less crowded region occupied principally by asteroidal chunks the size of small moons. The harvestfleet accelerated. The line dispersed.

“Well, you kept asking about the Yards,” Amy told benRabi. “We’re there.” She indicated the viewscreen they had been watching.

“Yes, but...” All Moyshe saw was a big asteroid illuminated by Danion’s powerful lights. A few smaller boulders drifted around it. Not one star was visible in the background. All outside light was screened by the dust of the nebula.

Danion seemed to be stalking that big asteroid.

“But what?”

“There’s nothing here. We’re in the tail end of nowhere. I expected a hidden planet. Maybe even Osiris. Something First Expansion. Strange cities, drydocks...”

“Planetary docks? How could we take Danion into atmosphere? Or lift her out of a gravity well? Most of your Navy ships wouldn’t try that.”

“But you’d have to have thousands of people to work on a ship this big. Tens of thousands. Not to mention a hell of an industrial base, and one all-time grandfather of a drydock.”

“The dock’s right in front of you.”

“What? Where?”

“Watch and see.”

He watched. And he saw.

A gargantuan piece of rock began separating from the asteroid. In time it exposed a brightly lit interior vast enough to accept a harvestship. Diminutive tugs swarmed out. Some pushed the cork. Some hurried toward Danion like eager bees to a clover patch.

BenRabi saw a glow in the remote distance. Another asteroid was opening its stone mouth.

“We’re going inside?”

“You got it. You catch on quick, don’t you?”

“Smart mouth.”

“They’ll lock the door behind us. Then they’ll flood the chamber with air. The work goes faster that way. And the dock will hide us from any snoopers who wander by.”

“Who would come poking around in a mess like this? That would be asking to get fine-ground between those flying millstones.”

BenRabi was less surprised by the existence of the nebula than by the Seiners’ willingness to hazard it. Similar asteroidal shoals existed inside several dust nebulae.

“But they come anyway. Moyshe, this’s the Three Sky Nebula.”

“No. Not really? Yes. I guess you’re serious.”

One of the most dramatic actions of the Ulantonid War had occurred in the outer shoals of the Three Sky Nebula. After the war, the repatriated human survivors had circulated stories of having seen abandoned alien ships there. Some had been wrecks, some had appeared to be intact.

Three Sky had won an immediate reputation as a Sargasso of space. The treasure-seekers, xeno-archaeologists, and official investigators who went there hunting the alien ships were seldom seen again.

“The expeditions... There must have been fifteen or twenty that disappeared. What happened to them?”

“We interned them before they could stumble onto something and run home to report it. They’re doing what they came to do. They just can’t go home.”

“Why risk setting up here if the traffic gets so heavy?”

“The risk isn’t that big. We don’t have visitors very often. Not when they always disappear. And, of course, it’s such an unlikely place to look for us.”

“Still... There’s been talk at Luna Command, off and on, about sending a squadron to back up an investigation. In case it’s McGraws or Sangaree that have been getting the others.”

“If that happened, we’d fight. And we’d win. Only a fool would attack what we’ve made out of Three Sky. We’ve been here since before the Ulantonid War. That’s a lot of time to get ready. It’d be almost like guerrilla warfare. We think we can hold off Confederation if we ever have to.”

“I think you’re a little over-optimistic. For people who don’t have the muscle to duke it out with the sharks. I’ll let you know for sure after I’ve looked things over.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I haven’t met a Seiner yet who had the least idea of just how big and strong Confederation is. Or how tough Luna Command can be when they put their minds to it. Or that your weapons systems are prehistoric relics. Danion’s got a ton of firepower, but one Empire Class battleship could carve this whole harvestfleet up like a side of beef and never get in a sweat.”

“I think you’re probably too impressed with your Navy. Our shortcomings were calculated into our defense plans.”

BenRabi decided not to argue. Each of them was telling the truth as he or she knew it. “Are the creches here?”

“Some. All of them will be someday. It’s a big job, civilizing a nebula.”

“Mainly an engineering problem, I’d think.”

“Yes. But it takes time and money. Especially money. We have to buy everything we can’t manufacture ourselves. Which means we have to wait for the auctions because our credit is pretty slim.”

“Ah. I begin to see why the good doctor was making do with primitive equipment.”

“We’ve colonized more than seven thousand asteroids, Moyshe,” Amy proudly declared. “But we’ve only just begun. They’re all cramped. The harvestships are cramped. Our other hidden places are overcrowded. We’ve been taking in Confederation’s dropouts for two hundred years. The ones who didn’t become McGraws or run away to the outworlds.”

Outworlds was a word as relative as yonder. For benRabi, born an Old Earther, it meant anything off Old Earth. Around Luna Command it meant any planet not one of the original seven founders of Confederation. Those seven usually called themselves The Inner Worlds. But out on the fringes of Confederation outworlds were human planets not signatory to the federal pact. BenRabi was unsure which meaning Amy wanted to convey.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said. “Why here?”

“Because of the industrial advantages. The stories those internees took back were true. There’s a lot of salvageable stuff here. We’ve identified over thirty thousand wrecks and abandoned ships. Built by seven different races.”

“Really?” He ticked fingers. He could name five, not counting humanity. Six if he counted the prehistoric race that had built Stars’ End. “I’ll give you human and Ulantonid. From the war. Who were the others?”

“I thought you’d wonder why they’d be here.”

He frowned at her. Was she trying to bait him by showing off her superior knowledge? Savoring one minuscule advantage? He knew more than she about almost everything and she seemed to take it as a personal affront.

“I imagine because it’s a good place to lay an ambush. That’s why Carolingian came here during the war.”

Her smile shrank. “Yeah. And because it’s close to the obvious space lanes. Moyshe, there’ve been battles here for ages. Probably for millions of years. Or even billions. Except for the wrecks from the Ulantonid war, which I didn’t even count, none of the ships here were built by any race we’ve ever met. They were all extinct before man ever left Old Earth. Or at least they were gone from this part of the galaxy. They all pre-date any of the races we have encountered.”

“Ask the starfish about them.”

“We did. We’re not stupid. But they don’t have much to tell. They don’t pay any more attention to hard matter races than we do to bacteria. Less, really, because we’re curious and they aren’t. We’re pretty sure one bunch of ships, though, belonged to a race that moved the ancestors of the Sangaree from Earth to wherever it is their homeworld is.”

“Ah? Don’t let Mouse know about that. He’ll drive you crazy trying to get to them.”

Only in this century had geneticists surrendered to the popular notion that Human and Sangaree sprang from the same root stock. The man in the street would not believe in a parallel evolution so similar that it could produce a being indistinguishable from himself. Scientists had demurred, citing no evidence on Old Earth for extraterrestrial intervention...

Then the abandoned alien base beneath the moon’s dark side had been discovered. Some major rethinking had been necessary. Then had come confirmation of reports that the human female could, occasionally, be impregnated by the Sangaree male.

The most famous — or infamous — of Sangaree agents, Michael Dee, had been half human.

“Mouse will be protected from himself.”

BenRabi studied her. She wore an oddly ferocious expression.

“Amy, I’ve been here almost fourteen months and you’re still springing surprises on me. When are you going to run out?” He stared into the hollow asteroid and awaited her response.

“Moyshe, what happened to the people who built Stars’ End?”

“We’ll probably never know. Unless somebody cracks its defenses.”

“We’ll do that. We’re going back. That was a rhetorical question.”

“Wait a sec. Back? To Stars’ End? After what happened? You’re out of your minds. You’re all raving lunatics.”

She laughed. “Moyshe, they left their ships behind when they disappeared. Right here. God knows how many of them there are. Three Sky occupies a cubic light-year. We haven’t explored a tenth of it. They had their yards and secret places too. Most of the ships we find were theirs. They were the people who transported the Sangaree, we think. We have explorers who don’t do anything but hunt for their hideouts. Every one we find is one we don’t have to build for ourselves.”

He spoke to the engulfing maw in the viewscreen. “She’s serious.”

“Absolutely, darling. Absolutely. Oh, we’re not really sure that it was the same race that did all three things. But the computers go with the probability. See, these are mostly good ships, Moyshe. They aren’t derelicts. Some of them still have a little emergency power left. They try to scare us off with mind noises the way Stars’ End does. And they have parts missing. Somebody took off all their weapons. I wish we had a whole army of xeno-archaeologists and anthropologists. It’s really interesting. I always go see what they’re working on whenever we come in. The scientists don’t go very fast. They’re mostly ones we captured, so they aren’t real enthusiastic about helping us out. They train some of our people as aides, sometimes. Old folks and birth defect types who can’t do much else.”

“That don’t make sense. People don’t abandon good ships, Amy. Where did they go? Why? How? And if they did build Stars’ End, why?”

She shrugged. “They weren’t people, Moyshe. Not our kind. Don’t judge their motives by ours.”

“I wouldn’t... though some ideas would seem universal. Just thinking questions out loud.”

“The questions are why I wish we had more scientists.” She switched the viewscreen over to a stern camera. Danion was well into the asteroid’s interior. “They could be the same creatures that did the tunneling at Luna Command. But were they really? Is there a connection between the moon and Three Sky and Stars’ End? Were we meant to find Stars’ End and Three Sky? Is it all some kind of big puzzle that we’re supposed to figure out? Is it a test?”

“You think they were planning to come back?”

“Who knows? The questions are all a hundred years old. The answers haven’t been born. And if we ever do answer any of them, then right away we’re going to ask three more.

“Anyway, those old ships are our main reason for being here. Some we fix up and use. They make good service ships. If they can be adapted. We scavenge some for materials to build harvestships. We only buy outside if we have to. Usually the Freehaulers make our purchases landside, for a commission, and make delivery to an asteroid at the edge of the nebula. They think it’s just a way station. They don’t ask questions. Too many questions is bad for business. They don’t try very hard to follow us around, either. They’re good people.”

“Is that a cut?”

“If you think so.”

“I suspected the Freehaulers. I know they had something to do with me and Mouse getting caught. How’s chances of me getting to look at one of those ships? I know a little about xeno-archaeology.”

A girl’s face crossed his mind. Alyce. She had been his Academy love. She had been a recorder at the alien digs in the moon. She had taught him a little, and the Bureau had taught him more.

Sooner or later, the Bureau touched every base.

“You’ll have to ask Jarl. I don’t think he’ll let you, though. We’re going to be awful busy repairing Danion. Plus you’ve got your citizenship classes and your beer nights with Mouse.”

“Now don’t start that again. He’s my friend, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. It don’t hurt for him and me to play a couple of games of chess once in a while. You can come keep an eye on us if you think we’re cooking up a plot against the Greater Seiner Empire, Lieutenant.”

She ignored his sarcasm. “I don’t feel like it. I always...” She stopped before she began waving the red flag. Their positions were inflexible. Argument would be pointless. “Moyshe, we’ve got to get Danion whipped into shape fast. The fleets are coming in. As soon as they’re all here we’re leaving for auction and another crack at Stars’ End.”

“Stars’ End. Stars’ End. That’s all I hear anymore. And it’s completely insane. We can’t stick our necks in that noose again, Amy. Look what it cost last time. And remember, I was there too. I was outside with the starfish. I know what that planet can do.”

“We’ve got to have those weapons, Moyshe. You saw the casualty reports. You saw the extrapolations. What the sharks are doing now is going to look pacifistic in ten years. We’re talking survival, Love. And you’re still thinking power politics.”

“You’ll just get yourselves killed.”

“Either way, then. But we’ll handle Stars’ End. Honest. The fish really do know how to open the way. They found the key while we were there before.”

“Huh?” He had not caught a hint from Chub. “The Sangaree, or Confederation...”

“They’d better come toting their guns if they want to steal it from us, Moyshe. Because they’ll have a hell of a fight on their hands. There’s a lot of us, honey. And we’re looking for a fight. People have been pushing us ever since I can remember. We’re tired of it. Once we get those weapons...”

“And sharks, darling. Don’t forget the sharks. Oh, it’s bound to be a gay party. How do I get transferred to a ground job?”

“You don’t.” She laughed. “I just heard a couple hours ago. You’re going to be transferred to Security for the auction project.”

She did not tell him that the auction project would be a pilot for a more ambitious program. If he and Storm performed well and faithfully they would be given joint chieftainship of their own espionage outfit. She did not think her own boss, Jarl Kindervoort, knew yet. The Ship’s Commander seemed reluctant to discuss it with the man.

“Auction? That’s Mouse’s special haunt. How’d he get stuck with it, anyway?”

“It’s going to be yours, too. Our new mindtechs will start coming aboard in a couple of days. And you’ll move over to the project.”

“Why?”

“Because you know The Broken Wings.”

