Protector

VANDERVECKEN

He woke with the cold burning his nose and cheeks. He woke all at once, and opened his eyes to black night and clear bright stars. He sat upright in vast surprise. This took some effort. He was wrapped like a pupa in his mummy bag.

The shadows of peaks thrust into the starscape. City light glowed far away beyond a lumpy horizon.

He had gone hiking in the Pinnacles that morning, after a week of backpacking. He had gone the full route, through the eaves, up miles of narrow trail bordered by manzanita and empty space, up to where crude steps and metal handrails had had to be set into the rock. He had eaten a late lunch up there at the top of everything. Started down in plenty of time, his legs protesting the renewed work. The Pinnacles’ strange vertical geology reached up like fingers toward the sky. Then… what?

Apparently he was still here, halfway up a mountain, his mummy bag spread on the path.

He did not remember going to sleep.

Concussion? A fall? He snaked an arm from within the mummy bag and felt for bruises. None. He felt fine; he didn’t hurt anywhere. The air chilled his arm now, and he wondered. The day had been so hot.

And he’d left his backpack in the car. He’d left the car in the Pinnacles parking lot a week ago, and he’d come back to it this morning and left his gear in the trunk, with the mummy bag. How had it gotten up here?

The trails through the Pinnacles were dangerous enough in bright daylight. Elroy Truesdale was not about to negotiate them in darkness. He made a midnight snack from his backpack — which should have been in the car, and which was sitting near his head, covered with dew — and waited for dawn.

At dawn he started down. His feet felt fine, and the empty desolate rockscape was a joyful thing to see. He sang loudly as he negotiated the incredible trails. Nobody screamed at him to shut up. His legs did not ache despite the afternoon’s climb. He must be in pretty good shape, he thought. Though only a fool would carry a backpack on these trails, unless it had been wished on him halfway up a mountain.

The sun was well up when he reached the parking lot.

The car was locked tight, as he had left it. He was not whistling now. This made no sense. Some Good Samaritan had found him unconscious on the trail, or stunned him there; had not called for help; had broken into Truesdale’s own car and lugged Truesdale’s own backpack halfway up a mountain to slide him into his own mummy bag. What the hell? Had someone wanted Truesdale’s car, to frame him for some crime? When he opened the trunk he half expected to find a murder victim; but there were not even bloodstains. He was relieved and disappointed.

There was a message spool sitting on his car entertainment set.

He fitted it in and heard it out.

Truesdale, this is Vandervecken. By now you may or may not have realized that four months have vanished from your young life. For this I apologize. It was necessary, and you can afford to lose four months, and I intend to pay a fair price for them. Briefly: you will receive five hundred UN marks per quarter for the rest of your life, provided that you make no attempt to find out who I am.

On your return home you will find a confirming spool from Barrett, Hubbard and Wu, who will supply you with details.

Believe me, you did nothing criminal during the four months you can’t remember. You did things you would find interesting, but that’s what the money’s for.

You would find it difficult to learn my identity in any case. A voice pattern would tell you nothing. Barrett, Hubbard and Wu know nothing about me. The effort would be expensive and fruitless, and I hope you won’t make it.

Elroy did not twitch when acrid smoke curled up from the message spool. He had half expected that. In any case he had recognized the voice. His own. He must have made this tape for… Vandervecken… during the time he couldn’t remember.

He spoke to the blackened tape. “You wouldn’t lie to yourself, would you, Roy?”

Under what circumstances?

He got out of the car and walked to the Tourist Office and bought a morning newstape. His set still worked, though the message spool was a charred lump. He played the tape for the date. January 9, 2341.

It had been September 8, 2340. He had missed Christmas and New Year’s Day and four months of what? In rising fury he lifted the car phone. Who handled kidnappings? The local police, or the ARMs?

He held the phone for a long moment. Then he put it down.

It had come to him that he was not going to call the police.

While his car flew him back toward San Diego, Elroy Truesdale writhed in a kind of trap.

He had lost his first and, to date, only wife because of his reluctance to spend money. She had told him often enough that it was a character flaw. Nobody else had it. In a world where nobody starved, a life style was more important than credit security.

He had not always been like this.

At birth Truesdale had owned a trust fund intended to keep him, not rich, but comfortable for the rest of his life. It would have done so; but Truesdale wanted more. At age twenty-five he had convinced his father to turn the money over to him. He wanted to make some investments.

He would have been rich, from the way it sounded. But it had been a complicated con. Somewhere on Earth or in the Belt, a man who might or might not be named Lawrence St. John McGee was living in luxury. He couldn’t possibly have spent it all, not even on his scale of living.

Possibly Truesdale had overreacted. But he had no real talents; he could not count on himself as security. He knew that now. He was a salesman in a shoe store. Before that it had been a service station, trading batteries on passing cars and checking the motors and fans. He was an ordinary man. He kept himself in shape because everybody did; fat and loose muscles were regarded as personal carelessness. He had given up his beard, a pretty good beard, after Lawrence St. John McGee had walked off with his fortune. A working man did not have the time to keep up a good beard. Two thousand a year for life. He could not turn down the money.

Now he was in a trap, walled in by his own character flaws. Damn Vandervecken. And he must have cooperated, sold himself out. That had been his voice on the message tape.

Wait. There might be no money… just a cheap promise to buy “Vandervecken” a few additional hours and send Truesdale a few hundred miles south.

Truesdale called home. There was four months’ worth of calls waiting in storage in his phone. He keyed it for Barrett, Hubbard and Wu, and waited out the sorting process.

The message was there. He heard it through. It said about what he had expected it to.

He called the Better Business Bureau.

Yes, they had records of Barrett, Hubbard and Wu. It was a reputable firm, as far as they were concerned, specializing in corporate law. He got their number from Information.

Barrett was a smartly dressed woman in middle age. Her manner was competent and brusk. She was reluctant to tell him anything at all, even after he had identified himself.

“All I want to know,” he told her, “is whether your firm is sure of your funds. This Vandervecken has promised me five hundred marks quarterly. If he cut off your funds, that would cut me off, wouldn’t it? Regardless of whether I’ve abided by the terms of the agreement.”

“That’s not true, Mr. TruesdaIe,” she answered severely. “Mr. Vandervecken has bought you an annuity. If you violate the terms of your agreement with him, the annuity passes to, let me see now, to Criminal Rehabilitation Studies for the remainder of your life.”

“Oh. And the terms are that I shouldn’t try to find out who Mr. Vandervecken is.”

“Roughly, yes. It’s all spelled out quite fully in a message which—”

“I have it.”

He hung up. And pondered. Two thousand a year, for life. And it was real. It was hardly a living, but it would make a nice addition to his salary. Already he had thought of half a dozen ways to use the first few checks. He might try a different job…

Two thousand a year. It was an exorbitant price to pay for four months of labor. Most kinds of labor. What had he done with those four months?

And how had Vandervecken known it would be enough?

I probably told him myself, Truesdale thought bitterly. Self-betrayal. At least he hadn’t lied. Five hundred every three months, to put a touch of luxury in his life… and he would wonder for the rest of his life. But he would not go to the police.

He could not remember ever having suffered such a case of mixed emotions.

Presently he began listening to the other messages stored in his phone.

“But you did,” said the ARM lieutenant. “You’re here.” He was a square-jawed, brawny man with eyes that did not believe. A close look into those eyes and you, too, would doubt whatever you had been telling him.

Truesdale shrugged.

“What changed your mind?”

“Money again. I started going through the messages in my phone. There was another message from a different legal firm. Do you know the name Mrs. Jacob Randall?”

“No. Wait a minute. Estelle Randall? President of the Struldbrugs’ Club until — um.”

“She was my great-to-the-fourth grandmother.”

“And she died last month. My condolences.”

“Thanks. I, I — see. I didn’t see Greatly ’Stelle that often. Maybe twice a year, once at her birthday party, once at a christening or whatever. I remember we had lunch together a few days after I found out I’d lost all my money. She was mad. Oh, boy. She offered to refinance me, but I turned her down.”

“Pride? It could happen to anyone. Lawrence St. John McGee practices an old and polished profession.”

“I know.”

“She was the oldest woman in the world.”

“I know.” The presidency of the Struldbrugs’ Club went to the oldest living member. It was an honorary title; the Acting President usually did the work. “She was a hundred and seventy-three when I was born. The thing is, none of us ever expected her to die. I suppose that sounds silly?”

“No. How many people die at two hundred and ten?”

“Then I played that tape from Becket and Hollingsbrooke and she was dead! And I’ve inherited about half a million marks, out of a fortune that must be unbelievable. She’s got enough great-to-the-Nth grandchildren to take over any nation in the world. You should have seen the birthday parties.”

“I see.” The ARM’s eyes looked deep into him. “So you don’t need Vandervecken’s money now. Two thousand a year is peanuts now.”

“And the son of a bitch made me miss her birthday.”

The ARM leaned back. “You tell a strange story. I never heard of any kind of amnesia that left no memory at all.”

“I haven’t either. It was as if I went to sleep and woke up four months later.”

“But you don’t even remember going to sleep.”

“That’s right.”

“A stun gun could do that… Well, we’ll put you under deep hypnosis and see what we come up with. I don’t suppose you have any objections? You’ll have to file some permission forms.”

“Fine.”

“You, ah, may not like what we find out.”

“I know.” Truesdale was already bracing himself against what he could find out. The voice had been his own. What had he been afraid to remember about himself?

“If you committed any crime during that period you can’t remember, you may have to pay the penalty. It’s not that useful an alibi.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“Okay.”

“You think I’m faking this?”

“The thought crossed my mind. We’ll find out.”

“Okay, snap out of it,” said a Voice. And Truesdale snapped out of it like a man awakened too suddenly, dreams dying in his mind.

The Voice was Doctor Michaela Shorter, a broad-shouldered black woman in a loose blue business jumper. She said, “How do you feel?”

“Fine,” said Truesdale. “What luck?”

“It’s very peculiar. You not only don’t remember anything during those four months; you didn’t even sense time passing. You didn’t dream.”

The ARM lieutenant was off to the side, where Truesdale didn’t notice him until he spoke. “Do you know of any drugs that would do that?”

The woman shook her head.

“Doctor Shorter is an expert at forensic medicine,” the lieutenant said to Truesdale. “It sounds like somebody’s thought of something new.” To Doctor Shorter he said, “It could be something really new. Would you do some computer work?”

“I did,” she said shortly. “Anyway, no drug could be that selective. It’s as if he’d been stunned asleep, then put in frozen storage for four months. Except that he’d show medical signs of thawing: cell ruptures from ice crystalization and like that.” She looked sharply at Truesdale. “Don’t let my voice put you under again.”

“I wasn’t.” Tmesdale stood up. “Whatever was done to me, it would take a laboratory, wouldn’t it? If it was that new. That’ll narrow the search a bit, won’t it?”

“It should,” said Doctor Shorter. “I’d look for a byproduct of genetic research. Something that decomposes RNA.”

The ARM lieutenant growled, “You’d think snatching you off a mountain would leave some traces too, but it didn’t. A car would have been spotted by radar. Vandervecken must have had you carried down to the parking lot on a stretcher, around oh four hundred, when there wouldn’t be anyone around.”

“That’d be goddam dangerous, on those paths.”

“I know. Have you got a better answer?”

“Haven’t you learned anything?”

“The money. Your car stayed in the parking lot because the parking fee was paid in advance. So was your annuity. All from an account registered to the name of Vandervecken. A new account, and it’s been closed.”

“Figures.

“Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No. Probably Dutch.”

The ARM nodded to himself. He stood up. Doctor Shorter was looking impatient to get her examining room back.

Half a million marks was a lot of money. Truesdale played with the idea of telling his boss to go to Hell… but, despite tradition, Jeromy Link didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. No point in sticking him for an emergency replacement. Truesdale gave Jeromy a month’s notice.

Because it was temporary, his job became more pleasant. A shoe clerk… but he met some interesting people that way. One day he took a hard look at the machinery that molded shoes around human feet. Remarkable, admirable widgetry. He’d never realized it before.

In his off hours he was planning a sightseeing vacation.

He resumed acquaintance with numberless relatives when Greatly ’Stelle’s will was executed. Some had missed him at her funeral and at her last birthday party. Where had he been?

“Damndest thing,” said Truesdale — and he had to tell the story half a dozen times that evening. He took a perverse delight in doing so. “Vandervecken” hadn’t wanted publicity.

His delight was punctured when a second-cousin-in-law said, “So you were robbed again. You seem to be robbery-prone, Roy.”

“Not any more. This time I’m going to get the son of a bitch,” said Truesdale.

The day before his backpacking trip began, he stopped in at ARM Headquarters. He had trouble remembering the brawny ARM lieutenant’s name. Robinson, that was it. Robinson nodded at him from behind a boomerang desk and said, “Come on in. You enjoying life?”

“Somewhat. How are you making out?” Truesdale took a seat. The office was small but comfortable, with tea and coffee spigots set in the desk.

Robinson leaned back from the desk as if glad of the interruption. “Mostly negatives. We still don’t know who kidnapped you. We couldn’t trace the money anywhere, but we’re sure it didn’t come from you.” He looked up. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“I was sure you’d check on me.”

“Right. Assume for the moment that someone we’ll call Vandervecken has a specific amnesia treatment. He might go around selling it to people who want to commit crimes. Like murdering a relative for her inheritance.”

“I wouldn’t do that to Greatly ’Stelle.”

“Regardless, you didn’t. Vandervecken would have had to pay you, and a hefty sum, too. The idea’s ridiculous. Other than that, we found two other cases of your type of selective amnesia.” There was a computer terminal in the desk. The ARM used it. “First one was a Mary Boethals, who disappeared for four months in 2220. She didn’t report it. The ARMs got interested in her because she’d stopped getting treatments for a kidney ailment. It seemed likely shed got a transplant from an organlegger. But she told a different story, very much like yours, including the annuity.

“Then there was a Charles Mow, disappeared in 2241, came back four months later. He had an annuity too, but it got cut off because of some embezzling in Norn Insurance. It made Mow mad enough to come to us. Naturally the ARMs started looking for other cases, but they didn’t find any. And that was it for a hundred years. Until you showed up.”

“And my annuity’s been cut off.”

“Tough. Now, in those two previous cases the money was to go to prosthetics research. There wasn’t any criminal rehabilitation a hundred years ago. They all went into the organ banks.”

“Yah.”

“Otherwise the cases were all quite similar. So it looks like were looking for a struldbrug. The time fits: the earliest case was a hundred and twenty years ago. The name Vandervecken fits. The interest in prosthetics fits.”

Truesdale thought about it. There were not that many struldbrugs around. Minimum age for admission to that most exclusive of clubs had been frozen at one hundred and eighty-one. “Any specific suspects?”

“If there were, I couldn’t tell you. But, no. Mrs. Randall definitely died of natural causes, and she definitely wasn’t Vandervecken. If she had some connection with him, we haven’t been able to find it.”

“Have you checked with the Belt?”

Robinson looked at him narrowly. “No. Why?”

“Just a thought.” Distance in time equals distance in space?

“Well, we can ask. They might have had similar cases. Personally, I don’t know where to go from here. We don’t know why it was done, and we don’t know how.”

There wasn’t room in all of Earth’s national and international parks for the potential backpackers alive in the year 2341. The waiting list for the Amazon jungle was two years long. Other parks had similar lists.

Elroy Truesdale carried a backpack through London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Morocco, Cairo. He rode supersonic trains between the cities. He ate in restaurants, carrying credit cards rather than dehydrated foods. This was something he had planned for a long time, but he had not had the money.

He saw the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and Tower of London, the Leaning Tower — which had been propped up. He saw the Valley of the Fallen. He walked Roman roads in a dozen nations.

Everywhere there were other backpackers. At night they camped in places set aside for them by the individual cities, usually old parking garages or abandoned freeways. They would pool their lightweight stoves to form a campfire and sit around it teaching each other songs. When he tired of them Truesdale would stay at a hotel.

He wore out disposable hiking socks at a furious rate, and bought new ones from dispensers in the campspots. His legs became hard as wood.

A month of this, and he was not finished. Something was driving him to see all of Earth. A cancellation got him into the Australian outback, probably the least popular of the national parks. He spent a week there. He needed the silence and the room.

Then on to Sydney, and a girl with a Belter haircut.

Her back was to him. He saw a pony’s tail of bobbing hair, black and wavy and almost long enough to reach her waist. Most of her scalp was bare and as darkly tanned as the rest of her, on either side of a two-inch-wide crest.

Twenty years ago it wouldn’t have jarred. There had been a fad for the Belter crest. But it had passed, and now she was like an echo from long ago… or far away? She was tall as a Belter, but with musculature far better developed. She was alone; she had not joined the campfire congregation at the other end of this, the eighth floor of a ten-story parking garage.

Inexpert singing echoed between the concrete roof and floor. I was born about ten thousand years from now. When we land upon the Moon I’ll show them how…

A real Belter? Backpacking?

Truesdale picked his way to her through a maze of mummy bags. He said, “Excuse me. Are you a Belter?”

She turned. “Yes. What of it?”

Her eyes were brown. Her face was lovely in a fashion that was all planes and angles, and it held no welcome. She would react badly to a pass. Maybe she didn’t like flatlanders; certainly she was too tired for games.

Truesdale said, “I want to tell a story to a Belter.”

She shrugged her eyebrows: an irritated gesture. “Why not go to the Belt?”

“I’d never get there tonight,” he said reasonably.

“All right, go ahead.”

Truesdale told her of the kidnapping on the Pinnacles. He was getting glib at it. He told it fast. Already he was sorry he had not simply gone to sleep.

She listened with uneasy patience, then said, “Why tell me?”

“Well, there were two other cases of this kind of kidnapping, both a long time ago. I wondered if anything like it has happened in the Belt.”

“I don’t know. There may be records in the goldskin files.”

“Thanks,” said Truesdale, and went away.

He lay in his sleeping bag, eyes closed, arms crossed on his breast. Tomorrow… Brasilia? They were still singing:

“Why, I once signed on with Amra, and I damn near lost my skin,

For the blood it flowed like water when the fighting did begin.

I’m the only tar who’s e’er jumped ship from Vandervecken’s crew—”

Truesdale’s eyes snapped open.

“And that’s about the strangest thing a man will ever do.”

He’d been looking in the wrong place.

Backpackers tended to wake with the dawn. Some preferred to find an all-night restaurant for breakfast; others made their own. Truesdale was cooking freeze-dried eggs when the girl walked up.

“Remember me? My name’s Alice Jordan.”

“Roy Truesdale. Have some eggs.”

“Thanks.” She passed him a packet, which he mixed with water and poured in with the rest. She was different this morning: rested, younger-looking, less formidable.

“I started remembering things last night. Cases like yours. They really do exist. I’m a goldskin myself, and I heard about them, but I never bothered to look up details.”

“You’re a goldskin?” A cop? Come to that, she was his size; she’d have the muscle to handle any Belter.

“I’ve also been a smuggler,” she said a bit defensively. “One day I decided the Belt needed the income more than the smugglers.”

“Maybe I’ll have to go to the Belt after all,” he said lightly. Thinking: Or talk Robinson into sending for the files. The eggs were ready. He served them into the cups all backpackers carried at their belts.

She said, “Tell me more about the Vandervecken case.”

“Not much more to tell. I wish I could forget about it.” It hadn’t been out of his mind in more than a month. He’d been robbed.

“Did you go to the police right away?”

“No.”

“That’s what I remembered. The Snatcher picks his victims from the main Belt, holds them for four months or so, then bribes them. Most of the time the bribe is big enough. I suppose it wasn’t in your case.”

“Almost.” He was not going to tell a stranger about Greatly ’Stelle. “But if most of them take the bribes, how do you find out about them?”

“Well, it’s not that easy to hide a disappearing ship. Mostly the ships disappear from the main Belt, then reappear four months on in their orbits. But if telescopes don’t find them during the four months, someone may ask questions.”

They poured the remnants of eggs out of their frictionless cups and filled them with coffee powder and boiling water.

“There are several cases of this kind, and they’re all unsolved,” she said. “Some Belters think it’s the Outsider, taking samples.”

