Elly looked at her smoker and put it out. "What I said a minute ago, about random things falling on me.

Do you know that on that mission everything peculiar seemed to happen?"

"Such as what?"

"I'm not sure I can even recall the whole list of oddities now. Before the berserker jumped us, we found amino acids in free s.p.a.ce, varieties that no one had ever observed outside of atmosphere before. All kinds of organics, in enormous profusion."

"Excuse me, but I have never heard what the basic purpose of that mission was."

"General intelligence-gathering. Not looking for berserkers, certainly, not with two people in one small ship." The young woman fell silent, perhaps with some private memory.

"You were telling me about all the organic materials."

"Right. We were surprised. There are very few planets, you know, in that sector near the Core."

"CORESEC. I know a little bit about it. But tell me."

"High average star-density, better than thirty per cubic pa.r.s.ec. Nebular material very heavy, very complex. A maze of tunnels and bottlenecks; it's easy for a ship to get trapped. A number of them have.

That's why they sent Frank."

"And you."

"Yes, I suppose. I was good. We saw gluts of petroleum. Would you believe dense enough in places for real gas-fires? Where there was free oxygen too, in regions sheltered from heavy starlight, you could get a line of real flame a billion kilometers long, along a zone of compression in the medium."

Another pause. Lombok got the feeling that when she had started to talk she had intended to lead up to something, but now she kept drifting away from it again. No doubt because nothing mattered. He prompted: "On that trip you became pregnant."

"Yes. I didn't realize you knew about that. I was on contraceptives, naturally. If I had wanted a pregnancy that wouldn't have been the ideal time or place to start it."

"Naturally."

"But for some reason there was a contraceptive failure. On that trip, all the long shots came home first."

It seemed that going on with the conversation was among the things that did not matter. Not wanting to concentrate too obviously on the pregnancy, he asked, "Tell me how you got away from the berserker."

Now Elly was looking past Lombok, as if at a viewscreen somewhere, and as she began to speak again tension gradually developed. Her strong hands started pulling and fingering at her robe. "It was after us-I mean right after us, a few kilometers, no more. I think that by then it had decided it could take us easily, and it wanted us alive. As we entered the Taj, there was some kind of-shock, sudden change, don't ask me exactly what. Frank was knocked out. I remained conscious the whole time-at least when they hypnotized me back at CORESEC, they couldn't find any gaps in my consciousness."

"And what did you see, feel, experience, while you were in there?" There was no immediate answer, and Lombok added, "How long did this-immersion last?"

The brief glance Elly gave him was almost pitying. "How long did it last? Well, the ship's clock in Frank's compartment ran through about four hours during the immersion, as you call it. The clock on my side meanwhile recorded something over eleven years."

Lombok had seen those figures before. He cleared his throat. "Obviously not any relativistic effect."

"Obviously." She smiled briefly. "Or I would have come out of the Taj with a half-grown child."

"So, some kind of strange field or whatever fouled up the timers. They were the regular cesium-133 clocks?"

"Yes. Therefore atoms of cesium-133 were changing energy states in our two compartments in quite different ways. If you were a scientist you'd look more puzzled than you do."

"Oh, I'm puzzled. But that's nothing new for me. Was your pregnancy affected by whatever had happened? Was the later fetal development normal?"

"I really don't know. There were other people willing to worry about that. And able to do a better job of taking care of it than I could, I'm sure. I had all I could handle, for a while, inside my own head. I had the conceptus removed on Alpine, the first place we stopped. You know, this is the first time I've really talked about it since. It was a nice-looking adoption agency, as I recall, well-equipped . . . I suppose there's an eleven-year-old running around Alpine now with a stranger origin than he or she can well imagine." Elly's expression softened, without quite reaching anything that could be called a smile.

Lombok sat back in his chair, raised his arms in a luxurious stretch. He looked up and around, at the dim groining of the ancient arches. "Who is the Final Savior, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I don't mind. We will know It when It comes."

"It?"

"When we say that, people tend to think we are berserker-worshippers. Completely untrue. The Savior is, will be, beyond the cla.s.sifications of life and non-life."

"Identified with omnipotence? With a Creator?"

"I don't see any meaning in those questions."

Lombok cheerfully let them pa.s.s. "You were going to tell me more about your experience inside the Taj."

"Yes." Elly saw her hands plucking at the gray robe, and made them stop. "Descriptions won't do much good, I'm afraid. I tried to make recordings, take pictures. They didn't show very much when we got home."

"I know. If it hadn't been for the two things you brought back, it's possible no one would have believed your story at all."

