Inconstant Star

Larry Niven, Poul Anderson

Produced by calibre 0.6.40

INCONSTANT STAR

Poul Anderson

Copyright © 1990 by Poul Anderson

Chapter I

A hunter’s wind blew down off the Mooncatcher Mountains and across the Rungn Valley. Night filled with the sounds of it, rustling forest, remote animal cries, and with odors of soil, growth, beast. The wish that it roused, to be yonder, to stalk and pounce and slay and devour, grew in Weoch-Captain until he trembled. The fur stood up on him. Claws slid out of their sheaths; fingers bent into the same saber curves. He had long been deprived.

Nonetheless he walked steadily onward from the guard point. When Ress-Chiuu, High Admiral of Kzin, summoned, one came. That was not in servility but in hope, fatal though laggardness would be. Something great was surely afoot. It might even prove warlike.Eastward stretched rangeland, wan beneath the stars. Westward, ahead, the woods loomed darkling, the game preserve part of Ress-Chiuu’s vast domain. Far and high beyond glimmered snowpeaks. The chill that the wind also bore chastened bit by bit the lust in Weoch-Captain. Reason fought its way back. He reached the

Admiral’s lair with the turmoil no more than a drumbeat in his blood.

The castle remembered axes, arrows, and spears. Later generations had made their changes and additions but kept it true to itself, a stony mass baring battlements at heaven. After an electronic gate identified and admitted him, the portal through which he passed was a tunnel wherein he moved blind. Primitive instincts whispered, “Beware!” He ignored them. Guided by echoes and subtle tactile sensations, his pace never slackened. Ress-Chiuu always tested a visitor, one way or another.

Was it a harder test that waited in the courtyard? No kzin received Weoch-Captain. Instead hulked a kdatlyno slave. It made the clumsy gesture that was as close as the species could come to a prostration. However, then it turned and lumbered toward the main keep. Obviously he was expected to follow.

Rage blazed in him. Almost, he attacked. He choked emotion down and stalked after his guide, though lips remained pulled off fangs.

Echoes whispered. Corridors and rooms lay deserted. Night or no, personnel should have been in evidence. What did it portend? Alertness heightened, wariness, combat readiness.

A door slid aside. The kdatlyno groveled again and departed. Weoch-Captain went in. The door closed behind him.

The room was polished granite, austerely furnished. A window stood open to the wind. Ress-Chiuu reclined on a slashtooth skin draped over a couch. Weoch-Captain came to attention and presented himself. “At ease,” the High Admiral said. “You may sit, stand, or pace as you wish. I expect you will, from time to time, pace.”

Weoch-Captain decided to stay on his feet for the nonce.

Ress-Chiuu’s deceptively soft tones went on: “Realize that I have offered you no insult. You were met by a slave because, at least for the present, extreme confidentiality is necessary. Furthermore, I require not only a Hero they are many but one who possesses an unusual measure of self-control and forethoughtfumess. I had reason to believe you do. You have shown I was right. Praise and honor be yours.”

The accolade calmed Weoch-Captain’s pride. It also focused his mind the more sharply. (Doubtless that was intended, said a part of his mind with a wryness rare in kzinti.) His ears rose and unfolded. “I have delegated my current duties and am instantly available for the High Admiral’s orders,” he reported.

Shadows dappled fur as the blocky head nodded approval. “We go straight to the spoor, then. You know of Werlith-Commandant’s mission on the opposite side of human-hegemony space.” It was not a question. “Ill tidings: lately a human crew stumbled upon the base that was under construction there. They came to investigate the sun, which appears to be unique in several ways.”

Monkey curiosity, thought Weoch-Captain. He was slightly too young to have fought in the war, but he had spent his life hearing about it, studying it, dreaming of the next one. His knowledge included terms of scorn evolved among kzinti who had learned random things about the planet where the enemy originated.

Ress-Chiuu’s level words smote him: “Worse, much worse. Incredibly, they seem to have destroyed the installations. Certain is that they inflicted heavy casualties, disabled our spacecraft, and went home nearly unscathed. You perceive what this means. They conveyed the information that we have developed the hyperdrive ourselves. All chance of springing a surprise is gone.” Sarcasm harshened the voice. “No doubt the Patriarchy will soon receive ‘representations’ from Earth about this ’unfortunate incident.‘ ’

Over the hyperwave, said Weoch-Captain’s mind bleakly. Those few black boxes that the peace treaty provided for, left among us, engineered to self-destruct at the least tampering.

Well did he know. Such an explosion had killed a brother of his.

Understanding leaped. If the humans had not yet communicated officially “May I ask how the Patriarchs learned?”

“We have our means. I will consider what to tell you.” Ress-Chiuu’s calm was giving way ever so little. His tail lashed his thighs, a pink whip. “We must find out exactly what happened. Or, if nothing else, we must establish what the situation is, whether anything of our base remains, what the Earth Navy is doing there. Survivors should be rescued. If this is impossible, perhaps they can be eliminated by rays or missiles before they fall into human grasp.”

“Heroes ”

“Would never betray our secrets. Yes, yes. But can you catalogue every trick those creatures may possess?” Ress-Chiuu lifted head and shoulders. His eyes locked with Weoch-Captain’s. “You will command our ship to that sun.”

Disaster or no, eagerness flamed. “Sire!”

“Slow, slow,” the older kzin growled. “We require an officer intelligent as well as bold, capable of agreeing that the destiny of the race transcends his own, and indeed, to put it bluntly ” he paused “one who is not afraid to cut and run, should the alternative be valiant failure. Are you prepared for this?”

Weoch-Captain relaxed from his battle crouch and, inwardly, tautened further. “The High Admiral has bestowed a trust on me,” he said. “I accept.”

“It is well. Come, sit. This will be a long night.”

They talked, and ransacked databases, and ran tentative plans through the computers, until dawn whitened the east. Finally, almost jovially, Ress-Chiuu asked, “Are you exhausted?”

“On the contrary, sire, I think I have never been more fightworthy.”

“You need to work that off and get some rest. Be-sides, you have earned a pleasure. You may go into my forest and make a bare-handed kill.”

When Weoch-Captain came back out at noontide, jaws still dripping red, he felt tranquil, happy, and, once he had slept, ready to conquer a cosmos.

Chapter II

The sun was an hour down and lights had come aglow along streets, but at this time of these years Alpha Centauri B was still aloft. Low in the west, like thousands of evening stars melted into one, it cast shadows the length of Karl-Jorge Avenue and set the steel steeple of St. Joachim’s ashimmer against an eastern sky purpling into dusk. Vehicles and pedestrians alike were sparse, the city’s pulsebeat quieted to a murmur through mild summer air day’s work ended, night’s pleasures just getting started. Munchen had changed more in the past decade or two than most places on Wunderland. Commercial and cultural as well as political center, it was bound to draw an undue share of outworlders and their influence. Yet it still lived largely by the rhythms of the planet.

Robert Saxtorph doubted that that would continue through his lifetime. Let him enjoy it while it lasted. Traditions gave more color to existence than did any succession of flashy fashions.

He honored one by tipping his cap to the Liberation

Memorial as he crossed the Silberplatz. Though the sculpture wasn’t old and the events had taken place scarcely a generation ago, they stood in history with Marathon and Yorktown. Leaving the square, he sauntered up the street past a variety of shop windows. His destination, Harold’s Terran Bar, had a certain venera-bility too. And he was bound there to meet a beautiful woman with something mysterious to tell him. Another tradition, of sorts?

At the entrance, he paused. His grin going sour, he well-nigh said to hell with it and turned around. Tyra Nordbo should not have made him promise to keep this secret even from his wife, before she set the rendezvous. Nor should she have picked Harold’s. He hadn’t cared to patronize it since visit before last. Now the very sign that floated luminous before the brown brick wall had been expurgated. A World On Its Own remained below the name, but humans only was gone. Mustn’t offend potential customers or, God forbid, local idealists.

In Saxtorph’s book, courtesy was due everyone who hadn’t forfeited the right. However, under the kzinti occupation that motto had been a tiny gesture of defiance. Since the war, no sophont that could pay was denied admittance. But onward with the bulldozer of blandness.

He shrugged. Having come this far, let him proceed. Time enough to leave if la Nordbo turned out to be a celebrity hunter or a vibrobrain. The fact was that she had spoken calmly, and about money. Besides, he’d enjoyed watching her image. He went on in. Nowadays the door opened for anybody.

As always, a large black man occupied the vestibule, wearing white coat and bow tie. What had once made some sense had now become mere costume. His eyes widened at the sight of the newcomer, as big as him, with the craggy features and thinning reddish hair. “Why, Captain Saxtorph!” he exclaimed in fluent English. “Welcome, sir. No, for you, no entry fee.”

They had never met. “I’m on private business,” Saxtorph warned.

“I understand, sir. If somebody bothers you, give me the high sign and I’ll take care of them.” Maybe the doorman could, overawing by sheer size if nothing else, or maybe his toughness was another part of the show. It wasn’t a quality much in demand any more.

“Thanks.” Saxtorph slipped him a tip and passed through a beaded curtain which might complicate signaling for the promised help, into the main room. It was dimly lit and little smoke hung about. Customers thus far were few, and most in the rear room gambling. Nevertheless a fellow at an obsolete model of musicomp was playing something ancient. Saxtorph went around the deserted sunken dance floor to the bar, chose a stool, and ordered draft Solborg from a live servitor.

He had swallowed a single mouthful of the half liter when he heard, at his left, “What, no akvavit with, and you a Dane?” The voice was husky and female; the words, English, bore a lilting accent and a hint of laughter.

He turned his head and was startled. The phone at his hotel had shown him this face, strong-boned, blunt-nosed, flaxen hair in a pageboy cut. That she was tall, easily 180 centimeters, gave no surprise; she was a Wunderlander. But she lacked the ordinary low-gravity lankiness. Robust and full-bosomed, she looked and moved as if she had grown up on Earth, nearly two-thirds again as heavy as here. That meant rigorous training and vigorous sports throughout her life. And the changeable sea-blue of her slacksuit matched her eyes…

“American, really. My family moved from Denmark when I was small. And I’d better keep a clear head, right?” His tongue was speaking for him. Angry at himself, he took control back. “How do you do.” He offered his hand. Her clasp was firm, cool, brief. At least she wasn’t playing sultry or exotic. “Uh, care for a drink?”

“I have one yonder. Please to follow.” She must have arrived early and waited for him. He picked up his beer and accompanied her to a privacy-screened table. Murky though the corner was, he could make out fine lines at the corners of her eyes and lips; and that fair skin had known much weather. She wasn’t quite young, then. Late thirties, Earth calendar, he guessed.

They settled down. Her glass held white wine. She had barely sipped of it. “Thank you for that you came,” she said. “I realize this is peculiar.”

Well, shucks, he resisted admitting, I may be seven or eight years older than you and solidly married, but any wench this sightly rates a chance to make sense. “It is an odd place to meet,” he countered.

She smiled. “I thought it would be appropriate.” He declined the joke. “Over-appropriate.” “Ja, saa?” The blond brows lifted. “How so?”

“I never did like staginess,” he blurted. His hand waved around. “I knew this joint when it was a raffish den full of memories from the occupation and the tag-end of wartime afterward. But each time I called at Wunderland and dropped in, it’d become more of a tourist trap.”

“Well, those old memories are romantic; and, yes, some of mine live here too,” she murmured. Turning straightforward again: “But it has an advantage, exactly because of what it now is. Few of its patrons will have heard about you. They are, as you say, mostly tourists. News like your deeds at that distant star is sensational but it takes a while to cross interstellar space and hit hard in public awareness on planets where the societies are different from yours or mine. Here, at this hour of the day, you have a good chance of not to be recognized and pestered. Also, because people here often make assignations, it is the custom to ignore other couples.”

Saxtorph felt his cheeks heat up. What the devil! The schoolboy he had once been lay long and deeply buried. Or so he’d supposed. It would be a ghost he could well do without. “Is that why you didn’t want my wife along?” he asked roughly.

She nodded. “You two together are especially conspicuous, no? I found that yesterday evening she would be away, and thought you would not. Then I tried calling you.”

He couldn’t repress a chuckle. “Yah, you guessed right. Poor Dorcas, she had no escape from addressing a meeting of the Weibliche Astroverein.” He’d looked forward to several peaceful hours alone. But when the phone showed this face, he’d accepted the call, which he probably would not have done otherwise. “After she got back, I took her down to the bar for a stiff drink.” But he’d kept his promise not to mention the conversation. Half ashamed, he harshened his tone. “Why’d you do no more than talk me into a, uh, an appointment?” He hadn’t liked telling Dorcas that he meant to go for a walk, might stop in at some pub, and if he found company he enjoyed male, she’d taken for granted would maybe return late. But he’d done it. “Could you not have gone directly to the point? The line wasn’t tapped, was it?”

“I did not expect so,” Tyra answered. “Yet it was possible. Perhaps a government official who is snoopish. You have legal and diplomatic complications left over, from what happened at the dwarf star.”

Don’t I know it, Saxtorph sighed to himself.

“There could even be undiscovered kzinti agents like Markham, trying for extra information that will help them or their masters,” she continued. “You are marked, Captain. And in a way, that am I also.”

“Why the secrecy?” he persisted. “Understand, I am not interested in anything illegal.”

“This is not.” She laid hold of her glass. Fingers grew white-nailed on its stem, and trembled the least bit. “It is, well, extraordinary. Perhaps dangerous.”

“Then my wife and crew have got to know before we decide.”

“Of course. First I ask you. If you say no, that is an end of the matter for you, and I must try elsewhere. I will have small hope. But if you agree, and your shipmates do, best that we hold secret. Otherwise certain parties they will not want this mission, or they will want it carried out in a way that gives my cause no help. We present them a fait accompli. Do you see?”

Likewise tense, he gulped at his beer. “Uh, mind if I smoke?”

“Do.” The edges of her mouth dimpled. “That pipe of yours has become famous like you.”

“Or infamous.” He fumbled briar, pouch, and lighter out of their pockets. Anxious to slack things off: “The vice is disapproved of again on Earth, did you know? As if cancer and emphysema and the rest still existed. I think puritanism runs in cycles. One periodicity for tobacco, one for alcohol, one for Ah, hell, I’m babbling.”

“I believe men smoke much on Wunderland because it is a symbol,” she said. “From the occupation era. Kzinti do not smoke. They dislike the smell and seldom allowed it in their presence. I grew up used to it on men.” She laughed. “See, I can babble too.” Lifting her glass: “Skaal.”

He touched his mug to it, repeating the word before remembering, in surprise: “Wait, you people generally say, ‘Prosit,’ don’t you?”

“They were mostly Scandinavians who settled in Skogarna,” Tyra explained. “We have our own dialect. Some call it a patois.”

“Really? I’d hardly imagine that was possible in this day and age.”

“We were always rather isolated, there in the North. Under the occupation, more than ever. Kzinti, or the collaborationist government, monitored all traffic and communications. Few people had wide contacts, and those were very guarded. They drew into their neighborhoods. Keeping language and customs alive, that was one way they reminded themselves that humans were not everywhere and forever slaves of the rat-cats.” Speaking, Tyra had let somberness come upon her. “This isolation is a root of the story I must tell you.”

Saxtorph wanted irrationally much to lighten her mood. “Well, shall we get to it? You’d like to charter the Rover, you said, for a fairly short trip. But that’s all you said, except for not blanching when I gave you a cost estimate. Which, by itself, immediately got me mighty interested.”

Her laugh gladdened him. “I’m in luck. Is that your American folk-word? Exactly when I need a hyperdrive ship, here you come with the only one in known space that is privately owned, and you admit you are broke. I confess I am puzzled. You took damage on your expedition ” Her voice grew soft and serious. “Besides that poor man the kzinti killed. But the harm was not else too bad, was it? And surely you have insurance, and I should think that super-rich gentleman on We Made It, Brozik, is grateful that you brought his daughter back safe.”

Saxtorph tamped his pipe. “Sure. Still, losing a boat is fairly expensive. We haven’t replaced Fido yet. Plus lesser repairs we needed, plus certain new equipment and refitting we decided have become necessary, plus the fact that insurance companies have never in history been prompt and in-full about anything except collecting their premiums. Brozik’s paid us a generous bonus on the charter, yes, but we can’t expect him to underwrite a marginal business like ours. His gratefulness has reasonable limits. After all, we were saving our own hides as well as Laurinda’s, and she had considerable to do with it herself. We aren’t really broke, but we have gone through a big sum, on top of normal overhead expenses, and meanwhile haven’t had a chance to scare up any fresh trade.” He set fire to tobacco and rolled smoke across his palate. “See, I’m being completely frank with you.” As he doubtless would not have been, this soon, were she homely or a man.

Again she nodded, thoughtfully. “Yes, it must be difficult, operating a tramp freighter. You compete with government lines for a market that is marginal, you said. When each planetary system contains ample raw materials, and it is cheapest to synthesize or recycle almost everything else, what actual tonnage goes between the stars?”

“Damn little, aside from passengers, and we lack talent for catering to them.” Saxtorph smiled. “Oh, it might be fun to carry nonhumans, but outfitting for it would be a huge investment, and then we’d be locked into those rounds.”

“You wish to travel freely, widely. Freighting is your way to make it possible.” Tyra straightened. Her voice rang. “Well, I offer you a voyage like none ever before!”

Caution awoke. He’d hate to think her dishonest. But she might be foolish no, already he could dismiss that idea she might be ill-informed. Planetsiders seldom had any notion of the complications in spacefaring. Physical requirements and hazards were merely the obvious ones. In addition, you had to make your nut, and avoid running afoul of several admiralty offices and countless bureaucrats, and keep every hatch battened through which the insurers might slither. “That’s what we’re here to talk about,” Saxtorph said. “Only talk. Any promises come later.”

The high spirits that evidently were normal to her sank back down. They must have been struggling against something stark. She raised her glass for a drink, gulp rather than swallow, and stared into the wine. “My name means nothing to you, I gather,” she began, hardly louder than the music. “I thought you would know. You have told how you are often in this system.”

“Not that often, and I never paid much attention to your politics. I’ve got a hunch that that’s what this is about.” Her fingers strained together. “Yah. Politics, a disease of our species. Maybe someday they’ll develop a vaccine against it. Grind politicians up and centrifuge the brains. Though you’d need an awful lot of politicians per gram of brains.”

A smile spooked momentarily over her lips. “But you must have heard a great deal lately. You are now in politics yourself.”

“And working free as fast as we can, which involves declining to get into arguments. Look, we came to Alpha Centauri originally because this is where the Interworld Space Commission keeps headquarters, with warehouses full of stuff we’d need for Professor Tregennis’ expedition. We returned from there to here because Commissioner Markham had revealed himself to be a kzinti spy and we figured we should take that news first to the top. It plunked us into a monstrous kettle of hullaballoo. Seeing as how we couldn’t leave before the investigations and depositions and what-Godhelpus-not else were finished, we got the work on our ship done meanwhile at Tiamat. At last they’ve reluctantly agreed we didn’t break any laws except justifiably, and given us leave to go. In between wading through that swamp of glue and all the mostly unwanted distractions that notoriety brought us, we kept hoping our brokers could arrange a cargo for whenever we’d be able to haul out. Understandably, no luck. We were pretty much resigned to returning empty to Sol, when you Well, you can see why we discouraged anything, even conversation, that might possibly have gotten us mired deeper.”

“Yes.” She tensed. “I shall explain. The Nordbos belonged to the Freuchen clan.”

“Hm? You mean you’re of the Nineteen Families?”

“We were,” she said in a rush, overriding the pain he heard. “Oh, of course today the special rights and obligations are mostly gone, the titles are mostly honorary, but the honor does remain. After the liberation, a court stripped his from my father and confiscated everything but his personal estate. He was not there to defend himself. The best we were able, my brother and I and a handful of loyal friends, that was to save our mother from being tried for treasonable collaboration. We resigned membership in the clan before it could meet to expel her.”

Saxtorph drew hard on his pipe. “You believe your father was innocent?”

“I swear he was!” Her breath went ragged. “At last I have evidence no, a clue A spaceship must go where he went and find the proof. Civilian hyperdrive craft are committed to their routes, and their governments control them in any case, except for yours. Our navy My brother is an officer. He has made quiet inquiries. He actually got a naval astronomer to check that part of the sky, as a personal favor, not saying why. Nothing was found. He tells me the Navy would not dispatch a ship on the strength of a few notes that are partial at best.”

And that could well have been forged by a person crazy-desperate for vindication, Saxtorph thought. She admits the instrumental search drew a blank.

Tyra had won to a steely calm. “Furthermore, thinking about it, I realized that if the Navy should go, it would be entirely in hopes of discovering something worthwhile. They would not care about the honor of Peter Nordbo, who was condemned as a traitor and is most likely long dead.”

“But you have your own reputation to rescue,” Saxtorph said gently.

The fair head shook. “That doesn’t matter. Neither Ib, my brother, nor I was accused of anything. In fact, at the liberation, he was among those who tried to storm the Ritterhaus where the kzinti were holding out, and was wounded. I told you, he has since become a naval officer. And I… helped the underground earlier, in a very small way, for I was very young then, and during the street fighting here I worked at a first aid station. Ach, the court said how they sympathized with us. We must have been one reason why they never formally charged my mother. That much justice got we, for she was innocent too. She could not help what happened. But except for those few real friends, only Ib and I ever again called on her, at that lonely house on Korsness.”

The musicomp man set his instrument to violin mode with orchestral backing and played a tune that Saxtorph recognized. Antique indeed, from Earth before space-flight, sugary sentimental, yet timeless, “Du kannst nicht treu sein.” You can’t be true.

Tyra’s gaze met his. “Yes, certainly we wish to rejoin the Freuchens, not as a favor but by birthright. And that would mean restoring us the holdings, or compensation for them; a modest fortune. But it doesn’t matter, I say. What does is my father’s good name, his honor. He was a wonderful man.” Her voice deepened. “Or is? He could maybe be alive still, somewhere yonder, after all these years. Or if not, we could maybe avenge him.”

The wings of her pageboy bob stirred. He realized that she had laid her ears back, like a wolf before a foe, and she was in truth of the old stock that conquered this planet for humankind.

“Easy, there,” he said hastily. “Rover’s civilian, remember. Unarmed.”

“She should carry weapons. Since you discovered the kzinti have the hyperdrive”

“Yah. Agreed. I wanted some armament installed, during this overhaul. Permission was denied, flat. Against policy. Bad enough, a hyperdrive ship operating as a free enterprise at all. Besides, I was reminded, it’s twenty years since the kzinti were driven from Alpha Centauri, ten years since the war ended, and they’ve learned their lesson and are good little kitties now, and it was nasty of us to smash their base on that planet and do in so many of them. If they threatened our lives, why, mightn’t we have provoked them? In any event, the proper thing for us to have done was to file a complaint with the proper authorities ” Saxtorph broke off. “Sorry. I feel kind of strongly about it.”

He avoided describing the new equipment that was aboard. Perfectly lawful, stuff for salvage work or prospecting or various other jobs that might come Rover’s way. He hoped never to need it for anything else. But he and his shipmates had chosen it longsightedly, and made certain modifications. Just in case. Moreover, a spacecraft by herself carried awesome destructive potentialities. The commissioners were right to worry about one falling into irresponsible hands. He simply felt that the historical record showed governments as being, on the whole, much less responsible than humans.

“Anyway,” he said, “under no circumstances would we go looking for a fight. I’ve seen enough combat to last me for several incarnations.”

“But you are serious about going!” she cried.

He lifted a palm. “Whoa, please. First describe the situation. Uh, your brother’s in the Navy, you said, but may I ask what you do?”

Her tone leveled. “I write. When liberation came, I had started to study literature at the university here. Afterward I worked some years for a news service, but when I had sold a few things of my own, I became a free-lance.”

“What do you write? I’m afraid I don’t recognize your byline.”

“That is natural. Hyperdrive and hyperwave have not been available so long that there goes much exchange of culture between systems, especially when the societies went separate ways while ships were limited by light speed. I make differing things. Books, articles, scripts. Travel stuff; I like to travel, the same as you, and this has gotten me to three other stars so far. Other nonfic-tion. Short stories and plays. Two novels. Four books for young children.”

“I want to read some… whatever happens.” Saxtorph forbore to ask how she proposed to pay him on a writer’s income. He couldn’t afford a wild gamble that she might regain the family lands. Let the question wait.

Pride spoke: “Therefore you see, Captain, Ib and I

are independent. My aim his, if I can persuade him is for our father’s honor. Even about that, I admit, nothing is guaranteed. But we must try, must we not? We might become what the Nordbos used to be. Or we might become far more rich, because whatever it is out yonder is undoubtedly something strange and mighty. But such things, if they happen, will be incidental.“

Or we might come to grief, maybe permanently, Saxtorph thought. Nonetheless he intended to hear her out. “Okay,” he said. “Shall we stop maneuvering and get down to the bones of the matter?”