“Outsider?”

“The first alien humanity will ever meet.”

“Like the Sea Statue? Or that alien that landed on Mars during—”

“No, no,” she said impatiently. “The Sea Statue was dug up on Earth’s own continental shelf. It was there for over a billion years. As for the Pak, it was a branch of humanity, as far as anyone can tell. No, we’re still waiting for the real Outsider.”

“And you think he’s taking samples to see if we’re ready for civilization. When we are, he’ll come.”

“I haven’t said I believed it myself.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was a charming story, and a little scary. It never occurred to me that he might be sampling flatlanders too.”

He laughed. “Thanks.”

“No offense.”

“I go to Brasilia from here,” he said. It was not quite an offer.

“I rest up. One day on, one day off. I’m strong for a Belter, but I cant just keep going day after day.” She hesitated. “That’s why I don’t travel with anyone. I’ve had offers, but I’d hate to think I was slowing someone down.”

“I see.”

She got up. So did Truesdale. He had the impression that she towered over him, but that was illusion.

He said, “Where are you stationed? Ceres?”

“Vesta. ’Bye.”

“’Bye.”

He trekked Brasilia and Sao Paulo and Rio de Janiero. He saw Chichen Itza and grooved on Peruvian cooking. He came to Washington, D.C., with the theft of four months of his life still itching in his brain.

The center of Washington was under a weather dome. They wouldn’t let him in with a backpack. Washington was a business city: it governed a respectable section of the planet Earth.

He went directly to the Smithsonian Institution.

The Sea Statue was a mirror-surfaced, not quite humanoid figure. It stood on its great splayed feet with both three-fingered hands upraised as against a threat. Despite the ages it had lain at the bottom of the sea, it showed no signs of corrosion. It looked like the product of some advanced civilization… and it was; it was a pressure suit with emergency stasis field facilities, and the thing inside was very dangerous. Once it had gotten loose.

The Pak was an ancient, tired mummy. Its face was hard and inhuman, expressionless. Its head was twisted at an odd angle, and its arms were lax at its sides, unraised against what had crushed its throat. Truesdale read its story in the guidebook, and felt pity. It had come so far to save us all…

So: there were things out there. The universe was deep enough to hold all manner of things. If something was sampling humanity, the only questions were: why would he bother? And why would he bother to put them back?

No, there was more. Itchy questions: why go to Earth for flatlanders? Couples of sufficient wealth spent their honeymoons on Titan, beneath the huge ringed wonder of Saturn. Surely it would be easy to hijack a honeymoon special. And why pick Belters from the main Belt? Enough of them still went out to mine the outer reaches.

He had a glimmering then, but it wouldn’t come clear. He filed it away…

There was a trek, along the Mississippi, and some climbing in the Rockies. He broke his leg there and had to be flown to a nearby arcology city built into a jagged canyon. A doctor set his leg and used regrowth treatments. Afterward he flew home. He’d had enough.

The San Diego Police had no new information on Lawrence St. John McGee. They were used to seeing Truesdale, and in fact were getting a little tired of him. It was becoming clear to Truesdale that they did not ever expect to find McGee and Truesdale’s money.

“He had more than enough to buy a face and fingertip transplant,” an officer had told him once. Now they just made soothing noises, and waited until he went away. It had been a year since he last dropped in.

Truesdale went to ARM Headquarters. He took a taxi rather than a slidewalk; his leg still hurt him.

“We’re working on it,” Robinson told him. “A case this strange doesn’t get forgotten. In fact — well, never mind.”

“What?”

The ARM grinned suddenly. “It’s got no real connection. I asked the basement computer for other unsolved crimes with a technologically advanced base, no time limit. I got some weirdies. You ever hear of the duplicate Stonehenge?”

“Sure. I was there, a month and a half ago.”

“Aren’t they amazing? Some clown put up that duplicate in a single night. Next morning there were two Stonehenges. You can’t tell the difference except by position: the duplicate is a few hundred yards further north. There are even the same initials carved in the duplicate.”

Truesdale was nodding. “I know. That’s got to be the most expensive practical joke ever pulled.”

“We don’t really know which is the real Stonehenge, either. Suppose the joker moved both Stonghenges? He had the power to move all the rocks in the duplicate. All he had to do was move the rocks in the real Stonehenge and put the duplicate in its place.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

The ARM laughed.

“Did you get anything from the Belt?”

Robinson lost his smile. “Yah. Half a dozen known cases, kidnapping and amnesia, and all unsolved. I still think we’re looking for a struldbrug.”

All unsolved. It boded ill for Truesdale’s case.

“An old struldbrug,” said the ARM. “Someone who was already old enough a hundred and twenty years ago, to think he’d learned enough to solve the problems of humanity. Or maybe to write a definitive book on human progress. So he started taking samples.”

“And he’s still at it?”

“Or a grandson took over the business.” Robinson sighed. “Don’t worry about it. Well get him.”

“Sure. You’ve only had a hundred and twenty years.”

“Don’t noodge,” said Robinson.

And that did it.

The center of goldskin police activity was the center of government: Ceres. Police headquarters on Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and Astraea were redundant, in a sense, but very necessary. Five asteroids would cover the main Belt. It had happened that they were all on the same side of the sun at the same time; but it was rare.

Vesta was the smallest of the five. Her cities were on the surface, under four big double domes.

Thrice in history a dome had been holed. It was not the kind of event that would be forgotten. All of Vesta’s buildings were pressure-tight. Several had airlock tubes that led out through the dome.

Alice Jordan entered the Waring City police airlock after a routine smuggler patrol. There were two chambers, and then a hallway lined with pressure suits. She doffed her own suit and hung it. The chest bore a flourescent she-dragon, breathing fire.

She reported to her superior, Vinnie Garcia. “No luck.”

Vinnie grinned at her. She was dark and willowy, her fingers long and slender: far more the Belter stereotype than Alice Jordan. “You had some luck on Earth.”

“Finagle’s Jest I did. You have my report.” Alice had gone to Earth in hope of solving a growing social problem. A flatlander sin — wireheading, the practice of running current into the center of the brain — had been spreading through the Belt. Unfortunately Earth’s solution had been to wait it out. In three hundred years it would solve itself… but that was hardly satisfactory to Alice Jordan.

“That’s not what I meant. You made a conquest.” Vinnie paused. “There’s a flatlander waiting for you in your office.”

“A flatlander?” She had shared a bed with one man on Earth, to nobody’s satisfaction. Gravity, and lack of practice. He’d been polite about it, but they had not seen each other again.

She stood up. “Do you need me for anything else?”

“Nope. Have fun,” said Vinnie.

He tried to stand up when she came in. He botched it a bit in the low gravity, but managed to get his feet to the floor and keep the rest of him upright. “Hello. Roy Truesdale,” he said, before she could fumble for the name.

“Welcome to Vesta,” she said. “So you came after all. Still hunting for the Snatcher?”

“Yes.”

She took a seat behind her desk. “Tell me about it. Did you finish the backpacking trip?”

He nodded. “I think the Rockies were the best, and there’s no trouble getting in. You ought to try it. The Rockies aren’t a national park, but not many people want to build there either.”

“I’ll try it, if I ever get to Earth again.”

“I saw the other Outsiders… I know, they aren’t really Outsiders, but sure as hell, they’re alien. If the real Outsider is like those…”

“You’d rather think Vandervecken is human.”

“I guess I would.”

“You’re putting a lot of effort into finding him.” She considered the idea that Truesdale had come chasing a certain Belter woman. A flattering thought…

“The law didn’t seem to be getting anywhere,” he said. “Worse than that. It looks like they’ve been hunting Vandervecken or someone like him for a hundred and twenty years. I got mad and signed up for a ship to Vesta. I was going to find Vandervecken myself. That’s a hassle, you know?”

“I know. Too many flatlanders want to see the asteroids. We have to restrict them.”

“I had to wait three months for crash couch space. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to go. After all, I could always cancel… Then something else happened.” Truesdale’s jaw clamped in retrospective anger.

“Lawrence St. John McGee. He took me for just about everything I owned, ten years ago. A swindle.”

“It happens. I’m sorry.”

“They caught him. He was calling himself Ellery Jones from St. Louis. He was running a whole new game, in Topeka, Kansas, but someone tipped off the marks and they got him. He had new fingerprints, new retina prints, a new face. They had to do a brain wave analysis before they were sure it was him. I may even get some of my money back.”

She smiled. “Why, that’s wonderful!”

“Vandervecken tipped him. It was another bribe.”

“Are you sure? Did he use that name?”

“No. Damn him for playing games with my head! He must have decided I was hunting him because he robbed me. He took four months of my life. He threw me Lawrence St. John McGee, so I should stop worrying about my missing four months.”

“You don’t like being that predictable.”

“No. I do not.” He wasn’t looking at her. His hands were closed hard on the arms of her pest chair. Muscles bunched and swelled in his arms when he did that. Some Belters affected to hold flatlander muscles in contempt…

She said, “Vandervecken may be too big for us.”

His response was interesting. “Now you’re talking. What have you found out?”

“Well… I’ve been hunting Vandervecken too. You know that there have been other disappearances.”

“Yah.”

Her desk, like Robinson’s, had a computer terminal in it. She used it. “Half a dozen names. And dates: 2150, 2191, 2230, 2250, 2270, 2331. You can see our records go back further than yours. I talked to this Lawrence Jannifer, the latest one, but he can’t remember anything more than you can. He was taking a fast orbit to the lead Trojans with some small machine parts, when… blackout. Next thing he knew he was in orbit around Hector.” She smiled. “He didn’t take it the way you did. He’s just glad he was put back.”

“Are any of the others alive and available?”

“Dandridge Sukarno and Norma Stier, disappeared 2270 and 2230, respectively. They wouldn’t give me the local time of day. They took their fees and that’s that. We traced the fees to two different names — George Olduval and C. Cretemaster — and no faces to go with the names.”

“You have been busy.”

She shrugged. “A lot of goldskins get interested in the Snatcher at one time or another. Vinnie sort of puts up with it.”

“It sounds like he takes a sample every ten years. Alternating between Earth and Belt.” Truesdale whistled uneasily. He was remembering those dates. “Twenty-one fifty is almost two hundred years ago. No wonder he called himself Vandervecken.”

She looked at him sharply. “Is there some significance?”

“Vandervecken was the captain of the Flying Dutchman. I looked it up. You know the Flying Dutchman legend?”

“No.”

“There used to be commercial sailing ships — sailing on the ocean, by wind power. Vandervecken was trying to round the Cape of Good Hope during a heavy storm. He swore a blasphemous oath that he would round the Cape if he had to beat against the wind until the last day. In stormy weather passing ships can still see him, still trying to round the Cape. Sometimes he stops ships and asks them to take letters to home.”

Her laugh was shaky. “Letters to who?”

“The Wandering Jew, maybe. There are variations. One says Vandervecken murdered his wife and sailed away from the police. One says there was a murder on board. Writers seem to like this legend. It turns up in novels, and there was an old flat movie, and an even older opera, and — have you heard that old song the backpackers sing around the campfires? I’m the only tar that e’er jumped ship from Vandervecken’s crew…”

“The Bragging Song.”

“All the legends have that one thing in common: an immortal man sailing under a curse, forever.”

Alice Jordan’s eyes went big and round.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Jack Brennan.”

“Brennan. I remember. The man who ate the roots aboard the Pak ship. Jack Brennan. He’s supposed to be dead.”

“Supposed to be.” She was looking down at her desk. Gradually her eyes focused on coils of printout. “Roy, I’ve got to get some work done. Where are you staying, the Palace?”

“Sure, it’s the only hotel in Waring City.”

“I’ll pick you up there, eighteen hundred. You’ll need a guide to the restaurants anyway.”

For a monopoly, the Palace was an excellent hotel. Human service was spotty, but the machinery — bathroom facilities, cleaning widgetry, waiters — all ran to perfection. Belters seemed to treat their machines as if their lives depended on them.

The east wall was three meters from the dome itself, and featured picture windows guarded by big rectangular screens that swung automatically to shut out raw sunlight. The screens were open now. Truesdale looked out through a wall of glass, over the shallow bulge of the Anderson City dome, past a horizon so jagged and close that he felt he was on a mountain peak. But the stars were not this vivid from any mountain on Earth. He saw the universe, close enough to touch.

And the room was costing him plenty. He was going to have to learn to spend money again without wincing.

He took a shower. It was fun. The shower delivered great slow volumes of hot water that tended to stay on his body as if jellied. There were side jets, and a needle spray. A far cry from the old days, he supposed, when the deep cavity that now housed Anderson City had been carved by the extensive, expensive mining of hydratebearing rock. But fusion was cheap, and water once made could be distilled over and over, indefinitely.

When he left the shower he found that there had been a delivery. The information terminal beside his desk had delivered several books’ worth of information, printing it into a book the size of the San Diego telephone book, with pages that could be wiped after the departure of a guest. Alice Jordan must have sent this. He leafed through it until he found Nicholas Sohl’s memoirs, and started there. The section on the Pak ship was near the end.

There was a chill on him when he finished. Nicholas Sohl, once First Speaker for the Belt… not a fool. The thing to remember, Sohl had written, is that he’s brighter than we are. Maybe he’s thought of something I haven’t.

But how bright would a man have to be to make up for the lack of a foodsource?

He read on…

Alice Jordan arrived ten minutes early. At the door she glanced past him at the, information terminal. “You got it. Good. How far did you get?”

“Nick Sohl’s memoirs. A textbook on the physiology of the Pak. I skimmed Graves’s book on evolution. He claims a dozen plants that could have been imported from the Pak world.”

“You’re a flatlander. What do you think?”

“I’m not a biologist. And I skipped the proceedings of Olympus Base. I don’t really care why a gravity polarizer doesn’t work yet.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. She was wearing loose slacks and a blouse: not dressed for dinner, in Truesdale’s view. But he hadn’t expected skirts in Vesta’s gravity.

She said, “I think it’s Brennan.”

“So do I.”

“But he’s got to be dead. He didn’t have a food source.”

“He had his own singleship on a tow line. Even two hundred years ago, a singleship kitchen would feed him for a long time, wouldn’t it? It was the roots he was missing. Maybe he had a few he took from the cargo pod, and there were more aboard the Pak ship. But when he ate those he’d be finished.”

“But you still think he’s alive. So do I. Let’s hear your reasons.”

Truesdale took a minute to get his thoughts organized. “The Flying Dutchman. Vandervecken. A man immortalized by a curse. It fits too well.”

She nodded. “What else?”

“Oh, the kidnappings… and the fact that he puts us back. Even with the chance that he’ll get caught, he puts us back. He’s too considerate for an alien and he’s too powerful for a human. What’s left?”

“Brennan.”

“Then there’s the duplicate Stonehenge.” He had to tell her about that. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since you mentioned Brennan. You know what it sounds like to me? Brennan had plenty of time with the gravity polarizer in the Pak cargo pod. He must have solved the principle, and improved it into a gravity generator. Then he had to play games with it.”

“Games. Right again. This superintelligence must have been like a new toy to him.”

“He may have pulled some other practical jokes.”

“Yes,” she said with too much emphasis.

“What? Another practical joke?”

Alice laughed. “Ever hear of the Mahmed Asteroid? It was in those excerpts I sent you.”

“I guess I didn’t get to it.”

“An asteroid a couple of miles in diameter, mainly ice. The Belt telescopes spotted it fairly early, in… 2183, I think. It was still outside Jupiter’s orbit. Mahmed was the first man to land on it. He was also the man who plotted its orbit and found out that it was going to hit Mars.”

“Did it?”

“Yah. It probably could have been stopped, even with the technology of the day, but I suppose nobody was really interested. It was going to hit well away from Olympus Base. They did carve off a hefty chunk of ice and move it into a new orbit. Nearly pure water, valuable stuff.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with—”

“It killed the martians. Every martian on the planet, as far as we can tell. The water vapor content of the atmosphere went way up.”

“Oh,” said Truesdale. “Genocide. Some practical joke.”

“I told you, Vandervecken may be too big for us.”

“Yah.” From a recorded voice on a self-destructing spool Vandervecken had grown in all dimensions. Now he was two hundred and twenty years long, and the realm of his activities blanketed the solar system. In physical strength he had grown too. The Brennan-monster could have slung an unconscious Elroy Truesdale over his shoulder and carried him down off the Pinnacles. “He’s big, all right. And we’re the only ones who know it. What do we do now?”

“Let’s get dinner,” she said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Alice said gently. “But let’s get dinner.” markup_rbmk-3~1.html — n56

The top of the Palace Hotel was a four-sided dome that showed two views of reality. For the east and West quadrants looked out on Vesta, but the north and south quadrants were holograph projections of some mountainous part of Earth. “It’s a looped tape, several days long,” Alice told him. “Taken from a car cruising at ground level. This looks like morning in Switzerland.”

“It does,” he agreed. The vodka martini was hitting him hard. He’d skipped lunch, and now his belly was a yawning vacuum. “Tell me about Belter foods.”

“Well, the Palace is mainly french flatlander cooking.”

“I’d like to try Belter cooking. Tomorrow?”

“Honestly, Roy, I got spoiled on Earth. I’ll take you to a Belter place tomorrow, but I don’t think youll find any new taste thrills. Food’s too expensive here to do much experimental cooking.

“Too bad.” He glanced at the menu on a waiter’s chest, and recoiled. “Ye gods. The prices!”

“This is as expensive as it gets. At the other end is dole yeast, which is free—”

“Free?”

“—and barely worth it. If you’re down and out it’ll keep you fed, and it practically grows itself. Normal Belter cooking is almost vegetarian except for chicken and eggs. We grow chickens in most of the larger domes. Beef and pork we have to grow in the bubble-formed worlds, and seafood — well, we have to ship it up. Some comes freeze-dried; that’s cheaper.”

They punched their orders into a waiter’s keyboard. On Earth a restaurant this expensive would at least have featured human waiters… but Roy somehow couldn’t imagine a Belter playing the role of waiter.

The steaks Diane were too small, the vegetables varied and plentiful. Alice tore in with a gusto he admired. “I missed this,” she said. “On Earth I had to take up backpacking to work off all I was eating.”

Roy put his fork down. “I can’t figure out what he ate.”

“Drop it for awhile.”

“All right. Tell me about yourself.”

She told him about a childhood in Confinement asteroid, and the thick basement windows from which she could see the stars: stars that hadn’t meant anything to her until her first trip outside. The years of training in flying spacecraft — not mandatory, but your friends would think you were funny if you dropped out. Her first smuggling run, and the goldskin pilot who hung on her course like a leech, laughing at her out of her com screen. Three years hauling foodstuffs and hydroponics machinery to the Trojans before she’d tried it again, and then it had been the same laughing face, and when she’d bitched about it he’d lectured her on economics all the way to Hector.

They were down to coffee (freeze-dried) and brandy (a Belt product, and excellent). He told her about the cousins and the part-cousins and the generations of uncles and part-uncles and great-uncles and -aunts to match, all spread across the world, so that there were relatives anywhere he chose to go. He told her about Greatly ’Stelle.

She said, “So he was right.”

He knew just what she meant. “I wouldn’t have gone to the law. I couldn’t have turned down the money. Alice, he thinks of the whole human race that way. On wires. And he’s the only one who can see the wires.”

Alice’s face was almost a snarl. “I won’t let a man think of me that way.”

“And he takes samples. To see how we’re doing, where we’re going. I suppose his next step is a selective breeding project.”

“All right, what’s our next move?”

“I don’t know.” He sipped at his brandy. Wonderful stuff; it seemed to turn to vapor in his mouth. The Belt ought to export it. It’d be cheap in fuel: all downhill.

She said, “We’ve got three choices, I think. First is to tell everything we know, first to Vinnie, then to any newstape producer that’ll listen.”

“Will they listen?”

“Oh—” she waved a negligent band. “They’ll publish, I think. It’s a new slant on things. But we don’t have any proof. We’ve got a theory, and it’s got a gaping hole in it, and that’s all we’ve got.”

“What did he eat?”

“Right.”

“Well, we can try it.”

