"Major Moore said Hague would be in my lab early this afternoon. The med teams aren't finished with him yet." Then: "It was rough, wasn't it?"

Nachtegall's shoulders sank. He cradled his new hand in his lap. "Yeah, Chris. It was rough. We lost almost everybody. That's all I can tell you. But if Hague really is their best brain, they'll be readying some kind of retaliation. And they're going to be pissed about what I did to that laboratory station."

Dykstra gave Nachtegall a sardonic smile. "They've already retaliated," he said. "Lex talionis. A few days ago they hit California with fusion bombs. My house was under them."

"What?"

"They don't know I'm on the Moon, I guess. We deprived them of their mad scientist. They wanted to deprive us of ours."

"I'm sorry, Chris. You loved that place."

Dykstra stood up. "There's a war on. We don't have time for sentimentality. At least I don't-not at my age. Now, tell me about Hague."

Nachtegall frowned. "Moore won't let me. He was specific."

"Oh?"

* * * Dykstra arrived at his lab to find Vander Kam already there with Major Moore and another man. He assumed it was Hague, but he'd never seen any pictures of the man. Judging by the man's appearance, he now knew why. "Dr. Dykstra," Moore said. "I'd like you to meet your new colleague, Dr. Arie Hague. Dr. Hague, this is Dr. James Christian Dykstra."

"Pleased to meet you," Dykstra said, extending his hand.

Hague took Dykstra's hand limply. "Yes, Dr. Dykstra, Dr. Dykstra, yes, yes, Dr. Dykstra." Hague was short and chubby, with soft muscles and a pinched face surrounding an undersized, pointy nose. "Yes, wonderful lab, wonderful lab, Dr. Dykstra, yes." He was nodding his head and smiling and seemed to have forgotten that he was still clasping Dykstra's hand.

Dykstra looked him over. So this was his rival, the man responsible for the only controversy to arise from his work. An autistic savant. Incredibly deep talents but so narrowly focused. Now I know how he could plunge so far into my physics, and still remain so unknown outside the discipline. They kept him under wraps. "Have you shown Dr. Hague our facilities yet, Rick?"

"Just briefly," Vander Kam said. "He'd really like to look over our mass converter, I think." Vander Kam had already referred to Hague in the third person, as if he weren't there. It was easy to do. Hague didn't notice.

Dykstra disengaged his hand. "Shall we have a look at our current project, Dr. Hague?" he said, leading the squat prodigy over to the table on which the gear was spread.

Major Moore waved from the door and made his exit, smiling, as if pleased with himself.

"Oh yes, Dr. Dykstra. The equipment, the equipment, yes, the work. Let us examine the work, Dr. Dykstra, yes."

Dykstra explained the theoretical details of the mass conversion process and Vander Kam covered specific items dealing with the device itself. Hague was a good listener except for his maddening habit of muttering, "Yes, oh yes, Dr. Dykstra, very good, yes," after every other sentence.

It was when Rick was discussing the specifics of the power control unit that Hague showed the first real glimpse of his uncanny talent. "Not right, no, not right, Dr. Vander Kam, no. Not right. Not good. Not this one."

"Why?" Dykstra asked. "What's wrong with that power control?"

"Not right. Not best," Hague said. "Magnoflux Electrics catalog, page 453, entry five, model SQG100230983-A. Need that one. Yes, need that one, is best, yes, need that one."

Vander Kam looked at Dykstra, shrugged, and called up the entry from the catalog. Dykstra looked at the screen, read the specs, turned to Vander Kam and said, "He's right."

Vander Kam nodded assent. "I know. Damn! I looked through catalogs for three hours just trying to find the one we've got now."

Hague was still at the table. While the other two had been distracted, he'd decided to fiddle with the device. "Hey!" Rick shouted as Hague pulled out a field guide.

"Wrong shape, wrong, all wrong. More curve, yes, curve. Radius of curvature 4.55982 centimeters, 4.55982 needed."

Rick rushed to the table and took the field guide away, then turned to Dykstra and looked at him helplessly.

Hague was jumping up at Vander Kam's hand, trying to retrieve the piece. "Give back, let me fix. I can fix. Please, I can fix, yes, I can fix: 4.55982 centimeters, yes."

"Give it back to him, Rick. Let's see what our new colleague can do." As he said it, he felt the sudden onset of a chill, as if the Sun had gone into eclipse.