Her look sought past him, beyond this tavern and this night. Her muted monotone flowed on beneath the music. “I give you the background first, for by themselves my father’s notes that I have found are meaningless. Peter Nordbo was twelve years old, Earth reckoning, when the kzinti appeared. He was the only son of the house, by all accounts a bright and adventurous boy. Surely the conquest was a still crueler blow to him than to most dwellers on Wunderland.

“But folk were less touched by it, in that far-off northern district, than elsewhere. Travel restrictions, growing shortages of machines and supplies, everything forced them into themselves, their own resources. It became almost a… manorial system, is that the word? Or feudal? Children got instruction from what teachers and computer programs there were, and from their parents and from life. My father was a gifted pupil, but he was also much for sports, and he roamed the wilderness, hunted, took his sailboat out to sea

“Mainly, from such thinly peopled outlying regions, the kzinti required tribute. The Landholders must collect this and arrange that it was delivered, but they generally did their best to lighten the burden on the tenants, who generally understood. Kzinti seldom visited Gerning, our part of Skogarna, and then just to hunt in the forests, so little if any open conflict happened. When my father reached an age for higher education, the family could send him to Munchen, the university.

“That was a quiet time also here. The humans who resisted had been hunted down, and the will to fight was not yet reborn in the younger generation. My father passed his student days peacefully, except, I suppose, for the usual carousals, and no doubt kzin-cursing behind closed doors. His study was astrophysics. He loved the stars. His dream was to go to space, but that was out of the question. Unless as slaves for special kzinti purposes, no Wunderlanders went any longer. The only Centaurian humans in space were Belters, subjugated like us, and Resistance fighters. And we never got real news of the fighters, you know. They were dim, half-real, mythic gods and heroes. Or, to the collaborationists and the quietists, dangerous enemies.

“Well. My father was… twenty-five, I think, Earth calendar… when my grandfather died a widower and Peter Nordbo inherited the Landholdership of Gerning. Dutiful, he put his scientific career aside and returned home to take up the load. Presently he married. They were happy together, if not otherwise.

“The position grew more and more difficult, you see. First, poverty worsened as machinery wore out and could not be replaced. Folk must work harder than ever before to stay alive, while the kzinti lessened their demands not a bit, which he must enforce. Resentment often went out over him. Then later the kzinti established a base in Gerning. It was fairly small, mainly a detector station against raids from space, for both the Resistance and the Solarians were growing bolder. And it was off in the woods, so that personnel could readily go hunting in their loose time. But it was there, and it made demands of its own, and now folk met kzinti quite commonly, one way or another.

“That led to humans being killed, some of them horribly. Do you understand that my father must put a stop to it? He must deal with the ratcats, make agreements, be useful enough that he would have a little influence and be granted an occasional favor. Surely he hated it. I was just eight years old on your calendar when he left us, but I remember, and from others I have heard. He began to drink heavily. He became a bad man to cross, who had been so fair-minded, and this made him more enemies. He worked off a part of the sorrow in physical activity, which might be wildly reckless, steeplechasing, hunting tigripards with a spear, sailing or skindiving among the skerries. And yet at home he was always kind, always loving the big, handy, strong, sympathetic man, with his songs and jokes and stories, who never hurt his children but got much from them because he awaited they would give much.”

Saxtorph was smoking too hard; his mouth felt scorched. He soothed it with beer. Tyra proceeded:

“I think he turned a blind eye on whatever underground activities arose in Gerning, or that he got wind of elsewhere. He could not risk joining them himself. He was all that stood between his folk and the kzinti that could devour them. Instead, he must be the subservient servant, and never scream at the devils gnawing in his soul.

“But I believe the worst devil, because half an angel, was the relationship that developed between him and Yiao-Captain. This was the space operations officer at the defense base in Gerning. Father found he could talk to him, bargain, persuade, better than with any other kzin. Naturally, then, Yiao-Captain became the one he often saw and… cultivated. I am not sure what it was about him that pleased Yiao-Captain, although I can guess. But Ib remembers hearing Father remark to Mother, more than once, that they were no longer quite master and slave, those two, or predator and prey, but almost friends.

“Of course folk noticed. They wondered. I, small girl at home, was not aware of anything wrong, but later I learned of the suspicions that Father had changed from reluctant go-between to active collaborationist. It was in the testimony against him, after liberation.”

Tyra fell silent. The long talk had hoarsened her. She drank deep. Still she looked at what Saxtorph had never beheld.

Gone uneasy, he shifted his weight about, minor though it was on this planet, and sought his stein. The beer was as cool and strong as her handshake had been. He found words. “What do you think that pair had in common?” he asked.

She shook herself and came back to him. “Astrophysics,” she answered. “Father’s abiding interest, you know. It turned into one of his consolations. He built himself an observatory. Piece by piece, year by year, he improvised equipment.” Humor flickered. “Or scrounged it. Is that your American word? Scientists under the occupation were as expert scroungers as everybody else.” Once more gravely: “He spent much time at his instruments. When he had gotten that relationship with Yiao-Captain remember, he mostly used it to help his tenants, shield them he arranged for a link to a satellite observatory the kzinti maintained. It had military purposes, but those involved deep scanning of the heavens, and Father was allowed a little time-sharing.” Her voice went slightly shrill. “Was this collaboration?”

“I wouldn’t say so,” replied Saxtorph, “but I’m not a fanatic.” Nor was I here, enduring the ghastlinesses. I was an officer in the UN Navy, which was by no means a bad thing to be during the last war years. We managed quite a few jolly times.

With a renewed steadiness that he sensed was hard-held, Tyra continued: “It seems clear to me that Yiao-Captain shared Father’s interest in astrophysics. As far as a kzin would be able to. They are not really capable of disinterested curiosity, are they? But Yiao-Captain could not have foreseen any important result. I think he gave his petty help and encouragement easy to do in his position for the sake of the search itself.

“And Father did make a discovery. It was important enough that Yiao-Captain arranged for a ship so he could go take a look. Father went along. They were never seen again. That was thirty Earth years ago.”

By sheer coincidence, the musician changed to a different tune, brasses and an undertone of drums. Saxtorph knew it also. It too was ancient. The hair stood up on his arms. “Ich hat‘ einen kameraten.” I had a comrade. The army song of mourning.

“He did not tell us why,” Tyra said. The tears would no longer stay captive. “He was forbidden. He could only say he must go, and be gone a long time, but would always love us. We can only guess what happened.”

Chapter III

The air was rank with kzin smell. The whole compound was, but in this room Yiao-Captain’s excitement made it overwhelming, practically to choke on. He half leaned across his desk, claws out, as if it were an animal he had slain and was about to rip asunder. Sunlight through a window gleamed off eyes and wet fangs. Orange fur and naked tail stiffened erect. The sight terrified those human instincts that remembered the tiger and the sabertooth. Although Peter Nordbo had met it before and knew that no attack impended probably he must summon his courage. He was big and muscular, Yiao-Captain was short and slender, yet the kzin topped the man by fifteen centimetres, with a third again the bulk and twice the weight.

Words hissed, spat, snarled. “Action! Adventure! Getting away from this wretched outpost. Achievement, honor, a full name. Power gained, maybe, to end this dragged-on war at last. And afterward afterward ” The words faded off in an exultant growl.

When he thought he saw a measure of calm, Nordbo dared say, in Wunderlander, “I don’t quite understand, sir. A very interesting astronomical phenomenon, which should be studied intensively. I came to request your help in getting me authorization to But that is all. Isn’t it, sir?” While he knew the Hero’s Tongue, he was not allowed to defile it by use, especially since his vocal organs inevitably gave it a grotesque accent. When he must communicate with a kzin ignorant of his language, he used a translator or, absent that, wrote his replies.

Yiao-Captain sat down again and indicated that Nordbo could do likewise. “No, humans are slow to perceive such possibilities,” he said. With characteristic rapid mood shift, he went patronizing. “I supposed you might. You are bold for a monkey. Well, think as best you can. A mysterious source of tremendous energy. Study of the stars deepened knowledge of the atom, and thus became a key to the development of nuclear weapons. What now have you come upon?”

Nordbo shook his head. His mouth bent upward ruefully in the bushy brown beard that was starting to grizzle, below the hook nose. “Scarcely an unknown law of nature in operation, sir. What it may be I’d rather not try to guess before we have much more data. It does suggest No, how could it have appeared so suddenly, if it were what has crossed my mind? In any case, not every scientific discovery finds military applications. Most don’t. I can’t imagine how this one could, five light-years off.”

“You cannot. We shall see.”

“Well, sir, if I get the kind of support I need for further research ” Nordbo stopped. Appalled, he stared at the possibility that his eagerness had camouflaged from him. Might this really mean a weapon to turn on his folk? No. It must not. Please, God, make it impossible.

“You will have better than that,” Yiao-Captain purred. “We shall go there.”

Have I misheard? Nordbo thought. Even for a kzin, it is crazy. “What?”

“Yes.” Yiao-Captain rose again. His tail switched, his bat’s-wing ears folded and lay back. He gazed out the window into the sky. “If nothing else, maybe that energy source can be transported. Maybe we can fling it at the enemy. They may have noticed too. If they have, they are bound to send an expedition sometime. Their peering, prying curiosity But Alpha Centauri is closer to it than Sol by… three light-years, is that a good guess? We shall forestall. I can readily persuade the governor, given the information you have brought. And / will be in command.”

Nordbo had risen too, less out of deference, for he realized that at present the kzin wouldn’t notice or care, than because he couldn’t endure being towered over by those devils. It struck him, not for the first time, that the reason few households on Wunderland kept cats any longer was that their faces were too much like a kzin’s. Well, that was far from being the only happy thing the conquest had ruined.

“I, I wish you would reconsider, sir,” he said.

“Never.” The bass voice grew muted. “Our ancestors tamed their planet and went to the stars because they had learned that knowledge brings might. Shall we dishonor their ghosts?”

Nordbo moistened his lips. “I mean you personally, sir. We will… miss you.”

It twisted in him: The damnable part is that that is true. Yiao-Captain has never been gratuitously cruel, nor let others be when he had any control over them. By his lights, he is kindly. He has helped us directly or intervened on our behalf when I showed him the need was dire and there would be no loss to his side. He has received me as hospitably as a Hero can receive a monkey, and, yes, we have had some fascinating talks, where he listened to what I said and thought about it and gave answers that approached being fair. Why, he got me to teach him chess, and if he loses he doesn’t fly into a murderous rage, only curses and goes outside to work it off in hand-to-hand combat practice. He likes me, after his fashion, and, confess it, I like him in a crooked sort of way, and what will happen to us in Gerning if he leaves us?

Yiao-Captain turned his head. Something akin to mirth rasped through his words. “Lament not. You are coming along.”

Nordbo took a step backward. The horror was too vast for him to grasp immediately. He felt as if he were in a cold maelstrom, whirling down and down. His hands lifted. “No,” he implored. “Oh, no, no.”

Yiao-Captain refrained from slashing him for presuming to contradict a kzin. “Assuredly. You will keep total silence about this, of course.” Lest a rival, rather than an enemy spy, learn, and move to get the coveted task himself. “Hr-r, you may return home, tell your household that you are going on a lengthy voyage, and pack what you need for your personal use. Then report back here for sequestration until we leave. I want your scientific skills.” Laughter was a human thing, but a gruff noise vibrated. “And how can I do without my chess partner?”

Nordbo sagged against the wall. He seldom wept, never like this.

“What, you are reluctant?” Yiao-Captain teased. “You care nothing for struggle, glory, or your very curiosity? Take heart. Your time away shall be minimal. I am sure all arrangements can be completed within days.”

A kzin’s way of challenge is to scream and leap.

Chapter IV

Tyra wiped furiously at her eyes. “I am, am sorry,” she stammered. “I did not plan to cry at you.”

No more than a few drops had glistened along those cheekbones. Saxtorph half reached to take her hand. No. She might resent that; and after snapping once or twice for air, she had regained her balance. Best stay prosy. “You think the kzin honcho forced your father to go,” he deduced.

She shrugged, not quite spastically. “Or ordered him. What was the difference? He could not tell us anything. If he had, and the kzinti had found out ”

Uh-huh, Saxtorph knew. Children for dinner at the officers’ mess. Mother to a hunting preserve, unless they didn’t reckon she’d make good sport and decided on a worse death as a public example. “This implies the ratcats considered the object important,” he said. “Even more does the item that it involved an interstellar journey, in those days before hyperdrive and with a war under way. It was interstellar, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Father spoke of… long years. Also, after the war, investigators got two or three eyewitness accounts by humans who worked for the kzinti. They had only seen requisition orders, that sort of thing, but it did establish that Yiao-Captain and a small crew left for some unrevealed destination in a vessel of the Swift Hunter class. Hardly anything else was learned.”

Saxtorph laid his pipe on the ashtaker rack and rubbed his chin. “You’re right, kzinti don’t do science for the sake of pure knowledge, the way humans sometimes do. They want it to help them cope with a universe they see as fundamentally hostile, or to win them power. In this case, surely, they thought of military potential.”

Tyra nodded. “That is clear.” She braced herself. “Father had been excited, almost happy. He spoke to several people of a marvelous discovery he had made from his observatory. I do not remember that, but I was little, and maybe I did not happen to be there. Mother was not interested in science and did not understand what he talked of, nor recall it afterward well enough to be of any use. Likewise for what servants or tenants heard. Ib was at school, he says. Everybody agrees that Father said he must see Yiao-Captain about having a thorough study made; the kzinti had the powerful instruments and computers, of course. He came home from that and I have told you.” She bit her lip. “The accusation later was that he deliberately put the kzinti on the trail of something that might have led them to a new weapon, and accompanied them to investigate closer, in hopes of wealth and favors.”

“Forgive me,” Saxtorph said softly, “but I’ve got to ask this. Could it possibly be true?”

“No! We, his family, knew him. Year by year we had heard as much of his pain as he dared utter, and felt the rest. He loved us. Would he free-willingly have left us, for years stretching into decades, whatever the payment? No, he simply never thought in terms of helping the kzinti in their war, until they did and it was too late for him. But the hysteria immediately after liberation There had been many real collaborators, you know. And there were people who paid oft” grudges by accus-ing other people, and It was what I think you call a witch hunt.

“The feet that Peter Nordbo had cooperated, that was not in itself to be held against him. Most Landholders did. Taking to the bush was maybe more gallant, but then you could not be a thin, battered shield for your folk. Just the same, this was part of the reason why the new constitution took away the special status of the Nineteen Families. And in retrospect, that Peter Nordbo gave knowledge to the kzinti and fared off with them, that was made to make his earlier cooperation look willing, and like more than it actually was.” Tyra’s grip on the table edge drove the blood from her fingertips. “Yes, it is conceivable that in his heart he was on their side. Impossible, but conceivable. What I want you to find for me, Captain Saxtorph, is the truth. I am not afraid of it.”

After a moment, shakily: “Please to excuse me. I should be more businesslike.” She finished her wine.

Saxtorph knocked back his beer and rose. “Let me get us refills,” he suggested. “Care for something stronger?”

“Thank you. A double Scotch. Water chaser.” She managed a smile. “You may take you an akvavit this time. I have not much left to tell.”

When he brought the drinks back, she was entirely self-possessed. “Ask whatever you want,” she invited. “Be frank. I believed my wounds were long ago scarred over. What made them hurt again tonight was hope.”

“Don’t get yours too high,” he advised. “This looks mighty dicey to me. And, like your dad, I’ve got other people to think about before I agree to anything.”

“Naturally. I would not have approached you if the story of your adventures had not proved you are conscientious.”

He attempted a laugh. “Please. Call ‘em my experiences. Adventures are what happen to the incompetent.” He sent caraway pungency down his throat and a dollop of brew in pursuit. “Okay, let’s get cracking again. I gather no details about that expedition ever came out.”

“They were suppressed, obliterated. When the human hyperdrive armada arrived and it became clear that the kzinti would lose Alpha Centauri, they destroyed all their records and installations that they could, before going forth to die in battle. Prisoners and surviving human witnesses had little information. About Yiao-Captain’s mission, nobody had any, except what I mentioned to you. It was secret from the beginning; very few kzinti, either, ever knew about it.”

“No report to the home world till success was assured. Nor when Wunderland was falling. They were smart bastards; they foresaw our new craft would hunt for every such beam, overtake it, read it, and jam it beyond recovery.”

“I know. Ib has described to me the effect of faster-than-light travel on intelligence operations.”

Her grasp of practical things was akin to Dorcas‘, Saxtorph thought. “When did the ship leave?” he asked.

“It was Now I am forgetting your calendar. It was ten Earth-years before liberation.”

“And whatever messages she’d sent back were wiped from the databases at that time, and whatever kzinti knew the content died fighting. She never returned, and after the liberation no word came from her.”

“The general explanation was is that it and the crew perished.” In bitterness, Tyra added, “Fortunately, they say.”

“But if she did not, then she probably got news of the defeat. A beam cycled through the volume of her possible trajectories could be read across several light-years, and wasn’t in a direction humans would likely search. What then would her captain do?” Saxtorph addressed his beer. “Never mind for now. I’d be speculating far in advance of the facts. You say you have come upon some new ones?”

“Old ones.” Her voice dropped low. “Thirty years old.”

He waited.

She folded her hands on the table, looked at him straight across it, and said, “A few months ago, Mother died. She was never well since Father left. As surrogate Landholder, she was not really able to cope with the dreadful task. She did her best, I grew up seeing how she struggled, but she had not his skills, or his special relationship with a ranking kzin, or just his physical strength. So she… yielded… more than he had done. This caused her to be called a collaborator, when the kzinti were safely gone, and retrospectively it blackened Father’s name worse, but she was let go, to live out her life on what property the court had no legal right to take away from us. It is productive, and Ib found a good supervisor, so she was not in poverty. Nor wealthy. But how alone! We did what we could, Ib and I and her true friends, but it was not much, and never could we restore Father to her. She was brave, kept busy, and… dwindled. Her death was peaceful. I closed her eyes. The physician’s verdict was general debility leading to cardiac failure.

“Ib has his duties, while I can set my own working hours. Therefore it was I who remained at Korsness, to make arrangements and put things in order. I went through the database, the papers, die remembrances And at the bottom of a drawer, under layers of his clothes that she had kept, I found Father’s last notebook from the observatory.”

Air whistled in between Saxtorph’s teeth. “Including the data on that thing? Jesu Kristi! Didn’t he know how dangerous it was for his family to have?”

“He may have forgotten, in his emotional storm. I think likelier, however, he hid it there himself. No human would have reason to go through that drawer for many years. He knew Mother would not empty it.”

“M-m, yah. And if nothing made them suspicious, the kzinti wouldn’t search the house. Beneath their dignity, pawing through monkey stuff. And they never have managed to understand how humans feel about their families. Yah. Nordbo, your dad, he may very well have left those notes as a kind of heritage; because if you’ve given me a proper account of him, and I

believe you have, then he had not given up the hope of freedom at last for his people.“

A couple of fresh tears trembled on her lashes but went no farther. “Yo« understand,” she whispered.

Enthusiasm leaped in him. “Well, what did the book say?”

“I did not know at once. It took reviewing of science from school days. I dared not ask anybody else. It could be undesirable.”

Okay, Saxtorph thought, if he turned out to have been a traitor after all, why not suppress the information? What harm, at this late date? I don’t suppose it’d have changed your love of him and his memory. You’re that kind of person.

“What he found,” Tyra said, “was a radiation source in Tigripardus.” Most constellations bear the same names at Alpha Centauri as at Sol four and a third light-years being a distance minuscule in the enormousness of the galaxy but certain changes around the line between them have been inevitable. “It was faint, requiring a sensitive detector, and would have gone unnoticed had he not happened to study that exact part of the sky. This was in the course of a systematic, years-long search for small anomalies. They might indicate stray mono-poles, or antimatter concentrations, or other such peculiarities, which in turn might give clues about the evolution of the whole But I explain too much, no?

“The radiation seemed to be from a point source. It consisted of extremely high-energy gamma rays. The spectrum suggested particles were being formed and annihilated. This indicated an extraordinary energy density. With access to the automated monitors the kzinti kept throughout this system, Father quickly got the parallax. The object was about five light-years away. That meant the radiation at the source was fantastically intense. I can show you the figures later, if you wish.”

“I do,” Saxtorph breathed. “Oh, I do.”

“He checked through the astronomical databases, too,” she went on. “Archival material from Sol, and studies made here before the war, showed nothing. This was a new thing, a few years old at most.”

“And since then, evidently, it’s turned off.”

“Yes. As I told you, Ib got a Navy observer to look at the area, on a pretext. Nothing unusual.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. Any idea what it might be, or have been?”

“I am a layman. My guesses are worthless.”

“Don’t be humble. I’m not. Hm-m-m… No, this is premature, at least till I’ve seen those numbers. Clearly, Yiao-Captain guessed at potentialities that made it worth taking a close look, and persuaded his superiors.”

Saxtorph clutched the handle of his mug and stared down as if it were an oracular well. “Ten years plus, either way,” he muttered. “That’s what I’d estimate trip time as, from what I recall of the Swift Hunter class and know about kzinti style. Sparing even a single ship and crew for twenty-odd years, when every attack on Sol was ending in expensive defeat and we’d begun making our own raids uh-huh. A gamble, but maybe for almighty big stakes.”

“And the ship never came back,” Tyra reminded him. “A ten-year crossing, do you reckon? It should have reached the goal about when the hyperdrive armada got here to set us free. Surely the kzinti sent it word of that. The news would have been received five years later. Sooner, if the ship was en route home.” Or not at all if the ship was dead, Saxtorph thought. “Then what? I cannot imagine a kzin commander staying on course, to surrender at journey’s end. He might have tried to arrive unexpectedly and crash his ship on Wunderland, a last act of terrible vengeance, but that would have happened already.”

“More speculation,” Saxtorph said. “What’s needed is facts.”

A sword being drawn could have spoken her “Yes.”

“Who’ve you told about this, besides your brother and me?” Saxtorph asked.

“Nobody, and I swore him to secrecy. If nothing else, we must think first, undisturbed, he and I. He sounded out high officers, and decided they would not believe our father’s notes are genuine, when their observatory contradicts.”

“M-m, I dunno. They know the kzinti went after something.”

“It can have been something quite different.”

“Still, these days a five-light-year jaunt is no great shakes. Include it in a training cruise or whatever.”

“And as for finding out the truth about our father, which is Ib’s and my real purpose they would not care.”

“Again, I wonder. I want to talk with Ib.”

“Of course, if you are serious. But can you not see, if we give this matter over to the authorities, it goes entirely out of our hands? They will never allow us to do anything more.”

“That is fairly plausible.”

“If you, though, an independent observer, if you verify that this is real and important, then we cannot be denied. The public will insist on a complete investigation.”

A decent cause, and a decent chunk of much-needed money. Too many loose ends. However, Saxtorph flattered himself that he could recognize a genuine human being when he met one. “I’ll have to know a lot more, and ring in my partners, et cetera, et cetera,” he declared. “Right now, I can just say I’ll be glad to do so.”

“It is a plenty!” Her tone rejoiced. “Thank you, Captain, a thousand thanks. Skoal!” When they had clinked rims, she tossed off an astonishing draught.

It didn’t make her drunk. Perhaps it helped bring ease, and a return of vivacity. “I had my special reason for meeting you like this,” she said. Her smile challenged. “Before entrusting you with my dream, I wanted we should be face to face, alone, and I get the measure of you.”

Yes, occasionally he had made critical decisions in which his personal impression of somebody was a major factor.

“We shall hold further discussion, and you bring your wife your whole crew, if you wish,” Tyra said. “Tonight, I think, we have talked enough. About this. But must you leave at once?”

“Well, no,” he answered, more awkwardly than was his wont.

They conversed, and listened to the music that most of humankind had forgotten, and swapped private memories, and drank, and she was a sure and supple dancer. Nothing wrong took place. Still, it was a good thing for Saxtorph that when he got back to his hotel, Dorcas was awake and in the mood.

Chapter V

Swordbeak emerged from hyperspace and accelerated toward the Father Sun. A warcraft of the Raptor class, lately modified to accommodate a superluminal drive, it moved faster than most, agilely responsive to the thrust of its gravity polarizers. Watchers in space saw laser turrets and missile launchers silhouetted against the Milky Way, sleek as the plumage of its namesake, overwhelmingly deadlier than the talons. It identified itself to their satisfaction and passed onward. Messages flew to and fro. When the vessel reached Kzin, a priority orbit around the planet was preassigned it. Weoch-Captain took a boat straight down to Defiant Warrior Base. Thence he proceeded immediately to the lair of Ress-Chiuu. A proper escort waited there.

