The Ceres Solution

Chapter Sixteen

A panel of food manufacturers and health officers were defending the new practice of introducing insect protein—discreetly tagged as “approved natural ingredients”—into products intended for human consumption.

Gretana had been trying to follow the arguments, particularly those of an assertive man who kept popping live mealworms into his mouth, but her television set was losing its ability to cope with serious power fluctuations, and the picture size and sound levels were changing almost continuously. She had forgotten to buy new batteries, which meant it was hardly worth the trouble of switching over to internal power. Her living room, illuminated by the mandatory low-wattage fluorescent tubes, seemed cheerless and uninviting, but she knew there was little chance of sleep if she went to bed.

The late evening and night seemed to stretch out before her like a Mollanian lifespan. Warden Vekrynn had told her that in his service she would have no need of a life recorder with which to preserve happenings of interest. Her experience on Earth had ratified his promise, but nothing could have prepared her for the mind-numbing rush of events in the past forty-eight hours.

She had a cold inner certainty that her lapses in conduct, especially the failure to make a full report to Vekrynn, were casting long shadows into the future, and yet she continued to leave things unresolved. What made it worse was the feeling that virtually everybody she knew would have acted with much greater decisiveness. Even the embittered little Terran, Denny Hargate, in spite of all his dreadful handicaps, would have plotted his own course through the tides of circumstance and it would have taken a great deal to deflect him, whereas she…You’re a typical product of Mollanian non-education, a remembered voice told her. But that had not been Hargate. It had been…

The pounding on the outer door of her apartment was totally unexpected.

She jumped up and listened for several seconds before realising there was nothing peremptory in the sound. It was slow and deliberate, as though the person responsible assumed right of entry, and somehow that had the effect of increasing her alarm. With one hand holding her blouse closed at the throat, she considered the range of possibilities and with ready prescience selected the most likely.

Lorrest tye Thralen.

She went to the door, irrationally choosing to move in complete silence, tilted her head and said, “Who’s there?”

“William McGonagall, poet and tragedian,” came the immediate answer, followed by a pause in which she heard laboured breathing. “Don’t make me laugh, Gretana—I’m hurt.”

She opened the door and saw the tall figure clutching his left arm. “What do you want?”

He shook his head. “Can’t do any more funny answers—I’ve got a broken arm.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“I believe it’s a greenstick fracture…typical Mollanian resilience…but I’m not used to this kind of pain, Gretana, and they’re hunting me.”

Gretana’s fear increased. “You can’t stay here.”

“Tell you what,” Lorrest said, moving forward and forcing her to retreat. “Why don’t you do what women in your position are supposed to do? You could bring me in and tend to my wounds and pretend to be sympathetic, but all unknown to me you’ve sent a secret signal to Vekrynn.”

“That’s impossible, and you know it.”

“Yeah—I’m not stupid.” Lorrest walked into the kitchen and turned to face her and she saw that his face was haggard. He unbuttoned his overcoat, withdrawing his left arm from the sleeve with great care, and draped the garment over a stool.

“Don’t you think you’re presuming a lot?” Gretana said.

“Not really.” Lorrest’s smile became a grimace as he slipped off his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt.” If you were the hotshot Preservationist you think you are you’d have tipped the Warden off about me and I wouldn’t have made it to the top of your stairs.”

“I see.” Gretana’s sense of responsibility increased. Previously she had only suffered forebodings, but here was confirmation that in a single dereliction of duty she had influenced a train of events about which she had no understanding. She watched in silence as Lorrest partly took off his shirt to reveal a left arm which was so massively bruised that between elbow and shoulder it had the appearance of being carved from a blackish marble veined with green. The ghastly discoloration extended down Lorrest’s left side, indicating that the muscles there had been torn by the impact which had wreaked such spectacular damage on his arm.

“You’re really hurt,” she exclaimed. “What happened?”

“A bunch of the Warden’s men showed up at my hotel and I went out on some steelwork next door to get away from them. Then I did something you’re not supposed to do on steelwork—I fell off.”

Gretana weighed up the story, one Mollanian to another. “You climbed around a high building?”

“They were carrying weapons. I had to get away.”

She sighed her exasperation. “Are you still claiming the Warden would harm you?”