"Dr. Dykstra?" Moore's face filled the screen. Dykstra was in bed, but the red blinking light by the screen had indicated an urgent priority, so he accepted the call.

"Yes, Major? What is it?"

"I'm sorry to awaken you, Doctor. But there's a new file on the system tonight, Slingshot. Look at it immediately. You'll understand what's involved from the technical end and I think you'll want to start dealing with this new information right away."

"Oh, c'mon Major, give me just a little hint," Dykstra said, annoyed.

Moore frowned, looked serious, and said, "The aliens have made another appearance. We learned some new things from this encounter. You of all people should look into it right away." Then with an expression Dykstra could best describe as "savage delight," Moore added, "And Dr. Hague, too." He broke off the connection.

Dragging himself from bed, Dykstra instructed the autochef to make him coffee, lightened to a fifty percent concentration of cream, and brought up his workstation. He retrieved the Slingshot file.

Reading rapidly, he discovered the basic facts. Slingshot was the code name for a System Patrol base some sixty astronomical units out. The work there involved investigating methods of delivery for kinetic kill projectiles against Dykstra shielded installations. Dykstra knew better than anyone that the best way to crack a shield was to smack it with something heavy, moving fast. Most of the work involved the use of close orbits past airless moons and asteroids by warheads that were essentially "rocks" equipped with high gradient pseudograv generators. The rocks were to be introduced into the Belt along carefully determined trajectories, where they'd perform close flybys of asteroids to undetectably pick up speed and alter their vectors, then smash into, as the text put it, "Belt military assets."

Dykstra admired the work, recognizing some of it as inspired, even brilliant; he'd have to check out the Slingshot base roster to see who was responsible.

Details were sketchy, and more information was promised for later, but the base had been hit by two alien spacecraft. They'd come in fast, without warning, and opened fire. The base had taken a beating, but somehow they'd managed to wreck one of the alien ships, and the other had immediately raced away.

Okay, this is all very interesting, but why couldn't it have waited until morning?

He found a cache of raw data from the tracking instruments that had first acquired the incoming alien ships. There was no visual data yet. The base was a wreck. The only information Intelligence had as yet was the text of the messages the acting base commander had sent, and whatever raw instrument data was in shape to transmit.

It took Dykstra only moments to orient himself to the numbers in the data cache. Here were the readings from the spatial position where the alien ships would shortly appear. There: Doppler radar and Dykdar scans indicating two craft, two hundred thousand kilometers out, closing rapidly. The tracking data followed the two vessels up until the moment they destroyed the scanning instruments.

What he saw disturbed him.

"Okay," he muttered. "Let's take a closer look at the time sequence." Time was resolved to the millisecond. At 14:31:46.003 the scans showed nothing. At 14:31:46.004, indications of one object appeared. At 14:31:46.013, a second object appeared, while the first was now a clear image.

But the scanning radius for the Dykdar alone was over five million kilometers. Even incoming at almost lightspeed would have put the ships in the Dykdar scan volume for sixteen seconds prior to their emergence.

But one moment, nothing, one hundredth of a second later, two ships, and both only two hundred thousand klicks out.

"Dear Lord!" Dykstra exclaimed. "They have it. Faster-than-light drive. Hyperdrive, overdrive, ultradrive, warp drive, and everything else the science fiction people have named it. The aliens have it."

But how does it work? I have no idea how it works. It was clear why Moore had called. The major was right; Dykstra was glad to have this information immediately. But something else: Major Moore knew it would not be wasted on Dykstra that Hague had been right about the discontinuity. And he, wrong.

Spite, Major? Was your call also motivated out of spite?

No point in being small about it. His second call found Hague in the lab. "Yes, oh yes, Dr. Dykstra, oh yes?" Dykstra told him the news. "Yes, oh yes, Dr. Dykstra, oh yes!"

II.

Sunshine

Samantha MacTavish, as usual after work these days, raced home to her apartment and checked her terminal for mail. The Luna City mail system was excellent, and anything from a serviceman that had reached Luna any time up until a half hour ago should have made it through the military censor machines by now. War or no war, MoonMail guaranteed prompt delivery. Scanning through the listings, she found her latest copy of The Journal of Genano Engineering, and a letter from her mom.

But nothing from her husband Steve, out there, somewhere beyond Uranus, or maybe Neptune, serving on a battleship probably, fighting this damnable war against the Belt. "Dammit!" she said aloud. Then softly: "Oh, honey, I miss you."