There was a flash of humor in her eyes. "I didn't want to bring up the subject of those artifacts. Security, you know."

"I thought security wouldn't matter to you."

"It must matter to you, though. Now I'm sure you are really from Defense. Tell me, have more people been sent to the Taj? Oh, they must have been, by this time. I'd like to know what they've found out."

So would I, Lombok thought drily. Neither of the two expeditions had returned as yet. Which was not necessarily a sign of anything really wrong, not yet, but certainly in another standard year it would begin to be. He said, "I'm not really in the exploration end of the business."

Elly was once more looking over his shoulder. "You want to hear what it was like. All right. At one point, for example, it was as if-as if the ship had been turned inside out, and shrunken to the size of a giant beach-ball. Spherical still, but hardly bigger than a human body. I sat there somehow, on this intricate thing, riding-like a sort of side-saddle. My own body-I couldn't tell if my body was inside out too, or not. I'm sure I wasn't dreaming. My head was giant-sized and stuck out unprotected."

"Didn't you have your suit on?"

"Yes. When the experience started. But then I seemed to be outside of it."

"Colonel Marcus was unconscious all this time?"

"Yes. Commander Marcus, then. I couldn't raise him on the intercom, which had changed into the weirdest little squiggle of wire. I looked around the-the beach-ball, but I couldn't identify anything belonging to the ship."

"And what about things outside the ship? Away from it?"

There was a longer pause than any yet. Elly might have been working out a complex math problem in her mind.

"Order," she answered at last. "And disorder, too. But maybe what looked like, felt like chaos was only order, arrangement, of a higher kind than I could understand."

"Can't you tell me anything more concrete?"

"I can. But I don't think it'll help you in grasping the total experience." She gave a sharp sigh, started again. "When you're dreaming, the concept or feeling comes into your mind first, and then the brain generates pictures as an appropriate accompaniment. This wasn't dreaming, definitely. But I think it worked in a similar way. First I was aware of order, and then I saw these great structural members surrounding our ship. Somehow I was able to appreciate, visualize, the distance scale. As if we were inside something like a geodesic dome, but bigger than a star. I've never had an experience like that before. I don't suppose I ever will again.

"I was aware of disorder, or apparent disorder, things going on that made no sense at all to me. And with that I visualized a mist, more like a water-droplet fog than nebula, so thick that I could see it whipping past, right beside the ship. And there were sounds-I can't really recall them, let alone describe them. But they affected me in the same way. Order and disorder alternating. Music, but not like-and I had the feeling that if I could have stopped the ship, I could have joyfully spent my life in trying to unravel the mysteries in just one handful of that fog rushing past. . . ."

Elly's hands were still now, but white-knuckled. Her face was almost serene, but Lombok to his astonishment thought he saw the beginnings of tears in those far-looking eyes.

For some reason this depth of feeling in her made him a little nervous, a little embarra.s.sed, almost a little angry. "At debriefing," he said, "you didn't report-an experience of that intensity."

Her gaze came back to him. "I was numb," she said, relaxing a trifle. "My feelings . . . have been growing, developing, ever since it happened."

Lombok was not satisfied. He said, "This thing, the Taj-it was only a couple of hours away, at sublight speeds, from at least one quite ma.s.sive star. I mean the star emitting that plasma jet, in which you were trying to hide your ship."

"Yes."

"Well, doesn't that present a seeming inconsistency? Doesn't it suggest perhaps that this thing that made such an impression on you had no physical reality?" Lombok was not much impressed by mystical experiences; not when some people could attain them by inhaling the smoke of burning weeds.

"Yes, it does," Elly answered calmly. "Or it would, rather, if I thought the Taj was just a physical construct of stellar size. Then tidal factors and other things would seem to make that kind of close proximity impossible. But I can only report things as they were."

"Or as they seemed to you."

"You yourself mentioned the two things we brought back. Proof of some kind of unusual encounter, certainly."

"Certainly." He had some theories of his own about them, but now was not the time. He was letting himself be distracted from what he had come here for. "Sorry I interrupted; go on. You went into the Taj, and the berserker came in after you, presumably."

"I saw it inside, following us, for a while. Wait. First, it-it said something, on voice radio, about how our new weapons weren't going to help us. Then we went in, and it came in, following us . . . and then . .

. I don't know. It was destroyed, perhaps. Or it lost us. Or it just-gave up."

"Gave up? How could a berserker-?"

"I don't know. I . . . the funny thing is, once we were inside, I think I all but forgot about the berserker."

"You were piloting the whole time you were inside?"