Alice thumbed a call button. When the waiter slid over in a whisper of air, she punched for two more brandies. She said, “Then what?”

“… Yah.”

“People would listen, and talk it over, and wonder. And nothing would happen. And gradually it would all blow over. Brennan would just wait it out, as long as it takes: a hundred years, a thousand…”

“We’d never know. We’d be yelling into a vacuum.”

“All right. Second choice is for us to drop it now.”

“No.”

“Agreed. Third choice is to go after him. With a Belt police fleet, if they’d back us. Otherwise, alone.”

He thought about it, sipping brandy. “Go where?”

“All right, let’s think about that.” Alice leaned back with her eyes half-closed. “He headed out toward interstellar space. He stopped in the cometary belt, well beyond Pluto’s orbit, for a couple of months — came to a dead stop, which must have cost him plenty in fuel — then went on.”

“His ship went on. If he’s here now, he must have sent the Pak drive section on without him. That leaves him with the Pak control cabin and a Belt singleship.”

“And fuel. All the fuel he wants, from the maneuvering reserve tanks in the drive section. They were filled before he took off.”

“All right. We assume he found a way to grow the roots for food. Maybe he took some seeds from the cargo pod before he left Mars. What does he need now that he doesn’t have?”

“A home. A base. Building materials.”

“Could he have mined the comets for those?”

“Maybe. For gasses and chemicals, anyway.”

“All right. I’ve been thinking about this too,” said Truesdale. “When you speak so glibly of the cometary belt, do you think you’re talking about a ring of rocks like the asteroid belt? The cometary belt is a region of convenience.” He spoke with some care. The brandy was getting to his tongue. If he mangled some complicated word she would only laugh. “It’s where the comets slow up and hover and fall back toward the sun. It’s ten to twenty times the volume of the solar system, and most of the solar system is in a plane anyway. There’s hydrogen in most of the compounds in a comet’s tail, isn’t there? So Brennan’s got no fuel problem. He could be anywhere in that shell by now, and somewhere else tomorrow. Where do we look?”

She watched him narrowly. “You’re giving up?”

“I’m tempted. It’s not that he’s too big for me. He’s too small. His hiding place is too mucking big.”

“There is another possibility,” she said. “Persephone.”

Persephone. And how the hell had he forgotten that there was a tenth planet? Still — “Persephone’s a gas giant, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I suppose so. It was detected by its mass, its influence on the orbits of comets. But the atmosphere could be frozen. He could hover until he’d burned a hole through the frozen layers, then land.” She leaned forward across the table. Her eyes were intense, and deep brown. “Roy, he had to get metals from somewhere. He built some kind of gravity generator, didn’t he? And he must have done some experimenting to get it. Metal. Lots of metal.”

“From a comet head, maybe?”

“I don’t think so.”

Truesdale shook his head. “He couldn’t mine Persephone. A planet that big has to be a gas giant — with a molten core. It’ll heat itself; it’ll have a gaseous atmosphere. He couldn’t land in it. The pressure would be, well, Jovian.”

“A moon, then! Maybe Persephone’s got a moon!”

“… Why the hell not? Why shouldn’t any random gas giant have a dozen moons?”

“He spent two months at rest, making sure he could live out there. He must have located Persephone and studied it with his telescopes. When he was sure it had moons, that was when he cut loose from the Pak drive section. Otherwise he’d have come home and turned himself in.”

“That sounds right. He may have been growing tree-of-life root… He might not still be there.”

“He’d have left traces. Were talking about a moon now. There’d be a scar where he landed a fusion drive, and big gaping scars where he dug his mines, and buildiiigs he’d have to abandon, and heat. He could cover up some of the damage, but not the heat, not on some little moon way the hell beyond Pluto. It would have gone into the environment, and fouled up superfluid effects, and vaporized some of the ices.”

“We’d have proof,” said Truesdale. “Holograph pictures. At worst we’d have holos of the scars he left on Persephones moon. Not just a half-cocked theory.”

“And at best?” She grinned. “We’d meet the Brennan-monster face to face.”

“Have at him!”

“Right on.” Alice raised her brandy. They clinked the blown glass snifters carefully, and drank.

The fear of falling brought him half awake, and the familiar sensations of a hangover did the rest. He sat up on a bed like a pink cloud: Alice’s bed. They’d come here last night, perhaps to celebrate or to seal a bargain, perhaps just because they liked each other.

No headache. Good brandy leaves a hangover, but not a headache.

It had been one of the better nights.

Alice wasn’t there. Gone to work? No, he could hear her in the kitchen. He padded into the kitchen on bare feet. She was frying pancakes in the nude.

He asked, “Did we really mean it?”

“Now you get to taste Belter cooking,” she said. She handed him a plate with a stack of pancakes, and when he grabbed it wrong they bounced and floated, just like in the advertisements. He managed to catch them, but the stack came down skewed.

They tasted like pancakes: good pancakes, but pancakes. Maybe you had to include the nudity of the cook to make it Belter cooking. He poured imitation maple syrup, and made a mental note: send Alice some bottles of Vermont maple syrup, if she stayed in the Belt, if he ever reached Earth alive.

He asked again. “Did we really mean it?”

She gave him a cup and a jar of freeze-dried coffee with an Earth brand. “Let’s find out about Persephone first. Then we can decide.”

“I can do that myself, at the hotel. Route you the information the way you sent it to me yesterday. Save you some work.”

“Good idea. Then I can brace Vinnie.”

“I’m wondering if a goldskin fleet would let me come along.”

She sat in his lap — feather-lightly, but a lot of girl, as much girl as a man could need. She looked him in the eyes. “Which way are you hoping?”

He thought about it. “I’ll come if your superiors let me. But I’ll put it to you straight: if I can set the goldskins on Vandervecken’s tail, I’ve proved that he can’t manipulate me. As long as Vandervecken knows it, that’s all I care about.”

“I… suppose that’s fair enough.”

They left the apartment together. Alice’s apartment was part of what seemed a cliff dwelling, apartments carved into a wall of the deep hydrate-mining scar that was Alderson City. They took a tube train back to Waring, and parted there.

PERSEPHONE: First discovered by mathematical analysis of perturbations in the orbits of certain known comets, 1972. First sighted 1984. Persephone is retrograde, in an orbit tilted sixty-one degrees to the ecliptic. Mass is somewhat less than Saturn.

Possible first exploratory visit to Persephone was by Alan Jacob Mion, in 2094. Mion’s claim has been cast into doubt by the lack of photographic evidence (his films were damaged by radiation, as was Mion himself; he had stripped shielding from his ship to save fuel) and by Mion’s claim that Persephone has a moon.

A more formal exploratory expedition was launched in 2170. Persephone was reported to have no moons and an atmosphere typical of gas giant worlds, rich in hydrogen compounds. The planet’s atmosphere would be worth scoop-mining if the planet itself were as available as Jupiter. There have been no further expeditions.

Damn, thought Truesdale. No moons.

He wondered if Brennan could have scoop-mined Persephone’s cold chemical gasses. With what, his cupped hands? And for what? He couldn’t have found metals that way… and it didn’t matter; he’d have left no scars in the clouds.

He located the report of the 2170 expedition and read it. With a little more trouble he found a condensed interview between Alan Jacob Mion and a reporter for Spectrum News. He was a boastful, flamboyant type, the kind of man who would take a year off to orbit a tenth planet, just to say he was the first. Not a careful observer. Perhaps his “moon” had been a comet head cruising past Persephone on a slow parabola.

He used his information terminal to send the material off to Police Headquarters.

Alice came back about 1800. “Vinnie didn’t buy it,” she said wearily.

“I don’t blame her. No moons. All our beautiful logic, and no mucking moon.” He had spent the day trying to play tourist in a city that wasn’t designed for tourists. Waring was a working city.

“She wouldn’t have gone for it even if there’d been a moon. She said… well, I’m not sure she wasn’t right.” Alice’s weariness was not a thing of gravity. She did not drop sagging onto the bed. Her posture was straight, her head high. But in her eyes and her voice… “In the first place, this is all hypothetical, she said. Which is true. In the second place, if it were true, what would we be sending a poor, helpless goldskin fleet into? In the third place, this Snatcher business has been adequately explained as cases of the Far Look.”

“I didn’t get that.”

“The Far Look. Self-hypnosis. A Belter spends too long staring into infinity. Sometimes he wakes up in orbit around his destination without remembering anything after his takeoff. In fact, Vinnie showed me the report on Norma Stier. Remember her? Disappeared 2230—”

“Right.”

“She was on course during that four months she was supposed to be missing. The films in her ship prove it.”

“But the bribes. The Snatcher bribes the people he kidnaps.”

“We’ve got evidence of a couple of bribes. But they could be explained away. People using the Snatcher story to hide profits from a smuggling run — or something dirtier.” She smiled. “Or Vandervecken doctored the films on Norma Stier’s ship. I believe in the Snatcher, myself.”

“Hell, yes!”

“But Vinnie makes a telling point. What are we going up against with a miserable Belt police fleet? Brennan had to get his metal from somewhere. If he mined Persephone’s moon, he must have moved it afterward!”

“That didn’t occur to you?”

“No.”

“It’s not that startling. What are we talking about, a mass the size of Ganymede, or a little ball of rock like Vesta? Asteroids have been moved before.”

“Right… and he had unlimited hydrogen fuel, and he already had his gravity generator, and we’re already assuming he moved the Mahmed Asteroid. But he couldn’t have moved it far. Any metallic chunk we find out there is going to be Persephone’s moon, right? And he wouldn’t have moved it unless it was pretty telling evidence against him.”

“You’re still going up against him?”

Truesdale took a deep breath. “Yah. I’ll need your help to pick my equipment.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Good.”

“I was afraid I’d have to drop it,” she said. “I don’t have the money to finance anything like this, and you didn’t seem… eager enough, and Vinnie just about convinced me it’s a wild goose chase anyway. Roy, suppose it is?”

“It’ll still make a nice little honeymoon trip. And we’ll be the only humans alive who’ve seen the tenth planet. I suppose we can sell the equipment again when we get back?”

They got down to technical discussions.

It was going to cost.

Brennan…

… what can one say about Brennan? He will always make maximum use of his environment to achieve his ends. Knowing his environment, knowing his motives, one could predict his actions exactly.

But his mind. What goes on in his mind?

His chosen career — the career that has chosen him for its life’s work — is accomplished largely by waiting. Long ago he was prepared. Now he waits and watches, and sometimes he adds refinements to his preparations. He has his hobbies. The solar system is one of these.

Sometimes he takes samples. Otherwise he watches the moving lights of fusion drives with his eccentric substitute for a telescope. He catches fragments of news and entertainment broadcasts with sophisticated noise filtering equipment. Earth provides most of these fragments. The Belt communicates via lasers, and they are not aimed at Brennan.

Civilization goes on. Brennan watches.

In a news broadcast he learns of the death of Estelle Randall.

This raises an interesting possibility. Brennan begins to watch for a fusion light source moving toward Persephone.

Roy wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He lay quiet in the web hammock, feeling the ship alive around him.

The vibration of the drive was feel rather than sound. Two days of that, and he couldn’t sense it without concentrating. The sensation had not changed — he thought.

Alice was beside him in the other hammock. Her eyes were open, her mouth faintly frowning.

That scared him. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Suit up.”

He grimaced. Suit up — she’d had him climbing in and out of that damn emergency suit for six hours of the first day. It was a man-shaped clear plastic bag with a zipper that ran from chin to knees, forking at the crotch. You could get into it in an instant, and it took another instant to plug that thick air-and-water tube into the ship’s lifesystem; but he’d caught the zipper a couple of times and got language one does not expect from one’s sex partner regardless of previous experience. “From now on you wear nothing but a jock strap,” she’d ordered. “And you wear that all the time. Nothing gets caught in that zipper.” The last couple of hours she was throwing the suit at him from behind, a crumpled ball he had to shake out and get into in ten seconds. When he could do it with a blindfold, she was satisfied.

“It’s your first move,” she’d said. “Always. Anything happens, get into that suit.”

He snatched the suit without looking, slid feet and hands and head in and zipped it two-handed and plugged into the wall. Another instant to pull the shoulder pack out of its recess, slip it on, pull the plug and plug it into that. Stored air filled his suit, tasting tasteless. Alice was still faster; she was ahead of him, swarming up the ladder.

She was in the pilot’s chair when be came through the hatch. “Nice going,” she said without looking around.

“What’s happening?”

“The drive’s functioning perfectly. We’re doing one gee exactly, still lined up for Persephone.”

“Okay.” He relaxed. He moved toward the other chair, stumbling slightly.

She looked around. “Don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“Maybe it’s me. I feel… light.”

Now he felt it too. “But we’re registering one gee.”

“Yah.”

He made an intuitive leap. “Check our course.”

She threw him an odd look, then nodded and went to work.

He couldn’t help. He had spent part of the first day and all of the next using learning tapes; he now had a good classroom education in how to fly, maintain, and repair a Belt cargo spacecraft. But Alice knew the instruments. He left her to it.

He felt it when the change came — a little more weight settling on his shoulders, a faint creaking in the fabric of the ship. He saw the fear in her eyes, and be said nothing.

Some time later she said, “We are no longer moving toward Persephone.”

“Ah.” He felt cold fear within him.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“I guessed. But it makes sense. Brennan’s got generated gravity; we’ve been assuming that. If we were in a strong gravitational field, there might be a tidal effect.”

“Oh. Well, that’s what’s happened. It didn’t register on the autopilot, of course. Which means I’ll have to get our new course by triangulation. It’s for sure we’re going wide of Persephone.”

“What can we do about it?”

“Nothing.”

He didn’t believe her. They’d planned it all in such vast detail. “Nothing?”

She turned around in her seat. “You may remember that we were going to blast up to a peak velocity of fifty-six hundred miles per second, then coast. We’ve got enough fuel to do that twice, once going, once coming.”

“Sure.” Two hundred and fifty-six hours accelerating, the same decelerating, about a hundred hours coasting. And if they had to use some fuel exploring, they’d come back at lower peak velocity. He ought to remember. They’d worked out dozens of possibilities. They’d taken a cargo ship to carry the extra fuel, lasers to cut away the empty cargo hold if things really went wrong and they had to save the weight. And the lasers would double as weapons.

All the planning, and now what? He’d sensed it then, and said nothing. He sensed it now, before she finished speaking -

“We’re moving at about twenty-two thousand miles per second now. I haven’t got it exactly — that’ll take hours — but as it stands we’ve got almost enough fuel to bring us to a complete stop.”

“Out in the cometary belt?”

“Out in the ass end of nowhere, right.”

— that there was something dreadfully wrong in making plans against Brennan. Brennan was beyond planning.

His mind planned anyway. There were old stories… men had survived emergencies in space… Apollo Thirteen, and the voyage of Four Gee Jennison, and Eric the Cyborg… “We could blast laterally to reach Persephone, then whip around the planet in a hyperbola. At least it’d send us back into the solar system.”

“We might have enough fuel for that. I’ll do a course analysis. Meanwhile—” She played with the controls.

The feel of gravity slowly died away.

The vibration of the drive was gone. It left a silence in his head.

Elroy Truesdale is less predictable than Brennan. Of the several choices that face him now, one is clearly best; but how can Brennan count on his following it? Breeders often don’t. Worse, he may have a companion aboard that big ship. Female and Belter: Truesdale is at least that predictable. But how can Brennan predict the whims of a girl he never met?

It’s like that with Truesdale’s weaponry. Lasers, of course. Lasers are too useful as an all-purpose tool to leave behind. He’d pick lasers, and one other weapon. Grenades, bullets, sonic stunners, plastic explosive? There are about four good choices. One best choice, except that Brennan might anticipate it. Truesdale’s logical move is to flip a coin, twice. Brennan knows that he is bright enough to realize it.

So he flipped a coin twice before takeoff. Which way did it fall, Brennan? Brennan laughs inside his head, though his face does not move. When Truesdale is clever, Brennan is pleased.

And what will he do now? Brennan mulls the point. Fortunately it does not matter. Nothing Truesdale can do will take him out of range of Brennan’s oddball telescope… the same instrument he used to alter Truesdale’s course. Brennan turns to other things. In a few days.

“If we didn’t have to worry about Brennan, I know just what we’d be doing,” said Alice. “We’d be decelerating, and blasting out a help call. In a few months someone would mount an expedition and pick us up.”

They were in Roy’s hammock, loosely moored against free fall. They had spent more and more time in the hammocks these last few days. They slept more. They had sex more often, for love or for reassurance or to end the occasional snappish quarrels, or because there was nothing constructive to be done.

“Why should anyone come for us?” Roy asked. “If we were damn fools enough to come—”

“Money. Rescue fees. It would cost us everything we own, of course.”

“Oh.”

“Including the ship. Which would you rather be, Roy? Broke or dead?”

“Broke,” he said immediately. “But I’d rather not have the choice. And I don’t. You’re the Captain, as per agreement. What are we going to do, Captain?”

Alice shifted against him, and reached around him to tickle the small of his back with her fingernails. “I don’t know. What do you want to do, my loyal crew?”

“Count on Brennan. But I hate it.”

“Do you think he’ll put you back twice?”

“Brennan’s got a pretty good record for… humanitarianism. When I turned down his bribe it went to Criminal Rehabilitation Studies. Before that it was going to medical research in prosthetics and alloplasty.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“You wouldn’t. Belter. On Earth there was this thing going with organ banks. Everyone wanted to live forever, I guess, and the easiest way to get enough transplants for all the sick people was to use condemned criminals. They were imposing the death penalty for anything and everything, including too many traffic violations. That was when Brennan was plowing money into other kinds of medical research.”

“We never had that problem,” Alice said with dignity, “because we decided not to. We never turned our criminals into donors.”

“Granted. You got through that period on pure moral fiber.”

“I’m serious.”

“We got through it because medical research found better ways of doing things. Brennan was backing that research. Now we’ve got live felons again, and they’ve got to be returned to society somehow.”

“And Brennan’s backing that. And this is the same soft-hearted Snatcher who’s bound to put us back on Earth if we don’t do anything in our own behalf.”

“You asked my opinion, my Captain. You have no reason to treat my answer as mutiny.”

“At ease, my loyal crew. I just—” Her hand clenched into a fist. He felt it against his back. ” — don’t mucking like to depend on someone—”

“Neither do I.”

“—someone with as much arrogance as the Brennan-monster. Maybe he really does see us as animals. Maybe he just — threw us away because we were coming to bother him.”

“Maybe.”

“I still haven’t seen anything ahead of us.”

“Well, wherever we’re going, we’re going a hell of a lot faster than we planned.”

She laughed. Her fingernails drew circles on the small of his back.

There was something ahead of them. It was invisible to telescope and radar, but it registered, barely, on the mass detector. It might have been a stray comet, or a flaw in the mass detector, or — something else.

They had been falling for six days. Now they were 7x10⁹ miles from Sol — as far as Persephone. Now the mass indicator showed a tiny, distinct image. It was smaller than any moon a gas giant ought to have. But matter was so thin out here — almost as thin as interstellar space — that by long odds they should have been falling toward nothing at all.

They thought it was Brennan. They took hope, and fear.

And the telescope showed nothing.

He wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He listened to the silence, he looked about him in the half-light…

Alice was sagging forward against the restraining straps around her hammock, hanging toward the ship’s nose. As was he.

He had learned his lesson well. He had his pressure suit in hand before he released the straps. He clutched them as an anchor and donned the suit one-handed. The pull was a few pounds, no more. Alice was ahead of him again, drifting down the ladder toward the nose.

The mass detector was going crazy. Beyond the porthole was a wilderness of fixed stars.

“I can’t do a course estimate out here,” said Alice. “There aren’t any reference points. It was bad enough back there, two days out from Sol.”

“Okay.”

She slammed a fist into the porthole glass. “It’s not okay. I can’t find out where we are. What does he want with us?”

“Easy, easy. We came to him.”

“I can do a Doppler shift on the sun. At least it’ll give us our radial velocity. I can’t do that with Persephone, it’s too goddamn dim—” She turned away suddenly, her face convulsed.

“Take it easy, Captain.”