“Harm me?” Lorrest looked thoughtful. “For the time being Vekrynn will do everything in his power to make sure I’m not harmed—that’s because I know something he needs to know—but if he gets his information he’ll do me harm, and that’s for sure. The sort of harm you inflict on an ant when you stand on it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Gretana snapped. “What are you going to do about that arm?”

“Could you fix up a splint?”

“If I do that will you promise to leave?”

“Leave?” Lorrest appeared to weigh up the idea. “For you, sweetheart, I’ll get off the planet altogether. All you have to do is tell me where…”

“Forget it!” Gretana’s former fears were displaced by anger. “Why is it that people like you can never listen to reason?”

To her surprise, Lorrest smiled in what could have been genuine pleasure. “I do believe you’re turning into a political animal,” he said mildly. “The first big hurdle is the realisation that nobody on the other side is capable of seeing the obvious. Once you’re over that, though, you come to the second and even bigger hurdle—what are you going to do about these people who can’t see the obvious? You can arrange to demonstrate to them that you’re right and they’re wrong, but that can take an awfully long time, and at the end of it…guess what?…they still can’t see what you’ve so carefully laid out in front of them. That brings you to the well-tried solution—stop them seeing anything at all.”

“You think you know everything,” Gretana said. Acutely aware that the retort had been both predictable and inadequate—exactly the sort of thing to trigger one of Lorrest’s painful laughs—she went to a drawer and took out a bamboo place mat. “Would this work?”

“Could do, if we bind it around my arm and fix up some kind of a sling. I knew you’d help.”

“I’m not helping with anything—all I want is for you to get the hell out of here.”

“Don’t pretend to be tough.”

“Do you know I’ve been to Station 23? That I went back to report on you?”

Lorrest glanced around the apartment with narrowed eyes. “What did they say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t get to make the report.”

“Oh? Why not?”

Gretana hesitated, wondering why she was further entangling herself. “I took a Terran back with me and it caused a bit of a furore.”

“You took a…” Lorrest’s shoulders gave a preliminary heave and he sat down on the nearest stool, his face already darkening. “That’s wonderful. I’ll bet Vekrynn wasn’t pleased.”

“He was furious.” Gretana smiled in spite of herself, comforted by Lorrest’s reaction. While padding the bamboo mat with cotton and binding it around his upper arm, she described how she had seen Denny Hargate at the nodal point and how on sheer impulse she had teleported him with her to Station 23. She noticed however that Lorrest’s expressions of amusement became muted as she outlined the subsequent events, and by the time she finished speaking his face had acquired a look of brooding solemnity.

“You sound as though you liked this man Hargate,” he said.

“He’s about the most sarcastic and short-tempered being I’ve ever met, but I suppose I did start to admire him in a way. You know, before I left Mollan that would have sounded grotesque.”

Lorrest gave her a wry smile. “Well, the thing you’ve got to keep uppermost in your mind is that when you first saw him he was obviously trying to end his life.”

“Yes, I could see he was…” She broke off, suddenly suspicious. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying you almost did Hargate a favour. He wanted to die anyway, so when Vekrynn…ah…disposed of him he was only doing what Hargate wanted.”

“Stop it!” Gretana threw her scissors on to the kitchen table and they slid along its surface with a metallic chittering. “I won’t listen to that kind of talk.”

“Sorry. I just don’t want you to feel guilty.”

“You’re still doing it. You…you are still calling Warden Vekrynn a criminal.” She tried to give a scornful laugh, but it emerged as something closer to a sob, further increasing her anger and frustration. “Why didn’t I tell the Bureau you were here?”

“There’s only one reason,” Lorrest said equably. “In your heart you didn’t really want to. If you’d been genuinely determined to turn me in nothing could have stopped you. Think about it.”

“I am thinking about it.” Gretana made the effort to clamp down on her emotions, realising that coldness and self-control were the best weapons against provocation. “I want you to go away from here and never come near me again.”

“So be it,” Lorrest said, apparently unruffled. He worked his splinted arm back into his shirt sleeve with some difficulty and began fumbling with the buttons. Gretana, disdaining to help, walked into the adjoining room and switched off the television set. Abruptly, and against her better judgement, she yielded to a desire to establish once and for all that the unwanted visitor was impervious to logic.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said, returning to the kitchen door. “Warden Vekrynn has everything that Mollanian society can offer—wealth, power, honour, privilege—so why should he descend to being the sort of person you think he is? What would he gain? Can you give me one shred of motive?”

