"He couldn't help it; surely you can see that."

I bad time to wonder why the Others were letting Elys scold them, instead of simply turning down her emotional wick, before Dahil said, "See now, but with- out try, not know. So make right and try. Man Szabo do right. Soon now, more try, one. Man Szabo do right more, then make right for stay. Or any when need." Elys, now with several of us backing her stand, tried to explain that the shocks of being made right and then reverting to the same old bind would likely'urive Szabo all the way out 'of his tree.

Dabil made the odd twitch of his upper torso that passed for a shrug. "Not us to say. Is said, now be done."

That was his final word, and the same for Tiriis, Szabo would have to tough it out, was all. Neither of them said what happened if he flunked the test, and nobody asked.

I know / didn't.

The story went around the ship. It wasn't supposed to leak, of course, but naturally it did. Soong didn't bother to scold anyone; I expect it took all his time and energy to ignore his own problems.

You wouldn't think that in a situation like ours, weeks could pass with absolutely no action taken. But that's exactly what happened, Soong wasn't going to make a move without orders, and Base didn't have enough info to give any. So we hung in slow orbit, now as far from Opal as we could get and keep that orbit stable, what

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with other gravitational influences. The stalemate was

virtually complete.

Not entirely, though. None of us could fire our own misgivings off to Base independently and hope to get away with it, but the routine departmental reports could be sent These were supposed to go out over the captain's signature, and he wasn't even reading them, let alone signing anything. But to save himself the bother of getting ink on his fingers, he'd long ago given signature-stamps to all his department heads. Thus, we preserved some shadow of legality; we used Rigan's stamp.

Everything that was sent, I read in the Chrono log, whether it went out on my watch or not. I couldn't see that Xenobiology, for instance, had much new to say, but maybe they'd give Base a little something to bite down on.

In the chain of command. Lisa was an odd side-link- a First rating in Psychology, no one out-ranking her in that line, but still under Medical so her material had to be correlated with theirs. It worked out well; we needed to rub together all the ideas we had. One new datum was that the impregnation program, downside at least, was intended to work in both directions. Because Tiriis was definitely showing signs.

Elys had taken our first guesses to her boss, Medic- Chief Mark Gyril. He's small and thin, deep-voiced and long on brains. Nice, informal kind of person; when Elys said she wanted me and Lisa to sit in on the worry ses- sions, he said, "Fine; bring in two more chairs." And that was that

Our first think-session, he summed up the mess. The Others didn't seem hostile, but they didn't have to be, when they could keep us from feeling that way. Did they mean us harm? Unproven.

Elys, he guessed, could have had her sample of the magic potion by asking. Because she couldn't have swiped it, against Dahil's wishes- She looked shocked, but then nodded, as Gyril added, "Either he doesn't care wnat we learn, or thinks we can't analyze the stuff; I'd guess the former." Well, so would I.

"I don't have a full analysis, and I couldn't synthesize the fluid here. Back at Base, perhaps, I could do both; so could the people there, for that matter." My impression was that given the props, anything Base could *r-o, Gyril could do better. )

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His incomplete analysis sounded pretty good to me. The side-trace items, he thought, stabilized the mixture and counteracted our anti-fertility measures. The mind-bender differed enough from other known hallucinogens to give him the idea that it might be tailored to a specific pur- pose. How specific? Gyril shrugged. Try cup-sharing be- tween a human, or Other, and a member of some other humanoid race, and then we might know more. But with- out the cup, humans and Others weren't sexually at- tracted. Or we weren't, at least; maybe they only drank to make it look mutual. But the crux was, the Others deliberately set up these encounters, while our people got hooked without knowing what was going to happen. Well, usually; Elys blushed and I expect I looked sheepish.

The component that resembled colchicine, the chromo- some-doubling agent: "I can't prove- this yet, or possibly ever, but it has to be the element that makes this inter-species fertility possible, at all." He smiled. "I have tissue samples from Dahil and Tiriisr you know." I hadn't.

."There's no real chance of disease-contagion between us and they know it, but they humored me.

"Well. by several definitive criteria we're as interfertile with the Others as we are with a stalk of wheat. There are some interesting near-fits to the genetic layouts, but the point is that they do not fit. Part of the cup's function, I speculate, is to act on our respective germ cells so that they will fit To produce a viable organism-& hybrid, if you please, between us and the Others."

Lisa blinked. "But what would it be like? How would it look?"

"It's a bit early," Gyril said, "but I'd like to get some X-rays. Because the trouble is that your question is not theoretical. It's very real-to you two, and to quite a number of other women."

That wasn't the only real trouble; another was that if he'd summarized our knowledge again two months later, he couldn't have added much. For one thing, we never did get any X-rays.

It's not really X-ray, doesn't even use hard radiation.