She was crying. When he put his arms around her she beat gently on his shoulders with her fists. “I don’t like this. I hate depending on someone—” She sobbed rackingly.

She had more responsibility than he. More stress.

And — he knew it was true — she couldn’t make herself depend on anyone. Within his big family Roy had always had someone to run to in an emergency. He’d felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have such a failsafe in his life.

Love was an interdependence kind of thing, he thought. What he and Alice had wouldn’t ever quite be love. Too bad.

Which was a silly thing to be thinking while they waited the whim of Brennan, or the Snatcher, or Vandervecken, or whatever was out there: a flimsy chain of reasoning, and something that moved spacecraft about like toys on a nursery floor. And Alice, who had her head buried in his shoulder as if trying to blot out the world, still had them anchored to a wall by one hand. He hadn’t thought of it.

She felt him stiffen and turned too. A moment she looked, then moved to the telescope controls.

It looked like a distant asteroid.

It was not where the mass indicator had been pointing, but behind that point. When Alice threw the image on the screen, Roy couldn’t believe his eyes. It was like a sunlit landscape in fairyland, all grass and trees and growing things, and a few small buildings in soft organic shapes; but it was as if a piece of such a landscape had been picked up and molded by the hands of a playful topologist.

It was small, much too small to hold the film of atmosphere he could see around it or the blue pond gleaming across one side. A modeling-clay donut with depressions and bulges on its surface, and a small grass-green sphere floating in the hole, and a single tree growing out of the sphere. He could see the sphere quite clearly. It must have been huge.

And the near side of the structure was all bathed in sunlight. Where was the sunlight coming from?

“We’re coming up on it.” Alice was tense, but there were no tears in her voice. She’d recovered fast.

“What do we do now? Land ourselves, or wait for him to land us?”

“I’d better warm up the drive,” she said. “His gravity generator might kick up storms in that artificial atmosphere.”

He didn’t ask, How do you know? She was guessing, of course. He said, “Weapons?”

Her hands paused on the keys. “He wouldn’t — I don’t know.”

He pondered the question. Thus he lost his chance.

When he woke he thought he was on Earth. Bright sunlight, blue sky, the tickling of grass against his back and legs, the touch and sound and smell of a cool and pollinated breeze… had he been abandoned in another national park, then? He rolled on his side and saw Brennan.

Brennan sat on the grass, hugging his knobby knees, watching him. Brennan was naked but for a long vest. The vest was all pockets: big pockets, little pockets, loops for tools, pockets on pockets and within pockets; and most of the pockets were full. He must have been carrying his own weight in widgetry.

Where the vest didn’t cover him, Brennan’s skin was all loose brown wrinkles like soft leather. He looked like the Pak mummy in the Smithsonian, but he was bigger and even uglier. The bulge of chin and forehead marred the smooth lines of the Pak head. His eyes were brown and thoughtful, and human.

He said, “Hello, Roy.”

Roy sat up convulsively. There was Alice, on her back, eyes closed. She still wore her pressure suit, but the hood was open. There was the ship, resting belly-down on… on…

Vertigo.

“She’ll be all right,” Brennan was saying. His voice was dry, faintly alien. “So will you. I didn’t want you coming out with weapons blazing. This ecosystem isn’t easy to maintain.”

Roy looked again. Uphill across a rounded green slope, to where an impossible mass floated ready to fall on them. A grass-covered spheroid with a single gigantic tree growing out of one side. The ship rested beside its trunk. It should have fallen too.

Alice Jordan sat up. Roy wondered if she’d panic, but she studied the Brennan-monster for a moment, then said, “So we were right.”

“Pretty close,” Brennan agreed. “You wouldn’t have found anything at Persephone, though.”

“And now we’re caught,” she said bitterly.

“No. You’re guests.”

Her expression didn’t change.

“You think I’m playing euphemisms. I’m not. When I leave here I’m going to give you this place. My work here is almost finished. I’ll have to instruct you in how not to kill yourselves by pushing the wrong buttons, and I’ll give you a deed to Kobold. We’ll have time for that.”

Give? Roy thought of being marooned out here, unreachably far from home. A pleasant enough prison. Did Brennan think he was setting up a new Garden of Eden? But Brennan was still speaking — “I have my own ship, of course. I’ll leave you yours. You intelligently saved the fuel. You should become very rich from this, Roy. You too, Miss.”

“Alice Jordan,” she said. She was taking it well, but she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. They fluttered.

“Call me Jack, or Brennan, or the Brennan-monster. I’m not sure I’m still entitled to the name I was born with.”

Roy said one word. “Why?”

Brennan understood. “Because my job here is over. What do you think I’ve been doing out here for two hundred and twenty years?”

“Using generated gravity as an art form,” said Alice.

“That too. Mainly I’ve been watching for high-energy lithium radicals in Saggitarius.” He looked at them through the mask of his face. “I’m not being cryptic. I’m trying to explain so you won’t be so nervous. I’ve had a purpose out here. Over the past few weeks I’ve found what I was looking for. Now I’ll be leaving. I never dreamed they’d take so long.”

“Who?”

“The Pak. Let’s see, you must have studied the Phssthpok incident in detail, or you wouldn’t have gotten this far. Did you think to ask yourselves what the childless protectors of Pak would do after Phssthpok was gone?”

Clearly they hadn’t.

“I did. Phssthpok established a space industry on Pak. He found out how to grow tree-of-life in the worlds of the galactic arms. He built a ship, and it worked for as far as any Pak could detect it. Now what?

“All those childless protectors seeking a mission in life. A space industry to build ships designed for one job. Something could happen to Phssthpok, you know. An accident. Or he might lose the will to live, halfway here.”

Roy saw it then. “They’d send another ship.”

“That they would. Even if he got here, Phssthpok could use some help searching a volume thirty light years in radius. Whoever followed Phssthpok wouldn’t aim directly for Sol; Phssthpok would have searched Sol by the time he got here. He would aim to the side, away from Phssthpok’s obvious area of search. I figured that would give me a few extra years,” said Brennan. “I thought they’d send another ship almost immediately. I was afraid I wouldn’t be ready.”

“Why would it take them so long?”

“I don’t know.” Brennan made it sound like an admission of guilt. “A heavier cargo pod, maybe. Breeders in suspended animation, in case we died out over two and a half million years.”

Alice said, “You said you’d been watching—”

“Yah. A sun doesn’t burn fuel quite like a Bussard ramjet. There’s a constriction and a hell of a lot of heat, then the gas expands into space while it’s still fusing. A Bussard ramjet will put out a lot of funny chemicals: high-energy hydrogen and helium, lithium radicals, some borates, even lithium hydride, which is generally an impossible chemical. In deceleration mode those all go out in a high-energy stream at nearly lightspeed.

“Phssthpok’s ship worked that way, and I didn’t expect they’d fool with his design. Not just because it worked, but because it was the best design they could get. When you’re as bright as a Pak, theres only one right answer for a given set of tools. I wonder if something happened to their technology after Phssthpok left. Something like a war.” He pondered. “Anyway, I’ve found funny chemicals in Saggitarius. Something’s coming.”

Roy dreaded to ask. “How many ships?”

“One, of course. I haven’t actually found the image, but they’d have sent the second ship off as soon as they built it. Why wait? And maybe another ship behind it, and another behind that. I’ll search them out from here, while I’ve still got my quote telescope unquote.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll destroy as many ships as there are.”

“Just like that?”

“I keep getting that reaction,” Brennan said with some bitterness. “Look: If a Pak knew what the human race was like, he’d try to exterminate us. What am I supposed to do? Send him a message, ask for truce? That information alone would tell him enough.”

Alice said, “You might convince him you were Phssthpok.”

“Probably could at that. Then what? He’d stop eating, of course. But first he’d want to deliver his ship. He’d never believe we’ve already developed the technology to make artificial monopoles, and his ship is the second of its kind in this system, and we might need the thalium oxide too.”

“Um.”

“Um,” Brennan mimicked her. “Do you think I like the idea of murdering someone who came thirty-one thousand light years to save us from ourselves? I’ve been thinking this through for a long time. There’s no other answer. But don’t let that stop you.” Brennan stood up. “Think it through. While you’re at it, you might as well explore Kobold too. You’ll own it eventually. All of the dangerous things are behind doors. Have a ball, swim where you find water, play golf if you like. But don’t eat anything, and don’t open any doors. Roy, tell her about the Bluebeard legend.” Brennan pointed over a low hill. “That way, and through the garden, and you come to my laboratory. I’ll be there when you want me. Take your time.” And he went, not strolling, but running.

They looked at each other.

Alice said, “Do you think he really meant it?”

“I’d like to,” said Roy. “Generated gravity. And this place. Kobold. With gravity generators we could move it into the solar system, maybe, and set it up as a disneyland.”

“What did he mean about — Bluebeard?”

“He meant, ‘Really don’t open any doors.’ ”

“Oh.”

Given an unlimited choice of direction, they chose to follow Brennan over the hill. They did not catch sight of him again. Kobold had the sharply curved horizon of any small asteroid, at least from the outer curve of the toroid.

But they found the garden. Here were fruit trees and nut trees and vegetable patches in all stages of bloom. Roy pulled up a carrot, and it brought back a memory: he and some cousins, all about ten years old, walking with Greatly ’Stelle in the small vegetable garden on her estate. They’d pulled carrots, and washed them under a faucet…

He dropped the carrot without tasting it. He and Alice walked beneath the orange trees without touching them. In fairyland one does not lightly ignore the command of the resident warlock… especially as Roy was not sure that Brennan understood the power of the temptation to disobey.

A squirrel darted into a tree as they came near. A rabbit looked at them from a row of beets.

“it reminds me of Confinement Asteroid,” said Alice.

“It reminds me of California,” said Roy. “Except for the way the gravity bends around. I wonder if I’ve been here before.”

She looked at him sharply. “Do you remember any thing?”

“Not a thing. It’s all strange. Brennan never mentioned the kidnappings at all, did he?”

“No. He… may think he doesn’t have to. We must have it all figured out, because we’re here. If Brennan thinks in pure logic, then he’d just be covering old ground, as if we’ve already talked it all out.”

Beyond the garden they could see the topmost tower of a medieval castle, almost on its side from this perspective. Brennan’s laboratory, no doubt. They looked, then turned away.

The land grew wilder, became a stretch of California chaparral. They saw a fox, ground squirrels, even a feral cat. The place was lousy with wildlife: like a park, except for the way it bent.

On the inner curve of the toroid they stood beneath the grassy sphere, looking up at their ship. The great tree pointed its branches at them. “I could almost reach those branches,” said Roy. “I could climb down.”

“Never mind. Look there.” She pointed around the curve of the donut.

Where she pointed was a flowing stream, and a waterfall that fell up out of the middle, fell from the major section of Kobold to the grassy sphere.

“Yah. We could get to the ship, if we wanted to take that fall.”

“Brennan has to have a way to get from here to there.”

“He did say, ‘Swim in any water you find.’ ”

“But I can’t swim. You’d have to do it,” said Alice.

“Okay. Come on.”

The water was icy cold at first. Sunlight glittered blindingly off the water… and Roy wondered again. The sun was hot and bright overhead. But they’d have seen an atomic generator that size.

Alice looked down at him from the bank. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Pretty sure.” He laughed partly because he was shivering. “If I get in trouble, get Brennan. What do you want from the ship?”

“Clothes.” She was naked under the transparent pressure suit. “I kept wanting to cover myself with my hands.”

“From Brennan?”

“I know, Brennan’s sexless. Still.”

He asked, “Weapons?”

“No point.” She hesitated. “I tried to think of some way to check what Brennan’s been telling us. There aren’t any instruments on the ship that would do it. Still… you might try pointing the solar storm warning toward Saggitarius.”

Roy swam toward the waterfall. There was none of the sound of wild water. It could not be as dangerous as it ought to be.

Something brushed his ankle. He twitched and looked down. Silver flashed away from him through the water. A fish had brushed his leg. That had never happened to him before.

He came to where water was falling up. He rested, treading water, letting it draw him in. There was a moment of disorientation, and then…

… he was in a smoothly flowing stream. Alice stood watching him with concern. She stood horizontally out from the side of a sheer cliff.

Currents around his feet made him wonder. He ducked under, into turbulence, and came out the other side of the stream, headed back. He ducked again, and rode the current to where it emptied onto the green ball in a kidney-shaped pond. The ship was just a few yards away.

He pulled himself out of the water, laughing and blowing. A stream that flowed two ways through the air!

The ship’s solar storm warning showed no sign of a disturbance in Saggitarius. It proved nothing. He didn’t know how much activity it took to set the instrument off.

He stowed clothing for both of them in another pressure suit, and added a couple of handmeals because he was hungry. He brought them back in the sealed suit. He had never looked at the weapons.

There was a Mobius strip forty feet across and six feet broad, made of some silvery metal, suspended almost horizontally in the air with part of the edge embedded in bare dirt. They studied it for awhile, and then Alice… tried it.

Gravity was vertical to the surface. She walked around the outside, negotiated the twist upside down, and came back along the inside. She jumped down with her arms raised for applause.

There was a miniature golf course. It looked absurdly easy, but Roy borrowed a putter from a rack and tried it anyway. He got several shocks. The ball drew strange curves in the air, sometimes bounced higher than it had fallen, and once it came back at his head as hard as he had hit it. He stuck with it long enough to realize that the gravity fields were changing from minute to minute, and then he gave up.

They found a lily pond studded with water sculptures, gentle shapes that rose and flowed out of the surface. By far the most detailed shape was a large sculptured head in the center of the pond. It changed shape as they watched, from the hard face and swelling skull of the Brennan-monster to — “I think that must be Brennan too,” said Alice.

— to a square face with deep-set eyes, and straight hair in a Belter strip cut, and a brooding look, as if the man remembered some ancient wrong. The lips curved in a sudden smile, and the face began to melt…

Kobold had turned. It was dusk in that region when they returned to the castle.

It stood up out of a rise of ground, a structure of rough-hewn dark stone blocks, with windows that were vertical slits, and a great wooden door built for giants. “Frankenstein’s castle,” said Roy. “Brennan still has a sense of humor. We might just bear that in mind.”

“Meaning his story could be a put-on.”

Roy shrugged. What can we do about it?

It took two hands to turn the knob of the great door, and both of them pushing to open it.

Vertigo.

They stood at the edge of a vast open space. All through it was a maze of stairways and landings and more stairways. Through open doors they could glimpse gardens. There were faceless dummies, a score of them, climbing up and climbing down and standing on the landings and walking into the gardens…

But they stood at all angles. Two-thirds of the landings were vertical. Likewise the gardens. Dummies stood unconcerned on vertical landings; two dummies climbed a flight of stairs in the same direction, one going up, one down…

Brennan’s voice boomed, echoing, from somewhere above them. “Hi! Come on up. Do you recognize it?”

Neither of them answered.

“It’s Esher’s Relativity. It’s the only copied work on all of Kobold. I thought about doing The Madonna of Port Lligat, but there wasn’t room.”

“Jesus,” Roy whispered. Then he shouted, “Had you thought of setting up a Madonna of Port Lligat at Port Lligat?”

“Sure!” came the cheerful bellow. “But it would have scared a lot of people. I didn’t want to make that many waves. I shouldn’t even have done that duplicate Stonehenge.”

“We’ve not only found Vandervecken,” Alice whispered. “We’ve found Finagle Himself!” Roy laughed.

“Come on up!” Brennan bellowed. “It’ll save shouting. Don’t worry about the gravity. It adjusts.”

They were exhausted when they reached the top of the tower. “Esher’s Relativity” ended in a spiral stair, and that seemed to go on and on, past slits of windows designed for archery fire.

The room at the top was dark, and open to the sky. By Brennan’s whim its roof and sides seemed smashed away, as by rocks fired from ballistas. But the sky was not the sky of Earth. Suns glared there, hellishly bright, fearfully close.

Brennan turned from his controls — a wall of instruments six feet tall and twelve feet long, prickly with lights and levers and dials. In the dim light of the suns he looked like some ancient mad scientist, bald and disfigured, pursuing knowledge at any cost to himself and the world.

Alice was still staring at the altered sky. But Roy bowed low and said, “Merlin, the king commands thy presence.”

Brennan snapped, “Tell the old buzzard I can’t make him any more gold till the lead shipments arrive from Northumberland! Meanwhile, how do you like my telescope?”

Alice said, “The whole sky?”

“Lie down, Alice. You’ll strain your neck in that position. It’s a gravity lens.” He read their puzzlement. “You know that a gravity field bends light? Good. I can make a field that warps light into a focus. It’s lenticular, shaped like a red blood platelet. That’s how I get my sunlight. Sol seen through a gravity lens, with a scattering component to give me blue sky. One fringe benefit is that the lens scatters light going the other way, so you can’t see Kobold until you’re right on top of it.”

Roy looked up at the suns burning close. “That’s quite an effect.”

“That’s Saggitarius, the direction of the galactic hub. I still haven’t found that goddamn ship, but it makes for pretty lights, doesn’t it?” Brennan touched a control and the sky slid past them, as within some faster-than-light craft moving through a globular cluster.

Roy said, “What happens when you find him?”

“I told you that. I’ve played it out a hundred times in my head. It’s as if I’ve lived it all before, in all possible ways. My ship’s a duplicate of the one Phssthpok used, except for some refinements. I can get up to three gravities with the ram alone, and I’ve got two hundred years’ worth of weaponry developments in the cargo pod.”

“I still think—”

“I know you do. It’s partly my doing that you haven’t had a war in so long. So you’ve grown soft, and it makes you more likable, bless you. But this is a war situation.”

“But is it?”

“What do you know about the Pak?”

Roy didn’t answer.

“There’s a Pak ship coming. If the Pak in question ever finds out the truth about us he’ll try to exterminate us. He may succeed. I’m telling you this, dammit! I’m the only man who’s ever met a Pak. I’m the only man who could ever understand one.”

Roy bristled. The arrogance of him! “Then where is he, O All-Knowing Brennan?”

Another might have hesitated in embarrassment. Not Brennan. “I don’t know yet.”

“Where should he be?”

“On his way to Alpha Centaurus. From the strength of the signal—” Brennan manipulated something, and the sky surged past them in streaks of light. Roy blinked, fighting vertigo.

The stars jarred to a halt. “There. In the middle.”

“Is that where your funny chemicals are coming from?”

“More or less. It’s not exactly a point-source.”

“Why Alpha Centaurus?”

“Because Phssthpok would have gone almost in the opposite direction. Most of the nearby yellow dwarf suns are all to one side of Sol. The Centaurus suns are an exception.”

“So this second Pak would look around the Centaurus system, and if he didn’t find Wunderland he’d head on away from Sol.”

“That was my best guess. But,” said Brennan, “the direction of his exhaust shows him coming dead on. Now I have to assume he’s been watching for Phssthpok to leave here. I did send Phssthpok’s ship off toward Wunderland. I have to assume it didn’t fool him. If Phssthpok hasn’t left here, he may have found what he was looking for. So Pak number two is coming here.”

“And where would he be now?”

The sky surged again. Bright suns backed by tiny suns, dim-lit gas and dust clouds, a panorama of the universe flowed past and lurched to a stop. “There.”

“I don’t see him.”

“I don’t either.”

“So you haven’t found him. Do you still claim to understand the Pak?”

“I do.” Brennan didn’t hesitate. In all the time he knew him, Roy Truesdale only saw him hesitate once. “If they’re doing something unexpected it’s because of a change in their environment.”

Unexpectedly Alice spoke. “Could there be a lot of ships?”

“No. Why would the Pak send us a fleet?”

“I don’t know. But they’d be further away than you’d guess from the density of your funny chemicals. Harder to find,” she said. She was cross-legged on the floor, with her head thrown back to see the stars. Brennan didn’t seem to be listening — he was working the telescope controls — but she went on. “The exhaust would be more blurred. And if they were further away they’d be moving faster, wouldn’t they? You’d get higher velocity particles.”

“Not if they were carrying more cargo,” said Brennan. “That would slow them.” The sky surged toward them, and blurred. “But it’s so damn unlikely! There’s only one assumption that would fit. Please bear with me; this takes a lot of fiddling, getting these fields just right.” The starfield half-cleared, then blurred again. “I’d have had to do this eventually anyway. Then we can all stop worrying.”