“Not really,” Lorrest replied, picking up his jacket. “He’s a raving megalomaniac, of course—but merely saying that somebody is crazy isn’t analysing his motives.”

Gretana raised her eyebrows. “You are saying that he is insane?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Look at his big project, his famous Notebook. Do you know that he has taken imprints of the summarised depositions of every observer the Bureau has ever stationed on Earth?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It can’t be done, child—that’s what’s wrong with it.” Lorrest paused and softened the pedagogic manner with which he liked to impart information. “There’s an upper limit to the number of our imprints the brain can usefully accommodate. For most people it hovers around the thousand mark, and some highly gifted individuals can cope with three or four thousand—but Vekrynn has zapped himself with at least a hundred thousand. A tenth of a million, Gretana. I don’t think it does him any harm, any more than overfilling a bucket does it harm but it gives you a clue about how he regards his own intellect. A definite god complex, I’d say.”

Gretana struggled with unfamiliar concepts. “Even if what you say is true, it still doesn’t make him a murderer.”

“Doesn’t it? Perhaps what we would regard as culpable homicide he would see as justifiable insecticide. I’m telling you, Gretana, your friend Hargate was too much of an inconvenience to be let stay around.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Did you actually go with him to Cialth and see him installed in some kind of rest home for sick Terrans?”

“No. I told you Vekrynn was trying to protect me—we went to a disused Bureau station first of all, then we split up.”

Lorrest stopped in the act of donning his jacket. “A disused station? Was it bright and hot? All bright and hot, and yellow and orange, with a kind of forest made of barley sugar all around it?”

Gretana nodded. “That sounds right.”

“It must have been Branie IV. There was an observational headquarters there for one of the human civilisations we let go down the tubes about six centuries ago. If Vekrynn abandoned your friend there the heat will have killed him off within a day, but I don’t think he’d have done that. The skord connections are good from Branie IV, and quite a few travellers still go through there. It would be bloody awkward for Vekrynn if somebody found a dessicated Mr Hargate, spinster of this parish, sitting there in his pushchair. He’ll have dumped him somewhere else, but unfortunately—especially for Hargate—we’ve no way of knowing where.”

“Wrong!” Gretana was triumphant, eager to drive Lorrest into a trap of his own devising. “I went back to try to put things right with Vekrynn.”

“So you really were going to fix me.”

“Naturally.” She met Lorrest’s gaze directly, enjoying the moment. “But there was nobody there when I arrived, and I thought I was too late. I went to have a look at your barley sugar forest while I decided what to do next, then I thought I heard voices and I turned back. I was just in time to see Vekrynn and Denny Hargate leave.”

“For Cialth?”

“Where else?”

“I don’t know.” Lorrest looked thoughtful. “What was the mnemo-curve like?”

Gretana hesitated and, employing her Mollanian talent for a special kind of mathematics, traced an exact copy of the gesture Vekrynn had made on the instant of departing with Hargate.

“It wasn’t Cialth,” Lorrest said emphatically.

“How do you know?” Gretana demanded. “You haven’t memorised every reciprocal address in the sector.”

“No, but I know the general form they take. Look.” Abandoning the attempt to put on his jacket, Lorrest set the garment down and gave her an impromptu lecture on descriptive topography as used in the Mollanian transfer system. “So you see,” he concluded, “wherever Vekrynn took your friend it wasn’t to Cialth. Show me the curve again.”

Reluctantly, feeling that once again she was being out-manoeuvred, Gretana began slowly recreating the symbol with her right hand. She had used only about a dozen skord addresses in her life and had regarded each one as being an arbitrary set of mathematical elements. Lorrest’s approach, treating all addresses as part of a unified system and being able to predict relationships between them, was so far superior to hers that it smacked of being unfair. Who decides these things? she wondered, completing the curve. Who teaches one person to enjoy using and developing his mind, whilst allowing another to…?

“It isn’t even in the human sector!” Lorrest hugged his immobilised left arm to his side and began pacing the length of the narrow kitchen. “For some reason Vekrynn has dumped your friend, your tame Terran, about…let’s see…about two hundred light years inside the Attatorian sector. There must be a Type One world there that nobody else from Mollan has even seen—but how did old man Vekrynn latch on to it in the first place? And why? Why would he…?”

