Harry was coming back into the small control room when he saw that the robot Perdix, in the course of keeping things tidy, had picked up an odd small object. Harry had last seen its like back on Cascadia. It was a kind of ligature, the kind of thing a paddy sometimes used to tie people without causing injury, or that kidnappers might find very handy in their business.

"What's that?"

Wordlessly Perdix handed the thing over. Harry bent the narrow, springy strip to and fro, and ran it through his fingers. It was hard to think of any way an engineer or test pilot might find such an item useful.

It might be used to tie small tools or spare parts together, or bundle someone's lunch. But none of those ideas seemed to make a lot of sense.

It finally occurred to Harry that the strip, used as a handcuff, might have been left over from some human's sessions with s.e.x robots-or with another human being, for that matter. Not that you would have to bind a robot for any reason that he could see-it would always cheerfully obey a simple order to hold still.

Holding the thin strip between thumb and forefinger, Harry turned to Gianopolous. "What do you use this for?"

The professor stared with what seemed honest blankness. "I can't remember ever seeing it before. If it is what it appears to be, I would say that it suggests bondage, and that sort of activity holds no attraction for me. One of the Templars perhaps left it aboard."

"Wouldn't have thought they'd be much into bondage either."

"Ah, I'm not so sure about that." The inventor gave his little smile. "One hears stories . . ."

"Yeah, one always hears stories. Maybe there was someone else on board, that you forgot to mention?"

Gianopolous showed irritation. "I keep telling you there hasn't been anyone else. Whatever the purpose for which your Mister Winston Cheng wants this ship . . . well, I do not care to know that purpose. I suppose that he has devised some way for it to afford him a secret advantage over his compet.i.tors, whoever they may be. As for the Templars, I shouldn't be surprised if warped minds are fairly common in that group."

Harry grunted. "Probably no more there than anywhere else. And he's not my Mister Winston Cheng. I don't much want anything to do with him. I won't, once this thing is over."

Gianopolous leaned a little closer. "Harry, I find myself becoming genuinely intrigued. What is 'this thing'

exactly, for which my ship is wanted? Isn't it time to open up a bit?"

Harry thought it over, shook his head. "I'd better let the boss handle that, in his own way. Along with the finances. It should all make a package."

Several more hours had pa.s.sed, with the ship for the most part cruising on autopilot-that too was part of the test flight-when Harry, who had been mainly just observing, shucked off the pilot's helmet and stood up and stretched and moved around. Gianopolous, in the other chair, had nodded off to sleep.

Yes, there were some strange gadgets on this boat. And some odd but minor deficiencies as well, things he'd noticed on his first walk through. Harry made his way aft, into another compartment.

For one thing, there was a definite lack of medirobots, which struck Harry as rather odd . . . here was where he had noticed, on his first go round, an alcove where the presence of the usual connections suggested that two ordinary coffin-sized medirobots might once have been installed.

Few vessels of any size at all lifted off on an interstellar voyage without at least one medirobot on board, insurance against emergencies, and that would go double when a ship was still in the test-flight stage. At least a couple of such machines seemed a minimum requirement on a ship like this one.

Returning to the control room, he noted that the professor was now awake, and commented: "No medirobots on board."

The other only nodded. "I've done without a lot of frills. The connections are all in place for two units; in fact I believe the Templars made a temporary installation as part of their test program."

It would seem only reasonable to have aboard more than one medirobot, when your next planned mission was to carry an irregular crew of semiprofessional commandos into a desperate fight. But, thought Harry, there must be some spare units stored among the plentiful supplies of hardware at 207GST, just waiting to be brought aboard some ship and installed. Apart from the practical certainty of casualties among the attacking team, any prisoners they did manage to rescue were probably going to need a medirobot apiece, and more likely an entire hospital.

Looking at it realistically, to predict that the raiders were going to need medirobots, or hospital care, was taking a very optimistic view of their probable condition when the fight was over. Of course being realistic in this matter was not a good idea, because then you would have to think about the probable condition of any prisoners the upcoming raid might succeed in discovering . . .

"What's wrong, Silver?"

"Nothing."

Suddenly Harry was afraid, not that he would fail to find his wife and son, but that he would succeed.

And when he had found her and the boy he would have to look at what the enemy had done to them . . .

Harry and the inventor completed an outwardly uneventful return to the advance base on WW 207GST.

The small ship, quite ordinary except in its appearance, cruised swiftly on autopilot and in its innocent unarmed civilian mode.

Both the defensive systems and the people at the base on 207GST had been fully alerted to expect the arrival of Gianopolous's unorthodox ship. Still, Harry and the inventor experienced some difficulty convincing the wanderworld's automated defenses that they were really on the side of humanity and of the angels.

Everyone who had been waiting for Harry's return showed relief when their two unimpeachably human faces actually appeared, climbing out of the ship's concealed hatch into the comfortable atmosphere of berth Number One.

