and Lisa, Mark Gyril, and a youngish, heavyset woman whose name Barton couldn't remember.

They rode upstairs without talk; Ferenc docked the aux boat, and the party gave the ship a final inspection, taking longer about it than Barton thought was strictly necessary. Well, maybe Ferenc bated what he had to do now, and was delaying. No harm done.

They wound up in the power control center, and Barton saw a great pile of tech manuals, and microfiches of circuit drawings. Ferenc said, "Let's get those into the Destruct box," and sure enough, that was the way the bin was labeled. Barton didn't say anything; as requested, he helped. Then Ferenc unlocked the main power switch, and Barton moved forward.

"You haveat said, Ferenc. Just what you plan to do now."

"AH of it," the man said. "I was going to push only two buttons here, one to cut all ship's power so it couldn't be restored without going through the refuel cycle, and the other to operate the bin and destroy all written in- formation that could possibly help restore it."

Barton nodded. "That sounds pretty thorough. Let's do it." At the back of his mind, something pushed for a moment, then ceased.

"Not enough," said Ferenc. "The information's 'a^o in the minds of ship's personnel. And the Children will get that knowledge from us, Barton; you have to realize that.

It won't be like our fighting off mental influence; when they get around to it and are capable, I think they'" read us like so many books."

"So?"

"So instead I'm going to turn the drive power back on, and mistime the exciters to blow the whole ship, a little after we leave it. Half an hour leeway, maybe, for safety. In that way-"

Barton shook his head. "No need, Ferenc. All the books in the world won't synthesize fuel without a lot of high- grade equipment. Or get it upstairs, if we disable the aux boats. Or ... "-he waggled a finger-" ... or, let anybody stay alive on this ship even if they could get here.

What we do is, we let the air out."

It was working, but Ferenc still hesitated. Barton said, "This is too much ship to blow up when we don't really have to." Hoping he wasn't going to need it. Barton kept

S04 ^. j

V.

one hand on his concealed gun. And then the man }

nodded agreement. '

"All right, you've convinced me. 111 stick with the original plan." His fingers reached for the two buttons.

And )ust as Barton was beginning to let himself relax, a wave of mental pressure hit the ship.

Barton staggered, and caught himself; for a moment his vision blurred. This had to be the Children as well as the Others, acting under adult direction. He saw Mark Gyril fail to catch balance, and fall. Ferenc steadied himself with one hand against the bulkhead, made a tight grin, and pushed first one button and then the other.

Barton felt one last burst of pressure, like the final out- raged howl of a child's temper tantrum, and then it was all over. Through the ringing in his ears he heard the sound of the air system's impellers beginning to wind flown. Funny; he hadn't consciously heard their steady

hum in a long time.

And as the group, after waiting while Ferenc checked through the power switch settings as if he hadn't already done so twice, walked slowly back to the aux boat, Barton felt the deck-gravs losing pull. That wasn't the way it would have worked on Ship One, so he asked, "How

come it didn't cut off all at once?"

"This system works differently," Ferenc said. "The field derives from a rotating magnetic torus. While the superconductor fields hold, the rotation will take some time to slow down, even without external power feed."

**l see." Barton didn't, except in a sort of way, but he wanted to keep Ferenc's thinking busy. Then they entered >the aux boat area and Ferenc gimmicked the entrance .door so it couldn't close, and by-passed the safety inter- lock ^o that the launching gates could still be opened.

.They got into the aux boat. "Strap m," said Ferenc.

"because' we're going to have a jet-assisted launching, when the air blows. I hope we don't hit the gates too hard,

while they're opening."

They didn't; the aux boat shuddered but made it through.

Still, Barton thought, it was one helluva bang, there,

Once clear, Ferenc turned the aux boat to face the ship for a moment, and looked at it. "That was a fine shi&^he said. "It's too bad we have to leave it dead, for- ever^s,

V. 505.

Barton, in his mind, agreed with the sentiment. But not with the prediction. What Ferenc Szabo didn't know about was the crate of spacesuits that Barton had smuggled downside. And Barton certainly wasn't going to tell him.

nght now.

506.

IV,.

Answers

All things considered. Barton thought the transition from ship to colony status went pretty smoothly. Npbody had told him that one of the original planned options had been to plant an outpost base with a skeleton crew to maintain it at first, so he was surprised when people be- gan cultivating ground and breaking out seeds from the , crated supplies. The stuff seemed to grow well.

Getting started was a lot of work, sure; nobody was working the kind of hours Barton and other folks had worked during the downloading, but it wasn't exactly like a union Job, either. Still, now be and Limila had more time together, and that was good for both of them.

The two'Earthani women who were carrying Children came near their times, and Limila conferred with them now and then. When Gyril did the Caesarians, Tiriis came to take the Children as she'd done before, but this time both mothers insisted on joining the nursery. Bartoa had no idea whether it was their own motivation or some'

thing new in the Others' repertoire.

He asked Limila what she thought, and she said, "It is different now. Barton. Or so I think. We shall have to be a community, here. We, and the Others, and the Chil- dren. The isolation must cease."

And^t was happening that way. Barton noticed, when he stop^4 to think about it. Since the last-ditch try at

507.

stopping Ferenc from disabling the ship. Barton knew of no instance of mental pressure from Others or Children.

Certainly everyone mingled now, in daily routines, with- out any tension or suspicion to speak of. Maybe there was no pushing, he decided, because there wasn't any- thing left to push for.

Dahil had promised, when Ferenc was making up his mind whether the Others and Children would live among humans or apart from them, that he wouldn't play any more games with his trick cup. Privately, Barton won- dered if maybe Dahil hadn't simply run out of joy juice.

But since he'd kept the promise, it didn't matter either way.

The Children, growing fast now, fascinated Barton.

Considering their powers-extent unknown, as yet-he figured it was lucky that these youngsters seemed to show no trace of the "me-me-ME" stage that makes normal human kids a little hard to take, sometimes. They kept to themselves a lot, or worked with Dahil or Tiriis on a plot of ground the Others were cultivating by themselves- whose seeds?-Barton had no idea. And when they came around humans, mostly they seemed to be observing. The couple of times when one or another spoke to Ba^on, the few words were in good English.

All in all, Barton decided they were pretty nice kids.

The only thing that worried him was what they were going to be when they grew up. Assuming that he and Limila were right about that.

On the human side, of course, it was really Kiddie Corner. When practically every woman from the ship began delivering human babies on schedule, from the Great Pregnancy Race as Barton thought of it, things had been truly hectic for "a time. He doubted that any- one was planning on having any more kids for a while, because it was all the community could do to handle the current crop.

Bearpaw and Teragni had a boy; they named him Ferenc. Gyril and Elys produced a girl, and Barton was pleased to see that this time the pregnancy left her look- ing better rather than worse. And a little later Ferenc Szabo's mate, Racelle, gave birth to a male child. Bear- paw said, in an aside to Barton, "In the old days, it any- body'd ever told me I'd see Szabo as a doting lathe""-U*