“I’m glad you’ve got around to asking yourself that,” Gretana cut in. “You keep building up these fantastic accusations against the Warden, with no real evidence, and you expect me to believe them. Well, I still don’t believe them and you’re still on your way out of here. Come on!” She picked up Lorrest’s jacket and held it ready for him. Lorrest obediently slipped his arms into it and allowed her to draw it over his shoulders, an action which made him seem oddly childlike in spite of his size and physique.

“That’s a very good point about evidence, and I’m glad you made it,” he said, turning to face her. “I don’t quite know why it is, but I’m becoming obssessed with the notion of making you see reason. Maybe it’s the sheer magnitude of the challenge. Anyway, I’ve worked out how to give you all the proof you need.”

“How?”

“Through Denny Hargate, of course. I’ll go after him and fetch him back to Earth. In all probability he’s already dead, but if he’s still alive he can testify for himself. Either way you’ll have your evidence.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, exasperated. “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“Don’t dismiss it like that,” he said quickly. “All you have to do is tell me where to find the Bureau’s east coast node, and I promise you I’ll bring him back. Why are you shaking your head?”

“E for effort,” she replied, borrowing a Terran expression, “but I’m not talking. I’ve already let Vekrynn down once and I’m not doing it again.”

“I thought we had established that your true loyalties are with Helping Hand.”

“Is that what you call yourselves? Helping Hand?”

“Yes. It doesn’t sound sinister enough for the Bureau’s propaganda, so they refer to us as 2H. But that’s what we’re doing here on Earth, Gretana—we’re giving these people the helping hand they need.”

“By sabotaging the space colony?”

“There was a good reason for that,” Lorrest said. “It was part of the plan.”

“Oh, yes. The plan you’re not allowed to divulge, but when it comes to a head everybody in the world will know about it.” Gretana smiled faintly, remembering her resolve to be coolly unconcerned. “You don’t seem to have any idea how crazy that sounds—and you’re still demanding everything and giving nothing in return.”

“Only for your own good.” Lorrest walked to the other end of the kitchen and stood for a moment facing the window, and when he turned his face was troubled and irresolute. “Can I trust you, Gretana?”

I can show Vekrynn I’m not a fool, she thought, hiding a powerful surge of excitement. The thing is not to appear too eager…

“I thought I was the specialist in corny dialogue,” she said. “Does anybody ever admit to being untrustworthy?”

“You’re learning,” Lorrest replied, and when he spoke again his voice was subdued. “We’re going to…”

“Yes?”

He made an unconvincing attempt to grin. “We’re going to destroy the Moon.”

Gretana had never acquired a taste for neat brandy, but the shock it administered to her tongue was oddly comforting, a sensual link with the humdrum world. She took repeated sips from her glass, all the while keeping her gaze on Lorrest. He had tucked his left arm inside his jacket just above the first button, improvising a sling, and now was seated at the dining table. He had taken only one drink from his glass and was flicking its rim with a fingernail, producing ringing sounds which turned the surface of the liquid into an oscilloscope of transient bright circles. His expression was one of tiredness and elation.

“We’re very lucky on Mollan, never having contracted religion,” he said, “but as a result we’re linguistically deprived. I mean, the word you’re looking for now is blasphemous—you feel that what we’re about to do is blasphemy—but, being a godless Mollanian, you don’t have access to the appropriate expression.”

“I can think of others just as appropriate,” Gretana countered. “How about wild, insane, hare-brained…?”

“You’re not doing too well—those mean more-or-less the same thing, and they don’t really express your gut-feeling that it’s terribly wrong for mere human beings to start meddling with the Grand Scheme.”

“How about impracticable? Or improbable?”

“The plan is practicable, even with 2H’s limited resources.” Lorrest’s tone was becoming surer. “There’s a minor planet in this system, name of Ceres, with a diameter of about seven hundred kilometres. I presume you’ve heard about its disappearance?”

“Yes, but…What has that to do with the Moon?”

“We put a bank of mass displacement units on Ceres and drove it out of orbit. It’s on its way to the Moon right now, accelerating all the way, and in two days from now there’s going to be one hell of a collision.”

Objections swarmed in Gretana’s mind, reinforcing her instinctive rejection of what she had heard. “I don’t understand. It said in the news that Ceres had ceased to be visible, but if has only been moved…”

“We screened it. Optically, magnetically, gravitationally—every way you could think of—to stop the Bureau using deflectors on it when they deduce what’s going on.”