The last letter had come a week ago, full of feelings, but short on specifics about where he was or what he was doing or when he'd get a chance to come home. She wistfully remembered how they'd gotten together; that stupid stunt he'd pulled as the preeminent suicide orbiteer of Luna City. Steve had bet a System Patrol officer that he could plot a suicide orbit close enough to the lunar surface to allow him to leave a mark on the ground. He'd almost gotten himself killed, had lost the bet in the process, and had thought he'd failed in his greater purpose, which was to impress Samantha enough to notice him. But she already had by then!

But shortly after they'd married, Steve was drafted and sent away.

"Damn war," she said.

Women were not drafted, but she could have enlisted. Her skills in genano engineering were first-rate, good enough to get a top research position on the Martian atmosphere project. She would have been made an officer and been put in charge of a billion-credit research facility, with no end of lucrative opportunities after the war. But she could never get past the fact that war meant people killing other people. She understood about clashing ideologies, and competing economies, and just causes, but none of that excused the evil of an institution that removed souls from their bodies.

In theory she could admit that sometimes circumstances may conspire to make killing an excusable sin. But this war with the Belt didn't make the cut.

And besides, the Patrol had separated her from her husband; she wanted no part of it.

Since she had no letter from Steve, Samantha read the one from her mother. It contained the usual trivial news and pleas to be cheerful, but didn't substantially improve her blue mood. She scanned the table of contents of the professional journal, found a couple of interesting papers and looked up their abstracts, but her heart just wasn't in her profession right now.

That settled it. She went to the environment controls for her apartment and turned down the Dykstra pseudograv field from the healthy one g field to a relaxing one-half g. Then she went into the kitchen and made herself a hot fudge sundae, extra nuts and whipped cream, and settled herself in front of the TV. When her sundae was half gone and her mood had shifted up the spectrum to yellow, still short of rosy red, the call signal sounded.

"Accept," she said to the TV, and the daytime drama she'd been watching disappeared to be replaced by a man in a military uniform. A momentary rush of excitement flooded her, thinking it must be Steve, but a split second later her eyes rested on the middle-aged face, and her mood plummeted. She didn't know military insignia worth a damn, but she thought he was a major.

"Yes?" she said, not quite hiding her disappointment.

"Hello. I am Major Gerald Moore of System Patrol Intelligence. Am I speaking with Samantha MacTavish?" the man asked.

"You have her."

"Would you mind activating your viewer so I can see you?"

Oops, she thought. She hadn't intended to be rude. She turned on the viewer.

What the major saw was a strikingly cute woman in her late twenties. Although not a classic beauty, Samantha had a twinkle in her eye and a bright, cheerful smile that had earned her the nickname of "Sunshine" long before. But the woman wasn't smiling now.

"Much better, Ms. MacTavish, thank you. I have a matter of some importance I'd like to speak with you about."

"Is it about my husband?"

"Not at all, Ms. MacTavish. Your husband is Ensign Steven Smith, correct?"

"No. It's Steven MacTavish. He changed to my last name when we married, just before he shipped out." From the look on the major's face, Samantha knew he was wondering why Steve had wanted to do that. But it was none of the major's business that Steve loved everything having to do with Scotland, so she didn't continue, but just waited for the major to explain his business.

He went on. "Well, anyway, this matter concerns you and your talents-not your husband's."

"My talents lie in the field of genano engineering. Is that what you're interested in?"

"Yes, Ms. MacTavish."

Her face became hard. "Well, maybe we can get through this pretty quickly. Do you want me to work

for the military?"

"We do think you'd be able to help us."

"Major, I might be able to-but I won't. I have no interest in helping you go on with this war. My family

is already helping enough."

She reached to end the call when the major said, "Your opposition to the war is well known to me-"

"It is? Why?"

"Ms. MacTavish, I'm afraid I'm the one who got your husband drafted. Finding talent is what I do. I

know quite a bit about you. That's why I called."

Samantha took that in stride, said, "Then you know I won't help you with this war."

"I don't want you to help us with the war, Ms. MacTavish. You'd be working for Intelligence, true, but

your work won't be at all connected with the war effort."Now she was puzzled. "I don't understand."The major continued: "I'd like to help you understand."He really means it, Samantha thought. Caught between her own curiosity and her disgust with the military, disgust won out. "No. Just forget it. I don't want to work for the military in any capacity."

Again she moved to end the call.