The High Admiral received him in the same room as before. Now, however, a table had been set with silver goblets of drink and golden braziers of sweet, mildly psychotropic incense. In the blood trough at the middle a live zianya lay bound. Its muzzle had been taped shut to keep it from squealing, but the smell of its fear stimulated more than did the smoke.

“You enter in honor,” Ress-Chiuu greeted.

From his rank, that was a pridemaking compliment. Nevertheless Weoch-Captain felt he should demur. “You are generous, sire. In truth I accomplished little.”

“You slew no foes and saved no friends. We never, realistically, expected you would. To judge by your preliminary report as you returned, you did well against considerable odds. But you shall tell me about it in person, at leisure. Afterward Intelligence will examine what is in your ship’s database. Recline ” in this presence, another great distinction “and take refreshment.” an extraordinary one.

As he talked, interrupted only by shrewd questions, memories more than drink or drug restored to Weoch-Captain his full self-confidence. If he had not prevailed, neither had he lost, and his mission was basically successful.

The story unfolded at length: Voyage to the old red dwarf. Cautious, probing approach to the planet on which Werlith-Commandant’s forces had been at work. Detection and challenge by humans. Dialogue, carefully steered to make them think that the kzinti had no foreknowledge of anything and this was a routine visit. Refusal to let the kzinti proceed farther, orders for Swordbeak to depart. (“So they show that much spirit, do they?” Ress-Chiuu mused. “The official communications have been as jelly-mild as I predicted. Well, maybe it was just this individual commander.”) Sword-beak’s forward plunge. An attack warded off, except for a ray that did no significant damage before the ship was out of range. Three more human vessels summoned and straining to intercept. Weoch-Captain’s trajectory by the planet, wild, too close in for the pursuit to dare, instruments and cameras recording that the kzinti installation had been annihilated, the kzinti warcraft that had been on guard orbited as a mass of cold wreckage, the likelihood of any survivors was essentially nil. Running a gauntlet of enemy fire on the way out. Another bra-vado maneuver, this around the larger gas giant, that could have thrown Swordbeak aflame into the atmosphere but left its nearest, more heavily armed chaser hopelessly behind. Swatting missiles on the way out to hyperspacing distance. A jeering message beamed aft, and escape from 3-space.

“It is well, it is well.” Ress-Chiuu rolled the words over his tongue as if they were the fine drink in his goblet.

Weoch-Captain gauged that he had asserted himself as much as was advisable. He had his future to think of, the career that should bring him at last a full name and the right to breed. “If the High Admiral is pleased, that suffices. But it was mere information we captured, which the monkeys may in time have given us freely.”

“Vouchsafed us,” Ress-Chiuu snarled. “Condescended to throw to us.”

“True, sire.” It had indeed been in the minds of Weoch-Captain and his crew, a strong motivation to do what they did.

“Nor could we be certain they would not lie.”

“True, sire. Nonetheless ” The utterance was distasteful but necessary, if Weoch-Captain was to maintain the High Admiral’s opinion of him as an officer not only valiant but wise. “They will resent what happened. We have barely begun to modernize and re-expand the fleet. Theirs is much stronger. How may they react? I admit to fretting about that on the way home.”

“The Patriarchs considered it beforehand,” Ress-Chiuu assured him. “The humans will bleat. Perhaps they will even huff and puff. We shall point out that they have registered no territorial claim on yonder sun and its planets, therefore they had no right to forbid entry to a peaceful visitor, and you did nothing but save yourselves after they opened fire. Arh, your restraint was masterly, Weoch-Captain. We will demand reparation, they will make a little more noise, and that will be the end of the matter. Meanwhile you have learned a great deal for us, about their capabilities and about what to expect, what to prepare for, when we start pushing at them in earnest. You deserve well of us, Weoch-Captain.”

He leaned forward. His voice became music and distant thunder. “You deserve the opportunity to win more glory. You may earn the ultimate reward.”

Energy thrilled along nerves and into blood. “Sire! I stand ready!”

“I knew you would.” Ress-Chiuu sipped, rather than lapped, from his cup. His gaze went afar, his tone deceptively meditative. “We have our sources of information among the humans. They are limited in what they can convey but on occasion they have proven useful. For the present, you need know no more than that. Let me simply say that not everything the hyperwave brings us is known to the human government.” Perforce he attempted to pronounce the English word. Weoch-Captain recognized, if not exactly understood it.

“For relevant example,” Ress-Chiuu continued, “we got early news of the disaster at the red sun, well before they contacted us officially about it. This you recall, of course. What you do not recall, because it happened while you were gone, is that we have received fresh intelligence, conceivably of the first importance. ”

Stoic, as became a Hero, Weoch-Captain waited. His ribs ached with tension. His heart slugged.

“Briefly put we will go into details later,” he heard, “a Wunderland resident has come upon a lost record from the time of the war. It appears that, some years before the enemy got the hyperdrive, an astronomer observed a cosmic phenomenon, about five light-years from Alpha Centauri. It was inexplicable, but involved enormous energies. The possibility of military uses caused the high command of the occupation to dispatch a ship to investigate. If the ship sent any messages back, those were expunged when the human armada appeared, and all kzinti who had knowledge of the mission died. Any beams that arrived afterward were never received, the tuned and programmed apparatus being destroyed; they are dissipated, lost. The ship has not been heard of again. Recent search has failed to detect anything remarkable in that part of the Wunderland sky.

“Regardless, for reasons not quite clear to me, humans are trying to organize an expedition to that region. Humans, I say, individuals, not the humans. Their patriarchs are, as yet, unaware of it.

“We have obtained the astronomical data. They are sufficient basis for an investigation. Perhaps nothing is there, or nothing of interest. Yet it is imaginable that those kzinti were justified who decided, three decades ago, that this was worth sending a high-velocity vessel.

“We must know. If it is anything of value, we must win it ourselves. The way is considerably longer from here than from there. Are you and your crew prepared to leave again quite soon?”

“Sire,” blazed Weoch-Captain, “you need not ask!”

“And I say, to your honor, that I am unsurprised.” Ress-Chiuu showed fangs. “I give you an added incentive. If the humans do mount their expedition, it will apparently consist of a single ship, unarmed, commanded by one… S-s-saxtor-r-rph, the designation is. The ship, commander, and crew that wrought the havoc you beheld.”

Weoch-Captain roared.

They spoke together, ran computations and simulations, speculated, envisioned, dreamed their fierce dreams, until past sundown. Much remained to do when they stopped for a feast of celebration. The first flesh ripped from the zianya, before it died, was especially savory.

Chapter VI

While the government ground ponderously through its motions, Juan Yoshü and Laurinda Brozik were as trapped on Wunderland as their friends. Released, they could not get early passage to We Made It; as yet, few ships plied that route. When a sudden opportunity came by, they grabbed. The others took no offense. Laurinda’s parents were eager to get her home and legally married. Her father had already promised his prospective son-in-law an excellent job, no sinecure but still one that would allow him to pursue his literary interests on the side. You don’t dawdle over such things. However, the situation gave scant notice or time for a sendoff. Preoccupied as they were with the Nordbo business, skipper and mate could merely offer their best wishes. Kamehameha Ryan and Carita Fenger made what arrangements they were able, and the foursome took off for the pair of days available before departure.

Though Gelbstein Park is popular in summer, visitors to that high country are few when winter has fallen over the southern hemisphere of Wunderland. These got romantic near-solitude. A walk amidst the scenery preceded dinner back at the lodge, drinks before the fireplace, and a long goodnight.

“Brrr-hooee!” Ryan hugged himself. Breath smoked from his round brown countenance. “I’m glad I’m not a brass monkey.”

Carita took his arm. The Jinxian’s own skin seemed coal-black against the snowscape, in which Laurinda’s albino complexion showed ghostly. “Keep reminding yourself that not all your ancestors were kanakas,” she suggested.

“Or that it gets pretty cold on top of Mauna Kea too, yeah.” The quartermaster snuggled his chin under the collar of his jacket.

“You could’ve insisted we go to Eden or the Roseninsel or wherever tropical.”

“Naw, I’m okay. Juan opted for here, and this’s his last chance.”

Yoshü seemed indeed lost in his surroundings. Was a poem brewing? Overhead the sky stood huge, cloudless, as deeply blue as the shadows cast by sun A across the snows. Paler were those from B, an elfin tracery mingled with the frost-glitter. A kilometer ahead, the trail ended at a hot springs area. The greens and russets of pools were twice vivid in the whiteness elsewhere; the steam that rose from them was utter purity. Beyond, the Lucknerberg gleamed in its might. The sounds of seething carried this far through the silence, but muffled, as if it were the underground working of the planet that one heard.

“You are so land,” Laurlnda said. “We’ll miss you so much.”

Yoshü shivered, left his reverie, and caught his girl’s gloved hand. They were walking in front of their companions. He glanced back. “Yes, and we’ll worry about you,” he added. “Headed into the… the unknown ”

“You’ll have better things to do,” Ryan laughed.

“And we’ll be fine,” Carita put in.

“Shorthanded,” Yoshü said. They had not found a satisfactory replacement for him. “I can’t help feeling guilty, like a deserter.”

“Juan, boy,” Carita replied, “if you left this lass behind now, even for a month’s jaunt, I’d turn you over my knee and spank you till you took first prize at the next baboon show.” Quite possibly she meant it. Her short, massive frame certainly had the capability.

“I might have gone too ” Laurinda’s words trailed off. No, she would not have done that to her parents. “If we could only stay in touch!”

Ryan shrugged. “Someday they’ll miniaturize hyper-wave equipment to the point where it’ll fit in a spaceship.”

“Why haven’t they already?” she protested. “Or why didn’t it come with the hyperdrive?”

“We can’t expect to understand or assimilate a non-human technology overnight,” Yoshü told her in his soft fashion. “As was, it took skull sweat to adapt what the Outsiders sold your world to our uses. I’m surprised that you, of all people, should ask such a question.”

“A woman needs to spring an occasional surprise,” Carita said.

Laurinda gulped. “But not a stupid remark. I’m sorry. My thinking had gone askew. I am afraid for you two and the Saxtorphs.”

“Nonsense,” Ryan said. “It’ll be aheahe, a breeze, a well-paid junket.” Into reaches that had swallowed a kzinti warcraft. “You don’t get ol‘ Bob haring right off on impulse. If we should meet difficulties we can’t skip straight away from, we’re equipped like an octopus to handle ’em.”

“No weapons.” She had not been concerned with the refitting, but she knew this.

“Oh, he and I saw quietly to our stash of small arms, explosives, and all.”

Yoshü‘s mouth tightened. “What use against the universe?”

“As for that,” Carita stated, “you know full well what we’ve got.” Mainly to Laurinda: “A beefed-up grapnel field system. We can lock onto a fair-sized asteroid and shift its orbit, if we want to spend the fuel. Our new main laser can bore a hole from end to end of it. Our robot prospector-lander can boost at as high as a hundred Earth gees, for a total delta v of a thousand KPS. Plus the stuff we carried before, except for the second boat radars, instruments, teleprobes, you name it. Oh, we’d be no match for a naval vessel, but aside from that, we’re loaded like a verguuz drinker.”

“Now will you joyful honeymooners kindly reel in your faces and start singing and dancing as the drill calls for?” Ryan snorted.

The couple traded a look, which rapidly grew warm. Smiles radiated between them. “Makes me feel downright lecherous,” Carita murmured to Ryan. “How ‘bout you?”

With a rumbling roar, a geyser erupted among the springs. Higher and higher it climbed against the gentle gravity, until the tower of it reached a hundred meters aloft. Light sharded to bows and diamonds in its plume. Thence it flung a fine rain which fell stinging hot, smelling of sulfur and tasting of iron, violence broken loose from rocks far below. Abruptly the humans felt very small.

Chapter VII

Waves move more slowly on Wunderland than on Earth and strike less hard, but the seas that beat against the cliffs of Korsness were heavy enough. The noise of them reached the old house on the headland as a muted throb, drums beneath the wind-skirl. Gray, green, and white-maned, they heaved out to a horizon vague with scud. The clouds flew low, like smoke. The room overlooking the view seemed full of their twilight, despite its fluoros. That glow lost itself in swartwood furniture, murky carpet, leatherbound codices and ancestral portraits. Above the stone mantel hung a crossed pair of oars, dried and cracked. The first Nordbo who settled here had used them after the motor in his boat failed, to fetch a son wrecked on Horn Reef.

Saxtorph liked this place. It spoke to something in his blood. “You’ve got roots,” he remarked. “Not many folks do these days.”

Seated on his left, Tyra nodded. Her hair was the sole real brightness. “The honor of the house,” she said, then grimaced. “No, forgive me, I do not mean to be pretentious.”

“Hut you shouldn’t be afraid of speaking about what truly matters,” said Dorcas on her far side.

“I am not. Your husband knows. But ” The com that they confronted chimed and blinked. Tyra stiffened. “Accept,” she snapped.

The full-size image of a man appeared, and part of the desk behind which he sat, and through the window at his back a glimpse of the Drachenturm in Munchen. “Good day,” he greeted. Half rising to make a stiff little bow: “Frau Saxtorph, at last I get the pleasure of your acquaintance.” He must have worked to flatten out of his English the accent his sister retained.

Dorcas inclined her head. The mahogany-hued crest and tail of her Belter hairstyle rippled. “How do you do, Herr,” she answered as formally. The smile on the Athene visage was less warm than usual. “Someday I may have the pleasure of shaking your hand.”

Ib Nordbo took the implied reproof impassively. He was in his mid-forties, tall and low-gee slim, smooth-chinned, bearing much of Tyra’s blond handsomeness but none of her verve and frequent merriment. At least, during his previous two short encounters with Saxtorph he had been curt and somber. Insignia on the blue uniform proclaimed him a lieutenant commander of naval intelligence.

“Why would you not come in person today?” burst from Tyra. “I tell you, this is the one spot on Wunderland where we can be sure we are private.”

“Come, now,” her brother replied. “My office was and is perfectly secure, there is no reason to imagine your town apartment or the Saxtorphs’ hotel room were ever under surveillance, and I assure you, this circuit is well sealed.”

Anxious to avoid a breach, for the earlier scenes had gotten a bit tense, Saxtorph said, “You’d know, in your job. Actually, my wife and I were glad of Tyra’s invitation because we were curious to see the homestead.”

“We hoped to get some feel for your father, some insight or intuition,” Dorcas added.

“What value can that have, on a search through space?”

Nordbo’s question would have been a challenge or a gibe if it had been uttered less flatly.

“Perhaps none. You never can tell. If nothing else, this was an interesting visit; and to hold his actual notebook in our hands was… an experience.”

“I fear nobody else would agree, Frau.” Nordbo’s attention went to his sister. “Tyra, I hesitate to say you have become paranoiac on this subject, but you have exaggerated it in your mind out of all proportion. What cause does anyone have to spy on you? How often must I repeat, the Navy no part of oificialdom will concern itself?”

Saxtorph stirred. “And I repeat, if you please, that I have trouble believing that,” he said. “Okay, one kzinti ship was lost thirty years ago, among hundreds. There was an avalanche of matters to handle in the years right after liberation. This business was forgotten. Sure. But if we did show them your father’s notes and reminded them that the kzinti reckoned it worthwhile dispatching a ship ”

“Nothing special is now in that part of the sky,” Nordbo retorted. “What he detected must have been a transient thing at best, an accident leaving no trace, perhaps the collision of a matter and an antimatter body.”

“That’d have been plenty weird. Who’s ever found so much loose antimatter? But we’ve still got that infrared anomaly.” Saxtorph had insisted on Nordbo’s retrieving the entire record of the naval observation.

“Meaningless. Its intensity against the cosmic background falls within probable error.” The officer stirred where he sat. “We need scarcely go over this ground again for your lady wife’s benefit. We have trodden it bare, and you must have relayed the arguments to her. But to complete the repetition, Frau Saxtorph, I have pointed out that the kzinti may well have had some entirely different destination, and took my father along merely because his noticing this phenomenon put them in mind of him as an excellent observer. They quite commonly employed human technicians, you know. Our species has more patience for detail work than theirs.”

He paused before finishing: “This is how they will think in the Navy if we tell them. I have sounded out various high-ranking persons, at Tyra’s request. Besides, I am Navy myself; I ought to know, ought I not? It might be decided to go take a look, on the odd chance that my father did stumble on something special. But they would not care about him or his fate. Nor would they want civilians underfoot. You, Captain Saxtorph, would be specifically forbidden to enter that region.”

“I understand that,” Tyra said. “At least, it is possible. Therefore Rover must go first, before anything has been revealed. What information it brings back can jumpstart some real action.”

“Frau Saxtorph, I appeal to you,” Nordbo said. “My sister has involved me ”

“It was your right to know,” Tyra interjected, “and I thought you would help.”

“She wants me, if nothing else, to withhold from my service word about this ill-advised space mission of yours. Can you not see what a difficult position that creates for me?”

“I agree your position is delicate,” Dorcas murmured.

Did Nordbo wince or flinch? If so, he clamped control back down too fast for Robert Saxtorph to be sure. Either way, the captain felt momentarily sorry for what had happened of late.

Not that the Rover crew were at fault. They’d had no way of foreseeing. They simply carried back to Alpha Centauri the news that Commissioner Markham had been a spy for the kzinti. It provoked a hunt for others. And soon after liberation, when Ib Nordbo was a young engineer working in the asteroids, Ulf Reichstein-Markham, still out there settling assorted affairs, had befriended him. They returned to Wunderland together, Nordbo enlisting, Markham going unsuccessfully into politics and later rather brilliantly into astronautics administration. Markham’s prestige, the occasional overt recommendation or conversational suggestion, helped Nordbo rise. They met fairly often.

Well, but suspicion found no grounds. “It must die away altogether,” Tyra had pleaded to Saxtorph. “Must it not? Ib fought for freedom not like Markham, only in one uprising, that crazy try of young men to take back the Ritterhaus, but he did suffer injuries. And Markham was in fact a hero of the Resistance, maybe its greatest. He did not change till long afterward. How could Ib tell? Yes, they did things together, dining, hunting, talking. What does that mean? They were both lonely. They have they had not sociable personalities. Ib was always of dark spirit. He has never married. I think he still carries the torment of our father inside him. Remember, he is seven Earth-years older than me. He lived through more of it, and then through the years alone with our mother, at that impressionable age. Now he is fine in his work. He would have risen higher if he had a wife who knew all the unspoken social rules, or if he could just be smooth. But he is too honest. He does not share those filthy dictatorial ideas you told me Markham held. I am his sister, I would know if he did. We are not close, he is not close to anyone, but we are the children of Peter Nordbo.”

Dorcas, who was tactful when she cared to be, went directly on: “However, nothing illegal or unethical is involved. We plan a scientific mission. Amateurs, yes, but if we get in trouble, nobody will be harmed except us. That land of personal risk is not prohibited by any statute or regulation I know of ”

Thus far, Saxtorph thought.

“ nor do the terms of our insurance and mortgage require more than ‘informed prudence,’ the interpretation of which clause is a matter for the civil courts. You are merely assisting an undertaking that may prove beneficial to your nation.”

Nordbo shook his head. “I am not,” he answered. “I have given it the serious thought I promised. Today I tell you that I will have no further part of it.”

“Ib!” Tyra cried. Her hand went to her mouth.

“It is lunatic,” he stated. “If we turned those notes over to my service, at least any investigation would be competently handled. My apologies, Captain and Mate Saxtorph. I am sure you command your ship well. You have been persuaded to enter a field outside your competence. Please reconsider.”

Tyra said something unsteadily in her childhood dialect. He replied likewise. In English: “Yes, I will keep my promise, my silence about this, unless circumstances force me. But I will not make any contribution to your effort, nor lend any more aid or counsel, except my earnest advice that you abandon it. That is final.”

His tone softened. “Tyra, you sit in what we have left of our inheritance, our father’s and mother’s and ancestors’ heritage. Will you really throw it away?”

“No,” she whispered. Her shoulders straightened. “But I will do what is my right.”

Korsness was no Landholding, only a freehold, shared by the heirs. She had arranged to hypothecate her half of the equity, to pay for the charter. The agreement lay awaiting her print. In the odds-on event that Rover found nothing of monetary value, her income from the property ought to pay off the debt, though not before she was well along in years. It would have helped if Ib had joined in.

Saxtorph didn’t feel abashed. He had a living to make. If Tyra wanted his capabilities this badly, why, her profession supported her. For his part, and Dorcas‘, Kam’s, Carita’s, they’d be putting their necks on the line. Still, he admired her spirit.

“Then best I say farewell,” Nordbo sighed. “Before we quarrel. I will see you in a few days, Tyra, and we will speak of happier things.”

“I am not sure where I will be,” she replied. “I cannot sit idle while It will be research for a new piece of writing. But of course I will get in touch when I can.” Her words wavered. “We shall always be friends, broder min.”

“Yes,” he said gravely. “Fare you ever well.” His image vanished.

The surf and the wind resounded through silence. After a while Dorcas said low, “I think that was why he chose to call, instead of coming in person as you asked. So he could leave at once.”

They barely heard Tyra: “Dealings like this are hard for him. He knows not well how to cope with humans.”

She sprang to her feet. “But I am not crushed.” Her stance, her voice avowed it. “I had small hope for better, after our talks before. Poor soul, he took more wounds than I did, and fears they might come open. I gave him his chance.” Louder yet: “We can proceed. Robert, you have told me very little of what you intend.”

Dorcas cast a glance at her man and also raised her lean length from the chair.

“Uh, yah, I’s‘pose we are on first-name terms by now,” he said fast, fumbling after pipe and tobacco. They had in fact been for a while, when by themselves. “I’ve had my thoughts, and discussed them with Dorcas, but we figured we’d best wait with you till the contract was definite. It is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, in all except our prints,” Tyra told him. “You have seen it, have you not, Frau m-m, Dorcas?”

Rover’s mate smiled and nodded. “I rewrote two of the clauses,” she said. “Evidently, next time you met Bob, you agreed.”

“But what do you propose to do?” Tyra demanded.

Saxtorph busied his hands. “A lot will depend on what we find.” He had explained earlier, but sketchily. “What Dorcas and I have drawn up is not a plan but a set of contingency plans, subject to change without notice. However, it makes sense to start by trying for that whatever-it-is that your father spotted. Presumably the kzinti ship got there, and what the crew found became a factor in determining what they did afterward.”

“Have you any idea about it?”

“None, really,” Dorcas admitted. “Your brother may well be right, it was a freak of no special significance.”

“Except, we believe, Yiao-Captain thought otherwise,” Saxtorph pointed out. “And he got his superiors to agree it was worth a shot. Of course, from a human viewpoint, kzinti are natural-born wild gamblers.” He thumbed tobacco down into bowl. “Well, this is a sec-ondary mystery. What you’ve engaged us for is to learn, if we can, what happened to your father. Yonder objective is a starting point.”

Tyra went to a window and gazed out across sea and wrack. A burst of rain spattered on the glasyl. “You have mentioned intercepting radio waves in space,” she said slowly. “Could you get any from that ship?”

“We’ll try. I’m not optimistic. Space is almighty big, and if a beam wasn’t very tightly collimated to start with, I doubt we could pick it out of the background noise after this many years, supposing we could locate it at all. Shipboard transmitters aren’t really powerful. But I do have some notions as to what the kzinti may have done.”

“Ja?” she exclaimed, and swung around to stare at him.

He got his pipe going. “What do you know about the Swift Hunter class?”

“Almost nothing. I see now that I should have looked it up, but ”

“No blame. You had a lot else to keep track of, including the earning of your daily bread and peanut butter. I remembered things from the war, and retrieved more from the naval histories in the Wunderland library system.”

Saxtorph blew a smoke ring. “I don’t know if the kzinti still use Swift Hunters. Who knows for sure what goes on in their empire? Any that remain in service will certainly be phased out as hyperdrive comes in, because it makes them as obsolete as windjammers. In their time, though, they were wicked.

“Good-sized, but skimpy payload, most of what they carried being mass for conversion. Generally they took special weapons, or sometimes special troops, on ultra-quick missions followed by getaways faster than any missile could pursue. Total delta v of about two and a half c, Newtonian regime. Customarily, during the war, they’d boost to one-half c and go ballistic till time to decelerate. Anything higher would’ve been too inefficient, as relativity effects began getting large. This means that they’d strike and return, with the extra half light-speed available for high-powered maneuvers in between. The gravity polarizer made it all possible. Jets would never have managed anything comparable. At that, the Swift Hunters were so energy-hungry that the kzinti saved them for special jobs, as I said. Obviously they figured this was one such.”

