I nodded. "You've been there; it won't throw you.

Now, look-this is important." Her expression said I'd checked my brains in a locker somewhere and was inde- cently exposed without them, but she was still listening.

"Share that cup with Dahil again. And the whole-works, if it goes that way." I grabbed her shoulders, no harder than I could help. "Here's the thing, Elys. Somehow, get a sample of that spiced-up bug juice, and bring it "back for lab analysis. Okay?"

She sighed, and relaxed. "]>t's nice to know you're still making sense. All right, I see it. Now if Dahil only plays aloAg ..." I left her then. We both had things to do.

The way things had been going, I'd lost track of Lisa's watch-sked. But I got lucky; she was in our quarters.

"Lisa!" I tried to hug her, but she pulled away-as usual, lately. "No!" I said. "Listen to me for a minute."

Dull-eyed and blank-faced, she looked at me. "What- ever you say." Her voice hadn't always been flat like that.

I said, "I know what it is with you. I know." She let her head sag forward, and shook it. The hell with that;

I grabbed her chin and raised it until we could match eyeballs. "All right. Lisa. So you shared the cup, with Dahil or with another of them. Well, so did I, with one of their women. I've been there, and so has practically all the whole damn down-party. Does that tell you any- thing?" I hoped it would.

For the first time in a long while, she smiled. Not

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exactly the smile I was used to, but better than none.

"Yes," she said. "Quite a lot. I-I'm sorry I've been put- ting you off. I guess if I'd known, I wouldn't have." Then she cried.

We were close, I felt, to getting ourselves back to- gether. So I kissed her, and so on, and although it was a little soon for me, things went well between us. But afterward she cried again, and wouldn't say why. I kept , on asking, the way you do when you can't get something- to make sense; she still cried. I would have let her be, but it struck me that maybe she was hiding something that could be important to more than just Lisa and me.

So against my own feeling I kept pressuring her until .she told me.

She was pregnant, that's all. Which may not sound like much, except that it should have been impossible; her contraceptive implant was a one-year squib with ten months to go. And until just now, she'd had sex exactly once since I'd left the ship with Szabo, and at the time I left, she had definitely not conceived. Downside, she had shared the cup with DahiL -s.

Lisa, pregnant by an alien? I found it hard to believe, but once the impossible is eliminated, you know what's left. So all I could do, now, was try to soothe Lisa. Once she realized that practically every woman in the'down- party, and now quite a few here on the ship, was getting the game treatment, she didn't feel like quite so much of a freak.

But then she sat straight up, from where she'd been snuffling gently against my neck. "Rent What if they ay-7"

That's when we both really began to worry.

The trouble was, we had no one to report our suspi- cions to. Captain Soong had holed up, talking to nobody except the messboy who brought him his meals, and be- tween all the rest of us there was enough authority to wipe our own noses, maybe.

Two days later. Lisa and I had a chance to talk things over with Elys. She'd approached Dahil, and all she'd say about that was that she'd lifted a sample of liquid love- bomb, all right As Medic-3 she'd authorized lab analysis on it, but no results as yet. One personal note, tipugh.

She, too, was pregnant, and we could take our i-noice between an Other or divine intervention.

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We needed to know whether impregnation vsas the whole idea of the Others' schtick, so it was my turn-to approach Tiriis, for cup-sharing and all. She smiled and said it wasn't "necessary," but before I could disengage with apologies, she handed me the cup, anyway. Well, what do you do?

I drank, and my mind changed her from an oddly formed humanoid with a mild visual attractiveness that grew with familiarity, to the essence of utter loveliness, and from there you can guess. Even now, after twice at that cup, I don't see a female Other the way you might.

I see beauty you wouldn't believe. But without the cup, I'm content merely to appreciate it.

When Elys got the lab report, the results weren't much, "Part of it's hallucinogenic, of course," she said, "and there are some trace items that don't seem to mean much, though we can't be sure. Also, we found something resem- bling colchicine, which has sometimes been used lo stimu- late plant growth."