The blur of the sky condensed into hard white points. Now there was no giant sun in the field of view.

But there were a couple of hundred blue points all the same size, tiny, set wide apart in what Roy gradually realized was a hexagonal array.

“I just didn’t believe it,” said Brennan. “It was too much coincidence.”

“It is. It’s a whole fleet!” Roy felt horror and the beginnings of panic. A fleet of Pak, coming here — and Brennan, the Protector of Man, hadn’t anticipated it.

He’d trusted Brennan.

“There must be more,” said Brennan. “Further in toward the galactic core. Too far to see with my instruments. A second wave. Maybe a third.”

“These aren’t enough?”

“They aren’t enough,” Brennan agreed. “Don’t you understand? Something’s happened to the galactic core. It’s the only thing that could bring this many ships this far. That implies that they’ve evacuated the Pak world. I don’t see enough ships to do it, not even with the wars that must have been fought, with each protector trying to get his descendants on the first ships.”

Little blue lights against a sky of too-bright stars. All that, from little blue lights?

Alice rubbed her neck. “What could have happened?”

“Any kind of thing. Black holes wandering through the core suns, picking up more and more mass, maybe wandering too near Pak. Or some kind of space-born life. Or the galactic core could be exploding in a rash of supernovae. It’s happened in other galaxies. What burns me is that it had to happen now!”

“Can’t you think of any other explanation?”

“None that fits. And it’s not quite as coincidental as it sounds,” Brennan said wearily. “Phssthpok built the best astronomical system in millennia, to chart his course as far as he could. After he left they must have looked around and found — something. Supernovae in a dense cluster of older suns. Stars disappearing. Places where light was warped. It’s still a Finagle’s Coincidence. I just didn’t believe it.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to,” said Alice.

“You can believe that!”

“Why here? Why come to us?”

“To the only known habitable world outside the galactic core? Besides that, we’ve had time to find them some others.”

“Yah.”

Brennan turned to look at them. “Are you hungry? I am.”

Deep within the eye-twisting maze of “Esher’s Relativity” was a miniature kitchen. It was a landing from one viewpoint, but from another it was a wall, and the wall held cookwear closets and a sink and a pair of ovens and a pull-down platform with burners in it. Raw materials had been dumped near the wall: a squash, a canteloupe, two rabbits whose necks were broken, carrots, celery, handfuls of spices.

“Let’s see how fast we can produce,” said Brennan. He became a many-armed blur. Roy and Alice stood back from his flashing hands. One held a knife, and it moved in silver streaks, so that carrots became rolling discs and the rabbits seemed simply to fall apart.

Roy felt disoriented, cut off from reality. Those little blue lights above the tower room had no intuitive connection with a fleet of superbeings bent on exterminating mankind. This pleasant domestic scene didn’t help. While a knife-wielding alien prepared his dinner, Roy Truesdale looked through the great castle door at a landscape tilted on its side.

Alice said, “That food is all from outside, isn’t it? Why didn’t you want us to eat anything?”

“Well, there’s always the chance that tree-of-life virus has gotten to something. Cooking kills it, and there’s precious little chance it can live in anything anyway unless I’ve spread thalium oxide through the soil.” Brennan did not look up or interrupt his work. “I had a Finagle’s Puzzle facing me when I cut loose from Earth. There was food, but what I needed was the virus in the tree-of-life roots. I tried to grow it in various things: apples, pomegranates—” He looked up then, to see if they’d catch the reference. “I got a variant that would grow in a yam. That was when I knew I could survive out here.”

Brennan had arranged rabbit and vegetables as for a still-life painting. He put the pot in the oven. “My kitchen had all kinds of freeze-dried produce. I used to like to eat well, luckily. Later I got seeds from Earth. I was never in danger; I could always just go home. But I didn’t like what was going to happen to civilization if I did.” He turned. “Dinner in fifteen minutes.”

She asked, “Weren’t you lonely?”

“Yah.” Brennan pulled a table out of the floor. It was not memory plastic extruding itself, but a thick slab of wood, heavy enough to require Brennan’s own muscles. A look back at Alice may have told him that she expected more of an answer. “Look, I’d have been lonely anywhere. You know that.”

“No, I don’t. You’d have been welcome.”

Brennan seemed to go off at a tangent. “Roy, you’ve been here before. You guessed that?”

Roy nodded.

“How did I wipe out just that section of your memory?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows.” Roy tensed inside himself.

“Simplest thing in the world. Just after I stunned you, I took a recording of your brain. Your complete memory. Before I left you in the Pinnacles I wiped your mind completely, then played the recording into it. It’s more complex than that — the process involves memory RNA, and very complex electrical fields — but I don’t have to select the memories I want to remove.”

Roy’s voice came out faint. “Brennan, that’s horrible.”

“Why? Because for awhile you were a mindless animal? I wasn’t going to leave you that way. I’ve done this twenty times now, and never had an accident.”

Roy shuddered. “You don’t understand. There was a me that spent four months with you. He’s gone. You murdered him.”

“You’re beginning to understand.”

Roy looked him in the eye. “You were right. You’re different. You’d be lonely anywhere.”

Brennan set the table. He held chairs for his guests, moving with the smooth lack of haste that marks a perfect headwaiter. He served, taking half the food for himself, then sat down and ate with the efficiency of a wolf. He was neat, but he finished long before they did. There was now a noticeable bulge beneath his sternum.

“Emergencies make me hungry,” he said. “And now I’d like to excuse myself. It’s not polite, but there’s a war to fight.” And he left, sprinting like a roadrunner.

For the next few days Roy and Alice felt like unwanted guests of a perfect host. They didn’t see Brennan much. When they glimpsed him across the landscape of Kobold he would be moving at a dead run. He would stop to ask them how they were enjoying themselves, tell them of something they might have missed, then be off again — at a dead run.

Or they would find him in the laboratory making ever-finer adjustments in his “telescope.” There was only one ship in the field now, seen against a background of red dwarfs and interstellar dust clouds: a blue fusion flame, blue-shifted yellow helium light, sparkling around the edges.

He would talk to them, but without interrupting his work. “It’s the Phssthpok configuration,” he told them with evident satisfaction. “They didn’t mess with a good thing. See the black dot in the center of the flame? Cargo pod comes first during deceleration. And it’s a bigger cargo pod than Phssthpok was carrying, and the ships are moving slower than his did at that distance. They aren’t that close to the speed of light. They won’t be here for a hundred and seventy-two or -three years.”

“Good.”

“Good for me, or it should be. Cargo pod first, and breeders in the cargo pod in frozen sleep. A vulnerable configuration, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not at odds of two hundred and thirty to one.”

“I’m not crazy, Roy. I’m not going to attack them myself. I’m going for help.”

“Where?”

“Wunderland. It’s closest.”

“What? No. Earth is closest.”

Brennan looked around. “Are you crazy? I’m not even going to warn Earth. Earth and the Belt are eighty percent of humanity, including all my descendants. Their best chance is to miss the fight. If some other world does the fighting, and loses, the Pak may still miss Earth for awhile.”

“So you’re using the Wunderlanders as a decoy. Are you going to tell them?”

“Don’t be silly.”

They toured Kobold, and tried to keep out of Brennan’s way. He would come on them unexpectedly, jogging around a boulder or out of a grove of trees, eternally hurried or eternally keeping himself in fighting trim; he never said which. Always he wore that vest. He didn’t need modesty, he didn’t need protection from the elements, but he needed the pockets. For all Roy knew the vest held protection too: a fold-up pressure suit, say, in one of the larger pockets.

Once he found them near one of the rounded huts. He led them into an airlock, and showed them something beyond the glass inner wall.

Floating within a great rock-walled cavity: a silvery sphere, eight feet across, polished to a mirror brightness.

“Takes a damn finicky gravity field to keep it there,” said Brennan. “It’s mostly neutronium.”

Roy whistled. Alice said, “Wouldn’t it be unstable? It’s too small.”

“Sure it would, if it weren’t in a stasis field. I made it under pressure, then got the stasis field around it before it could blow up in my face. Now there’s more matter on top of it. Would you believe a surface gravity of eight million gees?”

“I guess I would.” Neutronium was as dense as matter could get: neutrons packed edge to edge under pressures greater than those at the centers of most stars. Only a hypermass would be denser, and a hypermass would not be matter any more: just a gravitational point-source.

“I thought of leaving it here as a decoy, in case a Pak ship got past me. Now there are too many. I can’t leave Kobold for them to find. It would be a dead giveaway.”

“You’re going to wreck Kobold?”

“I have to.”

Sometimes they did their own cooking — avoiding the potatoes and yams, as per Brennan’s instructions. Sometimes he cooked for them. His blinding speed never seemed hurried, but he never stayed to talk after he had finished eating. He was gaining weight, but it seemed to be all muscle, and the great knobby joints still gave him the look of a skeleton.

He was unfailingly polite. He never talked down to them.

“He treats us like kittens,” said Alice. “He’s busy, but he sees to it we’re fed and sometimes he stops to scratch our ears.”

“Not his fault. We can’t do anything to help. I wish there were something—”

“Me too.” She lay on the grass in the warm sunlight, which had taken on an odd color. Brennan had taken the scattering component out of the gravity lens that showed the sun. The light interfered with his seeing. The sky was black now. The sun was bigger and dimmer; it would not burn out a human eye.

He had stopped Kobold’s rotation to make it easier to adjust the multiple gravity fields. Now there was always wind. It whistled through the permanent night around Brennan’s laboratory; it cooled the noonday heat on this side of the grassy sphere. The plants had not yet started to die, but they would.

“A hundred and seventy years. We’ll never even know how it ended,” said Alice.

“We could live that long.”

“I suppose.”

“Brennan must have more tree-of-life virus than he needs.” When she shuddered, he laughed.

She sat up. “We’ll have to be leaving soon.”

“Look.”

There was a bobbing head in the waterfall. An arm emerged and waved to them. Presently Brennan swam to them across the pond, his arms whirling like propellers.

“I have to swim like crazy,” he said. “I’m heavier than water. How’re you making out?”

“Okay. How goes the war?”

“Tolerably.” Brennan held up a handful of spools in a sealed plastic bag. “Star maps. I’m about ready to leave. If I could think of a great new weapon to take along, I’d spend up to a year making it. As is, there’s only final inspection.”

“We’ve got weapons in the ship. You can have them,” said Roy.

“Sold, with thanks. What’d you bring?”

“Hand lasers and rifles.”

“Well, they can’t mass very much. Thanks.” Brennan turned back to the pond.

“Hey!”

Brennan turned. “What?”

“Could you use any other kind of help?” He felt silly asking.

Brennan looked at him for a long moment. “Yes,” he said. “Remember, you asked.”

“Right,” Roy said firmly. By now that What have I gotten myself into now? sensation was a familiar one.

“I’d like you to come along.”

Roy stopped breathing.

Alice spoke. “Brennan? If you really need the help, I volunteer too.”

“Sorry, Alice. I can’t use you.”

She bridled. “Did I mention that I’m a trained goldskin? Trained in weapons, spacecraft, and pursuit.”

“You’re also pregnant.”

Brennan, infinitely adaptable himself, had the knack of dropping bombs into a conversation without seeming to realize it. Alice lost her breath. “I am?”

“Should I have been more tactful? My dear, you may expect a blessed event—”

“How do you know?”

“The hormones have made some obvious changes. Look, this can’t be a total shock. You must have skipped—”

“—skipped my last shot,” she finished for him. “I know. I was thinking about having a child, but that was before all this Vandervecken business came up, and after that… well, Roy, there was only you. I thought all flatlanders…”

“No, I’m cleared to have a child. Where do you think new flatlanders come from? I’d have told you, but it never…”

“Well, stop looking so flustered.” She stood up and put her arms around him. “I’m proud. Have you got that through your thick head?”

“Me too.” He sniffed, forcing it a bit. Of course he wanted to be a father. But — “But what do we do now?”

She looked troubled, but didn’t answer.

This was rapidly getting out of hand. Brennan had dropped too many bombs at once. Roy closed his eyes tight, as if that would help. When he opened them Brennan and Alice were still watching him.

Alice was pregnant.

Little blue lights.

“I, I, I’ll go,” he told them. “I’m not running out on you, love,” he added quickly and urgently. His hands had closed too tightly on her shoulders. “We’re bringing a child into the world. The same world which, by an odd coincidence, is now the target for t-t-two hundred and thirty—”

“I’ve located the second wave,” said Brennan.

“Dammit! I didn’t need to hear that!”

Alice put a hand across his mouth. “I understand, my loyal crew. I think you’re right.”

And the air was full of the smell of burning bridges.

They stood beneath the branches of the single huge tree, watching. Brennan was occupied with a portable control set taken from his vest. Roy only watched.

The two-hundred-year-old singleship looked like a short insect with a long stinger, the cargo webs spread like diaphanous wings, the stinger tipped with actinic light. The sound of it was a shrill scream. Brennan had spent a full day teaching Alice how to use the ship, care for it, repair it. Roy would not have guessed that a day would be enough, but if Brennan was satisfied… And she was doing well. She went straight up, then turned smoothly into what had been the sun.

Roy felt a twitchy urgency, a sense that if he didn’t do something now, right now, he was committed for life. But the moment was long past. He only watched.

The sun looked odd now. Brennan had fiddled with the gravity lens, turning it into a launching system for the singleship. As Roy watched the sun shifted a bit left, dimming, to catch the singleship, dead center.

She was gone.

“She won’t have any trouble,” said Brennan. “She should make a good thing out of that ship. It’s not just a relic. It’s got historical significance, and I made some interesting changes in—”

“Sure,” said Roy. He saw that the grass was dying and the leaves on the tree were turning yellow. Brennan had drained the pond; it was a shallow sea of mud. Kobold had already lost its magic.

Brennan slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on.” He walked out into what had been a pond. Roy followed, wincing. The cool mud squished between his toes.

Brennan stooped, reached deep into the sludge, and lifted. A metal door came up with a sucking sound. An airlock door.

It was all happening very fast now. The airlock led into a cramped control room, with two crash chairs and a three hundred and sixty degree wraparound vision screen over a control board like that of any spacecraft. Brennan said, “Use straps if you want. If we foul up now we’re all dead anyway.”

“Shouldn’t I know something—”

“No. You can inspect the vehicle to your heart’s content after we’re under way. Hell, you’ll have a year at it.”

“Why so hurried?”

Brennan looked sideways at him. “Have a heart, Roy. I’ve been sitting out here for longer than your Greatly ’Stelle was alive.” He activated the vision screen.

They floated within the hole in Kobold’s donut.

Brennan stabbed a button.

Kobold receded violently. “I’m giving us a running start,” Brennan said. “We’ll get root two times the velocity.”

“Good.”

Kobold slowed, stopped, then came up like a wargod’s fist. Roy yelped. He couldn’t help it. They were through the hole in an instant, and black space ahead.

Roy turned his chair for a rear view, but Kobold was already gone. Sol was a star among stars.

“Let’s magnify that,” said Brennan. Sol became much larger — the view expanding over a rectangular section of the vision screen — and there was Kobold, receding. The magnification jumped again, and Kobold filled the screen.

Brennan pushed a red button.

Kobold began to crumple in on itself, as if an invisible hand were wadding it up. Rock churned and began to glow yellow-hot. Roy felt queasy in his soul and in his belly. It was as if someone had bombed Disneyland.

He said, “What did you do?”

“Shut down the gravity generators. I couldn’t leave it out here for the Pak to find. The longer it takes them to find artifacts around Sol, the better off we are.” Kobold was all yellow-hot and melted, and tiny. “In a few minutes it’ll all be plated across that eight foot ball of neutronium. When it cools it’ll be practically unfindable.”

Now Kobold was a blinding white point.

“What happens next?”

“For a year and two months and six days, nothing. Want to inspect the ship?”

“Nothing?”

“By which I mean that we won’t be doing any accelerating for that long. Look.” Brennan’s fingers flashed over the control panel. The vision screen obeyed, showing a tridee map of Sol and her neighborhood out to twenty-five light years.

“We’re here, at Sol. We’re on our way to here. That point is just between Alpha Centaurus and Van Maanen’s Star. When we fire up the Pak ship we’ll be heading directly into the Pak fleet. They won’t be able to get our velocity toward them without knowing our exhaust velocity, and they won’t know our transverse component at all. They’ll have to assume I’m coming from Van Maanen’s Star to Alpha Centaurus. I don’t want to lead them back to Sol.”

“That makes sense,” Roy admitted reluctantly.

“Let’s take that tour,” said Brennan. “Later we can go into detail. I want you able to fly this ship if anything happens to me.”

The Flying Dutchman, Brennan called it. Though there were ships within it, it was hardly a ship. “If you wanted to be picky about it, I could claim we’re sailing,” Brennan said cheerfully. “There are tides, and photon winds, and shoals of dust that could chew us up.”

“But you did all our steering at takeoff.”

“Sure, but I could spin us a light-sail if I had to. I don’t want to. It would make us more visible.”

The Flying Dutchman was a matrix of rock, mostly hollow. Three great hollows held the components of a Pak-style Bussard ramjet ship. Brennan called it Protector. Another had been enlarged to house Roy Truesdale’s cargo ship. Other hollows were rooms.

There was a hydroponics garden. “This is off limits,” said Brennan. “Tree-of-life. Don’t ever go in here.”

There was an exercise room. Brennan spent some time showing Roy how to adjust the machines for a breeder’s muscles. Gravity was almost zero aboard the Flying Dutchman. They would both have to exercise.

There was a machine shop.

There was a telescope: big, but conventional. “I don’t want to use gravity generators from now on. I want us to look like a rock. Later we’ll look like a Pak ship.”

Roy thought that was unnecessary. “It’ll be half of a hundred and seventy-three years before the Pak find any trace of what we’re doing now.”

“Maybe.”

And there was Protector.

For the first several weeks of the voyage they did little besides train Roy Truesdale to use that ship. He was drilled in the differences between Phssthpok’s ship and Brennan’s. “I don’t know how long we’ll want to keep up the camouflage,” Brennan told him. “Maybe for keeps. Maybe never. It depends.”

So Brennan turned the control pod into a training room by hooking sensors to the control systems and monitoring the inputs from outside. Roy learned to maintain a constant point nine two gee. He learned to feather the fields to smear the exhaust a bit. Phssthpok’s drive had not been as precisely tuned as Brennan’s, due to its thirty-one thousand light year voyage.

The control pod was much bigger than Roy had expected. “Phssthpok didn’t have this much room, did he?”

“Nope. Phssthpok had to carry food and air and recycling equipment for something like a thousand years. I don’t. We’ll still be crowded… but we’ll be entertained. Phssthpok didn’t have our computer technology either, or didn’t use it.”

“I wonder why.”

“A Pak wouldn’t see the point of taking a machine to think for him. He thinks too well already… and likes it too much, for that matter.”

The inside of the teardrop-shaped cargo pod was nothing like that of the alien ship that had come plowing into the solar system two centuries ago. Its cargo was death. It could sprout heavy attitude jets and fight itself. Its long axis was an X-ray laser. A thick tube parallel to the laser would generate a directed magnetic field. “It should foul up the fields in a monopole-based Bussard ramjet. Of course that might not hurt him enough unless your timing was right.” When Roy had learned how to use it — and that took time; he knew little about field theory — Brennan started drilling him on when.

That was the point at which Roy rebelled.

The past two months hadn’t been particularly pleasant. Roy was back in school, the only student of a full-time teacher who could not be snowed or evaded. He didn’t like being a child again. He missed the open spaces of Earth. He missed Alice. Hell, he missed women. And it was going to go on for five years!

Five years, and the rest of his life on Wunderland. He didn’t know that much about Wunderland, but he knew that its population was small and thinly spread, its technology just adequate. A pastoral paradise, perhaps; a nice place to spend one’s life… until Brennan arrived. Then Wunderland would go on a war footing.

“The Pak fleet is a hundred and seventy-three years away,” he pointed out now. “We’ll be at Wunderland in five years. What makes you think you need a gunner? What am I doing here, anyway?”