“Nevertheless, ten years to their goal,” Dorcas murmured.

“But in stasis, apart from standing watch,” Saxtorph reminded her. “Or, rather, the kzinti version of time-suspension technics, in those days. You can be pretty patient if you get to lie unconscious and unaging during most of the voyage.”

It had been in Tyra’s awareness, of course, but she tautened and breathed, “My father ” Seen from indoors, she was a shapely shadow against the silver-gray in the window, save for the light on her hair.

Saxtorph nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said around puffs. “Do not, repeat, do not get your hopes up. But it just could be. Bound back here with word of something tremendous or without, for that matter the kzinti captain catches a beam that tells him Wunderland is falling to humans who’ve acquired a faster-than-light drive. What’s he going to do? He’s got a half c of delta v left to kill his forward vector, and another half c to boost him to the kzinti home sun.”

“But when he got there, he could not stop,” she said, as if against her will.

“He might wager they could do something about that at the other end,” Saxtorph answered. “Or he might travel at one-fourth c and take about 120 years, instead of about sixty, to arrive. In stasis he wouldn’t notice the difference. But I doubt that, especially if he was carrying important information which he couldn’t reliably transmit by radio. And kzinti always do go balls-out. If he could not be recovered at his new destination, at least he’d die a hero.

“Anyway, this is a possibility that we’ll investigate as best we can, within the bounds of due caution.”

Once again, as on that evening in the tavern, Tyra stared beyond him and the room and this world. “To find my father,” shuddered from her. “To waken him back to life.”

Dorcas gave her a hard look. The same unease touched Saxtorph. He rose. “Uh, wait a minute,” he said, “you’re not supposing you ”

Tyra returned to them. Total calm was upon her. “Oh, yes,” she stated. “I am going with you.”

“Hey, there!”

He saw her grin. “Nothing is in the contract to deny me.” Grimly: “If you refuse, I do not give it my print and you have no charter. Then I must see what if anything the Navy will do.”

“But ”

Dorcas laid a hand over his. “She is determined,” she said. “I don’t imagine it can do any harm, if we write in a waiver of liability.”

“You may have that, but you won’t need it,” Tyra promised. “I take responsibility for myself. Did you imagine I would stay behind while you hunted for my father? Well, Ib does, so I suppose it is natural for you. Let him. If he knew, he might feel he must release the truth and get the authorities to stop us. As for me ” sudden laughter belled “after all, I am a travel writer. What a story!”

Saxtorph chuckled and dismissed his objections. She could well prove an asset, and would indisputably be an ornament.

Dorcas stood pensive. When she spoke, it was so quietly that he knew she was thinking aloud. “In relativity physics, travel faster than light is equivalent to time travel. We use quantum rules. And yet what are we trying on this voyage but to probe the past and learn what happened long ago?”

Chapter VIII

When the kzinti drew Peter Nordbo into time, his first clear thought was: Hulda, Tyra, Ib. Oh, unmerciful God, it’s been ten years now.

“Up, monkey,” growled the technician and cuffed him, lightly, claws sheathed, but with force to rock his head. “The commander wants you.”

Nordbo crept from his box. He shivered with the cold inside him. Weight dragged at his bones, an interior field set higher than Earth’s. Around him, huge forms were likewise stirring, crew revived. Their snarls and spits ripped at the gloom. He stumbled from them, down a remembered passageway. His second clear thought was: What would I give for a cup of coffee!

Noticing, he barked a laugh at himself. Full awareness seeped back into him, and warmth as he moved and unstiffened. Even in this his exile, eagerness kindled. Snapping Sherrek had arrived. What had it reached?

Yiao-Captain waited in the observation turret. It was illuminated only by the images of the stars, he a shadow blotting out that constellation in which Alpha Centauri and Sol must lie. The light of their legions gleamed off an eyeball when he glanced about. “Arh, Speaker for Humans,” he greeted, brusque but not hostile, as in days that were suddenly old. “I know you are still somewhat numb. However, behold.”

He turned a dial. A section of the view seemed to rush toward them. Magnification stabilized. Nordbo stood an instant dumbfounded, then a low whistle passed his lips. “What is that thing?”

Against frosty star-clouds floated a sphere. Shapes encrusted it here and there, a dome in the form of half a dodecahedron, three concentric helices bent into a semicircle, several curving dendritic masts or antennae, objects less recognizable. The hue was dull gray, spotted with shadows filling countless pocks and scratches. Erosion by spatial dust, Nordbo thought dazedly, by near-vanishingly rare interstellar meteoroids, and, yes, by cosmic rays. How long has this derelict drifted?

“Diameter about sixteen kilometers,” he heard Yiao-Captain say, using kzinti units. “We have taken a parallel trajectory at a goodly distance.”

“Where is… the energy I detected… at home?” At home.

“On the other side. We who were on watch in the terminal stages of approach saw it from far. It was what decided us to stay well away until we know more. Now we commence the real investigation. The first observer capsule leaves in a few minutes.”

Already, before most of the crew were properly roused. Kzin style.

Yiao-Captain’s fingers crooked, his tail flicked. “I envy that Hero,” he said. “The first, the first. But I must stay in command until … I am the first to set foot there.”

In spite of everything, Nordbo was curiously touched, that the other should, consciously or not, reveal that much to a human. Well, doubtless Nordbo was the sole such human in existence.

A question came to him. “Have you measured the infrared emission?”

“Not yet. Why?”

“Maybe whatever is inside that thing sends its out put through a single spot. If not, if it emits in all directions, then the remaining energy has to go somewhere. Presumably the shell reradiates it in the infrared. But given the size of the shell, that must be at a low temperature, so it’s not readily distinguished from the galactic background.”

“And the integrated emission over the entire surface will give us the total power. Good. Our scientists would have thought of it, but perhaps not at once. Yes-s-s, you will be useful.”

“If the shell rotates ”

“It does, on three axes. Tumbles. Quite slowly, but it does. We established that upon arrival.”

“Then the bright spot would only point at Alpha Centauri, or any given star, for a short span of time, a few years at most. No wonder it wasn’t noticed before. Sheer chance that I did.” And condemned myself.

A thump shivered through metal and Nordbo’s anguish. “The capsule is on its way,” Yiao-Captain said with glee.

Nordbo understood. He had heard about the arrangement before the expedition departed. The intensity of the hard radiation here was such that nothing else would serve for a close passage. The screen fields that had protected the ship from collision with interstellar gas at half the speed of light were insufficient; near this fire, enough stray particles and gamma ray photons would get through to wreck her electronics and give the crew a lethal dose. Her two boats were laughably more vulnerable.

Room and mass were at a premium in a Swift Hunter, but Sherrek carried a pair of thickly armored spheroids which contained generators for ultra-strong fields. Wunderlanders before the war had used them in flyby studies of their suns. The kzinti had quickly modified them to accommodate a single crew member; when dealing with the unknown, a live brain overseeing the instruments might well prove best. Besides an air and water recycler, life support included a gravity polarizer. It was necessarily small, its action confined to the interior, but at such close quarters it could counteract possible accelerations that would kill even a kzin, up to fifty or sixty Terran gravities.

The capsule whipped through the magnified part of the turret view. Its metal gleamed hazy-bright, a nucleus cocooned in shimmering forces. Nordbo imagined the rider voicing an exuberant screech. It vanished from his sight.

More sounds followed, quieter and longer-drawn. A boat was not thrown out by a machine; it launched itself. The lean form glided by on its way to a rendezvous point at the far side of the mystery. There it would seize the capsule in a grapnel field, haul it inboard, and bring it back.

Yiao-Captain stared yonder. “What might the thing be?” he mumbled.

“Artificial, obviously,” Nordbo answered, just as low.

“Yes, but for what? Who built it?”

“And when? It’s extremely old, I’m sure. Just look at it.”

Yiao-Captain’s fur bristled. “Billions of years?”

“Not a bad guess.”

“The Slavers ”

“The tnuctipun. They were engineers to the Slavers, the thrintun, you know, till they revolted.” And the war that followed exterminated both races, back while the ancestors of man and kzin were microbes in primordial seas.

Yiao-Captain’s ears lay flat. He shivered. “Haunted weapons. We have tales about things ancient and accursed ” Resolution surged. “Aowrrgh!” he shouted. “Whatever this be, we’ll master it! It’s ours now!”

Time crept. Nordbo realized he was hungry. Was that right? Why hadn’t grief filled him to the brim? He had lost his loves, twenty-odd years of their lives at least, and he felt hungry and ragingly curious.

Well, but they wouldn’t expect him to wallow in self-pity, would they? Despicable emotion. Let him take whatever anodyne that work offered. He could do nothing else about his situation.

Yet.

It was actually no long spell until the boat, at a safe distance, snared the capsule. Although its screen fields had degraded incoming data, a shipboard computer could restore much. Transmission commenced at once. In minutes numbers and images were appearing on screens.

Blue-white hell-flame streamed from a ragged hole in the shell, meters wide. The color was nothing but ghost-flicker, quanta given off by excited atoms. The real glow was the gamma light of annihilation, matter and antimatter created, meeting, perishing in cascade after curious cascade until the photons flew free in search of revenge.

“Yes,” Nordbo whispered, “I think the source does emit in all directions. The output fantastic. On the order of terawatts, no, I suspect magnitudes higher than that. The material enclosing it, though, that is what’s truly incredible. It stops those hard rays, it’s totally opaque to them, damps them down to infrared before it lets them go… But after billions of years, even it has worn thin and fragile. Something, a large meteoroid or something, finally punched through at one point, and there the radiation escapes unchecked. Elsewhere ”

“Can we make contact?” Yiao-Captain screamed. “Can we land and take possession?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to study, probe, set up models and run them through the computer. My guess at the moment is that probably we can, if we choose the place well and are careful. No promises, understand, and not soon.”

“Get to work on it! Immediately! Go!”

Nordbo obeyed, before Yiao-Captain should lose his temper and give him the claws.

He’d been granted a comparatively free hand to carry on research, with access to a laboratory and the production shop, assistance if necessary, provided of course that he remained properly servile. On a ship like this, those facilities were improvised, tucked into odd corners, so cramped that as a rule only one individual at a time could use them. That suited Nordbo fine.

First he required nourishment. He made for the food synthesizer. What it dispensed was as loathsome to the kzinti as to him, albeit for different reasons. Irritable at the lack of fresh meat, a spacehand kicked the man aside. Nordbo crashed against a bulkhead. The bruises lasted for days. “Keep your place, monkey! You’ll swill after the wakened Heroes have fed.”

“Yes, my master. I am sorry, my master.” Nordbo withdrew on hands and knees, as became an animal.

A thought that he had borne along from Wunderland crystallized. He’d be modifying apparatus, or making it from scratch, as occasion arose. Contemptuous, the kzinti, including the scientists, would pay scant heed. Yiao-Captain might be the exception, but he’d have plenty of other demands on his attention. With caution, patience, piecemeal labor, it should be possible to fashion some kind of weapon a knife, if nothing else and keep it concealed under a jumble of stuff in a cabinet or box.

Chances were he’d never use it. What could he win? But the simple knowledge of its existence would help him get through the next months. If he could at last endure no longer, if nothing whatsoever remained to lose, maybe he could wreak a little harm, and die like a man.

Chapter IX

Having left Alpha Centauri far enough behind, Rover phased into hyperspace and commenced the long haul. “We’ll go about four and a half light-years, emerge, and see what our instruments can tell us at that distance,” Saxtorph had decided. “When we’ve got a proper fix on the whatchamacallit, we’ll approach by short jumps, taking new observations after each one.”

“Jamais I’audace,” Dorcas had laughed.

“Huh? Oh. Oh, yah. Caution. Finagle knows what we’re letting ourselves in for, but I’ll bet my favorite meerschaum that Murphy will take a strong interest in the proceedings.”

In the galley, on the second day under quantum drive, Ryan exclaimed, “Hey, you really are handy with the tools.”

Tyra trimmed the last creamfruit and dropped it in a bowl. “One learns,” she said. “I am not a bad cook, either. Maybe sometime you will let me make us a meal.”

“M-m, you cook for yourself a lot?”

She nodded. “Eating out alone very much is depressing. Also, some of the places I have been, nobody but a local person or a berserker would go into a restaurant. Or else it is machines programmed for the same menus that bore me everywhere in known space.”

“Adventurous sort. Well, sure, I’d be glad to take a chance on you, if you’d like to try being more than the bull cook.” Ryan cocked his head and ran his glance up, down, and sideways across her. “For which job, strictly speaking, you lack certain qualifications anyway. Not that I object, mind you.”

The blue eyes blinked. “What?” Now and then an English idiom eluded her.

“Never mind. For the moment. Uh, you are quite sweet, helping out like this. You aren’t obliged to, you know, our paying passenger.”

“What should I do, sit yawning at a screen? I wish I could find more to keep me busy.”

“I’d be delighted to see to that, after hours,” he proposed.

She colored slightly, but her tone stayed calm and her smile amicable. “I suspect Pilot Fenger would complain. It could be safer to offend a keg of detonite.”

“You’ve noticed, have you?” he replied, unembarrassed. “I guess in your line of work you develop a Sherlock Holmes kind of talent. Well, yes, Carita and I do have a thing going. Have had for years. But it’s just friendly, no pledges, no claims. She’s not possessive or jealous or anything.” He edged closer. “This evenwatch after dinner? Your cabin or mine, whichever you prefer. I’ll bring a bottle of pineapple wine, which I’s‘pose you’ve never had. Good stuff, dry, trust me. We’ll talk and get better acquainted. I’d love to hear about your travels.”

“No, thank you,” she said, still good-humored. “Entanglements, innocent or not, on an expedition like this, they are unwise, don’t you agree? And I have… private things to think about when I am by myself.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “Tomorrow, besides the galley, can I assist in other of your duties?”

Since his hopes had not been especially high, tlicy were not dashed. He beamed “ ‘Auwe no ho’i e!” By all manner of means.“

Tyra left him and went down a corridor. The ship throbbed around her, an underlying susurrus of ventilators, mechanisms, power. Dorcas came the opposite way. They halted. “How do you do,” the mate greeted. Her expression was reserved.

“Hallo,” Tyra responded. “Are you in a hurry?”

Dorcas unbent to the extent of a lopsided grin. “In space we have time to burn, or else bare microseconds. What can I do for you?”

“You were so busy earlier, you and Robert, there was no opportunity to ask. A minute here, please. I want to be useful aboard. Kam lets me help him, but that takes two or three hours a daycycle at most. Can I do anything else?”

Dorcas frowned. “I can’t think of anything. Most of our work is highly skilled.”

“I could maybe learn a little, if somebody will teach me. I do have some space experience.”

“That will be up to the somebody, subject to the captain’s okay. We have an ample supply of books, music, shows, games.”

“I brought my own. Finally, I thought, I shall read War and Peace. But well, thank you. Don’t worry, I will be all right.”

“Feel free. But do not interfere.” Dorcas stared un-blinkingly into Tyra’s gaze. “You understand, I’m sure.”

“Of course. I will try to annoy nobody. Thank you.” They parted.

Those on mass detector watch didn’t count, unless something registered in the globe. Then anyone else got out of the chamber fast. Tyra found Carita seated there, smoking a cigar the air was blue and acrid while she played go with the computer. “Well, hi!” the Jinxian cried. Teeth flashed startling white in her midnight visage. “On free orbit, are you? C’mon in.”

“I thought you might care to talk,” said the Wunder-lander, shyer than erstwhile. “But it is not needful.”

“Oh, Lord, for me it’s a breath of fresh beer. Dullest chore in the galaxy, this side of listening to an Ecotheist preacher. And the damn machine always beats me. Hey, don’t look near that unshuttered port. We’d have to screw your eyeballs back in and hang your brain out to dry.”

“I know about hyperspace.” Tyra flowed into the second chair.

“Yes, you have knocked around a fair amount, haven’t you?”

“Part of my work.”

“I globbed a disc of yours before we left. Put it through the translator and read it yesterday. In English, Astrids Purple Submarine.”

“That is for children.”

“What of it? Fun. When I got to the part where the teddy bear has to sit on the safety valve of the steam telephone, I laughed my molars loose. I’ll keep the book for whatever kids I may eventually have.”

“Thank you.” A silence fell.

Carita blew a smoke ring and said softly, “You’re a cheerful one, aren’t you? That takes grit, in a situation like yours. Because you’ve never put aside what happened to your parents, have you? I imagine you always dreamed of going out on your father’s trail.”

Tyra shrugged. “The tragedy is in the past. Whatever comes of it is in the future. Meanwhile, he would be the last person who wanted me to mope.”

“And you’ve more life in you than most. Yank me down if I pry, but I can’t help wondering why you’ve never married.”

“Oh, I did. Twice.”

Carita waited.

Tyra glanced past her. “I may as well tell you. We shall be shipmates for a time that may grow long and a little dangerous. I married first soon after the liberation. It was a mistake. He was born in space, he had spent his life as a Resistance fighter. I was young and, and impulsive and worshipped him for a hero.” She sighed. “He was, is not a bad man. But he wua Inn much used to violence and to being obeyed.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t take kindly to that.”

“No. My second husband was several years later. An engineer, who had traveled and done great things in space before he settled on Wunderland. A good man, he, strong, gentle. But I found we discovered together, time by time, that he no longer cared to explore things. He was content with what he had, with his routines. I grew restless until there was someone else. That ended, but by then it had broken the marriage.” Tyra sighed. “Poor Jonas. He deserved better. But he was not too sad. I was his third wife. He is now happy with his fourth.”

“So you’ve had other fellows in between and afterward.”

“Well, yes.” Tyra flushed. “Not many. I do not hunt them.”

“No, no, I never said you do. Besides, I’d look silly perched on a moralistic fence. Still,” Carita murmured, “older men generally, eh?”

“Do you care for puppies?” Tyra snapped.

“I’m sorry. I mean well, but Kam says that for me ‘tact’ is a four-letter word. ‘Fraid he’s right. Uh, you here after anything in particular, or just to chat? You’re welcome either way.”

Tyra relaxed somewhat. “Both. I would like to know you folk better.”

Carita grinned. “To put us in a book?”

Tyra smiled back. “If you permit. This journey will become big news when we return. I think I can tell it in such a way that your privacy is protected but it gives you publicity that will help your business.”

“Which could sure use help. Don’t feel guilty about any risks. You’re paying, and we went in with our eyes wide open, radiating the light of pure greed.” Carita paused. “Yes, I guess you are the right writer for us.”

“I want more to know you as, as human beings.”

“And we to know you. Okay. We’ve got a couple weeks ahead of us before the trip gets interesting, except for whatever we can stir up amongst ourselves. What else is on your agenda today?”

“I would liefer have a part in this ship than be idle and passive. You know I help Kam. M-m, do you mind?”

“Finagle, no!” Carita chortled. “Why should I? No claims. I warn you, he’ll try to get you in his bunk. Or is that a warning? He’s pretty good.”

“Thank you, but I shall… respect your territory.” Tyra hastened onward. “The thought came to me, another thing I might help with. This watch you are keeping. It demands very little, no?”

“If only it did demand. Hours and hours of nothing. And till we replace Juan Yoshü, the spells are longer than ever.” Carita’s cigar jabbed air. “You’re volunteering? I wish you could. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy as it appears.”

“I know. I did research for a script, a while ago, and remember. In the unlikely event that the detector registers a significant mass, die person must know exactly what to do, and do it at once. But the list of actions that may be required is short and rather simple. Give me instructions and some simulator practice, and I believe I could pass any test.” Tyra smiled again. “I would want you should be satisfied first I can handle the job. This ship carries something precious, namely me.”

Thick hand tugged heavy chin. “It tempts, it tempts… But no. I learned how. That doesn’t mean I’m qualified to teach how. Same for Kam. You see, the academies require that an instructor have experience of command. They’re right. This is a psionic dingus. The trainee needs close exposure to a personality who knows how everything aboard a ship bleshes together.” Carita brightened. “Ask Bob or Dorcas. Either of them could. And hoo-ha, do I want them to!”

“Thank you, I will.” Tyra’s voice vibrated.

“Fine. But let’s get sociable, okay? For me right now, that’s a big service. Care for a seegar? I thought not. Well, here’s a box of Kam’s excellent cookies.”

Reminiscences wandered. Inevitably they led to the present enterprise, the wish that drove it. By then the women felt enough at ease that Carita could murmur, “Every girl’s first sweetheart is her daddy, but you were only eight when you lost yours. And nevertheless He must have been one hell of a man.”

“He was,” Tyra answered as low. “I dare to hope he is.”

A while later, she left. Bound for the cubicle known as her stateroom, this time she encountered Saxtorph. He waved expansively at her. She stopped. He did too. “Anything you want, Tyra?” he inquired.

She met his look. “Robert, will you teach me to stand mass detector watch?”

Chapter X

From a hundred-kilometer distance, Rover sent her robot prospector around the thing she had tracked down. The little machine circled close, taking readings, storing data. When behind the sphere, it steered itself, with sufficient judgment to stay well clear of the radiation streaming forth from one site there. Otherwise Saxtorph kept in radio rapport, his computer helping him devise the orders he issued. From time to time the prospector transmitted, downloading what it had gathered. At length Saxtorph had it land on the surface. Capable of hundred-gravity acceleration, the robot could also make feather-soft contact. Presently he ventured to have it apply its dynamic analyzer, attempting sonic, electronic, and radiation soundings plus measurements of several different moduli.

Mostly it drew blank. This material was nothing like the asteroids and moons that it was meant to study. A few experiments yielded values, but with ridiculously large probable errors. Nor was the robot well suited for a tour of inspection. Saxtorph recalled it to his ship.

“At any rate, the side away from the firebeam should be safe for people,” he said. “Okay, I’m on my way.”

‘’ ‘Should be’ isn’t quite the same as ‘is,’ “ Ryan objected.

The captain ignored him. “I could use a partner.” He glanced at Carita. She nodded avidly.

After some unavoidable argument and essential preparations, they left. Saxtorph deemed that taking the boat, a comparatively large and ungainly object, was hazardous. They flitted in spacesuits.

The nearer they drew to the objective, the more the mystery deepened for them. Its horizon arcing across nearly half their sky, the starlit surface became a pitted bare plain on which crouched outlandish bulks, soared skeletal spires, sprawled shadowy labyrinths. Soon Rover seemed as remote as Earth. Breath sounded harsh in helmets, pulsebeats loud in motors, pumps, and bloodstreams.

The man pressed the control for a radar reading. Numbers appeared. He made his command carefully prosaic: “Brake, hold position, and wait for further instructions. I’m going down.”

“I still say I should,” Carita answered. “We can’t spare you.”

“Sure you can, while you’ve got Dorcas.” That was why his wife stayed behind, though he’d had to pull rank to make her do it.

“Your vectors are correct for landing,” she informed him from her post aboard. The ship tracked the flyers with a precision they themselves could not match. Probably he alone heard the tremor in her voice.

It filled Tyra’s: “Be careful, Robert, oh, be careful!”

“Quiet,” Dorcas snapped. She hadn’t wanted the Wunderlander in the circuit. Ryan wasn’t; he kept lookout at the main observation panel. But Tyra had appealed to Saxtorph. Not sniveling or anything; a simple request. When she wanted to, though, she could charm the stripes off a skunk.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The captain set his thrusters and boosted. Acceleration tugged briefly. As he turned and slowed, giddiness whirled through him. He was used to it, his reflexes compensated, it passed. His bootsoles touched solidity and he stood on the thing.

Rather, he floated. A few tens of millions of tons, concentrated some eight kilometers below him, exerted no gravity worth mentioning. He directed thruster force upward and increased it until he was pressed down hard enough that he could stand or walk low-gee fashion. This adjustment he made most slowly and cautiously, a fraction at a time. Untold ages had eroded the hollow shell, wearing away its strength until a rock traveling at mere KPS could drive a hole through. Of course, that might mean resistance equal to ordinary armor plate, but it might be considerably less, if not everywhere then at certain points; and he could have happened to land at one of those points.

Otherwise the stuff kept unbelievable properties. Measurements taken on the escaping radiation showed what an inferno raged inside. Yet on this opposite hemisphere, a glance at instruments on his vambrace confirmed the findings made by the robot. Nothing was coming off but infrared at a temperature hardly above ambient.

Saxtorph realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a gust. His ribs ached, his sweat stank. Why had he undertaken the flit, anyway?

Well, it was irresistible. Nobody felt able to leave without exploring just a little bit more. And after all, you never knew; a search could turn up a clue to Peter Nordbo’s fate.

Saxtorph made for a surrealistic jumble of pipes, reticulations, and clustered globules. Dust, millimeters thick, scuffed up in ghost-wisps wherever his boots struck. After several leaps, he halted. “Okay, Carita, come join the fun. Don’t land, remember. Stay a few meters above and behind me, on the alert.”