“Yeah. And I want to forget it.” His previous mission, as a Bureau agent, had taken him to The Broken Wings. It had been a nasty affair.

“That’s where the auction’s going to be held. They already sent the permission request. It’s just form from here on.”

“Form? What you want to bet the place is crawling with Confies and Sangaree? You people stirred up some bad feelings...”

“She hit you pretty hard, eh?”

“What?”

“The woman. The Sangaree woman. That Marya Strehltsweiter.”

“What? How did you?... Mouse. Shooting off his mouth.”

“He didn’t exactly volunteer it. And he told Jarl, not me. I found out when I was looking through the files for something else.”

“All right.” His heart hammered for no reason he could justify to himself. So he had gotten involved with the woman. He had not known she was Sangaree then. “It’s over.”

“I know. I knew that a long time ago. Mouse wrote that report after you shot her. I guess he thought it was important for Jarl to understand what you were going through.”

That did not sound like Mouse. “She would’ve killed all of us. Sooner or later. I had to do it. I never shot anybody before.”

“Especially somebody you still halfway cared about, eh?”

“Yeah. Can we drop it?”

“Did Mouse really do that? Inject her children with stardust?”

“Yes. Mouse plays for keeps. He doesn’t have trouble with his conscience. Not the way I do.”

“You really think the Sangaree will be at the auction?”

“They’ll be there. They hold a grudge the way Mouse does. Amy, I don’t want to get involved in that. I’m happy where I’m at. I like linking. Chub is a good friend. I was just scared there at first. I’ve been getting to know the other members of the herd... Hell, sometimes I go in just to bullshit with Chub.”

BenRabi could relax with the starfish as he could with no human. He did not feel naked when he let the starfish see what he really felt and thought. Chub made no value judgments. His values were not human. He had, in fact, helped Moyshe make some small peace within himself.

Parts of his mind remained inaccessible to the starfish. Whole sections were hidden behind rigid walls. Moyshe could not guess what might lie there. He could sense nothing missing from his past.

Seiner life was changing Mouse, too, he reflected. Storm was becoming even more sure of himself, more bigger-than-life than he had always been. BenRabi could not pin it down. One or two nights a week playing chess together was not the same as sharing a minute to minute life under fire.

Mouse was an operative born. He had changed allegiance, but not professions. He had become part of Jarl Kindervoort’s staff.

Flying easy. That was what benRabi had been doing since his release from the hospital. The only pressure he faced was Amy’s near-militance in hinting about their getting married. Under Chub’s ministrations his neuroses were scaling away. He had come to the Seiners with a great many.

“Not much more to see,” Amy told him. The rearmost cameras were inside the asteroid. The tugs were guiding the cork back toward the entrance.

“What? Oh. I’d better go say good-bye to Chub.”

He reached Contact almost as quickly as he had the day of the last battle. “Clara. Where’s Hans?”

“He’s off. We don’t have anything going.”

“I want to go in. They’re telling me I’m going to be transferred.”

“You can’t. We’re closed down, Moyshe. They’ll be cutting power in a minute. Heck, the herd should be out of range by now.”

“Clara, I probably won’t ever get another chance.”

“Ah, Moyshe. It’s silly. But all right. Get on the couch.” She prepared his scalp and the hairnet device in seconds. The helmet devoured his head almost before he could catch his breath.

He shifted to TSD, then onward.

The colors of the nebula were incredible. It was a dreary place to the eye, completely dark unless illuminated artificially. In this internal universe Moyshe could reach out and touch all the specks of it, the clouds of luminescent dust, the glowing asteroids majestically circling the nebula’s center in their million-year orbits. He could even sense the protostar down in the nebula’s heart, lying patiently in its time-womb, gathering the sustenance it would need to blaze for eons.

“Chub!” his mind shouted into the color storm. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

For a time he thought there would be no answer. The herd lay far off the bounds of the nebula, beyond the pain threshold of its diminutive gravitation.

Then, “Moyshe man-friend? What is happening?”

The link was tenuous. He could barely discern the starfish’s thoughts. He could not locate the creature with his inner sight.

“I came to say good-bye, Chub. They say I’m not going to be a mindtech anymore. You were right. They want me to go back to being what I was.”

“Ah. I am saddened, Moyshe man-friend. I am saddened because you are sad. We have been good friends. I am pleased that you thought it important to let me know. So many linkers just disappear. Perhaps this last time we can break through those barriers, Moyshe man-friend.”

But those corners of benRabi’s mind would not yield.

“Moyshe.” Clara’s voice seemed to come from kilometers away. “They’re going to shut the power off. You’ve got to come out.”

“Farewell, Moyshe man-friend.” BenRabi could feel the sadness in the starfish.

“Go softly, golden dragon,” he whispered. “My heart flies with you down the long dark journey.”

Chub’s sadness welled up. Moyshe could not stand it. He pounded the switch beneath his left hand.

There was very little pain. He had not been under long. “I don’t need it, Clara.” He pushed the needle away.

“Moyshe. You’re crying.”

“No.”

“But...”

“No. Just leave me alone.”

“All right.”

He heard the hurt in her voice. He struggled off of the couch, pulled her to him. “I’m sorry. Clara, I haven’t known you very long. But you’ve been a good friend. I’ll miss you. And Hans, too. Tell him to behave.”

“I see that he does. He’s my grandson.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.” What had he heard about Hans’s sister? Or was it mother? She had been lost with Jariel. Clara had never let on.

“There’re a lot of things you don’t know, Moyshe benRabi. About people. Because you never get around to asking.”

“Clara... Clara, come visit. Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Promise? Amy would love to meet you.”

“I promise. Now get out of here before somebody calls the boss and wants to know what the hell’s going on up here.”

“Thanks, Clara. Thanks a lot. For everything.”

His return trip was less precipitous. He was not eager to get home. Amy was bound to be waiting with some unimaginative new approach to the subject of marriage.

 

Seven: 3049 AD

The Main Sequence

 

“What’s the occasion?” benRabi asked. He had come home to find Amy clad only in a negligee. She had been playing body games all week. He supposed she was holding out in hopes lust would make him propose. She was going to be disappointed. He was not seventeen.

The tactic did not bode well for their relationship. There was no future in any relationship where one party practiced extortion upon the other. No one endured that for long. And benRabi had had his fill of it from Alyce, way back when.

Was this why he was so reluctant? Because Amy came on like a spoiled child?

Why did he resist it? If he was to make a life here he had to surrender to the culture. This one had scant tolerance for prolonged bachelorhoods.

Older singles tended to get shoved beyond the social fringes. He was out there now. And Mouse, for all the charm he exuded, was slipping too. The ladies were not buzzing round so much anymore. He had made it too clear that he was available for good times only, not for long times and old-style fidelity.

If Amy was the best available, why not?

Part of it was habit. He had been a loner for too long, caught up in a profession where responsibilities to anyone else made a deadly liability. That was why, through mission after mission, he had fought his growing friendship for Mouse.

He had failed at that, and Mouse had too. They saw so little of one another nowadays... That was a pity. Just when they had given in to it, life had taken a twist and spun them along separate paths.

That would end with his transfer to Security, wouldn’t it?

“There’s a bright side to everything, I guess,” he murmured.

Thinking about Mouse, he remembered their last evening together. He could have sworn Mouse had been hinting that he should do something about Amy. It was a damned conspiracy!

Why the hell would Mouse want him married? Mouse did not believe in the institution.

He should take the plunge. But not too soon. He could not let Amy get the idea that she could manipulate him.

He sat with his head in his hands, scurrying around the slot-tracks of an uncertain mind. The tracks did not always follow sane routes. There were moments when he did not know who or where he was. Sometimes he did not understand what was happening, or why. Sometimes he woke up thinking he was back on The Broken Wings, or in Luna Command. There had been a night when he had called Amy Max while they were making love... And a time when he had thought she was Greta... Frightening though they were, those had been isolated incidents. So far.

He and Amy made love fiercely, desperately.

She started getting dressed immediately afterward. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“You forgot? We’re supposed to have supper with the Sheik and his harem.”

“One thing I’m going to tell you right now, woman. And you better understand it. That man’s my friend. Learn to fly with it.” He had forgotten the dinner. Completely. There wasn’t a ghost of memory to be found anywhere in his head.

They joined Mouse and his shrinking clutch of dollies an hour later. BenRabi found his eye roving. Mouse had several honeys he would not mind topping himself. He dared not let Amy notice him looking. Any woman who got that jealous of a male friend...

This affair is headed for trouble, he thought.

Kindervoort appeared suddenly.

Jarl Kindervoort was a tall, lean man who reminded benRabi of Don Quixote, or the Pale Imperator in Czyzewski’s novel, His Banners Bright And Golden. Like Amy, and most Danion Seiners, he was pale, blond, and blue-eyed. BenRabi liked him as a person and found him physically repulsive. It was a combination he did not comprehend.

He did not quite understand Kindervoort’s position in the Danion scheme either. Kindervoort was, apparently, Amy’s immediate superior. Amy was only a Lieutenant, a low-grade officer, yet her boss seemed to speak for Danion’s whole Security force. The ship had a population matching that of a fair-sized city. Could the police force be that small?

Kindervoort had high cheekbones and a lantern jaw. They gave him a death’s head look. His pale eyes were seldom happy. He could have given Mouse lessons in cold stares. Yet he was a genuinely warm and caring person. He asked, “May I join you?”

“Sure, Jarl,” Mouse said. “Glad to have you.” Amy and benRabi nodded. Kindervoort settled down, plunged into his meal tray. He did not join the table banter. Neither did benRabi, though Amy brightened for a while and kept up with Mouse in a thrust and parry duel of the risqué and outré.

During his dessert Kindervoort asked, “You told him yet?”

“What? Oh. I forgot,” Amy replied.

“Told me what?” benRabi asked.

“We’re moving you to Security. Starting tomorrow. For the auction project.”

“Oh. That. I know.”

“Who told you?”

“I’m not stupid, Jarl. I may act it, but I’m a trained professional. I can see the signs and add the numbers.”

“Ah. Exactly. That’s why we want you on the auction thing. You’re a professional. And you know The Broken Wings. Payne’s Fleet has gotten the shove into the barrel this time. Payne thinks Danion should provide the protection for our auction crew. Off the record, I’d guess we get the auction because Gruber doesn’t want any Payne people with him at Stars’ End.”

“What? Stars’ End? Christ! I’m starting to hope a rogue singularity comes romping around and gobbles up that goddamned gun-runner’s pyramid like a big fat chocolate cherry.”

“Moyshe! What in the name of...”

“Jarl, you people are crazy. Every last one of you. I won’t stand around on the steps of the Senate screaming ‘Beware the Ides of March!’ but only because none of you whackos have got the sense to listen. It’s going to kill you. Can’t you get that through your thick heads? But what do I care? You’re only taking me down with you. All right. What do you want me on The Broken Whigs for?”

“Security shift leader down in AngelCity. Night shift. I picked your men already. I want you to start drilling them tomorrow. The feedback we get says it might get hairy.”

“What’d I tell you?” benRabi told Amy. To Kindervoort, “At the risk of sounding inane, why me?”

“You and Mouse both. Because you know the city.”

“Yeah. And he gets stuck with the other shift? Twelve hours at a crack. Wait. It’s only nine on The Broken Wings, but that’s bad enough, watch and watch with some guy around every corner waiting to burn you. You know what you’re asking us to walk into?”

“What?” Kindervoort would not meet his eye. He knew.

“Mouse killed her kids. I shot her here. And you let her get away. She’ll be there if she has to walk halfway across the galaxy. When she hears our fleet is going to handle it... It won’t matter if she can get her people’s okay. She’ll come, Kindervoort. With every goddamned thing she can lay hands on. Come to think of it, the Heads will probably back her even if they don’t like it. They’re going to be damned hot about what happened to the raidfleet at Stars’ End.”

“Anything else bothering you, Moyshe?”

“What?”

“I’d like to hear all your objections now. So we can get them out of the way ahead of time.”

“All right. Why trust me? I’m the man you caught leading Navy ships to your herd, remember?”

“Three points. One, you’re a convert. I saw your test results. Two, the Ship’s Commander recommended you. And the third I’d rather keep to myself.”

BenRabi tried to remember all the tests he had taken, both before and after deciding to remain with the Starfishers. They had seemed standard, but he might have missed something. “Typical security-type job? Three hours’ sleep and ten minutes for personals every day? Need them or not?”

“Probably.” Kindervoort smiled.

His smile did not have the desired effect on benRabi. Moyshe saw it as grim, not friendly.