Gianopolous, riding the copilot's seat on approach, had, in one of the last phases of testing, taken the controls from Harry and shifted his vessel briefly into its mode of berserker disguise. Even though the people on the rock had known what was coming, it still had a notable effect.

Someone told them: "Apart from your private code signal, we couldn't see anything that didn't look like genuine berserker."

Aristotle Gianopolous's mixed reputation had of course preceded him, and he got only a dubious welcome from some of the other people at the base.

But Winston Cheng was already present, and seized the opportunity to have a private talk with the inventor.

While en route, Gianopolous had told Harry he looked forward to some such discussion . . . but when he emerged from it, half an hour later, his hopeful att.i.tude had been replaced by a look of grim resignation. He didn't look like a man who'd just been made wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.

"What's the matter?"

No immediate answer.

"Did you sign a contract?"

"Yes." The inventor's chin was quivering. Now it appeared that anger was going to predominate, though fear was certainly not absent.

"Collect your down payment?"

"Yes! And then . . ."

"Then what?"

"I've just had the nature of this-this insane military adventure-explained to me. It appears certain that my ship is going to be destroyed."

"Oh. Yeah. It's likely. But you went through with the sale."

"Of course I went through with it! At such a price . . ."

Satranji, as chief pilot of Cheng's yacht, was here on the base as long as Cheng himself was here.

Satranji now jeered: "Well, man, look at it this way. At last your ship will get the full test that you've been looking forward to. I bet it'll turn out to be a little slow on acceleration."

"Yes, a full test . . . and no way to record the results. I'll have the money to build an improved model, but how will I know what changes should be made?"

Once back on the base, Harry found himself frequently staring at the digital clocks and calendars that Winston Cheng had grown fond of placing everywhere. Harry wasn't worried about the pa.s.sage of time, he was simply having trouble extracting any meaning from the changing numbers. Time was pa.s.sing, something more than a standard month had gone by since Cheng's people had been swept away, harvested by mechanical devices, wrenched out of the presence and the lives of their fellow humans.

Harry's wife and son had been missing for almost as great a length of time. The only meaning that the changing time-indicators really had for Harry was that he was in some sense getting closer and closer to his woman and their child.

When one of Harry's colleagues casually asked him something about his future plans, he answered simply that he wasn't thinking about anything beyond the raid. He wouldn't let himself imagine, or hope, or dream, that it might be totally successful.

Louise Newari, making an opportunity to be alone with Harry, seemed to be sending signals that she would like to be more friendly with Harry Silver, the famous pilot who suddenly, to those who knew his story, had become a tragic figure.

But Harry stayed distant and remote. He was here to do a job. Beyond that he no longer had a life, or wanted one.

He also resisted Satranji's attempts to egg him into a fight, or at least some kind of compet.i.tion.

Constantly in the back of Harry's mind was the fact that his name was on the list of humans to whom dedicated a.s.sa.s.sin machines had been a.s.signed. Darchan had been unable to tell him how old the list might be, how long Harry had been marked for destruction. But any sleepless hours Harry spent in his bunk in his small cabin-and there were some-were not on that account. For one thing, it seemed to Harry that any berserker would probably have a hard time pinpointing the location of any human individual until it had him actually in sight.

Of course that worked both ways-it was very unlikely that he, or any human, could try to determine the current position of any particular berserker, or tell where it was headed for, even if he had been inclined to make the effort. So, while it was possible that his own private, customized embodiment of Death could overtake him at any moment, the a.s.sa.s.sin could just as easily be tracking a false lead, pursuing some look-alike for Harry Silver a thousand light-years from the Gravel Pit. Or, for that matter, it could already have been blown to h.e.l.l in some chance encounter with an ED warship.

Suppose that the machine with his name on it did manage to catch up with him. Well, then it caught up, and that was all. There was no fear attached to the idea. His killer might be doing him a favor.

Back in those seemingly remote days before the first kidnapping had taken place, Satranji had spent more time than anyone else in this strange system called the Gravel Pit, and had more thoroughly charted its peculiarities, in his mind and in recordings, than any other human being. So Satranji perhaps had spent some days in charge of scouting. Of course, when you came right down to it, it was quite arguable that no amount of experience was going to be of much benefit to human beings trying to find their way around inside the Gravel Pit. Chaos was chaos, and a student could watch it happening for years, trying to pick out patterns, and still have only the vaguest notion of how the system involved was going to change in the next minute.

Such a chaotic mess as the Gravel Pit could not endure for long, on the astronomical time scale; calculations based on conservative a.s.sumptions predicted that in ten thousand standard years, or perhaps a hundred thousand at the most, the "gravel" would have ground and polished and shattered itself, through millions upon millions of collisions, into some reasonably well-behaved and predictable system.