“They’ll find it,” she asserted, her confidence springing from faith in Warden Vekrynn’s omnipotence rather than any appreciation of the technical problems involved.

“No doubt,” Lorrest said. “The Bureau will compute its rough position, then they’ll find some way to deactivate our screens and make the asteroid visible—but it will be close to the Moon by that time, and we’ve taken steps to make sure their deflectors won’t be effective. Fireworks night will go ahead as planned.”

“I can’t imagine the Moon just breaking up.”

“It won’t happen immediately.” Lorrest spoke as though explaining some minor mechanical process. “It won’t be a head-on collision, you see. What we’ve got to do is strike the Moon a glancing blow at a precisely calculated angle and start it spinning fast. Very fast. The rotation will set up gravitational stresses in the Moon and tear it to pieces, and the pieces will go on spinning and breaking up into smaller pieces and scattering themselves. According to our calculations, the end result will be a whole swarm of little moonlets strung out along the Moon’s orbit. All the second-order and third-order forces will be pretty well neutralised, especially gravity, which is why we had to force an evacuation of the Aristotle colony. The Lagrange points will have ceased to exist, and for a while there’s going to be enough chaos on Earth without a runaway space colony to worry about.”

“What sort of chaos?”

“Well, for example, there’ll be no more lunar tides. All tidal energy schemes will have to be abandoned, coastlines are going to change, major sea ports are going to silt up.”

Gretana gave an uncertain laugh. “Helping Hand!”

“Exactly. And having demonstrated in an impressive manner that we exist and mean business, we’re going to come out in the open. We’re going to put ships into Earth orbit, make direct contact with heads of state, help to stabilise the world situation until the new generations of Terrans appear—the ones who haven’t had their genetic blueprints distorted.” Lorrest raised his brandy glass as though proposing a toast. “You’re lucky, Gretana—you’re going to witness the birth of a new world.”

“And how many of the people who actually inhabit this world are going to be unlucky?”

Lorrest frowned. “Meaning?”

“The period of chaos…culture shock…reduced energy supplies…food and commodity shipments disrupted…How many Terrans are going to die as a result?”

“You can’t look at it like that,” Lorrest said impatiently. “If we do nothing the whole bloody lot are going to die sooner or later. Sooner, if you ask me.”

“What if I don’t ask you?” She kept her voice level. “What if I don’t regard you as any kind of authority?”

Lorrest slammed his glass down on the table, spilling some of its contents. “Igetit—you’re not going to give me the nodal point.”

“I never said I would.”

“You are learning, aren’t you?” Lorrest stood up, his face hardening as she had seen it do before, losing all trace of its characteristic amiability. “What next? A quick jaunt to Station 23 to report me to Vekrynn?”

“No, I’m prepared to keep this to myself—as long as you never come near me again,” Gretana said, and to give the lie more credence added, “Besides, I have no intention of leading you straight to the node.”

“We reached this stage once before,” Lorrest replied, slipping his right hand into the pocket of his jacket, “but the situation is more urgent this time. I need that location, and you’re going to give it to me—whether you want to or not.”

Gretana rose to face him, keyed-up and apprehensive, but not fully believing the threat of force. She was still formulating a reply when from the direction of the hall there came a violent pinging sound—half-explosive, half-electronic in nature—and a small metallic object slid into view on the parquet floor between the dining area and the kitchen. Heart stopped, mind numbed by the certainty that she was close to a grenade which was on the point of detonating, she threw herself backwards, collided with the table and was turning to run when her identification of the object was completed. It was the main lock from the apartment’s outer door. In the same instant a squat-bodied man with protuberant pale eyes and a down-curving gash of a mouth came running into the room. He was holding a weapon which appeared to be a laser pistol.

“Nobody move,” he ordered in a hoarse voice. “Don’t nobody move.”

Gretana forced her speech organs to manufacture distant sounds. “What do you want?”

“Shut it.” The intruder examined her briefly and dismissively, eyes as unsympathetic as those of a deep-water fish, and turned his attention to Lorrest. “The hands, big man—hoist ’em.”

“Gladly.” Seemingly unperturbed, Lorrest raised his right hand almost to the ceiling and spoke in conversational tones. “Would you mind saying what you want?”

The stubby man gestured with the pistol. “Get the other hand up.”

Lorrest smiled apologetically. “I’d like to oblige, but I’ve got a broken arm. I don’t usually walk around doing this Napoleon imitation.”