“Then I’d better settle my affairs. Because I don’t expect to get through this one alive. I was going to put this off a few days. Mouse, want to be best man? Jarl, you can stand witness. Everybody’s invited. I’ll put on a party in my room afterwards. If we can come up with anything drinkable.”

Nobody said anything for several seconds. Mouse stared blankly. Kindervoort managed to appear both surprised and amused. Mouse’s girls just looked puzzled.

Amy showed a half dozen quick reactions. Lack of comprehension. Stunned disbelief. Shock. Distress that threatened to become anger. “It isn’t fair,” she murmured. She wanted a pompous, ostentatious Archaicist affair with all the splendor of old-time royal weddings. “You’re making fun of me.” Their friends knew how badly she wanted him to propose.

He had to reassure her quickly.

“Jarl, can we get it done now?”

“We could start in ten minutes if you’re serious.”

“Go ahead.”

“Moyshe, that isn’t fair!” Amy cried. “You never even asked me! And I’m not dressed for it and I haven’t got anything to wear and...” She had a whole list of ands and buts. BenRabi and Kindervoort waited till she got them out of her system.

“Do I call or not, Amy?” Kindervoort asked.

“Oh!” She hit the table with her fists. “Yes! Yes, dammit! Call him. Moyshe benRabi, you are the meanest, connivingest man I’ve ever known. How can you do this to me?”

“Hey! You’ve been all over me about it...”

“Isn’t love wonderful?” Mouse asked the air. Amy stopped bitching. Mouse had given her a look which warned her that she was pushing her luck.

The ceremony was not what she wanted. Moyshe kissed her and whispered, “If I get out alive, you’ll have the real thing. The big one you want. That’s a promise.”

After the reception began, Kindervoort pulled Mouse and benRabi aside. “Finally got some word on that failsafer.”

Back when the landside contractees had been boarding the service ship for return to Confederation a man had tried to kill them when it had become obvious that they were staying behind. He had suicided after missing. They had assumed he was a Bureau agent failsafing them.

“The autopsy finally got done,” Kindervoort said. “He was Sangaree.”

“Sangaree!” Mouse said it as if it were a swear word.

“Yes. And he did commit suicide. He was wearing a poison ring.”

“Nobody killed him? There wasn’t a second failsafer?” BenRabi shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It didn’t make sense when we thought there were two of them, and one got away,” Mouse said. “Looks to me like he was Strehltsweiter’s man, not the Admiral’s. Makes sense in that context. She wanted us pretty bad.”

“That’s the way I figured it,” Kindervoort said. “Till now I halfway thought it might have been a setup. To make you look more palatable. It doesn’t look that obvious anymore. I’m confused, though. She was in intensive care all the time. Isolated. How did she make contact? How did she relay the order, even assuming the failsafer was pre-programed? If you come up with any theories, let me know. I’d hate to think my own people helped her.”

“Uhm.” BenRabi glanced at Mouse.

Mouse shrugged. “I was sure he was Beckhart’s.”

“Ever heard of a Sangaree suiciding?”

“It happens. Borroway.”

“Those were kids. They didn’t have any other way out, and they knew too much.”

“He had to be programed.”

“What’s going on?” Amy demanded. “Consoling the victim, Mouse? You look like your best friend just died.”

“We’ll talk it out later, Mouse. No, we were just talking about something Jarl brought up. Sort of a puzzle. Let’s dance, honey.”

It was a zestless party. It did not last long. Neither did the honeymoon. Mouse dragged benRabi out early next morning.

“Hey. I’m supposed to be a newlywed.”

“Come on. You been tapping it for eight months. Getting married didn’t make it new. Jarl wants us. Time to go into training.”

BenRabi spent the next fourteen hours talking about AngelCity, studying maps, teaching the use of small arms in a coliseum cube that had been commandeered for the purpose.

His group consisted of twenty-five people. Mouse had another the same size. Mouse drilled his mercilessly in unarmed combat. His was the easier task. His students at least had some idea of what he was talking about.

BenRabi worked at it, but thought the Seiners were taking everything too damned seriously — despite his own admonition about how rough it could get.

He vacillated between a belief that they would find The Broken Wings hip deep in Sangaree and the opposing view, that Navy Security would be so tight that not one unfriendly would get through.

His fourth morning of teaching was interrupted by Kindervoort. “Moyshe. Sorry. Got to take you off this today. They’ve got a tour planned for citizenship applicants.”

“Can’t it wait? This auction won’t, and these clowns are so bad they couldn’t hurt themselves.”

“I argued. I got shouted down. I guess they think it’s important that you know what you’re fighting for.”

“Yeah? I never did before, and I did my job...”

“Oh. You’re bitter today.”

“Just frustrated. The more I see, the worse it looks. We’re going to get hurt if this thing goes Roman candle, Jarl. We won’t be ready.”

“Do the best you can. That’s all you can ever do, Moyshe.”

“Sometimes that’s not enough, Jarl. I want to do enough.”

“Make a vacation out of today. Just relax. I don’t think it’s that important. They’re supposed to show you what life’s like for Starfishers who don’t live on harvestships. Probably do you good to get away from Amy, too. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. She’s even bitchy around the office anymore.”

“You’ve known her longer than I have. You figure it out. You tell me.”

Mouse stalked in. “You ready, Moyshe? I scrounged a scooter. Let’s go before somebody liberates it back.”

 

Eight: 3049 AD

The Contemporary Scene

 

Hel did not belong. It was a Pluto-sized twerp of a straggler planet which, like an orphaned puppy, had taken up with the first warm body it had come across. When it did so, it set up for business too far from the unstable Cepheid it adopted. Even at perihelion in its lazy, eggy orbit it did not receive enough warmth to melt carbon dioxide.

Hel was a black eight ball of a world silver-chased by ice lying in the canyons of its wrinkled carcass. Its sun was but the brightest of the stars in its sky. No one would expect such a planet to exist, and no one would want to visit it if a suspicion of its existence arose.

Those were the reasons Confederation’s Navy Bureau of Research and Development considered Hel the perfect site for a bizarre, dangerous, and ultra-secret research project.

Hel Station lay buried in a mountain like a clam in sand. Its appendages reached the surface at just two points.

The Station was not meant to be found.

 

“Ion?”

Marescu was a sight. His waistcoat was soiled, ragged, and wrinkled. His hose was bagged and falling. His wig was askew. His facial makeup was caked and streaked.

“Ion?” Neidermeyer said a second time, catching his friend’s elbow. “You hear the news? Von Drachau is coming here.”

Marescu yanked his arm away. “Who?” At the moment he did not give a damn about anything, Paul’s news included. The agony was too much for mortal man to bear. He yanked a grimy silk handkerchief from a pocket, cleared the water from his eyes. Paul should not see his tears.

“Von Drachau. Jupp von Drachau. The guy who pulled off that raid in the Hell Stars a couple of years back. You remember. The commentators called him High Command’s fair-haired boy. They talked like he’d be Chief of Staff Navy someday.”

“Oh. Another one of your militarist heroes.” Marescu could set in abeyance the worst blues for a good fight about the Services. “Fascist lackey.”

Paul grinned, refused the bait. “Not me, Ion. I know you too well.”

No fight? Marescu faded off into his internal reality. Damn her eyes! How could she have done it? And with that... that blackamoor!

“Hey. Ion? Is something wrong?”

More than normal? Ion Marescu was Hel Station’s resident crank and grouch, its leading Mr. Blues and Vinegar. Most people shunned him unless work forced contact. He had one real friend, astrophysicist Paul Neidermeyer, a lady love named Melanie Bounds, and managed a certain strained formality with his boss, Kathe the Eagle. Everybody else was fair game for his vituperation.

“Von Drachau? He’s Line, isn’t he? Why would they tell a Line officer about this place? They planning on locking him up?”

“Ion. Man, what’s wrong? You look bad. Why don’t we take you down and get you a shower and a clean jumper?”

One of the curiosities of Ion Marescu was that he appeared to change personalities with his clothing. When he wore standard Navy work clothing he was almost tolerable. When he donned his Archaicist costume he became arrogant, argumentative, viper-tongued, and abnormally misty, as if half the time half of him truly did exist in eighteenth-century England.

Marescu paused before a mirror inset in the passage wall, ignoring the people trying to pass. “I do look a little ragged, don’t I?” he muttered. He adjusted his wig, straightened the ruffles at his throat, thought, I wish this were Georgian England. I could call the bastard out. Settle this crap with steel.

But you would not have done that with a Negro, would you? You’d have gotten some friends together and played dangle the darky from a tree limb. If you could have stood the shame of confessing to your friends.

Marescu was not one of Hel Station’s more polished Archaicists. The others had brought their costumes and research materials with them. He had taken up the hobby only after the isolation had begun to grind him down. He had sewn his own costume, with Melanie’s help.

He was more devoted than most Station Archaicists. He prided himself on that, as he prided himself on his contrariness, his crotchets, and the perfection of his work with the test programs. He liked to think that he was the best at whatever he did — including at making himself obnoxious. He seldom noticed the compensatory sloppiness he expressed in his personal habits and hobby.

He had not researched his period thoroughly. He winged most of it. His hobby-era values and beliefs were based on hearsay.

There were those who thought the dichotomy between a perfectionist work life and slovenly play life, taken far too seriously, was indicative of deep disturbance. Admiral Adler disagreed. She felt Marescu was all showoff.

Marescu started walking. He had forgotten Paul. Neidermeyer seized his arm again. “Ion, if I can’t help, who can? We’ve been friends for years.”

“It’s not something anybody can help with, Paul. It’s Melanie. I got off shift early. The quark tube was acting up. The strange positives and bottom negs were coming off almost a milli-degree out of track. They couldn’t inject them into their orbital shells... They shut down. She had Mitchell with her.”

Neidermeyer murmured an insincere, “I’m sorry.” He thought, so what? and wondered if Marescu was not getting a little too far out of touch. Maybe the staff psychologists should hear about this.

A man who started confusing the mores of now with those of his hobby period was more than a little unstable.

Ion always had been neurotic. Now he seemed to have become marginally psychotic.

“How could she do it, Paul?”

“Calm down. You’re shaking. Follow me, my son. What you need is a little firewater to settle the old nerves. Eh! None of that, now. Doctor’s orders. Drink up, then tell me about it and we’ll scope something out.”

“Yeah. A drink. Okay.” Marescu decided to get blotted. “Tell me about this von Dago.”

“Von Drachau. Rhymes with Cracow, like in Poland.”

“Poland? Where the hell is Poland?”

“Where they raise the Chinese pigs.” Neidermeyer grinned.

Marescu stopped walking. His thin little face puckered into a baffled squint. Seconds passed before the intuition that made him one of Confederation’s better test programers clicked. “The non sequitur game? We haven’t played in ages, have we? Poland. Chinese pigs. Poland China hogs... Isn’t that the strain they were talking about on that ag show the other day? They want to breed back to something extinct?”

“I don’t know what they smell like.”

“Okay, Paul. I’m all right now. Ease up. That was a weak one, anyway. Just give me the story on your mercenary hero.”

Neidermeyer refused the challenge. “I don’t know much. It’s just something I overheard at Security. They were chasing their tails getting ready. Guess it took them by surprise. We’re here. What’re you drinking?”

They stepped off the escalator into soft luminescence just bright enough to prevent stumbling over furniture.

The lounge had been designed to give an impression of being open to Hel’s surface. Its protective dome was undetectable. The lighting was too diffuse to glare off the glassteel. The dome itself pimpled from the flank of a mountain, overlooking dark peaks and cruel gorges. The Milky Way burned above, a billion-jeweled expanse of glory.

“Ever notice how it seems colder up here?” Marescu asked, for at least the hundredth time in their acquaintance. He stared out at the poorly illuminated skin of the dead world. The inconstant Cepheid sun hung behind a peak, limning it with a trace of gold. In its off moments that sun was little more noticeable than the brighter neighboring stars. “You pick it, Paul. I’m not particular today. But build it big.”

Neidermeyer collected brandy and glasses from behind the bar. “Francis must have gone down for the Security festival,” he said. A Marine with an unpronounceable Old Earther name, dubbed Francis Bacon by the research staff, usually tended bar. Security had very little to do most of the time, so filled time by trying to make the Station more endurable for everyone.

People came to Hel on a one-way ticket. Only the Director of Research and Chief of Security ever ventured off world. For security reasons there was no instel comm system available. Isolation was absolute.

“Brandy?” Marescu asked, startled. Paul was a whisky man.

“Old Earth’s best, Ion. Almost makes being here worthwhile.”

Marescu downed half a snifter at a gulp. “They ought to turn us loose now, Paul. We built their damned bombs. All we’re doing now is piddling around with make-work.”