Probably the next long stable interval would see a system consisting mostly of Saturnian rings of dust and sandy grit; whether either humans or berserkers would still be around when that time came remained to be seen. It seemed very unlikely there would be both.

Lady Masaharu, in her capacity as coordinator of the expedition, had several times reminded the other members of the crew that they could not expect to achieve their goal by simply hurling two or three ships, however well one of them might be disguised, at a berserker base.

The rescue attempt had remained Cheng's consuming obsession, by far the most important thing in his life. These last few days he had become, if anything, even more fanatical about it.

Winston Cheng's tens of thousands of employees, men and women scattered across several sectors, formed a vast pool of talent, much of which was available for him to call on at any time. There were people available ready and willing to undertake any sort of job; among the thousands were a large number of people who were not likely to ask inconvenient questions of the boss.

The magnate might not even be aware of the fact that he was somehow profiting from those robotic s.e.x machines, unless he took the trouble to investigate.

d.a.m.n the expense, and d.a.m.n the dangers. The human recon specialists at the base, led by Harry and Satranji, had had a hundred robot scouts shipped to WW 207GST in a big freighter, and were sending them out prodigally. These machines took gruesome risks, jumping in and out of flights.p.a.ce while deep in this strange system's gravitational well.

A majority of those devices never came back from such missions, and it was presumed they were lost in collisions with dust or rocks or clouds of gas-at the speeds that the scouts were made to risk, in their human masters' desperate quest for knowledge, collision with a swirl of thin gas could have the same practical effect as with a granite asteroid.

Of course some of the loyal robots might have been picked off by the ent.i.ty they were trying to locate.

But not all of them were failures.

"This time we've got something."

When at last one of the robotic scouts was proudly brought in to 207GST with an actual image of the enemy's base, somewhat blurry but probably reasonably accurate, the visible structure appeared to be even smaller than anyone on the team had expected. Indeed, it seemed so very small that their crazy enterprise began to seem almost feasible.

The size and configuration were described, along with any visible evidence of activity. The structure, perhaps half a kilometer in length, appeared to consist of a series of interconnected domes, strung along the surface of a smooth rock roughly oval in shape, and not a whole lot larger than the structure it supported.

It seemed that this was the extent of the berserker presence in the Gravel Pit system; none of the other rocks nearby in stable orbits showed any sign of having been worked on.

There was little to be seen in the way of s.p.a.cegoing machines-only a couple of small units-and nothing in the way of factories or shipyards. There was only a small dock. This was not a full-scale berserker base, with heavy industrial capacity, but a very specialized installation.

Harry had never heard of any other berserker base being quite this small. There was no sign that the berserker defenses had taken notice of the scout before it plunged back into the maelstrom with its precious sampling of information.

Hopes began to rise among the members of the a.s.sault team, and the support staff. There seemed to be a fighting chance that the berserker's ground installation could be taken by surprise, and seized by a small attacking force-provided that Gianopolous's trickery with the identification code worked anywhere nearly as well as he claimed it would.

TWELVE.

The inventor had been rendered nervous by his talk with Cheng, and the effect was not entirely produced by the vast sum of money he had just been given, in the form of a guaranteed letter of credit, valid at practically any financial inst.i.tution in the Galaxy. Nor was it entirely due to the impending destruction of his ship.

Remembering the inventor's nervous reaction in the Trophy Room, Harry was curious to know if the man had ever actually faced a berserker.

Before the Lady Masaharu took Gianopolous with her aboard theSecret Weapon , he had been having a confrontation with a series of guards. He kept insisting: "I want to leave here. Now."

The last of Cheng's human employees to hear this complaint simply turned and walked away, leaving only a cheerful robot to deal with the inventor.

The robot said, brightly: "Yes sir. I understand that you wish to leave. But no ship at this station is currently boarding pa.s.sengers or visitors."

When Gianopolous persisted, Winston Cheng's robot pointed out that contracts had been signed, the sale was finalized. "Sir, you are required to keep yourself immediately available as a consultant for a period of ten standard days. That is clearly specified in the fourth article. Were you to separate yourself from the other members of the support group, the whole contract could be considered void, and your advance refundable."

"There was no such provision in the doc.u.ment as I read it!"

"Then, sir, I would suggest it is possible you did not read it thoroughly enough."

A copy of the doc.u.ment was readily available. The robot, suddenly deforming itself until it lost what faint resemblance to a human body it had possessed, produced a printout from its belly.

Gianopolous threw the paper on the deck without looking at it, knowing well enough what it would say.

He stewed in silence for a few moments, then burst out: "I tell you I want pa.s.sage on some other ship. It seems that you have couriers coming and going here almost continuously. This contract business can be settled later, in civil court."

The agent dealing with him was imperturbably sympathetic. "I'm very sorry, sir. Pa.s.senger s.p.a.ce is currently unavailable except on the evacuation courier. No other ships are scheduled to arrive."

"That is a barefaced lie!"