Brennan took a handhold at the rim of a fusion bomb’s rocket nozzle. “You could say I’ve learned some humility. I thought of looking for a Pak fleet, long ago, but I didn’t. The probability was just too low. Well, I’ve stopped taking chances.”

“What chances? We know where the Pak fleet is.”

“I didn’t want to worry you. It’s a long shot.”

“Worry me! I’m bored!”

“All right, let’s go back a bit,” said Brennan. “We know where the first fleet is, and how big it is. The second fleet wasn’t launched for another three-hundred-odd years. All I’ve found of it is a patchy source of those same chemical exhausts, off center to the first fleet and moving a bit faster. They wouldn’t follow directly behind the first fleet. It’d be eating up too much of their fuel.”

“How big?”

“Smaller. Order of a hundred and fifty ships, assuming they didn’t change the design, which they may have. I can’t tell.”

“Is there a third fleet?”

“If there is, I’ll never detect it. They had to go out for new resources to build the second fleet. They may have had to mine worlds in nearby systems and build the ships there. How long would it take them to build a third fleet? If it’s there, it’s too far away for me. But the point is that there had to be a last fleet.”

“So what?”

“I’m suggesting that when the last fleet left — the second or the third or the fourth, it doesn’t matter — some protectors stayed behind. We assume they were the ones without breeder descendants. They stayed behind partly to save room on the ships, and partly because they might do some good on Pak.”

“On an empty world? How?”

“They could build a scout fleet.”

It was not the first time Roy had worried about Brennan’s sanity. The changes in his physiology, plus twenty-two decades alone… but if Brennan were insane, he might be too bright to give it away.

Gently Roy pointed out, “But your scout fleet would be at least five hundred years behind the rest.”

“Sounds silly, does it? But they’re free to experiment. They don’t have to use a proven design, because they’re only risking themselves. They don’t need a cargo pod. They could take three gravities forever, I think; I know I could. That cuts down on their supply weight, because the trip takes less time. With the breeders gone they can do all kinds of things… like making new metal mines by setting up eruptions in the crust of Pak.”

“You’ve got quite an imagination.”

“Thank you. What I’m getting at is that they could plan to pass the first wave of refugee ships about where the Pak telescopes aren’t good enough to scout the territory any further. From there on they lead the fleet. Still bored?”

“No. You’re daydreaming, though. They might never have built these hypothetical ships. Whatever sent them scurrying out of the galactic core might have caught the scouts.”

“Hell, it could have caught the third wave and brushed the second. Or the scout ships might have blown up. Or — lest you miss the point of all this — they could be arriving now.”

“You haven’t found them?”

“What, with a whole sky to search? They wouldn’t just come down our throats; they’d converge on Sol from random directions. I would, if I were doing it. Remember what they’re expecting to find: a world of Pak protectors running a civilization two hundred years old. That’s enough time to build up a virgin world, starting with a population of… oh, thirty million breeders of all ages would have given Phssthpok about three million newly changed protectors. The scouts wouldn’t want to give away the position of their fleet.”

“Uh huh.”

“There is something I can do, but it’ll take a few days of work to make the tools. First I’m going to make sure you can fight this ship. Let’s go back to the lifesystem pod.”

A directed magnetic field would churn the interstellar plasma as it was guided into a Bussard ramjet. As a weapon it might be made to guide the plasma flow across the ship itself. The gunner would have to vary his shots, or an enemy pilot could compensate for the weapon’s effect. If the local hydrogen density were uneven, that would hurt him. If the plasma were dense enough locally, the enemy could not even turn off his drive without being cremated. Part of the purpose of the ram fields was to shield the ship from the gamma ray particles it was burning for fuel.

“Hit him near a star, if you get the choice,” said Brennan. “And don’t let him do that to you.”

The laser was surer death, if it hit a ship. But an enemy ship would be at least light-seconds away at the start of a battle. It would make a small, elusive target, its image delayed seconds or minutes. The thousand mile wings of a ram field would be easier to hit.

The guided bombs were many and varied. Some were simple fusion bombs. Others would throw bursts of hot plasma through a ram field, or carbon vapor to produce sudden surges in the burn rate, or half a ton of pressurized radon gas in a stasis field. Simple death or complicated. Some were mere decoys, silvered balloons.

Roy learned.

The wreck of Kobold was almost three months behind them, and Roy was at war. Lately he had come to enjoy these simulated battles, but he wasn’t enjoying this one. Brennan was throwing everything at him. The Pak scouts had used a three gee drive until they crossed his wake, and then Wham! Six gees and closing. Some of his missiles were going wild; the scouts were doing something to the guidance. The pair dodged his laser with such ease that he’d turned the damn thing off. They’d used lasers on him, firing not only at his ship but at the field constriction behind him where hydrogen atoms met and fused, so that Protector surged unevenly and he had to worry for the generator mountings. They threw bombs at unreasonable velocities, probably through a linear accelerator. He had to dodge in slow random curves. Protector was not what you’d call maneuverable.

Three days he’d been in the lifesystem module, eating and drinking there and using pep pills instead of sleep. Playing Brennan’s game. He was mad clean through. Within ships he could infer only from instruments, he imagined hard faces like Brennan’s.

Two scouts closing from behind, and finally he hit one with the directed magnetic field and watched its ram field flare and dissipate.

That was when he realized that there were two pairs of ships in tandem. Damn Brennan anyway! He’d hit a lead ship, but the trailing ship was still there… and slowing. Somehow the loss of the lead ship had slowed it. Roy concentrated on the second team, which was still closing.

He tried a turn. Two ships linked should be less maneuverable than one… and an hour later he knew that they were. He’d turned only a fraction of a minute of arc, but they had turned less. He could keep up his dodging and still turn inside them.

He tried some of his weaponry on the lone ship behind him.

Then half his weapons board was red, and he had to guess what had exploded in the trailing pod. Probably that idiot projector: he’d been trying to punch a hole in the lone ship’s ram field. He bet his ship he was right, and gambled further that the explosion had wrecked his laser, which might otherwise have been of some use. He fired a flurry of bombs from the side of the cargo pod opposite the explosion. The lead ship of the remaining pair flared and died.

That left two, each the trailing ship of a pair, making less than his own acceleration. He dithered a bit, then ran for it. He continued to dodge missiles and laser beams.

The scouts fell away. He watched them dwindling… and then one wasn’t dwindling… and it finally dawned on him that that one had picked up acceleration somehow and was coming up from behind at something like eight gees.

Roy’s first impulse was to scream, “Brennan! What are you trying to pull?”

He’d done that before. This time he restrained it. Because he’d guessed the answer: the second ship was burning Protector’s own exhaust! Never mind how: that was it, that was why they moved in tandem.

He dropped two half-tons of radon with the drives disconnected.

Radon has a short half-life: it has to be kept in stasis. The generator was outside the bomb shell, and was partly soft iron. The enemy’s ram field tore it apart. A minute later the radon was in the constriction, and incredible things were happening: radon fusing to transuranian elements, then fissioning immediately. The constriction exploded. The ram field sparkled like a department store Xmas tree gone manic. The Pak ship flared into a small white point, fading.

The last Pak ship was far behind.

Coming out of it was a slow process. Roy had to keep telling himself: this isn’t real, this is only pretend. He jumped violently when Brennan’s alien head poked through the twing.

Then he shouted, “What the hell was that about, him burning my exhaust?”

“I just knew you’d bring that up,” said Brennan. “I’ll tell you in detail, but first let’s talk about the battle.”

“Screw the battle!”

“You did well,” said Brennan. “There isn’t much left of your weapons pod, but that’s okay if you don’t meet any more scouts. You don’t have reserve fuel to get into orbit around Wunderland; you used too much. But you can abandon Protector and land with the cargo ship.”

“That’s nice. That’s very reassuring. Now tell me how a Pak scout can burn my own exhaust and come tearing up my tailpipe!”

“It’s one possible configuration. In fact, it’s the one I’m about to start looking for, because it’d be easy to find. I can show you better with diagrams.”

Roy had calmed down a bit when they reached the Flying Dutchman’s control room. He had also started to shake. Three days in Protector’s control chair had left him exhausted.

Brennan looked at him thoughtfully. “Want to put this off?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll make it quick. Let’s look at what your ram field does. It picks up interstellar hydrogen in a path three thousand miles across. It sweeps it in via magnetic fields, pinches it together hard enough and long enough to produce some fusion. What comes out is helium and some leftover hydrogen and some higher-order fusion products.”

“Right.”

“It’s also a hot, fairly tight stream. Eventually it’ll spread out into nothing, like any rocket exhaust. But suppose a ship were following you, here.” Brennan made pictures on the screen: two tiny ships, the second following a hundred miles behind the first. He spread a wide cone before the lead ship, converging it almost to a point behind the ship. A needle shape with the ship in its point — the ship’s protective shield — brought the incoming hydrogen into a ring shaped constriction.

“You’re collecting the fuel for him. His ram field is only a hundred miles across—” Brennan drew a much narrower cone. ” — and it gives him finer control over his fuel flow. It’s already hot and dense. It burns better, in higher-order fusion. The exhaust would be rich in beryllium.

“It’s just one of the things those last remaining Pak might have tried. The lead ship would be nothing but a ram: no onboard fuel, no insystem motor, no cargo. It would have to be towed up to ramscoop speed. The following ship is heavier, but it gets more thrust.”

“You think that’s what’s coming at us?”

“Maybe. There are other ways to work it. Two ships, independent, held together by a gravity generator. In a pinch they could split up. Or the lead ship might be the ship proper, with the hind ship only an afterburner. Either way, I can find them. They’ll produce beryllium frequencies like a neon sign on the sky. All I’ve got to do is build the detector.”

“Need help?”

“Eventually. Go to sleep. We’ll try another dry run in a month or so.”

Roy stopped in the doorway. “That long?”

“Just to keep you on your toes. You’re as ready as you’ll ever be. Only, be more careful with that electromagnetic projector. When you wake up I’ll show you what the Pak scouts did to it.”

“What you did to it.”

“What they would have done. Go to sleep.”

Brennan was in the machine shop for three days. If he slept he slept there. He skipped meals there. Whatever he was doing filled the machine shop with constant racket and sent a humming vibration through the rock of the Flying Dutchman.

Roy read a couple of old novels stored in the computer. He floated through bare rock caverns and corridors, and was oppressed by the sensation of being underground. He worked himself to exhaustion in the exercise room. Free fall had cost him some muscle tone. Have to do something about that.

He researched Wunderland and found about what he expected. Gee: 61%. Population: 1,024,000. Colonized area: 3,000,000 square miles. Largest town: München, population: 800. Farewell, city life. Come to that, München would probably look like New York to him by the time he got there.

There was a time on the fourth day when he found the machine shop quiet and Brennan apparently asleep. He was about to leave when Brennan opened his eyes and started talking.

“You depend too much on those long, slow turns,” he said. “The way to dodge Pak weaponry is to vary your thrust. Keep opening and closing the constriction in the ram field. When they throw something like a laser pulse into the constriction, open it. Nothing’s going to fuse if you don’t squeeze the plasma tight enough.”

Roy wasn’t flustered. He was getting used to Brennan’s habit of resuming a subject that may have been broken off days ago. He said, “That last ship could have done that when I threw radon at him.”

“Sure, if he did it fast enough. At good ramscoop velocities the shit should be in the constriction before he knows it’s reached the ram field, especially as you didn’t put any rocket thrust on it. That was good thinking, Roy. Memo for you: don’t ever follow a ship that’s running. There are too many things he can throw into your ram field. Hopefully we’ll be doing the running in any battle.”

Roy remembered what he had come for. “You’re two days past dinnertime. I thought I’d—”

“Not hungry. My prism’s in the oven, and I’ve got to wait for it to cool.”

“I could bring—”

“No thanks.”

“Any significance?”

“Didn’t I tell you I was predictable? If there aren’t any Pak scouts in the vicinity, you could just as well go on to Wunderland alone. Most of what I know about the Pak is stored in the computer. When a protector feels not needed, he doesn’t eat.”

“So you’re kind of hoping we find Pak scouts.”

Brennan laughed: a credible chuckle, though his mouth didn’t move. His face wasn’t hard, exactly; it was like wrinkled leather. It was his mouth that was like hard shell. Too much of human expression is in the mouth.

On the evening of the same day he came out towing three hundred pounds of machinery, of which a big, solid crystal prism was a prominent part. He wouldn’t let Roy help tow it, but they set it up together at the focus of the Flying Dutchman’s telescope. Roy brought him a sandwich then, and made him eat it. The Jewish mother role irritated him, but so did the thought of going on to Wunderland alone.

Brennan was gone when Roy came looking for him, around mid-afternoon of the fifth day. Roy found him in the one room from which he was forbidden, the hydroponics garden. Brennan was moving down the side of an open tank, consuming sweet potatoes one after another.

The prism threw a rainbow spectrum across a white surface. Brennan pointed to a bright green line. “Beryllium light, blue-shifted,” he said. “And the helium lines are up in the violet. Ordinarily beryllium is in the infrared.”

“Blue-shifted.” Any school child knew what that meant. “He’s coming down our throats.”

“Maybe not. He’s coming toward us, but maybe not dead on. We’re only a couple of light-weeks out from Sol, and he’s a light-year away, and I think he’s decelerating. I’ll have to check to see if we’re getting his exhaust. But I think he’s headed for Sol.”

“Brennan, that’s worse.”

“It’s just as bad as it can get. We’ll know in a month. He’ll have moved by then. We’ll have some paralax on him.”

“A month! But—”

“Just a minute. Calm down. How far can be go in a month? He’s way below lightspeed; we’re probably going faster than he is. A month won’t cost us much — and I’ve got to know how many there are, and where they are, and where they’re going. And I’ve got to build something.”

“What?”

“A widget. Something I dreamed up after we found the Pak fleet, when I saw that there might be Pak scouts around. The designs are in the computer.”

Roy did not fear loneliness. He feared its opposite. Brennan was an odd companion, and Protector was going to be cramped when they finally left the Flying Dutchman. For a week or so Roy stayed away from the observatory, consciously savoring his alone-ness. In the empty exercise room he hovered in midair, swinging his arms and legs in wide circles. Later he would want to remember the room. Even this half-hollowed ball of rock was too small for a man who would rather be climbing a mountain.

Once he suggested another dry run. Brennan’s models of the Pak scouts would be more accurate now. But Brennan wasn’t having any. “You know as much as you’re ever going to about fighting Pak. Does that scare you?”

“Hell, yes.”

“Glad to bear it.”

One day Brennan wasn’t in the laboratory. Roy went looking for him. The longer it took the more stubborn he got; but Brennan didn’t seem to be anywhere aboard.

He finally asked himself, “How would Brennan handle this? Logic. If he’s not inside, then he’s outside. What’s outside that he might need?”

Right. Vacuum, and access to the surface.

The tree, the grass, the mud of the pond bottom were all freeze-dried and dead. The stars were bright and eerie, and more real than they had seemed on a vision screen. Roy could see them as a battlefield: the unseen worlds as territories to be fought over, the gas shells around stars as death traps for an unwary warrior.

He spotted Brennan’s torch.

Brennan was working in vacuum, building… something. His redesigned pressure suit seemed both alien and anachronistic, and the chest design was a detail from Dali: a Madonna and Child, very beautiful. A torn loaf of bread floated within the window in the Child’s torso, and he looked down at it with an adult, thoughtful gaze.

“Don’t come too close,” Brennan said into his suit mike. “I had plenty of time to fiddle with this ball of rock while I was shaping Kobold. There are deposits of pure elements under all this landscaping.”

“What are you making?”

“Something that should collapse a polarized gravity generator at a distance. If generated gravity is what they’re using to hold their ships in tandem, they’ll have to polarize it to make it work over those distances. We know they know how to do it. They’ll put the generator on the trailing ship, because that’s the ship that’s producing enough excess power to maintain the field.”

“Suppose they’re using something else?”

“So I waste a month. But I won’t believe they’re using cables. In deceleration mode even a Pak cable won’t stand up to the exhaust from the trailing ship. I might believe they loaded everything on the trailing ship and used the lead ship purely as a stripped Bussard ramjet compressor. But they’d lose power and maneuverability.

“I’ve been trying to design a Pak scout ship myself. It isn’t easy, because I don’t know what they’ve got. The worst thing I can think of from our viewpoint is two independent ships with heavy, versatile ram field generators. That way if you lost a couple of lead ships in a battle, you could link the trailing ships, and vice versa.”

“Yah.”

“But I don’t believe it. The more widgetry they put into each ship, the fewer ships they wind up with. I think they’d compromise. The lead ship is a Bussard ramjet, built to fight, but not too different from ours. It’s the trailing ship that’s versatile, with the oversized adjustable ram field generator. You could link two trailing ships, but not two lead ships. The lead ships are more vulnerable anyway. You saw that.”

“Then these scouts are tougher than what I fought.”

“And there are three of them.”

“Three.”

“They’re coming in a cone, through — you remember that map of the space around Sol? There’s a region that’s almost all red dwarfs, and they’re coming through that. I think the idea is to map an escape route for the fleet, in case something goes wrong at Sol. Otherwise they’ll see to it that Sol is clean, then go on to other yellow dwarf stars. At the moment they’re all about a light year from Sol and about eight light-months apart.”

Roy looked up. Where within the battlefield — ? He found Sol easily, but he couldn’t remember the direction of the first scout. He shivered in his suit, though it was far more comfortable than it had ever been. Brennan had been tinkering with it.

“There could be more.”

“I doubt it,” said Brennan. “I didn’t find any more beryllium traces at any frequency shift.”

“Suppose they came in ones instead of twos. They’d show as ordinary Bussard ships.”

“I don’t believe it. Look, they need to be able to see each other. If a scout disappears, the others want to know it.”

“All right. Now we’ve got to keep them away from Sol. How about using ourselves as a decoy?”

“Right.”

That absent-minded monosyllable was disconcerting. It happened every so often, this implication that Brennan had already thought it through, in every detail, long ago. When he didn’t say any more, Roy asked, “Anything I can do to help?”

“No. I’ve got to finish this. Improve your mind. Brush up on local astronomy; it’s our battle map. Look up Home. We’re not going to Wunderland now. We’re going to Home, if we get the choice.”

“How come?”

“Let’s say I’m planning to make a right angle turn in deep space. Home’s the easiest target after that. They’ve also got a good industrial civilization.”

HOME: Epsilon Indi 2, second of five planets in a system which also includes 200 asteroids randomly distributed in charted orbits. Gravity: 1.08. Diameter: 8800 miles. Rotation: 23 hours 10 minutes. Year: 181 days. Atmosphere: 23% oxygen, 76% nitrogen, 1% nontoxic trace gasses. Sea level pressure: 11 pounds/square inch.

One moon, diameter: 1200 miles, gravity: 0.2, surface composition: roughly lunar.

Discovery reported 2094, via ramrobot exploration probe. Settled 2189, by a combination of slowboats and ramrobots…

Settling Home had been made easier by two new techniques. The slowboats had carried sixty colonists each, in stasis. Sixty colonists would have filled three or four slowboats a century earlier. And, though no living thing could survive travel in a ramrobot, it had proved possible to ship fuel to the slowboats via ramrobot. An older technique was used extensively: colony supplies were shipped via ramrobot to orbit about Home, saving room aboard the slowboats. Rams that failed on the way would fail in time for replacements to be sent.

The original colonists had planned to call their new world Flatland. Perhaps it amused them to think of themselves and their descendants as flatlanders. Once on Home they had changed their minds: a belated attack of patriotism. Population: 3,200,000. Colonized area: 6,000,000 square miles. Principal cities… Roy spent some time memorizing the maps. Cities and towns had tended to form in the forks of rivers. The farming communities were all near the sea. Home had sea life but little land life, and farming of any kind required a complete ecology; but sea life was used extensively for fertilizer.

There were extensive mining industries, all confined to Home itself.

Communication with Earth formed a principal industry, which tended to produce other industries at a steady rate.