“They won’t, though. Security. Won’t be any leaks as long as they keep us here.”

“Paul, how could she?”

“You knew she was...”

“When I got involved? I know. I keep telling myself. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less, Paul.”

“What can I tell you?”

Marescu stared into his empty snifter.

“Ion... Maybe you ought to ease up on the Archaicist thing. Try to get your perspective back.”

“The modern perspective sucks, Paul. You know that? There’s no humanity in it. You probably laugh at me because of this outfit. It’s a symbol, Paul. It’s a symbol of times when people did have real feelings. When they cared.”

“I’ve got feelings, Ion. I care about you. You’re my friend.”

“You don’t. Not really. You’re just here because having feelings bothers you.”

Neidermeyer glared. There were times when being Ion’s friend was work. Marescu refused to apologize. Paul took his brandy to the side of the dome. He stared at the indistinct hide of Hel. The critical question glared back from the serpent eyes of his own weak reflection.

Should Marescu be reported? Was he that far gone?

Nobody wanted to turn in a friend. The Psych people could lock him up forever. Their zoo of Hel-born mental mutations was a blue-chip growth industry.

The project was too delicate to risk its compromise by the unbalanced.

But the production team needed Ion. Nobody had his sure, delicate touch with the test systems. Best let it ride and hope he would come around. This thing with Melanie could be a positive if it jarred him back to reality.

Paul turned. He looked at a thin, short, weary little man who had a thousand years etched into his face and a million agonies flaring from his narrow little black eyes. Right decision? Those eyes were lamps of torment backfired by incipient madness.

Something rattled the foundations of the universe.

The snowy landscape glowed a deep, bloody red. The glow faded quickly.

Marescu turned an ashen color. He stumbled to the dome face, caressed it with shaking fingers. “Paul... That was damned close. They could have destabilized one of the test cores. We’d have been blown into the next universe.”

Fear had drained Neidermeyer’s face too. He mumbled, “But nothing happened.”

“I’m complaining anyway. They ought to have better sense.” Feeling the breath of the angel on his neck had snapped his streak of self-pity.

He stared into the darkness outside. A pale new light had begun etching the shadows more deeply. One brilliant point of light slid across the screen of fixed stars, growing more intense.

“They’re coming in fast.”

Hel’s surface was screaming under a storm of violet-white light when the dome polarized. The glass continued to respond to the light beating against it, its inner surface crawling with an iridescence like that of oil on water.

“Doctor Neidermeyer? Mister Marescu? Excuse me a moment.”

They turned. Marine Major Gottfried Feuchtmayer stood at the escalator’s head. He was Deputy Chief of Security, and a man who appeared to have just stepped out of a recruiting commerical. He was the quintessential Marine.

“Bet he wakes up looking like that,” Marescu muttered.

“What is it, Major?” Neidermeyer asked.

“We need your assistance in the arsenal. We need two devices for shipboard installation.”

Marescu’s stomach went fluttery. The butterflies donned Alpine boots and started dancing. “Major...”

“Briefing in Final Process in fifteen minutes, gentlemen. Thank you.”

Neidermeyer nodded. The Major descended the escalator.

“So,” Marescu snapped. “They’ll never use it, eh? You’re a fool, Paul.”

“Maybe they won’t. You don’t know... Maybe it’s a field test of some kind.”

“Don’t lie to yourself. No more than you already are. The damned bomb doesn’t need testing. I already tested it. They’re going to blow up a sun, Paul!” Ion’s mouth worked faster and faster. His voice rose toward a squeak. “Not some star, Paul. A sun. Somebody’s sun. The goddamned murdering fascists are going to wipe out a whole solar system.”

“Calm down, Ion.”

“Calm down? I can’t. I won’t! How many lives, Paul? How many lives are going to be blasted away by those firecrackers we’ve given them? They’ve made bloody fools of us, haven’t they? They suckered us. Smug little purblind fools that we are, we made ourselves believe that it would never go that far. But we were lying to ourselves. We knew. They always use the weapon, no matter how horrible it is.”

Paul did not respond. Marescu was reacting without all the facts. And saying things everyone else thought but did not say.

For the research staff, service at Hel Station had been a deal with the devil. Each scientist had traded physical freedom and talent for unlimited funding and support for a pet line of research. The Station was ultra-secret, but the knowledge it produced was reshaping modern science. The place seethed with new discoveries.

All Navy had asked for its money was a weapon capable of making a sun go nova.

Navy had its weapon now. The scientists had scrounged around and found a few Hawking Holes left over from the Big Bang, had pulled a few mega-trillion quarks out of a linear accelerator which circumscribed Hel itself, had sorted them, had stacked them in orbital shells around the mini-singularities, and had installed these “cores” in a delivery system. The carrier missile would perish in the fires of a star, but the core itself would sink to the star’s heart before the quark shells collapsed, mixing positives and negatives in a tremendous energy yield which would ignite a swift and savage helium fusion process.

Navy had its weapon. And now, apparently, a target for it.

“What have you done, Paul?”

“I don’t know, Ion. God help me if you’re right.”

The passageways were a-crawl with Marines, Marescu swore. “I didn’t realize there were so many of the bastards. They been breeding on us? Where’s everybody else?” The usual back and forth of technical and scientific staffs had ceased. Civilians were scarce.

At Final Process they were told to report to the arsenal instead.

They found three civilians waiting outside the scarlet door. The Director, though, was an R & D admiral in civilian disguise.

“This’s a farce,” Marescu growled at her. “Two hundred comic opera soldiers...”

“Can it, Ion,” Paul whispered.

The Director did not bat an eye. “They’re watching you, Ion. They don’t like your mouth.”

Marescu was startled. Ordinarily, even the Eagle did not bite back.

“What’s going on, Kathe?” Neidermeyer asked.

Marescu grinned. Kathe Adler. Kathe the Eagle. It was one of those nasty little jokes that drift around behind an unpopular superior’s back. Admiral Adler had a thin wedge of a face, an all-time beak of a nose, and a receding hairline. Never had a birthname fit its bearer so well.

“They’re taking delivery on the product, Paul. I want you to work with their science officers. Ion, you’ll prepare a test program for their shipboard computers.”

“They’re going to use it, aren’t they?” Marescu demanded.

“I hope not. We all hope not, Ion.”

“Shit. I believe that like I believe in the Tooth Fairy.” He glanced at Paul. Neidermeyer was trying to believe. He was like all the science staff. Keeping himself fed on lies.

“Ship’s down, Major,” a Marine Lieutenant announced.

“Very well,” Feuchtmayer replied.

“We’d better get lined out,” the Director said. “Paul, pick whomever you want to help. Ion, you’ll have to visit the ship to see what you’ll be working with. I want your preliminary brief as soon as you can write it. Josip, get with their Weapons officers and draw up the preparatory specs for carrying mounts and launch systems. Have the people in the shops drop everything else.”

Josip asked, “We have to build it all here?”

“From scratch. Orders.”

“But...”

“Gentlemen, they’re in a hurry. I suggest you get started.”

“They brought the whole ship down?” Paul asked. Ships seldom made planetary landings.

“That’s right. They don’t want to waste time working from orbit. That would take an extra month.”

“But...” That was dangerous business. The ship’s crew would stay crazy-busy balancing her gravity fields with the planet’s. If they made one mistake the vessel would be torn apart.

“It shouldn’t take more than twelve days this way,” Admiral Adler speculated. “Assuming we hit no snags. Let’s go.” She pushed through the red door.

The completed weapons had a sharkish, deadly look, looking nothing like bombs. The four devices were spaced around the arsenal floor. Each was a lean needle of black a hundred meters long and ten in diameter. They were longer than the shuttle craft intended to lift them to orbit. Antennae and the snouts of nasty defensive weapons sprouted from their dark skins like scrub brush from an old, burned slope.

They were fully automated little warships. The essentials of the nova bomb occupied space that would have been given over to crew in manned vessels. They were fast and shielded heavily enough to punch through a powerful defense.

The weapon remained largely theoretical. But the men who had created it were confident it would function.

Neidemeyer whispered to Marescu as they donned working suits, trying to convince his friend, and himself, that they were just gearing up for a field test. “I’m sure the money people just want to see if they’re getting any return on their investment,” he insisted. “You can’t blame them for wanting to try their new toy.”

“Yeah. Our hero von Drachau is going to take potshots at a couple of insignificant stars. Right?”

“Right.”

“You’re a fool, Paul.”

A band of strangers entered the arsenal. They stared at the four dark needles, clearly awed and a little frightened.

“That’s von Drachau on the right,” Paul whispered. “I recognize him from the holo. Only he looks a lot older.”

“Looks a little grey around the gills, I’d say.”

Von Drachau did look depressed. He spoke with the Major and Kathe Adler. Kathe led his party around one of the missiles. Von Drachau became more impressed.

There was something about the big, terrible ones that excited a resonance in the soul. It was almost a siren call. Marescu felt it himself each time he touched one of the monsters. He was ashamed of himself when he did.

“Little boys play with firecrackers, and big boys play with bombs,” he muttered.

“Ease up. Kathe meant it when she said they’re watching you. Feuchtmayer isn’t one of your big fans, Ion.”

“I’ll stay out of his way.”

The days whipped past. Technicians swarmed over the pair of weapons von Drachau selected. Marescu tested systems and supervised the installation of special shipping aids. Josip brought the missiles’ computation systems into communion with the battle computers aboard von Drachau’s ship. Technicians designed and installed adapters and links that would fit the securing rings and launch vanes going onto the belly of the warship.

Neidermeyer prepared a manual for the science officers responsible for arming the sunkiller and monitoring its gluon pulse in passage, watching for that tiny anomaly that might forecast the expansion of a quark shell into disaster.

Marescu could not believe there was so much to do. His shifts were long and demanding. He felt a lot of sympathy for Paul, whose personal research project seemed threatened with death by inattention.

Neidermeyer watched his friend more closely than he did the gluon pulse, hunting some telltale psychological anomaly. Marescu seemed almost too much in control, and had thrown himself into his work with a near-fanaticism that bespoke a very fragile stability fighting its last stand. Yet there were positive signs. Ion had shed the filthy Archaicist outfit. He had begun devoting more time to his personal appearance...

Then it was over.

Kathe Adler joined them in the lounge. “Let the firewater flow,” she proclaimed. “It’s time to say the hell with it and turn loose of the brass ring for a while.”

Marescu gave her an odd look.

The celebration became a premature New Year’s bash.

The pressure was off. The antagonisms went on the shelf for the day. Guilts got tucked away. Scientists and technicians made shows of comradeship with the Marines. A handful of von Drachau’s officers joined in, drinking lightly, listening to the jokes but seldom laughing.

“For them it’s just begun,” Ion murmured. He glanced around. No one had heard him.

Von Drachau was a focus of brooding gloom. He seemed to have sunk two-thirds into another universe. Ion watched him glare at Paul as if Neidermeyer were some small, venomous insect when Paul tried to strike up a conversation about the raid in the Hell Stars. Von Drachau disappeared only minutes later.

“Don’t think you made an impression, my friend,” Ion said.

Kathe agreed. “He’s sensitive about it, Paul. He’s a strange one. You should have heard the row he and Ion had.”

Marescu met Paul’s gaze. “It wasn’t any big thing. I came on a little too strong, that’s all.”

“What was it?” Neidermeyer asked.

“About the morality of using the weapon,” Kathe said. “Von Drachau is damned near a pacifist. Ion was pretty shook when he found out the man could adapt his convictions enough to let him use the weapon.”

“Ion’s problem is that he’s an absolutist. He’s got to have everything black or white. And he’s getting worse. Is there any way we can get him into therapy without having him committed?”

“You think there’s a reason to worry? His profiles keep coming up off-center, but they never show any danger.”

“Sometimes. Lately... He’s got a creepy feeling to him. Except for that argument with von Drachau, he’s swung too far away from what he was. I’m nervous about the backswing. Like I can hear the timer clicking. He might break loose going the other way.”

They had begun talking about Marescu as if he were not around for the very good reason that he was not, though neither of them had consciously marked his departure.

Kathe Adler had called von Drachau a crypto-pacifist, and Marescu had seen red. Literally. The dome and people went raggedly, liquid, and red. Then it was all clear. All perfectly clear. He had to go see Melanie and explain.

He was walking down a passageway. Time seemed to have passed. He had the distinct feeling that his head was on sideways. That mercenary von Drachau... The man had kicked the foundations out from under him. A flexible morality? How could there be such a thing? A thing was either right, or it wasn’t. The nova bomb was the most evil thing yet conceived by the military mind. And he had helped midwife that evil into this universe. He had allowed himself to be seduced... He had whored himself...