“You better hold real still,” the man said. “You so much as fart, I burn your arm off.”

Keeping the pistol trained on Lorrest, he felt in his overcoat pocket with the other hand and produced a small object which resembled a photographic light meter. He pointed it at Lorrest and made scanning movements. Gretana watched him with a sense of alarm which increased with every second. Violent crime was rife throughout the country, but it would have been too much of a coincidence if she and Lorrest had fallen foul of a casual raider at this particular time—and the intruder appeared to be unusually well equipped. The implication was that he was acting for the Bureau of Wardens, as a kind of bounty hunter, but what other inferences could be drawn?

“So you’re carryin’ no hardware, just like they said.” The man put the scanning device away. “You got a coat?” Lorrest nodded towards the kitchen. “In there.”

“I’ll pick it up on the way out. Walk in front of me.” Lorrest took one step towards the kitchen, but halted directly underneath a fluorescent light fitting, his face unnaturally shadowed. “This woman doesn’t know anything about me. She has never seen me before.”

“She never seen me before, neither.” The small man looked at Gretana, and for the first time there was a flicker of animation in his eyes, a door opening at the end of a long dark passageway in his mind. She saw the pistol in his hand swing towards her. Its movement seemed to grow slower with every degree of rotation, but the effect was subjective—a thin sad voice had warned her that her life was ending, that she was on the edge of oblivion, and her mind had reacted by seizing on the single moment that remained, attenuating it, reluctantly yielding it up by the microsecond.

In that cryogenic state of perception she saw with an awful clarity everything that happened as Lorrest reached higher with his upraised hand, snatched the fluorescent tube from its clips, and—turning it into a two-metre glass spear—drove it with all his strength into the stubby man’s face. It hit him on the bridge of the nose, shattered into little daggers which gouged through his eyes, then shattered again under the continuing impetus of the thrust to wreak further hideous damage. He fell backwards, howling, his pistol turning towards Lorrest. With the light tube in his hand reduced to a bloody spike, Lorrest went down after him. Gretana turned and ran to the bedroom as the howling abruptly ceased.

Death is real! The words shrilled silently inside her head. I’ve seen a butcher at work, and I’ve smelted the blood…

“Gretana!” Lorrest was standing in the doorway, and even in the reduced light from the other room it was obvious that his right hand was wet and red. “Playtime is over—you are now going to tell me where that node is.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Think again.” He came towards her, reaching out with the hand which was wet and red, his face an inhuman mask. “Think again, Gretana.”

“Near Carsewell, New York,” she heard herself whimper as she tried to avoid the hand. “On a ridge called Cotter’s Edge, just west of the Greenways enclave.”

“Thank you.” Lorrest retreated and left the room, and a few seconds later she heard a rush of water from the bathroom. She buried her face in a pillow, trying to suppress a gory kaleidoscope of after-images, and waited for any sound which would indicate that Lorrest had left the apartment. There was a brief silence and then, with the unexpected suddenness of a reptile attack, something warm and pliable fell across her legs. She sprang upright with a sob of panic to find that Lorrest had returned to the bedroom and had thrown one of her overcoats on to the bed.

“On your feet,” he said tersely. “Let’s go.”

She raised her hand, symbolically warding him off. “Go? With you?”

“What did you expect? If one man traced me here others could do it and, believe me, there’s no way you could get out of telling them where I’d gone. Besides, you don’t want to go on sharing your apartment with a corpse, especially if the police come nosing around.”

“You’re the killer. You!”

“In our special circumstances, that hardly matters. On top of all this, I need you as insurance.

“I don’t understand,” Gretana said, pushing the coat away with a trembling hand.

“Don’t you?” Lorrest’s smile was barely recognisable as such. “I don’t trust you any more, Gretana—you’ve been too long on Earth. The only way I can be sure that node location is correct is to take you with me. If it is. vou can skord yourself off to Station 23—which would be the safest place for you anyway—and blab everything you know to the Warden. Perhaps he’ll give you a vacation.”

Gretana dredged far into her reserves and found the strength for defiance. “Perhaps he’ll give you one.”

“He’d have to find me first—and there’s an awful lot of galaxy out there.” Lorrest tilted his head and stared for a moment in the direction of the unseen Moon. “And in two days’ time nothing the Warden does is going to make any difference.”