Three million… A population of three million at this date meant a heavy birthrate, even if initially augmented by bottle-grown babies and later by more colony ships. Roy hadn’t thought of that aspect of moving to a colony world. There was a pride in being the father of many children… a pride that would have less meaning on Home, where you didn’t have to prove genius or invent the wheel or something just to get the license. Still… he would have children on two worlds.

Still, Home would probably change for the worse when Brennan put it on a war footing. War was never fun, and Roy ought to know — this kind of interstellar war was going to be long and slow. What kind of mind did it take to plan a hundred and seventy-three years in advance?

The thing Brennan was building was slightly taller than he was, heavy and cylindrical. He had moved it near one of the great doors beneath which the components of Protector waited.

“I want to be damn sure I can get adequate polarization of the field,” he told Roy. “Otherwise the whole of Protector could wind up falling into it.”

“Like Kobold, huh? Can you do it?”

“I think so. The Pak did it… we assume. If I can’t do it I’ll have to assume they’re holding their ships in tandem some other way.”

“Where’s it going to ride?”

“I’ll string it behind the weapons pod. And your cargo ship behind the lifesystem. We’ll look somewhat strung out. It won’t surprise the Pak any that I’ve fiddled with the design of the ship. They would, given the tools and raw materials.”

“What makes you think they don’t have them?”

“I don’t think that,” said Brennan. “I keep wondering what they’ll build for me once they know what I’ve got.”

One day he was back in the observatory. “All finished,” he said briskly. “I can get the polarized gravity field I need. Which means a Pak could get it, which means they’re probably using it.”

“Then we’re ready for takeoff. Finally.”

“As soon as I know what the Pak scouts are doing. Twelve hours, I promise.”

In the ’scope screen the Pak scouts showed as tiny green lights, a good distance from each other, and measurably closer to Sol. Brennan seemed to know just where to find them, but then he’d been observing them for two months. “Still making three gravities,” he said. “They’ll be at rest when they reach Sol. I’ve been right about them so far. Let’s see how far I can carry it.”

“Isn’t it about time you told me what you’ve got in mind?”

“Right. We’re leaving the Flying Dutchman, now. The hell with convincing them I’m coming from Van Maanen’s Star. They’re seeing us from the wrong angle anyway. I’ll take off for Wunderland at one point aught eight gee, hold for a month or so, then boost to two gee and start my turn away from them. If they spot me in that time, they’ll turn after me, if I can make them think I’m dangerous enough.”

“Why,” he started to ask, before he remembered that one point aught eight was the surface gravity of Home.

“I don’t want them to think I’m a Pak. Not now. They’re more likely to chase an alien capable of building or stealing a Pak ship. And I don’t want to use Earth gravity. It’d be a giveaway.”

“Okay, but now they’ll think you came from Home. Do you want that?”

“I think I do.”

Home wasn’t getting much choice about entering the war. Roy sighed. Who was? He said, “What if two of them go on to Sol and the other comes after us?”

“That’s the beauty of it. They’re still eight light-months apart. Each of them has to make his turn eight months before he sees the others make theirs. Turning back could cost them another year and a half. By then they may just decide I’m too dangerous to get away.” Brennan looked up from the screen. “You don’t share my enthusiasm.”

“Brennan, it’ll be two bloody years before you even know if they’ve turned after you. One year for them to spot you, one year before you see them make the turn.”

“Not quite two years. Close enough.” Brennan’s eyes were dark beneath their shelf of bone. “Just how much boredom can you stand?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can make you a stasis field capsule, using two of the radon bombs.”

Ye gods, a reprieve! “Hey, that’s good. But you’d have to throw away the radon, wouldn’t you?”

“Hell, no. I wouldn’t do it. I’ll just move two of the bombs up into the lifesystem and rig a metal shell between the generators.”

Conscience smote him. “Look, do you feel the same way I do? About waiting, I mean. We could take turns on watch.”

“Come off it. I could wait for Judgment Day without unfolding my hands, if I had a reason.”

Roy laughed. The constant delays had really been getting to him.

The stasis box was a soft iron cylinder seven feet long, welded to the shells of two radon bombs to give a total length of fourteen feet. They’d had to run it through the door linking the kitchen and the exercise room.

It fitted Roy like a coffin. It felt like a coffin. Roy’s teeth clamped shut, holding words back, as he waited for Brennan to shut the curved hatch.

It made a very solid sound.

Are you sure this will work?

Idiot. Home was settled this way. Of course it’ll work. Brennan would’ve thought he was a fool.

He waited in darkness. He imagined Brennan finishing the welding, testing currents and circuitry and so forth before linking the switch. Then — he wouldn’t sense time passing. When the door opened would he foolishly ask, “Didn’t it work?”

Gravity dropped suddenly on him from above. Roy hit the floor and stayed there. He grunted in shock and surprise. No need to ask: Protector was in flight, making three gravities easy.

The hatch swung back. Brennan caught him under the armpits and lifted. His hands were hard as hatchet blades. He half walked, half carried Roy to a crash chair. He shifted his grip to Roy’s belt and slowly lowered him into the crash chair.

“I’m not a cripple,” Roy grunted.

Brennan reclined Roy’s chair. “You’ll feel like one.” He lowered himself into the other chair with the same care. “They bit. They’re coming after me. We’ve been doing two point one six gee for two years now. I kept it that low because I was afraid they’d think I could outrun them.”

“Can you? How are they doing?”

“I’ll show you.” Brennan played with the keyboard, and a starscape filled the screen. “This is two years action telescoped into ten minutes. You’ll see it better that way. Can you spot the Pak ships?”

“Yah.” Three green dots, visibly elongated, visibly moving. Presently a brilliant white light — Sol — drifted on from stage left.

“I got some paralax on them while they were making the turn. Low acceleration, but a fast turn, about the same turning radius as ours. I think the individual ships must have turned separately. Now they’re back in tandem, coming at us at five and a half gee.”

“You guessed that almost on the nose.”

“Remember, I spent several days with Phssthpok as my mentor. I figured a healthy Pak could take three gee forever, and six gee for five years, which would kill him. They knew their limits and designed for ’em.”

Three green stars drifted toward Sol. Presently, one by one, they went out and came on again. Now their color was dimmer, yellower. Roy tried to sit up against his own weight, but Brennan’s hand pushed him back. “This is where they switched to acceleration mode.”

Roy watched for another minute, but nothing happened, except that the green stars brightened slightly.

“This is where we stand now. Those images are about a light-year away. The ships themselves would be two light-months closer, assuming they’ve been chasing us at constant acceleration. In a few months we’ll know whether any of them turned back. Otherwise the lead pair would reach us in about fourteen months ship’s time, except that at some point they’ll go into deceleration mode and see if they can hurt us with the backblast, which means it’ll take a little longer.”

“Fourteen months.”

“Ship’s time. We’re doing relativistic speeds. We’ll cover a lot more distance than that.”

Roy shook his head. “It comes to me that you woke me just a bit early.”

“Not really. I can’t think of anything they could do to me over this distance, but I’m not certain they haven’t thought of something. I want you awake and fully recovered if something happens to me. And I want these bombs back in the weapons pod.”

“It sounds unlikely. What could they do to you that wouldn’t kill me too?”

“All right, I had another reason for waking you. I could have rigged you a stasis box right after we left Kobold. Why didn’t I?”

Roy felt tired. Gravity pulling blood from his brain? “I had to be trained. Trained to fight this ship.”

“And are you in condition to fight? Like a pile of wet noodles you are! When things start happening I want you able to move.”

He did feel like a pile of wet noodles. Hell. “All right. Shall we — ?”

“No chance. For today you just lie there. Tomorrow we’ll walk you around a bit. Pretend you’ve been sick.” Brennan glanced sideways at him. “Don’t take it so hard. Let me show you something.”

Roy had forgotten that this was Phssthpok’s own control module, with a hull that could be made transparent at will. It startled him when the wall went invisible. Then he looked.

They were moving that fast. The stars behind were red-shifted to black. Ahead, above, they were violet-white. And from the zenith they swept back like a rainbow: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, in expanding rings. The effect was total; all of Protector’s interior partitions had turned transparent too.

“No man has ever seen this before you,” said Brennan, “unless you count me a man.” He pointed. “There. That’s Epsilon Indi.”

“It’s off to the side.”

“We’re not headed for it directly. I told you, I’m planning to make a right angle turn in space. There’s only one place I can do it.”

“Can we beat the scouts there?”

“Barely ahead of the second ship, I think. We’ll have to fight the first one.”

Roy slept ten hours a day. Twice a day he took long walks, from the control room around the exercise room and back, an extra lap each day. Brennan walked with him, ready to reach out. He could kill himself if he fell wrong.

It felt like he’d been sick. He didn’t like it.

One day they threw the ram field constriction wide open, and — in free fall, protected from the oncoming gamma rays by the scintillating dome of the inner ram field — they moved the radon bombs back to their nests in the weapons pod. For those two hours Roy had his strength back, and he gloried in it. Then he was back in two point one six gee, a four-hundred-pound weakling.

With Brennan’s help he worked out a calendar of events for the longest war on record:

33,000 BC: Phssthpok departs Pak.

32,800 BC: First emigration wave departs Pak.

32,500 BC: Second emigration wave.

X: Pak scouts.

2125 AD: Phssthpok arrives Sol. Brennan turns protector.

2340 AD: Kidnap of Truesdale.

2341 AD, October: Discovery of Pak fleet.

2341 AD, November: Departure of Flying Dutchman. Destruction of Kobold.

2342 AD, May: Discovery of Pak scouts.

2342 AD, July: Truesdale in stasis. Departure of Protector.

At this point relativity would begin to screw up the dating. Roy decided to go by ship’s time, given that he would have to live through it.

2344 AD, April: Pak ships sighted altering course.

2344 AD, July: Truesdale out of stasis.

HYPOTHETICAL

2345 AD, September: Meet first Pak ships.

2346 AD, March: Right angle turn (?) Lose Pak scouts.

2350 AD: Arrive Home. Adjust calendars.

Roy studied Home. Over many decades there had been considerable message laser traffic between Earth and Home. There were travelogues and biographies and novels and studies of the native life. Brennan had already read it all; at his reading speed he hadn’t needed anything like his two years’ head start.

The novels had an odd flavor, a nest of unspoken assumptions that he couldn’t quite pin down, until he asked Brennan about it.

Brennan had an eidetic memory and a fine grasp of subtleties. “Partly it’s a Belter thing,” he told Roy. “They know they’re in an artificial environment, and they feel protective toward it. This bit in The Shortest Day, where Ingram gets shot for walking on the grass — that’s a direct steal from something that happened early in Home history. You’ll see it in Livermore’s biography. As for their burial customs, that’s probably left over from the early days. Remember, the first hundred people who died on Home knew each other like you knew your brother. Anyone’s death was important in those days, to everyone in the world.”

“Yah, when you put it like that… and they’ve got more room, too. They don’t need crematoriums.”

“Good point. There’s endless useless land, useless until it’s fertilized somehow. The bigger the graveyard grows, the more it shows the human conquest of Home. Especially when trees and grass start growing where nothing ever grew before.”

Roy thought the idea over, and decided he liked it. How could you lose? Until the Pak arrived.

“These Homers don’t seem particularly warlike,” he said. “We’re going to have to get them on a war footing before the Pak scouts find Home. Somehow.”

But Brennan wouldn’t talk about that. “All our information is ten to a hundred years old. I don’t know enough about Home as it is now. We don’t know how the politics have gone. I’ve got some ideas… but mainly we’ll be playing it by ear.” He slapped Roy on the back: a sensation like being hit by a sackful of walnuts. “Cheer up. We may never get there at all.”

Brennan was a wordy bastard when he had the time. More: he was making a clear effort to keep Roy entertained. Perhaps he was entertaining himself as well. It was all very well to talk of a Pak spending eight hundred years sitting in a crash couch; but Brennan had been raised human.

They played games, using analog programs set up in the computer. Brennan always won at chess, checkers, Scrabble and the like. But gin and dominoes were games hard to learn, easy to master. They stuck to those. Brennan still won more than his share, perhaps because he could read Roy’s face.

They held long discussions on philosophy and politics and the paths mankind was taking. They read a great deal. Brennan had stockpiled material on all the inhabited worlds, not just Home and Wunderland. Once he said, “I was never sure where I might wind up steering a crippled ship in search of breathing-air and a chance at repair facilities. I’m still not sure.”

Over many months Roy began exercising more and sleeping less. He was strong now; he no longer felt like a cripple. His muscles were harder than they had ever been in his life.

And the Pak ships came steadily closer.

Through the clear twing they were invisible, black in a black sky. They were still too distant, and not all of their output was visible light. But they showed under magnification: the sparkling of hysteresis in the wide wings of the ram field, and in the center the small steady light of the drive.

Ten months after Roy had emerged from the stasis box, the light of the leading pair went out. Minutes later it came on again, but it was dim and flickering.

“They’ve gone into deceleration mode,” said Brennan.

In an hour the enemy’s drive was producing a steady glow, the red of blue-shifted beryllium emission.

“I’ll have to start my turn too,” said Brennan.

“You want to fight them?”

“That first pair, anyway. And if I turn now it’ll give us a better window.”

“Window?”

“For that right-angle turn.”

“Listen, you can eitber explain that right-angle turn business or stop bringing it up.”

Brennan chuckled. “I have to keep you interested somehow, don’t I?”

“What are you planning? Close orbit around a black hole?”

“My compliments. That’s a good guess. I’ve found a nonrotating neutron star… almost nonrotating. I wouldn’t dare dive into the radiating gas shell around a pulsar, but this beast seems to have a long rotation period and no gas envelope at all. And it’s nonluminous. It must be an old one. The scouts’ll have trouble finding it, and I can chart a hyperbola through the gravity field that’ll take us straight to Home.”

Casual as Brennan sounded, that sounded dangerous. And the Pak scouts moved steadily closer. Four months later the first pair of ships was naked-eye visible, a blue-green point alone in a black sky.

They watched it grow. Its drive flame made wiggly lines on Brennan’s instruments. “Not too bad,” said Brennan. “Of course you’d be dead if you went outside for awhile.”

“Yah.”

“I wonder if hes close enough to try the gravity widget.”

Roy watched, but did not understand, as Brennan played his control board. Brennan had never showed him how to use that particular weapon. It was too delicate, too intuitive. But two days later the bluegreen light went out.

“Got him,” Brennan said with evident satisfaction. “Got the hind ship, anyway. He probably fell into his own black hole.”

“Is that what your widget does? Collapse somebody else’s gravity generator into a hypermass?”

“That’s what it’s supposed to do. But let’s just see.” He used the spectroscope. “Right. Helium lines only. Hind ship gone, lead ship coming on at about one gee. He’ll be passing me sooner than he expected. He’s got two choices now. Run or ram. I think he’ll try to ram — so to speak.”

“He’ll try to throw his ram field across us. That’d kill us, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. Him too. Well—” Brennan dropped some missiles, then started a turn.

Two days later the lead ship was gone. Brennan swung Protector back on course. It had all seemed very like one of Brennan’s dry runs, except that it took even longer.

The next pass was different.

It was six months before the remaining Pak came close; but one day they were naked-eye visible, two wan yellow dots in the blackness astern. Their speed had dropped to not much above Protector’s own.

From an initial separation of eight light-months the scout pairs had converged over the years, until they were nearly side by side, thirty light-hours behind Protector.

“Time to try the gravity widget again,” said Brennan.

While Brennan played with the controls, Roy looked up at two yellow eyes glowing beyond the black shadow of the drive section. Intellectually he knew that he would see nothing for two and a half days…

And he was wrong. The flare came from below, lighting the interior of the lifesystem sphere. Brennan moved instantly, stabbing out with a stiff forefinger.

For a moment afterward, then, Brennan hovered wiretense over the dials. Then he was himself again. “Reflexes still in order,” he said.

“What happened?”

“They did it. They built a gravity widget like mine. My own widget collapsed into a hypermass, and the hypermass started eating its way up the cable. If I hadn’t blown the cable in time it would have absorbed the weapons pod. The energy release would have killed us.” Brennan opened the keyboard panel and began closing control elements down against future need. “Now well have to beat them to the neutron star. If they maintain their deceleration, we will.”

“What are they likely to throw at us in the meantime?”

“Lasers for sure. They need heavy lasers anyway, to communicate with the main fleets. I’m going to opaque the twing.” He did. Now they were locked inside a gray shell, the scouts showing only in the telescope screen. “Other than that… we’re all in a bad way for throwing bombs. We’re all decelerating. My missiles would be like going uphill; they couldn’t reach them at this distance. They can reach me, but their bombs are going in the wrong direction. They’ll go right through the ram field from behind.”

“Good.”

“Sure. Unless they’re accurate enough to hit the ship itself. Well, we’ll see.”

The lasers came in two beams of searing green light, and Protector was blind aft. Part of Protector’s skin boiled away frighteningly. The underskin was mirror-surfaced.

“That won’t hurt us until they get a lot closer,” said Brennan. But he worried about missiles. He began dodging at random, and life became uncomfortable as Brennan played with Protector’s acceleration.

A cluster of small masses approached them. Brennan opened the ram field constriction wide, and they watched the explosions in relative comfort, though some of them shook the ship. Roy watched almost without fear. He was bothered by the growing feeling that Brennan and the Pak protectors were playing an elaborate game whose rules they both understood perfectly: a game like the space war games played by computer programmers. Brennan had known that he would get the first ships, that the others would ruin his widget, that in matching courses for a proper duel they would slow too far to catch him by the time they discovered the neutron star ahead…

A day out from the neutron star, one of the green war beams went out. “They finally saw it,” said Brennan, “They’re lining up for the pass. Otherwise they could wind up being flung off in opposite directions.”

“They’re awfully close,” said Roy. They were, in a relative sense: they were four light-hours behind Protector, closer than Sol is to Pluto. “And you can’t dodge much, can you? It’d foul our course past the star.”

“Let me get this done,” Brennan mumbled, and Roy shut up.

The thrust dropped easily to half a gee. Protector swung left, and the lifesystem pod swung oddly at the end of its cable.

Then Brennan turned the ram field off entirely. “There’s a bit of a gas shell,” he explained. “Now don’t bug me for awhile.”

Protector was in free fall, a sitting duck.

Eight hours later there were missiles. The scouts must have fired as soon as they saw the sparkle of Protector’s ram field go out. Brennan dodged, using the insystem drive. The missiles he’d thrown at the scouts had no apparent effect: the hellish green light from the lead ship continued to bathe Protector.

“He’s cut his ram field,” Brennan said presently. “He’ll have to cut his laser too, when he runs out of battery power.” He looked at Roy for the first time in hours. “Get some sleep. You’re half dead now. What’ll you be like when we round the star?”

“All dead,” Roy sighed. He reclined his chair. “Wake me up if he hits us, will you? I’d hate to miss anything.”

Brennan didn’t answer.

Three hours away, the neutron star was still invisible ahead of them. Brennan said, “Ready?”

“Ready.” Roy was suited up, floating with one hand on the jamb of the airlock. There was still sleep in his eyes. His dreams had been fearsome.

“Go.”

Roy went. The lock would pass only one man. He was at work when Brennan came through. Brennan had cut this close, to reduce radiation exposure from the neutron star’s thin gas envelope, and to reduce the time the Pak had to blast away at unprotected men.

They detached the cable that led to the drive section, then used it to reel the drive section close, coiling the cable as it came. It was thick and heavy. They stowed it against the stern of the drive section.

They did the same with the cable that towed the weapons pod. Roy worked his two-gravity muscles with adrenalin flooding his system. He was well aware of the radiation sleeting through his body. This was war… but with something missing. He could not hate the Pak. He did not understand them well enough. If Brennan could hate them, he could have caught it from Brennan; but Brennan didn’t. No matter that he called it war. What he was playing was high stakes poker.

Now the three main sections of Protector floated end to end. Roy boarded the Belt cargo ship for the first time in years. As he took his place at the controls, green light flooded the cabin. He dropped the sun screens fast.

Brennan came through the airlock shouting, “Foxed ’em! If they’d done that half an hour ago we’d have been cooked.”

“I thought they’d used up their stored power.”