There had to be a way to show them what they were doing.

He shook his head violently. Things were foggy. A band seemed to be tightening around his temples. There was something wrong. He could not force his thoughts into a straight line.

For an instant he considered finding a Psych officer.

Von Drachau seemed to laugh at him again.

“You fascist bastard!”

Christ! Some Torquemada had taken another turn on the strap. His skull was creaking with the pressure.

“Where am I?” he blurted. His feet had been moving without conscious direction. He tried to concentrate on his surroundings. “What am I doing here?”

He wanted to turn and go back. His feet kept going in the direction he was headed. His hand pushed on Melanie’s door.

He was an alien, a passenger aboard a body under another’s control. He was a slightly panicky observer of actions being carried out by another creature.

The little gasps and grunts lashed that devil, punishing it like a wizard’s curse. He stared at the eight-limbed, twenty-toed beast. It heaved and lunged. Its four blind eyes rolled swiftly. Its three uncontrolled mouths made wet, hungry sounds.

The Ion of him silently screamed and turned inward, refusing to see any more. A darkness closed round it.

A clumsy puppeteer jerked him around, dragged him out the door and down the passageway with jerky, meandering, drunken steps. When next the Ion rider surfaced it found its steed in the arsenal, clad in its Georgian, bent over the computer board in the heavily shielded test control kiosk. The clock claimed that hours had vanished from his life. His hands and fingers were flying, a pair of pale white dancing spiders.

They were doing something dreadful. He did not know what, and they would not stop when he commanded them. He watched them like a baffled child watching slow death.

An image here, an image there, surged into his mind, playing back fragments of the missing hours. Ion Marescu crawled over a long black needle. Ion Marescu crouched beneath the needle, connecting the heavy cables that ran to the test station. Ion Marescu squeezed through the cramped interior of the black ship, removing safety chips...

“Ion?”

Paul’s voice barely penetrated the thick stressglass of the booth’s walls. He was screaming. Ion realized the yelling had been going on for a while. He glanced at Paul puzzledly, barely recognizing him. He did not stop working. This was the most important test he had ever run. For the first time in his life he was doing something of real worth. He had found himself a holy mission.

What was it? He shook his head, tried to clear the mists. They would not go.

His hands danced.

Kathe Adler joined Paul. They pounded the unbreakable glass with their fists. Then the woman fled. Paul grabbed a fire axe and swung away.

When Ion next glanced up, the vast arsenal floor was acrawl with Marines. Major Feuchtmayer had his pale face pressed against the glass directly in front of him. His lips writhed obscenely. He was screaming something. Ion had no time to listen. He had to hurry.

What the hell was going on out there? the observer part of him wondered.

He finished programing the test sequences.

Each weapon had to be run through a simulated plunge into Hel’s own sun. Ion usually performed the test series on a system-by-system basis, with the drive never operational and the safety chips preventing the weapon from going active. “How do we know the drive will work?” Marescu muttered. “We just take their word for it?”

Paul and the Marines stopped trying to break the glass with hand tools. Ion saw the Major laying a sticky grey rope of something round the door frame.

“Plastic explosives? My God! What are those madmen trying to do?”

His right hand depressed the big black palm switch that opened the arsenal’s huge exit doors. It was through those very doors that that hired assassin von Drachau had moved his two missiles to his ship.

People flung in all directions as the arsenal air burst into Hel’s eternal night. Baffled, Marescu watched their broken doll figures tumble and bloat.

His left hand danced, initiating the test sequences. The arsenal drowned in intense light. The stressglass of the booth polarized, but could not block it all. The sabotaged holding blocks fell away from the number four weapon. It dragged itself forward, off its dolly. It flung off clouds of sparks and gouged its spoor deep into the concrete floor.

“Wait a minute,” Ion said. “Wait a minute. There’s something wrong. It’s not supposed to do that. Paul? Where did you go, Paul?” Paud did not answer.

The black needle, its tail a stinger of white-hot light, lanced into the night, dwindled. The little star of it drifted to one side and downward as its homing systems turned its nose toward the target.

“What’s happening?” Marescu asked plaintively. “Paul?

What went wrong?”

The eye of the black needle fixed itself on Hel’s sun. It accelerated at 100 g.

And in the booth, where the atmospheric pressure had begun to fall, Ion Marescu realized the enormity of what he had done. With a shaking hand he took a suggestion form from a drawer and began composing a recommendation that, in future, all test programs be cross-programed in such a way that the activation of any one would automatically lock out the others.

 

“We have influence, Commander,” Lieutenant Callaway reported.

“Take hyper,” von Drachau replied. “And destroy that Hel astrogational cassette as soon as you have her in the hyper arc. For the record, gentlemen, we’ve never heard of this place. We don’t know anything about it and we’ve never been here.”

He stared into a viewscreen, slumped, wondering what he was, what he was doing, and whether or not he had been told the whole truth. The screen went kaleidoscopic at the instant of hyper-take, then blanked.

Seventeen minutes and twenty-one seconds later the sun of the world he had just fled felt the first touch of a black needle. The little manmade gamete fertilized the great hydrogen ovum. In a few hours the nova chain would begin.

There would be no survivors. Security allowed no ships to remain on Hel. The Station personnel could do nothing but await their fate.

And nowhere else did there exist one scrap of information on the magnificent, deadly weapon created at Hel Station. That, too, had been a Security-decreed precaution.

 

Nine: 3049 AD

The Main Sequence

 

Mouse drove down to the same departure station that had witnessed the Sangaree failsafer’s suicide. A half dozen bewildered former landsmen were there already. He and benRabi were last to arrive. All but one of the others were women.

“They haven’t shown yet, Ellen?” Mouse asked.

“No. Did you hear anything? You know what it’s about?”

“Not really.”

BenRabi tuned them out. He walked through those last few minutes before Kindervoort’s men had come to disarm Mouse and he had walked into the failsafer’s line of fire. He went to the spot where he had been standing, turned slowly.

“Jarl was here. Mouse was there. Bunch of people were there... They brought Marya’s intensive care unit down that way, before Jarl showed, and took her right into the service ship.”

He walked through it three times. He could not recall anything new. He had been distracted at the time. He had believed that Mouse was shanghaiing him, and had not wanted to leave. Then Jarl had distracted him...

“Hey, Mouse. Walk through this with me. Maybe you can think of something.”

A scooter rolled into the bay. A pair of unfamiliar Starfishers dismounted. “You the citizenship class?” the woman asked.

“Hello there,” Mouse said, like a man who had just crossed a ridgeline and spied all seven cities of Cibola.

The woman stepped back, her eyes widening.

“Must be Storm,” the man said. “My wife, Mister Storm.”

“Well... You win some, lose some. You don’t know till you try.”

“I suppose not. All right. Let’s check the roll, then get started. Looks like we’re good. We’ve got the right number of heads. All right. What we’re going to do is leave the ship through the personnel lock and line over to one of the work bays on one of the mooring stays. There’s zero gravity in the work area so you don’t have to worry about falling. Follow me.”

He went to a hatchway, opened it, stepped through. The future Seiner citizens followed.

Mouse tried hanging back, to get nearer to the woman.

BenRabi gouged his ribs. “Come on. Let her alone.”

“Moyshe, she’s driving me crazy.”

“She’s prime. Yes. And married, and we don’t need any more enemies.”

“Hey. It isn’t sex. I mean, she’s fine. Like you say, prime stuff. What I’m saying, though, is this is our shot at somebody from outside.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“She’s not from Danion.”

“How the hell do you know that?” BenRabi ducked through the third of the lock doors. “You’ve maybe been around the world here, but I don’t think you’ve gotten to them all. Not yet. We haven’t run into a hundredth of Danion’s people.”

“But the ones we have all came from the same mold. Oh, Christ!”

BenRabi slithered out of the ship. He stood on her skin, offering Mouse a hand. In both directions, as far as he could see, were tubes, cubes, spars, bars... Hectare on hectare of abused metal. Overhead, the laser-polished stone of the asteroid arched in an almost indiscernible bow. Danion’s outermost extremities cleared it by a scant hundred meters.

Those hundred meters had Mouse petrified.

Mouse was scared to death of falling. The phobia usually manifested itself during a liftoff or landing, when up and down had a more definite meaning.

“You all right?”

Storm was shaking. Sweat beaded his face. He shoved a hand out the hatch, twice, like a drowning man clawing for a lifeline.

The others were hand-over-handing it along a cable spanning the gap between ship and asteroid.

“Come on, Mouse. It won’t be that bad.” How the hell had he gotten through all the e. v. a. exercises and small boat drills they had had to endure in Academy?

Mouse’s phobia perpetually astonished benRabi. Nothing else fazed the man. Whining bullets and crackling lasers simply created the background noises of his work...

His work!

“Assassin’s mind, Mouse. Go into assassin’s mind.” The state approximated a meditational trance, except that while he was in it Mouse was one of the most deadly men who ever lived.

Was he too much out of practice?

Mouse’s shaking slowly subsided. His eyes became glassy.

“All right,” benRabi said. “Come on. Slow. Take the handholds and work your way over to the line. That’s good. Good. Now across to the balcony.”

Moyshe spoke softly, without inflection. In this state Mouse had to be handled gently. Anything could set him off. Anyone not programed in as Friendly could get broken up pretty bad.

The woman instructor overtook benRabi on the line. “What’s wrong with your friend?”

“He’s an acrophobe.”

“A Navy man?”

“I know. Be real careful for a few minutes. Keep the group away. He’s not very stable right now.”

He got Mouse onto the balcony, with his back to the vast mass of the ship, and talked him down. In five minutes Storm was asking, “You ever meet anyone on Danion who wasn’t blond with blue eyes?”

“Some. Not many.”

“Anybody with black blood?”

“No.”

“I rest my case.” Mouse surveyed the harvestship. “Damn, she took a beating.”

“Huh?”

“Different perspective, Moyshe. It’s not up and down from here.”

BenRabi scanned the battered ship. “Mouse, I think we’ve been set up.”

“What?”

“I thought it was a little weird, coming out the way we did. I was going to ask the lady why they didn’t have something better.” He pointed with his chin.

A half kilometer away a telescoping tubeway connected the ship with the rock face. BenRabi soon indicated a half dozen more connections. Each was large enough to use to drive heavy equipment onto and off the harvest-ship.

“Think they’re just working on you and me? Or the whole group?”

“Fly easy,” benRabi suggested.

“It’s my ass in a sling, Moyshe. I’ll be your basic model of decorum.”

“Are these two part of a plan?”

“Take it for granted. The question is, was it supposed to be obvious? Or are they just clumsy?”

“To quote a certain Admiral, who used to tell us what to do, ‘Just lay back in the weeds and let them show their hand.’ He was good at mixing metaphors.”

“How’s the writing going, Moyshe?”

They turned to follow the Seiner couple, who were shooing the others into a tunnel.

“I haven’t written a page in months. I don’t know why.”

“Time?”

“That’s part of it. But I always found time before.”

Atop all his other hobbies, benRabi dabbled at writing short fiction. Traveling to Carson’s from Luna Command, an eon ago, he had looked forward to the Starfisher mission as a vacation operation during which he could get a lot of work done. He had expected to stay a maximum of six weeks. The Admiral had promised... A year had passed, and he had completed one dreary story, the manuscript of which he had not seen in months.

Once they departed the central hollow of the asteroid they entered local artificial gravity. There was little visible difference between ship and shore.

“Oh, boy!” Mouse said. “More brand new same old thing. This is going to get boring in a few years, Moyshe.”

“Sorry you decided to stay?”

Mouse eyed him momentarily. “No.” His expression became a little strange, but benRabi paid it no attention.

“Look, Mouse. Kids. I haven’t seen any kids since we left Luna Command.”

“Hooray.”

“Come on, man. Look at that. Must be some kind of class tour.”

Twenty little girls around eight years old were giggling along behind an old man. The old man was explaining something in a crackling voice. Several of the girls were aping him behind his back. Some of the others were making faces at the mockers.

“Call me back in ten years,” Mouse said. “I got no use for them till they get ripe.”

“You have got to be the sourest...”

“It some kind of crime not to like kids? Speaking of which, I never saw you get along with any but Jupp’s boy and that Greta. And she was sixteen going on twenty-six.”

Jupp von Drachau had been their classmate in Academy. He was now High Command’s special errand boy. He had helped with their operation on The Broken Wings. Later, it had been his assignment to provide the firepower when it had come time to seize Payne’s Fleet. They had thought. His premature approach and detection had left them stranded for the full year they had contracted to work for the Seiners.