“You’re afraid maybe I’ll take a nap?” the crewman gibed. Edged with their luminance, her spacesuit arrowed across the stars.

I suppose we shouldn’t crack jokes in the presence of something ancient and inscrutable, Saxtorph thought. We should be duly awed, reverent, and exalted. To hell with that. We’ve got a job to do. I hope Tyra will understand, when she writes this up.

Of course she will. She’s our own sort. If her whole life didn’t prove it already, the past couple of weeks sure did.

Saxtorph neared the complex. At hover, Carita directed a search beam as he desired, supplementing his flash. Undiffused, the brightness flowed like water over a substance that was not rock nor metal nor anything the humans knew. They both operated cameras as well as instruments, while their suits transmitted to the ship. Saxtorph’s eyes strained.

“I think the microcraters everywhere were formed in the last hundred million years, plus or minus x,” he said. “Otherwise we’d see much more overlap.”

“You’re supposing the construction is older than that, then,” Carita deduced.

“It certainly is,” Dorcas told them from the ship. “The computer just finished evaluating our data on the dust. Isotope ratios prove it’s been collecting for a minimum of two billion years, likely more.” After a moment: “Incidentally, that suggests cosmic radiation isn’t what weakened the shell to the point where impacts started leaving pockmarks and at last a big one broke through. The radiation inside must be mainly responsible. But if it hasn’t done more damage, well, the thing was built to last.”

“Besides,” Saxtorph said, “if I’ve got any feeling for machinery, this bears every earmark of tnuctipun work.”

“How can you tell?” Carita asked. Her words sounded thin. Ordinarily she would have kept silence, except for business and an occasional wisecrack, but the weirdness had shaken her a bit, roused a need to talk. Saxtorph sympathized. “What do we know about the Slaver era? What little the bandersnatchi remember, or believe they do, and what got learned from the thrint that came out of stasis for a short while, before they got it bottled again.”

“That includes a smidgin of technical information, and a lot of thinking has been done about it ever since,” he reminded her. “I’ve studied the subject some. It interests me. Come on.”

He bounded ahead to the next aggregation and examined it as best he cursorily could.

And the next and the next and the next. Time ceased to exist. He drank from his water tube, stuffed rations through his chowlock, excreted into his disposer, without noticing. He had become pure search. Sturdily, Carita followed. She made no attempt to call halt, nor did anyone aboard ship. The quest had seized them all.

Monkey curiosity, Saxtorph thought once, fleetingly. The kzinti would sneer. But they’d examine this too, in detail, till they used up every possibility of discovery that was in their equipment and their brains. Because to them it’d spell power.

The knowledge was chill: It is a terrible weapon.

“I suspect it’s one of a kind,” he said. “Humans and their acquaintances haven’t found any mini-black holes yet, and that hasn’t been for lack of looking. They’re bound to be uncommon.”

“Yes,” Dorcas agreed. “The tnuctipun doubtless came on this one by chance. I’d guess that was after they’d rebelled. They saw how to use it against the Slavers. Otherwise, if they’d built the machine around it earlier, the Slavers would have been in possession, and might have quelled the uprising early on. They might be alive today.”

Carita shuddered audibly. “A black hole ”

It could only be that. Mass, dimensions, radiation spectrum, everything fitted astrophysical theory. Peter Nordbo had recorded the idea in his notes, but he couldn’t reconcile it with the sudden apparition in the heavens. The tumbling shell and the meteoroid gap accounted for that. Perhaps while they were here the kzinti, under his guidance, had found indirect ways to study the interior, the eerie effects of so mighty a gravitation on space-time. But Rovers crew already had ample data to be confident of what it was they confronted.

Burnt out, a giant star collapses into a form so dense, infinitely dense at the core singularity, that light itself can no longer escape its grip. The minimum mass required is about three Sols. Today. In the first furious instants of creation, immediately after the Big Bang, immeasurably great forces were at play. Where they chanced to concentrate, they had the power to compress any amount of mass, however small, into the black hole state. It must have happened, over and over. Countless billions must have formed, a few large, most diminutive.

In the universe of later epochs, they are not stable. Quantum tunneling causes them to give off particles, matter and antimatter, which mutually annihilate. For a body of stellar size, the rate of evaporation is negligible. But it increases as the body shrinks. Ever faster and more fiercely does the radiation go, until in a final supernal eruption the remnant vanishes altogether. Nearly every black hole made in the beginning has thus, long since, departed.

This one had been just big enough to survive to the present day. Applying what theory the ship’s database contained, Dorcas had made some estimates. Three or four billion years ago it was radiating with about half its current intensity. Its mass, equal to a minor asteroid’s, was now packed inside an event horizon with a diameter less than that of an atomic nucleus. Another 50,000 years or so remained until the end.

Carita rallied. “A weapon?” she asked. “How could that be?”

“Your mind isn’t as nasty as mine,” Saxtorph replied absently. His attention was on high lattices, surrounding a paraboloid (?), which grew out of the shell where he stood. Their half-familiarity chewed at him. Almost, almost, he knew them.

“What else could it be?” Dorcas said. “A power source for peaceful use? Awkward and unnecessary when you have fusion, let alone total conversion. As a weapon, though, the thing is hideous. Invulnerable. Open a port, and a beam shoots out that no screen can protect against. At a minimum, electronics are scrambled and personnel get a lethal dose. No missile can penetrate that defense; if it manages to approach, it will be vaporized before it strikes. Sail through an enemy fleet, with death in your wake. Pass near any fort and leave corpses manning armament in ruins. Cruise low around a planet and sterilize it at your leisure.”

“Then why didn’t the tnuctipun win?”

“We’ll never know. But they can only have had this one. That was scarcely decisive. And… the war exterminated both races. Perhaps the crew here heard they were last of their kind, and went elsewhere to die.”

Saxtorph caught Tyra’s whisper: “While the black hole, the machine, drifted through space for billions of years ” The Wunderlander raised her voice: “I am sorry. I should not interrupt. But do you not overlook something?”

“What?” Dorcas sounded edgy. As well she might be after these many hours, Saxtorph told himself.

“How could the tnuctipun bring the weapon to bear?” Tyra asked. “The black hole was orbiting free in interstellar space, surely, light-years from anywhere. The mass is huge to accelerate.”

“They could have harnessed its own energy output to a polarizer system.”

“Really? Is that enough, to get it to a destination fast enough to be useful?”

Smart girl, Saxtorph thought. She hasn’t got the figures at her fingertips, but those fingers have a good, firm, sensitive hold on reality.

“Through hyperspace,” Dorcas clipped.

“Forgive me,” Tyra said. “I do not mean to be a nuisance. You must know more about tnuctipun technology than I do. But I studied what I was able. Is it not true that their hyperdrive was crude? It would not work before the vessel was moving close to light speed. This genstand has ordinary velocity, in the middle of empty space.”

“That is a shrewd question,” Dorcas admitted.

“A real fox question,” Saxtorph said. He was coming out of his preoccupation, aware how tired he was but also exuberant, full of love for everybody. Well, for most beings. Especially his comrades. “It could stonker our whole notion. Except I believe I’ve found the answer. There is in fact a hyperdrive engine. It’s not like anything we know or much like any of the hypothetical reconstructions I’ve seen of tnuctipun artifacts. But I believe I can identify it for what it is, or anyhow what it does. My guess is that, yes, they could take this black hole through hyperspace, emerging with a reasonable intrinsic velocity that a gravity drive could then change to whatever they needed for combat purposes.”

“How, when every ship must first move so fast?” Tyra wondered.

“I am only guessing, mind you. But think.” Despite physical exhaustion, Saxtorph’s brain had seldom run like this. Talking to her was a burst of added stimulation. “Speed means kinetic energy, right? That’s what the Slaver hyperdrive depended on, kinetic energy, not speed in itself. Well, here you’ve got a terrific energy concentration, so-and-so fantastically many joules per mean cubic centimeter. If the tnuctipun invented a way to feed it to their quantum jumper, they’d be in business.”

“I see. Yes. Robert, you are brilliant.”

“Naw. I may be dead wrong. The tech boys and girls will need months to warm over this gizmo before they can figure it out for sure. They better be careful. Considering how well preserved the apparatus is, in spite of everything that the black hole inside and the universe outside could do, I wouldn’t be surprised but what that hyperdrive is still in working order.”

“More powerful than ever,” Dorcas breathed. “The black hole has been evolving.”

“Brrr!” Carita exclaimed. “Knock it off, will you? If the ratcats got hold of it ” She yelped. “But they were here! Weren’t they? How much did they learn? How come they didn’t whoop home to Alpha Centauri with this thing and scrub our fleet out of space?”

“Even taking its time, what a single expedition could find out would be limited, I should think,” Dorcas said. Her tone went metallic. “We, though, the human species, we’d better make certain.”

“Yah,” Saxtorph concurred. He shook himself in his armor. “Listen, I decree we’re past the point of diminishing returns today. Let’s head back, Carita, have a hot meal and a stiff drink, and sleep for ten or twelve hours. Then I have some ideas about our next move.”

“Wow-hoo!” his companion caroled, uneasiness shoved aside. “I thought you’d decided to homestead. Say, ever consider how lucky the tnuctip race was, not speaking English? Spell the name backwards ”

“Never mind,” Saxtorph sighed. “Compute your vectors and boost.”

Bound for Rover, he felt as if he were awakening from a dream. In the time lately past, he had experienced in full something that had rarely and barely touched him before, the excitement of the scientist. It had been a transcendence. How did that line or two of poetry go? “Some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken.” Or a new star, small and strange, foredoomed, yet waxingly radiant; and the archeology of a civilization vast and vanished. Now he returned to his ordinary self.

He ached, his tongue was a block of wood, his eyelids were sandpaper, but he rejoiced. By God, he had seen Truth naked, and She took him by the hand and led him beyond himself, into Her own country! It wouldn’t happen again, he supposed; and that was as well. He wasn’t built for it. But this once it did happen.

When he and Carita completed airlock cycle, their shipmates were waiting for them. Dorcas embraced him. “Welcome, welcome,” she said tenderly.

“Thanks.” He looked past her shoulder. How bright was Tyra’s hair against the bulkhead. His brain hadn’t yet stopped leapfrogging. “We’ve got facts to go on,” he blurted. “Knowing what the kzinti found, we can make a pretty good guess at what they did. And where they are. With your dad.”

“O-o-oh ” the Wunderlander gasped.

He disengaged. She sprang forward, seized and kissed him.

Chapter XI

When the kzinti again drew Peter Nordbo into time, his first clear thought was: Hulda, Tyra, Ib. More than twenty years now. Do you live? I almost wish not, I who come home after helping our masters arm themselves for the enslavement of all humanity. Forgive me, my darlings. I had no choice.

“Up,” growled the one that hulked above him. “The commander wants you. Why, I don’t know.”

Nordbo blinked, bewildered. Through the gloom in the chamber he recognized the kzin. It wasn’t the technician in charge of such tasks, it was one of the fire-control ratings. Their designation translated roughly as “Gunner.” What had gone on? A fight, a killing? The crew were disciplined and the discoveries at the black hole had kept them enthusiastic; nevertheless, after months in close quarters, tempers grew foul and quarrels flared.

Well he knew. He bore several scars from the claws of individuals who took anger out on him. They were punished, though no disabling injury was inflicted. Nor had torture left him crippled, being carefully adminis-tered. He was too useful to damage without cause.

“Move!” Gunner hauled him from the box and flung him to the deck. There was mercy in the wave of physical pain that swept from the impact. For a moment it drowned every other awareness.

It faded, Nordbo remembered anew, he crept to his feet and hobbled off.

The corridor stretched empty and silent. How utterly silent. The rustle of ventilators sounded loud. Dread sharpened in him and cut the last dullness away. A-shiver, he reached the observation turret and entered. Only the heavens illuminated it.

No suns of Alpha Centauri shone before him, no constellations whatsoever. Around a pit of lightlessness, blue stars clustered thinly. As he stared aft he saw more, whose colors changed through yellow to red; but behind the ship yawned another darkness rimmed with embers.

Aberration and Doppler effect, he recognized. We haven’t slowed down yet, we’re flying ballistic at half the speed of light. Why have they revived me early? They didn’t expect to. I’d served my purpose. No, their purpose. I could merely pray that when their scientists on Wunderland finished interrogating me, I’d be released to take up any rags of my life that were left. Unless it makes more sense to pray for death.

Yiao-Captain poised athwart the stranger sky. Its radiances gleamed icy on eyeballs and fangs. His ears stood unfolded but his tail switched. “You are not where you think you are,” he rumbled. “Twenty-two years have passed,” Nordbo’s mind automatically rendered the timespan into human units “and we are bound for our Father Sun.”

The shock was too great. It could not register at once. Nordbo heard himself say, “May I ask for an explanation?”

Did Yiao-Captain’s curtness mask pain of his own? “We were about three years en route back to Alpha Centauri.” After half a year at the black hole. “A mes-sage came. It told of a fleet from Sol, invading the system and shattering our forces. Somehow the humans have gained a capability of traveling faster than light. No ship without it can win against the least of theirs. We must inevitably lose these planets. It must already have happened when Snapping Sherrek received the beam.

“When I was roused and informed, naturally I did not propose to continue there, bringing my great news to the enemy. I ordered our forward velocity quenched and the last of our delta v applied to send us home.”

At one-half c, a trip of nearly six decades. Nordbo’s thought trickled vague and slow. Can’t stop at the far end. Hurtle on till the last reserve mass has been converted, the screen fields go out, and the wind of our passage through the medium begins to crumble us. Unless first another ship matches speed and takes us off. I daresay they’ll try, once they have an idea of what this crew can tell.

It jolted: Faster than light? We had no means, nothing but some mathematical hints in quantum theory and the knowledge that the thrintun could do it, billions of years ago knowledge that led this expedition to conclude that the artifact is indeed a gigantic hyperdrive spacecraft powered by the black hole it surrounds. But how did the means come so suddenly to my race?

A thunderbolt: Wunderland is free! My folk have been free for eighteen years!

Nightfall: While I am captive on the Flying Dutchman among the demons that sail it.

Yiao-Captain’s voice rolled on: “If the humans do not find what we did, and if we can inform the Patriarchy of it, victory may yet be ours. Not from the alien vessel alone, irresistible though it be, but from what our engineers will learn.”

Was he boasting, or trying to reassure himself? Certainly the words were unnecessary. Even without Nordbo’s intellectual cooperation, the kzin known as Chief Physicist and his team had traced circuits, com-puted probable effects, inferred that the most plausible purpose was to achieve the relationship of wave functions which theory said might throw matter into a hypothetical hyperspace. They had actually identified an installation that appeared to be an activator of the entire system. Yiao-Captain had had to exert authority to keep three young members of the group from throwing what they thought was the main switch. Much more study was called for, a complete plan of the whole, before any such action was justifiable. Else they could well lose the whole treasure, construct and knowledge alike.

“We are continuously transmitting over and over, the entire set of data we did acquire, together with our ideas about it, on a beam directed forward,” the commander proceeded.

The merest fraction of what is there to discover, commented the remote part of Nordbo, yet an enormous load of information, words, numbers, equations, diagrams, pictures, everything we got at a cost of seven kzinti lives and the price I paid. But perhaps the beam, dopplered though its waves are, will register on someone’s communicator.

“The likelihood of its being noticed, even when it reaches Kzin, is very small, of course,” Yiao-Captain said. “We send it because it does go faster than we, and may perchance convey our word, should we perish along the way. Otherwise, we shall surely be detected as we near the home planets, and receivers will be adjusted to hear what we then broadcast. Meanwhile we stand three-month watches in pairs. More would be intolerable, would lead to hatred and deadly clashes, over so long a voyage. It is again my turn. Gunner is poor company. That is best; we need not see each other much, as I would have to do where he of a rank entitled to courtesy. But the time grows wearisome. Finally I have had you wakened. Maybe we can talk. Certainly we can play chess.”

Realization was draining downward from Nordbo’s forebrain, along the nerves, into blood and marrow.

He barely swallowed his vomit. It burned gullet and belly.

Almost, he screamed aloud: Yes, whistle your pet monkey to you. Get what amusement you can out of the sorry creature. In the end, after he begins to bore you, disembowel him with a swipe of claws and eat the fresh, dripping meat. Enjoy.

Did you enjoy watching me under the torture? Your eyes shone, ears lay back, tongue ran over lips. No, it was not for pleasure in itself. It was to make me recant my refusal to work any more for you, after it became clear that what we were investigating was a monstrous weapon. You may have regretted it a little. But naturally the spectacle spoke to your instincts.

I cheated them, Yiao-Captain. I yielded within minutes. As for your contempt, inwardly I laughed. It was not the pain that changed my mind, nor the threat of mutilation and death. It was the hope of returning home, to stand once more between you and my Hulda, my children, my folk. Yes, also the crazy hope that somehow I might smuggle a warning off to Sol.

Afterward, yes, I worked for you again, but I told you of no more inspirations, insights, ideas worth trying. I did nothing, really, that a robot could not. What else can you expect from a slave, Yiao-Captain? Love?

The kzin’s tone softened. “I know this is a stormwind upon you. You will need a while to regain balance. Go. Rest, think. Come back to me when you feel ready.”

Nordbo stumbled from him.

Grief welled up: I have lost you for always, my beloved.

Bleak joy: You are free. We can outpace light. Surely our fleets went on to defeat the kzinti everywhere and ram peace down their throats.

Despair: But no secret has ever stayed long under lock and key. Someday, somehow, they too will gain the knowledge. This ship bears news that may well help them to it. We did conclude that the machine englobing the black hole is tnuctipun and is meant to pass it through hyperspace. We think we identified the activator. We could not puzzle out more than the likeliest-looking procedure for starting it up, and we have no idea how to set a course or stop a destination. But a later expedition, better equipped, with up-to-date physicists, ought to learn much more than we did.

Wrath: “We!” As if this were my band!

Shame: For a while it came near being so. I was captivated. In the work, I could forget my loss for hours at a time. But then I began to see what the thing must be

Horror: A part of the arsenal that destroyed intelligent life throughout this galactic sector, those billions of years ago. Shall it fall into kzinti hands?

Logic: Oh, by itself it might not prove decisive, come (God take pity on us) the next war. But it would kill many. Worse, it would lead the kzinti to the hyperdrive; or, if they have that by now, it could well suggest improvements that make their ships irresistibly superior to ours. And who can be certain that that would be all it did?

Agony: And I am helpless, helpless.

Revelation: NO!

Through a time beyond time, Nordbo stood amidst lightnings. And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse

Apocalypse opened itself to metal, silence, and unseen stars; but the hand of the Lord was upon him. Somewhere a voice quavered that he had better take nourishment, sleep, recover his full strength, while watching for the best chance. He scorned it into extinction. He would never be stronger than now. Surprise, and a will that had given doubt no days or weeks to corrode it, were his only allies.

With long strides he made his way to the workshop. Every sense thrilled preternaturally keen. A bulkhead bore furrows where a kzin in a rage had scratched the facing. Air from the ventilators blew warm, a tinge of ozone cleansing a ratcat taint become slight. His feet thudded on the deck, the impacts went up through his bones. His mouth was no longer dry, but hunter-wet.

He had bitten his tongue and tasted the salt blood, His heart beat steady, powerful. His fingers flexed, making ready.

Though the shop was dark, cramful of stored equipment, he had no trouble finding his toolbox. Things clattered as he went after the knife he had made and left buried at the bottom. The kzinti had never suspected; else he would have become meat. He drew it forth. Heavy in his grasp, blade about thirty centimeters by two, it was crude, a piece of scrap surreptitiously sawed, hammered, and filed, a haft of plastic riveted to the tang; but patience had given it a microtome edge. He discarded the improvised sheath and held the steel behind his back when he went out. Barehanded, a kzin could take a man apart, and speed as well as strength was why. Nordbo didn’t plan to waste time drawing.

Nor had he any qualms of conscience. The odds against him were huge enough without the beasts he hunted being prepared for him.

He found Gunner slumped sullen in the den that corresponded to a human ship’s saloon. The kzin watched a drama which Nordbo recognized as classic. Maybe he’d seen the popular repertory too often and was desperate for entertainment. In the screen, Chrung was attacking an enemy stronghold, wielding an ax on its parapet. Gunner was moderately interested. He did not notice the man who glided forward until Nordbo reached his shoulder.

The massive head turned. Lips pulled from fangs, irritation that might flash into murder frenzy, did the intruder not grovel and plead. Nordbo’s hand came around, machine precise. He drove his knife through the right eye, upward into the brain.

Gunner bellowed. Nordbo cast himself against the great body. His left hand clung to the fur while his right twisted the knife. An arm scythed past him, reflex that would have laid him open were he in its path. He worked his blade to and fro. Abruptly he clutched limpness. The kzin sagged to the deck. Death-stench rose fetid.

Nordbo withdrew the knife and stepped aside. Not much blood ran from the socket at his feet. He had hoped for a silent kill. Well, that he had killed at all was remarkable. Next he must repeat it or die trying. He felt no fear, nor gladness or even anger. His mind was the control center of the mechanism that was himself.

He wouldn’t get a second opportunity like this. A spear, a crossbow a daydream. He glanced about. Their food being synthetic, these travelers had adopted the Wunderlander fashion of tablecloths. The gory play continued in the screen. It stirred memory of things watched or read at home, historical sociology and fiction. The trick he recalled must require long practice to be done right, but a man who had pitched tents and hoisted sails shouldn’t be too inept. Heavy feet sped along the passageway outside. Nordbo took a corner of the napery in his left hand. He snapped the fabric, to gain some feeling for its behavior.

Yiao-Captain burst into the den. “What’s wrong?” he roared while he slammed to a halt. His look blazed across the corpse and the man who stood beyond it, knife reddened. Insolent past belief, the man shook a rag at him and grinned.

For a whole second, sheer stupefaction held Yiao-Captain immobile. Then fury exploded. He screamed and leaped.

Nordbo swayed aside. The giant orange body arced across the space where the cloth rippled. It slipped aside. As the kzin passed, Nordbo hewed.

Yiao-Captain hit the bulkhead. It groaned and buckled. The kzin bounded off the deck and rushed. Nordbo was drifting toward the door. Again his capework saved him, though a leg brushed his and made him stagger. Yet he had gotten a stab into the neck.

He reached the corridor. “Blunderfoot!” he shouted in the kzinti language. “Eater of sthondat dung! Come get me if you dare!” His trick would soon fail him unless he kept his antagonist amok.

Yiao-Captain charged. Blood marked his trail, pumped out of the rents beneath ribs and jaws. Nordbo cut him.

Leaping by, he closed teeth on fabric. Nordbo nearly lost it. He slashed it across and saved half.

Scarlet spouted. My God, I got a major vein, Nordbo realized. Yiao-Captain turned. He lurched and mewled, but he attacked. Nordbo retreated. Flick cape over eyeballs, once, twice, thrice. Blindly, Yiao-Captain went past. Nordbo sliced his tail off.

Yiao-Captain came back around. He crumpled to his knees, to all fours. Snarling, he crawled at the man. Nordbo backed up, easily keeping ahead of him.

Yiao-Captain stopped. He stared. The raw whisper held a sudden gentleness. Or puzzlement? “Speaker for Humans, I… I liked you. I thought… you liked… me…” He collapsed. His death struggle took several minutes.

The ship is mine, said the computer in Nordbo’s head. Not that I can do anything with it. Except, of course, shut off the beamcast. And wait. Recycling is operative; plenty of food and water. Including kzin steaks, if I want. I can break into the small arms locker and shoot them where they lie. But probably that’s too ugly an act. I am not a kzin, I am a man.

Otherwise I wait. Forty or more years till I reach their sun. I will occupy myself, handicrafts, study of what’s in the database, love letters to Hulda. Meditation, maybe. For something may yet happen to set me free. The one sure way to lose all hope is to give up all hope.

Rationality fell apart. He retched and began to shake, miserably cold. Reaction. Let him go sleep and sleep and sleep. Afterward he would eat something, and clean up this mess, and settle down into solitude.

Chapter XII

In galactic space a sun is a mote, a planet well-nigh infinitesimal. How then to find a spacecraft felling through light-years?

“Ve haff our met’ods,” boasted Saxtorph. Begin by reasoning. The kzinti would not stay longer at the black hole than it took to learn everything they were able; and they were doubtless not extremely well chosen or well outfitted for scientific research. Having shot a beam at Alpha Centauri, describing what they had done and recommending a proper expedition, they’d start after it. Presently they’d receive word that the system was felling to an armada from Sol. Consider the dates of events, assume they’d been some months at work before they set forth, figure in acceleration time, and you conclude that they got the news about a third of the way along their course. What would they then plausibly do? Why, make for 61 Ursae Majoris, the star that Kzin itself orbits, the world that spawned their breed. Just as likely, they’d spend their engine reserve boosting to a full half c, and now be moving at approximately that speed. Calculate the trajectory.