The old name holds over, because it's easier to say. But we got no pictures, for many reasons or sometimes none.

Women didn't keep their appointments, or the techs were busy and rescheduled them. Or the machine was out of order. Or, more often, the job was just plain botched.

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After our think-group got together to concentrate on see- ing the work done right, and after four hours had a stack of blurs and fogs and all-black negatives to show for it, Gyril summed the matter up- "I think we can assume that the Others don't approve of this line of research." He grinned in a tired way, and we all went to his quarters and had a drink, to simmer down.

The Others were stacking the deck on us, no doubt of it. Some lines of investigation went fine, but always to logical negative results. And some we simply couldn't get off the ground; we'd forget proper sequence and botch the results. After a time we quit botherin_g with any ap- proach that ran into that kind of static, but made notes on it, anyway-for there, of course, the answers lay.

Once Gyril said, "I may not be able to feel hostile to- ward the Others, but sometimes 1 manage a certain an- noyance. My thought is that one day I shall conduct this research without them peeping down my brainpipe."

Good idea; too bad it didn't really apply.

And so it went. What we knew, what we even guessed, we tried to slip into the reports that went to Base. Looking at some of. it, Rigan went cautious and wouldn't let his Soong-signature stamp be used. But Gyril had one of those, too; no problem. The Xeno-folks sent a lot of stuff, too; I hope Base could make more sense of it than I could. If-they did, you couldn't tell it by the messages they sent to Soong, which I doubt he ever read. Certainly he answered none of it, or I'd have seen something in the Chrono.

The Others didn't interfere with anything we sent out;

either they didn't understand about Base, or they didn't care. In the latter case they were probably right.

Maybe if Szabo had been aboard, he could have been primed to pressure Soong or even go over his head. Dan- gerous proposition, it would've been, to make to Szabo -but I wasn't the only one getting desperate enough to try something dangerous. No point in bracing Command- Second Nargilosa; she was crowding retirement," and had a sort of myopic crush on Soong, anyway. Command- Third Rocco was a political appointee; enough said. And a doper, too.

It gets nervous, sitting for months in high jrbit, doing nothing much about a situation that's scary as all. Nearly every woman aboard, capable of the condition, was into

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late pregnancy. All, except those who had been downside, by Dahil. Well, there were five who'd made the grade, by human agency and with official permission, before we hit Opal. Maybe the Others were considerate in not adding an abortive chemical to the cup, or perhaps they weren't up to that stunt; I doubt that anyone ever asked them.

But having every woman on the whole ship, who's not past it, running about six months preggy, doesn't do a lot for morale. Theirs, or anyone else's. For starters, only five were volunteers; the rest had been drugged into it.

And knew that whatever they would bear, it was some- thing new under the suns. The idea scared hell out of some;, Gyril and Elys got worried that they might run out of a stock of stability drugs that should have been good for ten years, under normal conditions.

I had to think back, to recall what normal conditions were. For one thing, we used to know what we were sup- posed to be doing. But by now, even routine ship maintenance was beginning to suffer.

And that's what blew the whole package. The grav-lift biccuped while a woman was halfway up ft. Her broken ankle wasn't serious, but she began to hemorrhage and then miscarried.

It wasn't one of ours.

Only Mark Gyril actually saw the fetus; he said it wasn't viable so he'd destroyed it. He took no pictures ' for record, which gave us a good idea who was pushing bis buttons at the time. With Elys and Lisa and I all questioning him, it got embarrassing; he couldn't look either gravid woman straight in the eye when they asked him what the unborn creature looked like.

His strained voice came out a lot higher than his usual mellow, bass growl. "It wasn't . . . what you might ex- pect. I can't describe it. I'm sorry; I can't." And finally we realized he told literal truth; he couldn't describe it because the Others wouldn't let him. Which gave me to think, and I didn't like it much.

Especially I didn't like thinking how the women must feel, each carrying Something in her belly-and this good friend, the only one who knew, couldn't or wouldn't say what. Elys probably had it worse, because a few days earlier, she and Gyril had affirmed ship-marriage to- gether, and now he was clamming up about the biggest personal worry she had. What a way to run a honeymooni

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Not that Elys was in any better shape for frolic now than Lisa was-but the principle, I thought, still applied.

Muttering something, Elys turned away and began fid- dling inputs into the holo-projector. A man's image flickered into being; then it vanished and an Other's ap- peared- The man again, then the Other, faster and faster.

She pushed the sequence-speed to tops, far past normal usage range; the two images began to blur into one.

Gyril shouted "No!" and reached for the control. Too late; something blew and we had a lot of smoke in. the place. But for an instant, first, we saw both pictures at once- Heads and torsos superimposed, but arms and legs separate and clear.

In the dim back rooms of my mind, hackles raised.

What scared me was, that grotesque mishmash looked right.