“Horst-Johann. I didn’t see him last time we were in Luna Command. That’s two years ago now. Damn, time flies. Bet he’s grown half a meter.”

Their male guide said, “People, we’ll lunch in one of the worker’s commons before we show you a typical creche. Don’t be shy. Visit. People here are as curious about you as you are about them. We’d appreciate it if you’d stay close, though. If one of you gets lost, we’ll both have trouble explaining.”

“Great,” Mouse said. “Still more brand new same old thing. Doesn’t anybody ever eat anywhere but in these goddamned cafeterias? I’d sell my soul for a go at a decent kitchen on my own.”

“You cook?”

“I’m a man of myriad talents, Moyshe. Think that’s what I’ll do when we hit The Broken Wings. Figure out how to make myself a home-cooked meal. And devour it in private. Not out in the middle of a goddamned football field with five thousand other people.”

“You’ve got one classic case of the crankies this morning, my friend.”

“I didn’t get any last night. Besides, I’m not patient with crap, and this whole field trip is main course horseshit without the hollandaise.”

The commons was as predictable as Mouse feared. So was the food. The conversation did not sparkle either, till Mouse took the offensive. “Grace, what’s the point of this exercise?”

“I don’t understand your question, Mister Storm.”

Moyshe grinned behind his hand. The woman was sensitive to that overpowering Mouse charm. She had become as decorous as a schoolteacher by way of compensation.

“This bullshit exercise. You dragged us away from work we don’t have time to get done right anyway. You run us out on a goddamned wire, then walk us all to hell and gone when we could have done the whole thing on a bus. You tell us we’re going to see how Seiners live when they’re not in the fleet, but you just show us the same old stuff. And since you’ve only kidnapped us for today, you’re not really serious about showing us anything. I mean, an idiot would realize that it would take weeks just to skim the surface of a civilization like yours.”

The woman’s dusky face darkened with embarrassment.

“I mean, here we sit, eight former landsmen, all with that much figured out, and all of us on our best behavior figuring it’s some kind of test or someone wants us off Danion for a while... Whichever, it’s dumb. You’re wasting our time and yours.”

“Mister Storm...”

“Don’t mind him,” Moyshe interjected. “It’s old age creeping up on him. He’s not as tolerant of games-playing as he used to be.”

Mouse grinned and winked. BenRabi grinned back.

Their guides surveyed the other landsmen. They said nothing, but aggravated agreement marked each of their faces.

“There’s no point in going ahead, then,” the male guide said. “Your response is data enough. Finish your meals. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared.

“What is the point?” benRabi asked.

Grace shrugged. “I just work here.”

“Psychologist?”

She was startled. “How did you know?”

“I can smell them. You really married to him?”

“No.” She laughed weakly. “He’s my brother.”

“Ooh.” Mouse said it softly. Only Moyshe heard.

“You swallow something radioactive, Mouse?”

“What?”

“You just started glowing.”

The lady psychologist was not immune. Mouse wangled a date before her brother returned. BenRabi did not doubt that Mouse would make the date an interesting experience.

He could not fathom Mouse’s method. Even knowing they were being manipulated, knowing Mouse’s reputation, women walked right in. Indeed, Mouse’s reputation seemed to make him more interesting.

Their guide returned. He deposited his half-finished tray on the conveyor to the sculleries. He waited impatiently while his flock followed suit. He scowled at Mouse, who had opened up with the big guns and had Grace laughing like a teenager at stories woollier than the mammoths they antedated.

“Style,” benRabi told himself. “That’s what he’s got.”

“Excuse me?” one of the ladies asked.

“Talking to myself, Ellen. It’s the only way to hold an intelligent conversation.”

“You think they’ll be mad at us because of this?”

“Maybe. More likely at each other. Like Mouse said, it was a dumb idea, no matter what the point was.”

“Unless it’s a cover.”

“That’s a possibility.”

The man had a bus waiting outside the cafeteria. In ten minutes it reached the departure bay they had left so laboriously earlier. By then Mouse was holding Grace’s hand. He had her purring and almost unable to wait till he got off work.

“Come on, Storm,” her brother snapped. “Back to your assigned department. The rest of you, go back to your jobs. Grace, for god’s sake...”

“Oh, shut up, Burt.”

“He’s got a name,” one of the ladies crowed. Mouse’s mutinous attitude was catching. The Seiners had tried to put something over on the landsmen and they were responding with a mocking camaraderie.

“Come on, Mouse,” Moyshe grumbled. “Let’s don’t start anything.”

“Right. At eight, Grace? Bye.” Storm bounced onto the scooter he had commandeered for the ride to the departure station. Moyshe took the seat behind him.

“New worlds to conquer, eh?”

“That’s one way of looking at it, Moyshe. This old one is starting to wear. They must have some kind of open contract on me. Some kind of bounty for the girl who cons me into the ‘I dos.’ They won’t take no for an answer. Not and stay friends. Weird people.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Kindervoort demanded when they strolled into the coliseum, where he was overseeing some especially poor marksmen.

“Surprise,” Mouse crowed. “The game was called on account of rain.”

“What’s he talking about, Moyshe?”

“It was some kind of dumb exercise. I’m sure you know what it was all about.”

“I told him it was stupid.”

“Who?”

“The Ship’s Commander. He’s up to something with you two. I don’t know what.”

“Remind him that one of the reasons I crossed over was because people wouldn’t play games with me here. I’d have a job I knew what it was. I’d have a place in the scheme. Tell him that if the crap keeps up, I hike my ass back to Contact and chain me to a couch. He can put his auction project where the sun don’t shine. It’s a stupid operation too.”

“Calm down, Moyshe. Just go back to your job.”

When Kindervoort turned away, Mouse said, “Good to see you stand up on your hind legs, Moyshe.”

“It takes me awhile to get fired up.”

“Like the man said, let’s go to work. We’ve got a long way to go with these clowns.”

The next morning, whispering with motionless lips as they hurried along a crowded passageway, Mouse said, “They used the time to fix us up with a new set of bugs, Moyshe. Very good stuff. Better than anything Kindervoort stocks. The kind that hook into a stress analyzer. They’re putting the big eye on us, Moyshe. From now on you’d better play safe, no matter where you are or who you’re with.”

“What would they be looking for? We don’t have anything to hide.”

“Who knows? But don’t forget that they’re looking.”

 

Ten: 3049 AD

The Main Sequence

 

BenRabi was trying to clip a couple of stubborn, noxious-looking hairs out of his right ear. Amy called, “Ready yet, honey?”

“Half a minute.” He had butterflies. He did not want to go. The stalls and arguments had run out, though. He had to meet Amy’s family. Such as it was.

He was about to be exhibited to her mother. A prime trophy, he thought. Former landsmen turned Seiner, on his way up. A prize for any single girl.

He had been getting that feeling from Amy. The new was wearing off. The magic was fading. He was becoming an object of value instead of one of emotion.

Was the problem his or hers? Was he reading her wrong? He always misinterpreted women.

“Moyshe, will you come on?”

He stepped out of the bathroom. “How do I look?”

“Perfect. Come on. We’ll be late for the shuttle.”

“I want to make a good impression.”

“Stop worrying. Mom would be happy with a warthog, so long as I was married.”

“Thanks a lot.”

A flash of the old Army returned. “Any time.”

They rode a scooter out one of the connecting tubes, into the halls of the asteroid. Amy slowed to pass a series of doors with temporary plaques hung on them, reading names Moyshe found meaningless. “We’re here.”

The plaque said stafinglas. Amy parked the scooter among a small herd nursing charger teats.

“What’s that mean? Stafinglas?” Moyshe asked.

“I don’t know. I think it’s made up.”

“That’s where your mother lives?”

Amy nodded. “We’ve got to hurry. They’ll start pumping the air out of the lock in a couple minutes. They won’t let us board after they start.”

Could he stall that long? He decided that would be a petty trick. Much as intuition warned him that the trip was a waste, it was important to Amy. The thing to do was grit his teeth and ride it out.

The shuttle was a small, boxy vessel useful for nothing but hauling passengers. The seats were full when Moyshe and Amy boarded. Dozens of people stood in the aisles. BenRabi recognized a few as Danion crewfolk.

“Lot of relatives of Danion people in this Stafinglas, eh?”

“Yes. The old harvestships are like family enterprises. Three or four generations have served in the same ship. It gets to be a tradition. Almost nobody ships outside their own fleet. They say that’s why we’re getting into this nationalistic competitiveness between fleets. There’s talk about having a computer assign new crews by lot.”

Moyshe smiled. “Bet that’s a popular idea.”

“Like the black plague.”

His feet hurt and his back ached before the shuttle reached its destination. It was a six-hour passage. He spent every minute standing.

Stafinglas was exactly what Moyshe expected. An asteroid with kilometer upon kilometer of broad tunnels which served as residential streets. “I’m home,” he told Amy. “It’s just like Luna Command.”

She gave him a funny look. “Really?”

“On a smaller scale.” He wanted to tell her it was not a natural or comfortable way to live. Instead, he asked, “You ever been down on a planet?”

“No. Why?”

“Just curious.” He could not explain. She did not have the experience to understand.

“Anything else I should know about your mother? I want to make a good impression.”

“Stop saying that,” Amy snapped. “Stick to literary things. You can’t miss. Duck an argument. She’s contrary as hell. She’ll start a fight just to find out how stubborn somebody is.”

He looked at her askance.

“We had some beauts when I was young. Nothing I did and nobody I knew was ever good enough. Talk libraries if you know anything about them. She’s librarian for Stafinglas.”

The more Amy talked about her mother the less he wanted to meet the woman. He had encountered dragons before. They rolled right over him.

“We’re here.” Amy stopped at a door, reluctant to take the last step.

“Well?”

Biting her lower lip, Amy knocked.

Four hours later they excused themselves to go out for lunch. Neither spoke till they had drawn their meal trays. As he settled at a table, Moyshe said, “Jesus, do I have a headache.”

“Headache? Not here?”

“Tension headache. Not migraine.” It had been bad. Much worse than he had expected. The woman was a classic. He glanced at Amy. Want to know what a woman will be like in twenty-five years? Have a good, long look at her mother.

“I’m sorry, Moyshe. I... I can’t even make excuses for her. There isn’t any excuse for that kind of behavior.”

“Uhm. Maybe I’d better get used to it. Maybe she was just saying what a lot of people think. Me and Mouse and the others may have to live with that the rest of our lives.”

“You should have fought back.”

“Would that have changed anything? No. It would’ve kept her going that much longer.”

Moyshe was still numb. As an Old Earther he had been fighting prejudice since entering the Navy. He had thought he possessed a thick hide. But never had he encountered anyone as virulent as Amy’s mother. Outworlders went through the forms of equality, keeping their prejudices subtle and silent. Amy’s mother was open and vicious and adamantine about hers. Neither suasion nor force would alter her thinking in the least.

She had disowned Amy before it was over.

“You want to try again?” Amy asked.

He was startled. “What?”

“She is my mother, Moyshe.”

He reached across the table, took her hand for a second. “I know.” She was doing her brave act to conceal her pain. “I know. I’ve got one too. And she isn’t that much different.”

“They want the best for you. And they think they’re the ones to decide what’s best.” Amy gulped several mouthfuls. “Mother never was good at expressing feelings positively. Maybe that’s why I’m a little weird. I spent a lot of time with her while I was growing up. She never qualified for fleet duty. That was the big disappointment of her life. Till we gave her something else to feel sorry for herself about.”

Amy almost never mentioned her father. All Moyshe ever learned was his name and the fact that he had been killed in an accident here in the nebula. Apparently, despite protestations to the contrary, Amy’s mother had found the accident convenient.

“We’d better not go back, Moyshe,” Amy decided. “Not today. Let’s give her a chance to calm down and get used to the idea.”

“Okay.”

They had to kill four hours before a shuttle became available. Moyshe thought Amy would use the time to visit old friends. She did not. She said all her real friends were aboard Danion. She became defensive. She did not want to face any more disapproval. The stay-at-home Seiners were, apparently, less cosmopolitan than the people of the harvestfleets.

Going back, Amy suggested, “If you want, tomorrow we can sneak over and see those alien ships. The research center isn’t that far.”

Moyshe perked up a little. “All right. That’s a good idea. I’ve been looking forward to it. What do we do about our work assignments?”

“I’ll take care of everything.”

Amy took sleeping pills as soon as they reached their cabin. Despite a long, long day, Moyshe was not in the mood for bed. He strolled down the passageway and awakened Mouse.

“How’d the get-together go?” Mouse asked. And, without awaiting an answer, “That bad, eh?”