Your answer will reflect the uncertainties in your guesstimates. What you get is not a curve but a cone. The ship is somewhere near the top, which leaves you with a volume still so enormous that random search is a fool’s errand.

However, space is not empty. The interstellar medium, mostly hydrogen with some helium and pinches of higher elements, has a mean density equivalent to about one proton per cubic centimeter. An object passing through it at 150,000 klicks per second hits a lot of stuff. The X-rays given off at these encounters would quickly fry the crew and their electronics, save that the screen fields keep the gas at a distance from the hull and guide it into a fairly smooth flow. Nevertheless, the perturbation is considerable. Atoms are excited and emit softer quanta. The tunnel of near-total vacuum left behind the vessel will take years to fill: which means it is correspondingly long. All this shows in the radio spectrum from that part of the sky. Sensitive instruments can detect it across quite a few parsecs.

The technique was not original with Saxtorph. The UN Navy had developed and employed it during the war. Since Rover was not specially equipped for it, he did have to devise modifications. In essence, he went via hyperspace from point to precalculated point. At each, his gang took readings. Dorcas had written a program that interpreted them. In due course, the seekers should get an identification. On that basis they could measure a parallax and obtain a fix.

Saxtorph and Tyra sat by themselves over beers in the saloon. Talk ransacked the past, for the future seemed like a wire drawn so taut that at any moment it would snap and the sharp ends recoil. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I have been on Silvereyes. It is fascinating. A hundred lifetimes were too little for to understand those ecologies.”

“You were writing about it?” he inquired.

“What else? One must pay for one’s travel somehow. Of course, I knew better than to try squeezing a whole world into a book. I looked me around, but that which I made my subject was the Cyclops island.”

“Really? I’ve got to read your book when we get back. You see, I was there myself once. A tourniquet vine damn near did for a shipmate, but we chopped her free in time, and otherwise it was, as you say, fascinating. I begrudged every minute I was on duty and couldn’t explore.”

“You have been everywhere, have you not?” she murmured.

“No, no, much though I’d like to. Besides, this wasn’t my idea. Navy, tail end of the war, establishing a just-incase base. Satellite, but initial supplies of air and water and such would come from the ground.”

Reminiscence went on. “ boats, to check out the surrounding shoals. A simple mooring is a timber tethered to a rock. What I could’ve told those clowns, because I’d been in Hawaii, was that they’d picked a chunk of volcanic pumice. But I wouldn’t‘ve known either that the log was stonewood. So they took the ensemble to the mooring place and heaved it overboard, and the rock floated while the log sank.”

He always liked the heartiness of Tyra’s laughter.

“Here I’ve gone again, blathering on about me,” he said. “You’re a good listener no, a great, a vintage listener but honest, I set out to hear about you. And I really can listen too.”

She sobered. “I know. Not many men can, or will. You act very everyday, Robert, but in truth you are a deep and complicated person.”

“Wrong, wrong. Never mind. I said we should talk about you. Uh, on Silvereyes, did you visit the Amanda Lakes region?”

“Of course.” Tyra sighed. “Beauty that high comes near to hurt, no? At least when there is no one to share it with.”

“You had nobody? You should have.”

Her smile was rueful. “Well, I roomed with another woman. Although she was pleasant, finally we agreed what a shame that one of us was of the wrong sex.”

“Yah, I daresay it’ll become a favorite honeymoon resort.” Saxtorph stared into his beer stein. “Tyra, none of my business, except we’re friends. But you rate better than going through life alone the way you’re doing.”

She reached across the table and laid her hand on his. “You are kind.” Her voice lowered. “On this journey I have discovered my father was not the only man who is a fine creature.”

“Aw, hey ”

They turned their heads. Tyra pulled her hand back. Dorcas had entered. Her slenderness reared over them. “We have a decision to make about the next jump point,” she said calmly. “It depends on what weight we give the last set of data. Will you come and consult, Bob?”

Saxtorph’s chair scraped. “ ‘Scuse me, Tyra.”

The Wunderlander smiled. “Why should I?” she replied. “What need? You go in my cause.”

He tossed off his drink and left with his wife. When they were several meters down the corridor, she told him, “I lied, you realize. Not to make a scene.”

“For Christ’s sake!” he exclaimed. “Nothing was going on.”

“I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

“You, jealous?” He forced a chuckle. “Honey, you flatter me.”

“Not exactly. I’ve watched where things are headed. No bad intentions on anybody’s part. I continue to like her myself. But, Bob, I’d hate to see you hurt. And I’ve no reason so far to wish it on her. As for this team of ours ” She clutched his forearm. Had the muscle been less thick underneath, her fingers would have left marks.

Chapter XIII

Weoch-Captain was a thoughtful and self-controlled kzin. Much though he lusted to streak directly to his goal, first he pondered the implications of what he knew about it. Ideas came to him which he communicated to Ress-Chiuu. The High Admiral agreed that his flight plan should be changed.

Therefore Swordbeak cruised about, in and out of hyperspace, day after tedious day. It chewed on nerves. The crew grew restless. Quarrels exploded. A couple of times they led to fights. Weoch-Captain disciplined the offenders severely; they were long in sickbay and would bear the marks for the rest of their lives.

He had given his officers an explanation. The Swift Hunter that went to the unknown body had not been heard of again. If it found the thing, as was probable, this would have happened just about when the human armada entered the Alpha Centaurian System. That news would have taken five years to reach the ship, except that it was likely bound back. What then was its best course? Other kzin-held worlds might fall to the enemy before it could get to any of them. Wisest was to head directly for the Father Sun, especially if the expedition had made worthwhile discoveries. Assuming the crew still lived, they were now about a third of the way home. Swordbeak ought to search them out and learn what they could tell, before proceeding. Furthermore, such Heroes deserved to know as soon as possible that they were not forgotten.

Every basis for calculation was a matter of guessing. That included, especially, the location of the mystery object. The data that Ress-Chiuu’s informant had been able to pass on were fragmentary, maddeningly vague. Thus the Swift Hunter’s cone of location was immense. But the High Admiral had ordered Weoch-Captain’s vessel outfitted with the best radio spectrum detectors and analyzers that its hull could accommodate.

So at length his technicians identified a tunnel of passage and placed it approximately in space. Prudence dictated that Swordbeak not attempt immediate rendezvous. The precise trajectory and momentary position of the other craft remained unclear; and mass moving at half light-speed is dangerous. Weoch-Captain made for a point about two light-years behind. Inside the trail, the technicians could map it exactly and pinpoint his target.

There they picked up a message.

Weoch-Captain was not totally surprised. In a like situation, he did not think he would send a radio beam ahead. The slimy humans might come upon it, read it, and jam it. However, the idea of superluminal travel would have been unfamiliar to the expedition members. They would scarcely have thought of everything that it meant. If the possibility did occur to them, they might well have discounted it, since the probability of interception was slight, while the transmission increased by a little the likelihood that the Patriarch would eventually get the news they bore. At any rate, Weoch-Captain had provided for the contingency. When he reached the tunnel, receivers were open on a wide enough band that they would register anything, Doppler-diminished though the waves be.

They buzzed. A computer got busy. A part of the message unrolled on a screen before him.

He narrowed his eyes. What was this? “ material unknown. Eroded but, except where pierced, impervious to radiation ” His finger stabbed at the intercom. The image of Executive Officer appeared. “We have evidently come in in the middle of a sending,” Weoch-Captain said. “Doubtless the Swift Hunter plays a recorded beamcast continuously. I want the entirety of it. Have an acquisition program prepared.”

“Immediately, sire.”

“Mock me not,” purred the commander. “You know full well that we shall have to leap about, snatching pieces here and there, while reception will often be poor; and the whole must be fitted together in proper sequence, ungarbled where needful, until it is complete and coherent; and the highly technical content will make this a process difficult and slow. Do you suggest I am ignorant of communications principles?”

Executive Officer was a Hero, but he remembered the punishments. “Never, sire! I misspoke me. I abase myself before you.”

“Correct.” Weoch-Captain switched off. He had not actually taken offense. Because he was a cautious leader, he must snatch every opportunity to assert dominance.

Alone, he rose and prowled the control cabin. Its narrowness caged him. The real mockery came from the stars in the viewport, multitudes and majesty, a hunting ground unbounded. He bared fangs at them. We shall range among you yet, he vowed; we shall do with you what we will.

First the humans

Excitement waxed. Clearly the expedition had caught something important, something of power. He would persist until he knew everything the message told. Then he would seek out the old ship, hear whatever might remain to hear, give whatever praise and reassurance were due. And then, informed and prepared, he would be off to the goal of all this voyaging.

His ears lay back. The hair stood up on his body. Let any monkeys that he might encounter beware. The kzinti had much to avenge.

Chapter XIV

Once more Rover came out of hyperspace, and there the fugitive was. A computer recognized the inputs to instruments; a chime sounded; an image leaped into a screen. “That’s it,” said Saxtorph quietly in the command cabin. The intercom brought him a gasp from Tyra at the mass detector. Everybody else was at a duty station too. “Got to be.”

He increased magnification, and the spark crawling across the constellations waxed. Tyra saw the same, on the viewer where she was. Optics set limits to what could be reconstructed at a distance of some eighty million kilometers, but he made out a blurry lancehead shape amidst a comma of bluish light, which trailed aft like a tail, the visible part of photons from excited atoms and plasma around the screen fields and aft of them. The invisible part was greater, and deadly.

“The right class of vessel, and just about where she ought to be,” Saxtorph added. “Uh, what’s her name? I forget.”

“Khrach-Sherrek,” Dorcas supplied. It was in the bit of record and recollection that had survived. “A cursorial carnivore on their home planet.” She didn’t normally waste breath on trivia. Anticipated though it was, this culmination must have shaken her too.

“Well, well,” came Ryan’s voice, overly genial. “That was fun. Now what shall we play?”

“Dada-mann,” Tyra whispered. Saxtorph guessed it was unconscious, her pet name for her father when she was small. He imagined tears running down her cheeks, and wanted to go hold her hand and speak comfort. Her words strengthened, not yet quite steady. “Y-yes, that is the proper question. Isn’t it? How shall we get him out? Have you had any more ideas, Robert?”

They had discussed it, of course, over and over, as watch after watch dragged by. Yonder vessel couldn’t decelerate if the kzinti aboard wanted to, and Rover hadn’t a decent fraction of the delta’t; necessary to match velocities. In the era of hyperdrive such capabilities were very nearly as obsolete as flint axes. If somebody took off in a boat, he’d still have that forward speed, and be unable to kill enough of it to help before his energy reserve was gone. Not that there’d be any point in trying. A boat’s screens were totally inadequate against the level of radiation involved. He’d be doomed in a second, dead in an hour or two. The craft would become an instant derelict, electronics burned out.

The UN Navy kept a few high-boosters. They had marginal utility for certain kinds of research. “Besides,” Saxtorph had observed, “all government agencies hoard stuff to a degree a squirrel or jaybird would envy. They’ve also got quite a lot else in common with squirrels and jaybirds.”

Rigged with a hyperdrive, such as a craft could theoretically come out here, spend months building up her vector, at last draw close, mesh fields, and extend a gang tube if the kzinti cooperated. If they didn’t, an operation already perilous would become insanely so, forcing an entry under those conditions in order to meet armed resistance. Either way, the expense would be staggering. Next year’s budget might even have to cut back on a boondoggle or two. Would the top brass consider it, to rescue one man, a man convicted of treason? Saxtorph’s bet was that they wouldn’t. If they did anything, it would most likely be to order the ship destroyed simple and safe; leave an undeflectably large mass ahead of her before she brought home intelligence of the black hole.

He’d not had the heart to express his opinion as more than a possibility, nor did he now. After all, in the course of time Tyra might conceivably manage to rouse public sentiment and turn it into political pressure. She was a skilled writer, and beautiful. Never had he pointed out that her success must entail mortal hazard to a number of other lives. Once he’d thought Dorcas was about to say it, and had given her their private “steer clear” sign. “She’s got grief aplenty as is,” he explained later.

“We start by peering, don’t we?” Carita put in. Good girl, Saxtorph thought. You can always count on her for nuts-and-bolts common sense.

“Right,” he said. “Not that I expect we’ll learn a lot. However, let’s secure every loose end we can before we decide on any further moves.”

“We shall c-call them,” Tyra stammered. “Shall we not?”

“Well, I suppose we should, but I want to gang mighty warily. Twon’t be easy, you know.”

Indeed not. Aberration and Doppler effect complicated the task abundantly. The speed that caused them made matters worse yet. If Rover sent a message, by the time a response could arrive, Sherrek would have passed the point where Rover lay. Saxtorph meant to stay always well clear. It would be nice if he could fake matched velocity by popping in and out of hyperspace. Too bad that transition between relativistic and quantum modes required time to get the wave functions of atoms into the proper phase relationships. Late in the war the kzinti had figured this out and discovered what the neutrino emission pattern was when a drive prepared itself. Warned of impending attack from an un-predictable new direction, they’d actually won a couple of engagements.

Modern vessels changed state in minutes. The engineers talked about future models that would only take seconds. Rover’s antiquated engine needed almost half an hour. Ordinarily that made no difference. You’d be doing something else meanwhile anyway, such as completing your climb sufficiently high out of a gravity well. But here she’d better come no closer than a quarter billion klicks ahead of Sherrek. Preferably much more.

“Bloody hell!” cried Ryan. “Why are we glooming and dooming like this? We’ve found her! Let’s throw a proper luau.”

A sob caught in Tyra’s throat. “Thank you, Kam. Yes. Let us.”

When she’s seen the ship and doesn’t know whether her father is alive or dead or worse, thought Saxtorph. That’s one gallant lass. “Okay,” he said. “The computers can handle the observations. We’ll put other functions on auto and relax. Aside from you, Kam. We expect something special for dinner this evenwatch.”

“I will help,” Tyra said. “I… need to.”

“No, you don’t,” Saxtorph told her. “At least, not right off. Report to the saloon. What I need help with is downing two or three large schooners.”

She smiled forlornly as he entered, but she did smile. Quickly, before the rest arrived, he took both her hands in his. Their eyes met and lingered. Hearing footfalls, they let go. He felt a little breathless and giddy.

Either Tyra put tension aside and cheered up in the course of the next eight hours, or she did a damn good job of acting. The party wasn’t riotous, but it became warm, affectionate, finally sentimental. After they started singing, she gave them several ballads from her homeland. She had a lovely voice.

Chapter XV

Effort upon effort succeeded ultimately in getting through. The first partial, distorted reply croaked forth. Dorcas heard and yelled. She, who had the most knowledge of kzin xenology, was prepared to speak through a translator for her band. What she would say, she could not foresee; she must grope forward. Could she bargain, could she threaten? To her husband she admitted that her hopes were low. He agreed, more grimly than the situation seemed to warrant as far as they two were concerned.

She was not prepared for human words.

“Sind Sie wirklich Menschen?” And what must be Tyra’s own dialect: “Gud Jesu, endelig! Hvor langt, hvor langt ” Interference ripped the cry asunder. Static hissed and snarled like a kzin.

“Hang in there,” Saxtorph said. “I’ll be back.” He scrambled from his seat and out of the cabin. Dorcas’ gaze followed him.

Nobody else had been listening. To endure repeated failures is mere masochism, if you yourself can do noth-ing about them. Saxtorph pounded on Tyra’s door. “Wake up!” he bellowed. “We’ve contacted your father! He lives, he lives!”

The door flew open and she stumbled into his arms. She slept unclothed. He held her rightly until she stopped weeping and shivered only a little. She was warm and firm and silken. “We don’t know more than that,” he mouthed. Did desire shout louder in his blood than compassion? “It’s going to take time. What’ll come of it, we can’t tell. But we’re working on it, Tyra. We are.”

She drew herself free and stood before him. Briefly, fists clenched at her sides. Then she remembered the situation, crossed arms over the fairness above and below, caught a ragged breath and blinked the tears away. “Yes, you will,” she answered before she fled, “because you are what you are. I can abide.”

She did, calmly, even blithely, while three daycycles passed and the story arrived in shreds and snatches. When at last the whole crew met, bodily, for they needed to draw strength from each other, she sat half smiling.

Saxtorph looked around the saloon table. “Okay,” he said with far more steadiness than he felt, “Peter Nordbo is alive, well, and alone. Two years alone, but better that than the company he was keeping, and apparently he’s stayed sane. The problem is how to debark him. I can be honest now and tell you that I don’t expect any navy will do the job, nor anybody else that may have the capability.”

“Why not?” Carita asked. “He’s got important information, hasn’t he, about the black hole? That expedition checked it over as thoroughly as they could.”

The captain began filling his pipe. “Yah, but you see, their information’s in the radio beam the ship was transmitting till he took over. A hell of a lot quicker, easier, and safer to recover than by matching velocity and boarding. Oh, I daresay what he’s gone through and what he’s done will stir up a wave of public sympathy, but unless it becomes a tsunami, that probably won’t be enough.”

“Among the considerations,” Dorcas added in an impersonal tone, “Sherrek is approaching kzin-controlled space. Kzinti hyperships are bound to be sniffing about. A few of their kind did have valid reasons, from their viewpoint, to flee Alpha Centauri twenty years ago, rather than die fighting or get taken prisoner. The kzinti will search for any, as well as exploring on general principles. I agree the chance of their spotting Sherrek’s trail by accident is small, but it is finite, and every month that passes makes it larger. I can well imagine political objections to risking an unwanted incident, on top of every other argument.”

“We can go home, report this, and agitate for help,” Saxtorph said. “It’s the sensible, obvious course. I won’t veto it, if that’s what you want.”

Tyra gave him a sea-blue regard. “You have a different possibility,” she said low.

His grin twisted. “You’ve gotten to know me, huh?”

She nodded. Light sheened across her hair.

“It’s a dicey thing,” he said. “Some danger to us, a lot to your father. But if it works, you’ll have him back in days.”

“Else years,” she replied as softly as before, “or never.” Only her fingernails, white where she gripped the tabletop, revealed more. “What think you on?”

“We’ve, uh, discussed it, him and Dorcas and me. In the jaggedy fashion you’ve observed. We didn’t want to announce this earlier, because we had to do some figuring and would’ve hated to… disappoint you.” Saxtorph put fire to pipe. “Yon ship carries a pair of flyby capsules, unpowered but made to withstand extremely heavy radiation. As much as you’d get at one-half c. He can get inside one and have its launcher toss him out.” He puffed forth a cloud.

“You believe you can recover him,” she said, and began to tremble ever so slightly.

“Yes. Our new grapnel field installation. If we get the configuration and timing just right if not, you realize, he’s gone beyond any catching if we do, we can lock on. Rover has more mass by several orders of magnitude. We estimate that the combined momentum will mean a velocity of about 200 klicks per second, well within our delta v reserve.”

“Down from… that speed? I should think ” she must struggle to utter it “the acceleration overcomes your polarizers and tears your grappler out through the hull.”

“Smart girl.” How ludicrously inadequate that was for his admiration. “It would also reduce him to thin jelly. We can do up to fifty g. The capsules have interior polarizers with power to counteract a bit more, but we want a safety factor. Our systems can handle it too. Do you know about deep-sea fishing? Your dolphins may have told stories of marlin and tarpon.”

She nodded again. “I saw a documentary once. And in the Frisian Sea on Wunderland I have myself taken a dinotriton.” Ardor flamed up. “I see! You let the capsule run, but never far enough to get away, and you play it, you pull it in a little at a time ”

“Right. The math says we can do it in three and a half daycycles, through a distance of 225 billion kilometers. In practice it’ll doubtless be harder.” He had to have a moment’s relief. “Anderson’s Law, remember: ‘Everything takes longer and costs more.

Awe struck her. She sagged back in her chair. “The skill ”

“The danger,” Dorcas said. “At any point we can fail. Rover may then suffer damage, although if we stand ready I don’t expect it’ll cripple us. But your father will be a dead man.”

“What thinks he?”

“He’s for it,” Saxtorph replied. “Of course a buck like that would be. But he leaves the decision to us. With… his blessing. And we, Dorcas and I, we leave it to you. I imagine Kam and Carita will go along with whatever you choose.”

Abruptly Tyra’s voice wavered. “Kam,” she said, “you have taught me a word of yours, a very good, brave word. I use it now.” She leaped to her feet. “Go for broke!” she shouted.

The Hawaiian and the Jinxian cheered.

Thereafter it was toil, savage demands on brain and body, nerves aquiver and pulled close to breaking, heedless overuse of stimulants, tranquilizers, whatever might keep the organism awake and alert.

No humans could have done the task. The forces involved were immensely too great, changeable, complex. Nor could they be felt at the fingertips; over spatial reaches, the lightspeed that carried them became a laggard, and the fisher must judge what was happening when it would not manifest itself for minutes. The computer program that Dorcas wrote with the aid of the computer that was to use it, this held the rod and reeled the line.

Yet humans must be in the loop, constantly monitoring, gauging, making judgments. Theirs was the intuition, the instinct and creative insight, that no one has engineered into any machine. The Saxtorphs were the two best qualified. Carita could handle the less violent hours. The main burden fell on Dorcas. Ryan and Tyra kept them fed, coffeed, medicated. Often she rubbed a back, kneaded shoulders, ran a wet washcloth over a face, crooned a lullaby at a catnap. Mostly she did it for the captain.

From dead Sherrek, the cannonball that held the living shot free. Unseeable amidst the light of lethal radiation, a force-beam reached to lay hold. Almost, the grip failed. Needles spun on dials and Dorcas cast her man a look of terror. Things stabilized. The hook was in.

Gently, now, gently. Itself a comet trailing luminance, the capsule fled. The grapnel field stretched, tugging, dragging Rover along, but how slowly slowing it. As distance grew, precision diminished. The capsule plunged about. The Saxtorphs ordered compensating boosts. Ideally, they could maintain contact across the width of a planetary system. In feet, the chance of losing it was large.

They played their fish.

Hour by hour, day by day, the haste diminished, the gap closed. Worst was a moment near the end, when the capsule was visible in a magnifying screen, and suddenly rolled free. Somehow Dorcas clapped the grapnel back onto it. Then: “Take over for a while, Bob,” she choked, put head in hands, and wept. He couldn’t recall, at that point, when he had last seen her shed tears.

Ship and sphere drew nigh. A cargo port opened. The catch went in. The port shut and air roared into the bay. Some time yet must pass; at first that metal was too cold for flesh to approach. When at length its own hatch cracked, the warmth and stench of life long confined billowed out.

A man crept after. He rose unsteadily, tall, hooknosed, bushy-bearded, going gray, though still hard and lithe. He climbed a ladder. A door swung wide for him. Beyond waited his daughter.

Chapter XVI

The song of her working systems throbbed through Rover, too softly for ears to hear anything save rustles and murmurs, yet somehow pervading bones, flesh, and spirit. In Ryan’s cabin Carita asked, “But why are we headed back to the black hole? Add a week’s travel time at least, plus whatever we spend there. I’ve seen the damn thing. Why not straight to Wunderland?”

She had been asleep, exhausted, when her shipmates made the decision, and had only lately awakened, to eat ravenously and join her friend. The rest had spent their remnant strength laying plans and getting on hyperspatial course. Ryan took the first mass detector watch. Tyra had it now, drowsily; when relieved, she would doubtless seek her bunk again.

“We thought you’d agree, and in any case wouldn’t appreciate being hauled out to cast a vote when the count could just go one way,” Ryan answered. “Wherever we picked, it was foolish to linger. Nothing else to gain, and a small possibility that a ratcat moku might suddenly pop up and shout, ‘Boo!’ Care for a drink?”

“You know me. In several different meanings of the word.” Carita propped a pillow between her and the bulkhead and lounged back, her legs twin pillars of darkness on the gaudy bedspread. Ryan stepped across to a cabinet above a minifridge. He’d crowded a great deal of sybaritism into his quarters. In the screen, a barely clad songstress sat under a palm tree near a beach, plucked a ukulele, and looked seductive as she crooned. He did esoteric things with rum and fruit juices.

Meanwhile he explained: “Partly it’s a matter of recuperation. Nordbo’s served a hitch in Hell, and we visited the forecourts of Purgatory, eh? When we return, the sensation and the official flapdoodle are going to make what happened after the red sun business seem like a session of the garden committee of the Philosophical Society. We’d better be well rested and have a lot of beforehand thinking done.”

“M-m, yes, that makes sense. But I can tell you pleasanter places to let our brains simmer down in than that black hole. You know what the name means in Russian?”

Ryan laughed. “Uh-huh. So they call it a ‘frozen star.’ Pretty turn of phrase. Except that this one never really was a star, and is anything but frozen.”