"I took the controls, on manual, when Frank conked out. Then somewhere along the line we went on autopilot, because I do remember clearly, after we had emerged again, switching the autopilot off and taking back manual control."

"You were back in normal s.p.a.ce then?"

"What pa.s.ses for normal, in CORESEC. And Frank was coming round, and by then the Taj was out of sight. As soon as Frank started to get on top of the situation again, he made some little joke about how he'd rested. When I tried to tell him what had happened, he thought I was, or had been, delirious. Then we found the two artifacts, the astragalus in his cabin, the ring in mine. They were just sitting on our consoles, right out in the open. We picked them up-didn't know what to make of them. It wasn't until later, at CORESEC base, that their-properties-were discovered."

"Yes." Lombok pondered for a while. "Did Frank ever know that you were pregnant?"

Elly didn't spend much time thinking about it. "I really don't know, he never said anything. He's had other children here and there; now and then he'd mention the fact in pa.s.sing, as you might mention having had your appendix out. Don't tell me he's expressing a personal interest now."

"Not that I know of." Here came a few tourists, or prospective converts maybe, crossing the nave behind a gray-robed guide. The tourist man carried a rather weighty single-handled case which probably meant he was going to make some elaborate holographs.

Elly was lighting herself another smoker. "Something's come up, though, hasn't it?" she insisted. "Having to do with the kid."

Lombok appeared to take thought. "He'd be about ten now, wouldn't he? Are you developing a personal interest of your own?"

"Eleven. You said 'he.' "

"You didn't ask them about the s.e.x at the adoption agency, when you-?"

There was a step behind Lombok, and he turned to see one of the tourist women bending close. Why should she want to ask him a question, when she had a guide? But it wasn't a question anyway, because the woman had something in her hand, and there was a new coolness in Lombok's face and lungs.

Stupid joke,he thought, and started to get up, and knew that he was falling down instead.

SIX.

"Hey, Michel, that was one lovely counterpunch." In the low-ceilinged, hard-surfaced Moonbase corridor the voice issuing from Frank's speakers took on a small tail of ringing echo, and if Michel had been wearing Lancelot he might have found some amus.e.m.e.nt in trying to sort out the several sets of what he had learned were called harmonics. But he was in his loafing clothes today, shorts and loose shirt and sandals, taking a lone and moody stroll that had led him farther and farther from the busier regions of the base. He hadn't seen anyone at all for a couple of minutes before he came upon Frank's boxes standing motionless against a wall.

But Michel was at once glad of the meeting. "Thanks," he said. "I didn't mean to knock you out."

"I know. It's all right. No tests for you today?"

Two standard days had gone by since their sparring match. "Not today. Tomorrow I think we start again."

"Youstart again. They've informed me I won't have to wear the d.a.m.ned thing any more. What's up? You look a little worried."

"Well." There were really two things, neither of which he had yet mentioned to anyone else, not even to his mother. "For one thing, they're changing the equipment. Trying to fit extra weapons onto it. But-"

Michel, almost despairing of trying to make his feelings on the subject convincing to anyone else, shook his head.

"You don't know if you can work the weapons properly."

"That's not it! Probably I can. But-the thing is, Lancelot really doesn't need them."

Frank moved a few centimeters from the wall, all segments rolling together. His voice sounded alarmed and hardly mechanical at all. "Hey, kid. Eventually, you know, whoever wears that thing is supposed to fight berserkers with it."

"I know."

"That was a good pillow-fight that you and I had, but as a test it was very preliminary. If that had been a berserker machine instead of me . . . n.o.body's going to punch one of those things out with his fist."

"I know! I mean, I know what you mean, Frank. But-I think I could. With Lancelot. Once I really learn how Lancelot works."

Michel could almost see Frank's head shaking inside its box. "Kid. Michel. Look. Maybe it is theoretically possible for Lancelot to draw that kind of power. But the enemy uses the same power sources we do, roughly speaking. And Lancelot right now doesn't have the hardware."

"You mean metal."

Frank had fallen silent. Michel, looking back over his shoulder in the direction he himself had come from, saw the dark-skinned woman from the scientific group, approaching at a graceful walk. Not in her s.p.a.cesuit now of course, but wearing a dress whose draped skirt somehow, with her moving in it, suggested tall gra.s.s and elegantly drooping trees moved by a light wind.

"Michel," said Frank's speakers in a tone that was subtly new, "this is Vera. Mrs. Tupelov."

"h.e.l.lo," said Michel, and, as Mother would have expected, made a polite greeting gesture.