“It’s a whole different world, Mouse. I thought I knew how to handle prejudice... I never saw anything like it. Her mother was the worst, but there was plenty everywhere else we went, too.”

“I know. Grace took me for a little tour this morning.”

“You guys got out of bed long enough?”

“Hey, you got to do something the other twenty-three hours of the day.”

“So tell me. And where’s the board? I’ve been here three minutes and I still haven’t seen a chess board.”

“Sorry.” Mouse grinned. BenRabi had accused him of being unable to relate with the human male unless a chess board was interposed. “Guess I’m preoccupied.”

“She show you anything interesting?”

“I’m not sure. You can’t break the habits of trade-craft. So you look and you listen. But you don’t find anything that gives you a handle on these people.”

“Where’d you go?”

“To some kind of office complex first. Like a government and trade headquarters. We hunked around there for five hours. They had everything out in the open... You know, like no confidential files or anything, and nobody getting excited because you pick up a paper and read it. You take white. But there wasn’t anything there. I mean, nothing anybody back home would give a damn about. I didn’t see a damned thing worth remembering.”

“What the hell kind of weird move is that?”

Mouse smiled. “Some Seiner pulled that on me the other day.”

“And lost.”

“Yeah. But I was better than him. Hey. You know what they’re doing? They’re getting ready to go back to Stars’ End.”

“That isn’t any secret.”

“No. But they’re so damned serious. I mean, Grace and I went to this one asteroid they were making into a dry-dock. After we left the other place. I got to talking to this engineer. Her husband is on the team that’s adapting a shuttle to piggyback the Stars’ End weapons to orbit.”

BenRabi raised his attention from the board. “Curious. Everywhere you go... They’re so damned sure of themselves, aren’t they?”

“Awfully. Maybe we’re too sure they can’t do it. Maybe they have an angle.” Mouse’s attention had left the board too. He seemed to have a question he was afraid to ask. Moyshe felt the intensity of it, boiling there behind his friend’s eyes.

“I’ve got a hunch that they do. Through the starfish, somehow.”

Mouse returned to the game. His unorthodox opening got him into trouble early. BenRabi had him on the ropes, but let him wriggle loose by making a too-eager move. It cost him a knight.

“You always did get too excited,” Mouse observed. “How has your head been?”

“I had a headache today. Just tension, though. Why?”

“Just asking.” A move later, “What I meant was that disorientation stuff you had because of the Psych program. Any trouble?”

“Not much. Not like it was, I have my moments. You know. Blanking out for a second, then coming back wondering where I am and who I am. They don’t amount to anything. They don’t last long enough for anybody to notice.”

“Good. I was scared when you were doing that Contact stuff. Thought you might get mixed up while you were in, and come back somebody else permanently.”

“You didn’t, by chance, have anything to do with getting me transferred, did you?”

“I would have if I’d thought I had the drag. For your own good. But I didn’t.” Mouse rose, indicated that Moyshe should follow him. He stepped into the passageway, tapping his ear.

“What is it?”

“Don’t want them to know I know this. The orders came from up top. Way up top. I know this woman who works in Communications. She told me a couple things she thought I already knew. Naturally, I played along.”

“Naturally. If it’s female, you’ll go along with anything.”

Mouse grinned. “One of these days I’ll tell you about the Admiral sending me to pimp school. Whoring isn’t the oldest profession. Pimping is. You’d be knocked on your ass if you saw what a really good pimp can do with women.”

“He sent you to school?”

“Yeah. Hell, Moyshe, it’s the oldest trick in the spy business. You teach a guy how to make a woman fall for him, then turn him loose on the women who work for the organization you want to penetrate.”

“I thought it worked the other way around. Women seducing men.”

“It’s done. It doesn’t work as well. Men don’t respond the same to emotional blackmail.”

“What did your friend have to say? We can’t stay out here too long.”

“Buddy, we’re headed for the top. Somebody upstairs has decided we’re the medicine Seiner foreign relations needs. This auction project is a test. If we come through, they’ll give us a shot at setting up our own secret service.”

BenRabi had had a few hints. He had formed a few suspicions. Still, he was not ready for the truth.

“A real fleetwide secret service. Inside and out. Intelligence and counter-intelligence. The works. For all the Starfishers. The way it sounds, they’ll give us anything we want and turn us loose. They’ve got friends landside who try to keep them informed. The friends have fed them enough, the last couple of years, to get them worried about what’s going on in Luna Command.”

“Ah. I begin to smell the rat. We’ve got connections. We could turn a few of our old buddies.”

“You’ve got it.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I was about to ask you, Moyshe.”

“After you.”

“All right.”

“All right. It would be a challenge. We’d be going head to head with the Old Man. It would be a hell of a match-up.”

BenRabi was not pleased. “I take it you’re excited.”

“Damned right I am. Not meaning to brag, but if we’d gone back, I’d have had Beckhart’s job eventually. He said so himself. And you’d have become my Chief of Operations. He thought we had what it takes, Moyshe. You see what I’m driving at?”

“I think so.” BenRabi was disappointed for a moment. There was not a shred of loyalty in Mouse. His attitude was wholly mercenary... What the hell am I crying about? he wondered. I started this side-changing stuff.

He cast Mouse a sharp glance. More and more, he suspected his partner had stayed here only because he had, not out of conviction. What did that mean when taken with this sudden enthusiasm for directing an organization targeted against their former employer? What had become of his obsession with destroying the Sangaree?

“So what I think you should maybe be thinking about,” Mouse said, “is how we could set it up. Who we should use, where we should keep our eyes open, like that. And structure, too. You’re more of a theorist than I am.”

“Communications would be the big problem, Mouse.” He tried not to take Mouse’s chatter seriously. The obstacles to creating an effective Seiner secret service were insurmountable. “How do you run an S or K net without communications? See what I mean? We’re out here and the targets are the hell and gone somewhere else. You and I were always where we could use a public comm if we had to. Or we could use the Navy nets. Say we got somebody into Luna Command. He finds out something we should know right now. What does he do? Run outside and yell real loud?”

“We’ll figure it out, Moyshe. Don’t worry about the details that way. Don’t be so negative all the time. Instead of saying, ‘It’s impossible,’ say, ‘How can we do it?’ Figure a way, then organize to fit it. Let’s get back in there before they get too suspicious.”

They exchanged a couple of moves. Moyshe said, “I yield. I would’ve had you this time except for that one stupid move.”

“It was a bad opening. I deserved to get stomped. Another game?”

“Just one. Then I’d better turn in. Amy’s sneaking me out for a look at their xeno-archaeological project tomorrow.”

“Wish I could go. But Jarl will have fits enough about you.”

 

The main research station was awesome.

“What they did,” Amy explained, “was take over one of the drydock asteroids. So they could study the ships inside.”

The planetoid was smaller than the one that had engulfed Danion, but still was vast. At least a hundred ships floated in its interior. Some were so alien their lines almost hurt the eye.

Around the inner face of the asteroid lay an office and laboratory level. It was roofed by a layer of glassteel. The researchers and their staffs could look up at the ships floating overhead. People in the bay could see what was going on in the offices and labs. The asteroid had been given spin along its longitudinal axis instead of using artificial gravity generators, which would have been in continuous imbalance by facing inward.

Moyshe and Amy entered through a lock in the asteroid’s end, and observed briefly from a lookout there. Moyshe was impressed. The line of ships marched on till it vanished in the distance.

“They bring them in this end,” Amy said. “They look them over, study them, and the ones that aren’t useful they move up the line.” She indicated a remote vessel. Tugs were guiding it away. “The far end is industrialized. The ships the scientists don’t want they break up for raw materials or refit for us to use. Let’s see if we can find a scooter.”

An hour later Amy introduced him to a woman named Consuela el-Sanga. “Consuela is an old friend, Moyshe. Consuela, Moyshe might be able to give you an idea or two.”

Consuela el-Sanga was a small, dusky woman in her early fifties. She bore the stamp of the preoccupied researcher, of a person who had devoted a lifetime to her curiosity. Moyshe liked her immediately, and as quickly felt a kinship. She was a shy, diffident individual in matters outside her expertise.

“Are you a xeno-archaeologist, Mister benRabi?”

“No. Amy’s exaggerating. I’m not even a gifted amateur. My only claim is that I followed the Lunar digs close till a year ago. I had a friend on the project.”

Darkness hit him. It had the impact of a physical blow. A woman’s face floated before him. He had not seen that face in years. Alyce. Academy love. The girl who had worked at the Lunar digs...

“Moyshe!” Amy sounded frightened. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

He held up a hand, patted at the air. “Okay. Okay. I’m okay.” He shook his head violently. “Just a delayed reaction to the spin here,” he lied. “I’ve never been in centrifugal gravity.”

Inside, panic. What the hell was this? It had not happened for months. He realized he was talking, and talking fast. “I was at the digs a year and a half ago. They’d just opened a new chamber, in almost perfect condition. They thought some of the machinery might still work.”

Amy and Consuela watched him carefully. “You sure you’re all right?” Amy asked.

“Sure. Sure. Miss el-Sanga, what could I do to help?”

“I really don’t know. We could walk you through one of the ships we think relates to the Lunar base, for a layman’s opinion. We’re sure there was a connection, but, because of politics, we can’t work with the people there.”

“It’s a pity, too.”

“Come along. We’ll start with artifacts recovered from the ships. So you’re married now, Amy.”

BenRabi caught an odd note in what could have been either statement or question. He gave the women a closer look. There was a slight tenseness between them, as if there had been more to their relationship than friendship and shared interests. He filed it in the back of his mind.

“Took me long enough, didn’t it?” Amy tried to sound light. She failed.

The moment of disorientation had turned something on inside Moyshe. His mind went to work agent-wise. The cameras rolled. The cross-reference computer clicked. His surroundings took on more depth, more meaning. They became brighter and more interesting. His movements became quicker and more assured.

“This is what we laughingly call the museum,” Consuela el-Sanga said, pausing before opening a door. “It’s not, really. It’s just a storage room. Whoever those people were, they didn’t leave much behind. Mostly just trash. But that’s all archaeologists ever have to work with. Broken points, potsherds, and whatever else the ancients threw out behind their huts.”

Moyshe moved up and down rows of metal shelves. They contained hundreds of items, each tagged with a date, ship number, inventory number, and brief guess as to what the object might be. Some were referenced to other inventory numbers.

Twice he paused, reexamined an item, said, “I saw something like this at the Lunar digs. I’d say there’s a definite connection.”

The second time, Consuela el-Sanga responded, “Not necessarily. Parallel function. Say a comb. Any creature with hair would invent a comb. Wouldn’t you say? So the existence of a comb wouldn’t prove anything but a common physical trait.” And when Moyshe finished with the racks and shelves, she said, “Now into my office. I’ll show you our two real treasures.”

Moyshe and Amy followed her through another door.

“You haven’t seen these either, Amy. We found them while you were out. They were both part of the same find.”

Consuela El-Sanga took two plastic cases from her desk. She handled them with loving care.

Moyshe accepted one, Amy the other. The item benRabi held was a piece of paper that had been torn into small fragments. A very few faded marks were visible.

“Is it a photograph?” Amy asked.

“Good guess,” Consuela said. “We had a hell of a time with them.” Moyshe traded with Amy. The second object was an extremely faded, flat, two-dimensional photo. It had been torn in two.

Consuela continued, “First we pieced all the tears together. Then we did scans with low-intensity lasers and computer enhancements. We came up with these.” The woman glowed with pride as she handed over reproductions of the items.

The photo, in color, was of a creature very similar to the Lunar dig reconstructions. BenRabi said as much. The other object appeared to be a hand-written letter.

“Any luck interpreting this?” Moyshe asked.

“No. We haven’t even determined which direction it’s supposed to be read.”

“You haven’t found any technical manuals or anything?”

“Not a speck. Just a few characters on nameplates, stuff like you’d find around instrumentation and doors on any ship. Any time there’s more than three characters, they’re arranged in matrices like these.”

“Maybe they had a holographic system for reading.”

“No. Doesn’t go with a two-d photo. We don’t think.”

“Very interesting,” Moyshe said, studying the picture again. “A Dear John letter? And the guy, or gal, gets mad and tears up the lover’s letter and picture, but then can’t bear to part with the pieces?”

“That’s one of our hypotheses.”

Moyshe scanned the letter. “Thirty-four different characters here. Some punctuation?”

“Don’t try to figure it out in your head. Even the computers can’t get a handle on it. Just think how hard it would be to break our language without a starting clue. Big letters, little letters, script, punctuation, spelling variations by dialect, different type faces, all the stylized lettering and special symbols we use for technical stuff... You see? We’d need a whole ship full of old letters, novels, and newspapers to break it. Not just a few plaques on an instrument panel.”