“It’s turned into a kind of star, then.” For a moment they were silent. The same vision stood before them, a radiance more terrible century by century, at last day by day, until its final nova-like self-immolation. For the most part spacefarers speak casually, prosaically about their work, because the reality of the universe is as daunting as the reality of death.

“Well, but we’ve got a reason,” Ryan continued. “Nailing down a claim of discovery. The kzinti examined the artifact as thoroughly as they could, much more than our quick once-over. Especially, of course, with an eye to the military potentials. Nordbo was there. He knows fairly well what they learned. But as you’d expect, he needs to refresh his memory. He told us the kzinti ship beamcast a full description till he got control and shut it off. But we aren’t equipped to retrieve it. Think how much trouble we had communicating with him. We could waste weeks, and not be sure of recording more than snatches. Let Nordbo revisit the actual thing, repeat a few measurements and such, and he can write that description himself, or enough of it to establish the claim.”

Carita raised her brows. “What claim? The government’s bound to swarm there, take charge, and stamp everything Incredibly Secret.”

Ryan nodded. “Does a shark eat fish? They’ll be plenty peeved at us for telling the hoi polloi that it exists at all. We’ve got to do that, if only as part of Nordbo’s vindication, but I’ll concede that it’s probably best to keep quiet about the technical details. However, he’ll have priority of discovery. For legal purposes, the kzinti and their beamcast can be ignored. They shanghaied him, among numerous other unlawful acts; they’ve forfeited any rights, not to mention that there is no court with jurisdiction. He’ll be entitled to a discoverer’s award. In view of the importance of the find, and the fact that public disputes would be very awkward for the government, that award will be plenty big and we’ll share it with him.”

“Ah-ha!” Carita exulted. “I see. You were right, there was no need to roll me out of the sheets to vote.”

“Same thing should apply to the kzinti ship, if the Navy elects to go recover it for intelligence purposes,” Ryan said. “Not likely, though. My guess is they’ll simply read the message and then jam it. The black hole is our real jackpot.” He finished mixing the drinks and gave her one. “Pomaika’i.”

“Into orbit.” Rims clinked. He sat down on the edge of the bunk.

Carita turned thoughtful. “That poor man. He will be, uh, vindicated, won’t he?”

“Oh, yes. If necessary, he can take truth tests, but the story by itself, with the corroboration we can give, should do the trick. His name will be cleared, his family will be reinstated in its clan, and he’ll get back the property that was confiscated, or compensation for it if reversion isn’t practical. He won’t need any award money. I suspect he’s forcing himself, for our sake.”

Carita stared before her. “How’s he taking all this?”

Ryan shrugged. “Too early to tell. Excitement; exhaustion; the last scrap of endurance that stimulants could give, spent on making plans. But surely he’ll be okay. He’s a tough cookie if ever I bit into one.”

Compassion gentled her voice. “He met his little girl-child, and she was a not-quite-young woman. She told him his wife has died.”

“I think I saw grief, though he was fairly stoic throughout. However, it can’t have been a huge surprise. And he wouldn’t be human if, down underneath, he didn’t feel a slight relief.”

“Yes. She’d have been old. I bet he’d have stuck loyally by her till the end, but Well, sheer pride in his daughter ought to help him a lot, emotionally.”

“A rare specimen, her.” Ryan let out an elaborate sigh. “And sexy as Pele, under that brisk, sprightly, competent surface. I’d give a lot to be in the path of the next eruption. No such luck, though. In a perfectly pleasant fashion, she’s made that clear. It’s the single fault I find in her.”

Carita drank deep, frowned, and drank again. “Her eyes are on the skipper. And his on her. They can’t hide it any longer, no matter how hard they try.”

“I know, I know. I’m resigned. If anybody rates that fling more than me, that is Bob does.”

“Dorcas.”

“Aw, she shouldn’t mind too much. She’s as realistic a soul as our species has got.”

Carita’s lips tightened. “I’m afraid this wouldn’t be just a fling.”

“Huh? Come on, now.”

“You’ve been giving Tyra your whole attention. I’ve paid some to him.”

“You really think ?” Flustered, Ryan took a long drink of his own. “Well, none of our business.” He relaxed, smiled, leaned over, laid an arm across her waist. “How about we attend to what does concern us, firepants? It’s been a while.”

For a little span yet Carita sat troubled, then she put her tumbler aside, smiled back, and turned to him. The ship sailed on through lightlessness.

Chapter XVII

“No, I must speak the truth,” said Chief Communications Officer. “We will continue trying if the commander orders, but I respectfully warn it will be a total waste of time and effort. The commander knows we have beamed every kind of signal on every band available to us. Not so much as an automaton has responded. That vessel is dead.”

Or sleeping beyond any power of ours to disturb, thought Weoch-Captain. He stared into the screen before him as if into a forest midnight. At its distance, the runaway was a thin flame, crawling across the stars. Imagination failed to feel the immensity of its haste and of the energy borne thereby.

“I concur,” he said after a minute. “Deactivate your apparatus and stand by for further orders.” Rage flared. “Go, you sthondat-‘tic’taer’t Go!”

The image blinked off. Weoch-Captain mastered his temper. Chief Communications Officer did not deserve that, he thought. This past time, locked in futility, has made me as irascible as the lowliest crew member.

What, do I regret taking it out on him? I am thinking like a monkey also by looking inward and gibing at myself. No other Hero must ever know. Yes, we are badly overdue for some action.

Weoch-Captain cast introspection from him and concentrated on the future. Not that he had a large choice. He could not overhaul Sherrek, board, and learn its fate. He had repeatedly suppressed an impulse to have it destroyed, that object which mocked him with silence. The Patriarchs would decide what to do about it. He could return directly to them and report. A human shipmaster would do so as a matter of course, given the circumstances.

The High Admiral has granted me broad discretion. If I come back with my basic mission half-completed, someone else may take it from me and go capture the glory. Also, I do not think like a monkey.

He summoned Astronomer’s image. “Does analysis suggest anything new about the perturbation you noticed?” he inquired without expectations.

“No, or I would have informed the commander immediately. The data are too sparse. Something roiled the interstellar medium besides Sherreh, a few light-days aft of where we found it, but the effect was barely noticeable. The commander recalls my idea that a stray rock encountered the screen fields, too small to penetrate but large enough to leave a trail as it was flung aside in fragments. Further number-crunching has merely reinforced my opinion that a search would be useless.”

Yes, thought Weoch-Captain. The overwhelming size of space. And if we did retrieve a meteoroidal shard or two, what of it? An improbable encounter, but not impossible, and altogether meaningless. Whatever happened to Sherrek happened a light-year farther back, two years in the past, which is when we established that it ceased communicating.

And yet I have a hunter’s intuition

A cold thrill passed through him. He dismissed Astronomer and called Executive Officer. “Prepare for hyperspace,” he said. “We shall proceed to our primary goal.”

“At once, sir!” the kzin rejoiced.

“En route, you will conduct combat drill with full simulations. The crew have grown edgy and ill-coordinated. You will make them again into an efficient fighting machine. Despite what we have learned from the beamcast, there is no foreseeing what we will find at the far end.”

“Sire.”

Humans? thought Weoch-Captain. Maybe, maybe. According to our information, the black hole was not their principal objective; but monkey curiosity, if nothing else, may hold them at it still. Or I know not, I simply have a feeling that they are involved in Sherrek’s misfortune. They, the same who destroyed Werlith-Commandant and his great enterprise.

Be there, Saxtorph, that I may take the glory of killing you.

Chapter XVIII

Stars crowded the encompassing night, wintry brilliant. Alpha Centauri was only one among them, and Sol shone small. The Milky Way glimmered around the circle of sight, like a river flowing back into its well-spring. Rifts in it were dustclouds such as veil the unknown heart of the galaxy. Big in vision, a worldlet hilled and begrown with strangeness, loomed the black hole artifact.

Rover held station fifty kilometers off the hemisphere opposite the radiation-spouting gap. “Below” her, Peter Nordbo, with Carita Fenger to help, examined a structure that he believed could throw the entire mass into hyperspace. Elsewhere squatted the robot prospector, patiently tracing a circuit embedded in the shell substance.

Aboard ship was leisure. Dorcas kept the bridge, mostly on general principles. If the robot signaled that it had finished, she would confer with Nordbo and order it to a different site. Ryan watched a show in his cabin; some people would have been surprised to know it was King Lear. Saxtorph and Tyra sat over coffee in the saloon. When Carita relieved him on the surface and he flitted back up, he had meant to sleep, but the Wunderlander met him and they fell to talking.

“Your dad shouldn’t work so hard,” he said. “Three watches out of four, daycycle after daycycle. He ought to take it easier. We’ve got as much time as we care to spend.”

“He is impatient to finish and go home,” Tyra said. “You can understand.”

“Yes. Home to sadness, though.”

“But more to hope.”

Saxtorph nodded. “Uh-huh. He’s that sort of man. Not that I have any close acquaintance, but a great guy. I see now why you laid everything on the line to buy a chance of having him again.” He paused before adding in a rush: “And with you once more in his life, he’s bound to become happy.”

She looked away. “You should not Oh, Robert, you are too kind, always too kind to me. I shall miss you so much.”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “Hey, there, little lady, don’t borrow trouble. You know I’ll be detained on Wunderland for a goodly spell, like it or not.” He grinned. “Want to help me like it?”

Her eyes sought back to his. The blood mounted in her face. “Yes, we must see what we can ”

Dorcas’ voice tore across hers. “Emergency stations! Kzinti ship!” Coming from every annunciator, it seemed to roll and echo down the corridors.

“Judas priest! To the boat, Tyra!” Saxtorph shouted. He was already on his way. His feet slapped out a devil’s tattoo on the deck. As he ran, the enormity of the tidings crashed into him.

At the control cabin, he burst through its open door and flung himself into the seat by Dorcas‘. In the forward viewport, the shell occulted the suns of their desire. Starboard, port, aft gleamed grandeur indifferent to them. The communicator, automatically switched on when it detected an incoming signal, gave forth the flat English of a translator: “ not attempt to escape. If we observe the neutrino signature of a hyperspatial drive starting up, we will fire.”

Sweat shone on the woman’s scalp, around her Belter crest. Saxtorph caught an acrid whiff of it, or was that his own, running down his ribs? Her fingers moved firm over a keyboard. “Ha, I’ve got him,” she whispered. A speck appeared in the scanner screen. She magnified.

Toylike still, the other vessel appeared. Saxtorph followed current naval literature. He identified the lean length, the guns and missile tubes and ray projectors, of a Raptor-class warcraft. The meters told him she was about half a million klicks off, closing fast.

“Acknowledge!” the radio snapped.

“Message received,” he said around an acid lump in his gorge. “What do you want? We’re here legitimately. Our races are at peace.” Yah, sure, sure.

“Oh, God, Bob,” Dorcas choked while the beam winged yonder. “The call was the first sign I had. She may have emerged a long distance away. If we’d spotted her approaching ”

He squeezed her arm. “We didn’t keep an alert, sweetheart. We didn’t. The bunch of us. What reason had we to fear anything like this?”

“Weoch-Captain of Hero vessel Swordbeak, speaking for the Patriarchy.” Now, behind the synthetic human tones, were audible the growls and spits of kzinti. “You trespass on our property, you violate our secrets, and I believe that in the past you have been guilty of worse. Identify yourself.”

Saxtorph stalled. “Why do you ask that? According to you, no human has a real name.”

Can we cut and run for it? he wondered. No. The question shows how kicked in the gut I am. She can outboost us by a factor of five, at least. Not that she’d need to. Even at this remove, her lasers can probably cripple us. A missile can cross the gap in a few minutes, and we’ve nothing to fend it off. (Grab it with our grapnel, no, too slow, and anyway, there’d be a second or a third missile, or a multiple warhead, or ) She herself, at her acceleration, she’ll be here in half an hour. But how can I think about flight? Carita and Pete are down at the black hole.

It had flashed through him in the short seconds of transmission lag. “Do as you are told, monkey! Give me your designation.”

No sense in provoking the kzin further by a refusal. He’d soon be able to read the name, jaunty across these bows. “Freighter Rover of Leyport, Luna. I repeat, our intentions are entirely honest and we can’t imagine what we may have done that you could call wrong.”

Silence crackled. Dorcas sat stiff, fists clenched.

“Rover. Harrgh! Saxtorph-Captain, is it? Give me video.”

Huh? The man sat numbed. The woman did the obedience.

Weoch-Captain evidently chose to make it mutual. His tiger head slanted forward in the screen, as if he peered out of his den at prey. “So that is what you look like,” he rumbled. Eyes narrowed, tongue ran over fangs. “How I hoped that mine would be this pleasure.”

“What do you mean?” Dorcas cried.

Silence. The heart drubbed in Saxtorph’s breast.

“You know full well,” said Weoch-Captain. “You killed the Heroes and destroyed their works at the red sun.”

So the story had reached Kzin. Not too surprising, as spectacular as it was. Saxtorph had been assured that the Alpha Centaurian and Solar governments had avoided being very specific in their official communications thus far. They wanted to test ratcat reactions an item at a time. But spacefarers, especially nonhuman spacefarers with less of a grudge or none, traveling from Wunderland to neutral planets, might well have passed details on to their kzin counterparts in the course of meetings.

“Through my whole long voyage, I hoped I would find you,” Weoch-Captain purred. His flattened ears lifted and spread. “A formidable opponent, a worthy one. If you behave yourselves and do as you are told, I promise you deaths quick and painless… No, not quite that for you, Saxtorph. I think you and I shall have single combat. Afterward I will take your body for my exclusive eating, fit nourishment for a Hero, and give your head a place among my trophies.”

Saxtorph braced himself. “You do us great honor, Weoch-Captain,” he croaked. “We thank you. We praise your large spirit.” What else could I say? Keep them happy. Kzinti don’t normally torture for fun, but if this one got vengeful enough he might take it out on Tyra, Dorcas, Kam, Carita, Peter. At the least, he might bring them, us, back with him. Unless we kill ourselves first.

In the magnifying viewport the Raptor had perceptibly gained size, eclipsing more and more stars.

Weoch-Captain flexed claws out, in, out again. “Good,” he said. “But I still will not talk at length to a monkey. Stand by. You will receive your final instructions when I arrive.”

The screen blanked.

“Bob, darling, darling.” Dorcas twisted about in her seat to cast her arms around him.

He hugged her. As always in crisis, confronting the worst, he had grown cool, watchful but half detached, a survival machine. Not that he saw any prospect of living onward, but “We should bring the others up,” he reminded her. “We can have a short time together.” Before the kzinti arrive.

“Yes.” He felt how she quelled her shuddering. Steady as he, she turned to the communicator and directed a broad beam at the sphere. “Carita, Peter, get straight back to the ship,” she said crisply.

“Was ist what is bad?” sounded Nordbo’s hoarse bass.

“Never mind now. Move, I tell you!”

“Jawohl.” And: “Aye, aye, ma’am, we’re off,” from Carita.

Dorcas cut transmission. “I want to spare them while they flit,” she explained. “They’ll worry, but if they don’t happen to make the enemy out in the sky, they won’t be in shock.”

“Until we meet again,” Saxtorph agreed. “What about… Tyra and Kam? Shall we keep them waiting too?”

“We may as well, or better.”

“No. Maybe you weren’t being kind after all. I think Tyra would want to know right away, so she can, well, she can ” kiss me goodbye? “prepare herself, and meet the end with her eyes wide open. She’s like that.”

Dorcas bit her lip. “I can’t stop you if you insist.” Her words quivered a little. “But I thought you and I, these fifteen minutes or so we have left before we must tell them ”

He grinned, doubtless rather horribly. “ ‘Fraid I couldn’t manage a quickie.”

She achieved a laugh. “Down, boy.” Soberly: “Not to get maudlin either. But let me say I love you, and thank you for everything.”

“Aw, now, the thanks are all due you, my lady.” He rose. She did. They embraced. He damned himself for wishing she were Tyra.

She kissed him long and hard. “That’s for what we’ve had.” The tears wouldn’t quite stay put. “And for, for everything we were going to have the kids and ”

Yah, he thought, our stored gametes. We never made provision for exogenesis, in case something clobbered us. They’ll stay in the freeze, those tiny ghosts of might-have-been, year after year after year, I suppose, forgotten and forsaken, like our robot yonder.

Saxtorph lurched where he stood. “Fanden i helvede!” he roared.

Dorcas stepped back. She saw his face, and the breath whistled in between her teeth. “What?”

The Danish of his childhood, “The Devil in Hell,” his father’s favorite oath, yes, truly, for a devil did squat just outside the hell star awaiting his command. His revelation spilled from him.

Fierceness kindled in her, she shouted, but then she must ask, “What if we fail?”

“Why, we open our airlocks and drink space,” he answered. He had dismissed the idea earlier because he knew she wouldn’t want suicide while any chance of being cleanly killed remained. “Though most likely the kzinti will be so enraged they’ll missile us on the spot. Come on, we haven’t got time to gab, let’s get going.”

They returned to their seats and controls. An order went out. On the tnuctipun structure, the robot prospector stirred. Cautiously, at minimum boost, it lifted. When it was well clear, the humans accelerated it harder. They must work fast, to have the machine positioned before the enemy came so near that watchers at instruments might notice it and wonder. They must likewise work precisely, mathematically, solving a problem of vectors and coordinates in three-dimensional space. “ line integral of velocity divergence dS ” Dorcas muttered aloud to the computer while her fingers did the real speaking. There passed through the back of Saxtorph’s awareness: If the scheme flops, this’ll be how we spent our last moments together. Appropriate.

A telltale blinked. Nordbo and Carita had arrived. “Kam, our friends are back,” the captain said through the intercom. “Cycle ‘em through and have them sit tight. Tyra, I think we can cope with our visitors.”

Except for Ryan’s “Aye,” neither of them responded. The quartermaster knew better than to distract the pair on the bridge. The woman must have understood the same on her own account. She isn’t whimpering or hysterical or anything, Saxtorph thought not her. Maybe, not being a spacehand, she won’t obey my order and stay at the boat. It’s useless anyway. But the most mutinous thing she might do is walk quietly, firmly through my ship to meet her dad.

“On station,” Dorcas sighed. She leaned back, hands still on the keys, ga/e on the displays. “It’ll take three or four mini-nudges to maintain, but I doubt the kzinti will detect them.”

The Raptor was big in the screen. Twin laser guns in the nose caught starlight and gleamed like eyes.

“Good.” Saxtorph’s attention skewered Rovers control board. He’d calculated how he wanted to move, at full thrust, when things started happening. Though his present location was presumably safe, he’d rather be as far off as possible. Clear to Wonderland would be ideal, a sunny patio, a beer stein in his fist, and at his side

“Go!” Dorcas yelled. She hit the switch that closed her last circuit. “Ki-yai!”

Afloat among stars, the robot prospector received the signal for which the program that she sent it had waited. It took off. At a hundred gravities of acceleration, it crossed a hundred kilometers of space in less than five seconds, to strike the shell around the black hole with the force of a boulder falling from heaven.

It crashed through. White light was in the radiation that torrented from the hole it left and smote the kzinti ship.

Chapter XIX

“Put me through again to the human commander,” said Weoch-Captain.

“Yes, sire,” replied Communications Officer.

Human, thought Weoch-Captain. Not monkey, whatever my position may require me to call him in public. A brave and resourceful enemy. I well-nigh wish we were more equally matched when I fight him. But no one must know that.

His optics showed Rover, an ungainly shape, battered and wayworn. Should he claim it too for a trophy? No, let Saxtorph’s head suffice; and it would not have much meaning either, when he returned in his glory to take a full name, a seat among the Patriarchs, the right to found a house of his own. Still, his descendants might cherish the withered thing as a sign of what their ancestor did. Weoch-Captain’s glance shifted to the great artifact. Power laired there, power perhaps to make the universe tremble. “Arrrh,” he breathed.

The screens blanked. The lights went out. He tumbled through an endless dark.

“Ye-a-a-ach, what’s this? What the venom’s going on?” Screams tore at air that had ceased to blow from ventilators. Weoch-Captain recognized his state. He was weightless.

“Stations, report!” No answer except the chaos in the corridors. Everything was dead. The crew were ghosts flapping blindly around in a tomb. Nausea snatched at Weoch-Captain,

He fought it down. If down existed any more, adrift among stars he no longer saw. He shouldn’t get spacesick. He never had in the past when he orbited free. He must act, take charge, uncover what was wrong, rip it asunder and set things right. He groped his way by feel, from object to suddenly unfamiliar object. “Quiet!” he bawled. “Hold fast! To me, officers, to me, your commander!”

The sickness swelled inside him.

He reached the door and the passage beyond. A body blundered into his. Both caromed, flailing air, rebounding from bulkheads, all grip on dignity lost. “My eyes, arh, my eyes,” moaned the other kzin. “Did the light burn them out? I am blind. Help me, help me.”

An idea took Weoch-Captain by the throat. He bared teeth at it, but it gave him a direction, a quarry. Remembrance was a guide. He pushed along corridors where noise diminished as personnel mastered panic. Good males, he thought amidst the hammerblows of blood in ears and temples. Valiant males. Heroes.

His goal was the nearest observation turret. It had transparent ports for direct viewing, backup in case of electronic failures, which he kept unshuttered during any action. He fumbled through the entry. A blue-white beam, too dazzling to look near, stabbed across the space beyond. It disappeared as Swordbeak floated past. Weoch-Captain reached a pane and squinted. Stars clustered knife-sharp. Carefully, fingers hooked on frames, he moved to the next.

A gray curve, a jutting tower, yes, the relic of the ancient lords, the end of his quest. Swordbeak slipped farther along. Weoch-Captain shrieked, clapped palms to face, bobbed helpless in midair.

Slowly the after-images faded. The glare hadn’t blinded him. By what light now came in, he discerned metal and meters. He understood what had happened.

Somehow the humans had opened a new hole in the shell. Radiation tore the life from his ship.

Sickness overwhelmed him. He vomited. Foul gobbets and globules swarmed around his head and up his nostrils. He fled before they strangled him.

Yes, death is in my bones, he knew. How long can I fight it off, and why? You have conquered, human.

No! He shoved feet against bulkhead and arrowed forward. The plan took shape while he flew. “Meet at Station Three!” he shouted against night. “All hands to Station Three for orders! Pass the word on! Your commander calls you to battle!”

One by one, clumsily, many shivering and retching, they joined him. Officers identified themselves, crew rallied round them. Some had found flashlights. Fangs and claws sheened in the shadows.

He told them they would soon die. He told them how they should. They snarled their wrath and resolution.

Spacesuits were lockered throughout the ship. Kzinti sought those assigned them. In gloom and free fall, racked by waxing illness, a number of them never made it.

Air hung thick, increasingly chill. Recyclers, thrust-ers, radios in the spacesuits were inoperative. Well, but the pumps still had capacitor power, and you wouldn’t have use for more air than your reserve tank held. You had your legs to leap with. You knew where you were bound, and could curse death by yourself.

Weoch-Captain helped at the wheel of his airlock, opening it manually. Atmosphere howled out, momentarily mist-white, dissipated, revealed the stars afresh. He followed it. Rover wasn’t in sight. It must have scampered away. Maybe Swordbeak’s hull blocked it off. The artifact was a jaggedness straight ahead. He gauged distance, direction, and velocities as well as he was able, bunched his muscles, and leaped, a hunter at his quarry.

“Hee-yaa!” he screamed. The noise rattled feebly in his helmet. Blood came with it, droplets and smears.

Headed across the void, he could look around. Except for his breathing, the rattle of fluid in his lungs, he had fallen into a silence, an enormous peace. Here and there, glints moved athwart constellations, the space-suits of his fellows. We too are star-stuff, he thought. Sun-stuff. Fire.

Hardly any of them would accomplish the passage, he knew. Most would go by, misaimed, and perish somewhere beyond. A lucky few might chance to pass in front of the furnace mouth and receive instant oblivion. Those who succeeded would not know where to go. There had been no way for Weoch-Captain to describe what he had learned from long days of study. A few might spy him, recognize him, seek him, but it was unlikely in the extreme.

No matter. Because of him they would die as warriors, on the attack.

Swordbeak receded. It had still had a significant component of velocity toward the sphere when the flame struck, though it was not on a collision course. It left him that heritage for his flight.

Rover hove into view. Saxtorph was coming back to examine the havoc he had wrought, was he? Well, he’d take a while to assess what his screens and instruments told him, and realize what it meant and then what could he do? Unlimber his grapnel and collect dying kzinti?

He can try raying us, Weoch-Captain thought. He must have an industrial laser. I would certainly do it in his place. But as a weapon it’s slow, unwieldy, and I am almost at my mark.