I nodded. "Yes. The Others do mess with plants, don't they?"

"Not the same way, I'd imagine," said Elys. "As I understand it, colchicine doubles the chromosome count."

It wouldn't trigger ovulation, though, at any old point of the cycle. But something did, apparently.

So we weren't sure what we knew, what it meant, or who to tell it to, so as to get some constructive action started. Two more days we met for discussion, and got no place at all. Then Captain Soong came out of his cocoon-not as a butterfly, but to call assembly of all officers, and ratings of the first three grades. It was nice of the captain, I thought, to wake up and remember he had a ship to run.

All he said, to the lot of us seated in the galley, was, "Our visitors have something to show us." Then he sat down, and sure enough, Tiriis went to the viewscreen controls and Dahil got up front to speak. I wondered if she could handle those controls, and if so, how she'd learned the skill.

To the ear, the Others talk oddly, because they leave much detail to pass directly from mind to mind. I'm not sure Just how much they put into sound waves and how much not; stand by for a general impression.

"You want know on man Szabo," Dahil tegan. "Here

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man Szabo." And on the screen, there he was. He'd been missing for weeks now; this had to be a recording, and I have no idea how much of it was played on a real-time basis. All I can say is how we saw it.

I'd never seen Szabo nude before; I doubt if anyone had, on the ship. He looked exactly like any normal *man; his lack, which apparently had made him kill once too oftfen, was inside and hidden. Asleep or drugged, he lay supine on a cot, in a bare room.

One male and one female Other came on camera and stood, one at each side of Szabo's cot, looking down at him in silence.

"They think on man Szabo," Dahil said. "On where be not," Tiriis added. Minutes passed; then the two straight- ened up and came up past the camera to go out of sight.

Dahil said, "Man Szabo make right, now." For a mo- ment nothing happened, and then, pulsebeat after "pulse- beat, Szabo's erection grew. Like halfway up to a buffalo, my old grandaddy would have said; I had to reassure myself that size wasn't really all that important.

"Now man Szabo right," said Dahil. The stunned si- lence broke, everybody talking and nobody listening.

Which was all right; none of it was worth listening to, including me.

Then quiet came again, because Szabo was coming awake and sitting up, then getting off the cot. He was half-standing when he realized what had happened, and he froze in that crouch, face writhing. Obviously the poor guy thought he'd gone crackers and was hallucinating.

He reached to check by touch, then brought his hand away; probably he didn't dare find out, for sure.

Soft-voiced, Tiriis said, "Man Szabo not know he right We show."

They showed, all right. Nude, bearing the familiar cup, a female Other came on screen. Gently drawing Szabo upright, she put the cup to his lips and tilted it until he drank; then she took the rest of it, Szabo's face relaxed.

He smiled; not the frightening smile we knew, but a com- pletely open, defenseless smile, a shy one. And very gently, he reached to her.

In the next few minutes there was no doubt that Szabo was fully functional. None. "See?" said Tiriis. "Now he right. Now he know he right." Then, when it erided, I think the screened picture skipped some time, for su Idenly the female Other was leaving. Smiling his new smile,

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Szabo looked after her for a moment, then lay down and slept so immediately that I suspect he had some help.

Elys said, "Then he'll be all right, from now on?"

"No." Dahil looked puzzled. "Why need? Is done for now; can do again."

"You mean you'll make him right when you want to?"

She was near to screaming. "But the rest of the time, you don't think it matters?" She took a deep breath. "It mat- ters to him. Don't you see?"

"We see," said Tiriis. "We show." And on the screen we saw the time I mentioned earlier, when Szabo as we knew him took the cup, and went berserk and killed the female Other. It wasn't a true picture, probably some kind of thought-projection put onto tape, because the figures were stylized, like line drawings. But there was no uncertainty as to what was happening.

"So you're punishing him?" Elys challenged the Others.