“Don’t worry, Consuela,” Amy said. “We’ll be into Stars’ End soon. You’ll find your answers there.”

“If I’m lucky enough to go. They haven’t picked the science team yet. I’m worried.”

“You’ll go. You’re the best.”

BenRabi looked at the woman and slowly shook his head. That Stars’ End insanity again.

“I don’t know what I’d do if they turned me down, Amy. It’s my whole life. I’m not getting any younger. And they might use my age to keep me home.”

“Don’t worry. You know they can’t leave you behind. There’s nobody better than you. And they know how much it means to you.”

“How soon, Amy? Do you know?”

“It hasn’t been decided yet. But it won’t be long. A month or two.”

Consuela brightened. “You’re sure they’ll send me?”

“Of course. Don’t be silly.”

“That’s what I am, you know. A silly old woman.”

Amy enfolded her in gentle arms. “No you’re not. No you’re not. Come on, now. Show us one of those ships.”

Consuela el-Sanga led them to a little four-place air scooter, flew them out to a vessel. BenRabi felt lightheaded in the lack of gravity. “I feel like I could fall all the way to the end,” he said, staring down the length of the hollow.

The ship was one of the least alien of those in the lineup. “Form follows function,” Moyshe muttered, remembering the Luna Command constructs, which had very much resembled small human beings.

The ship’s lock was open. Consuela made fast, led them inside. She was small, but even she had to stoop in the passageways.

Moyshe wandered around for an hour. He finally summed up his impressions by observing, “It’s not that strange. Just kind of dollhouse. Like it was built for children. You can figure out what half the stuff is. It’s just parked places we consider weird.”

“You said it yourself, form follows function,” Consuela replied. “We’ve done comparative studies between these, Sangaree, Ulantonid, and our own ships. The physical requirements of bipeds appear to be universal. Scales seem to be the most noticeable difference.”

“That ship two ahead of this one. What built it? A giant slug?”

“We don’t know. It’s funny. There’s something almost repulsive about it. You have to work yourself up to it if it’s your turn to study it. It’s like the alienness oozes out of the metal. It’s more of a mystery than the other ships. It’s almost contemporary, if our dating technique is valid. It shows battle damage. It’s the only one of its kind we’ve ever located. It was as clean as these others. One of my colleagues believes the crew were forced to abandon ship after an accidental encounter during some crisis period, like the Ulantonid War, when everyone was shooting at anybody who didn’t yell friend fast enough. Curiously, though, it was surrounded by a whole squadron of our little friends here.”

“Enemies?”

Consuela shrugged. “Or purely chance. The ships aren’t contemporary with one another. What were they doing together? There aren’t enough books to write down all the questions, Mister benRabi. It gets frustrating sometimes.”

“I can imagine. Could the crew have been studying the old ships when they were attacked by a third party?”

“That’s a possibility we hadn’t considered. I’ll bring it up...”

“Consuela?” someone shouted into the vessel. “Is that you in there?”

“Yes, Robert. What is it?”

“Somebody’s looking for those people who came to see you. A man named Kindervoort. He sounded pretty excited.”

“Oh-oh,” Amy said. “I’m in trouble now. I thought he wouldn’t notice. Consuela, I’d better call him.”

She placed the call from Consuela’s office. Jarl foamed at the mouth and ordered them to return to Danion. Now. He snarled at benRabi, “Moyshe, I don’t care if you cut those nitwit citizenship classes. They’re a waste of time anyway. But you’re not ducking out on the training schedule. Now come back here and get your men ready. You’ve got the rest of your life to look at old ships. The auction is now.”

Amy was quiet throughout the return passage. Once she whispered, “He’s really going to give it to me,” and clutched Moyshe’s hand. She was shaking.

“He’s an amateur,” benRabi told her. “You haven’t been chewed out till you’ve taken it from Admiral Beckhart.” A moment later he grinned and added, “But if it’s private, he lets you yell back.”

Soon after they returned they heard that another of the great harvestfleets was entering the nebula. The news generated a fresh air of excitement aboard Danion.

One by one, the harvestfleets came in. Scores of fresh, eager young faces appeared aboard Danion as graduates of Seiner technical schools filled the billets of people lost at Stars’ End. The howl and hammer of repairs went on around the clock. The excitement and tension continued to mount.

They were going back. This time in full strength, and to stay. A prideful, nationalistic, bellicose mood gripped the fleets.

Moyshe benRabi and Masato Storm pursued their instruction of the teams they would direct on The Broken Wings. Their days were long and exhausting. Moyshe often tumbled into bed without enough energy left for a good-night kiss.

He began to feel the pressure. It started to intrude into his sleeping hours. He began to dream of the girl he had left behind, so long ago. He suffered more momentary lapses of attention while he was awake.

He began to grow frightened of what might be going on back in the nether reaches of his mind.

 

Eleven: Christmas 3049 AD

The Contemporary Scene

 

Tension gripped the bridge of the attack cruiser Lepanto. “One minute to drop,” the astrogation officer announced.

Jupp von Drachau scanned his people. They were poised like runners in the blocks, awaiting the crack of the starter’s pistol. They would have to grab an enormous fund of data in a few brief minutes.

Lepanto was coming up to an enemy star. There was no way of guessing what might be waiting. Detection gear would not work from hyper unless initial detection had been made in norm. The cruiser was going in blind.

No one knew the capabilities of the Sangaree detection systems. Operating from norm, they would not have the same handicap. A force might be moving toward the drop zone now.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Stand by, Weapons,” von Drachau ordered. “Button up, people.” He sealed the faceplate of his own helmet.

One quick drop to get his bearings, then a short arc in to the fringes of the Sangaree sun...

“Five seconds. Four. Three.”

The figures on the bridge hunched forward a centimeter more.

“One. Drop.”

“Screens up.”

“Commander, heavy vessels bearing...”

“Display active.”

“Three ships bearing...”

“Range to star one point three two a. u...”

“We have a local inherent velocity of...”

“Attack missiles bearing...”

“Bridge. Weapons. Launching two salvos.”

The vessel shuddered and rocked. Von Drachau stared at the display tank. Six red blips had come to life there. They sped along projected curves which would bring them within spitting distance of Lepanto. Tiny ruby pinpoints raced ahead, toward the cruiser.

“... time to intercept forty-seven seconds...”

The hyper alarm commenced its hooted warning to the crew. “Time to hyper one minute,” a voice boomed.

Someone said, “Commander, we’ve located the planet.”

“Bring me up a visual.”

“Aye, sir.”

Von Drachau’s command screen came to life. For an instant it displayed a computer graphic of the local solar system. The schematic yielded to a visual from an external camera. It showed a white third-crescent. The amplification rose quickly, revealing a world heavy with clouds and seas. “Looks a lot like Old Earth,” von Drachau murmured.

“Yes sir.”

“Are you taping?”

“We’re getting everything we can, sir.”

“Twenty seconds to hyper.”

Von Drachau glanced at the display tank. The missile salvos were driving closer. Weapons Department was not bothering with anything but defensive fire. Considering the nature of the mission, engaging a handful of raidships was pointless. “Anything near that sun?” he asked.

“No sir. We have a lot of activity near and on the planet.”

That made sense. The Sangaree would be scrambling everything in fear that Lepanto might be the spearhead of a thrust against their Homeworld. That was the doom they had dreaded for centuries.

“Hyper in five seconds. Four.”

Von Drachau did not think these picket ships would jump with him. They should await the rest of a suspected battle fleet.

“One. Taking.”

The universe shifted. Screens went blank. The display tank, cued in norm, remained active. Von Drachau stared, willing the Sangaree raidships to remain where they were.

“One minute to drop.” Astrogation had programed a very short, slow arc.

Von Drachau reached back into his soul, searching for any wisp of feeling that might bear on the orders he had to give. He did not want to do this thing. Every cell of him protested. And yet... And yet he knew too much. He knew the critical importance of obtaining results. And he had his own orders.

“Special Weapons Party, stand by.”

His orders would be a formality. The pre-launch program had begun an hour ago. The only significant command he could give now would be the abort.

He checked the tank again.

“Damn!” They were coming. Their detection gear was good. They knew no one else was coming in right away. “Looks like we knocked over a beehive,” he said. The six raidships from the drop zone were being joined by a horde quartering in from the planet.

“Twenty seconds till drop.”

It would be a narrow squeak, making the launch and getting clear in time. And some of them would chase him all the way home... “Astrogation, program your next jump for Carson’s.” He did not want to lead the pursuit too close to the action on The Broken Wings.

“Sir?”

“Pull the cassette and reprogram.” An attack squadron would be on station near Carson’s. He could scoot in and cling to its protective skirts.

“Yes sir.”

“Drop.”

“Special Weapons Party, launch when ready.”

There. It was too late to take it back. Too late to keep from having to live with it the rest of his life.

“Special Weapons launch in three minutes, twelve seconds,” launch party captain replied.

“What’s the holdup? We’ve got Sangaree crawling up our backs.”

“Sorry, sir. A coupling jammed.”

“Long range hunter missiles bearing...”

“Visuals, please,” von Drachau said. His screen came to life. “Show me the star.”

In a second he was staring at an endless plain of fire. Broad continental reaches of darkness lay upon it. The star appeared to be passing through a period of heavy sunspotting. But, as he remembered it, the Sangaree home star was supposed to be highly active, with exceptionally intense solar winds.

“Two minutes to special launch.”

Von Drachau checked the display tank. The Sangaree were coming on in a mob. They were not organized, but there were too many of them. Lepanto wouldn’t have a prayer in a heads-up fight.

“Astrogation, how’s your program coming?”

“Five minutes, sir.”

“We don’t have five minutes. Make it a basal arc that’ll drop us in the neighborhood. Do your fine calculation during the fly.”

“Yes sir.”

“... to intercept fifty-two seconds.”

Von Drachau glared at the tank. They would have missiles in their pockets by launch time. Power weapons would be pounding Lepanto’s energy screens. “Damn!”

It looked bad.

“Time to launch one minute.”

The bridge watch took on that hunchbacked look of people anticipating the kiss of the whip. Sixty lousy seconds. That could make a damned short life. Mayflies lasted longer.

“... to intercept fourteen seconds.”

That was close. And the next salvo would be closer.

“Astrogation. One millisecond free hyper straight linear,” von Drachau snapped.

“Sir?”

“Do it!”

The alarm hooted as the ship lurched.

The Ship’s Commander’s screen returned to life. The Sangaree sun had moved. He could see a horizon line. It had no curvature.

Weapons Department howled. They had to reprogram.

“So do those boys over there. Special Weapons. Time to launch.”

“Thirty-two seconds, sir.”

“Missiles bearing two five-niner relative, one two degrees nadir. Time to intercept two six seconds.”

Von Drachau sighed. That was right on the line. “Gentlemen, we’re going to make it.”

The bridge watch did not relax. They knew his remark was half prayer. The tank proclaimed that in its totally unambiguous display. A saturation barrage was hurtling toward them.

And it was a long, long run back to friendly space.

“Ten seconds to launch.”

And there was the problem of the weapon safely reaching target. If the Sangaree sniped it, Lepanto would have to try again. A second pass could get hairy.

Lepanto shuddered and lurched. Someone yelled, “That was too goddamned close!”

“Two. One. Launch. Weapon away.”

The warship lurched again. “One tenth second free hyper straight linear!” von Drachau ordered. “Detection, lock on that weapon. I want to know if it makes it.”

The cruiser dodged. Von Drachau shifted attention between display tank and screen, following the weapon into the sun.

Sangaree missiles had no chance to catch it. Scores of laser and graser weapons probed for it, caressed it with their deadly tongues.

“Telemetry. How are its screens holding?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

Lepanto rocked. Time was running out.

“She’s in, sir. They can’t stop her now. Her sun screens are stable.”

“Astrogation, get us out of here.”

“You still want an observation pass, sir?” R & D had asked them to hang around and study the results.

“The hell with that noise! Get out of here before they barbecue us.”

The hyper alarm hooted. The ship twisted away into an alternate dimension. Von Drachau turned to the display tank.

“Some of them are good,” he murmured. “Very good.”

Four vessels had caught the trail already, and were coming hard.

“Drive. Run your influence factor to the red line.”

“Sir!”

“You heard me. You’ll take it over if you have to. Stand by for it.”

“Yes sir.”

Von Drachau glanced at the sun shape dwindling in the display tank. The weapon would be sinking toward its heart. The killing process would begin in a few hours. He turned into himself again, looking for his feelings. All he found was a big vacancy, an arid desert of the soul.

He did not think much of Jupp von Drachau just then.