“No, that would have been stupid, but they must be pretty low. They thought I’d wait to the last second before I took the ships apart. They don’t know what I am yet!” he exulted. “And they don’t know I have help. All right, we’ve got about an hour before we have to go outside. Get us lined up.”

Roy used attitude jets to put the Belt ship fourth in line, behind Protector’s weapons pod. It felt good to be handling controls, to be doing something constructive in Brennan’s war. Through the sun screens the components of Protector glared green as hell. They were already drifting apart in the reaching tides of the mass ahead.

“Have you named that star yet?”

“No,” said Brennan.

“You discovered it. You have the right.”

“I’ll call it Phssthpok’s Star, then. Bear ye witness. I think we owe him that.”

They were going to go past Phssthpok’s Star damn fast.

The four sections of Protector fell separately. Even the Pak cable would not have held them together. Worse: the tidal effect would have pulled the sections into line with the star’s center of mass. The four sections with their snapped cables would have emerged on wildly different orbits.

This way the self-maneuvering cargo ship could be used to link the other sections after perihelion. But he and Brennan could not ride it out here. The Belt ship’s cabin was in the nose of the ship, too far from the center of mass.

Roy knew this intellectually. Before they left the ship he could feel it.

Protector had been three receding green dots before the Pak laser finally went out. Then they were invisible. And the neutron star was a dull red point ahead. Roy felt its tides pulling him forward against the crash webbing.

“Go,” said Brennan.

Roy released the webbing. He stood up on the clear plastic of the nose port, then climbed along the wall. The rungs were made for climbing in the other direction. Maneuvering himself into the airlock was difficult. Minutes from now it would have been impossible. More minutes, and the tides would have crushed him against the nose port, a beetle beneath a heel.

The hull was smooth, without handholds. He couldn’t wait here. He hung from the jamb, then dropped.

The ship fell away. He saw a tiny humanoid figure crouched in the airlock. Then four tiny flashes. Brennan had one of the high-velocity rifles. He was firing at the Pak.

Roy could feel the tides now, the whisper of a tug hiside his body. His feet came down to the red dot ahead.

Brennan had dropped after him. He was using backpac jets.

The tug inside was stronger. Gentle hands at his head and feet were trying to pull him apart. The red dot was yellowing, brightening, coming up at him like a fiery bowling ball.

He thought about it for a good hour. Brennan had intimidated him to that extent. He thought it through backward and forward, and then he told Brennan he was crazy.

They were linked by three yards of line. The line was taut, though the neutron star was a tiny red dot behind them. And Brennan still had the gun.

“I’m not doubting your professional opinion,” said Brennan, “But what symptom was it that tipped you off?”

“That gun. Why did you shoot at the Pak ship?”

“I want it wrecked.”

“But you couldn’t hit it. You were aiming right at it. I saw you. The star’s gravity must have pulled the bullets off course.”

“You think about it. If I’m really off my nut, you’d be justified in taking command.”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes crazy is better than stupid. What I’m really afraid of is that shooting at the Pak ships might make sense. Everything else you do makes sense, sooner or later. If that makes sense I’m gonna quit.”

Brennan was hunting for the cargo ship with a pair of binoculars. He said, “Don’t do that. Treat it as a puzzle. If I’m not crazy, why did I fire at a Pak ship?”

“Dammit. The muzzle velocity isn’t anything like good enough… How long have I got?”

“Two hours and fifty minutes.”

“O-o-oh.”

They were back aboard Protector’s isolated lifesystem by then, watching the vision screens and — in Brennan’s case — a score of instruments besides. The second Pak team fell toward the miniature sun in four sections: a drive section like a two-edged ax, then a pillbox-shaped lifesystem section, then a gap of several hundred miles, then a much bigger drive section and another pillbox. The first pillbox was just passing perihelion when the neutron star flared.

A moment ago magnification had showed it as a dim red globe. Now a small blue-white star showed on its surface. The white spot spread, dimming; it spread across the surface without rising in any kind of cloud. Brennan’s counters and needles began to chatter and twitch.

“That should kill him,” Brennan said with satisfaction. “Those Pak pilots probably aren’t too healthy anyway; they must have picked up a certain amount of radiation over thirty-one thousand light years riding behind a Bussard ramjet.”

“I presume that was a bullet?”

“Yah. A steel-jacketed bullet. And we’re moving against the spin of the star. I slowed it enough that the magnetic field would pick it up and slow it further, and keep on slowing it until it hit the star’s surface. There were some uncertainties. I wasn’t sure just when it would hit.”

“Very tricky, Captain.”

“The trailing ship probably has it worked out too, but there isn’t anything he can do about it.” Now the flare was a lemon glow across one flank of Plissthpok’s Star. Suddenly another white point glowed at one edge. “Even if they worked it out in advance, they couldn’t be sure I had the guns. And there’s only one course window they can follow me through. Either I dropped something or I didn’t. Let’s see what the last pair does.”

“Let’s put Protector back together. I think that must be the drive section ahead.”

“Right.”

They worked for hours. Protector was fairly spread across the sky. Roy worked with his shoulders hunched against deadly green light, but it never came. The second pair of Pak scouts was dead.

Midway they stopped to watch events that had happened an hour ago: the third pair of Pak scouts reconnecting their ships in frantic haste, then using precious reserve fuel to accelerate outward from the star. “Thought so,” Brennan grunted. “They don’t know what kind of variable velocity weapon I’ve got, and they can’t afford to die now. They’re the last. And that puts them on a course that’ll take them way the hell away from us. We’ll beat them to Home by at least half a year.”

Roy Truesdale was thirty-nine years old when he and Brennan rounded Phssthpok’s Star. He was forty-three when they slowed below ram speed outside the Epsilon Indi system.

There were times during those four years when Roy thought he would go mad.

He missed women. It wasn’t Alice Jordan be was missing now; he missed women, the varied score he had loved and the hundreds he had known slightly and the billions he had not. He missed his mother and his sister and his aunts and his ancestresses all the way back to Greatly ’Stelle.

He missed women and men and children and old people; people to fight with, to talk with, to love, to hate. One entire night he spent crying for all the people of Earth, taking care that Brennan shouldn’t hear him; crying not for what the Pak fleet could do to them but just because they weren’t here or he wasn’t there.

He spent long periods in his room with the door locked. Brennan had put the lock on it, and Brennan could have picked that lock in thirty seconds, or opened the door with a single kick; but it had a psychological effect, and Roy was grateful for it.

He missed the space. On any random beach on Earth you could run down the curve of wet hard sand between sea and shore until there was no strength left in you to do anything but breathe. On Earth you could walk forever. In his locked room aboard Protector, no longer hampered by Protector’s heavy acceleration, Roy paced endlessly between the walls.

Sometimes, alone, he cursed Brennan for using up all of the radon bombs. Otherwise he could have ridden this out in stasis. He wondered if Brennan had done it deliberately, for the company.

Sometimes he cursed Brennan for bringing him at all. A silly act for such an intelligence. At full acceleration Protector could have outrun the second and third pairs of scouts, with no need to fight. But three gravities might have injured Roy Truesdale.

He hadn’t been that much use during the battles. Had Brennan brought him only for company? Or as a kind of mascot? Or — he toyed with another idea. One of Brennan’s daughters had been named Estelle, hadn’t she? She might have passed the name to her own daughter. Greatly ’Stelle.

That was an angry thought: that he had been brought only because he belonged to the protector’s blood line, a living reminder of what Brennan was fighting for, to keep Brennan’s interest in the war alive. Because he smelled right. Roy never asked him. He didn’t really want to know.

“In a sense you’re being subjected to sensory deprivation,” Brennan told him once. That was not long before turnover, after they had tried something decidedly kooky: Brennan taking the parts of five experts of varying disciplines and accents, in a six-sided discussion of free will versus determinism. It hadn’t worked. They were both trying too hard.

Roy was losing the urge to talk.

“We’ve got all kinds of entertainment,” said Brennan, “but no conversation except mine. There’s a limit to how much illusion you can get from me. But let’s try something.”

Roy didn’t ask what he meant. He found out a few days later, when he walked into his room and found himself looking down a mountainside.

Now he spent more time in there than ever. Every so often Brennan would change the environment. The 270ш holograph vision tapes had come out of the computer memory, and they were all of worlds other than Earth. After a few false starts he avoided scenes that involved people. The people never noticed Roy; they behaved as if he did not exist. That was bad.

He would sit for hours, staring out into the faintly unearthly landscapes, wishing that he could walk out into them. Too much of that was bad too, and he would have to turn them off.

It was during such a time — with the walls around him nothing but walls — that he began wondering again as to just what Brennan was planning on Home.

The Pak scouts had veered wide during the pass around the neutron star. Now their enormous turning radius had finally aimed them toward Home; but their 5.5 gee acceleration would not compensate for the time they had lost. They were out of the running as far as Protector was concerned. And Home would have ten months to prepare for their arrival.

A peaceful people was not that easily persuaded to prepare for all-out defense. It took time to convert factories to make weapons. Just how big a threat was one pair of Pak scouts?

“I’m sure they could destroy a planet,” Brennan said judiciously when Roy put it to him. “A planet is a big target, and environmental systems are delicate, and it can’t dodge like a Bussard ramjet. Aside from that, a Pak scout was probably designed to wreck planets. If it can’t do that, what good is it?”

“We’ll have less than a year to get ready for them.”

“Stop worrying. That’s long enough. Home already has message lasers that can reach Earth. That speaks well for their accuracy and their power. We’ll use them as cannon. And I’ve got designs for induced gravity weapons.”

“But will they build them? These are peaceful people in a stable society!”

“We’ll talk them into it.”

Sitting in his room, staring into an empty, stormy seascape, Roy wondered at Brennan’s optimism. Had he grown unfamiliar with the way breeders thought? “I’ve stopped taking chances,” Brennan had said once. Well?

There had never been a war on Home, according to the tapes of their communications to Earth. Their novels rarely dealt in violence. Once they had used fusion bombs to shape harbors; but then they had the harbors, and now they didn’t even have the factories any more.

Had Brennan seen something in their novels — a buried violence — that Roy had not?

One day it occurred to him that there was a solution.

It was a horrifying thought. He never mentioned it to Brennan. He feared that it was evidence of his own madness. He conscientiously resumed his long conversations with Brennan; he tried to take some interest in the very predictable course of the remaining Pak; he offered suggestions for the vision walls of his cubical; be played gin and dominoes. He exercised. He was turning into a mountain of muscle. Sometimes he awed himself.

“Teach me to fight Pak,” he once asked Brennan.

“No way,” said Brennan.

“The subject might arise. If a Pak ever wanted to take a breeder prisoner—”

“All right, come on. I’ll show you.”

They cleared out the exercise room, and they fought. In half an hour Brennan “killed” him something like thirty times, pulling his karate blows with exquisite accuracy. Then he let Roy hit him several times. Roy delivered killing blows wiih a vicious enthusiasm Brennan may have found enlightening. Brennan even admitted that they hurt. But Roy was convinced.

Nonetheless they made the fights part of their program.

There were all kinds of ways to kill time. And the time passed. Sometimes it crawled, excruciatingly slow; but always it passed.

There was one Jupiter-sized mass in the Epsilon Indi system. Godzilla, Epsilon Indi V, was out of Protector’s path as they braked in at three thousand miles per second. But Brennan veered a bit to show Roy a wondrous sight.

They slid past a glittering translucent sphere of ice crystals. It was Godzilla’s Trojan point, and it looked like a vast Xmas tree ornament; but to Roy it was a Welcome sign. He began to believe they would make it.

Two days later, at 1000 miles/second, the ram field was no longer doing anything useful. Brennan turned it off. “Home in forty-two hours,” he said. “I could skydive the sun and use the ram field in the solar wind, but what the hell. We’ve got plenty of fuel, and I sense somehow that you’re anxious to get down.”

“Oddly enough.” Roy wore a hungry grin. “Not that I haven’t enjoyed your company.” He had Home in the telescope screen. Home looked like Earth: deep blue swirled with the white frosting of clouds, the outlines of continents almost invisible. He felt a throb in his throat. This past year, his vision walls had showed only scenes from Home.

“Listen,” he said, “are we going to wait for the ferries or just go down?”

“I thought I’d put Protector in distant orbit and go down with the cargo ship. We may need it to refuel Protector. Homers haven’t done much with their asteroid resources. They may not have any cargo ships.”

“All right. Before you turn on the insystem drive, why don’t I just go over to the cargo ship and put it through a countdown?”

Brennan studied him for a moment. It was the kind of considering look that sometimes had Roy thinking he’d made a foolish suggestion. But, “All right. That’ll save some time. Call me when you’re aboard.”

Home was already naked-eye visible, a white star not far from the sun. Roy boarded, stripped off his suit, went to the controls and called Brennan. Shortly Protector was again underthrust, backing toward Home at one Home gravity.

Roy started his inspection with the life support systems. All okay. The drive system checked out as far as instruments could tell. Roy worried that the drive tube might have been bent out of alignment by the tidal force of Phssthpok’s Star. They had never had a chance to inspect for that. They wouldn’t, until the cargo ship cut loose from Protector.

There was no landing gear to inspect. He’d land in a harbor; the ship would float.

He put twelve hours into his countdown, then broke for a nap. By now Brennan would have called whatever passed for spaceport facilities on Home. In another twelve hours…

Under one Home gravity he slept less, and lightly. He woke in the dim light, remembering his odd suspicions of Brennan. There was a faint smile on his face.

He went over them again… expecting to see how ridiculous they were. He’d been a bit paranoid then. Man was not meant to live locked in with a not-quite-human being for six years.

He went over his suspicions again, and they were logical. The idea was still horrid, but he could not find the logical flaw.

That bothered him.

And he still didn’t know just what Brennan planned for Home.

He got up and prowled the ship. He found something Alice had stowed aboard, long ago: paints for a pressure suit. There had never been a design on the chest of Roy’s suit. He draped the suit across a chair and stood before it, waiting for inspiration. But the inspiration that came to him was a vivid flourescent target.

Sucker. If he was right — but he couldn’t be right.

He called Brennan. Have it out -

“All okay here,” said Brennah. “How’re things at your end?”

“Green bird, as far as I can tell without actually flying it.”

“Good.”

Roy found that he was stupidly trying to read expression in the hard face. “Brennan, something occurred to me a while ago. I never mentioned it—”

“’Bout two and a half years back? I thought something was bothering you besides the lack of a harem.”

“Maybe I’m nuts,” said Roy. “Maybe I was nuts then. It hit me that you’d have a lot easier job of talking the Home population into backing your war, if you first—” He almost didn’t say it. But of course Brennan had thought of it. “If you first seeded the planet with tree-of-life.”

“That wouldn’t be nice.”

“No, it wouldn’t. But will you please explain to me why it isn’t logical?”

“It isn’t logical,” said Brennan. “The crop would take too long to grow.”

“Yah,” Roy said in a burst of relief. Then, “Yah, but you kept me out of the hydroponics garden. Wasn’t that because some of the virus might get to me?”

“No. It was because the smell would get to you and you’d eat something.”

“And the same with the garden on Kobold.”

“Right.”

“The garden Alice and I wandered through without smelling anything at all.”

“You’re older now, idiot!” Brennan was losing his temper.

“Yah, of course. Sorry, Brennan. I should have thought of all this—” Brennan was losing his temper? Brennan? And — “Dammit, Brennan, I was only a month older when you told me never to enter the Flying Dutchman’s hydroponics garden!”

“Censor you,” said Brennan, and he clicked off.

Roy leaned back in the crash chair. Thick depression was on him. Whatever else he was, Brennan had been a friend and ally. Now -

Now, very suddenly, Protector surged under three gravities acceleration. Roy sagged back. His mouth went wide in shock. Then, with all the strength of a now-massive right arm, he reached up to the controls and found a red button.

It was under a guard lock.

The key was in his pocket. Roy dug for it, cursing steadily under his breath. Brennan wanted to immobilize him. It wasn’t going to work. He reached up against three gravities of pull, opened the guard, pushed the button.

The cable that linked him to Protector blasted free. He was falling.

It took him a full minute to bring the drive up to thrust. He started a ninety degree turn. Protector couldn’t possibly match the turning radius of the smaller cargo ship. Through the port he watched Protector’s drive flame drifting away to the side.

He saw it go out.

Why had Brennan turned off the drive?

Never mind. Next step: the com laser, and warn Home.

Assuming he was right… but he dared assume nothing else, now. Brennan could clear himself afterward: turn himself over to spacemen from Home, wearing nothing but a pressure suit, and tell them how Roy had gone mad. Perhaps it would be true.

He swung the com laser toward Home and began tuning it. He knew the frequency he wanted, and the spot… if it was on the right side of the planet. What would Brennan be doing now? What could he do? That was what he would be doing. There was little of free will in a protector… and Hell’s own weaponry in Protector’s weapons pod. He was going to kill Roy Truesdale.

Home seemed to be turning the wrong face. The colony was big, as big as a medium-sized nation, but it had stupidly turned its back! And where was Brennan’s killing beam? He had to use it.

And Protector’s drive was still out. Not trying to chase him down.

Was Brennan still aboard the ship?

Roy saw a possibility then. Irrational, but no time to think: he swarmed out of the crash chair and scrambled down a ladder. The weapons were in the airlock. And the inner door was still open. Roy dashed in, snatched one of the lasers off the wall, and leapt back before the door could close on him.

It hadn’t moved.

But if Brennan wasn’t aboard Protector…

Then, irrational as it certainly was, Brennan must be trying to save the situation and Roy Truesdale too. To do that he must board the cargo ship. A feat of impossible heroism… but Roy could see him setting Protectoes drive to cut off automatically, then dropping out of the airlock toward the cargo ship just as Roy cut the cable. Dropping onto the hull, welding a line before Roy could build up thrust. Then, down the line to the airlock.

Impossible? What was impossible to Brennan? Roy held the gun ready, waiting for the inner airlock door to close.

He had his answer in the roar and flash behind him. In a whistling shriek of breathing-air the Brennan-monster was through the hull side of the cabin toilet, through the toilet door and closing it softly behind him. The door was not hull material; it buckled slightly under the pressure; but it held.

Roy raised the gun.

Brennan threw something. It came too fast to see, and it hit Roy in the upper right arm. The bone shattered like fine crystal. Roy spun half around with the impact, his arm swinging out from his shoulder like something dead. The laser bounced off the wall and back at him.

He fielded it with his left hand and finished his turn.

Brennan was poised like a pitcher on the mound. He held a soft carbon lubrication disc the size of a hockey puck.

Roy shifted his grip on the laser. Why didn’t Brennan throw? Now he had the trigger. Why didn’t Brennan throw? He fired.

Brennan leapt to the side, incredibly fast, but not as fast as light. Roy swung the beam after him. It crossed Brennan’s body just below the waist.

Brennan dropped, cut in half.

His arm wasn’t hurting him at all, but the sound of Brennan’s fall hurt Roy sickeningly in the guts. He looked down at his arm. It dangled, swollen like a melon and running blood where a fragment of bone poked through. He looked back at Brennan.

What was left of Brennan rose up on its hands and came for him.

Roy sagged against the wall. The cabin was going round and round. Shock. He smiled as Brennan came near. He said, “Touché, Monsieur.”

Brennan said, “You’re hurt.”

Things were graying out, losing color. Roy was aware of Brennan ripping his shirt to tie a tourniquet below his shoulder. Brennan talked in a steady monotone, whether or not he expected Roy to hear. “I could have killed you if you weren’t a relative. Stupid, stupid. May the ceiling fall on you, Roy. Roy, listen, you’ve got to live. They might not believe what’s in the computer. Roy? Dammit, listen!”

Roy fainted.

He was delirious during most of what followed. He did manage to swing the cargo ship around toward Home, but his technique was sloppy, and he wound up in an escape orbit. The ships that came after him were designed for exploring the inner system. They managed to retrieve him, and Brennan’s body, and the computer aboard Protector. Protector itself they had to abandon.

The injury to his arm seemed sufficient explanation for the state of coma in which they found him. It was some time before they realized that he was sick with something else. By then two of the pilots were down with it.