The shell filled half of heaven. Its curve now hid the deadly light; only stars shone on spires, mazes, unknown engines. Weoch-Captain tensed.

A latticework seemed to spring at him. He grabbed a member. His strength ebbing, he nearly lost hold and shot on past. Somehow he kept the grip, and slammed to a halt. He clung while he got his wind back. Rags of darkness floated across his eyes.

Onward, though, lest he die unfulfilled. It was hard, and grew harder moment by moment as he clambered down. With nothing left him but the capacitor supplying the air pump and a little heat, he must by himself bend the joints at arms, legs, and fingers against interior pressure. With his mind going hazy, he must stay alert enough to find his way among things he knew merely from pictures, while taking care not to push so hard that he drifted away in space.

Nevertheless he moved.

A glance aloft. Yes, Rover was lumbering about. Maybe Saxtorph had guessed what was afoot. Weoch-Captain grinned. He hoped the human was frantic.

He’d aimed himself carefully, and luck had been with him. His impact was close to the activator. He reached it and went in among the structures and darknesses.

On a lanyard he carried a flashlight. By its glow he examined that which surrounded him. Yes, according to Yiao-Captain’s report, this object like a lever and that object like a pedal ought to close a connection when pushed. The tnuctipun had scarcely intended any such procedure. Somewhere must be an automaton, a program, and shelter for whatever crew the black hole ship bore on its warfaring. But the tnuctipun too installed backup systems. Across billions of years, Weoch-Captain hailed them, his brother warriors.

This may not work, he cautioned himself. I can but try to reave the power from the humans.

I do not know where it will go, or if it will ever come back into our space. Nor will I know. I shall be dead. Proudly, gloriously.

A spasm shook him, but he had spewed out everything in his stomach before he left Swordbeak. Parched and vile-tasting mouth, dizziness, ringing ears, blood coughed forth and smeared over faceplate, wheezing breath, shaky hands, weakness, weakness, yes, it was good to die. He got himself well braced against metal to be inside this framework was like being inside a cane-brake at home, he thought vaguely, waiting for prey and pushed with the whole force that remained to him. Aboard Rover, shortly afterward, they saw their prize disappear.

Chapter XX

Regardless, the homeward voyage began merrily. When you have had your life given back to you, the loss of a treasure trove seems no large matter.

“Besides, a report on Sherrek and her beamcast, plus what we collected ourselves, should be worth a substantial award by itself,” Saxtorph observed. “And then there’s the other one, uh, Swordbeak.” Dorcas had read the name when they flitted across and attached a radio beacon, so that the derelict would be findable. “In a way, actually, more than the black hole could’ve been. Your navy or mine, or the two conjointly they’ll be overjoyed at getting a complete modern kzinti warcraft to dissect.”

“What that artifact, and the phenomenon within, should have meant to science ” Peter Nordbo sighed. “But you are right, complaining is ungrateful.”

“No doubt the authorities will want this part of our story hushed up,” Saxtorph went on. “But we’ll be heroes to them, which is more useful than being it to the public. I expect we’ll slide real easy through the bureaucratic rigmarole. And, as I said, get well paid for it.”

“I thought you were a patriot, Robert.”

“Oh, I’s‘pose I am. But the laborer is worthy of his hire. And I’m a poor man. Can’t afford to work for free.”

They sat in the Saxtorphs’ cabin, the most spacious aboard, talking over a beer. They had done it before. The instant liking they took to one another had grown with acquaintance. The Wunderlander’s English was rusty but improving.

He stroked his beard as he said slowly, “I have thought on that. Hear me, please. My family shall have its honor again, but I disbelieve our lands can be restored. The present owners bought in good faith and have their rights. You shall not pity me. From what I have heard since my rescue, society is changed and the name of Landholder bears small weight. But in simple justice we shall have money for what they stripped from us. After I pay off Tyra’s debt she took for my sake, much will stay with me. What shall I then do? I have my science, yes, but as an amateur. I am too old to become a professional in it. Yet I am too young to… putter. Always my main work was with people. What now can I enjoy?” He smiled. “Well, your business has the chronic problem that it is undercapitalized. The awards will help, but I think not enough. How would you like a partner?”

Saxtorph goggled. “Huh? Why, uh, what do you mean?”

“I would not travel with you, unless once in a while as a passenger for pleasure. I am no spaceman. But it was always my dream, and being in an enterprise like yours, that should come close. Yes, I will go on trips myself, making arrangements for cargoes and charters, improvements and expansions. Being a Landholder taught me about business, and I did it pretty well. Ask my former tenants. Also, the money I put in, that will make the difference to you. Together we can turn this very profitable for all of us.

“You cannot decide at once, nor can I. But today it seems me a fine idea. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a goddamn supernova!” Saxtorph roared.

They talked, more and more excitedly, until the captain glanced at his watch and said, “Hell, I’ve got to go relieve Dorcas at the mass detector. I’ll send her down here and the pair of you can thresh this out further, if you aren’t too tired.”

“Never for her,” Nordbo replied. “She is a wonderful person. You are a lucky man.”

Saxtorph’s eagerness faded. After a moment he mumbled, “I’m sorry. I often bull ahead with you as though you hadn’t… suffered your loss. You don’t speak about it, and I forget. I’m sorry, Peter.”

“Do not be,” Nordbo answered gently. “A sorrow, yes, but during my time alone, assuming I would grow old and die there, I became resigned. To learn I missed my Hulda by less than a year, that is bitter, but I tell myself we had already lost our shared life; and God has left me our two children, both become splendid human beings.”

The daughter, at least, for sure, Saxtorph thought.

Nordbo smiled again. “I still have my son Ib to look forward to meeting. In feet, since Tyra tells me he is in naval intelligence, we shall be close together Robert, what is wrong?”

Saxtorph sat moveless until he shook himself, stood up, tossed off his drink, and rasped: “Something occurred to me. Don’t worry. It may well turn out to be nothing. But, uh, look, we’d better not discuss this partnership notion with Dorcas or anybody right away. Let’s keep it under our hats till our ideas are more definite, okay? Now I really must go spell her.”

Nordbo seemed puzzled, a bit hurt, but replied, “As you wish,” and left the cabin with him. They parted ways in the corridor and Saxtorph proceeded to the detector station.

Dorcas switched off the book she had been screening. “Hey, you look like a bad day in Hell,” she said.

“Out of sorts,” he mumbled. “I’ll recover. Just leave me be.”

“So you don’t want to tell me why.” She rose to face him. Sadness tinged her voice. “You haven’t told me much lately, about anything that matters to you.”

“Nonsense,” he snapped. “We were side by side against the kzinti.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. Well, I won’t plague you. That would be unwise of me, wouldn’t it?” She went out, head high but fingers twisting together.

He took the chair that was not warm after her, stuffed his pipe, and smoked furiously.

A light footfall raised him from his brooding. Tyra entered. As usual, her countenance brightened to see him. “Hi,” she greeted, an Americanism acquired in their conversations. “Care you for some company?” as if she had never before joined him here for hours on end, or he her when she had the duty. “Remember, you promised to tell me about your adventure on ” She halted. Her tone flattened. “Something is woeful.”

“I hope not,” he said. “I hope I’m mistaken.”

She seated herself. “If I can help or console, Robert, only ask. Or if you wish not to share the trouble, tell me I should hold my mouth.”

She knows how to be silent, he thought. We’ve passed happy times with not a word, listening to music or looking at some work of art or simply near each other.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can’t talk about it till till I must. With luck, I’ll never have to.”

The blue eyes searched him. “It concerns you and me, no?” How grave and quiet she had become.

Alarmed, he countered, “Did I say that?”

“I feel it. We are dear friends. At least, you are for me.”

“And you ” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

“I believe you are torn.”

“Wait a minute.”

She leaned forward and took his free hand between hers. “Because you are a good man, an honest man,” she said. “You keep your promises.” She paused. “But ”

“Let’s change the subject, shall we?” he interrupted.

“Are you afraid? Yes, you are. Afraid of to give pain.”

“Stop,” he barked. “No more of this. You hear me?” He pulled his hand away.

An implacable calm was upon her. “As you wish, my dear. For the rest of the journey. You have right. Anything else is indecent, among all of us. But in some more days we are at Wunderland.”

“Yes,” he said, thickly and foolishly.

“You will be there a length of time.”

“Busy.”

“Not always. You know that. We will make decisions. It may take long, but at last we must. About the rest of our lives.”

“Maybe.”

“Quite certainly.” She rose. “I think best I go now. You should be alone with your heart for this while.”

He stared at the deck. “You’re probably right.”

Steadiness failed her a little. “Robert, whatever happens, whatsoever, you are dear to me.” Her footfalls dwindled off into silence.

A squat black form stood at a distance down the passage, like a barricade. “Hallo,” said Tyra dully.

Carita fell into step with her. “That was a short visit.”

Tyra bridled. “You watched?”

“I noticed. Couldn’t help it. Can’t, day after day. A kdat would see. I want a word with you.”

Tyra flushed. “Please to be polite.”

“We’re overdue for a talk,” the Jinxian insisted. “This is a loose hour for both of us. Will you come along?” Although tone and gait were unthreatening, the hint lay beneath them that if necessary, she might pick the other woman up and carry her.

“Very well,” Tyra clipped. They walked on mute to the pilot’s cabin and inside.

Carita shut the door. Eyes met and held fast. “What do you want?” Tyra demanded.

“You know perfectly well what,” Carita stated. “You and the skipper.”

“We are friends! Nothing more!”

“No privacy aboard ship for anything else, if you’re civilized. Sure, you’ve kept out of the sack. A few kisses, maybe, but reasonably chaste, like in a flirtation. Only that’s not what it is any longer. You’re waiting till we get to Wunderland.”

Tyra lifted her arm as if to strike, then let it fall. “Do you call Robert a schleicher a, a sneak?” she blazed.

Carita’s manner mildened. “Absolutely not. Nor you. This is simply a thing that’s happened. Neither of you would’ve wanted it, and you didn’t see it coming till too late. I believe you’re as bewildered, half joyful and half miserable, as he is.”

Tyra dropped her gaze. She clenched fists against breasts. “It is difficult,” she whispered.

“True, you being an honorable person.”

Tyra rallied. “It is our lives. His and mine.”

“Dorcas saved your father’s,” Carita answered. “Later she saved all of us. Yes, Bob was there, but you know damn well he couldn’t have done what he did without her. How do you propose to repay that? Money doesn’t count, you know.”

“Ich kann nicht anders!” Tyra cried. “He and I, we are caught.”

“You are free adults,” Carita said. “You’re trapped in nothing but yourselves. Tyra, you’re smart, gifted, beautiful, and soon you’ll be rich. You’ve got every prospect bright ahead of you. What we’ve got is a good marriage and a happy ship. Bob will come back to her, if you let him go.”

“Will he? How can I? Shall I leave him hurt forever?”

Carita smiled. She reached to lay an arm around the taller woman’s shoulders. “I had a hunch that’d be what makes you feel so helpless. Sit down, honey. I’ll pour us a drink and we’ll talk.”

Chapter XXI

The Jinxian relieved Saxtorph at the end of his watch. Lost in tumult, he barely noticed how she regarded him and forgot about it as he went out.

Oh, hell, he thought, I’m getting nowhere, only churning around in a maelstrom. Before it drags me under, I’d better what? Have a bite to eat, I guess, take a sleeping pill, go to bed, hope I’ll wake up clear-headed.

That he came to the place he did at the minute he did was coincidence. Nobody meant to stage anything. It made no difference, except that he would otherwise have found out less abruptly.

The door to Tyra’s cabin stood half open, Kamehameha Ryan in it. His hair was rumpled, his clothes hastily thrown on, his expression slightly dazed. Saxtorph stopped short. A tidal wave surged through him.

The quartermaster said into the room: “ hard to believe. I never would have I mean, Bob’s more than my captain, he’s my friend, and ”

Her laugh purred. “What, feel you guilty? No need. I enjoy his company, yes, and I had ideas, but he is too much married. Maybe when we are on Wonderland. Meanwhile, this has been a long dry voyage until now. Carita was right, she told me you are good.”

He beamed. “Why, thank you, ma’am. And you are terrific. Tomorrow?”

“Every tomorrow, if we can, until journey’s end. Now, if you excuse, I am ready for happy dreams.”

“Me too.” Ryan blew a kiss, shut the door, and tottered off. He didn’t see who stood at his back.

After a space Saxtorph began to think again. Well. So that is how it is. Du kannst nicht treu sein.

Not that I have any call to be mad at either of them. I’ve got no claim. Never did. On the contrary.

Even so

Vaguely: That’s the barbed wire I’ve been hung up on. Because the matter, the insight that hit me, touches Tyra, no, grabs her with kzin claws, I couldn’t bring myself to consult Dorcas. I couldn’t bring myself to see that she is the one living soul I must turn to. Between us we’ll work out what our course ought to be.

Later. Later.

He walked on, found himself at Peter Nordbo’s quarters, and knocked. The Wunderlander opened the door and gazed at him with surprise. “Hi,” Saxtorph said. “Am I disturbing you?”

“No. I read a modern history book. Thirty years to learn about. What is your wish?”

“Sociability. Nothing special. Swap stories of our young days, argue about war and politics and other trivia, maybe sing bawdy songs, definitely get drunk. You game? I’ll fetch any kind of bottle you like.”

Chapter XXII

Both suns were down and Munchen gone starry with its own lights. Downtown traffic swarmed and throbbed around the old buildings, the smart modern shops. Matthiesonstrasse was residential, though, quiet at this hour. Apartment houses lined it like ramparts, more windows dark than aglow, so that when Saxtorph looked straight up he could make out a few real stars. A breeze flowed chilly, the first breath of oncoming fall.

He found the number he wanted and glanced aloft again, less high. Luminance on the fifth floor told him somebody was awake there. He hesitated. That might be a different location from the one he was after.

Squaring shoulders, setting jaws: Come on, boy, move along. Rouse him if need be. Get this goddamn thing over with.

In the foyer he passed by the fahrstuhl and took the emergency stairs. They were steep. He felt glad of it. The climb worked out a little of the tension in him. Nonetheless, having reached the door numbered 52, he pushed the button violently.

After a minute the speaker gave him an uneven “Ja, was wollen Sie von mir?” He turned his face straight toward the scanner, and heard a gasp. “Sie!” Seconds later “Captain Saxtorph?” sounded like a prayer that it not be true.

“Let me in,” the Earthman said.

“No. This is, is the middle of the night.”

Correct, Saxtorph thought.

“You had not even the courtesy to call ahead. Go away.”

“Better me than the patrol,” Saxtorph answered.

He heard something akin to a strangled sob. The door opened. He stepped through. It shut behind him.

The apartment was ascetically furnished and had been neat, but disorder was creeping in. The air system foiled to remove the entire haze and stench of cigarette smoke. Ib Nordbo stood in a civilian jumpsuit. His hair was unkempt, his eyelids darkly smudged. Yes, thought Saxtorph, he was awake, all right. I daresay he doesn’t sleep much any more.

“W-welcome back,” Nordbo mumbled.

“Your father and sister were disappointed that you weren’t there to greet them personally,” Saxtorph said.

“They got my message. My regrets. They did? I must go offplanet, unfortunately, at that exact time. A personal difficulty. I asked for compassionate leave.”

“Except you holed up here. I figured you would. No point going anywhere else in this system. You’d be too easily found. No interstellar passenger ship is leaving before next week, and you’d need to fix up identity documents and such.” Saxtorph gestured. “Sit down. I don’t enjoy this either. Let’s make it as short as possible.”

Nordbo retreated, lowered himself to the edge of a chair, clutched its arms. His entire body begged. Saxtorph followed but remained standing above him.

“How long have you been in kzinti pay?” Saxtorph asked.

Nordbo swallowed dryness. “I am not. I was not. Never.”

“Listen, fellow. Listen good. I don’t care to play games. Cooperate, or I’ll walk right out and turn this business over to the authorities. I would have already, if it weren’t for your sister and your father. You damn near got them killed, you know.”

“Tyra No, I did not know!” the other screamed. “She lied to me. If I knew she was going with you, I would have gotten your stupid expedition stopped. And my father, any reasonable person believed him long dead. I did not know! How could I?”

“Bad luck, yah, but richly deserved,” Saxtorph said. “I might not have guessed, except that a clue fell my way. At that, the meaning didn’t dawn on me till a couple days later.”

He drew breath before driving his point home. “You’ll have followed the news, as much of our story as has been released. Before then, being who you are and in the position you are, you’ll have been apprised of what we told the Navy officer we requested come aboard as we approached. A kzinti warship caught us at the black hole, later than you expected it might, but still something you knew was quite likely.”

“I no, you misjudge me ”

“Pipe down till I give you leave to speak. The encounter could have been by chance. The kzinti might have happened on the beamcast from the earlier ship and dispatched this one at the precise wrong moment for us. Her captain knew who I was and what vessel I command. He could have heard that on the starvine or through his intelligence corps. Rover’s name wouldn’t matter to that mentality and would scarcely have been in any briefing he got, but conceivably he’d heard it somehow, lately, and it was fresh in his mind. Yah. The improbable can happen. What blew the whistle, once I realized what it meant, was that he told me he’d hoped to find me. He believed it was entirely possible we’d be there, we of all humans, Rover of all ships.

“We’d never disclosed where we were bound for or why. Nobody else knew, besides you. Nobody but you could have sent word about us to Kzin.

“I imagine you informed them as soon as Tyra discov-ered your father’s notes and showed you. The matter would be of interest to them, and might be important. When she got serious about mounting a search, you did everything you could to discourage her, short of telling your superiors. You dared not do that because then they might well order an official look-see, which could open a trail to you and your treason. They aren’t as stodgy about such things as you claimed. The disclosure about Markham had cast suspicion your way, and you must be feeling sort of desperate. When we made clear that we’d embark in spite of your objections, you got on whatever hyperphone you have secret access to and alerted the kzinti. If they scragged us, you’d be safe.

“Okay, Nordbo. How long have you been in their pay?”

“Tyra,” the seated man groaned. He slumped back. “I did not know, I swear I did not know she was with you.”

“Just the same,” Saxtorph said, “betraying us to probable death was not exactly a friendly act. For her sake and your father’s, I just might be persuaded to… set it aside. No promises yet, understand, and whatever mercy you get, you’ve got to earn.”

For their sakes, grieved a deep part of him. Yes, Peter has suffered, has lost, quite enough. He’s so happy that Dorcas and I will take him on as a partner. Christ, how I’d hate to dash the cup from his lips.

He wouldn’t be ruined. His vindication, the reparation to him, the family’s restoration to the clan, those will stand, because he was and is the Landholder, not this creature sniveling at me tonight. I think he has the strength to outlive it if he and the world learn the truth about his son, his only son, and to get on with his work. But if I can spare him if I can spare him!

Nordbo looked up. He was ghastly haggard. The words jerked forth: “I never did it for money. I got some, yes, but I did not want it, I always gave it to the Veterans’ Home. Markham was like a, a father to me, the father I had worshipped before he Well, what could I believe except that my real father turned collab-orator and died in the kzinti service? I thought Tyra was a wishful thinker. I could not make myself say that openly to her, but I thought my duty was to restore the family fortune and honor by my efforts. Markham was faithful in those first years after the trial, when many scorned. He helped me, counseled me, was like a new father, he, the war hero, then the brilliant administrator. When at last he asked me to do something a, a little irregular for him, I was glad. It was nothing harmful. He explained that if the kzinti knew better how our intelligence operations work, they would see we are defensive, not aggressive, and there would be a better chance for lasting peace. What should I trust, his keen and experienced judgment or a stupid, handcuffing regulation? That first information I gave him to pass on to the kzinti, it was not classified. They could have collected it for themselves with some time and trouble. But then there was more, and then more, and it grew into real secrets ” Again he covered his eyes and huddled.

Saxtorph nodded. “You’d become subject to blackmail. Every step you took brought you further down a one-way road. Yah. That’s how a lot of spies get recruited.”

“I love my nation. I would never harm it.” Nordbo dropped fists to knees and added in a voice less shrill, “Even though it did my father and my family a terrible injustice.”

“You got around to agreeing with Tyra about that, eh? And what you were doing couldn’t possibly cause any serious damage. Such-like notions are also usual among spies.”

Nordbo raised his head. “Do not insult me. I have my human dignity.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. Now, I told you to listen and I told you I want to make this short so I can get the hell out of here and go have a hot shower and a change of clothes. Snap to it, and perhaps, I’ll see if I can do anything for you. Otherwise I report straight to your superiors. For openers, how many more are in your ring?”

“N-no one else.”

“I’d slap you around if I had a pair of gloves I could burn afterward. As is goodnight.”

“No! Please!” Nordbo reeled to his feet. He held his arms out. “I tell you, nobody. Nobody I know of. One in my unit at headquarters, but she died two years ago. An accident. And Markham is dead. Nobody more!”

Saxtorph deemed he was telling the truth as far as possible. “You’ll name her,” he said. “That, and what else you tell, should give leads to any others.” If they existed. Maybe they didn’t. Markham had been a lone wolf type. Well, investigation was a job for professionals. “You will write down what you know. Every last bit. The whole story, all you did, all you delivered personally and all you heard about or suspected, the works. You savvy? I’ll give you two-three days. Don’t leave this apartment meanwhile.”

Nordbo’s hands fell to his sides. He straightened. A sudden, eerie calm was upon him. “What then?” he asked tonelessly. ,

“If I judge you’ve made an honest statement, my wife and I will try to bargain with the authorities, privately, when we bring it to them. We can’t dictate what they do with you. But we are their darlings, and the darlings of the public and the media more than ever. Our recommendations should carry weight. The Markham affair has shaken and embarrassed a lot of the brass pretty badly. They’d like some peace and quiet while they put their house in order. A sensation involving the son of hero-martyr Peter Nordbo is no way to get that. Maybe we can talk them into accepting your resignation and burying the truth in the top secret file. Maybe. We’ll try. That’s all I can promise. And it’s conditional on your writing a full and accurate account.”

“I see. You are kind.”

“Because of your father and your sister. Nothing else.” Saxtorph turned to go.

“Wait,” said Nordbo.

“Why?” Saxtorph growled.

“My memory is not perfect. But I need not write for you. I kept a journal of my, my participation. Everything that happened, recorded immediately afterward. I thought I might want it someday, somehow, if Mark-ham or the kzinti should Ach, let me fetch it.”

Saxtorph’s heart banged. “Okay.” He hadn’t hoped for this much. He wasn’t sure what he’d hoped for.

Nordbo went into an adjacent room. He strode resolutely and erect. Saxtorph tautened. “If you’re going for a gun instead, don’t,” he called. “My wife knows where I am.”

“Of course,” the soft voice drifted back. “No, you have convinced me. I shall do my best to set tilings right.”

He returned carrying a small security box, which he placed at the computer terminal. He laid his palm on the lid and it opened. Had anyone else tried to force it, the contents would have been destroyed. Saxtorph moved closer. He saw a number of minidiscs. “Encoded,” Nordbo said. “Please make a note of the decoding command. A wrong one will cause the program to wipe the data. You want to inspect a sample, no?”

He stooped, inserted a disc, and keyed the board. A date three years past sprang onto the screen, followed by words. They were Wunderlander, but Saxtorph’s reading knowledge sufficed to show that the entry did indeed relate an act of espionage. Copies of photographs came after.

“You are satisfied?” Nordbo asked. “Want you more?”

“No,” Saxtorph said. “This will do.”

Nordbo returned the disc to the box, which he relocked and proffered. “I am afraid you must touch this,” he said matter-of-factly.

Sudden pity welled forth. “That’s okay.” In several ways he resembled his sister: eyes, cheekbones, flaxen hair, something about the way he now stood and faced his visitor. “We’ll do whatever we can for you, Ib.”

“Thank you.”

Saxtorph took the box and left. “Gute nacht,” Nordbo said behind him.

The door closed. Saxtorph went the short distance along the hall to the stairwell and started down. Whatever I can for you, Tyra, he thought.

His mind went on, like himself speaking to her, explaining, though they were not things she would ever hear.

I’m not mad at you, dear. Nor at Kam, as far as that goes. You weren’t deliberately playing games with me. You honestly believed you were serious confusing horn-iness with love, which God knows is a common mistake till the impulse itself overwhelmed you.

Or so he supposed. Nothing had been uttered, except in the silent language. They simply understood that everything was over. Apart from friendship. Already he hurt less than at first. He knew that before long he’d stop altogether and be able to meet her, be with her, in comradely fashion. Dorcas would see to it.

I do wish you’ll find a man you can settle down with. I’d like you to have what we have. But if not, well, it’s your life, and any style of living it that you choose will be brave.

Saxtorph had reached the third-floor landing when he heard the single pistol shot.